My Thoughts and My Actions - Qing Wu

My Top Films of 2005

2005 saw another year of declining sales of foreign films and shrinking attendance for art house flicks, although the DVD sales for the same categories actually increased by a few decimal points. American media did not have much interest in films as an art form. Rather, films are entertainment machines where sequels and fantasies rule. Don’t be surprised if you never heard most of the films in my list. Some of them have not been released at all in this country. I had the luck to catch them in the film festivals, in the precious and splendid Castro theatre, or find them in the pirated DVD bins in China.

Head On, German-Turkey, Fatih Akin,
Fatih Akin has matured into a true master after this masterpiece. I cringed in my seat through the film with my heart throbbing and my fist clenching. Love hurts and bleeds, and the despair and the loneliness as culture outsiders are so real. In the end you get so invested in their world that you can only fear the worst. I confess that I fall in love with the lead actress Sibel Kekilli. I googled her as soon as I got home and only uncovered her earlier porn clips, and thus her life-imitating-art stories. Guess how heart-broken I was!

Peacock China, Gu Changwei
After the film won the Berlin film festival and became a huge box office inside China, I keep on hoping that this film will be on the radar screen of the American film distributors. No luck so far. Although the film aims to depict a particular period of China (late 70s- early 80) through a family of five, the struggles between the children and the parents are universal and should easily touch on hearts of non-Chinese audience. But since the film is neither an underground film that tried to be subversive nor a Kung Fu epic with technical wonder to woo the West, it probably would never get shown here. Gu could proudly stand in the A-list of Chinese directors after this amazing debut, and I can’t wait for its sequel “Spring Begins”, which recorded a subsequent period (mid-late 80s) I was so familiar with.

Old Boy, South Korea, Chan WooPark
South Korea has become a formidable entertainment powerhouse whose stars and films are sweeping over Asia and starting to gain their foothold in this side of Pacific. Old Boy is a second installment in Chan's Vengence trilogy. It lays out a plot that is almost impossible to believe but still very logical, with potent power of sentiment and intense visual violence. A perfect example to show that art can shock and entertain, especially when it is innovative, unexpected, and humanistic.

The Return, Russia, Andret Zvyagintsev
I stumbled onto this film by accident, and without knowing anything about it actually benefited my viewing experience. What could possibly happen when two boys went out on a fishing trip with a long-absent father? But when tension starts to build you just know that something dreadful would happen. The cinematography and editing give the film such lyrical and mystic touch, and the acting of all three characters is very unforgettable.

The World, China, Jia ChangKe
This is the Jia Changke’s first film ever released officially in China, although he has already become one of the world-renown directors. It did not score well in the domestic market, however. The reasons could be many-folded…but its very bleak ending and suppressive theme probably kept many people away from theatre. Using subtle metaphors, Jia created a story with urgency and poignancy. His real interest still lies in history’s force on the fate of small characters, but this time, he touched the fresh wounds of our national psyche and people do not seem want to be reminded of that.

Walk on Water, Isarel, Eytan Fox
Two years ago I put Yossi & Jager on my top 10 list. This year the director came back with a much stronger film layered with complexity of history, race, politics, and sexuality. Pairing a deeply-troubled Mossad agent with a free-spirited German gay guy Eytan span enough drama that could keep you suspended until the very last minute.

March of Penguin, France, Luc Jacquet
Ok I got have one documentary on my list. And undoubtedly I chose a crowd-pleaser this time. French seem to be very good at making films about animals. They managed to be both scientific (not as overly sentimental as Disney) and able to retain enough drama to sustain audience’s emotions.

The Intruder, France, Clare Denis
You either love it or hate it. But during the showing of this film in SF film festival, no one walked out in the entire 2 and half hours. Clare filled the screen with such sensuality and mysterious beckoning. It is about landscape, about weather, about aging and body and flesh, about drifting and travel and culture and everything else. But in the meantime the story has no coherence and sometimes no logic at all. Clare did not want to trick your mind as David Lynch did. She merely provided a framework and let you to imagine the rest.

Broken Flowers, US, Jim Jarmusch
A triumphant return for Jim Jarmusch to do another road film with his signature caricature of characters and eccentric humor. I was converted ever since I saw Mystery Train, and I always wondered how he would be able to make another hit after all those earlier classics. Using a mysterious letter as a thread, Broken Flowers engineered a set of seemingly normal but quirky characters who either reinvented themselves or got very bitter. Jarmusch is a quintessencial American artist who is veryt rooted in the country's culture and history. His earlier films placed foreign characters in the most American locales, and this time, he enlisted a variety of personality prototypes to reflect on what kind of people this country have produced.

Carandiru, Brazi, Hector Babenco
Like rest of Latin America and following a long left-leaning culture tradition, Brazilian directors excel in making films about marginal and underprivileged people. In Carandiru Babence portrayed a colorful set of characters from the largest prison with simpathy and compassion. After a slow buildup, the final 45 minutes ended in heart-wrenching and intense violence. I

Three Road Films

I have a preference for road films. My wanderlust can’t be satisfied by this busy work schedule, and films are the best places for me to escape to, if and only if just for those short two hours. I came across three wonderful but obscure road films this summer. It is a shame that they got so little media coverage, even if all of them were directed by renowned directors.

In July is Fatih Akin’s second feature after the success of his debut Kurz und Schemerzlos. He took a break and made this light-hearted romantic comedy before he went on to direct Head On, which won the Berlin Golden bear and was much darker and intense. The story follows a Hamburg teacher (handsome Moritz Bleibtreu) who falls in love with a Turkish beauty and decides to travel to Turkey by all kinds of transportation means, all in company of another girl Juli who tries to win his heart back. It is a well-worn genre with plenty of witty and humorous moments. It shows If you follow your heart, there will be great adventures waiting for you (beware of sexy East European temptress, corrupted customer officer, car theft etc etc).

