In the last twenty years the cinemas of the East have developed an incredibly sophisticated and diverse body of work, and have been garnering increasing attention in the West, not just at Film Festivals but on the shelves of high street shops. From the charm of the 1980s Hong Kong action flick, through the artistry of China's Fifth Generation and the Tawainese new wave, to the dynamism of the New Korean Cinema; Asian cinema has reinvented film language as we know it, wresting an essentially western medium from its roots and inflecting it with specifically Oriental themes and forms. Often innovative and formally beautiful, Asian film has reinvigorated cinema and began to challenge the dominance of an increasingly stagnant Hollywood. Hollywood's only defence has been to remake Asian films badly. This Blog will provide a personal commentary on the Asian film renaissance.

Saturday, 7 April 2007

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.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)