Nippon Connection & Shinya Tsukamoto in Frankfurt

The J W Goethe University in Frankfurt is the location of the world's biggest festival of Japanese Cinema, The Nippon Connection, which I recently attended. Founded by three students in 2000, who were frustrated by the sparsity of Japanese films getting distribution in Germany outside of the Berlin Film Festival, the festival has grown from a handful of films to a large and diverse programme around which gravitates an array of Japanese themed cultural events from puppet theater, to a noodle bar and Japanese DJs. This strategy of making the screenings a cultural 'event' has been hugely successful and from its inception the festival has drawn crowds numbering several thousands.

This year the festival also played host to the Kinema Club Japan a prestigious, international network of Japanese Film scholars. A festival that programmes anime and pink films next to works of the political avant garde and big name releases, and which appeals to scholars as much as it does fan boys, The Nippon Connection is about breaking down barriers as much as it about giving the exposure Japanese Cinema deserves to a nation that is traditionally resistant to subtitled films. 'We wanted to put all of these different people in a room together, to force them to interact', says Holger, one of the founders. A brilliant demonstration of grassroots cinephilia in action, the work of Alex, Marion and Holger to found and develop the festival whilst studying full time is nothing short of inspiring. Here are a few brief reflexions on what i saw...

Arch Angels (Issei Oda): A lavish manga adaptation set in a girls school were three friends (hilariously) discover they have superhuman powers and use them to foil a kidnapping operation conducted by the school's corrupt administration. Full of blistering optical effects and playful humour, including a CGI dog that turns out to be the film's wise cracking and intrusive narrator, it entertains from beginning to end.

Look of Love (Yoshiharu Veoka): Impressively shot on 8mm this surreal feature follows the exploits of a small time pimp and his two girls who undergo revelatory experience one night in Tokyo. A voyeuristic man that watches his two nude neighbours, an apartment full of abandoned children and a satellite that gropes one of the prostitutes with long metal tentacles as she floats through space are among the images that pepper this story of self discovery.

The Matsagune Potshot Affair (Nobuhiro Yamashita): Known for his dark humour Nobuhiro serves up the kind of brilliantly composed surreal, ensemble comedy that is one of Japanese cinema's most endearing and interesting genres. In a small provincial town a cop has to help out his brother who, after committing a hit and run, is blackmailed by two dim-witted criminals into helping them retrieve their stash of stolen gold - but what to do with the bullion once it is in their hands? Not to mention the severed head... Sheer comic genius.

Mushishi (Katsuhiro Otomo): Akira director Otomo's latest film after Steamboy is a live action supernatural period drama about a bug master who travels Japan taming the invisible bugs, which swarm through the air like molecules causing all manner of problems to humans. Although peppered with some very nice visual ideas (particularly a scene in which all the words escape from a library and have to be recaptured) the film has serious pacing problems not unlike Steamboy, the final scenes of which descended into lever pulling monotony.

The Prisoner (Adachi Masao): The most enigmatic and controversial film of the festival follows the survivor of a suicide attack on an airport by the Red Army terrorist group, as he is tortured mercilessly by his captors. Visited in his cell by representative from the French and Russian revolutions, he begins to philosophically explore his position. A highly personal, deeply abstract film from Adachi, who was himself involved in the Red Army (he served a prison sentence recently after finally being extradited from Lebanon where he was fighting for the Palestinian cause). Adachi was prevented from visiting the festival by the Japanese embassy but spoke to the audience via a video link.

The Pavillion Salamandre (Masanori Tominaga): A lonely radiologist is drawn into a web of conspiracy surrounding the authenticity of a giant Salamander, fought over by the four sisters of the Kinjiro foundation, charged with the care of this national treasure, and a crime syndicate. Beginning like a postmodern rendering of a Chandleresque detective story, the film rapidly descends into a baffling array of absurdist vignettes and inscrutable plot developments, not least the fact that the radiologist inexplicably turns into a faux Sicilian mobster half way through. It is all tenuously held together by the central figure of Kinjiro the giant Salamander, who passively tolerates the whole affair and periodically stares blankly at the camera in shots reminiscent of Imamura's The Eel.

Key Note lecture by Prof. Inuhiko Yomota, who gave an overview of the depiction of the Chinese in Japanese films made in Manchuria during the occupation. This prolific scholar is one of the first to broach this taboo, controversial topic and has even delivered the lecture in Beijing. The topic was approached with an admirable scholarly detachment. The most fascinating thing was seeing footage of Setsuko Hara, darling of postwar humanist cinema, in slavishly nationalistic roles, a hidden aspect of her career that casts her later performances in a rather more ambivalent light. More research clearly needs to be done here...

Nightmare Detective (Shinya Tsukamoto): The latest film from Tsukamoto, one of the figures responsible for the reemergence of Japanese cinema in the 90s after his groundbreaking 8mm masterpiece Tetsuo: The Iron Man dominated festivals in 1989, initially seems like a more mainstream film. About a gutsy police woman and a psychic who investigate a spate of gruesome suicides caused by a man (Tsukamoto himself) entering the victim's dreams, Tsukamoto however plays around with the tropes and cliches of the J-Horror genre even as he creates something so horrific that it represents a generic high point. The film opens with a man terrorised by the appearance of a girls long hair hanging on his door, a cliche that is quickly revealed to be that of his aborted daughter, at another point the police woman determines she is in a dream when her mobile phone, a standard prop of the Japanese horror film at least since kiyoshi kurosawa's Pulse, melts in her hand. In this way the tropes of the genre are literally dissolved, allowing room for Tsukamoto's own concerns such as the dulled sensation of life caused by our modern, urban, consumer existence (the dreamers all wake up on a busy overpass where they are attacked) and the monster itself, which in its horrific mutations is nothing short of a fleshy version of Tetsuo. Nightmare Detective clearly demonstrates an artist entering a popular genre and reconfiguring its conventions according to his own aesthetic and thematic concerns. I interviewed Tsukamoto (below), footage of which will soon appear on Firecracker.

Uncle's Paradise (Shinji Imaoka): The first of two pinku (or Softcore porn) films shown at the festival revealed a world of narrative experimentation on the margins of the mainstream film industry crying out for wider discovery. When Haruo's uncle Takashi invites himself to stay his life suddenly gets more than a little strange. Terrified of falling asleep, because he suffers the recurring dream of making love to a dead woman, Takashi spends the film drinking coffee and finding distractions by seducing every woman at hand, including his nephew's own girlfriend, who Haruo discovers has had the pleasure of his Uncle's company when he finds his signature on her back in green marker. The film also initially sets up a love triangle between Haruo, his girlfriend and his work colleague, which is prematurely terminated when the latter is arbitrarily dispatched by a giant and very fake looking giant spider. Having denied any possibility of a conventional narrative trajectory, making the whole thing quite a liberating experience, the film then follows Haruo's descent into the underworld, depicted as a seemingly insipid love motel curated by Yamada king of the underworld in which the unfortunate inhabitants are fellatioed until they bleed, to rescue his uncle after he is bitten by a poisonous snake whilst masturbating by a temple. As if it all didn't sound strange enough Haruo is guided on his journey by a giant squid, which represents some kind of vague sexual symbol. As this synopsis suggests the Pinku genre, which allows an easy point of entry into filmmaking, respectable budgets and a relatively large amount of freedom beyond the obligatory number of sex scenes, has created a breeding ground of auteurist experimentation, which is absolutely unthinkable in the adult industries of most other countries. The director here even undercuts the required scenes of simulated sex with some brilliantly wry, offbeat humour, and the whole thing is so wonderfully ridiculous that you entirely forget that the film is supposed to be pornographic. The lead actress Mutsuo Yoshioka obviously hadn't, however, when she told the audience at the beginning of the screening that 'I hope you enjoy my body.' Such a generous person...