Michael Winterbottom always has a political edge. After 24 hour Party people he took the project on smuggling of illegal immigrants. He and his production team chose two refugees from an Afghanistan camp in Pakistan and followed them through Iran, Turkey, Italy, France and finally to UK, often improvising the stories on the road. The end film is called "In This World". The central character, a charming and street-smart teenage kid named Jarmal, was a natural actor who brought the film to life. It was mostly shot by handheld camera, with plenty of jerky movements and occasional grainy shot, and it let us witness the entire smuggling itinerary, from bleak deserts to snow-capped mountains to containers and tunnels, from one language to another, from middle-east to west. The movies call on our sympathy of the illegal immigrants, of the great dangers they endured to look for a better life, and on thinking of the root causes of these human tragedies.

I cried a bucket load when I saw Humberto Solas’ Miel Para Oshun (Honey for Oshun). It was an equally sentimental journey for me since many of the scenes and plots reminded me of my own trip in Cuba. Solas created a melodrama in a documentary style, following an embittered Cuban exile returning to his island and looking for his own mother. Wounded and scarred in life, all these characters slowly discovered their common bond and shared identity in this incredible journey. I never heard about Solas before, but he has been a pivotal figure in the Latin cinema who experimented relentlessly over 50 years. In line with all other Latin American intellectuals, his works explored the Latin American identity and social justices with potent political messages. Honey for Oshun delivered such an emotional but optimistic redemption to the victims of history. It is a tear jerker, but it also makes us think.

ShangHai Dreams: Wang Xiao Shuai

Wang XiaoShui has always been hailed as one of the leading directors from so-called Sixth Generation of Mainland Chinese directors. You can at least find three of his films from Netflix (Frozen, So Close to Paradise, Beijing Bicyles), which is a hard evidence of his ascendance in the art-house arena. Characters in all his films don’t end up well. They either go insane, or commit suicide, or get violently beat up, all due to high external pressures and their inability to control their fates. It is easy to see why all his earlier films get banned in China. These external forces eventually all point to the system’s flaws, and to the social injustices and inequalities. His protagonists struggled hard but in the end still could not escape their tragic ends. These stories inevitably made him infamously underground as well as a favorite of all the film festivals.

Shanghai Dreams, Wang’s first film that ever passed the strict censorship in China, was released in Mainland this summer and got abundant media attention after it won an award in Cannes. This year saw a few major art films being heavily promoted by China’s media: Peacock (form Gu ChangWei), The World (from Jia Changke), and Something Like Happiness (from ZhangYang). Shanghai Dreams joined this rank although box-office-wise it fell short of expectation but still did way better than other art films. Film critics indulged in collectively nostalgia, focusing on the autobiographical side of the story and choosing to ignore the political message due to their own self-censorships. Shanghai Dreams is nevertheless a very depressing film that raised poignant questions on the leadership of not-so-distant past. The very fact that this film actually passed the censorship indicated a loosen grip by Chinese government. One of the few daring details in the film included the father sneakily listening to the Voice of America (the film never mentioned the name of the radio station but anyone from those years can easily recognize that), This plot would be unthinkable just a year ago. Wang obviously did not budge.

48th San Francisco International Film Festival Part 2

Although mainland director Tian Zhuang Zhuang is most famous for Blue Kite, one of the best films ever made in China that summed up the tragic years of political movements under communism, he first gained international recognition in late eighties for two earlier films, “On the Hunting Ground” and “Horse Thief”. Tian seems to have deep interest in China’s ethnic groups and the ways they survived in some of the harshest environments on this earth, and these two films used Mongolia and Tibet as the backgrounds where he applied many wide angle shots and slow pacing to bring out the bleak landscape and its human stories. It came as no surprise when he decided to make a documentary (Delamu) about the Tea Horse Trail, the highest caravan route that cuts through the edge of Tibetan plateau and down to the north India. Regardless of the spectacular scenes of snow peaks and rivers that run deep down in the gorges, the film really focused on the human stories that Tian uncovered along the road. Here he offered an ensemble of local characters of various ages and religions, which included a 104-year-old woman who recalled how she outlived two husbands and all the hardships, an aged pastor telling stories of missionaries and his own imprisonment, a Tibetan young man who shared a wife with his brother, and many more. In the end we realized that these people who seemed to be living so remotely also have to deal with the same problems as we do, struggling through love and loss and pain. And the larger history, such as the civil war between the nationalists and the communists, the religious cleansing after the republic, the Dalai Lama’s escape to India, and China’s rapid modernization, did not spare these common people either and is still constantly changing their lives.

Interesting enough, another film legend, Wener Herzog who was once one of the representatives for German New cinema, also made a new documentary (White Diamond) on an equally remote area, the Amazon jungle in Guyana. Herzog apparently also has some attachment to jungles. Aguirre, the wrath of the God, the film that brought him to the world fame, was shot entirely in jungles. But once again, even with all those breath-taking shots of canopy, waterfall, reptiles and flying swifts, the new film is really about humankind, about how human dreams and conquers the nature but nature forever holds its mystery. Herzog is drawn to human stories much as a scientist drawn to unsolved puzzles. He shows them in a specific setting and studies them as an anthropologist. In this film he followed a British aeronautic scientist named Dr. Dorrington who built small airship to fly through the jungles. Funny, self-deprecating, idealistic, sentimental, mistake-prone, Dr. Dorrinton by default became the perfect central character much of the film is based on.

