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.
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.
