EAST ASIAN CINEMA

Films will be screened between 7-9 p.m. and occasionally between 6:45-9:30 p.m. on Monday evenings in TR B-02. All films are required viewing, and you should plan on viewing some films more than once. DVDs will be held under restricted reserveconditions at the circulation desk of Trexler Library. Restricted reservemeans that you can only screen the films in the library. You will never be permitted for any reason to remove DVDs from the library. Should you do so, you will be violating the student social code. You are also free to purchase your own DVDs or rent the films from Netflix. All films must be seen prior to the day we discuss them; failure to see a film on time does not constitute excuse for being unprepared to participate in class discussions.

READING, WRITING, GRADING

You can plan on doing some form of writing on virtually every film we screen and discuss. This writing may take the form of assigned or impromptu in-class papers. You will also be held accountable for reading assignments either by means of direct questions, or fact-based quizzes. The primary texts will be supplemented by additional readings available on Canvas. Most of the films we screen likely treat material remote from your experience, and you may have an especially hard time picking up topical references and remembering (much less accurately pronouncing) the names of the characters, actors, and directors. Most of you will need to work hard at mastering the names and necessary terminology in the ways outlined in the Notes on Chinese Pronunciation (handout & Canvas). I have supplied you with the URLs of informative websites, but you will need to do your part to make the foreign more familiar. The extra readings available on Canvas should prove helpful on this account.

You will write three 3-page papers in response to a specific series of prompts or questions on Japanese, S. Korean, and paired Chinese and Taiwanese films, respectively; a 5-page on the films of Jia Zhang-ke; and two essays in what will serve as a 6-8 page take-home final examination. The 3-page papers count for about 15 points each, the 5-page paper 25 points, and the take-home 30 points in the calculation of your grades. Your performance on in-class writing assignments, quizzes, and class discussions may well constitute crucial variables in the determination of your final grades.

COURSE GOALS

–To develop the ability of students to respond thoughtfully and critically to film art in some of its more challenging global forms and formats.

–To demonstrate the ways in which film production and reception are connected to social, ethnic, local, national, regional, and global networks of exchange and meaning.

–To offer insight into the specific cultural, political, and religious concerns of films now being made in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.

–To appreciate the extent to which so-called arthouse films operate as charged sites of social and cultural expression, offering privileged insight into the values, beliefs, and behaviors of the people and nations they purport to represent.

–To indicate how serious film assumes some of the same responsibilities formerly delegated to great works of literature in representing the human condition in all its beauty, ugliness, and spaces between.

ONLINE DATABASES & RESOURCES

For books on world/global cinema: http://subjectguides.library.american.edu/c.php?g=179016&p=1176490

For film production information, critical reviews, and user reviewers:

http://www.imdb.com/ and https://www.mrqe.com/

CLASS SCHEDULE

Jan 14 Introductory Remarks. Japanese Cinema. Screening: Fireworks (dir.,

Takeshi Kitano, 1997, 103m), 7-9 p.m. Read Davis, “Therapy for Him & Her: Kitano Takeshi’s Hana-Bi (1997)” (Canvas: click on Phillips & Stringer and go to article) for next class and Buruna, “Yakuza & Nihilist” in Behind the Mask (Canvas)

16 Discuss film & reading. Read Introduction & Chapter 2 of Bingham, Contemporary Japanese Film Since Hana-Bi for next class along with Canvas entry on Japanese cyborgs.

Jan 21 ———-NO CLASS: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day———–

23 Discuss readings. Clips: Tetsuo/The Iron Man (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto,

1988, 64m). Read Chapter 4, Bingham for next class.

Jan 28 Prep: Tokyo Sonata (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008, 120m). Screening:

Tokyo Sonata, 7-9 pm.

30 Discuss film in context of readings. Read Chapter 3 of Bingham over

Weekend.

Feb 4 Prep & Screening: Audition (dir., Takashi Miike, 2000, 115m), 7-9 p.m.

6 Discuss film. Read Paquet, New Korean Cinema, Intro + chapters

1-3, and Hartzell on Kangwon (Canvas) over weekend.

Feb 11 3-page paper due/Begin South Korea module. Discuss readings.

Screening: The Power of Kangwon Province (dir., Hong Sang-Soo, 1998, 109m), 7-9 p.m.

13 Discuss film/ Read Paquet, chapter 4 & Conclusion over weekend.

Feb 18 Secret Sunshine (dir., Lee Chang-dong, 2007, 142m), 6:30-9 p.m.

20 Discuss film/Paper assignment.

Feb 25 Film Prep & Screening: Oldboy (dir., Park Chan-wook, 2003, 120m), 7-9

p.m. Read Kim article on Oldboy for next class (Canvas).

27 Discuss film.

28 3-page papers due: 4 p.m. Place in hanging file-holder outside CA 263 or

in my mailbox in CA 255. Read Murong Xuecun, Leave Me Alone: a Novel of Chengdu, over break

——————SPRING BREAK———————-

Mar 11 Hong Kong Cinema & Wong Kar-wai. Screening: In the Mood for Love

(dir, Wong Kar-wai, 2000, 98m), 7-8:45 p.m. Read Luk entry (Canvas) for next class. Recommended: Abbas, Hong-Kong, chapters 1 & 2 (Canvas).

13 Discuss readings & film. Read excerpt from Chang, Factory Girls over

weekend.

Mar 18 Discuss Factory Girls excerpt. Film prep & Screening: 24 City (dir., Jia

Zhang-ke, 2010, 112m), 7-9 p.m.

20 Discuss film. Read Cornelius, chapters 5-6 for next class, McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhang-ke” (Canvas), and review Murong, Leave Me Alone: a Novel of Chengdu.

Mar 25 Discuss Murong, Film Prep & Screening: A Touch of Sin (dir., Jia Zhang-

ke, 130m), 6:45-9 p.m.

27 Discuss film & paper assignment.

Apr 1 5-page paper due/Film prep. Screening: Kaili Blues (dir., Bi Gan, 2015,

113m), 7-9 p.m.

3 Discuss film, focusing on formal properties. Read entry by Kent Jones on Hou and “Gangland Taiwan” (Canvas) over weekend.

Apr 8 Introducing Taiwan New Cinema. Screening: Goodbye South, Goodbye

(dir., Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1996, 112m), 7-9 p.m.

10 Discuss Goodbye South. Read Austerlitz entry on Edward Yang and

Jameson, “Remapping Taipei” (Canvas) over weekend.

Apr 15 3-page paper due. Film Prep & Screening: Yi, Yi (dir., Edward Yang,

2000, 173m), 6:30-9:30 p.m.

Apr 17 ————-NO CLASS SCHEDULED————

Apr 22 ————-NO CLASS: EASTER BREAK————

24 Discuss film/Do assigned readings on Weerasethakul over weekend.

April 29 The Thai Exception: Cinema of Apitchatpong Weerasethakul. Screening:

Cemetery of Splendor (dir. Weerasethakul, 2015, 122m), 6:45-9 p.m.

May 1 Discuss film and take-home final. Course evaluation.

May 8 Take-home final due: 4 p.m. Either put essays in my mailbox in CA

255 or leave them in the file-holder hanging outside my office (CA 263).

NEW ASIAN CINEMAS Spring, 2012

Prof. Cartelli CA 263

Office Hours: MW 10-11 a.m., WR 3:30-4:30 p.m.,

(x3310): cartelli@muhlenberg.edu

SYLLABUS

PRIMARY TEXTS:

Chris Berry (ed.) Chinese Films in Focus II, second revised edition (2008).

Peter Brunette, Wong Kar-wai (2005)

Sheila Cornelius (ed.) New Chinese Cinema: Challenging Representations (2004).

Darcy Paquet, New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves (2010).

Murong Xuecun, Leave Me Alone: a Novel of Chengdu (2010).

RECOMMENDED RESERVE READING:

Chris Berry & Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (2006)

Justin Bowyer (ed) The Cinema of Japan & Korea (2004)

Ian Buruna, Behind the Mask (1984)

Sheldon Lu & Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh (eds), Chinese-Language Film (2005)

Alastair Phillips & Julian Stringer (eds), Japanese Cinema: Texts & Contexts (2007)

Shin Chi-Yun & Julian Stringer (eds), New Korean Cinema (2005): chapters 2,3,4.

Gary G. Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (2007)

Zhang Yingjin. Screening China (2002), esp., chapter 7, “Glocal City of Transnational Imaginary.”

SCREENINGS:

Most films will be screened for beginning at 7 p.m. on Thursday evenings in TR B-02, two being screened in Ettinger 201 on January 26 & April 19. Two other films will be screened on Tuesdays, starting at 6 p.m., while a third will be screened on a Wednesday, starting at 7 p.m. (All three exceptions are printed in bold-face in the class schedule below. Please mark them on your calendars now given how crowded your schedules will soon become.) All films are required viewing, and you should plan on viewing some films more than once. DVDs will be held under restricted reserveconditions at the circulation desk of Trexler Library. Restricted reservemeans that you can only screen the films in the library. You will never be permitted for any reason to remove DVDs from the library. Should you do so, you will be violating the student social code, and whatever writing you are assigned to do about the film in question will receive a failing grade. If you find this procedure too onerous, you are free to purchase your own DVDs or rent the films from NETFLIX. All films must be seen prior to the day we discuss them; failure to see a film on time does not constitute excuse for being unprepared to participate in class discussions.

UNRESTRICTED RESERVE DVDs:

Tokyo Story, Audition, Ju Dou, Farewell My Concubine, Tropical Malady, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Still Life, Perfect Blue, As Tears Go By,

2046, Woman in the Dunes, The Host, Oldboy, Vengeance Is Mine, Violent Cop.

READING & WRITING

You can plan on doing some form of writing on virtually every film we screen and discuss. This writing may take the form of assigned or impromptu in-class papers. You will also be held accountable for all reading assignments either by means of direct questions, or fact-based quizzes. The six primary texts will be supplemented by additional readings available on our Blackboard course-site, a few of which will also be available in the books (held in reserve for this course) from which they have been drawn. Most of the films we will discuss treat material remote from your experience, and you may have an especially hard time picking up topical references and remembering (much less accurately pronouncing) the names of the characters, actors, and directors. I can offer you no alternative but to work very hard at mastering the names and necessary terminology in the ways outlined in the Notes on Chinese Pronunciation (handout & Blackboard). I have supplied you with the URLs of informative websites on Blackboard, but you will all need to do your part to make the foreign more familiar.

You will write three 3-page papers in response to a specific series of prompts or questions on Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese films, respectively; a 5-page mid-term paper on Wong Kar-wai; and two essays in what will serve as a (6-page) take-home final examination. The short papers count for about 15 points each, the mid-term 25 points, and the take-home 30 points in the calculation of your grades. Your performance on in-class writing assignments, quizzes, and in class discussions may constitute crucial variables in the determination of your final grades.

CLASS SCHEDULE

Jan 17 Introductory Remarks. Read Inuhiko, “The Menace from the South Seas:

Honda Ishiro’s Godzilla (1954)” & Allsop on Gojira/Godzilla (also in Bowyer, chapter 6) for Thursday (Blackboard).

19 Japanese Cinema: “The Dream of Reason Creates Monsters.” Clips from Gojira/Godzilla. Problem of identity, faces in the crowd.

Screening: The Face of Another (dir., Teshigahara, 1966, 124m), 7-930 pm, TR B-02.

Jan 24 Discuss film. Read Grossman on Tetsuo films (Bowyer, chapter 14) &

Haraway on cyborgs for Thursday (Blackboard).

26 Discuss readings. Prep: Tetsuo/The Iron Man (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto,

1988, 64m). Screening: Tetsuo, 7-8:30 p.m., ETT 201.

Jan 31 Discuss Tetsuo. Read Davis, “Therapy for Him & Her: Kitano Takeshi’s

Hana-Bi (1997)” & Buruna, chapters 9 & 10 for next class (Blackboard).

Feb 2 Discuss readings. Screening: Fireworks (dir., Takeshi Kitano, 1997,

103m), 7-9 p.m., TR B-02.

Feb 7 Discuss Fireworks. Read Buruna, chapter 11 (Blackboard) for Thursday.

9 Discuss reading. Prep: Tokyo Sonata (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008,

120m). Screening: Tokyo Sonata, 7-9:15 pm, TR B-02.

Feb 14 3-page paper due/Discuss Tokyo Sonata. Read Brunette, Wong Kar-

wai, preface & pp. 86-101; Berry, chapter 18 (essay by Yue) for Thurs. Recommended: Abbas, Hong-Kong, chapters 1 & 2 (reserve).

16 Hong Kong Cinema & Wong Kar-wai. Screening: In the Mood for Love

(dir, Wong Kar-wai, 2000, 98m), 7-9 p.m., TR B-02.

Feb 21 Discuss film. Read Brunette, pp. 45-57; Berry, chapter 8 (Tong); and

Abbas, chapter 3 (Blackboard) for next class.

23 Discuss readings. Screening: Chungking Express (dir., Wong Kar-wai, 1994, 102m), 7-9 p.m., TR B-02.

Feb 28 Discuss film. Read Mitter, “Making China Modern” (Blackboard) for

Thursday.

Mar 1 5-page paper due/Introducing China. Read Cornelius, Intro + chapters

1-4 over break & Murong Xuecun, Leave Me Alone: a Novel of Chengdu.(You won’t regret taking this book on vacation—it’s like a Chinese Jersey Shore.)

——————SPRING BREAK———————-

Mar 13 Discuss readings. From Cultural Revolution to Postsocialist Modernity:

the Fifth and Sixth Generations. Read McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhang-ke” (Blackboard), Berry, chapter 32, & Cornelius, chapters 5-6 for Thursday.

15 Discuss readings. Screening: The World (dir., Jia Zhang-ke, 2004, 139m),

7-930 pm, TR B-02. Read excerpt from Chang, Factory Girls over

weekend.

Mar 20 Discuss film & Factory Girls. Screening: 24 City (dir., Jia

Zhang-ke, 2010, 112m), 6-8 p.m., TR B-02.

22 Discuss film. Read chapter 4, “Working from the Margins” in Chinese-Language Film (on Blackboard and reserve); Chang, “Beyond the Middle Kingdom”; & Gao, “From Elite to Small Man” (Blackboard) over weekend.

Mar 27 Guest Presentation: Amze Emmons (Associate Professor of Art). Read

Blackboard entry by Dror Kochan on Wang Xiaoshuai for Thursday.

