China Film Journal

I am not quite sure how to feel about this: Nikita Mikhalkov of Russia and Chen Kaige of China (who is a US citizen, I believe) have won the the Kurosawa Award for lifetime achievement at the Tokyo Film Festival. The award was worth 100,000 USD, which the two directors split.

My ambivalence stems from my opinion that Chen Kaige has become kind of a hack of late, though he has, on the whole, made many more decent films than shitty ones, and has even made a couple of near brilliant or at least close to seminal films in the last thirty odd years.

Of course, this is a pretty good omen for Chen, who has a highly anticipated upcoming film, the Mei Lanfang biopic. They’ve already released the official MV/theme song for the movie, sung by the film’s two co-stars, Leon Lai and Zhang Ziyi.

Earlier this year, we prefaced our interview of a rising star in film with the provocative title, The World is Not Enough: Has Jia Zhangke Permanently Left the Art House?

I should hope not. From my view Stateside it seems that Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯) has just arrived. After all, I had been waiting since 2006 for the U.S. release of Still Life (Sanxia Haoren: literally, “The Good People of Three Gorges”). So I waited. And waited. And wouldn’t you know, I waited.

Still Life made its American premiere in January 2008 at New York’s IFC Center. It reached the West Coast in April, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and a month later, showed for a week at one of the Lumiere Theatres in the Bay Area. In other words, an art house. So is Jia leaving the art house, just as he has entered it?

I think two different meanings of that phrase at play. One is subjective, about the film itself: serious, often experimental and avant-garde, produced independently, with a singular vision (i.e. that of an auteur). One is objective, the circumstances in which the film and by extension, the filmmaker, is received: where it plays and what audience.

The term “art house” or “art film” turns out to be a uniquely American one, due to the monopoly of commercially-oriented Hollywood films in American theaters (and abroad), leaving acknowledged serious films domestic and international limited to certain theaters. They could be specialty film centers such as the IFC in New York or Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, or repertory theaters that show classics for a day and new releases for a week, two on popular demand. In the suburbs, they could be the occasional chain-operated theater set aside for niche movies, or the single screen reserved at the 30-plex theater.

An independent film with strong prospects may open at several dozen screens. For example, a Jane Austen adaptation starring Emma Thompson (and a not-so-famous Kate Winslet). Sense and Sensibility opened at 70 screens in 1995. That sounds like a lot, but with nearly 300 million people and 400 metropolitan areas, it clearly did not show within driving distance of many Americans. In contrast, The Dark Knight opened at over 4000 screens in the US. The art film’s initial unqualified success did allow it to expand to several hundred screens, thus “leaving the art house”.

A more recent example is the phenomenon known as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Buoyed by the art house successes of Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s film was able to open at . . . 16 screens!! Two reasons come to mind. Foreign language films have smaller potential audiences, and so they started smaller. Also, they opened smaller at the start of December to build up to Christmas season.

Well Christmas came and went, and a month later it was playing at close to 200 screens, so it was bumped to 700 screens for another three weeks. But wait, it wasn’t going away. In fact those 700 screens were packed. So well after the holiday season, Crouching Tiger played at 1200 screens, then 1700…until it reached an unheard-of 2000 screens for a foreign language film. The punctuated equilbrium of this theatrical progression is fascinating to chart. It appears the powers that be expected such a film only needed 173 screens when it opened those screens, and when it exceeded all expectations, took some time before it made non-art screens available to the wire-fu epic. Put another way, it was the Obama of the cinema world.

At its theatrical peak, in February 2008, Still Life played at two screens. The World, his previous international success, hit three screens in the US. Of course, none of these record film festival screenings, which are lovely feathers in the cap but do little for accessibility. Seattle on May 23 and Austin on October 12? No thanks. Given the 4000+ screens available in the US, it seems even the proliferation of international films can find their, um, niche in a physical art house. Perhaps Netflix and soon the Internet will render inconsequential the movie bottleneck in the theaters. But the reviews, the buzz, the “event-ness” of a film today accompany generally just its theatrical release.

There is another world, one that falls somewhere between the visibility of repertory theaters and the singularity of film festivals. That’s the art museum world. At some point art museums decided to show international films as part of its regular exhibitions. Perhaps it’s an extension of their experimental film and video showings, or as a long awaited acknowledgment of narrative film as art with a capital “A”. While each film shows for a day or two, the program (often focusing on one filmmaker) may last weeks, giving the curious time and opportunity to taste some of the oeuvre.

