resurrección/ kuángyě shídài (w&d bi gan, w. zhai xiaohui)

When this film came out last year, I read some gushing reviews suggesting it was reinventing the art. In order to find out whether Bi Gan has indeed reinvented, or resurrected cinema, I came to pay my dues. What emerges is the work of a cineaste student let loose with a seemingly infinite budget. There are homages to Welles, Tarkovsky and the rest. There are set piece scenes which any cineaste would die to put together. What there isn’t is much of a story. In some ways the film’s scale seems akin to much modern Chinese cinema (Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still, the panoramic vistas of Jia Zhang-Ki, etc). Would it be too much of a reach to suggest that this reflects a culture struggling to come to terms with its new-formed grandiose status? However, Zhang-Ki’s films are rooted in the actuality of Chinese development/ expansion. Whereas Bi Gan is reaching for something altogether more poetic and pretentious, an overview of the history of cinema itself. The absence of an anchor means that, no matter how impressive the imagery, the film feels as though it drifts through a calm sea, going nowhere in particular. 

hamnet (w&d chloe zhao, w. maggie o’farrell)

Two connected thoughts on Zhao’s take on the novel.

Firstly - In The Rider and at times in Nomadland, Zhao employed what might be described as cinema verité to great effect. Naturalistic lighting, a roving, deliberately unsteady camera. Muted performances punctuated by dramatic moments. In Hamnet, she stays true to this, in spite of what must have been an inflated budget (although the CGI London riverbank scenes feel slightly low-cost). The trouble is, and perhaps this is exacerbated by coming from an English POV, cinema verité in a faux elizabethan England is always going to be a stretch. Rather than the viewer being sucked in by the style, it draws attention to everything that possesses the artifice of cinema. In a sense the nature scenes are the most effective: here the backdrop feels no more than regularly artificial. In contrast Elizabethan Stratford/ London feels like a construction, as indeed it is. The plague that is a motif and key plot diver is communicated via cinematic shorthand.  Secondly, given the presence of star names doing a lot of heavyweight acting, rather than getting lost in their story, as is the case of The Rider, one is constantly aware of the heavy-lifting the stars are doing. The naturalism is undercut and what remains is pure performance. Which also explains why Buckley was a shoe-in for the Oscar.

caught by the tides (w&d jia zhang-ke, w. jiahuan wan)

Zhang-ke’s film is, like Linklater’s Boyhood, an assemblage, cobbled together from four different eras, four different films. At the very opening, we note that the ratio is 4:3, a ratio from 2001, as women practice songs in an industrial backwater, presumably filmed on a camcorder. The images are disconnected, almost random. Where is the story? What is this film about?

The answers to these questions emerge gradually. The film is a love story, of sorts. It is also an account of the transformation of China over the course of quarter of a century. The love story takes the near mute Qiaoqiao, played by Tao Zhao, on a journey from the north to find her lover in Ganghzou. Theirs is a flawed relationship. He is selfish and obsessed by money. She steps through the ruins of a city destroyed to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, like she could be tiptoeing through the remains of their relationship. China evolves from a deep industrial hardship into a world where a robot becomes your shopping friend and can see sadness in your eyes. The relationship bobs alongside the country’s changes. There’s no happy ending, just various kinds of survival.

It struck me, watching the film, that the China I know, having never visited, is entirely filtered through the lens of Jia Zhang-ke. His vision has not so much shaped mine, as formed it. 

the rider (w&d chloé zhao)

I watched Zhao’s second film during lockdown on a small screen. At which point she might have been the most feted up-and-coming director on the planet, fresh from Oscar success and the Marvel call-up. Which, watching The Rider again, seems such a confusing career step, for someone whose art appears to be baked into the nuanced, anti-climactic possibilities of cinema. The Rider is a film where almost everything has already happened. Brady, the protagonist, has fallen off his horse and damaged his skull. Lane, his friend, has fallen off his horse and become irreversibly damaged. This is a film about coming to terms with trauma, not seeking it. As such it is obviously a wonderful corrective to the idea of the western as a proving ground for a man’s machismo. These men have proved and lost and now they have to face up to living in a world where all their aspirational values are worthless, or even suicidal. Zhao’s slow burning take on Brady’s crisis is filmed with such assurance that it makes up for the lack of action. There is an ingrained tension in the idea that he will seek to get back on the horse, but even this tension is underplayed to an extent, the filmmaker emphasising the aesthetic as much as the the dramatic elements. This is the golden hour sunset of the western and all the baggy messed-up dreams it carries with it. 