29 Screening: Frozen (dir., “wu ming”, aka Wang Xiaoshuai, 1996, 95m), 7-9

p.m., TR B-02. NO CLASS MEETING. Review Murong, Leave Me Alone: a Novel of Chengdu over the weekend.

Apr 3 3-page paper due/Discuss Frozen & Leave Me Alone. Introducing

Taiwan New Cinema. Screening: Goodbye South, Goodbye (dir., Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1996, 112m), TR B-02, 6-8 p.m. Read Berry, chapter 27; chapter 7 on films of Hou in Chinese-Language Film (Blackboard or reserve); entry by Kent Jones on Hou; and “Gangland Taiwan” essay (Blackboard).

5 ———————–NO CLASS———————-

————————EASTER/PASSOVER BREAK———————

Apr 10 Discuss Goodbye South. Read Berry, chapter 34, Austerlitz entry on

Edward Yang, and Jameson, “Remapping Taipei” (Blackboard) for

Thursday.

12 Discuss readings. Yi, Yi (dir., Edward Yang, 2000, 173m), 7-10 p.m., TR B-02.

Apr 17 3-page paper due. Discuss film. Prepare assigned readings on “Joe”

for next class (Blackboard).

19 The Thai Exception: Cinema of Apitchatpong Weerasethakul. Screening:

Syndromes and a Century (dir. Weerasethakul, 2006, 105m), ETT 201.

Apr 24 Discuss film. Read Paquet, New Korean Cinema, Intro + chapters

1-3, and Hartzell on Kangwon (Blackboard, also in Bowyer, chapter 17) for Thursday.

26 Discuss readings. Screening: The Power of Kangwon Province (dir., Hong

Sang-Soo, 1998, 109m), 7-9 p.m., TR B-02. Read Paquet, chapter 4 &

Conclusion over weekend.

May 1 Discuss film & readings.

2 Screening: Poetry (dir., Lee Chang-dong, 139m), 7-9:30 p.m., TR B-02.

3 Discuss film and take-home final. Course evaluation.

May 7 Take-home final due: 4 p.m. Either put essays in my mailbox in CA

255 or leave them in the file-holder hanging outside my office (CA 263).

HEADNOTE: NEW EAST ASIAN CINEMA

SUB HEAD: HONG-KONG: The Cinema of Wong Kar-wai (b. 1956, Shanghai)

VIEWING NOTES: Chungking Express (dir., Wong Kar-wai, 1996, 104m)

Cast & Credits

First Cop (#223) He Zhiwu: Takeshi Kaneshiro
Woman In Wig:                      Brigitte Lin
Second Cop (#663):              Tony Leung Chiu Wai
Faye:                                      Faye Wang
Flight Attendant:                     Valerie Chow

Written by Wong Kar-Wai. Based roughly on “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” by Haruki Murakami.

Select Filmography:

The Grandmaster (2013) (martial arts)

My Blueberry Nights (2007) (cross-over film—Jude Law, Norah Jones, Natalie Portman)

2046 (2004) (rooted in early 60s, projects into future timeless state)

In the Mood for Love (2000) (set in early 60s, Hong Kong)

Happy Together (1997) (young male lovers in Argentina)

Fallen Angels (1995) (hip killers, chance encounters, stylized extension of CEx)

Chungking Express (1994)

Ashes of Time (1994) (chivalry movie)

Days of Being Wild (1991) (hipster searching for roots)

As Tears Go By (1988) (stylized HK remake of Mean Streets)

Chungking Express is a “diptych” film consisting of two different but criss-crossing love stories set in two different spaces:

1) Chungking Mansion: a building in Tsimshatsui that is a hub of small business and criminal activities, also a source of cheap rooms for travelers; represents multicultural face of Hong Kong, a global village of exotic sights and sounds;

2) The Midnight Express food-stand in Lan Kwui Fong in Central across Victoria Harbor.

Transit between places is elided in the American version so that everything seems to be occurring in the same general area. Original title: Chungking Forest or Jungle.

Crucial Dates: 1967/Cultural Revolution; 1997/Hand-over of Hong Kong; 2047/complete reversion to China. Hong Kong as British crown colony from 1842, taken by Japanese during WW2; joint declaration of “return” to China in 1997 under “two systems” agreement that is to last for 50 years, that is, until 2047.

Hong Kong New Waves: 1970s, Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, martial arts & kung fu; 1990s, John Woo, Hard-Boiled (1992); Tsui Hark, Clara Law, Wong Kar-wai; Ang Lee, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Hong Kong film genres:

Ah Fei: romance films featuring punks and/or young gangsters (Days of Being Wild)

Wuxia pian: “sword & chivalry” films set in distant, semi-fantastical past (Crouching

Tiger, Ashes of Time)

Wenyi pian: romance melodrama (In the Mood for Love)

Chungking Express: Excerpt from Roger Ebert Review:

As the film opens, we meet a policeman named He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who wanders the nighttime city, lonely and depressed, pining after a girl who has left him. He gives himself 30 days to find another girl, and uses the expiration dates on cans of pineapple as a way of doing a countdown. A new woman walks into his life: the woman in the wig (Brigitte Chin-Hsia Lin), who is involved in drug deals.

We expect their relationship to develop in conventional crime movie ways, but instead, the film switches stories, introducing a new couple. The first cop hangs out at a fast-food bar, where he notices an attractive waitress (Faye Wang), but she has eyes only for another cop who frequents the same restaurant (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung). He scarcely notices her, but she gets the keys to his apartment, and moves in when he isn’t there — cleaning, redecorating, even changing the labels on his canned food. Both of these stories, about disconnections, loneliness and being alone in the vast city, are photographed in the style of a music video, crossed with a little Godard (signs, slogans, pop music) and some Cassavetes (improvised dialogue and situations). What happens to the character is not really the point; the movie is about their journeys, not their destinations.

Chungking Express was brought to the attention of American filmgoers by Quentin Tarantino, one of commercial cinema’s leading directors and producers, probably because Tarantino knew that Wong’s filmmaking style would speak to younger American filmgoers in ways older filmgoers might not completely appreciate or understand. CE is a film shot through with sympathy and affection for its youthful characters, two of whom appear to be on an unending quest for romantic connection. It’s also deeply embedded in “the romance of the city:” the sights and sounds of contemporary urban life, the chance encounters and missed connections of both ordinary and not so ordinary people. And, as Redmond notes in Studying Chungking Express, it’s also a film about consumption, not just of chef salads, but of images and objects and fashions and ideas.

From Sean Redmond, Studying Chungking Express (2008):

“Chungking Express is a film that is full of beautiful, sensuous images, textures, objects, places and spaces. The Hong Kong cityscape gleams, objects such as compact discs and jukeboxes glitter, and expressionistic reds and blues pour into the street scenes, fast-food joints, hotel rooms and easy bars. One could even argue that the film is good enough to eat, so central is food […] to the film’s visual structure.”

============================

Concentrate, in viewing and discussing Chungking, on those aspects of the film (1) that put it into circulation with the global drift of popular culture (music, fashion, movie stars, fast food, etc.); and (2) that evoke both the romance of the city and its capacity to isolate and alienate people from each other. In so doing, pay special attention to how these themes and subjects are mediated by Wong’s film-making style: hand-held cameras, slow-mo, stutter shots, voiceover, flashbacks, soundtrack, fracturing of temporality, and varying use of point of view.

Many scenes in Wong’s films are shot at a slower film speed, so the action is speeded up; then the frames are step-printed at a slower speed onto the finished film, so the action is restored to its real-time duration. The step-printing method gives these scenes a haunting sense of simultaneous animation and suspension, as if they are occurring in accelerated slow-motion or discontinuous freeze-frame. –Focusing on one or more such scenes, analyze what is occurring from a cinematographic and reception standpoint. Why are the scenes in question chosen for such treatment, and how do we respond to them in terms of our level of engagement or extent of our alienation?

Due to his visually disruptive approach, Wong’s films would be difficult to follow if it weren’t for the disembodied voices drifting from their soundtracks, both in the form of song lyrics and of the voices of characters that help us to interpret what transpires on screen. But the voices do more than merely hold the stories together: they comment on the action, vocalize what’s happening inside the characters’ heads, and affirm the presence of what the camera can’t capture, providing a parallel line of the intangible. To what extent does this parallel line of the intangible supply yet another element of uncertainty to the already elusive narrative line in a film like ChEx? Do the voiceovers serve to contain the stories—render them coherent and decipherable—or expand them in ways that make them even more elusive? To what extent can the voiceovers be construed as oral equivalents to the stretch-print visuals that blur the images they linger on?

Why does May invade 633’s space and alter even the labels on his sardine cans? Why does she make so many of her contributions to his life surreptitiously? Is this just a form of pathological timidity, an inability to be direct and forward? (After all, she clearly wants a free shot at him, as her nastiness to the waitress and her erasure of the girlfriend’s phone-message indicate.) How does 633 respond to her home invasions? How does she respond to his dinner invitation? What are we to make of their moment of reconnection at the film’s end? Is this a new beginning or the start of a new end? Does it matter? What, in the end, is the film’s aim? What does it want its effect to be?

Both parts of Chungking are pervaded by the influence of the West, particularly America and even more particularly California, on the imaginative life of the characters. In the first part, this influence is largely conveyed by Maggie Cheung’s glam get-up of blonde wig and sunglasses, as if she is some kind of American film-star trying to attract maximum attention while going incognito. We learn that the blonde wig is the preferred fetish of the Caucasian bartender who has his new girlfriend wear one too. Is there any point aimed at when Cheung throws the wig away after gunning down the bartender? The burden of the West or Americanness is largely carried in the second half by the preferred food choices at the Midnight Express stand, by Faye Wong’s constant playing of “California Dreaming”, and by her decision to fly off to California instead of keeping her date at the California restaurant with Cop #663. What might any of this have to do with the film’s focus on expiration dates, and, specifically, with the imminent date of the expiration of Britain’s hold on Hong Kong itself?

In the Mood for Love (dir., Wong Kar-wai, 2000, 98m)

SELECT FILMOGRAPHY: Wong Kar-wai (b. 1956):

The Grandmaster (2013) (martial arts)

My Blueberry Nights (2007) (cross-over film—Jude Law, Norah Jones, Natalie Portman)

2046 (2004) (rooted in early 60s, projects into future timeless state)

In the Mood for Love (2000) (set in early 60s, Hong Kong)

Happy Together (1997) (young male lovers in Argentina)

Fallen Angels (1995) (hip killers, chance encounters, stylized extension of CEx)

Chungking Express (1994)

Ashes of Time (1994) (chivalry movie)

Days of Being Wild (1991) (hipster searching for roots)

As Tears Go By (1988) (stylized HK remake of Mean Streets)

SELECT CAST:

Maggie Cheung … Su Li-zhen – Mrs. Chan

Tony Chiu Wai Leung Chow Mo-wan

Ping Lam Siu … Ah Ping

Tung Cho ‘Joe’ Cheung Man living in Mr. Koo’s apartment

Rebecca Pan … Mrs. Suen

Kelly Lai Chen … Mr. Ho

Man-Lei Chan … Mr. Koo

Szu-Ying Chien … Amah

VIEWING NOTES:

–It’s hard to call Mood a piece of wishful nostalgia insofar as it relentlessly records the seeming failures, frustrations, disappointments, missed chances of two unhappy people who no doubt seem deeply in love, or at the least, profoundly drawn to each other. After all, what could be “wishful” about such a situation? If Chungking is, in the end, a kind of hymn of romantic optimism, Mood would seem to be a elegy of romantic sadness or melancholy.

What makes it “wishful is, on the one hand, how beautiful a picture Wong paints of the two people in question, their yearning for, concern, consideration, and respect for one another; the poignancy of their being content to stand side by side in the rain, or pursuing a collaborative writing project in order to spend time with one another, their physical satisfaction restricted to furtively, and oh so tentatively holding hands. Romance, in this mode, is equivalent to feelings privately harbored and nurtured but publically repressed and physically withheld. It’s romance as writers of the European and Asian middle ages knew it—love that is spoken through emblems, signs, gestures, but never ever directly realized or expressed for reasons that have as much to do with the reticence or timidity of the lovers as they do with such constraining circumstances as their being married to other people. And it’s romance as well for the very fact that the lovers fail to physically satisfy their desire for one another

One of the other things that makes the nostalgia of In the Mood wishful is the extent to which the place and time and atmosphere within which it is set and situated are, from the point of view of the present, almost entirely contrived, conjured into existence as if for the first time by the beautifully rendered composition of image and acting and music and set design. This is not to say that the 1962 Hong Kong of Wong’s invention never existed; rather, that it never existed in quite the form and fashion in which he has chosen to invent it. That form and fashion take shape as a movie first and foremost, in which it rains as if on cue so as to better strand its two lovers in occasionally awkward, but always artful juxtaposition; in which a mere walk of a few blocks for a resupply of noodles is presented in a form of erotic slow-motion, paced to the exquisite rhythm of a mesmerizing waltz. The hair of the principal characters is never out of place; their mode of address never anything but considerate; their behavior never deviates from their shared commitment “to not be like them,” them being not only their adulterous husband and wife but, presumably, anyone who betrays the standards of propriety dictated by people like Mrs Suen, but that seem to be upheld by no one apart from the lovers themselves.

Why, one might ask, would Wong make such a film in the wake of such a confection of romantic optimism like Chungking Express or the far more graphic depiction of the fully realized love relationship he presents in Happy Together? Is Wong merely painting a nostalgic picture of a time when a certain elegance, dignity, even nobility might be held to have maintained itself, a time before permissiveness and promiscuity became a virtual way of life, and hence made the kind of renunciation and restraint practiced by our lovers seem not only superannuated but silly?

If Chungking wears its heart on its sleeve, In the Mood presents a much more cautious, claustrophobic, and nuanced assessment of romantic love. The lovers in Chungking are young and playful, the film’s cinematography is highly stylized, while Hong Kong itself is lively and cosmopolitan. In the Mood is different on every front. The would-be lovers are beautiful, handsome, and impeccably dressed (compare Mrs Chun’s endless array of cheongsam to Faye’s carelessly casual attire), but remarkably timid, unhappy, and repressed, not to mention married to other people. The film’s cinematography is gorgeously colored and perfectly attuned to its soundtrack, but most scenes are filmed in narrow, crowded spaces, and often populated by people burrowed together in rooms and offices and largely indistinguishable from one another. Instead of being playful and erotic, all the off-camera lovemaking is conducted surreptitiously in the form of middle-aged adultery by people we never see. What are we to make of all this? While beautifully rendered, Hong Kong in 1962 seems to be a space trading on lies and straitened circumstances where all the things people desire (ties, handbags, rice-makers) come from somewhere else. Even the music is imported—American singer Nat King Cole singing Latin American songs imported from the Phillipines (though how different really is this from the Hong Kong of Chungking, which is rife with crime and consumption, the music of California and the Caribbean, and such other American imports like jogging? Is Hong Kong represented in both films as a city set at one remove from metropolitan centrality?)

