China Film Journal

Normally I prefer to write a straight up review, but in light of an unusual experience in watching film, I thought I’d make this a meta-review of sorts:

I went to watch this film at Zhongshan park in Shanghai last Tuesday. When the lights dimmed, a “documentary” about Tibet came on. As you know, this is the sensitive year for anniversaries in China, and is, in particular, the 50th anniversary of the uprising in Tibet that led to the exile of the Dalai Lama.The documentary was called, quite pointedly, “China’s Tibet, Past and Future”. If you’ve followed this issue at all, none of the information presented in this film are surprising:

*Tibet has always been part of China and the Tibetan rulers have acknowledged Chinese suzerainty since ancient times. Here are pictures and images of various historical documents that prove this point.
*WHy bother decrying the vetting of Tibetan religious leaders by China’s central government? Emperors used to do this, including with the latest Dalai Lama, so what’s the big deal if the CCP inherits this role.
*Tibet was a despotic, feudal system before the Chinese liberated it. It was a cruel theocracy of vast socio-economic inequality. The lamas and their families–the upper strata of the ancien regime–owned everything, including virtually all the arable land and other resources of production. Regular people had next to nothing.
*China liberated Tibet and gave it a good dose of progressive socialist ideology–and things improved greatly.
*Tibetan heritage is fluorishng and the standard of living has steadily improved.

It was clearly and unambiguously agitprop, but 21st. century China style, wrapping the historical narrative of Tibet up in and interweaving it with that of modern China as a whole, including the successful Beijing Olympics and the upcoming World Expo. At fifteen minutes, it was long and tendentious, and made me a bit impatient, since even after it finished, there was yet another long preview (of a regular movie), so that the film we came to watch didn’t start until a good twenty or twenty five minutes after the time stated on the ticket.

*24 City (24城記）*

Jia Zhangke has said, over the years, that he wants to alternate making docs and fiction films, and in this case he has melded the two.There are real people mixed with actors doing recreations–Joan Chen, Lv Liping, Zhao Tao, among others–but while these actors put on some decent performances these interviewees, the film doesn’t end up being more than a series of vignettes. I doubt that Jia intended to put together some systematic history of the place, but there is an unfinished, work-in-progress feel to this movie that tends to work towards its detriment. However, many of the interviews with the real people are better, because you know they are real–so here, again,is a meta-level question–how does the fact that you are watching Joan Chen change your perception of what’s being shown? It’s obvious that no matter how good Chen’s acting chops are, what she is doing is a performance. Most of the time, of course, we accept this–because that’s what makes fictional films possible in the first place–however, in this case, while Chen and the others are fine, they are still a bit actorly–and you wouldn’t really notice that fact unless you had all these more “real” performances to compare them with.

Jia is probably too intelligent not to notice this himself, but it still took me aback when he confronted this head on during the Joan Chen segment, where she says in her youth, at the prime of her beauty, her coworkers at the factory compared her to the actress Joan Chen. A little pomo joke? Maybe, but it made me a bit skittish. I suppose I still relish the suspension of disbelief,and don’t like the feeling of being taken for a ride, even if the ride, for the most part, is an enjoyable one.

That said, there are some moving moments, both from the actors and the real interviewees–enough to remind you that Jia Zhangke is one of the only Chinese filmmakers out there that can convey the gravity of China’s changing. That pathos, that uniquely Chinese pathos that glossier magazines and Western media don’t–or rather, *can’t* pick up on–are captured by Jia’s lens. One can almost forgive the lack of polish for that very reason–Jia, more than other filmmakers is continually creating audiovisual artifacts for us, the rest of the world, Chinese and non-Chinese alike–that will, I believe, stand the test of time,not only for their aesthetic excellence but because they are excellent chronicles of China. They are chronicles of physical reality, of its metamorphosis–but more than that,they are chronicles of the spirit, of what Chinese people call *jingshen*, which can mean anything mental, intellectual, spiritual–and in Jia’s case, it’s the emotional undertow, the things that are not said, that are glossed over and ignored by ideological or mainstream rhetorics that finally, as it were, get their say.

It is this kind of pathos that you don’t normally see among the audiovisual artifacts being produced today: and that’s what makes the contrast with the Tibetan propaganda film so striking. Jia was once an unofficial or underground filmmaker–and he no longer is, and he is, as well as know, no longer a skint and scrappy indie guy. He makes money. He’s got connections. But there’s still something very real, and very heartfelt at the core, and in a world of cinematic
phoniness, there’s something to be said for that stick to your guns type mentality.

