Actually, more might not be the right word - I don't think my previous posts on the subject are all that anxious. This time, though, I promise angst! I haven't done any real bitching about it - now that I've voted (waiting for that big screen show of Pierrot le Fou - important for positioning purposes, as I haven't seen it in a while, and my favorite Godard film didn't make the cut), I am going to whine a bit.
1) What made the list that had no business being there? First - there are quite a few recent films that, while good, seem well below the threshold for a list of the 123 or so best foreign language films ever: Amores Perros? nice film - not great; City of God? Y Tu Mama Tambien? I'm not convinced by any of them, though I don't exactly disapprove. Another, similar category, might be good films by important directors - that are nowhere near the best. I probably shouldn't complain about the Kieslowski films that were nominated - preferring his Polish films to his French ones is probably a minority opinion - but I think it's justified. Similarly - Almodovar made the list a couple times, but for the wrong films - why not Law of Desire? Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown? even Matador?
On the other hand - how does Run Lola Run keep turning up on these lists? It's okay, but really - especially when you look at some of the kinds of films that didn't make the list (specifically, Hong Kong, Japanese and Korean action films) - what is this rather dull retread doing here? Come on people! have you all forgotten The Killer? And then we get to the Embarrassments: Amalie? people still watch that? Even worse - Delicatessen probably has a case for being on the list - so not only is this a bad film, it's the wrong film! And finally, there's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon - oh dear. That needs its own entry.
2) I am not happy with the quality of Chinese films nominated. Yi Yi is deserving, Wong Kar-wei is deserving (though I think he deserved it more for Fallen Angels or Happy Together than for In the Mood for Love or Chungking Express) - but filling out the rest with two of Zhang Yimou's silly soap operas and a fake Wuxia film - God, that annoys me. I know - I could have voted differently - I have been hating myself since I hit send on the first nominating ballot for not voting for, at least, A Touch of Zen - and since seeing some of the films that did get votes, I can hate myself for not voting for Come Drink With Me, as well, plus Jackie Chan (Project A II) or John Woo (either the Killer or Bullet in the Head) or Tsui Hark (Peking Opera Blues and/or Once Upon a Time in China). For that matter, I hate myself for not voting for Platform or The River - or for Beijing Bastards, if lost causes are worth anything. Though of course by now I'm up to a 10-15 or so films I'm hating myself for not voting for (including Fallen Angels and Happy Together and The One Armed Swordsman and Swordsman II if I were honest) - and I haven't even mentioned Hou Hsiao Hsien, since I did vote for him - but did I end up splitting votes there? If I'd voted for Flowers of Shanghai, would that have gotten it on the list? oh, the guilt.
Anyway - for all the complaining, there is a kind of point here: it is - that the world has moved on. I suspect that 10 years ago, you could have gotten a couple John Woo films on a list like this, if not Hou or Yang. Hong Kong action seems to have disappeared - oddly, not quite replaced by Korean and Japanese genre films, though they get more attention these days. I have noted in the past how strange it is that Park Chan-wook films, say, don't sell out; I noticed it a couple weeks ago, at a double feature of Election/Triad Election - there was a decent crowd, but 10 years ago, every showing would have been mobbed. It's odd, and kind of disappointing.
3) This is not a complaint so much as an observation about the changes in film culture. There was a lot of gnashing of teeth around the time Bergman and Antonioni died about the Death of Film (at least art films) - you could find some evidence in this survey. What does it say about film culture today that a poll like this could exclude films from the last five years? and get almost no complaints? I don't necessarily disagree with the decision - but try to imagine how something like that would have gone over in 1967 or 1962 - when films 2-3 years old were scoring high on these kinds of polls... I get the impression that in the 60s (and possibly in the 70s as well) even jaded cynics would have admitted the chance that the next film they saw could be the Greatest Film Ever Made. Reflected in the voting - L'Aventura landing on the 1962 Sight and Sound top 10, say.
Do people feel that way now? I don't think this exactly means that good to great films are no longer being made - but I think it means that the culture of film watching, if not film making, has changed - there is no sense of a collective effort to change the art form (or the world.) In a way, I think I can relate this to my own conviction that canons should be organized more around genres and types and categories like nationality, than around individual films. I think the perceived value and importance of an individual film is driven as much by the context - by the expectations about the art form as a whole - as by the film itself. Watching those Johnny To films a couple weeks ago, enjoyable as they were, did not give me the thrill seeing a new John Woo or Ringo Lam film would have in the 90s - or (speaking of Johnny To and associates) that Too Many Ways to Be Number 1 or Expect the Unexpected gave me. (If I'd known that was the last gasp...) Are the new films as good as the older ones? better? worse? I don't know - it isn't quite important. It's that being part of a movement, part of an expectation of seeing something new and exciting, gives films extra power.
