The Seventh Art

March 27, 2010

The Films Of Hou Hsiao-hsien (Part 2/2)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of Japan, Cinema of Taiwan, Filmmakers | Tags: Annie Shizuka Inoh, Cafe Lumiere, Chiang Bi-Yu, Chiang Kai-Shek, Cinema of Taiwan, Fan Yang, Félix Vallotton, Good Men Good Women, Goodbye South Goodbye, Hai Shang Hua, Hao Nan Hao Nu, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Jack Kao, Juliette Binoche, Kôhî Jikô, Millennium Mambo, Nan Guo Zai Jian Nan Guo, Qi Shu, Qian Xi Man Po, Raise the Red Lantern, Simon Iteanu, Tadanobu Asano, The Flowers of Shanghai, Three Times, Yasujiro Ozu and Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zui Hao De Shi Guang |
[19] Comments

(Continued from part 1/2)

Hao Nan Hao Nu (Good Men, Good Women, 1995)

Good Men, Good Women (1995), the final part in Hou’s trilogy on Taiwanese history, could well be considered as the first in a series of highly experimental films by Hou Hsiao-hsien. Dividing the film into two time lines – one set in the Chiang Kai-Shek era of White Terror and the other in contemporary Taiwan – Hou investigates both the unifying spirit and the chasms that exist between the nation’s past, present and future. A lonesome actress Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh) is to play the role of Chiang Bi-Yu, a Taiwanese resistance fighter from the 1940’s. Ching’s confrontation with the painful history of her nation coincides with a confrontation with her own dark past, where we learn about her stint as a bar host and her affair with a man named Ah-Wei (Jack Kao), whose murder she becomes an accomplice to, for three million bucks. The betrayal of a group of loyal partisans by the very side it wished to fight for serves as an agonizing reminder of her betrayal of a man who loved and trusted her. Hou’s highly stylized direction cuts back and forth between the scenes from the past that use soft, black and white footage and those from the present, shot in a bland colour stock, both of which mingle at one point, pointedly suggesting the marriage of collective and personal histories that gives a not-so-rosy picture of the future. Good Men, Good Women is a transitional film for Hou in the way it acts as a bridge between the idea of inseparability of past and present indicated by The Puppetmaster (1993) and that of absolute isolation of the two from each other that characterizes Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996).

Nan Guo Zai Jian, Nan Guo (Goodbye South, Goodbye, 1996)

With Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), Hou seems to have bid farewell to narrative cinema for good. It is safe to declare that absolutely nothing happens in the film, for right from the first shot of the film, where we witness a bunch of blasé youngsters sitting in a train and one of them losing signal on his cellular phone, to the last one where a car carrying those people crashes to a standstill, there is simply no indication that the vicious circle that the characters are treading on will break some day. Neither their choices nor their actions seem to make any difference to the drug-addicted, gamble-driven, aimless and nihilistic lives they seem to be leading. They live for the moment, without a shred of consideration for the consequences or causes of their present actions (They open a restaurant where they end up telling the customers what they should eat!). With an absurdly exaggerated colour scheme, consisting mostly of primary colours, Hou builds the film as a string of moments, each rife with dark, brutal humour (“Did she slit her wrists again?”), that gradually reveal how a whole generation is living with neither an apparent memory of the past nor a hope for the future. Alternating between scenes of motion – trains, motorbikes and automobiles – and transit, whose destination is never once clear, and utter motionlessness, shot in dimly lit, cramped interiors, Goodbye South, Goodbye is a stark and affecting portrait of a stalemated generation whose loss of identity seems to mirror that of the nation they are living in.

Hai Shang Hua (The Flowers Of Shanghai, 1998)

Could there be a more baffling and contrasting follow up to the apparent frivolity and irresponsibility of Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) than The Flowers of Shanghai (1998), Hou’s only film to be set entirely in the pre-WW2 era? Slightly redolent of Zhang Yimou’s magnificent Raise the Red Lantern (1991), The Flowers of Shanghai, set during the turn of the nineteenth century in the brothels of Shanghai, presents us a series of seemingly endless conversations and bouts presided by men, presumably belonging to the officer class of the ruling government, who indulge themselves by patronizing the courtesans and playing drinking games on the table. Hou’s most relentless and most rigorous film till date, The Flowers of Shanghai is shot completely indoors, with carefully orchestrated actor choreography, consisting almost entirely of medium shots and with a intensely reddish lighting scheme throughout that evoke a high degree of claustrophobia and suffocation, which perhaps mirror the experience of the flower girls themselves (the exact feeling that is induced when one watches Ten (2002)). It is hard not to think of the film as a political allegory given the fact that the whole film plays out within a single, enclosed structure and the intricate way in which relationships are reduced to ideas of ownership, subscriptions and contracts. However, even if the case for political abstraction is dismissed, The Flowers of Shanghai still remains a scathing examination of power and freedom of a highly marginalized section of people living under a decidedly patriarchal structure – an exploration that remains as potent even in the most modern of times.