The San Francisco Bay Area is fortunate to have several such venues for film. This month, SF Museum of Modern Art is showing the film series Rediscovering the Fourth Generation as part of its exhibit on Chinese contemporary art. Films include Wu Tian Ming’s River Without Buoys, Xie Fei’s Black Snow, and Huang Shuqin’s Woman Demon Human.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts tends to focus on experimental and documentary type films. Next month it premieres Fengming: A Chinese Memoir by Wang Bing, which showed at last year’s Cannes. Here’s the Variety review. He Fengming survived “anti-rightist” persecutions for decades and lived to tell her three-hour tale.

Across the Bay, the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive functions more like a stand-alone film center. Though nominally tied with the art museum’s contemporary Chinese art exhibit, the PFA had an extraordinary program this month. Unknown Pleasures: The Films of Jia Zhangke allowed Bay Area audiences to see for the first time “the quartet of beautifully constructed, profoundly astute examinations of a changing China”, as the Village Voice called Pickpocket (Xiao Wu), Platform, Unknown Pleasures, and The World.

That series has ended but is followed up this weekend with a four-day, five-film seriesI Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying , capped by a “master class” from Ning Ying (宁瀛) herself. But wait, there’s more! November features Mahjong: New Independent Chinese Cinema, a sample of 21st century visions from Beijing, Sanxia, and Anyang to an art house, I mean art museum, near you.

The feature film debut of Robin Weng Shou-ming (翁首鸣), Fujian Blue follows a group of disaffected, purposeless souls who spend their time blackmailing middle-aged women and clubbing away their twenties. Such a premise somehow transforms into an absorbing narrative of deeply felt characters, a trenchant social commentary, and a tone poem to a nearly-lost generation.

In the early 1980s, Fujian became a vital hinge on the open door policy that fostered China’s economic miracle, which brought suburbs, video games, and minvans to the province. At the same time, it lured many Chinese to seek their fortune abroad, and has made Fujian a center for human trafficking, particularly the “golden triangle” of Fuqing, Changle and Pintang. Into this picture step the Neon Knights, the gang of Roppongi, Amerika, and Dragon, who capitalize on the void left by emigre husbands by catching their “remittance widows” with local lovers (sometimes one of their own), and blackmail them. Call it a Chinese version of trickle-down economics. That some knights bear nicknames reflecting their fathers’ destinations adds poignancy to this sad state of affairs.

“Neon Knights” is also the title for the movie’s first half, which focuses on Amerika and his mother, a woman involved in the local church and local trafficking operation. Bonds are already strained between mother and son – the college grad won’t get a job, hangs around bad influences. The plot picks up when he finds out she’s also taken a local lover. Amerika convinces his reluctant friends to videotape and blackmail her mom. It works, but his expressionless face at seeing his mother make the cash drop is telling. There is no victory in this game, and no joy in their decadant lives.

Mom is angry and asks “the Czech”, the local underworld leader and smuggler in Fuqing, to smoke out the extortionists. This development puts a little fright to the little gang and sends them to chill out in Pingtan. Here, for the first time, the young folks seem to enjoy themselves and their youth, riding ATVs on the beach, taking a ferry ride to visit their friend, and having sex with the local girls. One of Fujian Blue’s achievements is its street-level perspective and non-judgmental tone, which allows us to become involved with its characters, and draw us into experiencing their world as they live it, including its moments of elation and wonder.

A couple of such moments come near the end of their merry vacation from petty crime, when Amerika and a friend are visiting Dragon, who is hiding out back home for reasons of his own. On the very old and small ferry, one of them acts out the scene from Titanic where Jack Dawson (a stowaway, incidentally) is flying without wings. Later on that ferry trip, he notices a mass of Taiwanese boats, and wonders why on earth they would be here, off the coast of China. To refuel for their fishing trips, comes the ferryman’s reply. Can ships that small cross the Straits? Even smaller than this one, says the ferryman. You can picture the gears turning in Amerika’s head.

Dragon is the subject of the second half, “At Home, At Sea”. It is set in motion when the gang decides to give him the windfall from Amerika’s mom. We realize why when he returns home to his poor fishing village and family in debt for his older brother’s emigration. Dragon uses part of the illicit cash to help pay off those debts as well as support his mom and sister. The rest of it – let’s just say its fate involves an even younger group of rogues in a scene both hilarious and sad.

In an especially plangent scene, his younger sister declares during a break from school she doesn’t want to head back, but instead wants to go abroad. No, Dragon says, go back to school. They have a fight. Pretty basic stuff, but the following silence is heart-rending. How can he explain how cruel adult life can be? They compromise: she skips school that day, her brother taking her to walk along the breakwater. If the neon wilderness of Fuqing is disappointing, there are no hopes to disappoint in his homely backwater village. The price of his family’s survival may be its ultimate fracture.