Noriko's Dinner Table (Sion Sono): Something of a prequel to the director's Suicide Club, Noriko's Dinner Table even incorporates footage from that film's depiction of 54 Japanese schoolgirls committing mass suicide by leaping hand in hand onto the subway tracks. In this rather more complex film the narrative is concerned with two sisters who join a society on the internet and then leave home to stay with their virtual friends in Tokyo, only to discover that the website is a front for a kind of emotional prostitution ring in which lonely men can temporarily rent a family. thus leaving their real family for a virtual one, the girls gradually loose their identities by taking on so many roles (which can even include being the passive victims of murder if the clients so wish), so that when their father finally tracks them down they have completely forgotten him. Initially only able to approach his daughters by partaking in this illusion, the father finally snaps and and murders the girl's bodyguards before sitting down with his daughters to eat amidst the bodies, bloodstained but determined to start over. All in all the film is a very interesting philosophical exploration of identity and how easily it can be transformed by our roles in society, however it suffers from being over long and messy. Although the numerous scenes that enforce the innocent naivety of the girls in the opening half are necessary to the effect of the film's bloody climax, there are far too many of them and the twee soundtrack melody quickly becomes annoying.

Indispensable Eight (various): Part of the festival's retrospective of rare avant garde Japanese short films, this programme of experimental shorts on super 8mm by such renowned talents as Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Cure) and Nobuhiko Obayashi (Hausu), sought to demonstrate the continued importance of this threatened medium for Japanese directors. This was particularly the case for Shinya Tsukamoto, who learnt his craft with a series of insanely innovative shorts throughout the 70s and 80s before finally breaking through with the pinnacle of his 8mm work Tetsuo: The Iron Man, about a metal fetishist and a salary man who begin to mutate into grotesque fusions of flesh and metal after being involved in a car crash. Tsukamoto still speaks fondly of the special 'flavour' of 8mm. There was a screening of an unfortunately short extract of his 40min short The Adventure of Denchu Kozo, about a boy born with an electrical pole sticking out of his back, who, after being shunned by society, travels to the future where robot vampires are taking over the world. Despite the length of the clip it was clear that the film is a work of tactile and visceral genius, which pushes the medium to its limits in terms of composition and special effects (Tsukamoto animates wires bursting from a woman's guts and consuming her after she is bitten using stop motion) - he received a round of applause for the film's plot.

Nikkomihoppy (Toshiro Enomoto): The festival's second Pinku film is a surprisingly poignant story of lost love, only somewhat disrupted by the obligatory sex scenes. After his girlfriend leaves him for an older man, Chiyohara goes on a trip to find his first love, who, he discovers from her best friend, has has been killed in a car accident only the week before. A simple comparison of this film with Uncle's Paradise demonstrates the startling range of approaches to this genre, which confounds western conception of porn consisting of plotless rendezvous between mustachioed boiler mechanics and frustrated nurses. When the film's male lead, present at the screening, was asked if he will continue to act in Pink films he rather surprisingly commented 'only if i get over the embarrassment of being naked. Quite a considerable hurdle given the demands f the genre.

Although its obviously stupidly reductive to attempt to identify a thread in such an eclectic mixture of films, its interesting to note that the spectre of realism that always hovers on the radars of western film criticism is largely absent from the films of the festival, with even such a politically engaged and autobiographical work as The Prisoner turning to dreamlike abstraction to express its themes. On top of this many films such as Paprika, Ten Nights of Dream, Nightmare Detective and Faces of a Fig Tree dealt directly with the theme of dreams and fantasy. This anti-realism in contemporary Japanese cinema is as fascinatingly pervasive as realism was in the humanist and New Wave movements in post-war film.

Letters From Iwo Jima

Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood's attempt to think his way into the Japanese perspective of the pacific war, after exploring the American perspective in Flags of our Fathers, is remarkably sensitive and understated. Interestingly there is a similar framing device here to the South Korean war film Brotherhood, in which a team of forensic archaeologists are uncovering personal remnants of the war, in this case a bag of undelivered letters, that triggers a flashback. In both cases this metaphor of the excavation of the past fits well with the film's attempt to revise history on a more human level. This is a film that is deeply humanist, not only showing the horrors of war, though avoiding the majority of the genre's cliches, but showing attempts by individuals to bypass ideology and reach out to one another across divides. Such as the genuinely moving scene in which baron Nishi, who had once lived in America and taken part in the olympics, talks to a wounded American soldier, telling him that he has had Douglas Fairbanks as a house guest in Tokyo.

The film is marked by excellent performances all round and strong characterisation. Central is Ken Watanabe's nuanced perfomance as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the officer sent to administer the godforsaken island, which is little more than a rock in the ocean, yet is deemed vitally important by the government because it is part of the sacred land of Japan. However, he finds himself not only facing the Americans but the opposition of his own conservative officers, who see his conscientious leadership as a sign of weakness. When the bombs are finally let loose on the island, it is a relentless pounding. As the troops hide in caves dug in the island's hills, the camera backs up, distancing the viewer from the carnage whilst taking in the full panorama of destruction. The red blossoms of flame seem all the more chillingly striking given the prevalence of steely blues and greys of the film's beautifully subtle palette. The cinematography is wholly appropriate in expressing the utter despair of the situation.

This is an impressive collaboration that completely avoids the orientalising aspects that plagued Memoirs of a Geisha, in which the director showed a great deal of cultural insensitivity to both sides by casting Chinese superstars as Japanese Geishas. It's nearest counterpart is perhaps the films of Ang Lee, such as Ice Storm and Brokeback Mountain; in which an Asian director has been able to deal with distinctly American genres and issues in a peculiarly insightful way in spite (or perhaps because) of his outsider perspective. Its interesting that it was Letters from Iwo Jima, not the more bombastic Flags of our Fathers, that competed in the Oscars best picture and director categories; it is a shame that in both cases such a sensitive cross cultural work lost out to Scorcese's inferior The Departed, a film that merely cribs the seminal Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. One can only assume that the jury felt sorry for Scorcese for loosing out against Eastwood on two previous occasions. Ultimately its proof of how little faith can be put into the impartiality and objectivity of this award ceremony. As always, we all know who should have won...

