China Film Journal

《南京》上海试映有骂声 陆川:请坚持看到结尾_新民网.

The above article from the Chinese media seems to reinforce the impression I’ve heard through the grapevine regarding Nanking, Nanking or City of Life and Death—namely, that it’s a hard, brutal film to watch. However, the article merely points out that during some test screening of the film that some audience member in Shanghai cursed and threw a bottle at the screen and then walked out. I tend to be skeptical about the importance of these things, but then again, I’m not the moneyman financing this film. The article points out the bleakness of the black-and-white film might have gotten to said audience member. However, the article irresponsibly spoils the ending of the film, not so much in terms of what happens, but in terms of what the last shot is, and the emotional tone that it sets—and then proceeds to quote Lu Chuan about the making of the film, and how depressing and difficult it was at times, and how that ending (perhaps they shot the script in sequence) was a moment of relief and redemption. 

I was never one to really care to know about how “grueling” the filming process was for directors since after all, whatever hardships they endure during the process, it is, after all, just the making of a movie. It’s long work hours and emotionally exhausting, perhaps, but I think it’s a lot better than being a janitor your entire life.

But I digress. Well, it seems that the movie ought to hit the screens in Shanghai fairly soon, after premiering in Beijing and Nanjing a few days ago. If all goes well, expect a review right on China Film Journal soon!

You know that China has fully entered the world of late capitalism when good Chinese folks are willing to blow $100 million on a sci-fi film for an American audience. Today’s Variety reported developments on this “ultra-ambitious” CGI film known as Empires of the Deep, an English-language tale of “mermaids, mermen and a hero who saves the world from an evil empire”. The $100 mil budget is impressive considering they were it was a $50 million project one year ago. Previously called Cutthroat Island, I mean Mermaid Island, it will be directed by special-effects guy Pitof of Catwoman fame (they actually mention that in Variety), with a screenplay written by Randall Frakes, and Irvin Kershner attached as producer.

Kershner, Frakes, and um, Pitof are not exactly household names. Sci-fi fans will recognize Kershner as the nominal director of The Empire Strikes Back. Those fans will be equally quick to note that George Lucas was fully in control of that blockbuster. That’s not to say that Kershner, the quintessential journeyman director, did not have his moments, including the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars and the bootleg Bond film Never Say Never Again. It is to say that Kershner has not directed a film since 1990’s RoboCop 2, and has only one real producer credit, a direct-to-video number. And he is 85.

Frakes has been more active recently, scripting (actually, co-scripting) a number of direct-to-DVD actioners starring Mario Van Peebles, Charlie O’Connell (brother of Jerry), and Mark Dacascos (martial artist, now of Iron Chef America fame) According to IMDB voting, his most widely-viewed work is 1987’s Hell Comes to Frogtown with then-wrestling star “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. Screenwriters aren’t wholly responsible for the fate of their works, of course. Acting, directing, production values count. If only he’d had Irvin Kershner to direct. I think the script will be scripted first by co-writer Jiang Hongyu, and then translated into English and film convention by Frakes, who has done is share of co-writing and novelization work.

And the mono-monikered Pitof? Again, I went to trusty IMDB to find his next film, called Only in New York. One of the user comments is titled simply, OMG! Pitof? NOOOOO!!!!! Apparently the commenter fears for the career of Jim Cavieziel (The Passion of the Christ, The Thin Red Line). To his credit, Pitof directed the well-received Vidocq, the Gallic fantasy which was the first filmed entirely with high-def Sony-Panavision cameras, using technology that Lucas developed for the Star Wars prequels. And he did visual effects work with Jean-Pierre Jeunet on City of Lost Children and Alien Resurrection.

What’s really going on? Even with the weak dollar, 100 million is still nothing to sneeze at. The Variety fluff piece goes on to say the film is being put together by “China’s Fontelysee Pictures in collaboration with the Emagine Studio of Hollywood.”  Though that line depicts a grand US-Chinese partnership, I believe these two entitles are in fact run by the same people, and that “Emagine” is a Chinese company with offices in the US. Check out for yourself: here is the Chinese Emagine site, and here is the US Emagine site.  Even the name “Emagine” seems designed to conflate it with Imagine Studios, a real Hollywood entity, much in the manner of those Asian knockoff “Adidos” and “Pummas”. Same with Irv Kershner – the very mention of his name is supposed to evoke sci-fi spectacular, though his involvement in high-profile movies is two-decades old. Chinese entrepreneurs will soon learn Western audiences and mass-media are more sophisticated than that.

The real connection between the two, and the actual producer of this film, is “Harrison Liang, PhD” whose bio on the Chinese site states he was an investment banker who moved to China in 2001, and is now Fontelysee’s CEO as well as head of China’s sister city program. Somehow I feel comforted that a competent businessman will be in charge instead of an 85-year-old. Even if this venture does not become, as Mr. Liang puts it, “Star Wars under the sea”, it will be one interesting step into the brave new world in commercial movie-making.

I read in the news recently that this sensitive film has been vetted by Chinese censors and will show in the theaters here in mainland China. That is good news for Chinese audiences, though the DVD has long since been available (we watched the film several weeks ago).The film might be somewhat sensitive from a political standpoint, though anyone can see that it’s an apolitical rom-com and there is really nothing too sensitive. The real drama lies in how SARFT, the PRC government agency that controls what can see the light of day in Chinese media, will take each film. Will they show the film ,or won’t they–and if they do, will it be edited in order to be appropriate for Chinese audiences. It’s become something of a pasttime for movie buffs and maybe just anyone that lives here in China to guess how the far from invisible hand of SARFT is going to alter the movie.

