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Vancouver 2018: Offense waves
Called-for (2018).
DB:
It's striking how many stories depend on crimes. Genre movies exercise, of course, just so practise art films (The Conformist, Blow-Up) and many of those in between (Run Lola Run, Memento, Nocturnal Animals). The crime might exist in the future (as in heist films ), the ongoing nowadays (many thrillers), or the afar past (dramas revealing buried family secrets).
Criminal offence yields narrative dividends. It permits storytellers to probe unusual psychological states and circuitous moral choices (as in novels likeOffense and Punishment, The Stranger). Yous tin can build curiosity virtually by transgressions, suspense about whether a law-breaking volition be revealed, and surprise when bad deeds surface. Law-breaking has an affinity with some other appeal: mystery. Not all mysteries involve crimes (e.1000., peradventureThe Plough of the Screw), and not all crime stories depend on mystery (due east.one thousand., many gangster movies). Notwithstanding, crime laced with mystery creates a powerful brew, every bit Dickens, Wilkie Collins, John le Carré, and detective writers have shown.
We ought, so, to expect that a moving-picture show festival will offer a panorama of criminal activeness. Venice did last year and this, and so did the latest edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival. Some movies were straightforward thrillers, some introduced crime obliquely. In 1 the question of whether a criminal offense was committed at all led–aye–to a full-fledged murder.
Smells like teen spirit
Diary of My Heed.
Offset with the packet of four Swiss Television set episodes from the series Shock Wave. Produced by Lionel Baier, these dramas were based on real cases–some fairly distant, others more than contempo, all involving teenagers. The episodes offer an anthology of options on how to trace the progress of a offense.
In Sirius a rural cult prepares for a mass suicide in expectation they'll exist resurrected on an extraterrestrial realm. The motion-picture show focuses largely on Hugo, a teenager turned over to the cult by his parents. Director Frédéric Mermoud gives the group's suicide preparations a solemnity that contrasts sharply with the food-fight that they indulge in the dark before. Similarly, The Valley presents a tense account of a immature car thief pursued by the police. Locking us to his consciousness and a linear fourth dimension scheme, managing director Jean-Stéphane Bron summons upward a good bargain of suspense around the boy'south prospects of survival in increasingly unfriendly mountain terrain.
Sirius and The Valley give us straightforward chronology, just First Name Mathieu, Baier's directorial contribution, offers something else. A serial killer is raping and murdering young men, but one of his victims, Mathieu, manages to escape. The film's narration is split. Mathieu struggles to readjust to life at home and at school, while the constabulary try to coax a business firm identification from him. This action is punctuated by flashback glimpses of the traumatic crime. The result explores the parents' incertitude about how restore the routines of normal life, the constabulary inspector's unwillingness to printing Mathieu too hard, and the boy'due south cocky-consciousness and guilt as the target of the boondocks's morbid marvel.
This insistence on the aftereffects of a crime dominates Diary of My Mind, Ursula Meier's contribution to the serial. This too uses flashbacks, mostly to the moments correct after a high-school boy kills his mother and father. But at that place'south no whodunit factor; nosotros know that Ben is guilty. The question is why. Ben's diary seems to offering a decisive clue ("I must kill them"), but just equally important, the magistrate thinks, is his creative writing under the tutelage of Madame Fontanel, played by the axiomatic Fanny Ardent. Because she encouraged her students to betrayal their accurate feelings, Ben'southward hatred of his father had surfaced in his classroom work. Perfectly normal for a immature man, she assures the magistrate. No, he asserts: a alert y'all ignored. The stupor waves that engulf onlookers after a crime, the proffer that art tin be both therapeutic and dangerous, the question of a instructor's duty to both her pupils and the society outside the classroom–Diary of My Mind raises these and other themes in a compact, engaging tale.
Last hurrah of (movie) knightly
Chinese director Jia Zhangke is no stranger to criminal matters. His films have dwelt on street hustles, botched bank robberies, and hoodlums at many ranks. Ash Is Purest White is a gangster saga, tracing how a tough woman, Qiao, survives across the years 2001-2018. Initially the mistress of boss Bin, Qiao rescues him from a trigger-happy beatdown using his pistol. She takes the blame for owning a firearm. Getting out of prison, Qiao tracks down the now-weakened Bin, who has taken up with another woman.
Ash Is Purest White tackles a familiar schema, the autumn of a gang leader, from the unusual perspective of the woman beside him, who turns out to exist stronger than he is. Virtually of the film is filtered through her experience, and forth with her we learn of Bin'south refuse and betrayal, forth with his integration into the corrupt and bureaucratic commercialism of 20-outset century Communist china. The 2nd half of the motion-picture show shows Qiao forced to survive exterior the gang'due south milieu. A funny scene plays out one of her scams: picking a prosperous human being at random, she announces that her sis, implicitly his mistress, is significant. Simply as important, Qiao's adventures let Jia to survey current mainland fads and follies, including belief in UFO visits.
Amidst those follies, Bin suggests, is a trust in mass-media images. As Ozu's offense films (Walk Cheerfully, Dragnet Girl) suggested that 1930s Japanese street punks imitated Warner Bros. gangsters, and so Jia'southward mainland hoods model themselves on the romantic heroes of Hong Kong cinema. They raptly spotter videos of Tragic Hero (1987) and cavort to the sound of Sally Yeh's mournful theme from The Killer (1989). They derive their sense of the jianghu--that landscape of mountains and rivers that was the backdrop of ancient chivalry–not from lore or even martial-arts novels but from the vehement underworld shown on TV screens.