Cinematography & soundtrack of In the Mood. If the visual look of ChEx is often blurred to reflect the speed of modern life, the cinematography of In the Mood seems invested in slowing down the world it records, often to the point of freezing it in time. How does this style of filming and editing complement, even generate, the “mood” of the film and what it represents on the level of narrative, especially given the film’s being set in 1962 Hong Kong? What is the function throughout of rhythm and repetition with respect to sound and image? Is Maggie Cheung’s unending collection of cheongsam designed as some kind of visual joke, or there something more serious at work here?

Opinion. Which, in the end, did you consider the more accomplished film, which the more visually or emotionally satisfying? Why? (If you choose this option, be painstaking in your organization of evidence to support your conclusions.)

SAMPLE ASSIGNMENT: Short Paper on Wong Kar-wai

Directives:

You can write your Wong Kar-wai paper on any topic related to film style, framing, editing, cinematography, deployment of voiceovers, musical choices and use of soundtrack, connectivity & correspondence of plot/theme elements, focus on time, expiration dates, deadlines, anniversaries, indirection, etc. You can also write on either or both films. The following are suggestions only, which you can mix and match as you please, or ignore entirely.

Topic Suggestions

Due to his visually disruptive approach, Wong’s films would be difficult to follow if it weren’t for the disembodied voices drifting from their soundtracks, both in the form of song lyrics and of the voices of characters that help us to interpret what transpires on screen. But the voices do more than merely hold the stories together: they comment on the action, vocalize what’s happening inside the characters’ heads, and affirm the presence of what the camera can’t capture, providing a parallel line of the intangible. But to what extent does this parallel line of the intangible supply yet another element of uncertainty to the already elusive narrative line in a film like ChEx? Do the voiceovers serve to contain the stories—render them coherent and decipherable—or expand them in ways that make them even more elusive? To what extent can the voiceovers be construed as oral equivalents to the stretch-print visuals that blur the images they linger on?

SUB HEADNOTE: CHINA:

CINEMA OF JIA-ZHANGKE: SHIJE/THE WORLD

The World (2004), in Mandarin, Shanxi, and Russian, 139m

Directed & written by: Jia Zhangke

Music: Kim Giong

Setting: World Park (Beijing)

Cast:

Tao (dancer, Taisheng’s girlfriend): Zhao Tao

Taisheng (security guard, Tao’s boyfriend): Chen Taishen

Wei (one of Tao’s roommates): Jing Jue

Niu (Wei’s jealous boyfriend): Jiang Zhongwei

Qun (dressmaker, sleeps with Taisheng): Huang Yiqun

Sanlai (Taisheng’s friend from home): Wang Hongwei

Liang (Tao’s ex-boyfriend): Liang Jingdong

Erxiao (Taisheng’s cousin, security guard): Ji Shuai

Youyou: Xiang Wan

Anna (Russian woman): Anna Chtcherbakova

“Little Sister”: Shen Zhijun

Jia Zhangke Filmography:

2020/Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (documentary)

2018/Ash is Purest White

2015/Mountains May Depart

2013/A Touch of Sin

2008/24 City

2006/Still Life (3 Gorges Dam film)

2004/The World (reinstatement of exhibition rights)

2002/Unknown Pleasures

2000/Platform

1999/films banned from public exhibition

1997/Pickpocket

Excerpt from Interview:

“This story has a lot of characters, and I’d been looking for a new narrative structure. I was going to follow the leading couple linearly, but then I realized that might be problematic to see China through just the two main characters […] Then it dawned on me that I could use the ‘Link’ method, as in the computer world. Say I want to find Tao; I look up her information, from there I find Taisheng, and onwards to his hometown pal, followed by the Russian. It’s just like surfing on the web via Links […] The film also used text messages several times as a communication method, including Flash animation.

[…] I don’t understand why young people in China rely so much on cell phones, followed closely by computers […] Unlike real intimate physical contact, all that cell phones or computers can create is a virtual space or a world of text and images. They seem to have expanded ways of communication and convenience, but they actually keep people further apart and lonelier […] I decided to work all these elements into film language, to explore and investigate this phenomenon.”

Discussion Notes:

–Who are these young people? Where do they appear to be going? Why are they so focused on romantic relations?

–Why don’t we ever see who or what is pulling the strings of the World Park itself? What is its purpose? Who does it appear to be for? How does the World Park represent “freedom of choice” under Chinese capitalism?

–Scholars talk about our living in a world of simulacra, of appearances, images that refer to something “real” but a reality so deeply mediated that it’s hard to imagine our ever getting there, wherever there is in the first place. How does The World address and/or represent this world of simulacra, both on the level of objects (miniaturized versions of monuments and buildings) and behavior? How does Jia differentiate between the mediated interactions of the characters (via cellphone, text messaging, etc.) and their actual (face-to-face) interactions? What do the mediated interactions promise that the actual ones fail to deliver?

–If one looks for a local analogue for the lives and work of the dancers and performers at World Park, one should probably think more about people who work and perform at places like DisneyWorld than to Broadway or Hollywood singers, dancers, and actors, that is, people who are functionally imitators or emulators of well-paid professional actors than the thing itself. Working off this analogy, how do we respond to or interpret the working and fantasy lives of the characters who inhabit The World?

–Not everyone in The World is an actor or performer. Some are security guards, others laborers, while still others work in restaurants and factories. Almost everyone, though, appears to be from somewhere else. What kinds of statements about life & labor in China does Jia appear to making in this film? Why do you suppose the film got official approval for exhibition in China? What does Jia allow us to see that appears to have been opaque to the censors?

–Critics confess to being bewildered by the ending of the film. Do you also find yourself bewildered? Or is there a way of making sense of the ending that seems to have escaped the critics? What might that be?

–What do you make of the film’s long-takes, panoramic shots of “The World”, flash animation sequences, episodic structure, or soundtrack?

–Shifts of tone in film get channeled through the Tao/Taisheng relationship, and expand outwards via “linking” mechanism; film gets increasingly dark as we see the human “parts” of World Park fraying. Select 2-3 sequences in second half of the film that demonstrate broken links in chain of this world for discussion.

–Function of flash animation sequences: nature of dreams allowed under “freedom of choice”? Any cue here to explaining Tao’s suicide if that is, in fact, what it is?

–Breakdown of family, local, and personal relationships under pressure of economic circumstances and incentives: cheating, lying, betrayal, prostitution, theft, etc.

–Anna & Tao: What do you make of their friendship? What do they have in common?

–Single scenes, e.g., Tao & Little Sister at building site: “It’s beautiful” “Doesn’t look beautiful to me,” airplanes; Tao & Taisheng in hotel: “You can’t count on anyone, including me”; Niu setting fire to jacket; Little Sister’s accident and death; Tokyo Story reference (film by Japanese director Ozu about breakdown of family relations under pressure of capitalism in postwar Japan.

24 City (dir. Jia Zhang-ke, 2010, 112m)

Select Filmography:

2020/Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (documentary)

2018/Ash is Purest White

2015/Mountains May Depart

2013/A Touch of Sin

2008/24 City

2006/Still Life (3 Gorges Dam film)

2004/The World (reinstatement of exhibition rights)

2002/Unknown Pleasures

2000/Platform

1999/films banned from public exhibition

1997/Pickpocket

Select Cast:

“Real Actors” Characters

Chen Jianbin Song Weidong (management type)

Joan Chen Minhua Gu (“Little Flower”)

Lu Liping Dali Hao (older lady)

Zhao Tao Na Su (TV news presenter)

Setting: Factory 420, Chengdu, Sichuan

Writing Credits: Jia Zhang-ke & Zhai Yongming

=================================

Notes & Topic Suggestions:

—24 City has been variously called a docu-drama, “a docu-fiction hybrid, an essay in contemporary history, an experiment in cine-portraiture” and “one of the saddest films I have seen for many years” (Peter Bradshaw). What film genre does it seem to working in for you, and what difference does classifying it as one thing or another make? Given the difficulty of fitting it into a single established genre, it’s arguable that the film is in the end too singular to be classified within existing categories, an observation that still begs the question, what kind of film is it? What effects (intellectual, emotional, political, aesthetic) does it aim to generate or produce in the viewer?

–We know that the film is co-scripted by Jia and the female novelist Zhau Yongming, and that the citations from the poetry of Yeats and others are entirely attributable to them. But we are given no information whether any aspect of the testimony of the nine “characters” who speak directly to the camera in the film is effectively “their own”, based on “their own” stories, or largely or entirely fabricated by the screenwriters. What difference does it make to our viewing, reception, response that we don’t know whether the narratives presented are “real” or merely “true to life”, fact-based or fictional? Are fabricated stories less “true” for having artfully reshaped experiences that are not necessarily the same as but similar to the lived experiences of selected residents of Factory 420? Are the narratives delivered by the 5 non-professional actors in the film more trustworthy than the narratives delivered by the professional actors? How does Jia manage to make the expression of emotion genuine and performative at the same time?

–How would you assess the role played in 24 City by the main factory building itself, what we know of its past, and what we see of its deterioration and demolition? Does it serve to harbor or generate what some commentators have called “communist nostalgia”?

Given that contemporary China is a world of constant, sudden, shifting change that can radically undermine establish habits of work and domestic life, does it seem as if this film is serving a critical or elegiac purpose? (Does it make any difference to know that the film’s budget was partially underwritten by the corporate developers of the 24 City project?)

—24 City has been called Jia’s “most woman-centered” film to date, “a reaffirmation of female sorrow as the most convenient signifier of China’s social upheaval.” This same critic (Andrew Chan) further claims that Jia situates his “appropriation of female emotion in the same fantastical space as the animated interludes in The World and the UFO sighting in Still Life.” He is referring here to the three narratives delivered by the three professional actresses in 24 City, the first of which depicts an instance of child abandonment that seems straight out of Dickens, the second the recounting by the actress Joan Chen of her character’s long association with Joan Chen by her fellow workers and the implications that has had in her life, and the third an even more obvious “interpolation” by Jia’s favorite actress, Zhao Tao. What do you make of these three interpolations? How do they speak to the condition of women as depicted in Cheng’s Factory Girls or A Touch of Sin?

–In what way can you “read” the docudramatic 24 City and the more strictly fictional Touch of Sin as two sides of the same coin? In what ways are the “workers” in both films caught up in the same kind of social and economic changes? Does the later film seem to offer some form of critical commentary on the conditions dramatized in the earlier film? To what extent does “the world” represented in Touch of Sin undercut/undermine the optimistic future that the developers of the 24 City project seem intent on projecting?

–Explore and discuss Jia’s “framed portraits” of workers in 24 City? How do these individuals’ faces, bodies, movements, and lack of movement speak to us? How do they compare with the testimony of the younger workers in Factory Girls?

A Touch of Sin (dir., Jia Zhang-ke, 2013, 130m)

Select Filmography:

2020/Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (documentary)

2018/Ash is Purest White

2015/Mountains May Depart

2013/A Touch of Sin

2008/24 City

2006/Still Life (3 Gorges Dam film)

2004/The World (reinstatement of exhibition rights)

Select Cast:

Wu Jiang … Da Hai

Baoqiang Wang Zhou San’er

Tao Zhao … Xiao Yu

Lanshan Luo … Xiao Hui

Jia-yi Zhang … Zhang Youliang

Viewing & Writing Notes:

—A Touch of Sin is composed of four stories loosely adapted from real-life incidents of violence spanning the first decade of China’s 21^st century. The models for Jia’s central characters are: Hu Wenhai, a peasant vigilante who killed 14 villagers in 2001 in Shanxi; Zhou Kehua, a fugitive who carried out a series of armed robberies in 2012; Deng Yujiao, a pedicure worker who stabbed a harassing customer and local government official to death at a Hubei hotel in 2009; and the 14 Foxconn employees who jumped off buildings to their deaths in 2010.

–In the boat scene that echoes the poetic opening sequence of Jia’s 2007 Still Life (literally “the good man in the three gorges”)—we will see this clip on Monday–the camera tracks past Han Sanming, the “good man” in the earlier film, and holds on the face of Zhou before cutting away to the river. This change of visual focus from “the good man” to “the bad guy,” in an otherwise identical frame, presages Jia’s shift of moral focus in the new film. Personifying violence, Zhou San’er both binds the stories together and, as pulled by Jia, rips apart their social fabric to expose the strands unspooling from it.

–The film opens on an early scene of spectators gathered around a deadly accident to gawk at the remains of the wreck only to segue soon into a focus on actors/agents as opposed to witnesses of violence. According to one critic, “The directness and shock of violence is intended to jolt [the] audience into a new recognition of Chinese reality, one […] reshaped by dizzying economic growth as well as rampant corruption, astounding greed, and an abysmal gap between rich and poor.” Question for characters & audience: Does one merely look on passively at spectacle of injustice or take arms against it?

–In an interview, Jia “praises the ‘rebellious spirit’ of his characters, comparing them to warriors in Chinese wuxia (martial arts) fiction. Not unaware of their lack of heroic means and chivalry, he also calls them canxia (impaired knight-errant). To what extent is Da Hai presented as a “warrior”? To what extent do we see him that way in the film? Why and how might it matter that he is also clearly impaired?

–Animals & animal imagery: note the beating of a horse that later runs free after it is “liberated” by Da Hai. Tiger imagery: is Da Hai tiger or hunter, hero or monster? Note buffalo on truck, unguarded herd of cattle: do they represent scapegoats? Note also image and use of snake in Xiao Yu story, and that snake is generally associated with yin, feminine elements.

–Two of the film’s most powerful scenes feature anonymous crowds in public spaces, which Jia turns into lyrical tableaus of the “floating life” or “floating population” in contemporary China. Three of the four main characters in the film travel between town and country, indicating the decay of family-rooted rural society. They may have families, yet they—possibly apart from Da Hai–live in a perpetually rootless state. How does it seem that “rootlessness” affects the characters in question? How does observing this social characteristic help explain the anxiety felt by many of the superannuated or displaced workers in 24 City?

–The fourth episode concerning Xiao Hui eventually centers on a Taiwanese-owned factory meant to remind viewers of Foxconn, the contract manufacturer of iPads, iPhones, and other electronic products. How does a reading of Factory Girls help explain the feelings and behavior of Xiao Hui? How does the representation of work and workers in new high-tech factories like these compare to the representation of the work and workers of Factory 420 in 24 City? (Note running references to apples throughout, possibly an allusion to Apple and the dominance of technology in today’s social and economic worlds.)

