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.