To bring it back to Tibet: it is a strange juxtaposition, watching these two films together–we’re so used to seeing just previews before the movie that to see this stylish bit of agitprop is a bit startling: it hearkens back to newsreels of old, a time when the news was delivered on big screens, or when the political just had to intrude everywhere
because the world was in the throes of war or what have you. I feel obliged to mention that when we went, on Tuesday afternoon, even with the half off discount the theater was nearly empty.I highly doubt that Jia is going to make much money off this film, at least on the domestic market. Likewise, watching propaganda in the afternoon with a handful of other people didn’t quite jibe with I am sure that they play the Tibet film before the other, popular movies, so that before you settle down to watching “Transporter 3″ you get a good dose of “historical” education about the Tibet issue. Just in case things get hairy and out of control in Tibetan areas this March, or throughout the rest of this sensitive year.

China changes, or China never changes. Same ideological posture, except now in IMAX. However, Jia’s world, everything changes–and the only thing that lasts, the only thing that binds us are memories.Children are lost to their parents. Migrations, emotional rows, generation gaps all tear families asunder. The ligature of memory is strained as people get older–it seems strong when they are recalling it in front of us–but of course, we know that simply recalling something and saying it verbally doesn’t really do justice to the “strength” or “saturation” of that memory among the many memories that are stored in your brain or the salient memories constitutive of the sense of self and identity. Therefore, you get the uneasy sense that you are watching something that was unearthed quite by accident, and could very well have been lost. Maybe these “little people”, these “laobaixing” don’t mean much in the large scale of things: you read media articles with Chinese government planners, bureaucrats and energy scientists that are talking about the year 2100 like it’s tomorrow. Just about all of us who are alive now will be dead by that time, and our secrets and wounds, the maybes and could have beens–both individual and collective–will be just as gone. I’ve always been afraid that the official Chinese meta-narrative would swamp and subsume everything else–which is why it’s that much more incumbent on artists, in whatever medium, to keep recording the micro-sadnesses, vicissitudes, twists and turns, warp and woof of the individual life and consciousness. Lest it be completely be forgotten by History.

Technorati Tags: tibet, tibetans, dalai lama, china, chinese, ccp, jia zhangke, movies, movie, film, cinema, documentary, joan chen

This film is about the Chinese that left China in the 19th c. to build railroads in Canada and the US, and of course, has a bit of intrigue and romance as well.
The story follows Little Tiger (Sun Li), a plucky girl living the hard scrabble life on the streets of Hong Kong. Without family or friends, Little Tiger has to pretend that she’s a boy (a la Mulan) and work odd jobs to keep herself afloat. Her dream is to learn English and then go to the “Gold Mountain”, where she thinks she can make some real money and perhaps find her long-lost father, who went there and was never heard from again.

Fate has it that she runs into James Nichol (Luke McFarlane), the dashing young lad that is sent by his railroad tycoon father to get 2000 coolies to Canada right quick, lest they not able to finish their railroad and thus forfeit everything to their debtors. From there on in you can expect plenty of fortune cookie type moments thrown in, and you can guess who falls in love with who, and you can almost guess if there is a happy ending or not.

The two performances that I enjoyed the most were not by either of the main actors, but by Tony Leung Ka Fai as the bookman with the mysterious scar on his face as well as the venerable Peter O’Toole, who gets to play a drunken, aging old China hand responsible for finding workers for the Nichols. Peter O’Toole’s performance is of note, and not because it’s bad–I think it’d be hard for an actor of his caliber to be awful, but there are some ropey lines in there, especially when O’Toole is speaking Chinese and says some cheesy things like “forgive him, he is but a foreign devil” or just “oh shit”…it’s the kind of role that are easy paychecks for O’Toole John Hurt and the like–a sagging face, a slurred voice, drunken roues, world-weary philosophers, a still posh English accent–its still a joy to watch but there is, truth be told, nothing of real value in a role or performance of that sort. It adds nothing new. It is, literally, just a role.

The story itself, when it moves to Canada, has the normal ups and downs. There are a couple of secrets, a couple of conspirators, an couple of racist baddies, etc. There is also supposed to be this streak of melancholy because of all the Chinese workers that lost their lives in this process–they said 3 for every mile of railroad–and they hit this point home fairly often enough in the movie, when random Chinese workers get tragically killed. There are some bits about the emotional lives of the workers–but for the most part, the story is focused on Little Tiger, the she that is a he, as well as James Nichols, who learns a little something about Chinamen, building railroads, and himself in the process.

On the whole, not too bad, but nothing that you really want to waste your time watching if you have something more pressing to do, or something of real quality to watch.