Qian Xi Man Po (Millennium Mambo, 2001)

Millennium Mambo (2001) arrives, at the turn of the century, as a timely reboot to Hou’s Daughter of the Nile (1987). Like the protagonist of the latter film, Ah-Sang (Fan Yang), Vicky (Qi Shu) finds herself in a stalemate of sorts, with no relationship to really hold on to, and wishes to escape into the past as a means of overcoming the abyss called future. She seems haunted by the idea of beginning anew in a new place and a new time and is fascinated by the antiquity of Hokkaido, Japan, the old people who live there and the old cinema posters that adorn its slow-clad streets. However, unlike Ah-Sang, she seems numbed by her condition so as to not show any signs of desperation for escape. There are echoes of both Tsai Ming-Liang and Wong Kar Wai in this film in its existential overtones and (yet) brimming optimism. In stark contrast to the medium-shot rigor of his previous film, Hou’s aesthetics are freewheeling and he shoots in cinema vérité format, employing a mildly accentuated colour palette and a large number of loosely focused, handheld shots and close ups that was hitherto uncharacteristic of the director. Like some of his previous films, Hou seems to be interested more in capturing the rhythm of life during a specific time period in Taiwanese history than anything else. Consequently, Hou employs a highly evocative techno soundtrack and punctuating slow motion shots that gives one the affecting feeling that these are moments of utmost transience to be cherished for eternity, much like the evanescent face imprint that Vicky leaves on snow.

Kôhî Jikô (Café Lumiére, 2003)

Café Lumiére (2003) is the kind of film that I would have expected from Jarmusch, given his preoccupation with Japan and, specifically, Ozu (No wonder he cites Hou as one of his idols). However, in retrospect, it looks like that no other director deserves making this film as much as Hou does. That is because Café Lumiére serves both as the updation of Ozu’s themes for the new century and as the next logical step in Hou’s body of work. Most minimal in terms of plot in all of Hou, Café Lumiére continues Hou’s exploration of the new generation that has been cut off from its past and that seemingly unbridgeable generation gap that exists between the members of two generations – a characteristic Ozu theme that had its cultural roots in Post-war Japan – in this post-globalization world. However, Hou examines this chasm from an outsider’s point of view, as and through a person straddling the cultures of Japan and Taiwan – a stance that permeates the whole film, tying what is quintessentially Hou to that which is quintessentially Ozu. Hou’s stylistics, too, become inseparable from the Japanese director’s as he concocts similar ground level compositions, with meticulous actor choreography filmed in long shots and separated, at times, by major ellipses. Like Jarmusch’s latest, Hou’s film is also one about transition – one without any particular destination – and he adorns the film with images of trains and railway stations. In fact, Hou’s film is the cinematic equivalent of the painting that Hajime (Tadanobu Asano) creates in the film, indicating a generation that rests within the womb of a dense network of trains, slowly bleeding.

Zui Hao De Shi Guang (Three Times, 2005)

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s most acclaimed film, Three Times (2005), brings him back to overtly political filmmaking after a hiatus of, arguably, four films. Divided into three segments – set in 1911, 1966 and 2005 in Kaohsiung, Dadaocheng and Taipei respectively – Three Times seems like a distillation of three of the director’s earlier films. Hou’s aesthetics change with the time period the film deals with (in a highly cinematic sense too). He uses a green filter, a mixture of outdoor and indoor shots and a soundtrack composed of romantic songs for the first segment, a red filter, largely medium shots filmed indoors with a static camera and a classical soundtrack for the second and a blue tinge and fluid camerawork with a number of close-ups for the third, reflecting the spirit of each age. But Hou’s film is far from a simple comparison of lives in three distinct time periods. Hou is more interested in the underlying similarities and ironies more than the apparent and inevitable differences. Like many of the director’s previous films, Three Times is an exploration of the distance between individuals, the communication gap that separates them and the ways those distances and gaps are bridged. In the bittersweet, first segment, letters and boats serve the purpose of bringing people together, with words complementing when stretches of silence aren’t enough. In the second segment, voices are entirely muted as intertitles replace conversations. In the final one, despite the infinite means of communication and commutation available, characters don’t seem to be able to connect either with each other or with their past, as they ride off in their contraptions to nowhere.