There has been a lot of hype for Jia ZhangKe’s new film The World. It was hailed as the first “above-ground” film that was made by him through official channel in China after he already made three other underground films, all of which were critically-acclaimed festival favorites and firmly positioned him as one of the youngest film masters. But the film opened to box office disappointment in China. I personally think this is his best film. Using a world miniature theme park as the setting, the film slowly unfolds the story of two main characters, both of whom came to Beijing to look for opportunities from a provincial town. The fantasy and falsehood of the locale contrasts absurdly with the real struggles these small people face. Jia avoids quick sentimentality and tells the story with restrains only until the very end. His meticulous attention to details made these characters so real. Jia’s favorite actress Zhao Tao deserved an acting award for he excellent performance too!

I chose the Moroccan film “In Casablanca Angels don’t Fly” partly due to my own fond memory of Marrakech. How often do we ever see a Moroccan film anyway? It also tells the plights of migrant workers, and in this case, they are the Berbers who left their native villages to make money in Casablanca. The film followed three waiters who all worked in the same restaurant, although the three stories don’t quite fit together. One subplot that really stands out is a tear-jerker, but a good one. I only wished that the director could have focused on this single thread and elaborate more on the few characters, but in the end we only got a glimpse of them.

48th San Francisco Film Festival Part 1

It was exactly ten years since I first attended the San Francisco International Film Festival. Thanks to an old school acquaintance at the time, not only did I get a chance to chat with Jiang Wen on the back of my friend’s car (he was showing his directorial debut “In the Days of Sun”), I also happened to crush Joan Chen’s dinner party in her beautiful Pacific Heights house. I no longer remember any details of these encounters other than the arrogance of both celebrities. I could not blame them anyway. What would possibly make them curious about me?! I was then a Stanford geek who goofed away a lot of time in front of my VCR watching tapes after tapes of foreign films (checked out from our media library). I thought I would be able to talk about films with them, but little did I know what a stupid brat I was.

Since then I have been a loyal patron of this festival, devoting some of best sunny days in Kabuki within those two weeks. On weekends I could watch three in a day. Voyeuristic by nature, I enjoy escaping into these alien cultures and faraway landscapes. But I also tended to select films from directors I had heard about, or films that were in competition in Cannes or Berlin film festival, just to reduce the “miss” rate in these hit-and-miss gambles. Over the years, the ticket price also crept up, outpacing the inflation rate, but the number of films I watched did not decrease accordingly. As a film buff/snob, film festival is a ritual I need to hold on to.

By accident or by trend, my favorite three films from this festival are all from female directors. Clair Dennis, who always surprises audience with her unconventional styles, pulled another interesting film (The Intruder) together by constructing suspense, fragmentary scenes, and conflicting story lines. It leapt from French mountains to Pusan and ended up in Tahiti, following an old man with secret identities who went through some heart surgery and had some issue with his son (first we thought we saw the son, but in the later part he was looking for the son who was left in Tahiti). Clair seemed to have cut and paste the plot and deliberately made it inconsistent and baffling, but this freedom at will opens up all kinds of possibilities to create very atmospheric and spectacular scenes, with mysteries lurking behind. Like David Lynch’s “Moholland Drive”, the film can be interpreted in many ways, while the real theme remains elusive, or Claire may never have a clear one except for a set of ideas and moods and visual impressions. The film was not made to entertain. It aims to take you through a meandering global journey, through gorgeous landscapes, through tropical storms and winter blizzard, through uncommon events, through solitude and memory and pain and loss, through what is called life.

I watched Argentinean director Lurecia Martel’s first film “La Cienaga” in Castro Theatre a couple of years ago and still remember the opening scene vividly. She has the uncanny ability to frame the most ordinary scenes with full tension and suspense, and her characters tread through daily life as if they could step on landmines anytime. Once again she pulled the same tricks in her latest film “The Holy Girl”, and instead of using a rundown swimming pool, she put the characters in a hotel and around a thermal pool, where sounds echo and dilapidated interior harbors forbidden desires and wakening sexuality of girlhood. Lots of close-up shots and unsymmetrical camera angles are used effectively to observe all the nuances of the psychological changes. But the new film can’t measure up to her last one. The directing is flawless, but the story is narrowly-focused and too intimate study of the girlhood struggles. It lacks the broader appeal of her previous film, which gives more context and sense of places and time.

Ever since Central Station and City of God came out, Brazil immediately brings to mind images of Samba and gangster fight and poverty of children to people’s mind. The new film Almost Brothers from another female director Luica Murat plays into these clichés but it is nevertheless another impressive endeavor to tap into the same fertile story ground of racial polarization, violence and political repressions. Film makers in Brazil, more than anywhere else in the world, feel obligated to portrait a society in chaos, either to fight injustice or to reveal the root of their alarming social problems. Murat herself has spent time in prison during the 70s and this film, although spanning through 50 years, really centered on the prison period. The two protagonists, one white and one black, grew up together from two different backgrounds and reunited briefly in the prison but eventually drifted apart. One would wonder how a female director can make a film about male prison, where machismo is on its ultimate extreme. But Murat proved that she could just do this job as well, with a toughness and cool-headedness that can rival a man.

Peacock: Gu Chang Wei

Growing up at the outskirt of a provincial capital in 70’s China is not such a unique experience among Chinese of my generation. Mao died right before we hit the school age. The ensuing changes, gradual but radical, were confusing at times but were never questioned by us. The old way of life, a very austere existence based on universal poverty and inflated ideology, slowly disappeared, until one day we find ourselves living in modern high-rises and driving Japanese-made cars but somehow nostalgic of such a recent and prudent past that was forever gone. Peacock, the debut film from renowned cinematographer Gu ChangWei, presented this bygone era with meticulous details and a infectious glumness. However, its somber tone and repressive theme did not stop it from becoming the highest gross art film in China after it won the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival. Its very success in the domestic market indicated that watching film is not just an escape to a fantasy world. It is also an experience to reflect on where we come from, to be connected with a powerful and collective past, and to identify oneself through the suffering and dilemmas of the others.