Bin'south refuse is portrayed as abandoning those ethics of righteousness and self-cede flamboyantly dramatized in the movies. But Qiao clings to the imaginary jianghu to the terminate. She explains to him that everything she did was for their old code, just every bit for him: "You're no longer in the jianghu. You wouldn't sympathise." You can respect his pragmatism and adore her tenacity, only he'south still a feeble figure, and she'southward left running a seedy mahjongg joint–1 much less glamorous than the club she swanned through at the film'southward first. Appropriately for someone who got her idea of heroism from videos, we last meet her as a speckled figure on a CCTV monitor.
From dailiness to darkness
Burning.
Oftentimes the criminal offense in question is presented explicitly, but two films leave information technology to us to imagine what shadowy doings could take led to what we see. In Manta Ray, past Phuttiphong "Pom" Aroonpheng, we get the familiar motif of swapped identity. A Thai fisherman finds a wounded homo in the forest and nurses him back to health. The victim is a mute Rohinga whom the fisherman names Thongchai. They share a home and the occasional trip the light fantastic and swim, even a DIY disco.
But who attacked Thongchai in the forest, and why? And what is the connection to the unearthly gunman who paces through the wood, bedecked in pulsating Christmas bulbs? And what makes the foliage teem with gems glowing in the murk? Somewhere, there has been a crime.
Manta Ray accumulates its impact gradually, with the scenes of the men'due south routines giving manner to mystery when the fisherman vanishes and Thongchai (named by the fisherman for a Thai pop singer) is trailed past a ninja-like figure clad in a red cagoule. A disappearance and a reappearance (of the fisherman's wife) punctuate moody scenes of trees and sea. The opacity of the action makes a political bespeak: offscreen, Thais brutally chase downward the refugee Rohingas. But the critique of anti-immigrant brutality is intensified by the lustrous cinematography (Aroonpheng was a top DP). You can feel the texture of the planks in the motel and the precipitous edges of the gems that fingers root out of the forest floor. This is probably the nearly tactile movie I saw at VIFF.
And then in that location was Lee Chang-dong'southward Burning. Lee started his career stiff and has stayed that mode. The slowly paced, Kitanoesque gangster story Greenish Fish (1997) and Peppermint Processed (1999), with its reverse-gild chronology, both achieved local popularity and established him as a fixture on the festival circuit. Oasis (2002), a daring romance of a disabled couple, won a special prize at Venice. Clandestine Sunshine (2007) brought Lee even more widespread fame. Like the episodes of Shock Waves, it dealt with the aftereffects of a horrific crime. Virtually everyone I know who saw the pic remembers nigh vividly a item scene: the heroine, having converted to Christianity and at last ready to forgive the perpetrator, visits him in prison. It's one of the virtually nakedly blasphemous scenes I've always seen, carried off with a shocking calm. Offense–this time, a gang rape–is likewise at the heart of Poetry (2010), with another female parent facing familial tragedy.
Most of these plots, particularly Poetry, are rather busy, but Burning is more stripped down (though non short). Lee Dong-su maintains the shabby family unit farm while his begetter is in jail awaiting trial. In town Dong-su meets Haemi, a former classmate now running sidewalk giveaways.
She lures him into her life by asking him to feed her cat while she's in Africa, but before she leaves they beginning an affair. But he seldom breaks into a smile, favoring a puckered-lip passivity. After their coupling, we become his POV on a bare wall.
This turns out to exist the get-go of many disquieting passages. Betwixt bouts of tending livestock, feeding Haemi's cat, and masturbating to her picture, Dong-su gets mysterious phone calls with no one on the line. He meets Haemi at the airport simply to notice that she'south formed a friendship (or more than?) with the suave Ben, whose gentle courtesy makes Dong-su feel an even bigger bumpkin. Shortly the 3 are hanging out together, but at parties Dong-su can but stare at Ben'southward yuppie friends. Dong-su, who wants to be a writer, is a fan of Faulkner, but Ben compares himself to the Slap-up Gatsby.
After a long night of relaxing at the farm, with the men watching Haemi dance topless, she disappears. A black frame, a dream of a called-for greenhouse, and Dong-su is left solitary halfway through the flick. What happened to Haemi? And why does Ben say he enjoys torching greenhouses? Dong-su turns detective,
Lee is a master of pacing, and the deliberateness of the flick delicately turns a romantic drama into a critique of entitled lifestyles then into a psychological thriller. We are locked to Dong-su'southward consciousness except for a couple of telltale shots of Ben calmly studying his rival from afar. Nosotros go Vertigo-like sequences of Dong-su trailing Ben and probing for clues and perhaps having more than dreams. At the same time, Dong-su starts writing, as if Haemi'due south disappearance has inspired him, only he finds more than violent ways to release his simmering bewilderment.
Later only one viewing, I didn't discoverBurning every bit devastating a film every bit Secret Sunshine or Poetry, but I'd gladly watch it again and probably I'd come across more than in information technology. Lee manages to sustain over 2 and a half hours a plot centering on three, and then 2 main characters. He has earned the right to soberly take the states into the mundane rhythm of a loner's life and then shatter that through an encounter with two enigmatic figures who may be playing listen games. Equally with Manta Ray, we accept to infer some of the activity behind the scenes, but that just shows that in cinema, classic or modern, crime can pay.
Thank you as always to the tireless staff of the Vancouver International Picture Festival, above all Alan Franey, PoChu AuYeung, Shelly Kraicer, Maggie Lee, and Jenny Lee Craig for their aid in our visit.
Snapshots of festival activities are on our Instagram page.
Japadog, a Vancouver landmark.
Vancouver 2018: Landscapes, real and imagined
Shoplifters (Kore-eda, 2018).