–Embedded judgments: mother of Zhou San’er seems to refuse to accept his effort to restore relations. Brothers effectively greet him by asking him to pay his share of costs of ceremony. Opera performance: The Trial of Su San plays on theme of guilt and, possibly, repentance as Xiao Yu bends head low, her eyes cast down. How does Jia represent her the aftermath of her acts of violence?

–Quite apart from A Touch of Sin’s relevance as a representation of contemporary China’s social realities, this film also marks a definite turn away from the docudramatic approach to specifically Chinese social problems Jia takes in 24 City and Still Life to something more commercially oriented and even exploitative. To what extent does it feel as if the commercial appeal of violence, especially of the more shocking variety, informs Jia’s filmmaking here? Is it possible that Jia is using actions drawn from recent headlines for a more commercial, exploitative goal than to provide insight into contemporary China?

–You may choose to concentrate your paper on any one of the four specific sequences into which the film is divided. If so, be sure to pay as much attention to the form these sequences take—framing, shot selection, mise en scene, rhythm, pacing, editing, etc.—as you do on content. Also, remember to make use of screen captures or film clips either as illustrations or subjects of close analysis.

SUB HEAD: FUTURE PAST: BI GAN

OUT-TAKE: The longest long-take

Kaili Blues (dir., Bi Gan, 2015, 113m)

Filmography

2018 Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Chinese title: Last Evenings on Earth)

2016 Kaili Blues

Select Cast

Yongzhong Chen Chen Shen

Yue Guo … Yang Yang

Linyan Liu … Zhang Xi

Feiyang Luo … Wei Wei (Little )

Lixun Xie … Crazy Face

Zhuohua Yang … Monk

Shixue Yu … Wei Wei (Older )

Daqing Zhao … Elderly Doctor

Viewing Notes:

–Stylistically both the most challenging and most free-flowing films we’ve screened this semester, Kaili Blues probably has most in common with Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life. Yet where Still Life takes on a grandly-scaled journey in which we play witness to the socially disruptive consequences of China’s modern industrial development, Kaili Blues—even more clearly a “road movie”—takes us into a less easily demarcated zone in which China’s present collides with its past and very little can be determined to be certain or fixed. That includes both the identity of individuals we encounter along the way and whether or not we are encountering their past or present selves. The town of Dangmai we enter less than a third of the way into the film, for example, has no geographical correlative in modern China; it’s a made-up name for a made-up place.

–Film studies majors should be aware of the strong influence on Bi Gan of master Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly two of Tarkovsky’s most celebrated films, Stalker and Solaris. The influence of the great Taiwanese filmmaker, Hou Hsiao-hsien, is obvious and pronounced, particularly in the 41 minute-long sustained tracking shot that constitutes both the most compelling and most celebrated aspect of this film. Try, in watching the film, to let it take you where it seems to want you to go. Try to enjoy the sheer visual pleasures on offer, the serendipity of its rhythms and structure.

–Bi Gan was a poet before he became a filmmaker and the film screen often displays the text of his poems recited in voiceover over film images that don’t immediately seem pertinent to the poems. To what extent is the look and feel of the film designed to feel “poetic”? What exactly does this imply about the film’s approach to meaning and coherence?

–Questions to consider: So what that the director presents an unedited 41-minute tracking shot? What’s so special about that? To what extent does “story” have as much to do with this film’s composition and reception as style? What exactly is its style anyway?

From REVIEW by Dennis Schwartz

–The riveting debut feature by the mid-20s aged Chinese filmmaker, a poet-turned- director, Bi Gan, is a beautifully photographed visual dream-like, original, oblique arthouse film, that’s superbly acted by nonprofessionals. It’s about a middle-aged widowed Chinese rural village herbal doctor, Chen (Chen Yongzhong), with a shady past but now reformed, from Kaili City, a shoddy town in China’s southeast, subtropical Guizhou province, who goes on a long trek to Zhenyuan to find his missing mistreated favorite nephew Wei Wei (Feiyang Luo). The kid’s father, the doctor’s brother Crazy Face (Xie Lixun), either sold his kid to another village or abandoned him. En route to the remote location the doctor reflects upon his life, as he recalls past relationships, haunting family grudges, certain eerie dreams, ghosts from his criminal past and encounters strange ethnic people along the way who can’t let go of living in past centuries. We also get to hear the director’s stirring poetry as delivered by Chen, that magically blends into the narrative. The money shot is a 40-minute-long tracking shot depicting Chen’s journey up a mountain from the village of Dang Mai.

A New Language for Chinese Film

J. Hoberman

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/05/19/new-language-chinese-film-kaili-blues/?printpage=true

Kaili Blues, an eccentric, remarkably assured first feature by the young Chinese director Bi Gan, is both the most elusive and the most memorable new movie that I’ve seen in quite some time—“elusive” and “memorable” being central to Bi’s ambitions.

Predicated on time travel but hardly science fiction, the film is set in and around Bi’s native Kaili, a city in China’s south-central Guizhou province, a region of subtropical highlands that is home to the Miao people, a minority that shares cultural affinities with the Hmong of Indochina. The protagonist, Chen, an ex-convict perhaps fifty years old, now working in a modest medical facility in Kaili, takes it upon himself to rescue his feckless half-brother’s young son Weiwei, who may have been sold into servitude to a clockmaker in a nearby village.

Plot is secondary. Bi, who was twenty-six when he made Kaili Blues, seems primarily concerned with developing a film language that treats memory as a tangible thing. Objects here are pieces of time. In addition to searching for the boy, Chen agrees to look up a man who had once been his elderly co-worker’s lover and present him with several remembrances—including a shirt that had long ago been intended as a gift and a tape cassette of old pop songs. Bi is hardly the first director to dramatize temporal space or to seek to replace chronology with simultaneity. Alain Resnais and Chris Marker come immediately to mind. Bi is, however, less analytical and more intuitive. Kaili Blues is prefaced with a quote from the Diamond Sutra to the effect that Everything is Now. Past thought cannot be retained, future thought cannot be grasped, and present thought cannot be held. Go with the flow. It’s a fair warning.

Kaili Blues begins with a flurry of vivid images—neither entirely connected nor completely disconnected. An introductory shot of a flickering light bulb is followed by a circular pan around Chen’s shabby clinic. Chen is next seen walking through some sort of dank storage cellar asking after a shipment of bananas. The radio news refers to sightings of a “wild man” (seemingly a legendary creature who is the local equivalent of a yeti). After an unattended TV set in an outdoor setting broadcasts the reading of a poem, Chen and Weiwei appear together in a dilapidated amusement park.

The montage of semi sovereign shots continues, sometimes linked by half-heard ambient music, evoke a sleepy, somewhat overgrown, somehow idyllic place of ramshackle cottages and junk-strewn backyards. But, if the mode is contemplative and the mood entropic, the visual information is rich and lively. As a filmmaker, Bi operates on all cylinders—for its first half hour or so, Kaili Blues is a flurry of sudden close-ups, slow dissolves, and subtly off-kilter camera placement. (The movie is also an impressive debut by the director of photography, Tianxing Wang.)

These fragments can resemble Yasujirō Ozu’s so-called “pillow shots”—unmotivated cutaways to a landscape or interior or an object in close-up held for several seconds and typically used as a bridge between two scenes. Bi’s non-narrative inserts are precise but off-handed and not obviously systematic.

Some cutaways are autonomous. Others introduce elements that will only make sense later in the film—such as the childish chalk drawings of clocks scrawled on a concrete wall or the recurring image of blue slippers floating to a river bottom that represents Chen’s memory of a dream. At times, the camera simply moves from characters to a pillow shot, pausing for example on a disorderly table top, thus creating a certain equivalence between the setting and the characters.

Kaili Blues begins as a mosaic of discreet sensations, but once Chen leaves Kaili, the mode changes. Bi’s film becomes increasingly interested in continuous motion, the notion that movement in space is time made material. There is a long sequence on a strangely empty train—the camera shuddering, the light shifting—and an even longer one shot through the windshield of a car. As we transverse the mountains, Chen is heard recounting, perhaps to the car’s unseen driver, a story regarding a punishment he suffered in the coal mine where he worked as a prisoner.

Chen is next seen following the railroad tracks towards the village of Dangmai. This rustic settlement is a zone where, it gradually becomes apparent, various time-states coexist or perhaps the Diamond Sutra is literalized. Here, Weiwei—whom Chen does not immediately recognize—has grown into a young man who makes a marginal living by transporting passengers on the back of his battered motorbike, and the driver and Chen’s dead wife, now a barber, reappear as well. Neither she nor Weiwei appears to acknowledge Chen.

These relationships are dramatized, if not explained, during the course of a remarkable forty-one-minute single take, covering several miles and much of Dangmai. (In interviews, Bi has maintained that he developed the facility for extended sequence shots in his capacity as a maker of wedding videos.) Traveling first in a truck and then on the back of Weiwei’s motorbike, Chen rides through the countryside and into the town.

There, he dismounts and goes to a tailor shop and to get a haircut. Meanwhile, Weiwei continues over the bridge, doubling back across the river even as the camera picks up and follows other characters, including the young woman who darns Chen’s shirt. She crosses the river ostensibly to purchase a child’s pinwheel but really for no other reason than to give Bi’s camera an excuse to circle around and cross back. This amazingly coordinated sequence ends with a listless crowd watching the band that gave Chen his initial ride. The scene, which is filled with musical analogies, ends with Chen joining the band to sing a song despite the fact that he can’t carry a tune.

Leaving Dangmai, Chen resumes his quest. He locates the child Weiwei in a somewhat larger town, without making contact—although he does apparently connect, in an enigmatic long shot, with a group of traditional Miao musicians who are perhaps close to his colleague’s lost love. The last shots are of a moving train, presumably returning to Kaili. An arm flicks a cigarette out the window and the film ends.

What makes this so engrossing? First, of course, is Bi’s highly original use of cinematic form. But there is also the fact that China now exerts the same fascination as “America” held for the European avant-garde a century ago. As much as it is about anything, Kaili Blues is about a place.

Although more fictional than not, Kaili Blues incorporates a number of documentary aspects. It’s partially set in Bi’s hometown. Most of the actors are locals. Chen is played by Bi’s uncle, whom he has identified as a former gangster like his character. The child Weiwei is played by Bi’s step-brother. His mode is not realism but what I have elsewhere called “real-ness,” as manifest in his movie’s central sequence shot.

At least since Jia Zhangke established himself in the early 2000s as China’s preeminent director with a series of semi-documentary fictions, including Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000), and Unknown Pleasures (2002), similarly independent documentarians like Wang Bing (maker of the nine-hour portrait of industrial despoliation West of the Tracks) and Zhao Dayong (who spent six years observing a near-deserted backwater village for Ghost Town), to name but two, have occupied a vanguard position in Chinese cinema.

Kaili Blues is less a semi-documentary than a mental travelogue constructed around a tour de force of choreographed “real time” cinema. It’s almost incidental that, in making his movie, Bi managed to engage the work of a half-dozen major film artists—not just Resnais and Marker, but also Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and David Lynch, all of whom seek to extract some transcendent energy from a particular, fastidiously observed landscape. Bi may or may not be familiar with their work. In any case, his movie never seems derivative. Kaili Blues is both absorbing and self-absorbed, which is to say that Bi never appears distracted from his own particular remembrance of lost time.

LONG TAKE TOPIC

Directive: 2-3 page paper on long take in either Kaili Blues or Goodbye South, Goodbye

–Locate and identify by time signature and brief description any take that qualifies as a long take—roughly of more than three or so minutes–or sequence shot (a long take that comprises a single scene) in Kaili Blues or Goodbye South, Goodbye. In doing so, account for whether the long take is comprised of tracking shots taken by a camera moving through space or presented through the lense of a stationary camera (possibly fixed in place, mounted on a tripod).

–Once you choose the long take you want to examine, make a list for yourself of everything that enters into the camera’s field of vision as the take progresses, that is, the space explored during the extent of the sequence in question, as well as into its aural field (differentiating diegetic from non-diegetic sounds). (Things you list needn’t be presented in a separate section but should reappear in your response to the following directive.)

–Then list when these things, places, or persons appear during the course of the long take and what actions or events are recorded by the camera during the take’s temporal duration, using time signatures to identify individual sections of the progression of sights, sounds, and actions.

–Then record your own sensory response to the long take, taking the pulse, as it were, of your openness or receptivity to the aesthetic experience on offer.

–Finally, assess how this take functions with respect to the film’s dramatic or aesthetic economy, that is, how it serves the film’s narrative/storytelling or sensory/visual aims and interests.

Your finished product should follow the following format:

Identification by time signature of the beginning and end of the long take in question, accompanied by brief description of where this sequence occurs in the film’s dramatic economy (e.g., “My paper focuses on the first ten minutes of the 41 minute tracking shot that starts with Cheng’s entrance into Dangmai in Kaili Blues”).
Record of when things or persons appear and when action or events occur within the frame of the long take (e.g., 58:00: Cheng meets young man with moped in pull-off along main road, etc.).
Record of sensory response to individual moments and overall experience of long take. For example, “As Kao and his buddies road their bikes along the contours of the green hills, I felt some of the elation they may have been feeling.” Or, “The scene in the group’s apartment made me too want to jump out of the window.”
Critically assess the long take’s function in the film’s dramatic or aesthetic economy. In so doing, feel free to express whatever other thoughts you may have developed with respect to the use of long takes in general. (I strongly encourage the use of screen captures of 2-3 individual frames you discuss or directly refer to.)