A touch of sin/ tian zhu ding (w&d jia zhang-ke)

Zhang-Ke’s magisterial film yokes complexity with simplicity, micro with macro, tragedy with comedy, violence and humour. Each of the four tales within the film employs the eternally potent dramatic tool of violence, to offer a savage X-ray of society, moving from high end hotels to scabrous street restaurants where anonymous faces slurp noodles like there’s no tomorrow. I was watching it with Mr Presno, who said at the end: But they can’t show that in China can they? How Zhang-Ke gets financing for his films remains a mystery but in many ways they give the lie to the idea of China as an overwhelmingly repressive state, in part because they are permitted to show the worst of the corruption and decadence of the new money with its communist party kickbacks. Despite being split into four parts, A Touch of Sin in many ways employs a classical narrative character framework. Each of the featured four flawed characters have to fight to find their significance within a world which reduces the individual to a part in a vast machine. Whether this is through the cathartic act of killing the bad guys, as in stories 1 and 3, or choosing a tragic end, as in story 4, or just assuming a role beyond the moral or social remit of society, as in the story 2, each character realises themselves though their capacity to enact violence. This model makes for straightforward storytelling, which is at the same time a radical critique of the society they emerge from. 

the world/ shijie (w&d jia zhang-ke)

The World is named for a theme park in Beijing which features selected wonders of the world, including Big Ben, a mini Manhattan complete with Twin Towers, (long after they have fallen), a mini Eiffel Tower as well as a Taj Mahal, a St Mark’s Square and other sundry wonders. The film follows the lives of several performers who participate in the shows staged in the theme park, where they dress up in national dress of different regions. Tao, the central character, appears as an Indian dancer and a Japanese geisha, among others. However, Tao longs to travel, and although the world is on their doorstep, few of the people who work there have ever been out of China. So Jia Zhang-Ke’s conceit takes shape: the image of a burgeoning China where the world appears to be opening up is nothing more than a simulacra. The reality is that this is a kind of prison. So far so Baudrillard. It’s also interesting to note that the film occurs just as mobile phones are starting to infiltrate the social web, another mechanism that appears to expand the world, but actually contracts it, with jealous individuals constantly asking why their partner hasn’t answered their call, using the phones as a tool to micro-manage day to day relationships.

Within this context, the film looks at the realities of the lives of these ordinary citizens, many of whom are internal immigrants, coming from rural parts of the country to participate in the economic boom. This is perhaps more typical Jia Zhang-Ke material, the struggle of its citizens to adapt to the rapidly changing face of China. What he succeeds in doing so skilfully is conjuring out of this material an overview of an entire society. By the time we reach Tao’s tragic end in a flat on an old industrial estate, a far cry from the fake glory of The World, it feels as though we have traversed the length and breadth of Chinese society, from high class karaoke joints for the elite to the desperate hotels where internal immigrants turn up when they first land in town. There are many things which make Jia Zhang-Ke one of the greatest living directors, but one of them is the sheer scale of his cinematic imagination. 

ripples of life (w&d shujun wei, w. chunlei kang)

