The seventh letter, 2014-11-05, to Fredrik

Dear Fredrik,

After a long silence, here I am! Hope that this letter finds you enjoying autumn colours and good films! At my end life goes on with its due share of bliss and doubt. After my chance encounter with your external examiner, I thought that it would be a good timing to continue with our epistolary adventure in honour of our PhD days and friendship.

Maybe I will start by talking about the film which lingered in my mind lately, Mohammad Ali Atassi's Our Terrible Country (2014). This documentary follows the Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh's unusual road journey across Syria through desert from Douma to his native town Raqqa, accompanied by the young photographer Ziad Homsi, and subsequently to Turkey. As Yassin spent 16 years of his youth in jail for his leftist political activities, he is the one who understands how life in confinement is like. At the very beginning of the film, Yassin stood in the rubble and made the striking analogy between life in the temporarily liberated Douma and life in jail. I imagine that in this any-space-whatever, if I may use this term again, freedom comes with such a high price and can only be obtained on a superficial level. Among heaps of debris or beehive-looking buildings, the images bring out an amazing amount of everyday calmness and admirable serenity. It is a good example of how documentary images, despite sensational and over-mediatised subject matter, can avoid practicing self-exoticism and stay grounded. This groundedness is quite opposite to the second film of my letter here, Monika Treut's Taiwan-German coproduction, Ghosted (2009).

I haven't done any research on this yet, but my feeling is that there is not a tremendous amount of cinematic collaboration between Germany and Taiwan, apart from Wim Wenders' general interest in Taiwanese cinema. I still vividly remember how the media in Taiwan was making a big fuss about it at the time of its making. It managed to attract so much attention partially because the main actress is the daughter of a current mayor of Taichung and a famous actress of the 70s, but more importantly, the media was overjoyed to see a German filmmaker taking interest in making a film in Taiwan. I will not go into the issue of media culture and intermingled working of inferiority and superiority complex here, but I think you know what I mean. As much as we both come from an institution which advocates transnational cinema and loves what boundary-crossing can do aesthetically, Ghosted is a very good example of how such a transnational production can go very wrong. The film's subject matter of a transnational lesbian love story between a German and a Taiwanese is quite new, but it is a huge disappointment in comparison to what I Don't Want To Sleep Alone (2006) managed to do. What I see was amateurish cinematography, carelessly designed lighting, incomprehensible editing and forced acting. What is most problematic, is the script which not only fails to discuss gender and identity issues, but also recycles all the clichés about intercultural communication and chance encounter. This Taiwan version of Die Jungfrauen Maschine (1988) lacks both audacity and sincerity. If it aims to do film tourism, its image of Taiwan is superficial and alienating. If it tries to create mystery, the dopplegänger device is hasty and unconvincing. Somehow I feel that it is like forcing Marcel Proust to reminisce about Chinese dumplings in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.   

The sixth letter, 2014-06-20, to Fredrik

Ciao!

Having freshly come back from Rome, I am tempted say that the world is beautiful as long as we have Fellini (and those perfectly-groomed men in tailor-made suits!).

Speaking of Fellini, in the same year when Fellini's Casanova (1976) came out, the world also got to see Parviz Kimiavi's The Garden of Stones (1976) and P Like Pelican (1976). They are wonderful cinematic discovery which I made at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt recently, where both films were finally rendered justice on the auditorium's big screen. My nostalgia for the spirit of filmmaking of that time aside, they both demonstrate complexity and multifacetedness within a rather straightforward narrative structure – at the same time mysticism and philosophy, sight and sound, sanity and insanity. Their grainy texture and anti-horizontal direction seem to find contemporary resonance in Philippe Grandieux's White Epilepsy (2012), yet the latter's experimentation is somewhat overshadowed by the former's ethnographic and humanistic insight, I think.

I don't think you explained much about your choice of Humanity of Paper Balloons and your fondness for Café Lumière? I am very intrigued. At the moment I am reading You Are Not A Gadget - in fact, this blog post could have been written by a robot!

The fifth letter, 2014-05-27, to Yun-hua

Hello!

We had summer here for a week and then yesterday it suddenly disappeared, without a trace, and I was shivering in the cold wind. Being inside and write letters suddenly felt like an excellent idea!

I agree with what you say about festival audiences. Over the years I've been to a number of Q&A sessions at film festivals, and occasionally I've been the one providing the A's (at Bergman related events I've organised), but I usually find them embarrassing. Embarrassing because the questions are often naive and uninformed and so very rarely about the art but almost always about the politics. ("How do you feel about the rebellion now taking place in Mali?" is a more common kind of question than, "That scene in the middle, when they were at the lake, was beautiful. How did you shoot that?") It is as if people watch film at festivals to get their prejudices about other countries confirmed.

It's quite possible that Ai Weiwei's biggest artwork is himself, but is that necessarily a bad thing? He is a living installation, using the Chinese authorities as part of the artwork, and as such he is probably not aiming for timelessness but for an embodied critique of the contemporary.

I haven't watched A Touch of Sin yet, these have been busy days and I've had to prioritise rather harshly (it doesn't help that it has only been shown in a cinema here in which all seats are terribly uncomfortable).