Told in three separate segments, Peacock narrated through stories of three siblings. The sister, a dreamer who was never satisfied with her job, struggled and married out to change her situation but only ended up in ultimate disillusion. The older brother, slightly mentally retarded and constantly abused by his peels, accepted everything with stubborn optimism and naiveté. The youngest brother, seemingly shy and absent-minded, became a runway kid but returned year later with a wife and a kid, a missing finger, and a withdrawn attitude towards everything.

Both Gu and Li Qiang (who wrote the screen play) repeatedly told the critics that the three characters represented three types of life philosophies: romanticism, pragmatism, and escapism. But the film seems far from being contrived, and the characters were so real that we really fall for them, and eventually see part of ourselves or our own families in each of them. It can be argued that the obstacles these siblings faced in life were specific to late seventies and early eighties when opportunities were scarce and hopes were dim, but on a closer look, their struggles and their tragic fates are much more universal since life itself can be cruel regardless of time and places. And in the end, people do survive, even if their dreams are shattered, their hopes are lost and misfortune does not necessarily spare them.

I could not quite sleep after the film and had to phone my own siblings and parents just to talk about it. The film brings back much of my own memories living through that period, and it also makes me appreciate my own family. There are many understated but touching moments in the film that haunted me. It made me think how much sacrifice parents would give to help their kids, but more than often their efforts only lead to their own frustration and more misery for the children.

Gu rose to international fame after making Red Sorghum in late eighties. He became the leading cameraman for some of the most prestigious film in 90s such as Farewell my Concubine, In the Days of Sun, Devil on the Door Steps, etc. For a while he lived in Hollywood and shot a few bigger-budget films but the commercial studio system eventually drove him back to China so that he could make his own films. Peacock is a very impressive debut that could redefine his place in the Chinese film history when art films are on the verge of extinction due to the box office pressure. Gu used neither special effects nor big stars. He proved that humanistic stories with profound messages can draw audience back to theatres, especially when it is done with observed eyes and a nonjudgemental attitude towards our own common history.

My Top Ten Films of 2004

It is a year that critics hailed as a strong year for movies, but opening Art Forum or San Francisco Guardian all you find are these obscure entries whose names won’t ever register in your mind. After all, top ten is the manifesto of taste, and luckily film makers around the world continue to create and innovate regardless of how Hollywood or Bollywood dictate the industry.

2046 (China): After four years in production, the much anticipated and star-studded film from Wong Kar Wai was finally released in China last September. Loosely connected with In the Mood for Love, plotwise it is much less coherent but visually it is even more composed and color-saturated. Future and past alternated and added both mystery and fantasy to an otherwise rather tedious story. It transcended over layers of metaphors and became a rhapsody for lost love and memories.

The Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind (US): Charlie Kauffman and Michael Condry were a perfect team to make a movie that could be both intellectually challenging and visually stimulating. Surrealism is at its full play here in the dream sequence, where Condry paid his homage to Brunel without confusing audiences with absurdity or symbolism. Kate Winslet rules!

Maria Full of Grace (Joshua Matson, Colombia): When I got searched at least times in the Bogota airport last summer, I heard stories of drug smuggling and how women would swallow to carry them. After I came back I found this film in theatre just in time and it made me cringe in tears.

I am not Scared (Gabriele Salvatores, Italy): This small gem won some critic's award earlier in the year but quickly disappeared without a trace due to lack of marketing. Adapted from a bestseller in Italy, the film depicted a strange world from a nine year old boy’s eyes, where menace, wonders, boredom makes everyday life both a thrilling and tedious existence. The opening shot where a group of kids cycled through a sun-drenched wheat field deserves to be seen by all the cinematographers-want-to-be.

Memories of Murder (Jong Ho-Bo, South Korea): Korea continues to churn out high quality films which are both entertaining (this one is a thriller) and politically relevant. There is another anti-Hollywood ending --The serial killer was never found, which would leave most audience walking out of theatre in chills. Life is never what it seems to be.

Proteus (John Greyson, Canada): Greyson returned to the gay theme after making Law of Enclosure, and his new project retained his political outrage but followed a more straightforward plot line, about an interracial affair in the 18th century South Africa that led to execution under the sodomy law.

Trilogy: On the Run, An Amazing Couple, After Life. (Lucas Belvaux, France/Belgum) These three films, one thriller, one comedy, one melodrama, have to be seen together. Delvaux played both the game of genre and the game of perspectives. The side characters in one film became main characters in another, and all three films can share the same scenes although from different narrative points of views.

Corporation (Mark Achbar, Canada): I am a leftist. I am not a fan of globalization. I am against multi-nationals, big business interest, and extreme capitalism. I am an environmentalist looking for alternative resources and sustainable growth…therefore I vote for this film!

Cell Phone (Feng Xiao Gang, China): Usually only a few types of Chinese films get released in US: Martial arts, underground films, stories set in distant past. Since Cell Phone was a major box office hit and was about how cell phones changed people’s life in contemporary Beijing, it probably would never see the Western audiences. Feng is a great satirist, revealing the absurdity of modern life with subtle sense of humor. After the film, many of the couples checked each other’s cell phones and ended up breaking up, and many of the dialogues became popular phrases in the everyday Chinese.