Wherefore Chinese cinema? One opens with this question because this is how Ripples of Life begins and ends. A film crew arrive at a hotel-restaurant in an out-of-the-way town, to make a film (called Ripples of Life) about how China is changing. The film is set in a downtrodden hotel restaurant. Gu, the frustrated young mother who lives with her in-laws who run the establishment, becomes friendly with some of the crew, and for a while it looks as though this is going to be a Pygmalion narrative. Gu would be perfect for the part of the owner of the restaurant in the film, and she’s keen for a way out of her humdrum life. She gets her nails done and is roped in to try out the costume for the role. And then the real movie star arrives and her narrative is cut short, in every way. The film is structured in three parts. The second part deals with the movie’s star, who has agreed to do the film in spite of the absence of a definitive script, because it is set in her hometown. We see another side of the town, the side that has been developed. She stays in a fancy hotel and finds herself both realising she misses the town and also wants to get away. The final chapter is an extended dialogue between the director and the screenwriter, who is incapable of producing a finished draft. Their exchanges are intricate and wordy. The screenwriter has worn an Argentine Football jacket all along, and at one point the blue and white shirt. At the moment when the conflict between him and the director seems on the point of becoming irreversible, the director looks at his phone and sees that Maradona has died. Which prompts a montage sequence of all the characters, over the singing of Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina. If this sounds like a bit of a stretch, it also feels like one. Ripples of Life, with its meta premise, veers between fascinating insights into the role of women in this new China, and self-indulgent theorising. The final section of the narrative does indeed feel as though the film is emulating its narrative, with both director and writer unsure how to conclude and resorting to didacticism, although I am sure there are elements of their conversations I might not have grasped. Nevertheless, I emerged from the cinema little the wiser as to the answer of the question, wherefore Chinese cinema?

red dust (ma jian)

In times of Covid it is doubly enthralling to read travellers’ tales. We have all become the old peasants that he meets in remote corners of an awakening China, never moving more than ten miles from where we live. Red Dust is an account of the author’s travels through that country in the eighties. It opens in Beijing, where he works as a state photographer, separated from his wife and his daughter. Long-haired, reading Whitman, he belongs to a bohemian set which is under attack by the forces of law and order. His love life is a disaster, his professional life is a dangerous farce, he fears arrest, and given all this he sets off on his travels.

One of the earliest famous journeys, that of Marco Polo, was to China. It’s exoticism and sense of apartness remained intact over centuries. Ma Jian’s account of his travels around the country, his fascination with the lost tribes of China, and those who live on the edges of greater China, feel like the report of someone venturing to corners of the globe which even now remain obscure. He travels through desert, jungle and mountains, visiting the Mongolian, Burmese and Tibetan frontiers, as well as travelling down the Yellow River and then the coast. The book, split into nine chapters, is woozy. Time slips and slides. Towards the end he says that he’s been on the road for three years, but place supersedes time as he floats through geography. This is true in another sense: China of the eighties is on the brink of change. The economic transformation has already begun on the coast, near Hong Kong. Meanwhile, deep inland, poverty is still extreme. Ma Jian’s account gives a vivid portrayal of these contrasts. One wonders how much has changed in deepest Tibet, for example, where the book concludes with the spectacle of a Buddhist funeral of a 17 year old girl. 

It’s of note that the book was published in 2001, nearly two decades after the journey. These are recollections in tranquility, the writer returning to his younger self. The book is a remarkable blend of acute observation and adventure. Run-ins with the police, near drownings, encounters with an exotic poetess, dovetail with observations of poverty and ways of life that are struggling for survival. The vast quantity of ruins the writer visits (and one of the pleasures of reading this book in a digital form is the ability to look up images of places he visits), are testament to the way in which China has always been a crucible for the birth and death of entire cultures. It also contextualises the issue of cruelty and rights, from the way entire workforces of thousands were buried alive by an Emperor’s command to keep a secret, to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and finally even the cruelties of Buddhism itself, where a Lama can blandly explain that the reasons for a punishment like cutting off an arm might be attributed to sins committed in a former life. Ma Jian’s book succeeds in giving an overview of the multiple histories, religions and ways of thinking that make up the idea of the country called China. It is also, in these straightened times, a wonderful escape. We need the travellers of this world to remind us that there are other ways of thinking, other ways of seeing, other ways, even, of dying. 

an elephant sitting still (w&d hu bo)

Film and context. I’ve just read the wiki entry for Hu Bo, the film’s director, writer and editor. One paragraph instantly throws the four hours of film I watched yesterday into a different light, a prism through which this film is bound to be seen forever more. 

