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.