Le Voyage Du Ballon Rouge (The Flight Of The Red Balloon, 2007)

The Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) might just be Hou’s greatest accomplishment to date. Hou’s second film on foreign soil is aptly set in Paris, France – the city of arts – and takes off from Lamorisse’s childlike short The Red Balloon (1956). The latter trivia is very important and provides thematic context to Hou’s film. The balloon in Lamorisse’s film becomes a symbol of beauty and of art, abandoning a cruel world that rejects it and embracing and protecting those who recognize beauty in the mundane. Likewise, in Hou’s film, Simon (Simon Iteanu) is surrounded by a number of art forms – music, literature, photography, puppetry, cinema and painting – and mother figures – his actual mother, his nanny, his piano teacher, his “pretend sister” and, of course, the all-mysterious red balloon. Hou, evidently inspired by the city, creates a fractal of art forms around these wonderful people in the film who seem to be striving to capture instantaneous reality and achieve peace and perfection through the art forms they practice. Hou uses semi-transparent, partially reflecting surfaces and has melodious music pieces accompany the most quotidian of images to underscore both the impossibility of life to attain the utopia of art and the presence of art in everyday life, all around us (The dense, final scene of the film employs Félix Vallotton’s painting, The Ball, to highlight how art is created out of the ordinary and how it embodies a desire to overcome the imperfection of reality). When Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) asks the blind tuner if he can tune the piano back to normal, she might well have been taking about her life.

March 23, 2010

Ellipsis #3

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Ellipsis | Tags: Cinema of France, Emmanuelle Riva, Germany occupied France, Jean Pierre Melville, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Léon Morin, Léon Morin prêtre |
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Léon Morin, Prêtre (1961) (aka The Forgiven Sinner)
Jean-Pierre Melville
French

One of the two most unusual features by Jean-Pierre Melville (the other one being the incredible The Silence of the Sea (1949), also set during the German occupation of France), The Forgiven Sinner (1961), is also one of the director’s many fine films. Ingeniously mixing the flamboyance of the then nascent Nouvelle Vague, through its casting, (partial) location shoot and non-classical cutting, and the revered tradition of the European art cinema and the studio cinema of the United States, in its classical staging, expressionist lighting and production design, understated performances and non-modernist literalism, Melville, perhaps inadvertently, plays with the audience’s perception of his film. The Forgiven Sinner is set in a little town in France, towards the end of the Second World War, and tells the tale of pastor Léon Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo, whose New Wave image is cleverly subverted here), who indirectly participates in the French resistance by sheltering Jews, and a Communist woman Barny (Emmanuelle Riva) who seems to be attracted to him. What begins as a series of witty conversations between a reasonable theist and a staunch atheist gets complexly interwoven with the politics of France at large as the characters equate, in both metaphorical and concrete senses, conscious resistance to physical temptation with resistance to imperial occupation and the guilt of desire with the guilt of collaboration. Melville’s direction, however, remains non-judgmental and brilliantly keeps remarking, through a spectacular interplay of avant-garde editing and meticulous mise en scène, the ironies underlying the characters and their situations and how, in fact, Léon and Barny are both on the wrong sides.

March 20, 2010

Band Of Insiders

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Review | Tags: Aditya Chopra, Amit Sial, Anshuman Jha, Bollywood, Dibakar Banerjee, Film about films, Love Sex and Dhoka, Love Sex aur Dhoka, Love Sex aur Dhoka film review, Love Sex aur Dhoka movie review, Love Sex aur Dhoka review, Raj Kumar Yadav |
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Through The Rear Window
(Image courtesy: BigOye.com)

Let’s not make wrong assumptions. Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (2010) is not an experimental film, although it is considerably avant-garde in comparison to the existing norms of Bollywood, with its premise, non-professional casting, sound design and somewhat non-conformist grammar. The promos may have given one the idea that it is a film that works in ultra-Brechtian mode. Far from that, the film doesn’t ever breach the fourth wall, thanks to its choice of making the film appear entirely subjective (It actually isn’t as is revealed by certain shots). Another misconception the promotional ads might have given birth to is that Banerjee’s film is highly agenda-driven. This was my biggest fear too, that Banerjee might be presenting an extended, dressed-up message pertaining to mass media and reality TV. Thankfully, not considering its minor flights into Madhur Bhandarkar-ness, the film eschews making any overt statement and lets the implication of its choices speak for itself. Banerjee uses a number of clever and not-so-clever tricks to make the film straddle the zones of populist and experimental cinema, the brilliant and the banal and art and entertainment. But, perhaps, the best part about the whole venture is that it stands witness to the fact that it isn’t just because of the star or studio system that our cinema is in such a poor shape. And that good cinema can well be produced under shoestring budgets.