The film itself takes place over the course of a single day. Á la Magnolia or Amores Perros,  it interweaves the stories of four characters in a backwater Chinese city, one which has yet to reap the full benefits of China’s economic transformation. The city is post-industrial, cold, filmed with a washed-out grade, as though colour itself struggles to thrive in this environment. Over the course of four hours we participate in this fateful day, when Wei Bu accidentally kills the brother of a local gangster, Yu Cheng, who himself has witnessed a man committing suicide at the start of the film, after discovering that the gangster has slept with his partner. Death stalks the screen; sooner of later it seems its going to catch up with at least one of the protagonists. 

Four hours is a lot of screen time. The pace is wilfully slow. There are myriad shots of the back of people’s heads as they walk towards the next point in their day’s journey. The director compels us to experience the same lassitude, the same sense of creeping, omniscient despair, that his characters face. Secondary characters, parents or school staff, live in a vortex of rage or petty corruption. When the hunter Yu Cheng and hunted, Wei Bu finally meet, this despair gives way to a Beckettian humour. Both laugh bleakly together at the absurdity of the game they have been caught up in. The poetic motif of a motionless elephant, which is part of a travelling circus in another city, nearby, unites them. For both, life is like the elephant, a vast, useless alien which just sits around, provoking curiosity by the mere fact of its existence. And, of course, the film itself is also the elephant, this extended, unwieldy body of time, which seeks to be so vast that it encapsulates every aspect of these characters’ harsh lives, but does so going nowhere. It too has provoked curiosity by the mere fact of its presence, an unwieldy suicide note.

Because, I learn from Wiki, Hu Bo himself is no longer with us. He committed suicide after the film was completed. A startling fact which seems to warp the density of this movie, giving it an immortal element. The director might not walk the earth anymore, but he lives on through his art. As though it is sending a sign that the sitting elephant can and will move at some point. And when it does, be careful, because it will tread on you.

ash is purest white (w&d jia zhangke)

Jia Zhang-ke latest film is a sweeping tale which chronicles recent Chinese history through the story of Qiao, a gangster’s moll who takes the fall for him and then discovers when she emerges from five years prison that he hasn’t shown her the same loyalty. Instead he’s gone off with another woman, and in addition gone straight. As such the film is split into two parts, pre and post prison. The first part, building up to the incident where Qiao saves Bin’s life, is by far the most effective. It details how the charismatic Bin manoeuvres himself in the small but growing mining town. The film offers a vivid portrayal of a society on the point of transition, a metaphor for the country. Qiao becomes a sacrificial lamb on the altar of change. The second part is more picaresque, with the narrative having less of a sense of purpose, leading to a consciously anti-climactic finale. It feels a little bit as though the film is slipping out of the director’s grasp, in much the same way as Bin is fated to always escape the grasp of Qiao. Nevertheless, even if the film doesn’t quite live up to its promise, there’s something in the overarching vision that Jia Zhang-ke conjures which lends the film a flawed grandeur. 

dream of ding village [yan lianke]

My mother pressed this book on me. My mother and I have always had a soft-cell literary side to our relationship. Her taste and mine don't coincide all that much, but as one might expect, the influence is there. In my younger years I would steal books from her shelves: Woolf, Forster, David Garnett and the like. She always wanted the books back. Which for a long time seemed slightly petty to me, but as I got older I began to understand. A book is more than the words written within its pages. It is a tangible memorial of the time, place, reason, mood, cares and concerns adjacent to the reading of it. Which is why, although my reading has now been compelled to come to terms with the digital word, I will always be more fond of the printed one.

Anyhow, my mother belongs to one (or several) book groups in Ipswich. Most of the books they select to read fail to impress her. I gave her Onetti, which she liked, and she passed that on to the group. They hated it. She came across Dream of Ding Village via one of her many groups and as it’s the first book she has recommended via that source, I decided I ought to read it. 