Cinemas of the Arab World

Today i attended a symposium on the subject of 'cinemas of the Arab world', which accompanied a programme of ten new films from Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Palestine and Egypt organised by the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World The talks were fascinating and raised many important issues. I particularly liked Kay Dickinson's (Goldsmith College) discussion of our approach to cinema using the theoretical framework of tourism. She later told me that Chris Berry is currently based at Goldsmiths, whilst i thought he was still at Berkeley. I think i may discuss a potential PHD with him. Who knows i might end up at Goldsmiths soon, if i pursue my topic of Chinese cinema.

After the talks i went to a screening of a film called Bakarat! An Algerian road movie about a young woman who is trying to find her husband after he has been kidnapped by religious fundamentalists, and the French police refuse to do anything. She travels with her work colleague, an older woman who reveals that she fought in the war of resistance against the French, and together they meet a kindly old man who is searching for his missing sons. These three people, representing their various generations, are brought together by a common experience of suffering and historical trauma, and their growing friendship is portrayed in a beautifully understated way. In the last scene the old man throws the young womans gun, taken from her father to help her gain revenge, into the sea shouting Bakarat (Enough) - a powerful statement against violence.

A few days earlier i sawa Moroccan film called WWW What a Wonderful World, an incredibly brash and stylish arty hitman movie, which completely took me by surprise. With its focus on the city as much as the characters dispersed therein, its fragmented narrative in which various characters gravitate around one another and its central relationship between a hitman and a woman who communicates his missions with elaborate codes but have never really met, reminded me a lot of Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels. It had an incredible amount of stunning visual ideas, like when the hitman walks around a toilet setting off all the hand driers, so that when he strangles his victim the man's screams are muffled, and was so rife with stylistic flourishes that Tarantino looked like a hick in comparison.

Cinema China Day 10 - Final Festivities

The grey haired gentleman in the above image is none other than Xie Fei, one of the leading directors of the Forth Generation of Chinese filmmakers and mentor of the Fifth and Sixth generations. And yes, unlikely as it sounds, he is dancing in a Salsa club. This was taken at the celebratory post festival meal. Not only are his films inspiring but so is the man himself - modest, intelligent, kind hearted. Its great that enduring ten years of the cultural revolution has done nothing to dampen his sense of style, and his dancing was putting everyone else to shame - not bad for someone in their sixties. What a great end to the festival! Until next year... Ni hao

Cinema China Day 9 - BFA day

This day was set aside for the Beijing Film Academy (above). In the morning I had the pleasure of interviewing Xie Fei at his flat near the Meadows. He spoke eloquently about his films and life through an interpreter, my friend Larry also from the BFA, and I got it all on film - it should hopefully appear on Firecracker soon along with an article I am writing on Xie Fei and the festival. One thing that particularly interested me was how he conceived of the role of his generation of filmmakers. Educated before in 1965 Xie, however, could not start to make films freely until after the Cultural Revolution around the same time as the Fifth Generation directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Although his work is more classical in tone it is clear they were dealing with similar problems. He sees the main achievement of directors in this period as shifting the focus of cinema from ideologies to people. This reemergence of humanism, not unlike the period in Japan following WWII, is exemplified in a quote from novelist Shen Congwen with which he begins his masterpiece The Girl from Hunan: 'I only build Greek temples in which humanity is worshipped'. It is a phrase, i think, that perfectly sums up his ambitions as a filmmaker and the relationship between form and content in his work.

I had bagels with Xie Fei and the festival organisers Mark Cousins and Dorota Ostrowska before he gave a lecture on the role of the BFA in Chinese cinema at the old College. It made me want to go there even more. Next there was a quick sprint across town to the Filmhouse to see some recent work from the BFA. First there was a showcase of shorts, all shot on 35mm and to quite an impressive standard for student work. There was a quirky animation that explored three alternate futures based on the play of cause and effect after a begger steps on a dogs tail, in a way reminiscent of Run Lola, Run (Xie has noted the influence of directors like Tykwer and Luc Besson on the current generation of students). Another good film called Innocent as I Was, was about a kid who deliberately set out to 'lose' his absent minded grandfather after he shamelessly eats all of the meatballs his grandma has made for him. Feeling a pang of guilt when he sees how upset granny is he rushes off to find the old man, only to find he has returned safely home himself. As the boy cries, the grandfather silently pushes a bar of chocolate across the table - all is forgiven. I don't know why but this reminded me of Kiarostami's early child centred short films such as Bread and Alley and Ear. Sunshine on her Shoulders, about two pretty girls falling for the same guy and finding their friendship tested, is more of a guilty pleasure, I admit, than a masterpiece. Sentimental as it is at times, the emotions are quite subtly alluded to. Then there was Mama, a Self-reflexive film about a student making a documentary about his attempt to make a film about his mother visiting. Although it had all the potential to turn into a pretentious student film, there was far too much wry humour for that and the whole thing became quite a charming exercise in ritual self-humiliation on the part of the filmmaker. The showpiece film, called Grassland, was by a Tibetan graduate and looked at the confrontation that occurs within a small traditional society after a sacred Yak goes missing. I think this description pretty much says it all. I found it beautifully shot but pretty cliched. It has all of the ingredients required to woo a middle class audience - a simple story from a traditional culture shot in crisp cinematography with lots of shots of sublime natural surroundings. Unfortunately there's not much else to say about it. It certainly isn't as interesting in terms of form and narrative as Story of the Weeping Camel.

After the shorts was an award winning feature by one of the BFA's recent graduates: Distance by Wei Tie. About a poor, lumpen peasant who comes to the big city to find work and stays with his more sophisticated graduate cousin and his girlfriend, who are both also unemployed, the title refers to the distance between the characters but also between the viewer and the film. Its practically a transposition of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Uzak, which also means Distance, onto Beijing. It not only shares that film's title and plot, but also its atmosphere of dislocation and alienation. However there is none of the wry humour that cuts through Ceylan's film, and Distance has far less empathy for its characters and is far less mature stylistically. It is also derivative of the films of Jia Zhang Ke, which focus on alienated youth.

Speaking of Jia Zhang Ke the next film on my itinerary was Unknown Pleasures, which i thought would make quite a hard double bill with Distance, but instead glowed all the more brightly in contrast. When I first saw Unknown Pleasures, which is about two nihilistic youths aimlessly roving around Beijing, I had a strong sense of malaise but this time i found the whole thing exileratingly. Actually the incredible thing is that the film manages to be both breathtakingly stylish and completely downbeat, much like the films of Takeshi Kitano, whose production company produced this film. Jia Zhang Ke is one of the freshest voices in world cinema, developing a minimalist aesthetic that is constructed from repetitions and fragments. Few people say so much with so little. Jia Zhang Ke also represents the new film literate generation of directors, gorged on films from the BFA archive and China's booming blackmarket DVD industry. Unknown pleasures contains covert references to Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde, when the two decide to finally rob a bank. But these references are often ironic, such as the character's motorbike that breaks down constantly. I also loved the self-reflexive touch of a character attempting to buy Jia Zhang Ke's own films from the protagonist who is attempting to sell DVDs in order to pay back a loan.