HEADNOTE: CINEMA OF SOUTH KOREA

SUBHEAD: INTRODUCING THE MASTER: HONG SANG-SOO

Viewing Notes: The Power of Kangwon Province

(dir., Hong Sang-soo, 1998)

Selected Director Filmography: Hong Sang-soo

2018 Hotel by the River

2017 The Day After

2017 Claire’s Camera

2017 On the Beach at Night Alone

2016 Yourself and Yours

2015 Right Now, Wrong Then

2012 In Another Country (with Isabelle Huppert!)

2011 The Day He Arrives

2010 Oki’s Movie

2009 Like You Know It All

2008 Night and Day

2006 Woman on the Beach

2004 Woman Is the Future of Man

2002 Turning Gate

2000 Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

1998 The Power of Kangwon Province

1996 The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well

Cast: Power of Kangwon Province

Jong-hak Baek … Sang-kwon

Jaehyun Chun … Jae-wan

Sunyoung Im … Misun

Yoosuk Kim … The Policeman

Yun-hong Oh … Ji-sook

Hyunyoung Park … Eunkyoung

Outline/Synopsis:

Film consists of two sequential narratives that occur at roughly the same time followed by a brief coda which brings the two protagonists, Ji-sook and Sang-kwon, together. Backstory: Ji-sook and Sang-kwon have recently broken up after engaging in what appears to have been a fairly intense relationship. First narrative: Ji-sook meets up with two girlfriends, Misun and Eunkyoung, for brief holiday in Kangwon Province. In drunken stupor, Ji-sook “hooks up” with Policeman, then returns to Seoul with friends, only to return for overnight drunken rendezvous with Policeman before returning alone to Seoul on bus. Second narrative: Would-be professor, but promiscuous slacker, Sang-kwon (married with one young child), has series of meetings with two friends and influential Professor Kim before going off on holiday with one of them (Jae-wan) to Kangwon Province. Tries but fails to hook up with unnamed woman-in-black-top, returns alone to Seoul, gets professorship. Coda: Ji-sook responds to note from Sang-kwon left on wall outside her apartment; they meet, spend night together.

Viewing Notes:

Film appears to be of more interest on level of form than content. In order to appreciate its formal artistry, you will almost certainly have to see it more than once. Preference throughout for long takes is leavened by elliptical edits; scenes will shift abruptly after having supplied viewer with sufficient information to follow shift, but you must attend closely to keep up. Though many conversations seem pointless, points will nonetheless be made that require your notice (e.g., Ji-sook’s story about a boy who admired her in high school). Film traffics in correspondences and parallelisms that also require notice: e.g., Ji-sook’s concern for fish-out-of-water parallels Sang-kwon’s taking possession of abandoned pair of fish in bowl; both groups notice or interact with woman-in-black-top and later hear that she has plunged or fallen to her death from a cliff; Ji-sook will engage in drunken exchange with Misun, Sang-kwon will engage in even nastier drunken attack on Jae-wan; Ji-sook will become indignant with Policeman, Sang-kwon will verbally harangue woman-with-black-top. Review the chapter on the film in Bowyer, and attend closely to what he has to say about the theme of shame. Be careful about generalizing on present state of Korean society. Though the film’s protagonists are clearly troubled and troubling individuals, their friends and associates (for the most part) are not.

Questions & Topics for Discussion & Writing:

–One of the more enigmatic characters in the film is the married Policeman who tries to hook-up with Ji-sook. Superficially warm and amiable, he appears oblivious of his wife, gets hopelessly drunk, and, seemingly without motivation, almost lets himself fall to his death off the balcony of the motel during the second night he spends with Ji-sook. Are we to assume he’s just another horny, selfish guy on the make? How does he compare with the much more obviously self-involved and chronically promiscuous Sang-kwon?

–Ji-sook & Sang-kwon seem unable to break their bad habits. But Hong suggests that more than lust motivates them. What glimpses does he give into their motives & the effects of their behaviors? What do we learn of Ji-sook when she, and later, when Sang-kown and Jae-wan visit the temple? What do we learn of Sang-kwon’s past at the end of the dinner party with his new colleagues? Are we shocked when Ji-sook breaks down on the bus? Are we more shocked when she “goes down” on Sang-kwon at the end?

–Explore the interactions between Ji-sook and her friends and Sang-kwon and Jae-wan. Why are they friends in the first place? Why, in particular, does Jae-wan sustain so much abuse from Sang-kwon? How does their body-language speak? What does it say?

–Form, structure: Why is this film structured around a series of visits to Kangwon Province? How are the movements and behaviors of the characters in KP represented? Why does Hong choose the format of sequential, but overlapping, narratives? How, and to what effect, does he deploy the correspondences and parallelisms described above?

–Cinematography: What’s notable about the way Hong frames his shots? Does he develop an obvious rhythm in how he structures his montage? How does he position his camera in the interest of point of view? When and why does he deploy high angle shots? Does he seem to favor long shots, medium shots, or close-ups?

SUBHEAD: LEE CHANG-DONG

Viewing Notes: Secret Sunshine (dir., Lee Chang-dong, 2007, 142m)

FILMOGRAPHY

2018 Burning

2010 Poetry

2007 Secret Sunshine

2002 Oasis

1999 Peppermint Candy

1992 Green Fish

SELECTED CAST:

Lee Shin-ae Jeon Do-yeon

Jun Seon Jung-yeob

Kim Jong-chan Song Kang-ho

Schoolteacher Cho Young-jin

VIEWING NOTES:

–This film takes on the daunting task of trying to make the audience care about an unsympathetic, prickly, standoffish protagonist who is absurdly optimistic, clearly in denial, and presumptuous to the extreme. That task is abetted by the fact that the character in question—Lee Shin-ae—suffers a devastating loss in the course of the film. But it is also exacerbated by the role her own neglect plays in making that loss possible. How well does Lee succeed in making his protagonist sympathetic?

–The tone of this film may be a little hard to gauge at times. It starts on a note of upbeat optimism, enhanced by the early entrance of the self-deprecating, buffoonish, but sweet-tempered Kim Jong-chan to the scene, who brings a gently comic note to most of his scenes. But the film plunges midway into tragedy, whose aftermath it explores in a fairly detached, clinical manner as we watch Shin-ae try on and take off the comforts of fundamentalist Christianity. What do you make of this generally neutral approach the film seems to take to its protagonist and subject matter?

–What kind of reading does Secret Sunshine deliver of the lives and values of citizens in a small Korean city? How is the regime of “the normal” established in this film? Which characters represent normal or normative values?

–One critic has claimed that Lee’s characters constitute allegories of society at large, and that the struggles of his protagonists represent a microcosm of the cultural clash imperiling the nation. Judging from Secret Sunshine–in whicha trustworthy school employee proves to be guilty of the kidnapping and murder of one of the school’s students—by what imperiling cultural clash is Lee’s protagonist embattled? What allegory of the society at large is being transacted through the characterization, interactions, and behavior of the film’s protagonist?

–The work of filmmakers and that of sociologists would appear to operate at some remove from one another. But the work of Lee Chang-dong seems to go a long way towards bringing them together, offering viewers powerful insights into the hypocrisies of everyday life. Is this, in your estimate, the kind of work film is equipped to do in a given culture or society? Is it objectively fair for films to generalize about the conditions and values of a community by isolating on one or other crisis moment in the life of that community? How can a film effectively and authoritatively move from the single event to the broader, more general observation or conclusion? What renders the move authoritative in the viewer’s mind? How do Lee’s film in particular negotiate such moves? How does it establish the authority of its representational claims?

Viewing & Discussion Notes: Poetry (dir., Lee Chang-dong, 2010, 139m)

FILMOGRAPHY:

2010 Poetry

2007 Secret Sushine

2002 Oasis

1999 Peppermint Candy

1992 Green Fish

CAST

Mija Yun Jeong-hie

Jongwook Lee Dar-wit

Mr. Kong Kim Hira

Kihum’s father Ahn Nae-sang

Heejin’s mother Park Myeong shin

Viewing Notes:

–Attend closely to series of repeated scenes: dinner and breakfast with Wook; meetings of poetry class and poetry readings; meetings of group of six; the two times Mija abruptly leaves those meetings; the five times Mija visits the semi-paralyzed Mr. Kong; the two visits Mija makes to doctor’s offices. Note framing device of badminton game; the number of times people comment on Mija’s clothing (usually critically, as if she is inappropriately trying to be chic).

–How is the regime of “the normal” established in this film? Which characters represent normal or normative values? Where—if anywhere—is an alternative to the regime of the normal discoverable? (To what extent are the poetry classes and poetry readings themselves somewhat out-of-the-ordinary but otherwise recognizable markers or outposts of the normal?

–What’s the real challenge Mija faces once she becomes aware in Wook’s involvement in the gang-rapes of Heejin: paying her share of the blood money or reckoning with Wook’s guilt—and her responsibility for Wook—in a different way? Why does she make no effort to find the money in the first ¾ of the film? Why does she never confide in Wook’s mother? By extension, why doesn’t she turn Wook in? What effectively is she doing during the first ¾ of the film apart from trying to write a poem—or is trying to write a poem more of a concern of hers than Wook’s (so-called) future throughout large sections of the movie?

–What actions does Mija take, what events occur, that prompt and hasten her identification with Heejin? What do you make of her encounter with Heejin’s mother in the fields? Does Heejin’s mother recognize Mija during the penultimate meeting of the group of six? So what that she does or doesn’t?

–What kind of reading does Poetry deliver of the lives and values of citizens in a small Korean city? (FYI: The compensation offered by the boys’ parents to the Heejin’s mother amounts to $26,500, that is, about $4,400 each.) How do the boys and the parents reckon with the boys’ role in driving Heejin to suicide? How, by contrast, does Miya reckon with the event and her grandson’s role in prompting it? How does Miya’s “education by poetry” help inform the conclusions she reaches with respect to the payment of the blood money and the disposition of her grandson?

One critic has claimed that Lee’s characters constitute allegories of society at large, and that the struggles of his protagonists represent a microcosm of the cultural clash imperiling the nation. Judging from Poetry—and possibly from Secret Sunshine in whicha trustworthy school employee proves to be guilty of the kidnapping and murder of one of the school’s students—by what imperiling cultural clash is Lee’s protagonist embattled? What allegory of the society at large is being transacted through the characterization, interactions, and behavior of the film’s protagonist?

[Possible take-home prompt preview: The work of filmmakers and that of sociologists would appear to operate at some remove from one another. But the work of Hong Sang-soo and Lee Chang-dong seems to go a long way towards bringing them together, offering viewers powerful insights into what could be termed the hypocrisy of everyday life. Is this, in your estimate, the kind of work film is well equipped to do in a given culture or society? Is it objectively fair for films to generalize about the conditions and values of a community by isolating on one or other crisis moment in the life of that community? How can a film effectively and authoritatively move from the single event to the broader, more general observation or conclusion? What renders the move authoritative in the viewer’s mind? How do Hong’s and Lee’s films negotiate such moves? How do they establish the authority of their representational claims? (Can more obviously commercial films like Oldboy make some of the same representational claims as art-house films like Poetry seem to make? If so, what can you say about the social implications of a film that traffics so graphically in cruelty and revenge, and whose only stagings of romantic love occur in the context of filial and cross-generational incest?)

[Take-home prompt preview: The film, Poetry, seems, in the end, to take a different view of poetry than Mija does for at least the first half of the film, where she insists on its association with liking flowers and saying odd things. Mija’s understanding of poetry is, in part, supplemented by what the other poetry students and their teacher say it is, that is, tied up with seeing things (like apples) as if for the first time, and having poetic feelings, or feelings things intensely. But the poem Mija actually writes—which is successively read in voiceover during the film’s closing (and deeply moving) panoramic montage by the poetry teacher and, seemingly, by the dead Heejin whose “song” it is said to be—is something very different, and closer to being an ethical pronouncement than a mere thing of beauty. In a conclusive panoramic essay of your own, try to arrive at a critical assessment of Poetry’s approach to the distinctly moral problem which Mija feels she must contend with all along. How, in the end, does a newer understanding of “poetry” inform the choices she makes, the decisions she takes, and the film in which she plays so crucial a role?

SUB HEAD: PARK CHAN-WOOK

OUT-TAKE ON OLDBOY

Viewing Notes: Oldboy (dir., Park Chan-wook, 2003, 118m)

Selected Filmography: Park Chan-wook (b. 1963)

2016 The Handmaiden

2012 Stoker

2006 I’m a Cyborg, but that’s OK

2005 Lady Vengeance

2003 Oldboy

2002 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

2000 Joint Security Area

Select Cast:

Min-sik Choi … Dae-su Oh

Ji-tae Yu … Woo-jin Lee

Hye-jeong Kang Mi-do

Dae-han Ji … No Joo-hwan

Dal-su Oh … Park Cheol-woong

Byeong-ok Kim Mr. Han

Seung-shin Lee Yoo Hyung-ja

Jin-seo Yoon … Lee Soo-ah

Viewing Notes

–Second film in Park’s revenge trilogy. Decontextualized approach to revenge, which is nonetheless situated amid all the physical trappings of modern world—high-rise cities, television, popular entertainment, fast food, etc., and also alludes to political history of Korean “forgetfulness,” lost time and the lost memory of it.

–Conjunctions & disjunctions of realism and anti-realism, naturalism and exaggerated unnatural behaviors (eating a live octopus).

–Mixed (up) class affiliations and assignments. Dae-su as drunken (but sentimental) salaryman who, we learn, seems to have studied at an expensive private Catholic school (named Evergreen), but 15 years later emerges as a virtual scourge of modern middle-class life: a barbaric, homeless, almost entirely inarticulate avenger.

–Ultraviolence less of the stylized than sadistic (pulling out of teeth) & masochistic (cutting out of tongue) variety. Violence also often takes shape as psychological and emotional abuse. Why? How does this approach to violence tie into the film’s preoccupation with (and ultimate attempt to justify/rationalize) incest?

–What kind of commentary does Oldboy’s preoccupation with sadism, masochism, emotional violence, and particularly incest seem to supply with respect to a society that distinguishes itself for its orderliness, propriety, and the “bright smile” it is encouraged to show to the world? What, by contrast, seems to be Oldboy’s position regarding more traditional Korean concepts like han, which Paquet identifies as “a deep-seated feeling of sorrow, bitterness or despair that originates in oppression or injustice, accumulates over time and remains unexpressed in the heart” (32).

–Though the film’s audience is clearly prompted to sympathize (if not identify) with Dae-Su from the start, how are we encouraged to respond to Lee Woo-jin’s insatiable rage against him, and to the rather detached face he often puts on it? Is Woo-jin systematically displacing his own guilt to Dae-su? Is Dae-su truly guilty of the crime Woo-jin accuses him of? Which character is ultimately most responsible for Lee Soo-hah’s death? And what, finally, do you make of Dae-su’s effort to erase from his own memory the consciousness of incest at the film’s end?