DB here:
We've been attending the Vancouver International Picture show Festival since 2004. (The entries are tagged hither.) Information technology'due south provided us many of our happiest viewing experiences, and this year is proving just every bit exciting. In detail, the festival'southward long commitment to new films from Asia hasn't flagged. Thanks to programmers Shelly Kraicer and Maggie Lee there has been plenty to showcase trends in Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Republic of korea, and other lands. We won't, unfortunately, be hither for Hong Sangsoo's Grass, just here are acting reflections on 4 items that nosotros've seen in our outset days.
Families, fraught and fragile
Shoplifters.
Girls Always Happy is a quiet just ingratiating outset feature from Yang Ming Ming. Mother and daughter are both writers, and they struggle to live together in harmony while hoping for a legacy from Grandad and for some resolution in their love lives. Yang says that she based the motion-picture show on her own life, which rings true when you consider the range of emotions that well up. The two women tease each other, insult each other, ravenously devour meals together, shop partly to annoy sales staff, and sometimes flare-up out in screams. Reconciliations may be temporary but are still heartfelt.
With the ii of them jammed together in a hutong, a neighborhood of cramped former basis-floor apartments, their jousts take on an intensity captured by Yang's exceptionally tight framings and rapid cut. Yang storyboarded the entire moving-picture show, which immune her quite precise control of limerick and focus.
The relentless close-ups allow both psychological intimacy and subtle performances, too every bit comparison of eating styles. Trips outside—Wu on her scooter or in her lover's modern apartment, the female parent at a pilus salon—provide a respite from what's essentially a serial of escalating 2-handed combats. The final shot is a lengthy take that carries our heroines forward into their urban center. Yang explained in the Q & A that subsequently a film full of fast cutting and lots of talk she decided to end with the sort of long accept Chinese filmmakers favor. In this context, with a canny use of a motorbus's rearview mirror, the shot becomes an exhilarating, floating passage into the Beijing night.
Girls Always Happy came to VIFF garlanded with awards, including prizes from both the Berlinale and the Hong Kong Pic Festival. Even more than honored was the latest by Kore-eda Hirozaku, The Shoplifters, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It's another of his family dramas (nosotros've discussed Yet Walking,I Wish,Like Begetter, Similar Son, Our Lilliputian Sister, andSubsequently the Storm), simply here the notion of family unit is given an uncanny twist at the end.
Each member, as per Kore-eda's addiction, is given a specific, respectful delineation. There's the happy-go-lucky Osamu, a day laborer who both coddles the boy Shota and leads him into niggling crime. There's the maternal Nobuyo who works at a dry-cleaning facility and pilfers what she finds in pockets. Twentysomething Aki works at a sex club flashing her breasts and bottom at men crouched behind ane-way mirrors. Grandma keeps the group going with her pension, her pachinko-playing, and some secret sources of income. Into this household comes Yuri, an driveling child brought home like an abandoned true cat.
Like Tsai Ming-liang's more somber Pelting Dogs, this is a moving picture well-nigh people on the margins. The kids don't go to schoolhouse; Shota teaches Yuri the tricks of shoplifting, while Aki warms to a sex-club client. As in Girls E'er Happy, interiors are sharply distinguished from exteriors, just not by close framings and shifting focus. Instead, master shots fill the frame with the detritus of seven people jammed in together. (Come across shot above.)
In a moving-picture show so concentrated on label, we naturally get the sort of privileged moments that Kore-eda excels in. Osamu pauses in his construction work to stand up looking around an unfinished flat—a minor one, but a home he tin never have. The immature kids collect cicadas. Aki cradles a lone punter in her lap. Nobuyo consoles Yuri by comparison the girl's scars to burns Nobuyo has accumulated from ironing clothes. Grandma, watching her charges play on the beach, pours sand to comprehend the age spots on her legs. The ensemble comes together in moments of shared joy at the seaside or watching the fireworks at the Sumida River festival.
But these moments don't set up us for the unsettling revelations about the characters' pasts that we get in the last half hour. Even here, though, the details of behavior remain indelible. Ane astonishing shot turns a cinematic staple—a woman trying to wipe abroad tears—into a tour de forcefulness of facial functioning past Ando Sakura.
The Shoplifters reminded me of Ozu's Passing Fancy and Inn in Tokyo, obliquely but sharply condemning the economic atmospheric condition that push button people into wayward lives. Information technology's a gently subversive film most people flung together resourcefully trying to survive and find happiness past flouting the comfortable norms of middle-course morality.
Time out of mind
A Land Imagined.
Lush Reeds, by Yang Yishu, has plenty of the long takes that Girls Always Happy avoids. In nearly abstruse framings, newspaper reporter Xiayin moves through minimalist offices and country lanes, bleak apartments and dense foliage.
As in many postwar films, drama sometimes becomes subordinate to the walks taken by the protagonist into an overwhelming, mysterious environment.
Confronting the wishes of her politically cautious editor Xiayin inquires into complaints of rural pollution. At the same fourth dimension, she's significant and is growing afar from her adequately cold husband. Her visit to the countryside becomes a threatening feel that brings to low-cal parallels between the death of a villager and the apparent suicide of a fellow reporter.
The motion-picture show is less linear than I propose. Yang breaks up the story into midsize chunks and sets them out of club, then that some images–a fiddling girl who meets Xiayin in the village, a shoe on a riverbank, the rescue of a suitcase from a rubbish depot–could fit into one fourth dimension frame or another. Yang is fifty-fifty so assuming equally to run the title credit over again midway through the picture, suggesting that what follows might be backstory, or imagination, or an culling movie, or something in between.