Sexual Dependency (Rodrigo Bellot, Bolivia): First time director, two continents, five interrelated stories, and split screen for more than two hours…this sounds a formula for disaster but Bellot miraculously pulled them together into a very coherent and viewable movie that touched upon all that tensions caused by race, social economic class, geopolitics and sexuality

Two Talented Young Film Makers from Small Countries

American film schools must have done something right, even if American films themselves seemed ultimately iterative and dull these days. The path to success is to come from some small obscure countries without any baggage and learn the required theory and techniques and then go home and make films. Two films I saw this weekend convinced me of this. But of course, other than the ability for cross-culture exchange, the key is the talent. Without that, even the richness of unexplored heritage would go wasted. What also could help is, hm, some dose of gayness. I don’t know whether these two directors are gay or not, but I have reasons to believe so. They tend to think beyond conventions and take their liberty to dive in the complexity of sexualities. And the end result is usually refreshing and thought-provoking.

As a graduate of Chicago Art Institute and from Thailand, Weerasethakul (shortened as Joe) became more widely known when he won a special Jury prize at Cannes for his new film Tropical Malady. But his works have had enough followers through words of mouth way before that. His name becomes equivalent to New Thai Cinema. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which always pays special attention to Asian art, put together a three-day program to feed the converted and the curious. Unfortunately, I only got chance to catch the last show which was also his debut feature film called Mysterious Object at Noon. I walked in the theatre knowing nothing about the film. After first 20 minutes of confusion, I suddenly got the idea and the rest was an exciting and engaging ride. Using unrelated real storytellers from school kids to village elders, the movie slips in and out of the narrated story and blends both reality and fiction into one coherent flow. You can read the film as a deconstructive means to analyze narrative and its social-economical or psychological roots. You can also use it to experience Thailand as a country with lively and diverse culture heritage. Regardless of what you walk away with, the film does not give straight answer about what it is about. Maybe that is also the reason why his films could be so controversial. People either hate them or love them, and there don’t seem to be anyone in between. (Interesting enough, I found out that my friend Mike also blogged on this film and he absolutely hated it. See this link).

Apichatpong showed up after the screening and answered a few of my questions (plus others) with his usual modesty and economy of words. He did not want to explain why and how he made his films and insisted on following his own instinct in all his works. As his films are getting more and more budget and more polished technically, let’s hope he would never get corrupted by studio systems in Thailand or in Hollywood. After all, he is a true avant-garde visual artist in his heart.

While the Apichatpong retrospective was taking place in SOMA, Castro Theater was taken over by the annual Latino Film festival. One of the great things about San Francisco is its all-year-round film festivals where you can find films you won’t see anywhere else. More reasons not to move to the red states! The only flick I caught turned out to be the very outstanding piece from a very young Bolivian film maker named Rodrigo Bellot, who studied films in Cornell and broke into the international scene with this very debut. Presented entirely in split screen, I was slightly annoyed in the first 10 minutes but quickly got over the nuance of constant focus shifts and started to really enjoy the double perspectives. The film did not stop there. The split evolves and becomes a style device which moves freely between contrasting tones and rhythms, between mirrored and echoed images and voices, and between converged and diverged view points. In the end, it becomes a true work of art.

But what I found most interesting are the plots: Five interconnected stories that moved from both high and low classes of Bolivia to Cornell. The backgrounds of the characters could not be more different, but they share things in common: prejudice, global consumerism, identity confusion, and sex driven by something less pure. Bellot presented a panoramic view of a problematic world, where tensions of race, class and sexuality are so palpable and intense while they have to find strange and dangerous outlets in sex acts. This theme is not entirely new due to widely-practiced postmodernism in art, but a fusion of this theme with both South and North America under one critical lens is definitely new.

Both Weerasethakul and Rodrigo were born in 70s and still in the early stage of their careers. Their rising reputation and growing body of works indicate that film-making, as an art form of one hundred year old, is taking new directions in many geographic fronts although there is a uniting philosophical ground underneath. While Apichatpong’s film turns narratives inside out, Rodrigo focuses on manipulation of media images and reveals what is behind. The deconstruction is in full gear and Derrida must be smiling in his new grave.

Motorcycle Diaries

Few books affected me more than Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries in my younger years. The book inspired both wanderlust and an everlasting adoration for Che. It also helped form my own ideology and political judgment when I was still ultimately apolitical. Years passed and the book has been staying on my shelf collecting dust, while I traveled much of South and Central America and felt strangely home in all these remote countries I would never have imagined to set my feet on. I could only say that all these adventures, all these affinities to a vast continent so different from my own, probably started from this small magic book.

So when I heard the book was adapted into a movie by Brazilian director Walter Sallers, it became the most waited film of the year for me. I was afraid the movie would destroy all those imaginations built through the years (with backdrop landscapes culled from my own traveling), but a visualization of that enchanting and strenuous journey is also very appealing and exciting (especially with Gael Garcia Bernal in it).

I finally watched the movie with a large group of friends, many of whom with Latin heritages. I walked out of the theatre with mixed feelings. The movie is almost just as good as I expected, yet I found it unsatisfying. Maybe the fault is the medium itself. In order to make a coherent movie, Sallers spent much of the time building up the plot and the characters and even ended the movie with a Hollywood-like triumphant crossing of the Amazon, many of which were not even mentioned in the original book. Sallers also took the liberty to cut and paste the diaries and rearrange the small anecdotes to make the story flow better. I don’t see this as a bad practice, but it certainly altered the existing pace and rhythm of the book. The voice-over is the best Saller can do to convey the tone of the book. Gone are the poetry and the cerebral reflections. But as visual medium, a film can also do what the book can’t do. Unfortunately Salles could only provide some breathtaking landscape without personal feelings. The movie sees what a usual traveler sees. It is not necessarily what Che had seen.

The problem could be that Salles may not be the best person to adapt a road story like this. It is too easy for him to trap us in the same sentimentality he was so good at in his earlier films (Central Stations). Just as the book, the movie has a light and comical air in the beginning but eventually took a somber turn once the protagonists got to Andes, but this turn was rather sudden and the witnessed miseries did not point well to the wakening of Che’s political conscience. The tears were simply too cheaply won. As a book, Motorcycle Diaries was much more than a tour of places or tour of hearts. Even if the movie tried hard to go beyond that, it did not succeed.