The Violence (and the Seafood) Is More Than Raw (March 25, 2005) By MANOHLA DARGIS
One question, perhaps the question, is this: what does art have to do with a guy eating a live octopus, and then hammering a couple of (human) heads? The guy in question, the one doing the gobbling and hammering, is Oh Dae-su, the central character in the frenzied Korean thriller “Oldboy.” The latest in pulp-fiction cool, “Oldboy” was directed by Park Chanwook, whose films, including the very fine “Joint Security Area” and the repugnant “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” have won him admirers in rarefied circles, including the Cannes Film Festival, where last year “Oldboy” took second prize. Given the body count and sadistic violence in “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “Oldboy,” it’s no surprise that Mr. Park’s largest fan base may be those cult-film aficionados for whom distinctions between high art and low are unknown, unrecognized and certainly unwelcome. After going on a raucous drunk, an ordinary businessman, Dae-su (the terrific Choi Min-sik, who also starred in Im Kwon-taek’s “Chihwaseon”), is mysteriously abducted to a private prison. There, with a television set and a painting of a leering Jesus-like figure for company, Dae-su keeps body and mind together (if barely), mostly by working out and chipping away at his prison walls. Eventually, he’s released, whereupon he meets a kindly, predictably beautiful sushi waitress, Mido (Gang Hye-jung), gobbles down that poor octopus and proves that he wields a mean hammer. In time, he comes face to face with his anonymous tormenter, a smoothie with a smile named Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae), who gives him five days – or else! – to learn why he was imprisoned. A master of composition, Mr. Park makes some of the snazziest-looking pulp fiction going. He has an impeccable if unoriginal visual style, indebted both to the usual masters (Hitchcock, Kubrick, with a nod at Buñuel) and especially to David Fincher, whose pop nihilism and dedication to the plasticity of the medium hang heavily over this film. That generally makes “Oldboy” entertaining to watch – notwithstanding the scene in which Dae-su eats a live animal – which is a good thing, because there is not much to think about here, outside of the choreographed mayhem. The screenplay, which the director helped write, is the least of the film’s attractions; certainly the puerile, big-bang finish, which flashes the story back to high school and a teenage “slut,” suggests that Mr. Park knows the adolescent mindset of his target audience all too well. “Oldboy” is a good if trivial genre movie, no more, no less. There’s no denying that Mr. Park is some kind of virtuoso, but so what? So was the last guy who directed a Gap commercial. Cinematic virtuosity for its own sake, particularly as expressed through cinematography – in loop-the-loop camera work and, increasingly, in computer-assisted ornamentation – is a modern plague that threatens to bury us in shiny, meaningless movies. Historically speaking, the most interesting thing about “Oldboy” is that like so much “product” now coming out of Hollywood, it is a B movie tricked out as an A movie. Once, a film like this, predicated on extreme violence and staying within the prison house of genre rather than transcending it, would have been shot on cardboard sets with two-bit talent. It would have had its premiere in Times Square.

Sample South Korean Cinema Paper Assignment 3-page Paper Due

Directives: You may write about any topic of your choosing or mix and match any of the prompts listed below. You may write exclusively about only one or inclusively about two or all three of the films in question. Please cut and paste screen captures if they will help enrich your arguments.

Topic Suggestions:

–Form, structure: Why is Hong’s Power of Kangwon Province structured around a series of visits to Kangwon? How are the movements and behaviors of the characters in KP represented? Why does Hong choose the format of sequential, but overlapping, narratives? How, and to what effect, does he deploy the correspondences and parallelisms described above?

–One critic has claimed that Lee’s characters constitute allegories of society at large, and that the struggles of his protagonists represent a microcosm of the cultural clash imperiling the nation. Judging from Secret Sunshine–in whicha seemingly trustworthy school employee proves to be guilty of the kidnapping and murder of one of the school’s students—by what imperiling cultural clash is Lee’s protagonist embattled? What allegory of the society at large is being transacted through the characterization, interactions, and behavior of the film’s protagonist? Applying the same criteria to the characters, situations, and character interactions in Kangwon, consider what (if anything) Hong may be trying to say about Korean society at large.

–What connections can you draw about the seemingly drifting, ambling structure of Kangwon and Secret Sunshine? To what extent to these films count on their viewers to fill in what the elliptical narratives leave out?

–Though Oldboy’s audience is clearly prompted to sympathize (if not identify) with Dae-Su from the start, how are we encouraged to respond to Lee Woo-jin’s insatiable rage against him, and to the rather detached face he often puts on it? Is Woo-jin systematically displacing his own guilt to Dae-su? Is Dae-su truly guilty of the crime Woo-jin accuses him of? Which character is ultimately most responsible for Lee Soo-hah’s death? And what, finally, do you make of Dae-su’s effort to erase from his own memory the consciousness of incest at the film’s end?

–Generically speaking, the three S. Korean films in question are clearly very different: Kangwon is very much an arthouse product; Secret Sunshine verges on melodrama; and Oldboy is as extreme a violent spectacle as one could want.

HEADNOTE: JAPAN

Tetsuo: the Iron Man (dir., Shinya Tsukamoto, 1988)

FILMOGRAPHY: Shinya Tsukamoto (b. 1960

2014 Fires on the Plain

2013 Venice 70: Future Reloaded (Documentary)

2009 Tetsuo: The Bullet Man

2008 Nightmare Detective 2

2006 Nightmare Detective

2005 Haze

2004 Vital

2003 Tokage

2002 A Snake of June

1999 Sôseiji

1998 Bullet Ballet

1995 Tokyo Fist

1992 Tetsuo II: Body Hammer

1991 Hiruko the Goblin

1988 Tetsuo, the Iron Man

What genre of film is this? Shock cinema? Cyberpunk fantasy? Monster movie? Postmodern samurai? Industrial sci-fi? Associations with other films and a host of novels are abundant, ranging from David Lynch’s Eraserhead, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, The Terminator series, Edward Scissorhands, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and even Kafka’s Metamorphosis,

If we think of this film in terms of science fiction, among the immediate problems we encounter is its seeming lack of contextualization and of clearcut narrative or storyline. We can find snatches of a narrative and even of contextualization (in terms of sudden, transformative changes in postwar Japanese life), though precious little back-story. We can even distinguish what appears to be “fact” from nightmare or fantasy, though not with a great deal of assurance since the entire film “signifies” at the level of nightmare or fantasy.

===================================

Viewing Notes:

–ever escalating technology is conflated with both infectious disease and evolution: “future shock”

–the obsessive heterosexual relationship at core of Tetsuo becomes dead-end, abandoned in favor of a chaotic cyborg life whose cathartic, revolutionary anarchies remain the only thing in the film resembling the futuric or ‘reproductive’ life. At Tetsuo’s end, the cyborg’s unstoppable reproductions turn apocalyptic, and it becomes an ironically animalistic, raving hybrid poised to refute postmodernism’s easy utopias.

–T-films “as satires of anthropological and evolutionary adaptation”

alloplastic: “behaviors by which humans use their intelligences to speedily and willfully manipulate the external environment to meet their own needs”

autoplastic: “the more primitive, instinctual behaviors through which species undergo evolutions to fit the demands of the external world—such as a chameleon’s automatic, and therefore unwilling, camouflage.

— “evolution-by-prosthesis”—“pandemic prosthetic evolution”: alloplasticity, which should benefit humankind, has been robbed of its ‘wilfulness’, and human hands no longer use technology to manipulate the environment, but are manipulated by the environment when technology spins out of control.

–Metal Fetishist Speaks: “We can mutate the whole world into metal” “We can make the world rust till it crumbles” “Our love can destroy the whole fucking world.” MF speaks lines after two characters have merged into what looks like a self-propelled junk metal sculpture or tank that is traversing a residential section of Tokyo in which all houses are made of wood, and which seems totally uninhabited.

–Effect of metamorphosis: in Ovidian myths, people turned into trees or animals or birds are still sentient, still in touch with human feelings—though MF prefers to speak language of mutation: What’s the difference? In Ovid human beings willfully morph or are perversely or productively transformed into other organic shapes; in Tetsuo characters are either willfully (MF) or unwillingly mutated into junk metal. Why does MF speaks of their merger as manifestation of “love” in last pronouncement?

–construction of viewer response: disgust? unease? anxiety? excitement? Is tone comic? satirical? do we—are we meant to—feel salary man’s pain? MF’s pain ?

–try responding to film without worrying about plot or storytelling considerations; don’t try to “retell” the story or fill in its gaps; instead, respond to the film on more visceral (assault on our senses) and more formal (as act of controlled filmmaking) levels. How often and how well does Tsukamoto deploy cinematographic devices and effects, such as stop-motion effects, sequential still photography, close-ups, etc.? Note at least a dozen repetitions of car crash; punctuation of accelerated movement, fast-forwarding and fast-rewinding. How integral is the film’s soundtrack to its visual representation?

— Why in the sleek age of “clean industry” and computerization, does Tsukamoto concentrate so much on the detritus, the leftovers and spare parts of industrial civilization? How (and why) is human sexuality represented as it is? What makes the “characters” so aggressive? How do they respond to their transformations?

— Salman Rushdie wrote in 1980 that human beings are becoming more and more like machines. Is Tsukamoto suggesting the same thing in indication that the alloplastic is giving way to the autoplastic in the first Tetsuo film?

SUB HEAD: KUROSAWA KIYOSHI

Viewing Notes & 3-Page Paper Prompts

Tokyo Sonata (dir. Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 2008, 119m)

Paper Due: Tuesday, February 14

Select Filmography: Kurosawa Kiyoshi (b. 1955)

2008 Tokyo Sonata

2006 Retribution (detective thinks himself killer—horror/thriller)

2004 Doppelganger (sci fi thriller)

2003 Bright Future (features poisonous jellyfish)

2001 Pulse (dead appear as spectral computer images)

1999 Charisma (“existentialist eco-thriller” focused on a tree)

1997 Cure (serial killer)

Cast:

Teruyuki Kagawa Ryuhei Sasaki

Kyoko Koizumi Megumi Sasaki

Yu Koyanagi Takashi Sasaki

Kai Inowaki Kenji Sasaki

Haruka Igawa Kaneko-san

Kenji Tsuda Kurosu

Kazuya Kojima Kobayashi-san

Koji Yakusho Dorobo

Paper Directives:

–Your paper may be exclusively devoted to Tokyo Sonata but I’d like you also to draw on previous films and related readings whenever such a move seems instructive or pertinent. In any event, cut right to the chase. Don’t waste time on long-winded introductions. Establish your topic/argument right from the start and keep it in sustained focus throughout. You can write about anything you choose, so long as it is primarily centered on Tokyo Sonata.

Topic Suggestions:

–Japanese family values. We only have access to two families and two family settings in the film, one of which leads to a murder/suicide, the other to something seemingly restorative, possibly even redemptive. But the starting circumstances seem very alike—husband out of work; lovely, thoughtful wife kept in the dark, seemingly clueless; smart, sensitive, interesting children; very comfortable, prosperous surroundings which seem unaffected by husband’s downsizing. What’s clearly established in Sasaki family? Worried but passive wife; rebellious, fairly courageous sons; weak, resourceless, bullying, uncommunicative father. How does any of this compare with what we have seen in earlier films? How is family represented in broader terms, that is, with respect to school, workplace environments? In what ways does Kurosawa seem interested in “privileging” the wife’s situation, that is, making her and her evolution our primary sympathetic touchstone?

–Though the film is arch and clever and quietly ironic, it also is very sentimental and markedly unreal in how it resolves personal and family problems. For example, the boy is not only musically precocious but turns out to be a master musician despite never once having practiced on the piano; the wife goes off on a wild (only slightly transformative) adventure with a bumptious hipster/failed thief; the older son joins the US army (not at all impossible at the time but not quite believable for this character); the father survives a suicide attempt, returns a large wad of found money, and is still cleaning toilets for a living four months later. Despite all this, the film seems to work, even its ending (which one critic called “awe-inspiring”). How does it work? How does Kurosawa manage to finesse the arguably unreal resolutions of seemingly unresolvable problems?

–If you review the sheet I distributed on the genres of Japanese cinema, you would be hard-pressed to identify the one kind of film this is. Is it a kaiteigeki (home drama), salaryman film, tsuma mono (wives film), shakai-mono (social problem film), or nansensu (satire or farce)? Is it one of these part of the time and another the rest of the time? I noted that at roughly the 70-minute mark when Megumi is attacked by the burglar (played by the famous actor Koji Yokusho), the film radically alters its approach to its material, though it doesn’t do so in any easy to identify manner. (It may seem to slip into farce only to slip into something seemingly more existential/serious a few minutes later.) What do you make of the ambiguous, protean nature of the film’s tone and style? To what extent does its unidentifiability become one of its strengths?

–Focus on and analyze the operation of a sustained area of interest (e.g., the unemployment office, the outdoor area where the unemployed hang out); the way Kurosawa positions his characters as they walk home, approach their house, and configure themselves in relation to one another; the house itself, which is, in many respects, a picture of warmth and serenity, but frequently rattled by the noise of the train right outside its windows. Alternatively, focus on one or more character sets—Kenji and his teachers, fellow students; Ryuhei and the unemployed architect Kurosu; Myuhei during her adventure with Dorobo—and explore how the relationship/interaction functions in relation to the film’s broader interests.

–A broader approach might be to approach the film as a critique/assessment of the state or condition of post-millennial Japan. Note, e.g., the film’s focus on Japan’s economic recession, its (literal) downsizing by Chinese business interests, the persistence of paternalistic behavior in the absence of authority (Kenji’s teacher & father, Kurosu’s pretence of being Ryuhei’s boss, etc.), unemployed young people joining the US army, the virtual “social death” of the salaryman and the “good housewife,” etc. Note also, however, how many of these social ruptures are effectively recouped by the film’s ending. (This would be a good topic to connect to earlier films.)

SUBHEAD: TAKESHI KITANO

Viewing Notes: Hana-bi/Fireworks (dir., Kitano, 1997)

SELECT FILMOGRAPHY: Takeshi Kitano (b. 1947)

Outrage Coda (2017)

Beyond Outrage (2012)

Outrage (2010)

Achilles & the Tortoise (2008)

Takeshis (2005)

Zatôichi (2003)

Dolls (2002)

Brother (2000)

Kikujirô no natsu (1999)

Hana-bi (1997) Fireworks

Kizzu ritân (1996) Kids Return (International: English title))

Sonatine (1993)

3-4 x jûgatsu (1990) Boiling Point (International: English title) (USA)

Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki (1989) Violent Cop (International: English title) (USA)

Other Works:

He was the namesake and host of Takeshi’s Castle, a silly 80s Japanese game show on which contestants are painfully eliminated through barely possible stunts and events, most taking place above pools of mud.

