Review: The Case (Wang Fen, 2007)

A note that my review of Wang Fen's satisfying The Case [箱子] (2007) is now up at Electric Sheep. Also, worth tracking (for Chinese readers) is Lola’s blog; If you didn’t know, she is the rather glamorous mover-shaker head of the Yunnan New Film Project.

Who is this Man?

Yes, of course it is Tony Leung in Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild (1991), but whom was he playing? More importantly, how does his character relate to any of the others in the narrative? That is, on the presumption that he relates to them at all. Perhaps we can be a few steps closing to finding out; after David Bordwell’s delightful post, which pits his trademark frame-by-frame diagnosis on the rarely seen alternative edit against its more common international sibling.

I, as does Chanvinci, assumed that the identity of Leung’s dapper incongruent was resolved, as the reprised (and finally named) Chow Mo-Wan of In the Mood for Love. The warrant for this assumption being that Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love and 2046 are, without too much stretching of the imagination, a quasi-trilogy. Particularly in the continuity of Maggie Cheung’s character name, Su Lai-Chen (or Su Lizhen as it was subtitled in ITMFL). Then also the coda of the train: Yuddy’s (Leslie Cheung) method of “flight” in DOBW; the imagined then actualized locomotive in ITMFL and 2046.


However, as Bordwell recounts, the alternative edit alienates this reprisal theory. Leung’s spruced-up gambler not only appears twice to book end both the start and end of the film, but also hints that he may have a direct narrative relation (as card playing acquaintances?) to Andy Lau’s cop character. Since he is the subject of contemplation via a voice-over, although Bordwell is unclear who’s voice it is! [If you read this, please upload of this hen’s tooth to Youtube!] Do mail him any clues you may have.

Whether or not these lost fragments can or should be re-joined – and there are plenty more in Wong’s universe (lost characters like Shirley Kwan in Happy Together, or even lost films like Summer in Beijing) – it never seems to that important. Since it seems to add an extra dimension of pleasure to the memory of Wong’s films; especially as this one happens to be FTIN’s favourite film of all time.

Wing Shya's poster for Wong's phantom film, (apologies for the wonky scan).

Capital Volume I with David Harvey

In case you have been putting it off and wanted that extra push (FTIN included) in reading it; this is a quick note about the mighty David Harvey's video lectures on Marx's Capital Volume I, which have been generously made available online. So here's your chance to be expertly guided through the prescience of Marx and with it, an ever deeper despair with the way we live.

Image: Blind Shaft.

Young & Restless in China

Economically speaking, the paradoxical idea that "freedom isn't free", is not a new one. The simplest of many criticisms of the notion of freedom in consumerist society, which was overlooked, or perhaps more suspiciously, avoided in Duncan Jepson's neoliberalist tub thumper. As if to support my point [discovered via China Beat], PBS's Frontline documentary series Young & Restless in China offers what looks to be a slightly more promising undertaking. Breaking China's contemporary society down into three narrower currents: disillusioned youth, venture capitalists and migrants; and not wanting to allude too much to quantitative guarantees of quality, the series allowed for each of the subjects it followed a duration of four years. One other plus, is that each episode is watchable online after its live broadcast, and includes the chance to grill a panel of commentators there and then. The first episode is on 17th June 2008.

Event: Geographies of Film Theory

A 3 day conference held at Birkbeck at the end of this month.

The conference has been designed to engage specifically with intellectual fields that concern both the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies and the Screen Studies Group through an examination of the development and diffusion of film theory. The symposium will trace the contexts in France, Italy and Germany between the wars in which film theory was first articulated; it will then follow the reception and reconfiguration of film theory in key, mainly non-European, cultural and political contexts. The collaboration between the IGRS and the SSG has enabled an original approach to the complex intellectual and aesthetic relations between influential European cultural discourses and ‘world’ film theory.

Keynote speakers:
Francesco Casetti (Professor, Universita Cattolica, Milano)
Mikhail Iampolski, (Professor, New York University)
Kim Soyoung (Professor, Korean National University of Arts)
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, (Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore)

Sarah Cooper (King's, University of London): Imaging the Soul:
Henri Bergson and Classical French Film Theory

Erica Carter (Warwick University): The Cosmopolitan Body:
The Early Film Theory of Béla Balázs

Esther Leslie (Birkbeck, University of London): Ice and Artifice:
From the Nature of Filming to the Filming of Nature in Late Weimar Film Theory

Laura Marcus (Edinburgh University): The Mental Mechanism: Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Early Film Theory

Rachel Moore (Goldsmiths, University of London): A Different Nature:
How Ethnography Served Film Theory

Ian Christie (Birkbeck, University of London): The Vision Machine:
Mechanistic Theories of Film in the 1920s

Chris Berry (Goldsmiths, University of London): Teahouse Attraction and Garden View: The Cinema Arrives in China

Kay Dickinson (Goldsmiths, University of London): Red and Green Stars in Broad Daylight: Syrian Cinema's Journeys to the Eastern Bloc

Haidee Wasson (Concordia University): Siegfried Kracauer's Secret Business:
A German Émigré and American Institutions of Film Art (1939 –1945)

Isolde Standish (SOAS, University of London): Yoshida Yoshishige and Visual Anarchy: a Theory of Japanese Avant-garde Filmmaking in the 1960s

Michael Chanan (Roehampton University): ‘Just because we don't have written theory, it doesn't mean we don't have theory' (Pastor Vega). The Theoretical Implications of Radical Practices in New Latin American Cinema

Rosalind Gray (Goldsmiths, University of London): Mozambican Revolution: Trajectories of Radical Film Theory and Practice in Africa

Kim Soyoung (Korean National University of Arts):
Cinema Almost In/visible: Postcolonial Archive

Image via.