Though - to end this post - I still walk away from films actively wondering if I just saw the best film ever. Syndromes and a Century felt a bit like that - probably the only time this year. Last year it happened twice - the Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Inland Empire - which might be... and so on. But even there - my curiosity about the growing interest in Rumanian and Thai films gives those films an extra kick. And even the Lynch film gets a little push from the existence of films like Zodiac, which are also reinventing the technology of filmmaking...
Showing posts with label Asian cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Asian cinema. Show all posts
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Edward Yang
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Brigitte Lin's Eyes
The happy day is here at last: the Action Heroine Blog-a-thon, at Film Experience. Here on this humble blog, let us pay tribute to the possessor of the best stare on the planet: Ms. Brigitte Lin.
Brigitte Lin is a classic movie star. She has the kind of screen presence women had in the 30s - she's more Barbara Stanwyck or Marlene Dietrich than anyone in this day and age. She's almost a silent film star - doing almost everything with her eyes, the tilt of her head, a gesture. It's a quality filmmakers have recognized and used: it's hard to think of any recent star who has provided more iconic images that Lin: in Peking Opera Blues, in The Bride with White Hair, in Chungking Express and Ashes of Time - and especially, in the second and third installation of the Swordsman series, where she plays one of the screen's great monsters, Asia the Invincible.
Asia the Invincible starts life as the brother of one Wu, head of a highlander group called the Sun Moon Sect. The first Swordsman film is about the machinations of a host of heroes looking for the Sacred Scroll, which offers unlimited powers to whoever uses it. At the end of this, Jacky Cheung, playing (in grand style) a completely faithless sniveling courtier, seems to get away with the scroll - whether he is supposed to be Asia or not, it's Asia who has the scroll and who reads it and follows its formula for unlimited power. This requires a certain sacrifice - though since the sacrifice turns him into Brigitte Lin, it has its mitigations.
The third film of the series, The East is Red, is (almost) all Asia's, and all Lin's. But the second film, Swordsman II, gives us Asia in transition - and that gives Lin a chance to use all her skills. Swordsman II is still, really, about the swordsman - played here by Jet Li - trying to retire from martial arts but constantly dragged back in by the complications of the troubled world. Asia is the ultimate villain in the story. But one of the complications Ling (the swordsman) faces is a strange, beautiful, silent woman who shares his taste for wine - none other than Asia the Invincible, mid-transformation, her voice still a man's, her face and body, Brigitte Lin.
Silence is no impediment for Brigitte Lin. She has the presence of a silent film star - she has the eyes of a silent film star. She controls the screen with her eyes, her gestures, the way she stands. The premise of Swordsman II, Asia mid-transformation, moving back and forth between appearing as a man and a woman, with her voice separate from her body, lets her play across her range. Dressed as a man, she bullies her underlings and enemies, caresses her concubines and her weapons, all the while smirking at what she knows and they don't....
Dressed as a woman, she flirts with Jet Li, let's him seduce her and protect her, but never without maintaining complete control.
It's all in the eyes: if the crux of feminist theory (grossly simplified) is that women are made the object of the male gaze, then Lin - like Barbara Stanwyck and her peers - resists that misogyny in the most obvious way: she never relinquishes her gaze. There is no doubt about the power of Brigitte Lin's eyes - filmmakers know, and the good ones exploit it - even when they hide her eyes, they know, there is no escape - she is never just an object to be looked at, she is always the one doing the looking.
And she is in control, of herself, if nothing else. She conveys, in Swordsman II (and indeed, in most of her greatest films), a strong sense of her awareness - she conveys curiosity, her sense of the strangeness of her situation. A man becoming a woman, and a person gaining unlimited power, at the same time - she toys with herself, what her body is doing these days, what her will can do, how people react to her, she tests herself and others, and takes palpable delight in it all. Awareness, consciousness, thought, in films, is often shown as a function of a character looking - Lin looks at the world, at other people in it, and she judges them, with those eyes.
And - I haven't forgotten that this is an action heroine blogathon - and we can't forget that Asia the Invincible is, after all, a supervillain. If you go against her, she will kill you with a flick of the wrist (and that glare):
There's a lot more of that in the next film - Asia wreaking havoc. Here, she only rarely has to muster much of the power of the Sacred Scroll - more often, she just keeps doing her needlework -
- until Jet Li starts trying - then, well, she becomes wrathy....
...I suppose the rest would be a spoiler - even knowing there's another Asia the Invincible film doesn't really tell you how this one ends. But I'll risk it far enough to say that the the ending of this film, and much of the premise of the next, depends on the kind of ambivalence and curiosity (for lack of a better word) Lin gives the character. She becomes a judge of sorts - testing the world, usually, though not always, finding it lacking. (That's quite explicit in The East is Red.) When you are, in fact, invincible, you can sometimes afford to let the good guys off the hook - you can even look away for a moment (maybe the only moment of the film she isn't staring something down).... Asia is a great character: Lin, a great actress, who makes the most of it.