I also wanted to read it because it's written by a Chinese author. For all the changes of the past thirty years, Chinese culture, if not society, still has a remote feel. There are weighty tomes about the impact of the Cultural Revolution, but the literature has yet to permeate. Lianke is credited as being a major Chinese novelist, but I'd never heard of him. 

About a hundred pages into the novel I began to wish my mother hadn't recommended it. Not because it is poorly written. The style is concise, the storytelling engaging. Because the subject matter of the book, the annihilation of a village by the transmission of Aids, is truly galling. This is a visceral, shocking book, in a way that Brett Easton Ellis, for example, could never be. Aids strikes, people fall to bits, and there is no redemption. The great disease which threatened but somehow more or less bypassed Western consciousness, finds more hospitable territory in rural China, and it doesn't let up. 

The book it might perhaps be compared to is The Plague. As in Camus' novel, there's a clear philosophical voice at work, narrating events. Lianke's narrator is a dead child. The world's cruelty has already done all it can, so nothing can surprise him. His even-handed tone as he describes the horrors visited on his village over the course of two years makes the events all that much harder to bear. 

However, above and beyond the description of the decimation of a village, the book turns into a powerful eco-critique of capitalism. The narrator's father is one of the great amoral villains of modern literature, a man for whom the acquisition of wealth vindicates any decision he makes, no matter how inhumane. He sells coffins and dead spouses as though they are apples and pears. His reward is not merely wealth, but also status and respect. Money, or the obvious capacity to exploit others' weaknesses in order to acquire wealth, becomes an almost Kantian 'good'. Ding village is stricken by more than Aids. It is also been stricken by the unconscious stupidity of the capitalist mentality. Lianke's book is a harrowing critique of the changes occurring in his native land. 

And, walking around a mutating London on a sunny Spring afternoon, a London that is cannibalising its own self in the name of commercial development, it's hard not to think that Lianke's dream is relevant to more than just China. It's relevant to everywhere where tomorrow is placed on such a high pedestal that yesterday can be instantly forgotten, its buildings and culture raised, its trees cut down, its soil turned to dust. 

24 city (d. zhang ke jia, w. zhang ke jia & yongming zhai)

My appetite for reviewing appears to be waning somewhat, so my apologies if this is at all cursory. Perhaps its the result of the political manoeuvrings which have been occuring in the UK of late. Strange to think that as a nation we once held sway over China, forcibly addicting its citizens to opium, in one of the more benevolent phases of British imperialism. Now it's China which is finally looking outwards, imposing its mark upon the world. I have no figures but its said they own most of Africa, I know they own large parts of Australia, and are no doubt active in Latin America. Over the course of what seems like no time at all they've become the world's greatest commercial power, or have initiated the process of becoming it. The transformation seems astonishing, but then one of the conundrums of ageing is that it's only as you yourself devour the years alloted to you that you begin to realise how fast history operates, and how impermanent are things that in your youth seemed to have been the same for ever.

All of which is apropos of Zhang Ke Jia's film, which is a study of an old weapons factory in the growing city of Chengdu. Zhang films the process of its destruction as it makes way for a swanky housing/ commercial development. In the course of the film he stages interviews with workers (apparently played by actors) who recount some anecdote from their past, thereby bringing the social fabric of the factory to life from its inception in the fifties up to its recent closure. These stories are counter-pointed by images of the factory as the last workers work there, engaged in the rugged labour of heavy industry. Rings of molten metal are beaten into shape, before the workers leave and the space becomes a kind of mausoleum to the China which has now slipped away.

