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