Love, Sex Aur Dhokha presents three stories, running for about 40 minutes each, each of which is introduced by an apt B-movie title, suggesting the highly fictional and staged nature of the segments to follow. Indeed, each of the three stories amounts to some form of performance or the other. The first segment gives us a student filmmaker, Rahul (Anshuman Jha), who idolizes Aditya Chopra and is trying to complete his diploma film that takes off from his mentor’s much loved Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995). The second part tells the story of a retail store manager, ironically named Adarsh (Raj Kumar Yadav), who is terribly pressed for money and plans to break through, not without much hesitation, by rigging up a sex scandal. And the third section gives us a television reporter, Prabhat (Amit Sial), and his aide, whom he saves from suicide, trying to blow the cover of a vulgar pop-star by setting up a sting operation. Banerjee uses the oldest trick of the new millennium to tie the three disparate stories together, using overlapping narratives and intersecting references and conversations, whose artificiality shows up at a few places, but not so much as to make the choice seem completely inorganic. In all three segments, there is at least one diegetic camera recording all the events – of Rahul’s professional camera, the CCTC cameras and Prabhat’s spy-cam – whose footage Banerjee splices and slices to form a seamless narrative.

The first segment, at first glance, seems cut off thematically from the other two. However, gradually, it reveals itself as a gateway to the other two segments, which starkly diverge from the idea the first one presents. Rahul, like the bumbling duo of Ishqiya (2010), does not understand the difference between life and art. He believes that life can proceed the same way as one of his mentor’s movies. He tries to port Bollywood culture on to his life – scribbling his beloved’s name on trees, eloping with friends’ help a la Saathiya (2002) and making late night phone calls to surprise his sweetheart. One even wonders if his real name is Rahul or if it is another one of his lame attempts at merging life with pop art. In other words, he does not realize that his life is the exact negation of the film he is making. A cut from the smiling face of Shruti within the film gives way to the image of her crying in reality. A scene in Rahul’s film is interrupted by a similar incident happening in real life. Shruti’s father turns out to be far from the generous father in his film. Rahul films his life 24×7, in order to send it to his idol some day, with a belief that it is as fairytale-like as the films he likes (there is even a kiss scene in this section that is severed from the frame in a manner characteristic of Bollywood). Rahul, eventually, pays the price for not understanding the vast chasm that exists between reality and its popular representation, an instance of which he is creating as his diploma project (I don’t understand why Banerjee feels the need to exaggerate the film within the film so much to emphasize this dichotomy. Comic relief, maybe).

[LSD Trailer]

Having established the disjunction between truth and its representation, Banerjee’s film attempts to explore the ethics of representation in the second segment of the film. Banerjee bases this part of the film fittingly in a supermarket – the temple of commodification and commerce. Characters, especially the two women in this segment, are almost always filmed standing amidst aisles filled with FMCG products, wearing clothing that is as colourful as the products themselves. One person in the mall tells us how commercially profitable the CCTV is, citing the hefty amount of money that the footage of a shootout brought. Welcome to the world of consumer capitalism, where violence and sex are commodities to be proliferated, packaged, advertised and sold. The moral conflict that Adarsh is presented with, when he has the option of switching off the CCTV system, is the quintessential moral question underlying capitalism – just how far will you go? In fact, the target is capitalism in all three segments of the film. Only that it is indicted through its powerful agents – mass media and Bollywood. Adarsh himself is a more polished and less addicted version of Rahul in the way he is unable to comprehend the difference between reality and its representation (and, hence perhaps, the gravity and possible consequences of his moral choice). In a cheeky homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964), Adarsh gloriously “performs”, in true Bollywood fashion, a fake death stunt while he frets when an actual shootout follows. The sex scene itself is filmed head on and plays out between the storeroom shelf and a curtain suggestive of a theatrical performance.

Following this segment on the ethics of representation, Banerjee takes up the tautological (and Godardian) question of representation of ethics. This third section of the film, which deals with a sting operation performed by a private news network, is, on paper, the richest segment of the film for it’s the most morally ambiguous of the three. Morally ambiguous because, unlike the other two segments, we just aren’t able to embrace any particular side or character here. The pop-star’s activities may be highly questionable and even downright immoral, but so are the methods of the news network. Each character in this segment is prostituting himself/herself in one way or the other (Of course, here too, the punching bag is capitalism). Only that the news network, the self-proclaimed keeper of truth and justice, seems licensed to do it. More than acting as a medium of announcement, this news network, as in reality, likes to work as a moral police, telling its people what is ethically right, what is wrong, when to be enraged at someone and when to cheer for some lame event. There is apparently no difference between what the news network editor does and what Adarsh does. However, there is a ray of hope that is presented in this segment in the form of (again, the aptly named) Prabhat, the least unethical person in the film and the alter ego of the director himself perhaps, who refuses to hand over any of the footage that he has shot, sacrificing fame and money for integrity.