Cast: Fireworks

Takeshi Kitano … Yoshitaka Nishi (as ‘Beat’ Takeshi)

Kayoko Kishimoto … Miyuki, Nishi’s wife

Ren Osugi … Horibe

Susumu Terajima … Nakamura

Tetsu Watanabe … Tesuka

Hakuryu … Yakuza Hitman

Yasuei Yakushiji … Criminal

Taro Istumi … Kudo

Kenichi Yajima … Doctor

Makoto Ashikawa … Tanaka

Yuuko Daike … Tanaka’s widow

Viewing Notes:

Very unusual generic mix of police drama, yakuza film, arthouse film, and domestic tragedy; also mix of radically opposing emotional material. Film is also rendered in discontinuous mode, supplying backstory information sporadically as it moves along, “thickening” without overtly explaining gaps in narrative landscape.

Critical Comments:

–“The narrative is delivered in a spatially fractured, dislocated fashion. Kitano reveals elements of his story like puzzle pieces, disclosing information in dislocated flashbacks, forcing us to reorient ourselves within the narrative.”

–“Whatever your feelings are about the paintings in Fireworks, they articulate an intense desire to create a few similar dialectic exchanges: narrative and non-narrative, movement and stillness, photographic realism and abstraction, and (within the works themselves) animals with flowers.” Floral themes of paintings also refer directly to film’s Japanese title: hana (flower) and bi (fire).

Notes for Discussion:

–Kitano’s use of his own actor’s body: way he walks, opaque facial expression, hints of playful (and not so playful) malice, impassivity, immobility. Does K create a subjectivity from which we are alienated, or open up a void we are free to fill?

–What do you make of film’s interplay of violently kinetic movement and inaction; of sudden violence and tenderness; of brutality and beauty; of sentimentality & sadism?

–Why does Miyuki water dead flowers? How does this practice compare with what Nishi does in last moment of the film?

–What is the function of silence in the film? How does the film’s silence operate in relation to its soundtrack? What does the silence that generally obtains between Nishi and Miyuki tell us about the nature of the marriage? Is silence suggestive of void or lack, or of a fullness that wouldn’t remain full if it were spoken?

–Are we to assume that the tenderness he shows his wife and the cruelty (verging on sadism) he visits on his enemies are meant to show the disconnectedness of Nishi’s character? What else might such contrasts indicate? Do the contrasts collapse in the last moment of the film?

–How is violence choreographed and visualized in Fireworks? Is it meant to be as thrilling or titillating as it is in films of Tarantino? Or is it designed to be something different? What, e.g., is the effect of Kitano’s use of slow motion?

–What function do Horibe’s paintings serve in the overall film-narrative, particularly with respect to their fusions of plant and animal imagery? How do these fusions complement or comment on the interplay between fused body parts and fused body and metal parts in Face of Another and Tetsuo?

–What do you make of the film’s varied soundtrack? How does it work to conjure moods that variably fit and are incompatible with the action and imagery it accompanies and supplements?

Viewing Notes: Audition (dir., Takashi Miike, 1999, 115m)

Takashi Miike (1960- ): Often linked to the Asia Extreme movement but is actually wide-ranging

and unpredictable in his style and choice of subject matter. Credited with directing over 100 films, videos, and TV movies.

Select Filmography:

2017 Blade of the Immortal

2015 Yakuza Apocalypse

2014 As the Gods Will

2013 Shield of Straw

2012 Lesson of the Evil

2011 Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai

2010 13 Assassins

2009 Crows Zero II

2008 God’s Puzzle

2007 Crows Zero

2007 Detective Story

2007 Like a Dragon

2006 Waru

2004 Izo

2004 Zebraman

2003 Gozu

2002 Happiness of the Karakuris (in opening sequence a creature crawls out of a plate of soup and rips out the throat of a disturbed diner before flying off)

2001 Ichi the Killer (As sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer Kakihara searches for his missing boss he comes across Ichi, a repressed and psychotic killer who may be able to inflict levels of pain that Kakihara has only dreamed of.)

2000 The City of Lost Souls

1999 Dead or Alive

1999 Audition (can claim to be both an “alternative” feminist film and an excellent example of dominant misogyny)

1998 Blues Harp

1998 The Bird People in China

1998 Andromedia (After her sudden death a teenage girl finds her father has uploaded her mind to computer form. With a rival corporation wishing to capture her, the girl is uploaded to her boyfriend’s laptop.)

1997 Rainy Dog

1997 Young Thugs: Innocent Blood

1996 Fudoh: The New Generation (features a transsexual character who continually seeks to subvert normative gender categories by alternating his/her gender alignment)

Audition: Select Cast

Ryo Ishibashi … Shigeharu Aoyama

Eihi Shiina … Asami Yamazaki

Tetsu Sawaki … Shigehiko Aoyama

Jun Kunimura … Yasuhisa Yoshikawa

Renji Ishibashi Old man in wheelchair

Miyuki Matsuda Ryoko Aoyama

Toshie Negishi Rie

Ren Osugi … Shimada

Yuriko Hirooka Michiyo Yanagida

Misato Nakamura Misuzu Takagi

Yuuto Arima … Shigehiko as a child

Ayaka Izumi … Asami as a child

Discussion Notes:

–How do you read/respond to the starting premise of this film, of prosperous men misrepresenting the targeting of women as possible love/sex partners by making it seem as if the women are auditioning for roles in a film? Alternatively, you may consider how contemporary forms of dating do resemble the practices of auditions, though with the difference that women here are not given the power of choice exclusively held by presumably powerful men. As one critic writes, “Sitting behind a desk, presiding over 30 would-be actresses/wives, Yasuhisa and Aoyama look like royalty plucking from the rabble, and their questions cross brazenly over personal boundaries: ‘Have you ever had sex with someone you didn’t like?’ ‘Are you interested in drugs?’ ‘Did you ever want to work in the sex industry?’ No wonder most of the women look so perplexed. Will they be asked to, you know, act?”

–The best horror films often set their scenes by presenting what seem to be entirely “normal” people going about the entirely normal business of everyday life, but also offer hints of things that are either a little bit off or oddly troubling—like the ear that gets discovered in an entirely normal neighborhood on a sunny suburban day in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. What things seem off in Miike’s film that suggest that all is not as it seems to be in the widower Aoyama’s fidelity to his wife’s memory and in his attitude towards women? To what, apart from her beauty and apparent availability, does Aoyama seem to respond to in Asami?

–How does the film deploy devices like time-lapse, flashback, dream, hallucination, memory/fantasy and insert shots to unsettle our hold on the unspooling of its narrative and stage the invasion of past events on the present?

–Note early depictions of death of wife, repeated ghostings of wife, one-off sex with secretary, man in sack, sexual abuse, red-hot sticks/scarring, traumatic memory, and unusual approach to acupuncture.

HEADNOTE: CINEMA OF TAIWAN

Viewing Notes: Goodbye South, Goodbye

(1996, dir., Hou Hsao-hsien, 116m)

Cast (in alphabetical order)

Hsiang Hsi … Hsi

Kuei-Ying Hsu … Ying

Annie Shizuka Inoh … Preztel

Jack Kao … Gao/Kao

Ming Kao … Ming

Ming Lei … Kao’s Father

Pi-tung Lien … Tung

Giong Lim … Flathead

Vicky Wei … Hui

Filmography: Hou Hsiao-hsien (b. 1947)

The Assassin (2015)

Voyage du ballon rouge, Le (2007) aka Flight of the Red Balloon

Zui hao de shi guang (2005) aka Three Times

Kôhî jikô (2003) aka Café Lumière

Qianxi manbo (2001 aka Millennium Mambo

Hai shang hua (1998) aka Flowers of Shanghai

Nanguo zaijan, nanguo (1996) aka Goodbye South, Goodbye

Haonan haonu (1995) aka Good Men, Good Women

Hsimeng jensheng (1993) aka The Puppetmaster

Beiqing chengshi (1989) aka A City of Sadness

Niluohe nuer (1987) aka Daughter of the Nile

Lianlian fengchen (1986) aka Dust in the Wind

Tong nien wang shi (1985) aka A Time to Live and a Time to Die

Plot Notes

–Film moves between two settings: Taipei and Chia Yi, a country town in the South.

–Principal characters—Gao, Flathead (“Flatty”), & Pretzel—are small-time hustlers who work under the loose sponsorship of Hsi, a more successful gangster-businessman, who appears to be in the process of moving his family to Canada.

–While Gao harbors arguably big-time ambitions (he wants to open a restaurant or karaoke club in Shanghai), Flatty & Pretzel are clearly less “motivated” characters who emulate punk-stylings of Taipei hipsters.

–Gao closely linked with his father who owns a failing restaurant, and to his girlfriend, Ying, who is in process of moving to America to work in family’s real estate business; Flatty maintains loose ties to family in Chia Yi, which will prove his undoing when he insists on claims he has no capacity to enforce.

–Crucial concept: guan xi: connections, or connectedness; operates on four levels: family and kinship (e.g., Gao & father), neighbors and native-place ties (e.g. Flatty & ancestral land), non-kin relations of equivalent status (e.g., Gao’s hustler “family” to which he remains unstintingly loyal), and non-kin superior-subordinate relations (e.g., Gao’s relationship with Hsi). (Note how business interests combined with corrupt institutional ties—e.g., Flatty’s cousin’s ties to police in Chia Yi—can prove far more powerful than kinship connections, and reveal a point of rupture in guan xi. Note also that gang is temporaily “saved” by Gao’s guan xi relationship with Hsi.)

Viewing Notes:

–Hou renowned for his highly visual style, which often deploys long takes from a generally fixed camera position; also renowned, through 1993’s Puppetmaster, for his interest in period between 1949—1980 and historical reconstructions. Beginning in 1995 with Good Men, Good Womeni, Hou begins to focus his interest—and his camera—on more exclusively contemporary concerns, and on the comparatively aimless life and small-time ambitions of young people in Taiwan.

–Hou’s long takes may seem similarly aimless, but they contribute to a kind of “waiting style” that allows meaning, or at least impressions, to emerge. He doesn’t provide viewer much in the way of signposts or markers that help one to situate oneself in a specific space and time, though very careful use of soundtrack (both diegetic and non-diegetic) often provides clarification. Viewer compelled at once to “go with flow” but also to be on the alert for those signs and markers that do prove legible.

–Unlike earlier films, many of Hou’s long takes here are traveling shots, taken from back or front of trains, cars, motorcycles. Others are framed in what would appear to be a deliberately awkward manner but that nonetheless allow characters to emerge and depart without being “willed” into movement by director. Note use of filters

–Hou also splits objects of audience attention in usual ways, e.g., in one instance camera focuses on silent driver of a car (Gao) while character in the passenger seat (Flatty, whom we don’t see) speaks on cellphone. In same scene, we watch from driver’s point of view and listen in on his cellphone conversation while Flatty silently interacts with others behind glass windows of shop. Why? What’s the point or effect? How does scene resolve?

–Scenes to notice: Flatty’s refusal of invitation to drink tea with others; “Shanghai Nights” and pot-smoking; trouble with Pretzel; comparing tattoos; Gao cooking & Flatty & Pretzel waiting tables; Gao vomits & emotes; “Easy Rider” scene; Flatty & brother & parents becoming gods; Flatty beaten up by cousin; car-wash; karoke bar and meeting of bigwigs; closing scene.

SUB HEAD: EDWARD YANG

Viewing Notes: Yi Yi (dir., Edward Yang, 2000, 173m)

FILMOGRAPHY: EDWARD YANG (1947-2007)

Yi yi (2000) … aka A One and a Two

Mahjong (1996)

Duli shidai (1994) … aka A Confucian Confusion

Guling jie shaonian sha ren shijian (1991) … aka A Brighter Summer Day

Kongbu fenzi (1986) … aka The Terroriser

Qingmei Zhuma (1985) … aka Taipei Story

Haitan de yitian (1983) … aka That Day, on the Beach

Guangyinde gushi (1982) … aka In Our Time

Credited cast:

Nien-Jen Wu…. N.J.

Elaine Jin…. Min-Min

Issei Ogata…. Ota

Kelly Lee…. Ting-Ting

Jonathan Chang…. Yang-Yang

Hsi-Sheng Chen…. Ah-Di

Su-Yun Ko…. Sherry

Shu-shen Hsiao…. Hsiao Yen

Adriene Lin…. Li-Li

Pang Chang Yu…. Fatty

Ru-Yun Tang…. Grandmother

Hsin-Yi Tseng…. Yun-Yun

Notes:

Yi, Yi supplies a very rounded representation of Taiwan New Cinema, embracing many of its characteristic themes and concerns, among them, what could be called “Asian family values,” the tensions and conflicts between different generations as well as between husbands and wives, parents and children; globalization and the erosion of traditions and traditional values; the rise and triumph of “businessism” and the linkage of business with political corruption; the intense drive for romantic connection of young people; and the complicated relations of Asians with other Asians, Taiwanese with mainland Chinese on the one hand, and with the Japanese on the other, as well as well with North America and North American values and ideas. (Yang attended university and graduate school in the USA—including USC film school—and worked in computer businesses in Seattle before returning to Taiwan.)

Setting/Situation:

–Middle-class family in Taipei. Father, N.J., in business with opportunistic former schoolmates. Irresponsible brother-in-law (Ah-Di) whose wedding to his pregnant girlfriend is the first sustained sequence in film. NJ’s wife (Min-Min) is on verge of nervous breakdown and temporarily abandons family to go off to her guru. Other significant characters: grandmother, daughter (Ting-Ting), and son (Yang-Yang), N.J.’s former girlfriend, Sherry, and Japanese businessman, Ota. (Pay close attention to N.J.’s successive encounters with Ota, and to what Ota represents [intelligence, humor, humanity, integrity], also to way they communicate [in halting English].) Note that while film begins with a wedding, it includes a birth in the middle, and ends with a death and funeral.

Some Questions to Consider:

–What’s the source of this family’s dysfunction and pain? Is NJ quite the model human being he often seems to be? Yang Yang quite the little angel?

–How do other characters in the film behave? NJ’s brother-in-law and sister in law? Ah-di’s former girlfriend? The men NJ works with? The next-door neighbors? What’s different abt NJ, Ting Ting, Yang Yang, and Ota?

–Is this meant mainly to be a family drama, or is Yang making some broader statement about Taiwan or globalization? If so, what might that be?

–What kind of business principles prevail in Taiwan’s corporate circles? What kinds of principles seem to prevail in Yang Yang’s school? What do you make of the Ata/Ota reversal? How does NJ position himself (or fail to do so) in this climate?

