Shooting Down Pictures

Petition (dir. Zhao Liang)

This entry is mostly lifted from an announcement posted at dGenerate Films.

In the recent Top Ten Chinese Films of the 2000s poll, one of the top-ranked documentaries was Zhao Liang’s Petition: The Court of the Complainants. A pretty impressive showing, given that the film was just released last year and has been seen by relatively few people, even in Chinese cinema circles. Tonight folks in Minneapolis will have a chance to see what some are calling the most exciting Chinese documentary since West of the Tracks.

Zhao Liang will be visiting New York City this weekend to present his films Petition and Crime and Punishment at the China Institute in New York, and the Center of Religion and Media at New York University. I’ll be at both so hope to see you there.

Information on his films and a schedule of his programs after the break. Continue Reading »

Running on Karma (dir. Johnnie To and Wa Ka Fai)

Over on the dGenerate Films website, the results of weeks of emailing Chinese film experts and tabulating of ballots to determined the top Chinese language films of the last 10 years. I’m kind of whateverz about the top pick, which I’ve reflected upon already, but I think results are quite interesting. I didn’t expect West of the Tracks to place so highly, and didn’t realize Devils on the Doorstep had so much support as well. But the showing for Oxhide was truly amazing – and heartening. I still need to write at length what I think about that film as well as it’s equally astounding sequel.

I didn’t submit a top ten list to the poll to avoid conflict of interest, but for what it’s worth here’s what mine would have looked like:

Before the Flood (Yu Yan and Li Yifan)
Crime and Punishment (Zhao Liang) – still waiting to see Petition though
Hero (Zhang Yimou)
Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow)
Oxhide (Liu Jiayin)
Platform (Jia Zhangke)
Running on Karma (Johnnie To and Wa Ka-Fai)
The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang)
West of the Tracks (Wang Bing) – sort of the 800 pound gorilla whose massiveness can’t be denied
Yi Yi (Edward Yang)

See what everyone else voted by going here

“A Revolution on Screen” is a two-part video essay coinciding with the 2009 New York Film Festival Masterworks series “(Re)Inventing China: A New Cinema for a New Society, 1949–1966.” This series is the first major U.S. retrospective of the films made during the “Seventeen Years” period between the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the Cultural Revolution.

PART ONE: MOVIES FOR THE MASSES (AND A SMUGGLING OF ART)

PART TWO: THE FLOWERING BEFORE THE FALL

Screened Tuesday April 28 on Beauty Media DVD in Weehawken, NJ

TSPDT rank #915 IMDb Wiki

First, I want to acknowledge that this is the first – and perhaps only – Shooting Down Pictures blog entry dedicated to a Chinese film, a fact that at first seems baffling given my passion for Chinese cinema (not to mention the fact that I’m heavily involved in a pioneering effort to bring more Chinese cinema to the U.S.). But this blog is dedicated to exploring the titles on the They Shoot Pictures 1000 Greatest Films list that I haven’t yet seen, and of the 20 films from China/Hong Kong/Taiwan on the list, this is the only one that qualifies.

It’s also worth noting that I watched this film the same week that I read a breakthrough in-depth article on Jia Zhangke by Evan Ossnos in The New Yorker, the leading figure of the so-called Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers from the Beijing Film Academy. It’s an article that, in my opinion, marks a decisive shift in mainstream American attention away from the Fifth Generation and towards the Sixth Generation (a much-delayed shift, I must say, and one I find all the more amusing since I’m currently focused on what one might call the post-Generation – or de-Generation? – of Chinese filmmakers).  There are 13 productions from Mainland China and Hong Kong listed in the They Shoot Pictures 1000 Greatest Films, of which five titles are from the vaunted Fifth Generation of Beijing Film Academy directors, and all belong to just two names: Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Too bad there isn’t room for other great Fifth Generation works, such as Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Horse Thief and The Blue Kite or  Jiang Wens’ In the Heat of the Sun, much less numerous Sixth Generation titles by Jia Zhangke, Ning Ying (On the Beat), Zhang Yuan (Sons) and the like. 

I bring up the issue of Fifth, Sixth and post-Generation Chinese cinema because it informed my viewing of King of the Children, the first Fifth Generation film I’ve seen in a few years (I don’t include anything Zhang or Chen have done in the 2000s as they’re working in quite a different aesthetic environment than what they did in the ’80s and ’90s.) In some ways, the highly politicized realism of post-Fifth Generation films have done their work on my eyes, because it was difficult for me to get into the world of the film as an authentic place and time. It’s amazing to think that King of the Children was once considered part of a breakthrough movement to bring the “real” China to the screen, in opposition to the whitewashed, progagandizing cinema of an idealized China that was the norm (and still is, though in a more sophisticated form).  In its own way King of the Children idealizes the rural peasantry, lensing the dirt-poor environment in lush, romantic hues.