Finally there was Black Snow by Xie Fei, a tragic drama starring the inimitable Jiang Wen, China's greatest actor, as a recently released convict attempting to return to society and live an ordinary life, but is hounded by gangsters, struggles with illiteracy and social changes, has his parole threatened by a visit from his fugitive brother and is finally arbitrarily stabbed by muggers. In this final scene he trudges through a crowd of people, destined to move against the tide of society to which he so desperately wanted to belong, their voices inaudible over the exaggerated staccato of his footsteps. Various voices play out moments from his past before he collapses in a square, the camera drawing out in an overhead shot. The expressive power of the film is remarkable and was made even more so by the quality of the new digital print.

Cinema China Day 8 - Vive L'Amour

Spent the whole day in the university editing suite putting together clips for Xie fei's masterclass. I also managed to watch Xie Fei's Girl from Hunan on video. It is an incredibly powerful film about a twelve year old girl who is married off to a two year old boy in a remote village at the turn of the century. They grow up more like brother and sister than husband and wife, but then the girl, Xiao Xiao, transgresses the clan rules by having an affair with a farm hand, which is shown through soem very inventive metaphoric staging, and becomes terrified at being found out after she witnesses another woman being drowned for committing a similar crime. At the end of the film she perpetuates the cycle of abuse by marrying off her son to a young girl. Somehow i managed to get a part time job at the Languages and Humanities Centre whilst hanging around there. I start on Monday straight after the festival!

A theme is slowly starting to emerge from the festival. Almost all films are about sexual repression in various ways, not least Vive L'Amour, a masterful almost wordless drama about supressed homosexual impulses developed by a man (Lee Kang-Sheng) who steals the key to an empty apartment and spies on the sales agent and her lover having sex. I also love the fact that after seeing Tsai Ming-liang's films you can never take a watermelon seriously again - watch it and see. Perhaps this theme is the reason why i like Chinese cinema so much. Its comforting to know that there are over a billion people out there who are as repressed as me (homosexuality excluded of course).

I missed the UK Premier of Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles to do some research on Xie Fei for the interview tomorrow. Alexander saw it and said he had not been so moved by a film in ages. I hope i get to see it soon.

Cinema China Day 7 - Raise the Red Lantern and Wedding Banquet

Professor John Orr gave a brilliantly insightful discussion of Hou Hsiao-hsein's film aesthetics today in the posh Elder room of the university's Old College. There i met Pin Lu, the founder and manager of the Chinese Internet Movie Database. I discussed with him the rough idea i have of developing a website on Chinese cinema modelled on Midnight Eye, providing a growing database of reviews, interviews and commentary, which would serve to further develop an audience for Chinese cinema. Considering how exciting the films coming out of China have been of recent years, this strikes me as a vital project that is yet to be seriously taken up.

later in the day I saw Raise the Red Lantern (my second favourite film of all time after In the Mood for Love) on a fantastic print. I could spill rivers of ink enthusing on this film but i will save it for the book i would like to write on Zhang Yimou and just say for now that no film has such a rigorous, architectural control of film form, except perhaps those of Ozu. The visual system of symmetrical, repeated compositions and colour motifs create a sense of entrapment that perfectly reflects Songlian's imprisonment within the patriarchal household. Like the house, the images form a beautiful prison, in which all dissent is turned inwards into petty power struggles between the fourMistresses, whilst the faceless master lingers in the shadows like some terrifying Corleone pulling the strings.

I also saw Ang Lee's the Wedding Banquet, a charming comedy about Wei-Tung and his American gay lover Simon in Manhattan, who attempts to hide his relationship from his visiting Taiwanese parents by holding a fake marriage with his tenant, a struggling artist named Wei-Wei in need of a green card and emotional sustenance. A very funny and uncliched treatment of the material, which completely avoids sentimentality or sensationalism. Expectations of the viewers and parents alike are undermined as the film joyously mocks every 'serious' issue from immigration to heterosexual union, ending in the formation of a very unconventional, though undoubtedly happy, family unit. Few directors have looked at the issue of family recently with as much originality and compassion as Ang Lee.

Cinema China Day 6 - The Yellow River on Film

A rare opportunity to see the incredibly controversial Chinese documentary Heshang: The River Elegy, broadcast on CCTV in 1988 and quickly banned after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, brilliantly contextualised in an all-day seminar led by Professor Natascha Gentz of the Chinese department of Edinburgh University. Heshang was so controversial because it went public with a debate that had previously been privy to small gatherings of intellectuals; namely the problem of modernisation and China's relationship to the West now that the country was opening up. The documentary's thesis is radically self critical, both of 'backward' traditional culture and the CCP's resistance to modern ideas, and calls for an embracing of Western science and democracy and an end to 1000s of years of self imposed isolation. By utilising an emotionally provocative and lyrical assemblage of images, the makers posit that the Chinese are a grounded, agricultural nation whose origins in the Yellow River established a national character of deep fatalism, which lacks a spirit of adventure. This traditional culture is then contrasted to the liberal, maritime cultures of Europe and Japan, who were able to carve huge empires as a result of the industrial revolution, which ironically came about through Chinese inventions (Paper, Gunpowder etc...). Whilst the Europeans conquered the world, the Chinese built a huge wall, which has become a point of pride to the Chinese, but which the filmmaker merely sees as a shameful reminder of China's inadequacy.

That evening there was a screening of Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984), a film as allusively rare as it is artistically significant, which also explores traditional Chinese culture at the source of the Yellow River, but gives a very different message. The film is set in 1939 in an isolated village that still worships the Dragon god at times of drought, which is visited by a Communist folklorist named Brother Gu, who aims to record the song's of the region and transform them into patriotic marching tunes - a subtle insight into the workings of a propaganda machine. However what he finds is suffering, which is expressed in the melancholy songs sung by the peasants. Lodged with a poor family, Gu becomes a source of fascination for the young daughter Cuiqiao, who is about to be forced into an arranged marriage. Cuiqiao begs Gu to take her away to join the communists, but he cannot as, much like the villagers traditions, the party has its rules and they cannot be bent. In this sense there is not much to choose between them, and Cuiqiao seems fated to suffer regardless of the society. He promises to return, but by the time he does it is too late, as Cuiqiao drowns attempting to escape, her death worked into the film's poetically minimalist programme with the simple yet powerful image of her bowl floating to the shore.

This was the film that gave birth to the famous Fifth Generation and revolutionised film aesthetic in China after half a century of turgid socialist realism. The film's poetic qualities seem all the more extraordinary in this context, as does the subtle complexity of its ideological critique. On the surface Chen Kaige seems to be enacting a familiar dialectic, with traditional culture on the one hand and the communist party on the other, but what is incredible here is that the former is used to undermine the official ideological pedagogy, which was beginning to break down in this period of opening up. In the final shot we hear the elegiac voice of the now dead Cuiqiao singing 'The Communist Party will save us all', but we know it couldn't save her and at this point the camera pans down to the yellow earth, grounding the film back in the traditions of China and the source of its culture.

