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.