Eventually, Dragon decides to go abroad and seek his fortune in the West, perpetuating the cycle of debt and desperation, but also hope and persistence in the face of a two-faced globalization that welcomes the movement of goods and ideas but is cruel to the movement of human beings, all of which it fuels. This persistence may seem absurd, when sometimes emigres leave to pay a “snakehead” for having previously smuggled their relative, or even a prior unsuccessful trip they’d taken themselves. A reference to the human-trafficking tragedy at Morecambe imbues real-life gravity to their plight. But this persistence of dreams is also a persistence of memory, of the fact that Fujianese are everywhere, making up a majority of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and the United States. It also reflects the persistence of a buccaneering spirit, reckless but not always self-destructive, which fuels both the crimes and the dreams that feed on each other. Like generations of Fujianese before them, they don’t accept their truncated roles – not in the new China of great expectations.

Several qualities make Fujian Blue a unique standout effort. Weng’s employ of non-professionals punctuates the palpable realism in every scene, whether its the young men teasing the sole woman among them in a gently sexual way, or giving running commentary on the date in their blackmail video. His use of ribald humor also anchors the characters’ authenticity – the Czech tells his card-playing friends that Czech detention wasn’t so bad because they let you watch porn. I also have to give props to the subtitles team, as I’ve never seen Chinese or any other foreign language translated as “beayotches” and “bros before hoes” (sic).

Speaking of the colloquial, yet another unique and daring feature is the liberal use of the Hokkien dialect (Fujian), which is as different from Mandarin as English is from French. Such use is both accurate (reflecting how people really speak) and illuminating (of China’s true polyglot history and sense of regional identity). Indeed, it’s mentioned that two of the gang hail from Hunan and Sichuan (which also signals that in much of China, Fujian is a placed to be envied). Finally, it is also politically and even psychologically daring to suggest that young men in Fujian (the winners of globalization, both in the world and in China) look wistfully at Taiwan. Perhaps it’s not that Fujian itself is envied, but it’s the closest to what is enviable in the world.

Along with some other features, the attitude towards the characters and their lives reminded me a bit of a breakthrough Scottish film called Trainspotting. Like that movie, we have young men and one woman, lives of petty crime and decadence, and sometime exuberance that the audience is invited to share. Even the usage of dialect lends a superficial resemblance. More likely, much of it is coincidental, or rather convergent – they share distinguishing traits of a great narrative, lightness in the face of gravity, specificity in the face of stereotype, and multiplicity in the face of dogma.

The problems they face are ultimately different, too: whereas the struggles of Scottish addicts are self-induced, that of these Fujianese rogues result largely from their legitimate though MTV-fueled dreams and the contrasting reality of their horizons. The Chinese title Jīn Bì Huī Huáng is an idiom literally meaning magnificent looking in green and gold. It is used to describe a building, or to use an English idiom word, a facade. After watching the movie at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I learned that Robin Weng is just 26. I have every hope that he will continue to seek out facades and with his remarkable vision, penetrate them.

According to the Chinese media, France’s MK2 has secured theatrical rights for the new Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯) film 24 City (24城记), which is going to screen soon at the Cannes Film Festival.

Think Rocky V, but during the Olympics. Jackie Chan, 54, will engage in some kind of fighting? boxing? kung fu? exhibition against Tszyu, 38, a welterweight boxer from Russia and former Olympian. However, as this is China’s Olympics, we suspect that, like in the movies, Chan will triumph over the white man in the final, climactic scene. If he’s in top form, he might be able to rescue some Ming vases and other priceless artifacts of Chinese culture at the same time! The exhibition has been agreed upon by both parties and would be set for August 22 or 23, depending on whether or not it gets final IOC approval.

Ang Lee’s next film is going to be a film adaptation of the book Taking Woodstock, a autobiography/memoir by Eliot Tiber, one of the guys that organized that world-shaking festival in the summer of 69. It’s also the story of a young, Jewish, and (then) closeted gay kid finding his way in the late 1960s gay scene of Greenwich Village, where he hobnobs with with artists and cultural icons. Lee said that Tiber walked up to him somewhere when he was promoting Lust, Caution in the US and handed him the book. He found it so moving that he decided it would become his next film project.

Last but not least, Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯）is the only Chinese film director to make it into the official competition at Cannes, with his new film The Story of 24 City (24城记）about the changes in the lives of factory women in the 1970s.