This week I'm working on an article about Yasujiro Ozu, an inspiration for both Jia and Hou, and a filmmaker I feel have been talked about in a manner that is rather disconnected from the reality of the actual films. There is a big difference between Ozu's films and the constructed, critical idea of them. This of course often happens but I think it is unusually pronounced in the case of Ozu.

Today I think I'm going to see the new Godzilla. Not because I expect to be enlightened about the world and the political issues facing Japan or the US today but because, judging by the trailer and a few articles I've read, it is spectacular-looking, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Fredrik

The fourth letter, 2014-05-10, to Fredrik

Hello Fredrik,

For the whole week I have been looking forward to this moment, when I can finally sit down in tranquility (with a cuppa of course) and write to you. And here I am. It's hard to pinpoint what exactly kept me from having such a moment, but my globe-trotting with filmPolska and Korean film festival in town are one of the good reasons.

Speaking of independent film festivals here, I find the Q&A session very intriguing. The audience is much more direct than in the UK and hence provides more unpolished materials for my observation. After Floating Skyscrapers (2013), all the questions, mostly coming from Polish expatriates, focused on how the film does not portray positive images of the gay community in Poland and how they don't want to see more depressing Polish films. After Han Gong-ju (2013), one German girl asked the filmmaker if in Korean there is a social support network for women in crisis at all. In the former case the audience craves to see their motherland being portrayed as a utopia and bringing uplifting messages to the world, whereas in the latter case film-viewing as virtual travelling makes the audience view a foreign film in search for information instead of cinematic experience. It would be interesting to think about how the role of images has changed since we entered an age of media-saturation or maybe how the present role of images approximates that at the time of L'arrivée d'un train en gare de la Ciotat (1896) more than ever.

Another example of how we tend to believe in “representation” and images' proximity to us, at a time when images are so accessible and almost every device we have in our handbag creates images, would be the Berliner's general enthusiasm for Ai Weiwei's exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau at the moment. Some art critics did express their disappointment and scepticism, but judging from the massive queue and the spectator's messages on a sketchbook, I sense that the majority finds it “creative” and “special” according to some expressions being used. For me, however, this exhibition is exactly the opposite, because of his over-representation of himself and his eagerness to sell his definition of Chineseness. Here and now were re-rendered without enough digestion, which prevents art works from being timelessness.

If Zeitgeist has to be a timeless understanding of a certain period, it would have to come from a gaze beyond oneself. Some artists don't need much temporal or spatial distance to acquire this kind of gaze and to transform the timely into timelessness, and this is what Jia and Hou have and Ai does not. It is also from this perspective that I think Jia Zhangke's works on the 90s and post-2000 are artistically more insightful than Hou. Have you watched A Touch of Sin? It is definitely the best film I watched last year, at same time grounded and universal.

Going back to your question of Flight of the Red Balloon (2007). Maybe cross-cultural improvisation doesn't work as well as what Hou would have hoped, but I loved it, especially the transformation of Juliette Binoche into a Parisian version of Li Tien-lu in The Puppetmaster (1993) and the character Song as an unusual Chinese woman in the western setting. She is a “seer” like Kuanmei in A City of Sadness (1989) and Jiang Bi-yu in Good Men, Good Women (1995), as well as the stabilising force in turmoils.

                                               Yun-hua

The third letter, 2014-04-28, to Yun-hua

Hello Yun-hua!

I hope you've had a good weekend. It’s been busy days here, with me finishing a major article for an edited collection, and other assorted assignments and responsibilities, but all I really wanted to do was to reply to your sweet letter. Now I finally got the time to do so.

For you the films by Hou that are set in the past are the better ones, but I couldn’t make such a distinction. I like almost all of his films equally much, whether a contemporary like Millennium Mambo or a historical like A Time to Live, a Time to Die. (But maybe I like Café Lumière a little more than the others. I like it a little bit more than almost any other film). I didn’t care much for Good Men, Good Women, but it was a long time since I saw it so I might feel differently today. What do you think of Flight of the Red Balloon, which is so far from Taiwan?

What I like about his films is the warmth and wit, combined with the focused and beautiful compositions, that often gives the scenes such a feeling of intimacy you feel like you’re intruding. I think that is one of the most treasurable aspects of cinema, these moments when you want to look away, or feel ashamed for disturbing the people on the screen. Like the scene (to depart from Hou) in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly when Max Von Sydow’s character starts to cry, uncontrollably, or towards the end of Make Way For Tomorrow when the old couple go out to a restaurant together, one last time before they will be separated for ever.

This brings us into a discussion about cinema and ethics, and ethics and acting, something which I’m interested in (I have given papers on the subject.) But I feel that is for a later letter!

It’s funny that you should mention the word Zeitgeist because I’ve been thinking about that lately. There have for example been a retrospective of Jia Zhangke’s films here at the Cinémathèque so I have re-watched some of them, such as Unknown Pleasures and Still Life. His films are sometimes said to capture the Chinese Zeitgeist, and I can see why but also how it is somewhat limited because China is a huge country, and a film like Unknown Pleasures is only looking at a few people in a particular place. The Uyghur’s are not in the film for example, and neither are the successful businessmen in Shanghai. Still Life does succeed in capturing more of China but it is still a select view. Of course, it couldn’t be anything else, and he wasn't trying to capture it all. And what he did capture he captured amazingly well.