A similar ambiguity pervades A Land Imagined (2018), another prize-winner (Golden Leopard, Locarno). Information technology centers on a migrant worker Wang working at a Singapore site devoted to extending the coastline with sand dredged up or brought from other countries. Wang has disappeared, and the investigating cop Lok soon learns that Wang's Bengali friend Ajit has vanished besides. A flashback takes us into the backstory, showing Wang spendiing his nights at a cybercafé and getting harassed by a troll who invades his videogame screen. Wang as well begins a chaste thing with the tough gamine Mindy who oversees the game parlor. Eventually the flashback turns into a parallel, dreamlike narrative, with Ajit past turns expressionless and alive and Lok reenacting scenes involving Wang.
Director Yeo Siew Hua has given this noirish tale an appropriately lustrous treatment, with saturated long shots of black derricks looming against a ruby-red sky or sunk in sickly orangish murk. Lyrical tedious-movement musical interludes heighten the dreamlike ambience, and in that location'southward a post-Wong-Kar-wai freedom of camera placement in the processed-colored cybercafé.
In his comments subsequently the screening, Yeo spoke of trying to provide a counter-image to "the postcard, Crazy Rich Asians" delineation of Singapore. The shifting time frames and uncertain stretches of subjectivity are connected, for Yeo, with a sleeplessness suffered non just by the chief characters but too by the population at large. The "state imagined" isn't only the sand that expands the contours of the shoreline but also the hallucination of a hypermodern city land congenital on the labor of workers who can conveniently go missing.
Thank you as ever to the tireless staff of the Vancouver International Film Festival, in a higher place all Alan Franey, PoChu AuYeung, Shelly Kraicer, Maggie Lee, and Jenny Lee Craig for their help in our visit.
Snapshots of festival activities are on our Instagram page.
Girls E'er Happy.
Friendly books, books by friends
Moses and Aaron (1974).
DB here:
When the stack of books by friends threatens to topple off my filing cabinet, I know it's fourth dimension to flag them for you. I can't claim to have read every discussion in them, simply (a) nosotros know the authors are trustworthy and scintillating; (b) what I've read, I similar; (c) the subjects hold immense interest. Then there'due south (d): Many are suitable seasonal gifts for the cinephiles in your life (which can include yous).
Happy birthday, SMPTE
It includes survey articles on the history of flick formats, cameras and lenses, recording and storage, workflows, displays, archiving, multichannel sound, and television and video. There'south even an overview of closed-captioning. The outcome costs $125 for not-SMPTE members, and information technology's worth it. Many libraries subscribe to the journal too.
A highlight is John Belton's magisterial "The Last 100 Years of Move Imaging," which includes twenty-two pages of dense timelines of innovations in movie, Television receiver, and video. They stretch back across 1916, to 1904 and the transmission of images by telegraph. John'south article is provocative, suggesting that we might think of digital movie house as returning to film'south origins in handmade images for optical toys.
Lucas predicted that digital postproduction brought film closer to painting, and for more than and more filmmakers that prediction is coming truthful. I was startled to learn that 80% of Gone Girl was digitally enhanced after shooting.
Yes, sir, that'south our BB
Die 3 Groschen-Oper (1931, G. Due west. Pabst).
During the 1970s, Bertolt Brecht'due south proper name was everywhere in film studies. He epitomized what an alternative, oppositional, or destructive cinema ought to be. Cinema, even more than powerfully than theatre, was a motorcar for producing illusions. Then in his name critics objected to happy endings, plots that tidied upwardly reality, characters with whom nosotros ought to identify, letters that masked the real nature of conservative society. Films made all these things seem function of the natural lodge of things.
The Brechtian antidote was, every bit people used to say, to "remind people they were watching a film." This was washed past rejecting what he chosen the Aristotelian model and replacing information technology with the "alienation result": a panoply of distancing devices like intertitles, characters addressing the camera, actors confessing they were actors, and a display of the means of cinematic product (including shots of the camera shooting the scene).
Brecht became part of Theory. In French literary and theatrical civilization of the 1950s, his ideas on staging and performance had claimed the attention of Roland Barthes and other Parisian intellectuals. Godard was alert to the trend early, it seems; he had fun in Contempt (Le mépris, 1963) citing the 2 BB's (the other was Brigitte Bardot, bébé), and letting Lang quote a verse form past his onetime collaborator and antagonist. Past the time Anglo-American moving-picture show theorists were ready for semiotics, Brecht was offering support. Didn't his anti-illusionism chime well with the belief that all sign systems were arbitrary and culturally relative?
My summary is also simple, but and so so were many borrowings. Soon enough any highly artificial cinematic presentation might be called "Brechtian," though commonly minus the politics. In the academic realm, Murray Smith's book Engaging Characters (1995) pointed out crucial weaknesses in the anti-illusionist, anti-empathy account. By then, the certified techniques were condign part of mainstream cinema. Thereafter, we had Tarantino's section titles and enough of movies breaking the fourth wall. Brecht might have enjoyed the irony of using the to-camera confessions of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) aptitude to support contemptuous swindling. Isn't The Big Short (2015) a sort of Hollywoodized lehrstück ("learning play")?
Brecht'southward writings should be read and studied by every humanist and certainly everybody interested in film. They're clear, blunt, and often sarcastic.
This beloved "human involvement" of theirs, this How (unremarkably dignified past the word "eternal," like some indelible dye) applied to the Othellos (my married woman belongs to me!), the Hamlets (better sleep on it!), the Macbeths (I'one thousand destined for higher things!), etc.