The buzz is growing, especially after some posters were unveiled in Hong Kong at the FilMART and film festival happening right now. Lots of people talking about it, and the film is being hyped as a new style (or even breakthrough) in the Asian fantasy genre. To say that the film is a remake of the 80s film by King Hu might not be totally accurate — for one, a lot of time has passed since the 1980s, and what you can do on film is much different. One report says that a major difference is replacing the gentle Jiangnan scenery (hills, lakes, villages, Eastern China) with more rugged Western vistas (they filmed part of the movie in the Hengdian studios in Zhejiang, where all the huge sets are, but also filmed some of it in Ningxia province in the northwest of China, where there is PLENTY of mountain and desert). What’s for sure is that they really did get the creme de la creme for this new one, with Zhao Wei, Donnie Yen, Zhou Xun (as the female ghost), and Chen Kun among others in the cast. The director is Gordon Chan (replacing Wilson Yip … and we don’t know why).

The cast and crew have been uber-secretive about the film, and we gather that whatever posters or other things are being shown at FilMART are just the tip of the iceberg. The film’s not even done, apparently — they’re still in post, but from the reports we’ve read it seems that the film ought to be ready for the next Cannes Film Festival, where it will go head to head against another Chinese film — John Woo’s Red Cliff.

In the process of finding information for this post we came across some links that you might interesting, especially if Zhou Xun gives you that warm tingly feeling in your special region, like it does to my friend. Here’s some English blog dedicated to Zhou Xun, and this another English blog posting from February, where they are talking about the cold, rainy weather in Hengdian, where they shot most of the interior scenes and wrapped principal shooting.

Hidden in plain view among the abundant offerings of this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (which runs from March 13 to 23) was a program of four short films under the title By Hand. Aside from the delightful opening bit of animation, three were documentaries featuring men of a certain craft, from a pushcart cinema operator in India, to the proprietors of a halal slaughterhouse in New York, who intend to pass their hand-made talents to their children.

In Salim Baba, the pushcart man has several sons who already help him on his daily runs through Calcutta, wheeling the cart with his century-old, custom-rebuilt film projector to show eager children an assortment of classic Bollywood videos and trailers, which the old man cuts and splices himself. The skills will be passed on, but it remains to be seen whether such an out-of-time tradition will survive our digital age.

When we first meet 27-year-old Imram in A Son’s Sacrifice, his dress and demeanor suggest hip-hop more than halal. The business his elderly Bangladeshi father started in Queens has flourished, thanks to the influx of South Asian, African, and West Indian immigrants into New York. All he needs is a successor, whom he finds in his hamburger-eating, half-Puerto Rican son, whose competence is exceeded only by his devotion to his family.

But the centerpiece was Tailor Made: Chinatown’s Last Tailors, where brothers Bill and Jack Wong are the endearing victims of their own success story, and seem quite comfortable with it. Their father started Modernize Tailors in 1913, and the two eldest brothers have run the business for the past fifty years. In the postwar boom, they were the largest men’s tailor shop in Vancouver, employing 20 people and suiting up celebrities like Sean Connery and Gordon Lightfoot. In the off-the-rack, globalized 21st century, they still do a boutique business, from the mayor of Vancouver who rolls in throwing around a few Cantonese phrases, to the department store who seeks them out for their vintage Singer Buttonholer, which is almost as old as they are.

They are now 85 and 83, and their North American success story has produced an extended family of doctors, business folk, and other professionals, but no tailors. It turns out that neither Bill or Jack intended to take this path either. After World War II, they both graduated with engineering degrees, but were unhireable as Canadian Chinese. Nevertheless it’s clear the wise and witty Bill loves the business he turned to because of the limits white society imposed upon him. The more reticent Jack tends to stay in the background. When asked about his trade, he says at one point, “Maybe I can be a carpenter,” a remark expressing both ambivalence in his path and as well as an inherently hopeful attitude that’s made them and Modernize Tailors endure.

Their youngest brother Milton, whom they helped raise, did breach the wider world, and spectacularly, as an investment banker, university chancellor, and Order of Canada honoree. As a gift to his brothers, he buys the original storefront which he then converts into a retirement home-cum-living museum and work shop, for the brothers to continue part-time tailoring. The only thing left to do, is find a successor to take over their store.

It is this search which takes up the lion’s share of the CBC documentary, with two strikingly different candidates. One is an Asian-American architect and part-time fashion reporter, who is attracted by the artistry as well as a desire to make connections with his roots. Unfortunately he does not sew and never really picks up the essential skills, which dashes his romantic and somewhat rose-tinteed aspirations. It’s a testament to Bill’s integrity, that he dissuades the apprentice from continuing at the probable cost of seeing the shop close forever.