As a reference, I went back to reread the chapters in one of the best biography book “Che Guevara: A Revolutional Life”, written by Jon Lee Anderson. Salles clearly took some notes from the same pages since much of the highlights in the movie were all here (but not in the diaries). Two more observations: The final close-up of real-life Alberto (who is well into his 80s) reminds me of “Rabbit Proof Fence”, and the back-and-white stills of the workers and peasants and Indians seemed to come straight from end of “Mango Yellow”, another Brazilian film on working-class people in Recife.

Incidentally, as I am also finishing reading Garcia Marquez’s General in Labyrinth, I can not help but compare Che to Simon Bolivar. Both were ferocious fighters, poets, avid readers, and rigorous intellectuals. Both grew up in privileged families and traveled widely. Both died young and fought the whole life for a united America but failed miserably in the end, and both became martyrs to inspire millions to follow. Heroic and tragic, Che and Bolivar are unique to South America, to its tumultuous history and continuous struggling, to its melodramatic culture sensibilities and sentimentality, to its need for hopes, dreams, and optimism. As today’s extreme capitalism continues to divide the world into rich and poor and exhaust the world’s natural resources, we have more reasons to challenge the status quo and seek alternative solutions for a better and fairer society. Che would always to be the symbol of this idealism and this selfless search of the truth. The violence he resorted to has proved to be futile and unwise, but his high spirit and combatant energy would live on. As I stood outside the theatre and looked around and saw all those young inquisitive faces, I felt I was one of them.

Two European Classics

Two representative works from two recent retrospectives made into SF's Castro theatre in September. They were Ingma Bergman's Fanny & Alexander and Visconti's Leopard. Roxie, a few blocks down in the heart of Mission, also presented a BBC documentary on Visconti to time with Castro's offering on European masters. After watching all three films, I started to understand why the baby boomer critics miss those heydays of cinema back in late fifties and sixties, when Italian masters, French new wave, and Ingma Bergman were making ground-breaking films one after another, pushing boundaries on many fronts -- all are the reasons to lament on the bleak state of current cinema.

Both Bergman and Visconti are not the typical stylists who populate today's art houses, although they each developed quite distinguished styles and forms to support their own cinematic visions. They principle achievements lie on the higher intellectual grounds, raising questions and providing insights for a wide spectrum of issues that concern psychology, philosophy, politics, religion and history. But behind all these large themes, these films never deviate far from their own life. Both Fanny&Alexander and Leopard are probably the most autographical films they made. They continuing successes and timeless qualities only prove that true art only comes out of one's heart. Their powers to move and to inspire are often stamped with the art-maker's own memories and feelings, which, on the other hand, also compelled them to make these films.

So, when both films were shown side by side, the commonality can be easily summarized. They are both historical dramas set merely 50 years apart, with sumptuous interior settings and aristocratic families as the main sujects. Both Bergman and Visconti were so fascinated with family tragedies and they went back again and again to to their own life to dig out tormented characters. The BBC film traced it all back to Visconti's attachment to his mother in an unhappy marrige, while Bergman biographers wrote in details and tried hard to map real family members to his cinema characters. Both men used their films to resolve their problems with God: while Visconti was interested in immortality, Bergam was more concerned with the moral issues. If Visconti wanted his God for eternal peace, Bergman defied its doctrines and wanted humanity to shine all through. Leopard is such a historical epic that zooms in on one family from a much larger social political perspective. F&A instead used character sketches to zoom out, reflecting the values and revealing the class tensions of the time. In the end, it is a much more personal film.

The BBC film on Visconti focused on the relationship between his films and his own life, spending very little time to mention other Italian film makers and how his works might be influenced by the others. It became very clear that each of Visconti's film showed a side of him: The "bitchy queen" in "Senso", the erotic attraction to Nazi in "The damned", the aristocratic upbringing from "Leopard", the hidden SM theme in "Rocco & his Brothers', etc etc.

I first read the script of F&A in high school. The world seen from a child's eye enchanted me, although that world could not be more different from my own at the time. The last scene in the antique shop is one of the best scenes I have ever seen, with magic and visual wonders abound. Leopard was also one of the very first foreign films showed in China after the Cultural Revolution, partly due to the fame of Alain Delon. Watching both of them in the same month is a feast on my own nostalgia.

Morning Sun

Cultural Revolution is probably one of the most misunderstood periods of Modern Chinese history that has been greatly simplified in Western eyes when it was frequently used as proof of brutality and failure of communism. Thanks to a handful films that made into the international scene (To name a few, Farewell My Concubine, Red Violin, Blue Kite and Xiu-Xiu), popular images of Cultural Revolution are often about red guards smashing cultural heritages or denouncing and torturing innocent elders. Within China itself although much have been written and said, few dared to break the party lines and give more thorough unbiased studies. As early as mid-eighties, Ba Jing, the most prominent literary figure in China, proposed to build a Culture Revolution museum to commemorate lost lives and lost innocence. Not surprisingly, the government never took it seriously.

Thirty years have passed and Cultural Revolution seems such a distant memory. China is already an entirely different country from what it used to be. Even if little research has been done, do we still need to bring back the old ghosts and all those painful memories when the country is currently rushing through a major capitalistic boom? If history does repeat itself, would something like Cultural Revolution ever happen again in China, or in any other countries? What lessons can we learn from such a large-scale manmade catastrophe? Morning Sun, a new film from Long Bow Group and funded partly by PBS, is an ambitious project aiming to answer some of these questions. In fact there is no better time to embark on a project about Cultural Revolution when enough time have passed so that we can discuss it more objectively and when some main witnesses and participants are still alive.