This strikes me as a very different stance on the topic to Heshang, and this differnce is manifest in the images. Whereas the documentary uses constant shots from planes to give a sense of liberation from the boundedness to the earth, Zhang Yimou's stunning cinematography in Yellow Earth constantly fills the frame with the landscape, which dwarfs the characters, peasant and communist alike. Its worth pointing out that perhaps only Kiarostami's films come close to using the landscape in such a powerful and expressive way. What makes the work of the Fifth Generation director's so incredible, i think, is the way they enact a social critique indirectly through the film's form. Although they have been unjustly criticised for simplistically exoticising and over-indulging in aesthetic images, i think this visual quality makes films such as Yellow Earth and Raise the Red Lantern more sophisticated and ambiguous in its meaning than the later, more realistic work of the Sixth Generation directors such as Jia Zhang Ke with their more obviously critical stance. The close ups of Cuiqiao's disappointed face, particularly after moments of overt political comment (such as when Gu teaches her brother a revolutionary song) or after she is told her marriage date is set, also possess a stunning potency that destabilises all ideology, allowing the film to transcend the narrowly political and enter the realm of the profoundly human.

Also saw Hou Hsiao-hsien's masterpiece A City of Sadness, a film that has the scope and historical sweep of a Russian novel as it explores through a single family of four brothers the tragic events in Tawain as it made the transition from Japanese colonial rule to occupation by the mainland's defeated nationalist army, and the resulting tension between the natives and the 'born-elsewheres'. What is so brilliant about the film is its indirectness; the massacre the film centres around, the notorious 228 incident, is only alluded to by radio reports and brief glimpses. A series of absences and ellipses in the fragmented narrative, which is littered with barely signposted flashbacks, makes the film deliberately hard to follow - like looking at history through a clouded glass. This distance, even more pronounced for the western viewer, is also built into the formal elements of the film, for instance in the fights which are always filmed in an emotionally detached long shot, as well as the narrative, for instance Tony Leung's mute photographer who is a passive observer of events, powerless to change the course of history.

Cinema China Day 5 - The Arch & A Touch of Zen

A day of unconventional Hong Kong movies with Cecile Tang's The Arch (1970) and King Hu's A Touch of Zen (1969), although the latter was made in Taiwan. Of these the former was breathtaking; chronicalling the repressed sexual desires awakened in a widdowed mother and her daughter when a soldier is billeted at their home during the Ming dynasty. Meanwhile an arch is being built in the village in honour of the mother's chastity, a symbol of social propriety that prevents her from acting on her emotions, which results formally in the increasingly abstract montages that end the film. The film boasts astonishing contrasty black and white photography depicting images of jaw-dropping poetic resonance. It is little wonder that Partha Panchali comes to mind throughout the film as the DOP is Satyajit Ray's regular Subatra Mitra. The film also anticipates the more human interest work of later female New Wave directors Ann Hui and Clara Law.

A Touch of Zen is an uneven masterpiece. Ku Shen Chai, a small town artist and scholar lives alone with his mother who is constantly bemoaning his lack of ambition, is drawn slowly into a conspiracy that seems to be unfolding around him but remains tantalisingly out of reach. Many early scenes are perfectly controlled, putting one in mind of Japanese Chanbara films of the same period, particularly in terms of the slow pacing and tight editing. In one scene, for instance, the protagonist explores the supposedly haunted fort he lives next to, the incredibly long scene building and building in tension, only for it to anti-climax in a moment of bathos when his mother appears and criticises him for wandering around so late. This constant putting off of the action, very uncharacteristic for the genre, gives the film an immensely allusive quality. Ku's sexy new neighbour, who he rather embarrasingly initially takes for a ghost (turning up at the door with spirit wards rather than the traditional welcome of homebaked cookies), the blind fortune teller and the herbalist who has recently set up his stall in the town square, turn out to be fugitives from the soldier's of Eunoch Wei. Finally putting his studies of military tactics to good use, Ku aids the outcasts in fighting off their assailants in a haunted fort, and as a result Ku ironically takes on the persona of Kong Ming, the arcitypal scholar in Chinese tradition - standing on the battlements with his fan, observing the aftermath of his successful strategy.

The latter half of the film is perhaps one of the best examples of artistic over ambition in cinema, with King Hu jettisoning the narraive in favour of a highly abstract and impressionistic exploration of buddhism, ending in a final sequence as bewilderingly abstract as 2001: A Space Oddysee. The plot doesn't quite so much break off after the highly influential Bamboo forest fight (see House of Flying Daggers), as it does violently disintegrate. Yet this unravelling, this lack of narrative coherance, is one of the film's most fascinating elements, along with its potent Daoist symbolism in the recurrent shots of nature (i've never seen so many establishing shots in a film before). The English title, with its Japanese allusions, is interesting given that the film won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in 1969 (one of the first Chinese films to do so), placing it within the context of the Japanese cinema, which had come to considerable fame in the West whilst the Chinese cinemas remained generally uncharted territory. It speaks volumes about the Western consumption of Asian films; the tendency to assimilate them into a familiar context. The ending, in this light, would perhaps have been seen in light of the Modernist works of directors such as Antonioni and Bergman.

Cinema China Day 4 - Shaw Brothers Double Bill

Kim Ho Ip, who composed the new soundtrack to The Goddess, set up in the filmhouse bar to play Beijing Opera pieces and 1930s Shanghai jazz numbers, creating the perfect atmosphere to lead up to the Love Eterne. The first of a Shaw Brothers double bill, The Love Eterne tells the story of the Butterfly Lovers, a story as archetypal in China as Romeo and Juliet over here. It follows a woman in Confucian China named Yin-tai who disguises herself as a man to attend school where she falls in love with Shan-bo, who remains oblivious to her true identity. When Shan-bo finally learns the truth and set off to propose it is too late, for Yin-tai has been betrothed by her father to a influential family. The film is almost unbearably beautiful, revelling in melodramatic and aesthetic excess. There are brilliant layers of dramatic irony, not least because the director chooses to cast women in the two main roles, placing it in the same gender-bending territory as many other Hong Kong films such as Swordsman and He's a Woman, She's a Man.

The second film in the double bill was The One Armed Swordsman (Chang Cheh, 1967), which revolutionised Hong Kong cinema by shifting it from the melodrama into the more masculine territory of the martial arts film, paving the way for Bruce Lee. Its dated somewhat now, with much of the dialogue seeming unintentionally funny and the antagonists running around with their special weapon, a sword lock that looks more like a giant can opener. The final part of the film is a carnival of violence, almost as though the circus freakshow and clowns had risen up against their whip cracking ringmaster.