At present Marc Silberman, our colleague here at Madison, has completed a trio of books that make the master's work available.Bertolt Brecht on Picture and Radio includes essays, scripts, and the Threepenny Opera lawsuit cursory. There'southward alsoBrecht on Operation and a complete revision of that trusty black-and-yellow volume dear to many grad students: Brecht on Theatre. The latter ii collections Marc worked on with collaborators. All are indispensible to a cinephile's education. As Brecht imagined a bold political version of music he called misuc; can nosotros imagine a cenima?
From BB to Southward/H
Speaking of Straub and Huillet, every decade or then somebody comes out with a book about them. This time we have to give thanks the admirable Ted Fendt, in the twenty-sixth volume in the serial sponsored past the Austrian Moving picture Museum (as well every bit the Goethe Institute and Synema). Similar the Hou Hsiao-hsien volume (reviewed here), Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet is fatty and full of ideas and information.
Starting things off is a lively and comprehensive survey of the duo's careers by Claudia Pummer, with welcome accent on production circumstances and directorial strategies. The book wraps with a detailed thirty-page filmography and a substantial bibliography.
My thoughts near S/H are tied up with their earliest work, when I first learned of them. So I loved, and still dear, Not Reconciled (1965) and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. I likewise have a fondness for Moses and Aaron, Form Relations (1983), From Today until Tomorrow (1996), and Sicilia! (1998). I observe others out of my achieve, and several others I haven't still seen. People I respect notice all their work stimulating, so I suspect it'due south really a thing of gaps in my taste.
Whether y'all like them or not, they're of tremendous historical importance. Without them, Jim Jarmusch and Béla Tarr, and of course Pedro Costa and Lav Diaz, would not accept accomplished what they have. And especially in December 2016, we ought to find their unyielding ferocity inspiring. Call up them on Dreyer: "Any gild that would not permit him make his Jesus flick is not worth a frog's fart." Brecht would accept approved.
Rock'd
To the minimalism of Straub and Huillet we can counterpoint the maximalism of Oliver Rock, the nigh aggressive tabloid American director since Samuel Fuller (although Rococo-period Tony Scott gives him some competition). Subsequently two books on Wes Anderson, Matt Zoller Seitz has brought us a booklike slab as impossible as the man's films. Can you lot pick it up? Just barely. Can you read information technology? Well, probably non on your lap; meliorate have a table nearby. Does its pattern mirror the maniacal scattershot energy of films similar JFK (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994), andU-Turn (1997)? Picket the title propel itself off the cover.
The whole thing comes at you lot in a headlong rush. Amid the pictorial churn and several essays by other deft hands, we plunge into and out of that stellar interview, mixing biography and filmmaking nuts-and-bolts. Matt gets deep into technical matters, such equally Rock's penchant for rough-hewn editing, as well as raising some big ideas about myth and autobiography. In that location are occasional quarrels between interviewer and interviewee. Out of the blue nosotros get remarks like "Alexander was not only bisexual, he was trisexual," which was non redacted.
The book's very backlog helps make the example for Rock's idiosyncratic vision. Matt'south connecting essays, along with the vast visual archive he's scavenged and mashed up, fabricated me desire to rethink my attitude toward this overweening, sometimes crass, sometimes inspired filmmaker. He at present seems a quintessential 80s-90s effigy, every bit much a part of the era equally Reagan, Bush-league, and Clinton. Stone emerges equally a resourceful defender of The Oliver Stone Experience, articulating a radical political critique with gonzo verve.
Rhapsody in white
This period slice is in its own way as wild every bit an Oliver Stone movie. From its opening cartoon of Paul himself as a Nifty White Hunter bagging a lion, information technology's a nearly self-parodying account of how a black musical tradition got netted, trussed up, and caged for the swaying delectation of white audiences. (No need to mention the irony of the name of our King.)
Along the way we have some straight-up songs (including some by Bing Crosby) spread amid extravagant dance numbers. The Universal crane gets a conditioning also. The music is infectious, the performers sweating to please, and the restoration–coming, I hope, to your screen presently–finally shows what two-color Technicolor could practise. This is the definitive version of a film too often known in cut versions with shabby visuals and sound.
The book is an in-depth contextualization of the motion picture, the studio, and the tradition of musical revues, both on stage and in motion picture. It records the production and reception, with rich documentation throughout. The story of assembling the restoration is in that location too, and it's a saga in itself. David is one of the moving spirits backside the online Media History Digital Library and its gateway Lantern. James is Director of the Celeste Bartos Picture Preservation Center at the Museum of Modernistic Art. Their collaboration has given us both a lush picture book and a serious, e'er enjoyable piece of scholarship. Their book proves the value of crowdsourcing: funded by online subscription, information technology was self-published. In this and much else, information technology can be a model for film historians pursuing questions that commercial and university presses might find too specialized. The outcome is a model of ambitious research, writing, and publishing.
Visiting Radio Ranch
Factor Autry in The Phantom Empire (1935).
For most thirty years I've been arguing that 1 fruitful enquiry program in film studies involves what I call a poetics of cinema: the study of how, nether particular historical conditions, films are made to achieve certain effects. This program coaxes the researcher to analyze class and fashion, study changing norms of production and reception, and consider how filmmakers work in their institutions and creative communities, with special focus on craft routines, work methods, and tacit theories virtually the ways to brand a movie.
Scott traces production practices and conventions, focusing in item on two dimensions. First, to a surprising degree, serials rely on the conventions of classic stage melodrama, such as coincidence and more or less gratuitous spectacle. 2nd, the serials are playful, even knowing. Like video games, they invite viewers to imagine preposterous narrative possibilities, not merely in the imagination just likewise on the playground, where kids could mimic what they saw Flash Gordon or Factor Autry do.