Carma Hinton, one of the three directors, was born to American parents in 1949 and grew up in Beijing. She left for America in 1971 and at one point studied history in Harvard. As so-called "the new generation born with the republic" and a member of "old three classes" (referring to the high school students graduating from 1965-1968, who made up for the majority of red guards and were sent down to countryside without college education), she witnessed all the twists and turns of the mass movement in the early phases. Her intimate knowledge and wide connection network made the film both informative and thought-provoking. Rare cameo interviews of major historical figures from that period, such as Luo XiaoHai (founder of Red Guards), Song BingBing, Mao’s secretary Li Rui and his daughter, Chairman Liu Shao Qi's widow and daughter, plus other thinkers and writers from that generation, were pieced together by propaganda film clips and documentary footages. Its attempt to dissect this movement from personal angles proved to be very rewarding to audience, giving the film an emotional charge when these characters seemed to have suffered, grieved and grown out with dignities.

I watched the film at Roxie two weeks ago. It made me cringe and cry and laugh. Although born in the end of Cultural Revolution and bearing little memory of its actual events, I am familiar with many of the propaganda film clips, songs and Mao’s quotations. The specific Mao’s paragraph where the film took its title from, was in my second grade textbook, and I probably have seen East is Red a million times. What struck me the most is the feverish passion and self-righteous attitude of the Red Guards. The rebellious spirit of the youth is universal, but it can be both destructive and constructive. Under the manipulation of the higher orders, the selfless dedication to a cause bettering the society could easily be derailed towards something sinister. Yet in the current time of extreme commercialism, we also feel nostalgic of the sanitized society and revolutionary spirits.

Mao was the central character of Cultural Revolution, during which a God-like worshipping of him reached the highest order. The film did not paint Mao as neither evil nor God. By the end of the film he came across as a very complex character, a brilliant political schemer who could ruthlessly destroy his foes while remaining a romanticist and peasant poet in his heart. That also explains why he was never so hated in China, and up to this day, he remains a symbol of good earthly omens. The movie suggested that Mao launched Cultural Revolution to purge people who were against him. But he did not stop there. His essential goal was a single-sighted social re-engineering, mobilizing millions and creating a senseless Utopian vision in this biggest country of the world. It proved to be more devastating and more dangerous than any power struggles.

L’AGE D’OR and UN CHIEN ANDALOU -- Luis Bunuel

Going to screenings of classic masterpieces is a good intellectual exercise to find out how they influenced more contemporary films and film makers. L’AGE D’OR and UN CHIEN ANDALOU, Luis Bunuel's two earliest films in colaboration with Dali, have been well discussed in the art history and in the context of surrealism. But they only get a chance to be shown side by side until very recently. So when Castro Theatre finally put them on this week, , we decided that we could not possibly miss this rare treat. As a Luis Bunuel fan, I watched most of his later and more famous films. These two films are the missing link towards understanding where he started and how he developed an artistic style that is still so talked about in every film schools.

I walked out the theatre playing name-dropping games with Diego. David Lynch came to our minds right away: The discovery of a single ear in the very beginning of Blue Velvet seemed to be a straight variation of the scene is Un Chien Andalou, when a piece of broken hand was lying on the street; and then inevitably the hot name Matthew Barney, whose Cremaster Cycles probably borrowed a few editing tricks and ideas from Bunuel. After all, all of them are obsessed with violence and sexual "deviances", aiming to subvert and shock. If David Lynch had to obey rules of narrative films driven more often by characters and plots, Matthew Barney went a lot further than Bunuel since he aspired to make real art without any consideration of an average theatre goer.

Another exercise while watching these two films is to recognize all the signature images and tricks of surrealism, thought-provoking and groundbreaking 70 years ago and still fresh and interesting at this moment. Body parts (eyeball, specifically, is always a surrealist's favorite), juxtaposition of discordant images, large live animals or nasty small insects, bizarre and illogical sequence of actions, etc. It still works well into the sub consciousness and invokes our deepest psychological reactions (fear and horror, primarily) after being used again and again and almost becoming cinematic clichés.

http://www.filmmonthly.com/Video/Articles/UnChienAndalou/UnChienAndalou.html
http://www.filmforum.com/films/lagedor.html

Goodbye Dragon Inn - Tsai Ming Liang

Tsai, newly awarded with Medal of Honor by French government, is probably unknown outside film festival circuit. The slow pace and depressing themes have made his films not quite accessible for mainstream audiences. Even in Taiwan, he has trouble raising money for his new projects regardless of how critically acclaimed his previous films are.

His very first debut in 1992, Rebels of the Neon God, set the color and tone for all the following films he made. Working with the same actors and actresses and with loosely connected but largely different plots and settings, he created a bleak and oppressive world where his protagonists yearned for connections in vain and often set out for actions that only led to self-destruction and disappointment.

Goodbye Dragon Inn is showing in this year's international film festival and it made me crave for a drink after it was over. All the signature styles of Tsai are here: Excruciatingly long shots, scarce dialogues, the desolate and dilapidated urban setting, heavy shadows and blinking lights. Even the tropical torrential rain, his favorite metaphoric subject, was pouring through the film. Loneliness, alienation, repression, the words that have been used to describe all his other films, fit perfectly well here. Beyond all that is the same nostalgia. The nostalgia is more explicit than ever: Dragon Inn, a popular martial-art film made in 60s, was showing through the film in the background. It represents a lost past, a death of cinema, an era when heroes and fairy tales still existed.