La Condition Canine (Jia Zhangke, 2001)

La Condition Canine (2001). A rarely exhibited and still undistributed short by Jia Zhangke.

Follow Your Heart (Duncan Jepson, 2007)

Follow Your Heart (Duncan Jepson, 2007)

One has to be sympathetic of those proposing to undertake daunting tasks. This was the feeling that prefaced my viewing of Follow Your Heart. Daunting as it promised to faithfully document the ever proliferating and complex circumstances of contemporary China’s so-called ‘urban youth movement’. In 89 minutes no less. For this to have been achieved, Duncan Jepson’s work must have been either one of genius little seen before, or far more likely, one that was dangerously perfunctory and superficial. Sadly, this editorial styled documentary belongs to the latter.

Following the lives of five youths, their immediate friends and their families. In their common passion for Hip-hop and the urge to express themselves with a “freedom” that the music and its culture allows for them. Documenting the activities of Shanghai’s The Lab, loosely a Hip-hop commune and its main proponent DJ V-Nutz. On their tour to the inland city of Guiyang, the capital city of the Guizou Province, which before their arrival had yet to experience (and wasted no opportunity to remind the viewer in its repeated captioning) Hip-hop in its live forms: DJing, B-boying, Graffiti and MC-ing.

This element of the film was pleasantly achieved, following a well-established format in capturing live music on-the-road. The honesty and amicable individuals themselves carry across effectively. V-Nutz explains that his DJ moniker expresses his obsession for vinyl; DJ LJ insists with Hip-hop that it is something that channels his desire to learn; SIC a teenage girl of Guangzhou is probably the most unassuming looking graffer Hip-hop has known; Nasty Boy dances and makes his presence known at every extroverted chance and Wang Bo MC’s, his relationship with his surprisingly supportive parents is perhaps the film’s most genuine offering.

Yet genuine-ness or sincerity is what Follow Your Heart is, to put it in the documentary’s own economic terms, in short supply. I say this because it is through this type of insipid marketing speak and focus group sensibility that the film exposits their subjects through and subsequently the mass generalisations it makes from them. The film’s selection of interviewed youth movement gurus is rather revealing, representatives of haute fashion house Dior, conglomerate multinational Pepsi and a MOR type record exec intersperse the film with mildly patronizing sound bites.

This is where the ethic of the documentary becomes questionable. The film juxtaposes these five youths against their parents’ generation, vigorously pointing to new freedoms that they now enjoy. Yet never at any point articulating its understanding of what it means for them to be free. Instead, one has to infer from the corporate panel and the presentation of restless statistics on youth trends (on topics such as ‘internet usage’ and ‘how much the youth care about their appearance?’), of which the film bases its authority upon. "Freedom" for this documentary equates with sadly little more than "consumerism", and "open mindedness" the willingness to submit to globalisation.

By the film's conclusion, I felt that Follow Your Heart resembled more a lengthy infomercial with the less than subtle imperative of “the time is right, invest in China youth now!” And ultimately my initial sympathy to Jepson's task had evaporated.

Further suggestions:

Those interested in Chinese Hip-hop might want to seek out a far less assuming documentary on the now defunct Hong Kong based, LMF crew in Dare Ya! [大你！] (Louis Tan, 2002).

Also Sexy Beijing's entertaining episode Bling Bling in Beijing.

Image via.

Update: Young & Restless in China.

The Auteur and the Commercial

Director: Zhang Yimou
Client: Toyota


Director: Jia Zhangke
Client: Olay


Director: Wong Kar Wai
Client: Phillips


Director: Tsai Ming-Liang
Client: Family Mart


Director: John Woo
Client: Nike


Director: Fruit Chan
Client: Vita


Director: Chen Kaige
Client: Yahoo


Director: Stephen Chow
Client: San Miguel


Director: Feng Xiaogang
Client: Yahoo


Director: Harmony Korine
Client: Thorntons


Director: David Lynch
Client: Gucci

Director: Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Client: Air France

Flowers of Tsai-Wan

A surplus to recent illustrative requirements for a paper, some bonus images of theatrical flowers (commissioned by Tsai Ming-Liang) and Chiang Kai-Shek 'campness'. Thanks again to Mei.

(via)

There is a surplus of pre-fabricated statues of Chiang Kai-Shek dotted around the island. (via)

...Which, of course, mood-boarded the final product in The Wayward Cloud (2005):

Tiger, tiger burning bright...

FTIN enjoys spontaneity, and yesterday was a pleasant episode. Attending on short notice, alongside of Cristobal and HM, the Asian film distribution seminar organized by the Tiger Film Festival. Which featured a series of presentations from a representative panel of some leading distributors of Asia region cinema in the UK. Constituted by Eureka!, Sony Pictures, ICA Films, Third Window Films and Electric Sheep Magazine.

Sometimes forgetting how rare opportunities are, even today, to see films by Feng Xiaogang or Johnnie To on a big screen in London. Especially, bearing in mind the household-name status they have back in their respective regions. Festivals like these are always welcomed. Three I am particularly looking forward to are UK debuts: To’s Mad Detective (2008) which has already earned for Lau Ching Wan an overdue best acting award; Follow Your Heart (2007) a documentary of “China’s youth movement”, which should be interesting from Duncan Jepson's (editor of West East Magazine) point of view. Then also The Case (Wang Fen, 2007) which was part of the Yunnan New Film Project, who's news I have been following since last year. All of which are showing at the ICA and I hope to be reporting on.

Image: Still from Follow Your Heart.