Matinee Melodramainvestigates the implications of these dimensions for narrative compages, visual manner, and the movie and television of our day. Scott closes with assay of the James Bond series, the cocky-conscious mimicking of serial conventions in the Indiana Jones blockbusters, and the Bourne saga, and he shows how they amp upwardly the older conventions. "Like the gimmicky action flick generally, the Bourne movies participate in a cinematic practice vigorously constituted by studio-era serials. That is, they alloy melodrama with forceful articulations of concrete procedure in scenes of pursuit, entrapment and confrontation."
Poetics, frank or stealthy
The Red Disengagement of Women (1971).
Scott's book acknowledges the poetics research program, and then, fifty-fifty more explicitly, does a new collection edited by Gary Bettinson and James Udden. The Poetics of Chinese Movie theater gathers several essays that usefully test and stretch that frame of reference.
I standard challenge to the poetics arroyo is: How do you handle social, cultural, and political factors that impinge on picture? I think the all-time way to respond this is to treat these factors as causal influences on a moving picture'south production and reception. More specifically, in the product process, what nosotros now call memes function every bit materials—subjects, themes, stereotypes, and common ideas circulating in the culture or the filmmaking institution. In the reception process, they provide conceptual structures that viewers tin employ in making their own sense of the films that they're given. And such materials will necessarily include other fine art forms; films are constantly adapting and borrowing from literature, drama, and other media.
Tradition is a central concept in poetics, and the editors explore of import ones in their own contributions. Gary Bettinson studies the emergence of Hong Kong puzzle films in works like Mad Detective (2007) and Wu Xia (2011). Are they unproblematic false of Hollywood, or are they doing something different? Gary shows them to accept complicated ties to local traditions of storytelling. Jim Udden focuses more than on stylistics in his account of Fei Mu's 1948 classic Jump in a Small Town, remade by Tian Zhuangzhuang in 2002. By examining staging, cutting, and voice-over, Jim shows that the earlier film is in many ways more "modernistic" than it'south usually idea and is somewhat more experimental than the remake.
It might seem that the "model" operas and plays of the Cultural Revolution, epitomized in The Scarlet Detachment of Women (1971) would resist an aesthetic assay; they're adamant, top-down fashion, past strict canons of political messaging. But Chris Berry'south contribution shows that they're amenable to close analysis likewise. Like Soviet Socialist Realism, they may be programmatic in meaning, but not in every choice about framing, performance, cutting, and music. Indeed, the fact that people both inside and outside Cathay (me included) yet find them pleasurable probably owes something to their "Ruby Poetics." And in true Hong Kong fashion, many filmmakers in that territory plundered those soundtracks with shameless, drop-the-needle panache.
I should probably add that I have an essay in this drove also. It'southward chosen "Five Lessons from Stealth Poetics," and it surveys things I've learned from studying movie house of the "three Chinas": Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Mainland. What attracted me were the films themselves, just in exploring them I was obliged to dash and stretch the poetics approach. Readers of this weblog know the play tricks: in talking near particular movies, I also endeavor to testify the virtues of the approach I favor. In other words, stealth poetics.
This is a good moment to pay tribute to Alexander Horwath, moving into his terminal nine or and so months of directing the Austrian Pic Museum. He has been a major figure in European picture show civilization, through his inspired programming and leadership in publishing the books and DVDs issued by the Museum. Nosotros're very grateful for all he has done for united states of america and for motion picture historians effectually the world.
P.S. eleven Dec 2016: Thanks to Mike Grost for a title correction and John Belton for a name correction!
King of Jazz (1930).
Genre ≠ Generic
The Shape of Night (Nakamuro Noboru, 1964).
DB here:
I didn't plan information technology that way, just it turns out that a great many films I saw at this twelvemonth'south Hong Kong International Picture show Festival would have to be categorized as genre pictures. Not, admittedly, Shu Kei'due south episode of Cute 2014 , which interweaves flashbacks and erotic reveries in a purely poetic fashion. And not Tsai Ming-liang's "sequel" to Walker (2012, made for HKIFF), chosen, whimsically, Journey to the W . Hither again, Lee Kang-sheng, robed as a Buddhist monk, steps slowly through landscapes, some so vast or opaque that you must play a sort of Where'southward-Waldo game to find him. (You have plenty of time: there are merely 14 shots in 53 minutes.)
But there were enough of other films that counted as genre exercises. Notwithstanding they mixed their familiar features with local flavors and fresh treatment, reminding me that conventions can always be quickened by imaginative film artists.
Keeping the peace, in pieces
Anthracite coal, Thin Ice (2014).
Have, for case, The Shape of Dark , a 1966 street-criminal offense pic from Shochiku, directed by Nakamura Noburo. Nakamura was the subject of a small-scale retrospective at Tokyo'due south FilmEx final twelvemonth, and this item certainly makes one want to see more of his work. A more than or less innocent girl falls in honey with a yakuza, who forces her to become a prostitute. In precipitous, sometimes very brief flashbacks, she tells her life to a customer who wants to rescue her. The film makes characteristically Japanese apply of bold widescreen compositions, disjointed close-ups, and mixed voice-overs from her and the men in her life. In retrospect, everything nosotros've seen has been seen in other movies, but Nakamura'southward treatment kept me continually gripped and often surprised.
Or accept That Demon Within , a Hong Kong cop film that premiered at the festival'south close. Dante Lam has made several solid urban activity pictures, especially Jiang Hu: The Triad Zone (2000), Animal Stalker (2008), Fire of Conscience (2010), and The Stool Dove (2010). They're characterized by wild visuals and exceptionally roughshod violence, and That Demon Inside fits smoothly into his style. The new wrinkle is that a boy traumatized by the sight of police violence himself becomes a cop. He's and then haunted by the paradigm of the cop from his past, while he's also caught upwardly in a search for a accept-no-prisoners robber.