Gay subplots appeared frequently in Tsai's films. In Vive l'amour, in one scene the main character lied underneath the bed and was ultimately turned on while his object of desire was having sex with a woman. In The River, a father went to a bathhouse only to find out he almost had sex with his own son in the dark. Goodbye Dragon Inn also has one of the most intense and comical gay cruising scenes in cinema. But I heard Tsai himself is not gay. He is fascinated with gay sex probably because it gives him the best plot devices to portrait repressed desires and despairs for human intimacy.

All of Tsai's films can be seen as various explorations of the same theme. He never seems to succumb to the pressure of commercial films and stubbornly stick to his own vision and interpretation of the modern world. In the end, he finds himself a true artist who is revealing and continues to reveal the stark reality of modernization.

My Top Ten movies of 2003

It is that time of the year again when every film critic rushes to pick up their favorite ten, either to make a manifesto of one’s own taste or to promote some obscure gem. After watching three critically-acclaimed Hollywood box-officers (Lord of Rings, Cold Mountain, 21 Gram) over the Christmas season, I felt numbed and emotionally exhausted and in the end I did not remember much of them. I finally decided to write down my own favorite ten just to sort out my mind and re-live those unforgettable moments when I walked out of the theater and felt that world around me had changed a little, even if just for that short moment.

City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, Brazil)
A mind-boggling rollercoaster ride through Rio’s slums and ganglands. The violence is both disturbing and numbing, and the myriad of stories are told in such innovative way that it draws you in immediately as if you were walking in and out of all these lives with time leaping back and forth and with bullets barely dodged. Such a pallet of vivid colors and exuberant rhythms!

The Pianist (Polanski)
Polanski was born to make this film. Adrien Brody’s understated performance was not a singsong for the courage of survivors but went deeper to touch upon human instinct and dignity against unfathomable terror.

Winged Migration (Michel Debats, France)
You got to see this in wide-screen, or the I-Max for the best. I bought the DVD just to find out how they made this film. We all have dreams in which we could fly like a bird, and this film almost made that dream come true. In eighty minutes we followed the birds around the world, from Amazon to Antarctica, from Vietnam to Senegal. What else could be worth my $9?

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Kim Bartley and Donnacha Brian, UK)
The directors intended to film Cesar Chavez but instead witnessed the whole coup and filmed the entire historical drama from the inside. Intense and thought-provoking, it showed how media could be so maliciously manipulated by the right-wingers and shed some true light on an event largely ignored and misunderstood by Americans due to their own media’s biased propaganda.

Bolivar Soy Yo (Jorge Ali Trana, Colombia)
A political satire that was both sad and hilarious, in the same canon with “Z” and “Modern Times”. In a tangle of soap operas, leftist guerrillas, pompous government and over-used revolutionary icons, the movie captured the idiosyncrasy of the Latin American psyche so well and made us laugh in tears.

Pepper Mint Candy (Lee ChangDong, Korea)
Story told backwards can be mentally challenging and suspenseful, and sometimes can be annoying and confusing. Lee made this ambitious film in 2001, same time when “Memento” came out and two years before “Irreversible” was made. It unfolds the charaters’s life chapter by chapter, carefully tracking back two decades of turbulent times when the innocent protagonist slowly lost his grip on life and degenerated into a wounded despair. In the end we saw how humans are just tiny boats in that treacherous sea of history, and a few wrong turns could easily lead one to an inevitable tragic end.

Carla My Dog (Lu Xue Chang, China)
Lu never gained much recognition in the international circuit since neither is he interested in exploring the oriental exotica nor does he want to cater to the political underground and settle for the subversive. His last film, “How steel is made”, raised the poignant questions for a generation who grew up in a grand ideology but ended up losing them all in the capitalistic booms. This latest film changed the angle and looked more closely on a more ordinary and underprivileged class of Beijing citizens, putting humanity under a microscope of realism and see how it shines in a chaotic times.

Marooned in Iraq (Bahman Ghonbadi, Iran)
Iran continues to be the movie power house, and their films can be both politically urgent and profoundly poetic. Set in post Iran-Iraq war and following an aged musician’s journey (with his sons) into Kurdish Iraq, it dived right into the suffering and terror faced by the Kurdish people but never lost the sense of humor and optimism. Heart-wrenching and uplifting.

Yossi and Jagger (Eytan Fox, Isarel)
When I saw the film in the gay and lesbian film festival, some protesters busted onto the stage and were greeted by the shouting and cursing of the audiences. Actually I thought the drama after add another dimension to the bittersweet love story between two gay soldiers on the war front. The love was so real, the loss was heart-breaking, but the harsh reality is still more complex and authentic.

Spanish Apartment (Cedric Klapisch, France)
It is not a brilliant film, but I ultimately enjoyed it, probably out of my own nostalgia of the life as a foreign exchange student, or the fantasy of quitting corporate job and joining the international drifters while there is still the last drop of youth left. Hm…why do all the dropouts universally become writers of some sort? Plenty of European stereotypes are created here, but you got to love that raw energy.

Other art-crowd pleasers, such as “Whale Rider”, “Swimming Pool”, “21 Gram”, or “Dirty Pretty Thing” would not make my list. They were well-made but broke no artistic grounds. But I have to single out a few runner-ups:
Weather Underground (Sam Green and Bill Siegel)
Documentaries are suddenly getting so much attention, and this one is surely one of the diamonds in the crown.

Piedras (Ramon Salazar, Spain)
Multiple stories told simultaneously with crisscross plots have been done again and again (Magnolia, Short Cuts), but this latest entry from Spain added some Almodovar type coincidences and gay subplots to that standard formula and made it a bit more enjoyable. I noticed that all the gay men ended up finding love and the straight ones breaking up in the end. Hm?

25th Hour (Spike Lee, US)
Not Spike Lee’s best but certainly his somber study of personal crisis in the post 9-11 times. Is there any hope to rebuild life from the wounds and relics of the past? The film gave an ambivalent answer.