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