Of course, Banerjee’s film isn’t as consistent and ambitious in presenting us with such moral ambiguity. The characters in the first two segments are mostly black and white and we are told beforehand whom to root for and whom to curse. But as such, the film has a set of ethics (evident from its editing pattern), close to that of Prabhat’s, which it staunchly adheres to, even to the point of flaunting it. The possibly sensational sex scene is dimly lit and choreographed at a considerable distance from the camera that it is completely de-eroticized. So is the case with the murder in the first segment. In all three segments, reality is manipulated to a large extent for the sake of representation – Rahul’s film, the MMS clip and the sting operation footage – with a profit motive. Although the titular love, sex and betrayal form the prime motifs in the first, second and third segments respectively, it is clear that all three elements run though all the three sections of the film in a manner that betrays much cynicism about cinema. This cynicism towards such an important medium by a filmmaker is certainly off-putting until Banerjee presents the warm epilogue to the film, where a young girl wields the camera and charmingly interviews the various characters of the film. Yes, Banerjee does seem to recognize the power of cinema in preserving life’s most precious and fleeting moments, to convert them into art and preserve them for eternity.

Rating:

March 18, 2010

Ellipsis #2

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the USA, Ellipsis | Tags: American politics in film, Capitalism, capitalism in film, Capitalism: A Love Story, Leftist cinema, Michael Moore, political films, socialist cinema |
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Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)
Michael Moore
English

Capitalism is an evil. So declares Michael Moore at the end of his latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), effectively negating its title. Even after having come to terms with the fact that Moore, as a filmmaker, is incorrigible, that he will use his images to multiply the effect of his voiceover and that he will carry on with his self-pitying, self-congratulatory brand of showmanship and provocation, Capitalism: A Love Story turned out to be a large disappoint for me (For the record, I do think that he had a strike with Bowling for Columbine (2002) and the temperature did soar with Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)). Two facets of this work prove to be the prime nails in its coffin. First of them is Moore’s largely reductive analysis of capitalism. His treatment of religion as a force that is corrupted by capitalism, instead of one that perpetrates it, betrays naïveté, at best, and hypocrisy, at worst. Perhaps, conceiving the project as a mini-series would have helped Moore build a more detailed analysis of the various elements at work. The second: Moore’s temptation for moral simplification. Moore treats all the corporations as a single, monolithic entity driven by profit motive. Instead of illustrating the flaws in the logic of the system, he comfortably resolves its participants into good and evil. Although there may be some truth to that, it is only expected of a film that works on a human level, as Moore’s film most definitely does, to explore the human dimension of both sides and discover where exactly we are going wrong. However, Moore’s film has a lot going for it, especially in the later passages which exude much welcome optimism. Unlike his antiestablishmentarian ancestor Stanley Kubrick (whose Spartacus (1960) is echoed in the opening sequence), Moore is not a cynic by any measure. Fittingly, he tells us: “I refuse to live in a country like this. And I’m not leaving.”

March 14, 2010

The Films Of Hou Hsiao-hsien (Part 1/2)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Taiwan, Filmmakers | Tags: A City of Sadness, A Summer at Grandpa's, A Time to Live and a Time to Die, All The Youthful Days, Bei qing cheng shi, Chiang Kai-Shek, Cinema of Taiwan, Daughter of the Nile, Dust in the Wind, Fan Yang, Feng Gui Lai De Ren, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, In Our Time, Kenny Bee, Li Tien-lu, Lian lian feng chen, Ni luo he nu er, Politics of Taiwan, Sandwich Man, The Boys from Fengkuei, The Green Green Grass of Home, The Puppetmaster, Tong nien wang shi, Xi meng ren sheng, Yasujiro Ozu and Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zai na he pan qing cao qing |
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Hou Hsiao-hsien
(1947-)

Director Hou Hsiao-hsien, in a 1988 New York Film Festival World Critics Poll, was voted one of three directors who would most likely shape cinema in the coming decades. He has since become one of the most respected, influential directors working in cinema today. In spite of his international renown, his films have focused exclusively on his native Taiwan, offering finely textured human dramas that deal with the subtleties of family relationships against the backdrop of the island’s turbulent, often bloody history. All of his movies deal in some manner with questions of personal and national identity, particularly, “What does it mean to be Taiwanese?“. In a country that has been colonized first by the Japanese and then by Chiang Kai-Shek’s repressive Nationalist Government, this question is pregnant with political connotations.