His hallucinations and disorientation are rendered through nearly every damn trick in the book, from upside-down shots and blurry color and focus to voices bouncing around the multichannel mix.
At that place are dreams, likewise (seems like almost every new film I saw had a dream sequence), and scenes under hypnosis, and men bursting into flame, and action sequences that are visceral in their shock value. I thought the picture show careened out of control pretty early, and its nihilism wasn't redeemed by an epilogue that assured the states that this possessed policeman was, at moments, friendly and helpful. In this example, the storytelling innovations generated some confusion about exactly how the hero'due south breakdown infused what was happening around him.
More consequent, largely considering it didn't try for the subjectivity of Lam's picture, was the Chinese cop movie Blackness Coal, Sparse Ice . My friend Mike Walsh of Commonwealth of australia pointed out that the mainland picture palace's bleak realism seems to exist starting to alloy with traditional genre material. Director Diao Yinan explained, "My aim was not only to investigate a mystery and find out the truth about the people involved, but also to create a true representation of our new reality." The opening crosscuts the grubby detail of bloody parcels churning through coal conveyors with a couple entwined in a final copulation before breaking off their relationship.
The mystery revolves around body parts that are showing up in coal shipments around one region. Later on a startling shootout in a hairdressing salon, the case remains unsolved for several years. The surviving detective, a shabby drunk, returns to track downward the culprit, simply in the meantime he runs into a frosty femme fatale. "He killed," she says, "every man who loved me." Needless to say, the detective falls for her likewise, especially after ice-skating with her. Diao'southward film reminds us that y'all can create a neo-noir in two ways: Past taking a mystery and dirtying it upwards, or taking concrete reality and probing the mysteries lurking in it.
There were even two Westerns. Another mainland picture, No Man's Land , was unexpectedly savage coming from the director of the super-slick satiresCrazy Stone (2006) and Crazy Racer (2009). Now Ning Hao has given us a bleakly farcical, Road-Warrior account of life on the Chinese prairie.
A wealthy lawyer brought out to the wasteland to negotiate a criminal example becomes embroiled in primal passions involving men with very big guns, very large trucks, impassive faces, and almost no sense of humour. It's a black one-act of escalating payback (involving spitting and pissing), and it exudes sheer masculine nastiness. Completed four years ago, information technology institute release only afterwards all-encompassing reshoots demanded by censors. Yet even in its milder state information technology remains true to the spirit of Sergio Leone's jaunty grimness, bleached in umber sand and light.
Itching to run into a Kurdish feminist political Western? You'll find Hiner Saleem'due south My Sweet Pepperland welcome. A tough policeman (= sheriff) is dispatched to a remote village in Kurdistan to keep order (= clean up the town). A immature teacher (= schoolmarm) leaves her oppressive family unit to teach there as well. A warlord (= boondocks boss) and his minions (= paid killers) have terrorized the locals, while marauding female person guerillas (= outlaws) bring their fight into town.
These time-honored conventions shape a story of stubborn courage taking on complacent viciousness. In primal scenes, our sheriff faces downwardly big, hairy, scary killers.
USA frontier conventions, it turns out, piece of work pretty well in a Muslim society besides. The Hollywood Western's continued embodiment of American values transfers easily to the former Republic of iraq. "Our weapons are our laurels," the chief thug says, in a line that resonates through our history correct up to now. Yet things we take for granted bring modern alter to the wasteland. The sheriff assigns himself to the village in order to escape an arranged matrimony, as the woman he finds there has done. She is vilified by both the locals and her male person relatives, who would prefer death (hers) to dishonor (theirs). In the process, both he and she become heroic in a righteous, old-fashioned mode.
A killer proposes a compromise while sneakily drawing his pistol. The cop shoots him and remarks: "I don't do compromise." Neither does My Sweet Pepperland.
Gangs of New York, and elsewhere
The Dreadnaught (1966).
From March to May, the Hong Kong Film Annal has been running a series, "Ways of the Underworld: Hong Kong Gangster Film as Genre." It'south packed with classics (The Teahouse, To Be No. 1, City on Fire, Infernal Affairs) too as several rarities (Absolute Monarch, Baldheaded-Headed Betty, Lonely 15). I managed to grab three titles, all previously unknown to me.
The Dreadnaught (1966) has a familiar premise. Two orphan boys indulge in petty theft later the war. One, Chow, is caught but gets adopted by a policeman. He turns out a solid young citizen. Lee, the male child who escapes, grows up to exist a triad. When the two re-meet, Lee is attracted to Chow'southward stepsister. Some years after, Grub is now a cop and vows to smash Lee'southward gang. After a struggle with his conscience, Lee agrees to help.
The flick's main attraction is the shamelessly flashy performance of Patrick Tse Yin. Tse would brand his fame in the post-obit yr in Lung Kong's Story of a Discharged Prisoner, famous as a primary source for A Ameliorate Tomorrow. With his sidelong smile, his endlessly waving cigarette, and the dark glasses he wears at all times, Tse in The Dreadnaught looks forward to Chow Yun-fat's charismatic role as Marking in Woo's masterpiece.
