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.