Today i also met Mehelli Modi, the managing director of Second Run DVD who is at the festival checking out potential films for release. Although the label specialises in East European cinema, a recent release of Apichatpong Weeresthakul's Blissfully Yours demonstrates a potentially fruitful branching out into Asian cinema. Mehelli is a kind hearted, shrewdly intelligent and elegant man with impeccable taste. He gave me his email address and told me to stay in touch. Perhaps i could get some work in his company.

Cinema China Day 3 - In the Mood for Love, Spring in a Small Town

Saw In the Mood for Love for about the fifteenth time (this has to be the 5th time on the big screen) and it still remains my favourite film, something which I also managed to say to Maggie the other day before I completely broke down into adolescent over-excitement. Maggie came on stage for the fifth and last time of the festival to introduce it, dressed casually in Jeans, one of those fashionable peaked caps and the Cinema China T-shirt. She rather generously spent the introduction downplaying her own considerable contribution to the film in favour of the work of the prolific William Chang, Wong Kar-wai's regular art director, producer and editor. She called him Wong's 'muse' and said that he was so talented that he could 'take three aprons and turn them into a dress.' Mark declared his intention to invite William Chang for a masterclass in next year's festival. I'm looking forward to it! I was very happy that In the Mood for Love managed to attract a bigger audience than hero (300 people in the screen plus a good many more queuing for returns).

The second film of the evening was Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948), often cited as the greatest Chinese film ever made. It certainly was incredible, with Wei Wei's performance as the sometime submissive, sometime vampish wife of an ailing small town intellectual particularly striking. Her banal married life is shaken by the return of Dr Zhang Zhichen, a former lover and by coincidence also a friend of her husband's. Whilst the husband represents the outmoded past, quite literally 'the sick man of Asia', Zhang represents the modernity and progress that the Communists were claiming to be ushering in. In this sense the film's ending, in which the wife Yu Wen chooses to return to her husband and watches her lover leave, was deemed by critics at the time to be conservative.

The film is astonishingly subtle, slowly articulating the relationship between the characters through a series of disolves and camera pans, a style that, along with its sensitive portrayal of a woman suffering from a banal marriage, makes the film remeniscent of Mikio Naruse's work, particularly Repast (1951). Moreover pairing the film with In the Mood for Love, another film on the theme of sexual repression and social propriety, was a stroke of programming genius. Its fascinating to see the different films tackling the film from their different historical and social view points. I returned home that evening to find my housemates intently watching Chungking Express - In the Mood for Love clearly made an impression, and rightly so, it just gets better and more nuanced with every viewing.

Cinema China Day 2 - Maggie Cheung and The Goddess

Today Mark Cousins, clad in his trademark kilt, interviewed Maggie Cheung. Her former husband and collaborator Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Clean) described his first impression of her thus: 'It was a vision. I didn’t think contemporary cinema could still produce an actress with such an aura. I felt like a little kid looking at the great stars of the past.' Her star status was immediately apparent; the Chinese community had appeared in full force and the cinema erupted into a firestorm of camera flashes as soon as she stepped on stage. After the interview I was sitting with some Chinese friends in the bar when they suddenly sprinted out the door, leaving me mid sentence - they had caught a glimpse of Maggie being smuggled out of the cinema. Yet there is much more depth to her than what can be normally expected of a star, and she gave very insightful answers. In particular I liked her response to the question 'how would you feel if all your films were destroyed?' She said: 'I think I would like them all to be burnt or all to stay. If I had one film missing from my list then I would not be the same actress'. It was an answer that revealed her self awareness and her lack of pretention, in so far as she did not reject her more generic early roles. Indeed, good sport that she is, she laughed along with the audience at the screening of clips like the one from Police Story.

She also took a question from me (Mark also unexpectedly and generously introduced me by name as the festival researcher). I asked what her opinion of current Hong Kong cinema was since it has been some time since she starred in these films. She replied that since the handover and the decline and slow reemergence of the Hong Kong film industry it was harder to make a claim for a specifically Hong kong cinema since much of what is made is co-produced with the mainland. 'Better to call it Chinese cinema. There are lots of Hong Kong films that are bad that i am embarrased by. Sometimes i see one on a cathay Pacific flight and it is just like what i was making in the eighties only worse, because there is no longer any sincerity. Back then things looked cheap because of the lack of budgets, now they seem cheap because people don't care. Then on the other hand there is Wong Kar-wai, Andrew lau and Johnnie To. But there is nothing in between.'

Later in the day The Goddess (Wu Yonggang, 1934) starring Ruan Lingyu was played to another packed house with a brilliantly atmospheric new score by Kim Ho Ip, who played the Yang Ching accompanied by Jazz vocals and saxophone evoking 1930s Shanghai Jazz. The Goddess is one of those rare films to which the label masterpiece can be attached with absolutely no reservations or fear of contestation. Ruan Lingyu's peformance as a mother who must prostitute herself in order to raise her child, both of whom fall victim to the self-righteous, prigish moralism and prejudices of society, is stunningly naturalistic when placed next to the mannerist acting style still prevalent in western cinema at the time. It is without a doubt one of the most stunningly subtle, nuanced and profound performances in cinema - silent or sound. The film also demonstrates that socially didcatic filmmaking can be elevated to something truly artful. The editing and framing are incredibly sophisticated, the film opening, for instance, with a serious of seemingly incongruous images that reflect Ruan's devided personality as mother and whore: cosmetics and elegant dresses, and a baby's bottle.

Less sophisticated and subtle in terms of its social commentary, but still very well made, is Crows and Sparrows (Zheng Junli, 1949), which was completed just after the people's liberation army routed the KMT to Tawain and follows a series of colourful characters living in a tenement block in Shanghai. Their landlord nicknamed 'Monkey', a lazy and immoral KMT official who seized control of te appartment as a collaborator during the Japanese occupation, and his pampered, shifty wife are little more than characatures, even if the other tenants are fairly well defined. There is also the amoral journalist Kong, the plebian couple who struggle to make ends meet with their small shop amidst the rising inflation even as they dream of making money, and Hua a teacher who is reluctant to become involved in a strike at his school and is consequently labelled both a traitor and a ringleader. Of course by the end of the film each of the characters has attained a political consciousness more in line with the socialist realist style that would increasingly seize Chinese cinema in the years to come; with the various individuals finally uniting to resist their despotic landlord, who is attempting to evict them all and sell up before heading into exile in Taiwan. However the film avoids being a turgid social tract thanks to a wry sense of humour and an emphasis on the problems faced by people living in a time of ideological and political transistion, with all of the moral confusion and social problems this entails.

Cinema China Grand Opening

Last night was the opening of Cinema China '07 and i was invited to the launch reception at the stunning Great Hall at Edinburgh castle. As you can see from the above photo I had the pleasure of meeting one of my icons, Maggie Cheung Man Yuk. She is as stunningly beautiful in reality as she is in her films and is also a very sincere and friendly person. It took me three glasses of Champagne to pluck up the courage to meet her (its a hard life). The difference between us could not be more apparent; whilst I look incredibly awkward, Maggie is utterly at ease in front of the camera, and totally photogenic. This is why she is a star and I am a critic.