The second time I thought of Zeitgeist was because of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (to mention one of Deleuze’s time-image directors). He I feel managed to capture, remarkably well, the American moment in a series of films in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in particular A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and People Will Talk (1951). The films discuss class, sexuality, masculinity, tax politics, the problems for returning soldiers to re-adjust to civilian suburbia, ladies fashion, the bad impact of commercials on our daily lives and the degradation of culture and civility. Even farm policies. There’s an extraordinary wealth of themes and topics that are brought into focus by Mankiewicz’s scripts and direction, like if he was doing some kind of sociological fieldwork. And in that respect I think of these films as capturing the Zeitgeist. The way he juggles different time frames simultaneously, the forking paths, adds to this sense. (They’re also filled with delicious wit and emotions of course.)

But there’s also a different kind of Zeitgeist, and I thought of that when I recently re-watched WarGames, a computer thriller by John Badham from 1983. It’s about the fear of nuclear war, the computerisation of society and the military-industrial complex, and it has two teenage kids, a boy and a girl, as the heroes, saving the world from annihilation. Although it was probably not trying to deliberately capture the spirit of the times, it did so anyway, with the combination of teenagers and computers. All of the guys who were involved in the dot.com bubble around 2000 probably knew that film by heart, growing up as computer geeks and dreaming of playing thermonuclear war with a computer named Joshua.

I watched films about kids and computers in the 80s although I didn't dream of becoming one of them. Not sure what I actually dreamed off though.

 Fredrik

The second letter, 2014-04-19, to Fredrik

Dear Fredrik,

Thank you for the heart-warming first post! You were the first and only person that came to my mind when I thought of doing an epistolary film blog, and I was very happy to find your response the same enthusiastic. I am sure a lot of green tea would be drunk and I am looking forward to seeing where our shared journey on the web would take us.

Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) is an opportune choice, not only because I, to some extent, said goodbye to the south. More interestingly, it can open up a discussion on “our favourite Hou”. I don't think we actually talked much about Hou back in our St Andrews years. While waiting to see if Hou's first martial art film, The Assassin (2014), would actually become my favourite Hou, for the time being I am including the Taiwan Trilogy (1989-1995), Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and Three Times (2005) in my shortlist (maybe not that short after all). I do like Goodbye South, Goodbye, but for me this film, along with Hou's other attempts on capturing the Zeitgeist of my generation, like Daughter of the Nile (1987) and Millennium Mambo not as profound and timeless as his gaze towards the past. Without getting into a discussion on Deleuzian Time-images, I find that Hou's depiction of memories and historical trajectories is of a much broader scope and touches upon helplessness of human existence to such a level that makes me deeply sad but lucid during every single viewing. One does not need to be familiar with the geopolitical context of the island in order to see the beauty of irrevocably turbulent past shared by individuals who simply drift along. Yet I never quite get the same sensation from Hou's view of the contemporary. One might think that there is definitely something global in decadent young life under neon streets lights, but I somehow doubt that this is conveyed at all in Zhu Tianwen's script, as much as I admire all her writings; I find that Hou's films about the present are often characterised by repetitive and twisted dialogues, and actors' extradiegetic public images often override their presence on screen. This chain of thoughts also leads me to question how we deal with our own present artistically. How remote do we have to be from ourselves in order to acquire certain lucidity? Is that why we are so obsessed with cinematic rendering of different versions of apocalypse, as we cannot look at ourselves straight into the eyes? Here are my initial thoughts. Happy Easter holidays!

                                                                      Yun-hua

The first letter, 2014-04-16, to Yun-hua

Dear Yun-hua,

I'm very grateful to you for contacting me and suggesting we do something together, some kind of web-based project. It's been some time since we last saw each other in St Andrews, several years in fact, but I remember fondly our many talks (some more serious than others). I hope this blog will give us the opportunity to continue those discussions for a long time. The last couple of days I've been reading Here and Now, a recently published collection of letters that Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee sent to each other from 2008 to 2011, and it has been very inspiring. Consequently I was especially thrilled to be given the chance to do something similar, and with you. (They write mainly about sports, politics and literature, but films as well, so we might borrow a quote or two.)

When I designed (perhaps too big a word) the blog I wanted to have some photographs on it and I chose two images from two films. Above your name I chose an image from Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-hsien 1996), a Taiwanese film in honour of your birthplace and also because your thesis is partly about Hou and his films. With the same logic I should probably have chosen a still image from a film by Hasse Ekman above my name but since I'm a fan of Japanese films of the 1930s, and also a champion of lesser known, or unknown, films and filmmakers, I went with Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanaka 1937), a wonderful film (as is Goodbye South, Goodbye). But these photos might be exchanged for others later on, so maybe Ekman will eventually appear .

But that's all for this first letter. It's going to be very interesting to see where this will take us. As Vince Vaughn says in The Wedding Crashers, I'm psyched!

all the best,
Fredrik