Hou was born to a member of the Hakka ethnic minority in southern Guangdong province in mainland China, but his parents emigrated to Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in 1949, to escape the bloodshed of the Chinese civil war. After serving in the military, Hou entered the film program at the National Taiwan College of the Arts. He graduated in 1972 and worked as a salesman until he landed a job as an assistant director and a screenwriter. In 1980, he made his directorial debut with Cute Girl, but he did not attract critical attention until The Son’s Big Doll appeared as an episode of the omnibus film Sandwich Man (1983). This film, along with another portmanteau movie, In Our Time (1982), is considered one of the first films of the New Taiwan Cinema movement, which injected a new level of sophistication and vitality into a moribund film industry previously known for martial arts spectaculars; it arose from the Foundation for the Development of Motion Picture Industry and the loosening of censorship laws in the late ’70s and was led by such young filmmakers as Hou and Edward Yang. (Bio Courtesy: All Movie Guide, Image Courtesy: Freakyflicks)

Zai Na He Pan Qing Cao Qing (The Green, Green Grass Of Home, 1983)

During the first quarter hour, The Green, Green Grass of Home (1983), undoubtedly a weak link in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s early career, seems to safely adhere to the noble-teacher-scores-over-unruly-kids-and-profoundly-changes-their-lives genre. Instead, Hou diverts the attention of the narrative from the student-teacher relationship towards the one between the kids and their parents and the romance between the teacher, played by Hong-Kong pop icon Kenny Bee, and his colleague in the primary school. There is dramatic tension in the story, which now seems uncharacteristic of the director, in the form of a environmental issue about illegal fishing in the village river, that is used to tie all the characters together in the third act. The director’s signature is barely visible and his methods seem to be in their very nascent stage. Hou shows almost none of his trademark restraint on the soundtrack, employing schlocky sentimental songs to hold attention. Of course, there is also much to take away from the film when the director is not concentrating on the star value of the film, especially when he deals with slice-of-life sequences from the children’s lives (There is a very funny sequence involving a stool test which, I’m sure, has been ripped off elsewhere). Also noteworthy is the way Hou positions his camera amidst the kids, often taking their POV of their teacher. But it is Hou’s choice of repeating certain compositions and locations throughout the film, which also presages a key technique in the director’s modus operandi, to get the audience accustomed to the film’s environment that ultimately saves the film.

Feng Gui Lai De Ren (All The Youthful Days, 1983)

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s fourth feature stands in remarkable contrast to the banality of his previous film, The Green, Green Grass of Home (1983), and should probably be considered as the first signs of a master who is to come. Tinged with nostalgia throughout, as the title would imply, All the Youthful Days presents us the lives of a bunch of rowdy youths from the town of Fengkuei, who move to the city looking for work (in a manner very reminiscent of Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996)). Although much more restrained than the director’s previous, a few of the clichés of the genre still remain. But what really sets apart the film from its predecessor is the confidence of its approach and its formal consistency that would become characteristic of the director later on. All the Youthful Days already shows the filmmaker’s need for direct sound, which he would employ a few films later, while the visual component succeeds in capturing the rhythm of life in the city and in the town with its long and drawn-out shots, restrictive framing, use of off-screen space and employment of multiple planes of action. Hou’s camera takes a detached but ever curious gaze towards its subjects as they engage in gang wars, witness the lives of their neighbours, get cheated in the city and lead a life that is as detached from the past as it is from the future. There is much understated pathos to be found in the final passages of the film, a la I Vitelloni (1953), where the friends are forced to come to terms with the fact that they have to break up and move on with their individual lives. (Republished)

Dong Dong De Jia Qi (A Summer At Grandpa’s, 1984)

A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984) is a tale of transition – from the chaotic life in the city to la dolce vita of the countryside, from the ennui of scientific modernity to the fascination with nature’s antiquity and from the blissful ignorance of childhood to the mercurial moods of pre-adolescence – and, fittingly, begins with the graduation ceremony of one of the two child protagonists of the film, who are to spend their titular summer at their grandfather’s house while their mother is to undergo a critical surgery in the city. Surely, it is not only the mother who is going to be going through a life-altering phase. The kids come across a host of alien characters and situations, including a pair of robbers and a mentally-challenged woman, that are so intricately woven into the narrative that even the adult viewer finds it increasingly difficult to locate his/her moral footing with respect to the film. A Summer at Grandpa’s is starkly redolent of Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) in the way it filters the political and moral complexities of the world though the eyes of children to paint an unsettling portrait of a society that is far from being the paradise it appears to be on the surface. Hou observes, with equal intrigue, both the carefree indulgence of the children in social games (including a hilarious turtle race) and the stark reality that interrupts these activities, as if trying to remind them that the best part of their lives is over.