Another icon of the menses is Alan Tang Kwong-wing. He played in over 100 films, mostly romances and triad dramas made in Taiwan. Westerners probably know him best as the producer of Wong Kar-wai's first two features, Equally Tears Get By and Days of Existence Wild. Wong had worked as a screenwriter for Tang. Onscreen, Tang had a suave, polished presence marked past his perfect coiffure; he was known every bit the Alain Delon of Hong Kong. His company, Fly-Scope, specialized in mob films during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
New York Chinatown (1982) shows Tang equally a immature hood whose ambitions to dominate the neighborhood are blocked past a rival gang. Eventually the constabulary decide to permit the two gangs decimate each other. This leads to an enjoyable, all-out showdown involving surprisingly heavy armaments. Shot quickly on location (passersby sometimes glance into the lens), the motion picture gives a rawer sense of street life than yous get from most Hollywood films. In that location's too a scene in which Tang, apparently attending Columbia role fourth dimension, corrects a history professor lecturing on Western imperialism in Cathay. Although the pic circulates on inexpensive DVD in 1.33 format, it'south a widescreen production, and it was a pleasance to scout a fine 35mm print at the Annal.
The biggest revelation of the series for me was Tradition (1955), a Mandarin release. This is considered i of the earliest pure gangster films in local picture palace. Information technology'south a fascinating plot near a boy raised by a triad kingpin in the 1930s. When the godfather dies, the immature Xiang is given power over the gang and the main's household. Trying to exist faithful to the old man's principles, Xiang finds himself unable to command his master's widow and daughter, who are led astray by the widow's worldly, greedy sister. At the aforementioned time, Xiang must ally with other triads to smuggle assistance to the forces fighting the invading Japanese. He is torn betwixt devotion to tradition and the need to adapt to modern materialism and the impending earth war.
Even more than tightly buckled upwards are director Tang Huang'due south obsessive hooks between scenes. A terminal line of dialogue is answered or echoed by the first line of the next scene; a closing door or graphic symbol gesture links sequences in the style of Lang's M. Most daringly, when sister San starts to low-cal a cigarette in one scene, nosotros cutting to her puffing on information technology in a tight shut-up—a gesture that takes place in a new scene hours later on. This and other admittedly gimmicky links expect forward to Resnais'south elliptical matches on action in Muriel.
Fortunately for us, the Archive has published Always in the Night: A Study of Hong Kong Gangster Films. Edited and partly written by Po Fung, it is an splendid collection of essays and interviews. It is in Chinese, but it includes a CD-ROM version in English. Information technology's available from the Annal's Publications part.
Behind the scenes at Milkyway
Johnnie To and a recalcitrant crane during the shooting of Romancing in Sparse Air.
Sometimes a genre film becomes a prestige picture. This happened, in spades, with The Grandmaster. If awards affair, Wong Kar-wai'southward film has become the official all-time Asian film of 2013. I missed the Asian Moving picture Awards in Macau (was watching early Farhadi films), simply the event was a virtual sweep: seven meridian awards for The Grandmaster, including Best Picture and Best Director. Afterward I got dorsum home, the Hong Kong Film Awards gave the picture a staggering twelve prizes, everything from Best Picture to Best Sound.
Unhappily, nothing in either contest went to the other outstanding Hong Kong picture show I saw terminal twelvemonth, Johnnie To Kei-fung's Drug War. It lacked the obvious ambitions and surface sheen of Wong's film. Many probably took it as merely a solid, efficient genre motion picture. I believe information technology's an innovative and subtle slice of storytelling, as I tried to show here.
Mr. To presses on, as prolific as usual. He has finished shooting a sequel to Don't Get Breaking My Heart, a rom-com that found success in the Mainland, and he's currently filming a more than unusual project in Canton. More on that soon.
During the festival only one recent To/Milkway moving-picture show was screened, The Blind Detective (I wrote virtually that here). But Ferris Lin, a immature manager from the Academy for Performing Arts, presented a very informative documentary feature on To and his Milkyway company. Boundless takes us behind the scenes on several productions, peculiarly Life without Principle, Romancing in Sparse Air, and Drug War. It also incorporates interviews with To, his collaborators, and critics similar Shu Kei.
Sitting at the monitor with his cigar, To may seem afar, merely actually he is wholly engaged. Nosotros run across him help push a crane out of the mud and shout commands to his staff. To confesses that he may scold too much, but the dedicated cooperation he gets confirms his demands. The team gives its all, equally we learn when they explicate the tension ruling the 3 days of rehearsal for the sequence-shot at the start of Breaking News. For The Mission, made at the time of Milkyway's biggest slump, the actors supplied their own cars and costumes.
To remains a complete professional who has perfected his craft, albeit in the Hong Kong tradition of "just do it." He doesn't rely on storyboards or even shot-lists, only outlines of the action, and he adjusts to the demands of the locations. The Mission had no script, merely the entire story and shot layout were in his head. For Exiled, he didn't even have that much and simply began thinking when he stepped onto the prepare each day. It'south hard to believe that precise shot design and sly dramatic undercurrents can emerge from such an obviously unplanned approach. In its recording of To's unique creative procedure, Dizzying provides a vivid portrait of one of the world's finest contemporary directors.
To continues to challenge himself. He is currently trying something else once again, shooting a musical wholly in the studio. Its source, the 2009 playDesign for Living, was written by and for the timeless Sylvia Chang Ai-chia. It won success in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Mainland. In the motion-picture show Sylvia is joined by Chow Yun-fatty, thus reuniting the stars of To'southward 1989 breakout film All About Ah-Long. The project also indulges the managing director's long-felt admiration for Jacques Demy. There is no 2022 motion-picture show I'yard looking forward to more keenly.
Special thanks to Shu Kei and Ferris Lin of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Thanks as well to Li Cheuk-to, Roger Garcia, and Crystal Yau, too as all the staff and interns of HKIFF, and to Winnie Fu of the Hong Kong Film Archive.
Journey to the W (Tsai Ming-liang, 2014).
Source: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/category/national-cinemas-china/
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