Earlier on in the day, at one of the lectures accompanying the festival in the lavish Raeburn room of Old College, I was jumped upon by two young reporters from China Central Television (the ominously named CCTV) and interviewed for their popular World Film TV show. That means i will be broadcast all over China and seen by an audience of hundreds of thousands of people. I hate being in front of a camera, and as usual in these circumstances my mouth went on autopilot. I hope I said something intelligent. I think I talked about the fact that there are two Chinese cinemas; the art films of Jia Zhang Ke and Lou Ye, and the Daipan (Big Pictures) of Zhang Yimou and Feng Xiaogang, and that i hoped that the two could continue to coexist as they should in any healthy national cinematic tradition - what Chris Berry calls a Full Service Cinema.

I also met Professor Xie Fei (above) of the Beijing Film Academy, director of Black Snow and Women from the Lake of Scented Souls, both coming up at the festival. From the brief time I spoke to him I could tell that he is an incredibly intelligent and elegant man. I hope to organise an interview with him later in the week.

After the special event at the castle a coach drove us down to the opening gala screening of Centre Stage, which was packed out. Mark showed the trailer made by Alexander and I before the speeches, of which there were many. They were mainly from university officials and ministers extolling the economic benefits of Scotland's relationship to China. Its to Mark Cousin's credit that he has managed to harness the various political agendas of these people and channel thei energy to produce something as culturally significant as the Festival. The most interesting speech was that of Xie Fei, who read out a congratulatory letter from the principle of the Beijing Film Academy praising the festival and the relationship between my old film studies department at Edinburgh University and the BFA in the warmest possible terms. The two institutions signed a memorandum of understanding in 2005, which is the event that spawned the Festival. I am thinking of making use of this connection myself in light of a potential future Phd.

Centre Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1992) is, of Course, stunning. Not only is it one of Maggie's finest performances, in which she appropriately plays the biggest star of early Shanghai cinema Ruan Lingyu, but it has an incredibly radical narrative structure by the standards of Hong Kong films in that period - the way it mixes documentary, archive footage and dramatic reconstruction to create a dialogue between the present (Maggie Cheung) and the past (Ruan Lingyu) is quite incredible. Despite this, or rather because of it, the film also functions brilliantly as an audaciously powerful melodrama. In one scene, at a party the night before she commits suicide, Ruan kisses each of the five key directors she has worked with at Lianhua studios, and each time Kwan intercuts the scene with that director sitting by Ruan's corpse. Ruan's sucide, when it finally comes, is a tour de force of acting, with Maggie resolutely swallowing her emotions as she does the sleeping pills that she has stirred into her congee.

Another astonishing scene, and one that embodies the spirit of the film, comes with dirctor Tsai Chu-sheng (Tony Leung Ka Fai) filming Ruan in New Woman. It is a death scene, one that will earily echo Ruan's own death, in which her character has been hounded by the press and lies struggling agianst death on a hospital bed. Tsai shouts cut, but even after the scene finishes, Ruan/Maggie is so emotionally invested that she breaks down. Tsai sits on her bedside, the image changes to black and white, the camera retracts and Stanley Kwan shouts cut. Next the original footage of the scene is shown. The film consists of these complex frames within frames, like Chinese boxes, each one modifying and enhancing the meaning and resonance of the other layers.

Move Over Ozu

A recent touring season of contemporary Japanese films on the theme of family, curated by the Japan Foundation and Midnight Eye’s Jasper Sharp, is seeking to show that there is more to modern Japanese film than J-horror and Yakuza flicks, which currently dominate the international distribution channels. The title alludes to classical maestro Yasujiro Ozu, whose films invariably revolved around the trials and tribulations of a family. However what is immediately evident from the varied interpretations of this theme, the six films here are anything but classical.

Hanging Garden (Kûchû Teien, 2005) by Toshiaki Toyada shows how a rootless, falsely happy middle class family tears itself apart through its own policy of honesty. The film centres on Wild Monkeys, a garish love motel replete with kitsch psychedelic décor and a revolving bed, which becomes a centre point for the various family member’s not-so-secret trysts throughout the film. These encounters are then cheerily announced over family birthday gatherings, which invariably turn into occasions for sordid ritual humiliation presided over by the ever-smiling mother Eriko (Kyoko Koizumi), an epitome of false domestic tranquillity; each gathering pushing the family closer to the brink. Hanging Garden certainly demonstrates the uncanny ability many modern Japanese, and more recently Korean, films have of changing tone on a dime, but Toyoda perhaps overplays the horror elements, which threaten to swallow the acerbic humour of many other scenes. It seems that when the façade of the nuclear family implodes, then the fall out is best expressed in the style of Takashi Miike – perhaps the modern family melodrama in Japan is not as divorced from the country’s better known horror cinema as might be expected.

Sway (Yureru, 2006) by female director Miwa Nishikawa, is an exceptionally well-executed study of the relationship between two very different brothers following the traumatic death of Chieko, a girl they both covet, whilst they are visiting a remote beauty spot with a rickety old suspension bridge. But did she fall or was she pushed? And what exactly did Takeru witness? The ensuing courtroom drama seeks out to answer these questions, but only reveals the gulf of jealousy and repressed emotion that lies between the two brothers. A masterpiece of understated drama and shifting perceptions.

Licence to Live (Ningen Gokaku, 1999) is an unconventional film from Japanese horror director Kiyochi Kurosawa. It follows the efforts of Yutaka to reestablish his life and his family after he awakes from a ten year coma, before eventually being crushed to death by a teetering pile of refrigerators in what may be the most arbitrary death i have seen in a Japanese film (and that's saying something). The film's set up and tone is reminiscent of Shohei Imamura's The Eel, about a released murderer rebuilding his life in the company of various eccentrics in a provincial town. Stylistically it is also quite close to Kitano's work, with its deadpan humour, sudden bursts of slapstick and hard cuts between two vastly different tones, however without the magnetic intensity of Kitano around which the fragmented elements can coalesce the film looses some momentum in its latter parts.

This weekend's films give an encouraging impression of Japanese cinema beyond the usual suspect directors. What unites the disparate director’s approaches to their material is not so much the family drama, but how each one has revived this tried and tested genre, the rules of which were established as long ago as Ozu, through an electrical charge of style and narrative flare.

Firecracker TV

Firecracker have recently relaunched their site with the addition of a new feature called Firecracker TV. With it they aim to broadcast hard to find Asian movies over the net on a pay-per-view basis. Their choices are hearteningly eclectic and very interesting. They include a documentary on the Beijing rock scene by Zhang Yang, and a focus on Malaysian and Filipino independent filmmaking, a little known area of cinema that they seem to be leading the way in promoting. Also forthcoming is the award winning Chinese film Nuan and a series of films dedicated to Filipino '70s grindhouse director Bobby A. Suarez. Check out the programme. What's more Firecracker's impeccable design and enthusiasm ensure that this is all presented in as hip a way as possible. We could be witnessing the future of distribution for obscure films, using the net to bypass the biased and conservative mainstream distribution channels. Imagine the next Edward Yang or Apichatpong Weerasethakul available at the click of a button? I encourage everyone to check it out and spread the word!