Tong Nien Wang Shi (A Time to Live, A Time to Die, 1985)

Of all the early works of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, it is perhaps A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) that most warrants a comparison to the works of Ozu given its themes of separation, loss and loneliness. First of the director’s films to be set in post-WW2 period in Taiwan, the film follows a family from mainland China that moves to the south of Taiwan after the war. Hou’s film simultaneously covers three generations– represented by the grandmother, the parents and the children respectively – each of which presents a certain kind of relationship between the present and the past. Grandma believes that she is still in the mainland and keeps looking for a bridge that isn’t there. The parents spend their lives believing that all this travail is temporary (as was the case with Taiwan itself during the period) and the past will return. The children are plainly oblivious to the past, engaging themselves in petty gang wars and bumming around. In addition to the themes, it’s also Hou’s aesthetics that seem highly Ozuvian. The architecture of the family’s house looks very Japanese (whose authenticity is intact given the place and the time the film is set in) with sparse, well-ventilated living rooms and doors, windows and other furniture made of bamboo and glass. The indoor compositions are double-framed with a ground-level camera angle that recalls the respect and humility of the Japanese director. Then there are also those major and minor ellipses that punctuate the narrative to give us a sense of time passing, people departing and life drifting away.

Lian Lian Feng Chen (Dust In The Wind, 1986)

As much as Dust in the Wind (1986) takes Hou back to the dialectics between rural and urban life styles that was present in his earlier films, it deviates starkly from the ideas underlying those films. The first five minutes of the film sits alongside the very best sequences that Hou has ever filmed. The film begins with Biblical darkness after which we see a speck of brightness approaching us, gradually growing in intensity and size. We realize soon that we are on a train moving into and out of unlit tunnels regularly. As twilight strikes, a young couple alights from the train and walks into the village. The dark and foreboding clouds gradually drift over the couple’s heads as the boy escorts the girl to her house. This extremely evocative sequence sets both the tone and the themes of the film that’s to come. The boy leaves school to go the city in search of work. The girl follows suit and ends up working in a textile firm. The romance between them is palpable and so is the seemingly unbridgeable gap. Hou and screenwriter Wu Nien-Jen, on whose teenage experiences the film is based, create a tender piece of work about the inability to escape one’s socio-economic and political status to do what one wants. They build the film around (subtly ridiculous) patriarchal structures, wherein it takes nothing more than a pair of cigarettes for males to bond while the whole world seems to be conspiring against the fruition of a romance.

Ni Luo He Nu Er (Daughter Of The Nile, 1987)

Daughter of the Nile (1987) is an anomaly of sorts in Hou’s filmography considering the direction his films have hitherto been moving in. The film’s begins like a Markerian tone poem, especially resembling Level Five (1997), establishing a strange connection between Taiwan and ancient Egypt, and goes on to unfold as a Tsai-esque poem about physical and emotional loneliness in a pre-apocalyptic world. Ah-Sang (Fan Yang) is a college-going young woman living with her sister, a school going teenager, her brother, a lifelong thief, now escalating the ladders of the mafia and her grandfather. Ah-Sang tries to find some happiness in the relationships with her family and friends, but is continually hampered by the ever-increasing brutality of the world around her. She tries to escape the bleakness by imagining herself as Carol, a manga character who leaves her family and flees to ancient Egypt only to be killed at 22. The greenery and serenity of the countryside, which had till now played a significant part in Hou’s films, is completely absent as Hou replaces it with saturated primary colours exuded by the luminous advertisements of nighttime Taipei. The spacious and airy interiors of previous films give way to cramped, suffocating rooms. Surely, Ah-Sang is no better than the fish in the tank in her apartment. Even amidst this desolation, she remains hopeful of a meaningful relationship with one of her brother’s mafia friends, only to be disappointed later. These are, truly, victims of the neon god.