I didn’t think especially highly of the film, but there were a couple of things worth mentioning: one is that the modern day love affair between the Taiwanese male and Japanese female protagonists suggests that in the present, Taiwan and Japan can meet as “romantic” equals, that is, they can, in their own circuitous way, fall for each other. In the present day, Japan is gendered as a woman, Taiwan as a man. Both are initially wary of each other, afterwards, its rip each other’s clothes off, head over heels.

In contrast, in the flashback love affair, which happens at the end of the second World War, Taiwan is gendered as a woman, Japan as a man, and it is only the man that speaks of his love of the woman and Taiwan. He cannot take the woman with him: why, exactly, we are not sure. Japan had to relinquish Taiwan and other colonial pretensions. But again, it is only the Japanese man’s voice that we hear. The woman is never fully seen—we get a few brief glimpses of her in the past, as she watches the boat with her Japanese lover leave the harbor, and in the present, we only see her back and weathered/withered hands. We never hear her side of the story, and thus we never understand her pain. I think this is quite interesting–it seems that the Japanese male never mailed the letters, and so the Taiwanese woman never replied–nonetheless, that isn’t exactly a justification for why her voice is absent from the film. It does suggest that people of that generation, and especially those that had “sensitive” relations with the colonizers, have many more secrets than we’ll ever know, things that we of the latter generations may accidentally happen upon, or even consciously uncover, but which will always just be the tip of the iceberg.

On a less highfalutin level, there is also the fact that this film has been the most successful local film in Taiwan for a long, long time, and everyone is trying to figure out why that happened. One of the more thought out articles on this is from Asia Pacific Arts magazine, where writer Brian Hu comes up with a list of seven reasons why he thinks the film was so successful in Taiwan, while debunking some of the pat and what he thinks are incorrect answers. His list begins with 1. Because it appeals to both local and cosmopolitan sensibilities. Hu points out that in this regard, this film can only be understood within the context of the Taiwanese film industry, including among other things the Hou Hsiao-Hsien pioneered Taiwanese New Wave of the 1980s and 1990s. Hu argues that the appeal of Cape is not in some “realism” a la the Taiwanese New Wave. Verisimilitude and social realism don’t necessarily equate with box office success. Hu’s second point: 2.Because it makes people laugh. Anyhow, there are seven total and the article is a good read.

Hu’s conclusion is quite thoughtful and is worth quoting here in its entirety:

Cape No. 7 got great word of mouth because it got great word of mouth. For a local film — that most despised category of film in Taiwan — to get good buzz was enough for everyone to want to see it to believe it. In that sense, this inflated box office may only be a one-time deal, since the next Cape No. 7 won’t come with that element of surprise. But what the Taiwanese industry doesn’t need are more shocks like Cape No. 7. What it needs are directors interested in making comedies that are funny, romances that are romantic, and melodrama that’s moving. I’m fearful that Cape No. 7 will lead to copycats rather than craft, which is what Cape No. 7 demonstrated most impressively. The industry can’t rely on word-of-mouth to win back the audience. It needs to win back the audience’s trust, not just its attention.

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 famed Chinese film director died on October 18 at the age of 85. The International Herald Tribune said this about Xie’s life during the Cultural Revolution. <blockquote>Xie himself was targeted during the Cultural Revolution, his 1964 film “Stage Sisters” attacked because it “advocated the reconciliation of social classes.”

Xie recalled in the 2002 interview that his parents committed suicide amid the political pressure — his mother jumping off a building and his father overdosing on sleeping pills — and he had to collect their bodies himself.

Xie was also denounced at a rally attended by more than 100,000 people.

Top young Chinese director Jia Zhangke said it was still risky for Xie to make films about the period in the 1980s, when China had started to open up and implement economic reforms.

“He was very bold, he had a rebellious spirit for that time,” said Jia, whose movies were also once banned.

Not surprisingly, Xinhua mentioned that Xie’s films tackled the Cultural Revolution but never mentioned what he himself experienced.

6th generation director Jia Zhangke mentioned that he had recently talked to Xie and that Xie had always been quite supportive of his films. He also said that he hoped to give the old man a bottle of maotai to take over to the next world, since that was Xie’s poison of choice.

Xie’s Chinese movie database (Chinese language IMDB) page is here.

The United Nations has sponsored some public awareness films from 20 prominent filmmakers and artists, and Jia Zhangke was one of them. Out of the several themes the directors could choose from, Jia picked the environment as his theme and his film will be made in a silent film style, starring, (who else?) Zhao Tao.The films are being executive produced by Martin Scorcese.(Links in Chinese)

Browsing Eachnet for headlines I came across some news regarding an accidental fire on the set of John Woo’s upcoming historical action film Red Cliff.
One person died and six were injured, all in stable condition and expected to live. I just skimmed the articles but so far there’s been no thorough investigation of the matter (it only happened on June 9), but, according to John Woo, the film will still still premiere in Chengdu on July 3 and hit theaters in the rest of China on July 10, as planned. The person that died was some kind of effects technician. He was only 23 years old.

A quick post about some earthquake and film related news: first off, Jia Zhangke, at the Cannes Film Festival where his new film 24 City was recently screened, lead a moment of silence for the earthquake victims and dedicated the film to the memory of the victims. The film is actually set in Chengdu, Sichuan.

Jet Li donated one million yuan and his charitable foundation, the One Foundation, has collected 28.05 million yuan and is sending supplies to Sichuan.

And lastly, a 17 member team of filmmakers is making a documentary about the earthquake. The film is provisionally entitled “Wenchuan” and they started filming on May 14, two days after the earthquake happened.

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.