Brigitte Lin is a classic movie star. She has the kind of screen presence women had in the 30s - she's more Barbara Stanwyck or Marlene Dietrich than anyone in this day and age. She's almost a silent film star - doing almost everything with her eyes, the tilt of her head, a gesture. It's a quality filmmakers have recognized and used: it's hard to think of any recent star who has provided more iconic images that Lin: in Peking Opera Blues, in The Bride with White Hair, in Chungking Express and Ashes of Time - and especially, in the second and third installation of the Swordsman series, where she plays one of the screen's great monsters, Asia the Invincible.
Asia the Invincible starts life as the brother of one Wu, head of a highlander group called the Sun Moon Sect. The first Swordsman film is about the machinations of a host of heroes looking for the Sacred Scroll, which offers unlimited powers to whoever uses it. At the end of this, Jacky Cheung, playing (in grand style) a completely faithless sniveling courtier, seems to get away with the scroll - whether he is supposed to be Asia or not, it's Asia who has the scroll and who reads it and follows its formula for unlimited power. This requires a certain sacrifice - though since the sacrifice turns him into Brigitte Lin, it has its mitigations.
The third film of the series, The East is Red, is (almost) all Asia's, and all Lin's. But the second film, Swordsman II, gives us Asia in transition - and that gives Lin a chance to use all her skills. Swordsman II is still, really, about the swordsman - played here by Jet Li - trying to retire from martial arts but constantly dragged back in by the complications of the troubled world. Asia is the ultimate villain in the story. But one of the complications Ling (the swordsman) faces is a strange, beautiful, silent woman who shares his taste for wine - none other than Asia the Invincible, mid-transformation, her voice still a man's, her face and body, Brigitte Lin.
Silence is no impediment for Brigitte Lin. She has the presence of a silent film star - she has the eyes of a silent film star. She controls the screen with her eyes, her gestures, the way she stands. The premise of Swordsman II, Asia mid-transformation, moving back and forth between appearing as a man and a woman, with her voice separate from her body, lets her play across her range. Dressed as a man, she bullies her underlings and enemies, caresses her concubines and her weapons, all the while smirking at what she knows and they don't....
Dressed as a woman, she flirts with Jet Li, let's him seduce her and protect her, but never without maintaining complete control.
It's all in the eyes: if the crux of feminist theory (grossly simplified) is that women are made the object of the male gaze, then Lin - like Barbara Stanwyck and her peers - resists that misogyny in the most obvious way: she never relinquishes her gaze. There is no doubt about the power of Brigitte Lin's eyes - filmmakers know, and the good ones exploit it - even when they hide her eyes, they know, there is no escape - she is never just an object to be looked at, she is always the one doing the looking.
And she is in control, of herself, if nothing else. She conveys, in Swordsman II (and indeed, in most of her greatest films), a strong sense of her awareness - she conveys curiosity, her sense of the strangeness of her situation. A man becoming a woman, and a person gaining unlimited power, at the same time - she toys with herself, what her body is doing these days, what her will can do, how people react to her, she tests herself and others, and takes palpable delight in it all. Awareness, consciousness, thought, in films, is often shown as a function of a character looking - Lin looks at the world, at other people in it, and she judges them, with those eyes.
And - I haven't forgotten that this is an action heroine blogathon - and we can't forget that Asia the Invincible is, after all, a supervillain. If you go against her, she will kill you with a flick of the wrist (and that glare):
There's a lot more of that in the next film - Asia wreaking havoc. Here, she only rarely has to muster much of the power of the Sacred Scroll - more often, she just keeps doing her needlework -
- until Jet Li starts trying - then, well, she becomes wrathy....
...I suppose the rest would be a spoiler - even knowing there's another Asia the Invincible film doesn't really tell you how this one ends. But I'll risk it far enough to say that the the ending of this film, and much of the premise of the next, depends on the kind of ambivalence and curiosity (for lack of a better word) Lin gives the character. She becomes a judge of sorts - testing the world, usually, though not always, finding it lacking. (That's quite explicit in The East is Red.) When you are, in fact, invincible, you can sometimes afford to let the good guys off the hook - you can even look away for a moment (maybe the only moment of the film she isn't staring something down).... Asia is a great character: Lin, a great actress, who makes the most of it.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Is Being a Human Being So Disgusting?
Shohei Imamura has died. One of my favorite directors, very possibly my favorite living director over the last 7-8 years. I saw the retrospective of his films that toured in 1998, and came away more than a fan. Right up to the last thing he did, his section of the 11'09''01 film, itself a mini-masterpiece. He set it at the end of WWII -a returned soldier thinks he is a snake, crawls around, eats rats, and finally crawls off into the jungle... it struck me then as being to Imamura's career what David Lynch's piece in Lumiere and Company was - both for being a stunning short film in the middle of an inconsistent, though interesting, project - and for being a distillation of their work: "is being a human being so disgusting?" Well - no, not when some people make films like he did.
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