My review of the Mikio Naruse boxset and of Funeral Parade of Roses are also now online at the site.

Chinese Film takes the Golden Bear

What more proof could you ask of the rise of Chinese cinema than for its films to walk away with the grand prixs of two out of the three most important film festivals in the wolrd; Jia Zhang Ke's Still Life at the Venice Film Festival and, only yesterday, Wang Quanan's Tuya's Marriage at the Berlinale. The film is set on the Mongolian Steppes, where a woman is torn between the hard but traditional way of life of a shepard and the easy, souless life of the encroaching urban centre when her her husband falls ill. The director, who was born in the region, stated that his intention was to record the nomad's traditional way of life before it disappears for ever. The film might make a good companion peice to The Cave of the Yellow Dog.

The festival was remarkably receptive to Asian films this year with China and South Korea very well represented. Highlights include Hong Sang-su's latest Woman on the Beach, Park Chan-wook's surreal sounding I'm a Cyborg but thats OK, about a woman in a mental home who believes herself to be bionic, and Zhang Yang's latest Getting Home, an intriguing sounding comedy/drama about a man trying to get the corpse of his dead friend across China by pretending that he is dead drunk. To cap it all there was even a (much overdue) retrospective of Kihachi Okamoto (of Sword of Doom fame), which made up for the lack of new Japanese films, apart from the latest film from the prolific Yoji Yomada Love and Honour, about a samurai who goes blind and must rely on his wife to support him.

Lets hope that the international sales agents are paying as much attention to the success of Asian cinema as the festival programmers, and that some of these delights get picked up for distribution.

Cinema China Festival Unveiled

I've been dying to make a post about this for weeks now, but have been sworn to secrecy (not that this blog is exactly a hub of activity - I'm going to have to try harder to drum up an audience). This morning, rather yesterday morning as I am writing this past midnight, saw the launch of Cinema China '07, the biggest festival of Chinese cinema ever held in Britain. I have been involved with it for a little under a year now, after meeting the co-director Mark Cousins whilst studying my MSc at Edinburgh University (the other director is my old tutor Dr Dorota Ostrowska). I worked first as a print researcher, then a general researcher and copy editor, and I even helped to compile the clip reel shown during the launch with my housemate, which seemed to go down very well, and included such stylistic audacities as cutting between Spring in a Small Town and In the Mood for Love, with Shigeru Umebayashi's music playing over both.

Over the year it has been a pleasure to see the festival grow from a mere outline to something of such magnitude; 26 films, spanning 80 years and touring 20 UK cities, with special guests including the wonderful Maggie Cheung and the filmmaker Xie Fei, whose rarely seen works chronicle the social problems of modern China with a striking degree of frank realism. For more information on the programme, which spans films from action (One-Armed Swordsman and A Touch of Zen) to melodrama (Love Eterne) and everything in between, visit: http://www.cinemachina.org.uk/

Of course the nature of such an event, supported as it is by the Beijing Film Academy and to be documented by China Central Television (CCTV) for a predicted audience of 20 million(!), might suggest political compromises had to be made. On the contrary, at the heart of the festival is a programme of films chosen with passion and verve within the positively unpolitical spirit of internationalism. It is an act of outreach on a very human, rather than geo-political, level; as Mark Cousins says there is no better way to learn about a country than through its films. That said, the programme is incredibly daring in its selection of films that courageously broach topics such as sexuality and politics. The fact that the film Yellow Earth, the key work of the famous 5th generation directors of the Beijing Film Academy, is being shown for the first time in a generation despite its significance and despite the fact that it is still - I think - banned in China demonstrates the good faith in which everyone has acted. This is not an easy film to track down (I know because at one point I was the one trying to find it - its amazing how such major films can disappear without a trace into the vague matrix of cinematic distribution) and like many of the films on offer (like such classics as the 1940s melodrama Spring in a Small Town or the Hong Kong proto New Wave film The Arch) it is a rare, possibly exceptional, opportunity to see this masterpiece on the big screen.

The festival will serve to construct a tentative cannon in the minds of the British audience and will paint a broad outline of the history of cinema in the three Chinas (Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan), making it an unbeatable and timely introduction to a national cinema that is crying out to be discovered in the West, following the recent successes of films like Hero. By displaying the nation's riches the festival will show how the medium has been innovated by Chinese artists; from the pictorial beauty and brilliant visual storytelling of Zhang Yimou - a focus in the festival - to the devastating atmosphere of ennui and alienation evoked by of Jia Zhang Ke and Tsai Ming-liang, via the sumptuous formalism of Wong Kar-wai, who is surely one of the great poets in cinema and certainly one of its only impressionists. As Mark Cousins maintains "If we have one aim, it is that audiences will get to know the scale and beauty of Chinese language film and, through it, an insight into China and its people."

Of course the most exceptional thing is that Maggie Cheung, one of the most beautiful, multi-talented and fascinating actresses in the world, will be in attendance. Apparently she has even been brushing up on her scots, emailing Mark only yesterday to say 'cannae wait'. Neither can we.

Mikio Naruse

There has been a distinct lack of blogging from me recently, so what better way to restart than to draw your attention to a great new release from my favourite DVD label Eureka! Their first box set of films by the legendary, but under-exposed Mikio Naruse, a contemporary of Ozu and Mizoguchi, constitutes a rare event indeed. The three films, all masterpieces of understated melodrama, Repast, The Sound of the Mountain and Flowing, are accompanied by commentaries and a 200 page book of insightful essays. This release heralds a retrospective, currently touring the greater cities of the western world, and due to arrive at London's NFT in the first half of this year (the rumour is something like 25 films out of the director's eighty odd). The three films explore the status of women in postwar Japanese society with a great sensitivity. Naruse's style is breathtaking: rooted in complex psychology and powerful, but never excessive, emotions, characters interact within an editing system of astonishing visual economy, which captures the poetic rhythms of everyday life and infuses every encounter with a subtle network of glances and meanings arising from under the surface of things. Repast follows the uncertainty of a wife trapped in an unfulfilled marriage, Sound of the Mountain the friendship between an old man and his daughter in law as a result of her philandering husband, and Flowing the everyday, unromanticised lives of the women of a geisha house teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Naruse's view is pessimistic, yet incredibly empathetic, and he handles his material with a rare ad complex emotional subtlety.

You can find out more at http://www.eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/catalogue/repast/ and i will hopefully have a review online fairly soon at www.firecracker-magazine.com

I recently spent new year in Paris, where i found an exceptional video rental store just on the intersection of Boulevard St Michel (by the Jardins du Luxemburg) and the Rue Abbe D'Eppe called Videosphere, which has a great selection of Asian films, including the odd rare gem.