–Fatty, and the tragedy brewing next door, seem designed to point out by contrast either the normality or abnormality of the Jian family in contemporary Taiwan, who seem fairly naïve and innocent by comparison. Fatty makes this particularly obvious in two places, first, in his commentary on movies vs. life and later in his verbal attack on Ting-ting’s values. In his commentary on movies, Fatty also serves as a second “artist-figure” in this film, supplementing Yang-Yang’s ideas about telling and showing people things they don’t know or haven’t seen.

Additional Scenes & Subjects:

–Wedding hysterics; NJ and Sherry; Min Min and guru; Ting Ting & Lili (& Fatty)/scene in café/corner rendezvous/scene in hotel/in lobby; Lili’s Mom and her boyfriends & scandal; NJ’s office and colleagues; NJ and Ota; Ah Di and former girlfriend; Grandma’s & Ting Ting’s magic realist moment. (If you don’t buy it, what do you make of the origami?)

Stylistic Concerns:

–long takes with stationary camera (esp. in apartment); framings; use of long and medium shots (as opposed to close-ups): do these contribute to a detached or neutral POV? (How do Yang’s long takes and framings compare with Hou’s in Goodbye South?

–views of city, particularly use of mirrorings & reflections, buildings and traffic: note how often private moments in offices, even in bedrooms are “invaded” by sights and sounds of city and traffic. Also note how montage boundaries are often broken by bridging voiceovers, e.g., dialogue spoken by characters in Japan leaks into visual representations of characters walking in Taipei.

–cross-cutting of romantic episodes: Taipei & Japan, young & old

–tone: moves from comic to serious, light to heavy

HEADNOTE: THAI CINEMA

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

(dir., Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, 2010, 114m)

Select Filmography: Apitchatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970)

2021 Memoria

2015 Cemetery of Splendor

2012 Mekong Hotel

2010 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2009 Phantoms of Nabua (short)

2009 A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (short)

2006 Syndromes and a Century

2005 Ghost of Asia (short)

2005 Worldly Desires (short)

2004 Tropical Malady

2003 The Adventures of Iron Pussy

2002 Blissfully Yours

2000 Mysterious Object at Noon

Cast:

Thanapat Saisaymar … Boonmee

Jenjira Pongpas … Jen

Sakda Kaewbuadee … Tong

Natthakarn Aphaiwonk … Huay

Geerasak Kulhong … Boonsong

Wallapa Mongkolprasert … Princess

Kanokporn Tongaram … Roong

Samud Kugasang … Jaai

Viewing Notes:

–Thailand has suffered through close to a century of chronic political crises, and lately from a massive tsunami, economic setbacks, and recently reignited political violence. Yet except for one passing reference of dialogue and a brief, elusive flashback, you wouldn’t guess it from the tone, pacing, and overall sweetness of Uncle Boonmee, or, for that matter, from any of Apichatpong’s earlier films. At the same time, most commentators consider Apichatpong’s ethic and aesthetic to be quintessentially “Thai”—as if one can completely separate a culture’s ideals from its realities. Where and how does a less savory social and political reality seem to “leak” into this film? (See “Memory of Nabua,” 196-7).

–Human ghosts and “monkey ghosts” co-habit the stage of this film with living animal and human life, but their emergence does not necessarily seem to be an everyday thing. How does the film account for the entrance of the spirit world into the world of the living at precisely this moment of Boonmee’s life? How in particular does it account for the existence of “monkey ghosts” and the particular monkey ghost, Boonsong, who is Boonmee’s and Huay’s “disappeared” son?

–According to one critic, “The movie doesn’t mean anything—it simply is.” Does that formulation satisfy you after watching Uncle Boonmee? Does it mean nothing that his dead wife returns to shepherd him to death? That his possibly also “dead” son returns to assure him that he’s found a life elsewhere? That Boonmee returns to die at the place where he believes his original existence began?

–What do you make of the closing scenes of this film, particularly the scene that takes place in the motel room and involves Tong, Jen, and Jen’s daughter? How do absorbed television watching and the figures on the television screen itself play into the themes and imagery introduced earlier in the film? What in particular do you make of characters seeming to occupy two different physical spaces at the same time?

From “Ghosts in the Darkness”:

If you notice the people around you while watching a film, you will see that their behaviour is like that of ghosts, lifting up their heads to look at the moving images in front. The cinema itself is like a coffin with bodies, sitting still, as if under a spell. The moving images on the screen are camera records of events that have already taken place; they are remains of the past, strung together and called a film. In this hall of darkness, ghosts are watching ghosts (113).

Tens of thousands of years ago, when our ancestors were living in caves, they often drew on the walls of the cave, showing us how they lived their lives. It seems to be an unknown force in our blood. Looking at it like this, you could say that cinemas, whether inside or outside department stores, are our modern day caves (115).

Phantoms of Nabua Synopsis: A fluorescent tube illuminates an empty playground in the evening. Nearby a flash of light is projected on a makeshift screen. This outdoor movie is a portrait of a village repeatedly struck by lightning. As night falls, the silhouette figures of young men emerge, they are playing with a football raging with fire. They take turns kicking the ball which leaves illuminated trails in the grass. The lightning on the screen flickers amid the fire and the smoke rising from the ground. The game intensifies with each kick that sends the fireball soaring into the air. Finally the teens burn the screen and crowd around it to witness the blazing canvas, behind which is revealed the ghostly white beam of a projector. Phantoms of Nabua is part of the multi-platform Primitive project which focuses on a concept of remembrance and extinction and is set in the northeast of Thailand.

See: http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2009/phantoms

Letter to Uncle Boonmee: http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2009/a_letter_to

Interview: http://www.apengine.org/2010/04/apichatpong-weerasethakul/

Viewing Notes: Cemetery of Splendor

(dir., Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, 2015, 122m)

Select Filmography: Apitchatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970)

2021 Memoria

2015 Cemetery of Splendor

2012 Mekong Hotel

2010 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2009 Phantoms of Nabua (short)

2009 A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (short)

2006 Syndromes and a Century

2005 Ghost of Asia (short)

2005 Worldly Desires (short)

2004 Tropical Malady

2003 The Adventures of Iron Pussy

2002 Blissfully Yours

2000 Mysterious Object at Noon

Cast:

Jenjira Pongpas … Jenjira (as Jenjira Pongpas Widner)

Banlop Lomnoi … Itt

Jarinpattra Rueangram Keng

Petcharat Chaiburi … Nurse Tet

Tawatchai Buawat … The Mediator

Sujittraporn Wongsrikeaw Goddess 1

Bhattaratorn Senkraigul Goddess 2

Sakda Kaewbuadee … Teng

Pongsadhorn Lertsukon Library’s Director

Sasipim Piwansenee … Cream Hostess

Apinya Unphanlam … Singing Woman

Richard Abramson … Richard Widner

Reviewer Comment:

“Weerasethakul’s films have always been marked by their tenderness, unobtrusive rigor, and desire to splice the straightforward with the oblique, with Cemetery of Splendour perhaps the purest, most focused expression of these concerns. Yet, couched in perhaps the film’s strongest scene, he also seems to be making a typically indirect statement as to what film itself should be: a darkened auditorium, the audience standing up as one to gaze at the screen, an unstemmable flow of beautifully unfathomable images, cinema as the stuff dreams are made of” (James Lattimer). See also: https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/film-week-cemetery-splendour and

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/cemetery-of-splendour/

Viewing Notes:

–The weave of life that embraces marriage, birth, and death in Yi, Yi presents itself less in a cyclical and more in an existential manner in Cemetery of Splendor as we not only witness but at times become immersed in the conflation of waking life with dreaming and memory. There has, indeed, seldom been a film that more often encourages the kind of waking dreaming already induced in us by viewing a film in a darkened theater or screening room.

–The dreams and memories evoked in Cemetery are, often as not, deeply historically, ethnically, and religiously specific. They engage with events that either mythically or historically occurred on the site of the makeshift hospital that serves as the film’s primary setting, and also with the personal memories of Jen, Itt, and their filmmaker creator, who grew up in the surrounding town of Khon Kaen. In this sense, they may seem doubly remote to Western viewers, who need not only to suspend their disbelief but their craving for certainty, clarity, concreteness, and fact-based experience.

–The best way to approach this film, both as a viewing and critical practice, is to fasten on Jen as a somewhat skeptical but open-minded medium who serves to ground our understanding of images, dialogue, and events that seem to float free of apprehension. Jen presents herself as a physically damaged but spiritually resilient visitor to a space (the hospital) that was formerly the primary school she attended during a period (the 1950s and 1960s) of considerable violence and conflict in Thailand in general and northeastern Thailand in particular, given its proximity to Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and the anti-colonial, Cold War struggles that beset the region.

Things to Notice:

–History of hospital as former schoolhouse; physical surround of hospital grounds (bulldozer, soccer field, lake); adjoining town of Khon Kaen, with its night market, modern mall, movie theater, and outdoor aerobics classes; visit of goddesses; penis jokes; Itt’s dream of mooncakes; Jen’s sexual history; humming turbines; 6-foot tall neon lights (and their indoor and outdoor effects); cement sculptures from the Sala Keoku Temple, a park created by controversial mystic/artist Bunleua Sulilat that fuses Buddhist, Hindu, animist, and secular art styles; non-musical chairs; stories of reincarnation; propagandistic murals; cream that smells like sperm; Jen’s uneven legs and massive wound; acts of healing.

From “Ghosts in the Darkness”:

See: http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2009/phantoms

HEADNOTE: CAMBODIA

Viewing & Discussion Notes: The Missing Picture

(dir. Rithy Panh, 2014, 92m)

Select Filmography:

2013 The Missing Picture (Documentary)

2011 Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (Documentary)

2008 The Sea Wall

2007 Paper Cannot Wrap Ember (Documentary)

2005 The Burnt Theatre (Documentary)

2004 The People of Angkor (Documentary)

2003 S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (Documentary)

2000 The Land of the Wandering Souls (Documentary)

1998 One Evening After the War

1996 Bophana, une tragédie cambodgienne (Documentary)

1994 Rice People

1991 Cambodia, entre guerre et paix

Cast: Voiceover Commentary

Randal Douc … Narrator (voice)

Jean-Baptiste Phou Narrator (voice

Historical Chronology:

March, 1969: Secret U.S. bombing of Vietnamese communist bases in Cambodia begins.

1970: Marshal Lon Nol stages a coup, forcing Prince Norodom Sihanouk out of power. Sihanouk aligns himself with the Khmer Rouge, an ultra-Maoist group building up a following in the countryside

April 17, 1975: The Khmer Rouge seize Phnom Penh, completing their taking over of the country. The city’s inhabitants are forced to leave the capital, heading out to rural areas. Some 2 million people are forced out of Cambodia’s urban centers. The new government declares the start of Year Zero as it begins a forced relocation to the countryside in their drive to build their vision of an agrarian utopia. Division of population into “old people” (peasants) and “new people” (formerly city-dwelling, including monks, intellectuals, French speakers). A four-year reign of terror follows that leaves an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians–nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population– dead. Execution, disease, starvation and overwork, were the leading cause of death, according to the Documentation Centre of Cambodia.

Late 1977: Fighting breaks out between Vietnam and Cambodia

May 25, 1978: Khmer Rouge purges East Zone.

January 7, 1979: The Vietnamese take Phnom Penh, beginning 11 years of Vietnamese occupation. The Khmer Rouge move west.

1979: A genocide tribunal in Phnom Penh finds Pol Pot and Ieng Sary guilty of genocide. Neither appeared in court or served any sentence

1982: Triparty coalition government forms, consisting of Prince Sihanouk, who was exile in China, the Khmer Rouge and non-communist leader Son Sann to create the Triparty Coalition Government. Vietnam helps establish a new government led by Heng Samrin

1990: Vietnamese troops withdraw from Cambodia

October 23, 1991: Paris peace talks. A peace accord among all Cambodian parties is signed. They approve holding a national election under the supervision of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge boycott the polls and won’t demobilize their forces.

May 23-28, 1993: The U.N.-supervised elections are held. The party of one of the king’s sons, Ranariddh, wins but the Cambodian People Party sought an equal share of power. Hun Sen of the CPP and Ranariddh are appointed co-prime minister. Khmer Rouge soldiers continue to wage guerrilla war.

1996: King Norodom Sihanouk pardons top cadre Ieng Sary’s genocide sentence.

1998: Pol Pot dies. Civil war ends in Cambodia

1999: Considered the end of the Khmer Rouge

Viewing Notes:

–“What I’m looking for is comprehension. I want to understand the nature of the crime, not to establish a cult of memory” (Rithy Panh).

–Lacking the usual evidence a documentarian deploys in the form of official documents, family records, etc. (because of the very events he represents), Panh ended up using artfully-crafted “clay figures set in dioramas and mixed in whatever grainy footage he could find, along with Khmer Rouge songs and speeches, dream and fantasy sequences, and a haunting original score, topping all that off with a hallucinatory, poetic, French language narration” (Larry Rohter, NYT 3-14-14).

–To what extent does the act of historical reclamation undertaken in this film also function as an act of exorcism? How does Panh approach, represent, express, repress the personal and collective traumas of the events of 1975-79 and their continuing aftermath?

–How does his creation and deployment of clay figurines instead of using live actors to re-enact events enrich and sustain both the representational aims and emotional claims of the film? How does it possibly distance viewers from visceral effects of brutalities put on display? Does there come a point when the clay figures effectively turn into individuated people?

–Strict documentarians believe that documentary film has no place for the kind of inventiveness or more fiction-oriented techniques Panh puts to work here. How would you respond to such objections? (This issue will recur in responses to our next film, Bamako, and could become the basis of a thoughtful consideration of the validity and effects of mixing and merging genres. You could also draw connections between this film and the techniques deployed in another recent film, The Act of Killing.)

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

Chris Berry & Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (2006)

Chris Berry (ed.) Chinese Films in Focus II, second revised edition (2008).

Adam Bingham. Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-bi.

Peter Brunette, Wong Kar-wai (2005)

Justin Bowyer (ed) The Cinema of Japan & Korea (2004)

Shin Chi-Yun & Julian Stringer (eds), New Korean Cinema (2005): chapters 2,3,4.

Sheila Cornelius (ed.) New Chinese Cinema: Challenging Representations (2004).

Sheldon Lu & Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh (eds), Chinese-Language Film (2005)

Darcy Paquet, New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves (2010).

Alastair Phillips & Julian Stringer (eds), Japanese Cinema: Texts & Contexts (2007)

Gary G. Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (2007

Murong Xuecun, Leave Me Alone: a Novel of Chengdu (Recommended)

Zhang Yingjin. Screening China (2002), esp., chapter 7, “Glocal City of Transnational Imaginary.”

Thomas Cartelli

EAST ASIAN CINEMA

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