Vast, almost abstract shots of landscapes and the ruddy soil convey fertility and potential, symbolized as well in the children being taught by an inexperienced sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution.  This rough-edged eccentric prone to fits of laughter allows his students to chart their own path to knowledge, partly due to necessity (lack of schoolbooks and his own training as an educator). It’s a celebration of innovation, improvisation and pragmatism, but is soon curtailed by the rule-sticking authorities. The premise is clearly allegorical with elements both highly personal (the teacher standing in for Chen the artist/innovator – a lot of Chen protagonists have this autobiographical subtext of keeping their artistic integrity under pressure of institutional compromise) and impersonal (the children are an largely indistinguishable mass, save for one gifted child whose story of scholarship as redemption for his peasant father’s struggles falls into its own symbolic purpose).  Images take on a monumental quality: the children are at times shot from below looking upward like heroic statues, or aligned en masse like the terra cotta soldiers in Xi’an. Even the acting has a stiff-backed affect.  Most of the action takes place around a schoolhouse whose impossibly voluminous thatched roof seems too extravagant for such a dirt-poor setting. There’s virtually no depiction of the children’s parents and how they live, or any sort of day-to-day living outside the schoolhouse; the community is barely a sliver. These are the kinds of concerns that subsequent Chinese filmmakers preoccupied themselves with filling in; the return of Marxist socialist materialist cinema with a vengeance.

Despite the limitations of Chen’s approach in terms of illuminating a social situation by resorting to reductive symbolism, there’s no denying that this same approach generates some impressive visuals and uniquely cinematic moments.  A scene that seems both laughably absurd yet aurally and visually stunning is when the teacher, forced to copy a lesson out of the only schoolbook available, furiously transcribes it onto a chalkboard as his students follow suit with pencil and paper. Their scribblings build into a rumble resembling a stampede of cattle (another metaphor invoked to suggest the immense power and herd mentality of the Chinese people). This goes on well into the night, with an oil lamp at each desk offering plumes of fire to this ritual of rote recitation, resembling what John Woo would do with church interiors slathered in candlelight.

While the grandiosity of such gestures may seem patronizing and even cliche after so many Fifth Generation films to follow that made postcard porn out of desolate environs, at the time these were mindblowingly unprecedented expressions of a new subjectivity in Chinese cinema, one that came from a discernibly individual vision rather than a bland, groupthink aesthetic.  Who’s to say what this decade’s Chinese cinema, dominated by bleeding edge, street-level realism, will look like twenty years from now. 

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

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This is cross-posted to the dGenerate Films website.

Last Saturday we had the pleasure of presenting Ying Liang and his film The Other Half at The China Institute. Here’s the entire Q&A session with Ying Liang that followed the screening, in three parts. Special thanks to Vincent Cheng for his excellent live translation, and Jeff Yang and Jeff Hao for taping the session.

Part I:

0:00 – “What inspired you to make The Other Half?”

2:05 – “What’s your take on independent filmmaking in China?”

4:12 – “Who are your actors? Do they appear routinely in all your films?”

6:30 – “Have your films caused problems between you and the government?”

Part II:

0:00 – Continuing on the topic of the commercial and legal considerations of distributing independent cinema in China

7:00 – “To what degree do you consider your films to be documentary and not just fiction?”

Part III:

0:00 – Continuing on the topic of the film’s use of fact and fiction

3:55 – “Why can’t an army officer get a divorce?”

5:00 – “Are your films made with a non-Chinese audience in mind?”

No, Richard Pena did not say that Chinese Indie Films “kick ass” – I said that to him, or at least I wished I had. Anyway, now that I have your attention, I want to let you know about a great new resource for Sino-cinephiles. The new website of my distribution company dGenerate Films has a blog that’s been seeing steady stream of content coming through, sort of an ongoing depository of all things going on in the Chinese indie cinema scene (that we know of, at least).  Some highlights so far:

- The insider’s scoop. Chinese cinema festival programmer Shelly Kraicer (Udine and Vancouver Film Festivals, among others) will be a regular contributor to our site with informed articles giving his take on what’s happening in the Chinese indie scene. Here’s his first entry, “An Independent Film Scene, Thriving Miles from Main Street“, reporting on the 3rd Annual Beijing Independent Film Festival. 

- On the Road with Yours Truly. Lately I’ve been attending academic events related to Chinese cinema to get the word out about dGenerate and meet others in the academic community who are actively interest in Chinese cinema. Recently I’ve been to the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting in Chicago and a special series of Chinese independent documentaries hosted at Harvard University. Read up on both and you’ll get a sense of how I’ve been spending my weekends lately.

- Upcoming screenings!  We’re happy to be presenting Chinese indie director Ying Liang on a bicoastal tour of NYC and SF this coming weekend.  Read more about his screenings at Film Society of Lincoln Center, The China Institute in New York (yours truly in attendance), the San Francisco International Film Festival and UC Berkeley.

Then read about another dGenerate screening, this one happening next Wednesday at BAM. Jian Yi’s Super,  Girls! will be screening at 7:30 with yours truly in attendance.

- Aforementioned “Kick Ass” Interview with Richard Pena.  The only thing scarier about the breadth of Richard Pena’s knowledge of Chinese cinema is the likelihood that his knowledge of other national cinemas around the world is equally extensive. 

That’s it for now, but more will definitely be on the way.  I’ll try to get in the habit of cross-posting… unless you want to get in the habit of visiting or RSSing dGeneratefilms.com!