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 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.

Squat – The Moss via kwout

Unfortunately, we haven’t had enough time to devote to this website. I wrote a review that appeared on Batgwa/Squat, which you can read by clicking on the link above.

moss, shawn yu, violence, hong kong, society, police, cops, China, drama, action

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)

彭韬凭《血蝉》获亚洲数码录像银奖 王小帅颁奖_影音娱乐_新浪网 via kwout

《血蝉》（Xue Chan/Little Moth) is a film about a girl that gets sold into slavery, joining one of those large beggars’ rings that anyone that’s spent any time living in and reading about urban China knows about. I had never heard of its director, Peng Tao (彭韬）until today, because while in Paris I went to an exhibition on China’s cities, and one of his films was showing there. The film was called “Wait” and was executive produced by Jia Zhangke and starred his leading lady, Zhao Tao. The film was about a woman with a young baby trying to make ends meet in Chongqing. Her husband is living in Pakistan and is absent throughout the film, echoing a theme found in Jia’s film Still Life. Her only form of communication comes in waiting at the post office for letters/mail that he might send, but of course, she never receives anything and then the post office ends up getting demolished (sorry for the spoiler, but the film is only 24 minutes long and being contemplative and arty doesn’t really have much of a plot to begin with). Her noodle stall gets demolished and so she’s forced to scrounge with work with a former patron who gives her some somewhat sketchy singing/karaoke type job, and that’s more or less where the movie concludes.

This was a short film, and it seems that Little Moth is the only feature length film that Peng Tao has made. As you can tell from the above picture though, it seems that he won an award (and was given that award from Wang Xiaoshuai, who is on the left). Googling in Englsih I found that he did indeed win the ,a href=”http://www.hkiff.org.hk/eng/programme/award01.php”>”Silver Digital Award” at the last Hong Kong International Film Festival.

I don’t know if any of his films are out on DVD in China, but would love to get a copy of Little Moth—I think I know what to expect, basically a bit of Jia Zhangke with a dash of Zhang Yang. Excuse me if I’m starting to sound a little cynical at this point, but hey, we all know what the Chinese arthouse is about. That doesn’t vitiate its value, by any means. Technorati Tags: china, peng tao, hong kong, HKIFF, little moth, slavery, beggars, china, chinese, society, awards, silver, zhao tao

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.

Do films with titles like “Feathers of Dongtan” and “Sounds. Breaths” give you a tingle in your special area? If not, fret not, there’s still some time to develop that acquired taste which is promotional films for really-big-Chinese-events. “Vision Shanghai”, like “Vision Beijing,” is going to feature documentary films by famous directors, thought the names of those directors have yet to be released. However, Shanghai Film Group has announced its next Expo film, a full-length doc by Jia Zhangke. We’ve been hearing about this intermittently for awhile, and whatever our reservations about promo films, we’re still curious to see what Jia’s up to with this film.The article says that trailers are being shown on TV soon, but we haven’t seen anything new on the video-sharing sites.

From Blogcritics.org we find a post about Orlando Bloom taking the lead role in the upcoming Hong Kong Phooey live-action movie. Toonzone links to a Variety article reports that Bretter Ratner’s Rat Entertainment is going to produce this film. Kirsten Dunst is reportedly playing the lead female character, telephone operator Rosemary. The movie is based on a short-lived Hanna-Barbara Saturday morning cartoon. Blogcritics says that Johnny To is going to direct – and then proceeds to call To the “Jerry Bruckheimer of Hong Kong,” which we would find insulting if we were To. But who knows, maybe he’d take it as a compliment.

Supporters of Tang Wei, the Lust, Caution that was recently banned by SARFT, has become a bit of a cause celebre – Danwei translates an open letter to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao asking that she be allowed to work again.

Lastly, again from Variety, is news that some French films are going to screen in Shanghai as part of the fifth French Film Panorama： “Pics include “Asterix at the Olympic Games,” “Towards Zero,” “Hunting and Gathering,” “Dragon Hunters” and “Go West! A Lucky Luke Adventure.” We were just in Paris and some of these movies are still being advertised and still showing in the theaters. So they’re newish movies, yes, but tend to fall on the schlocky side of the spectrum. Not really the most representative slice of French film perhaps, but in case you’re interested, this is happening from April 15-19, though we don’t know which four Shanghai cinemas they are screening at.Technorati Tags: tang wei, lust, caution, ban, censorship, China, SARFT, hong kong phooey, orlando bloom, johnnie to, cartoons, comics, jia zhangke, documentary, Expo, worldexpo, 2010