The other apprentice candidate, a Caucasian, who turns up is none other than the tailor from Holt Renfrew, the department store client of Modernize. Unlike the architect, he can sew and do all the tailor stuff well. That makes him attractive to the fashionistas on London’s Saville Row, where our young tailor ends up. He comes back to break the news to Bill, but not before he shares a Saville Row catalogue and we are let in on a rich moment: young tailor points out excitedly to old tailor that the haute coutre fabric of the day can be found right on his shelves, to which Bill replies laconically, “So, it’s back in fashion.” Young tailor decides to return to Saville Row, but not before both apprentices and many family members help them move across the street to their new old home.

The film ends with a postscript, showing the now part-time tailors at their new shop. I felt comforted by that sight, as well as by this Vancouver Sun article. In addition to more background on the Wongs and Vancouver Chinese, it indicates that the Chinatown area, long in decline, may be poised for a resurgence that could support once again an exemplar of craft such as Modernize Tailors. But Bill and Jack Wong are irrevocably the last of something – they are the final generation of pioneers, every bit as pioneer as the frontiersmen, trailblazers, and homesteaders of the North American West – and I strongly hope that people who see this story will begin to view the brothers and their achievement in that same spirit.

Tailor Made: Chinatown’s Last Tailors

Directed by Leonard lee, Marsha Newberry

Canada 2007, 45 min.

Although there are more important things happening in China, and around the world, we’ve been keeping some tabs on the goings-on at the Hong Kong/Asian film festival and financing forums.

But it’s probably better to hear about it from people who are actually there, and better yet, blogging about it. If you’ve ever taken a film studies 101 class in the US, you probably remember the names David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, because that husband and wife team wrote a textbook you ought to be familiar with: Film Art: an Introduction. Bordwell is one of the more prolific and influential film academics in the US, and has interests ranging from Dreyer to classic Hollywood to Danish film to Hong Kong and Asian cinema. His book on Ozu proved mighty helpful when we had to write a paper on the Japanese master. Anyhow, he’s got a blog and he’s been writing about the happenings in Hong Kong. He’s got some pictures of celebs, of the events in general. One picture that was really intriguing was a comic sketch that the late Edward Yang made of himself.

Bordwell mentions two films that he liked and that seem, at least coming from him, to be really interesting. The first one is Old Fish:

Two films struck me as excellent. Gao Qunshun’s Old Fish (2008) centers on a simple idea. Somebody is planting bombs throughout Harbin, and an aging police officer is the only person remotely qualified to dismantle them. Over a leisurely half hour, we’re introduced to Old Fish, his wife, and his colleagues. Then the first bomb is found, and the suspense kicks in. The apparently clumsy codger, who in an early scene fumbles a World War II grenade, summons up wiliness and delicacy when he has to defuse the mysterious packages.

The second is The Sparrow, a Johnnie To (with Simon Yam, again) film:

Just as fine, but more unclassifiable, was Johnnie To Kei-fung’s The Sparrow (2008), premiered at Berlin. A gang of pickpockets led by Simon Yam is beguiled by a mysterious lady on the run (Kelly Lin), and their schemes start to fall apart. As often with To, the conception of the film is slim, but the execution is rich. There are the games and competitions, the symmetries and repetitions, the offhand motifs (here, cigarettes, cigars, and pipes), the geometrical and arithmetical plot mechanics. Johnnie To has become perhaps the world’s most unpretentiously, unapologetically formalist director.

Johnnie To — the world’s most unapologetically formalist director — that’s a thought we’re going to have to chew on for awhile. From Bordwell’s blog we discovered a link to Variety Asia Online’s FilMart Blog, where they sort of live blog the events, talking to filmmakers, buyers, movers and shakers and drop in some parties here and there.

Well, both of the films that Bordwell recommends seem really good. Anyone who has seen them is free to leave a comment or even write a review for us.

Technorati Tags: festivals, financing, hong kong , Johnnie To

On February 16, Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai (王小帅) won his second Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, taking honors for best script for his new film In Love We Trust 《左右》, a film that has one whopper of a premise: the daughter of a divorced couple develops leukemia and the only way that they can save her is by having another child (which will serve as a donor for the first?). There are a couple of previews and interviews on the video-sharing sites. We’re not sure when it comes out in China, but we like Wang’s movies despite their get-under-your-skin-in-a-weird-way sentimentality, so we’re looking forward to this one. The first video is a preview and the second one an interview with the cast and crew.