Zhang's film is lengthy and far from an easy watch. Its pace is slow and there's little attempt to dramatise the stories, which are told by speaking heads in fixed locations (a bus, a hairdresser's etc.) Yet the film has a subtle and gradually accumulating potency, with the final subject, a pretty young buyer who owns a new VW Beetle talking about how she finally grew up when she realised she had to take responsibility for her parents. Which suggests the film's message is that the present cannot be called mature, or developed, until it learns to respect the past. The dangers and ironies of vast material growth at the expense of spiritual (for want of a better word) development are reaffirmed by the closing vision of modern Chengdu, a sprawling, characterless seeming city of glass skyscrapers and flyovers. This is a documentary of sorts, but it is also a critique of onrushing history and the way in which China is changing.

she a chinese (w&d xiaolu guo)

There's an interview in the Guardian with Guo, where she's quite scathing about the British film culture, in particular, one gets the impression, with regard to its distribution strategy and criticism. The film has a niche spot in the ICA, tucked into a season of female film directors. It's probably not an easy sell, as they say, but that doesn't quite justify the fact that its picked up so little attention.

The film itself is split into two parts. The first part occurs in China, as the young and charismatic protagonist Li Mei, played with verve by Lu Huang, moves from the countryside to one of the country's many growing cities. After various adventures, and after developing a slightly sign-posted affinity with Big Ben, she comes to London, where the second half takes place, as Li Mei struggles to get by as an illegal immigrant, collecting unlikely bedfellows along the way. I found myself getting more from the film's observational Chinese narrative than the English one which might be because of the window it offers into another culture, or might be because the relationships of the second part lend the piece a slightly more melodramatic air. Nevertheless, the film as a whole holds together, and there are many neatly observed moments which give it a quirky, unusual feel, as the director uses situation and images to build up her portrayal of Li Mei's world, in particular the snake in the Chinese river, and the anatomy class in which she partakes in London.

She, A Chinese is something of a gentle ride, and sometimes feels as though its narrative might have benefited from being a tad more ambitious. Nevertheless, Guo handles her material deftly, and it doesn't come as a surprise to learn the film had done well on the festival circuit. However, in spite of several sex scenes and the cross-culture London storylines, it probably doesn't fit into the right marketing quadrant to warrant the kind of exposure Guo might have hoped for. Which is probably something for which it should be applauded. (The fault lies not with the film but the system). It's refreshing to see a UK financed film that adopts an understated approach, casting a cool cinematic eye over one woman's journey through a globalised world.

still life (d. Jia Zhangke)

Still Life, is, in its discreet way, another dystopian fable, dealing with the end of civilisation. The film is set in the last days of a 2000 year old city, Fengjie, over an unclear period of a time. The town will be submerged as a result of the Three Gorge's dam being built on the Yangtze river, and the film follows the journeys of two unconnected characters who travel there looking for their missing spouses.

The currents of history, both personal and political, flow through the film, suggesting the rootlessness caused by the political act of destroying the city is mirrored in the lives of the citizens in the new China. The labourer Han Sanming comes to the town by river to seek a wife who left him sixteen years ago. His story is counterpointed by that of Mrs Guo, the wife of a party official, who has not seen him for two years. Her story is sandwiched within Han Sanming's, and any connections are implicit, rather than direct.

Han Sanming's is played with a kind of virile docility by the actor who shares his name. A labourer who knows little of the city but arrives and becomes a part of its destruction, working in the demolition teams. These are frequently captured on film like the still lives of the title, the labourers framed from a distance, sometimes sillhouetted. The act of labour eclipses the artifacts of labour - buildings and monuments collapse at the whim of history (Mrs Guo's contact for her husband is an archeologist, excavating ruins within soon-to-be-ruins) but human toil continues until the bitter end.

Still Life is a stately film, infused with the torpor of Sichuan Province. Nothing happens in a hurry. A cigarette lingers, a husband waits sixteen years before he decides to find his lost wife. When he does she asks him to sit down and offers him a plate of noodles. Civilisations come and go, but history is subject to the sluggish tide of human development and perception. Some of the most eye catching scenes in the film are a-historical: the monument blasting into space; and the filmmaker's whimsical depiction of a UFO, the only point of connection between the twin protagonists, suggesting that no matter what influence the historical powers of China seek to exert on history, even geography, there will always be forces beyond their control.