Bei Qing Cheng Shi (A City Of Sadness, 1989)

A City of Sadness (1989), one of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s finest films, is an ambitious and extremely poignant work that deals with the tumultuous years after the war, during which Taiwan was in the transit between Japanese occupation and communist China’s rule. The film concerns, primarily, with the four sons of the Lin family, the eldest of whom is a straightforward man running a restaurant. The second son has lost his sanity during the war, the third is reported missing and the fourth – a deaf-mute – runs a photo-studio. These are, of course, the most basic of characters among the tens of others that come and go in the film. Hou’s rhythmic and oft-repeated compositions, aided by the runtime of the film, induce such familiarity with the film that they invoke a feeling of having lived with the Lin family for a long time. A City of Sadness deals with the problem of communication, as would the later works of the director, in all its shapes and sizes. There is the communication gap between the past and the present in the form of numerous arrests of the Taiwanese by the new Chinese government. There is the cultural gap between the mainlanders and the islanders exacerbated by the difference in languages of the two counties. Then there is the most basic human gap between the deaf-mute son and the girl he is interested in, which the pair tries to bridge using written language, also flashed on-screen. As a result, A City of Sadness plays out as an elegy about agonizing socio-cultural limbos during an equally painful political limbo in Taiwanese history.

Xi Meng Ren Sheng (The Puppetmaster, 1993)

The Puppetmaster (1993), my favorite among the eight films listed here, chronicles the events in the life of a real life puppet master Li Tien-lu, from his birth to the year of Japanese surrender of Taiwan. Hou cuts back and forth between accounts narrated by Li himself, speaking directly to the camera in lengthy shots, and the fictional recreation of those events by the director as if trying to convey the amount of historical time that has passed. As Jonathan Rosenbaum notes, Li may a puppet master, but he is also a puppet himself. Right from the first significant event of his childhood, where he is prompted by his aunt to steal a few manuals, to his adolescent days, where he becomes a cash coughing machine for his father, and up to his mid life, where he does propaganda for the Japanese in Taiwan, Li is always under control of some higher authority, be it Chinese or Japanese. Of course, Li’s fate mirrors that of Taiwan – a country that was attached to strings held by the Dutch, then the Japanese and, finally, the Chinese. Furthermore, as highlighted by the long shots that dwarf the characters with respect to the landscape they are in, by the striking resemblance between puppet shows and stage performances within the film and also by a significant cut from the image of Li sitting in a dressing room, getting ready for a theatrical performance, to his present-day self, The Puppetmaster is also about people’s (specifically Taiwanese) near-complete loss of control of their own lives, courtesy the all-powerful political structure that oversees them and sweeps them along with its laws and decisions.

(To be continued…)

March 7, 2010

Ellipsis #1

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Taiwan, Ellipsis | Tags: All The Youthful Days, cinema of nostalgia, Cinema of Taiwan, Feng Gui Lai De Ren, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, The Boys from Fengkuei |
[20] Comments

Feng Gui Lai De Ren (1983) (aka All The Youthful Days)
Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Mandarin/Taiwanese

[P.S: As you might have guessed, this is a new column intended to keep this blog a bit more active between reviews (and to appease my guilt of being lazy to put up longer posts). Also, although it won’t exactly take me closer to my dream of writing something about every film I’ve seen, I think it would nevertheless help me jot down my instantaneous response to films I’ve just seen]

February 28, 2010

Awards!

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts | Tags: 2009 film awards, awards, best films of 2009, Film Awards |
[25] Comments

Now that it’s fairly clear that the Academy awards are purely a business deal, let’s talk about some real year-end recognitions now. Instead of churning out a generic should-would-wish-dark horse list for the Oscars, I would like to present my own token of appreciation to films of (strictly) 2009 that impressed me with some or all of their facets. Of course, I haven’t seen as many films from last year as I would have liked to, but I would like to think that I have missed only about a dozen should-have-seen films (Visage, Around A Small Mountain, In Comparison, Enter the Void, My Son My Son, What Have Ye Done, Ruhr, Wild Grass, Kinatay, White Material and About Elly being some of them). Furthermore, I’d like to propose a handful of changes to the usual (read: Academy’s) categories of awards:

No Supporting Actor categories: A category that’s very dubious. It’s been long since popular films have eschewed the one male protagonist-one female protagonist template. And then, who’s to decide who is supporting whom?
No separate category for Male Actors and Female Actors: What’s the argument here? That a woman brings a separate sensibility to the character and that they can’t be compared head to head? In that case, we should have such classification in every other category too. Since that’s absurd, we’ll just have one all-encompassing category: Best Actor.
No separate category for Original Screenplay and Adapted Screenplay: Is adapting a screenplay from a book or a play easier than writing a original one? Or are we looking at how the film captures the spirit of the book? What are we honoring anyway? Ditch that. Only one: Best Screenplay.
No separate categories for Make-Up, Costume Design and Art Direction: I fail to understand how these three can have independent existence. And it seems to me that the first two are a hangover from the star-studded studio era. Again, we’ll be having only one: Best Production Design.
No categories for Special Effects and Original Song: Superfluous.
No separate category for Animation films: The medium is a mere directorial choice. Why condescend?
No separate category for Documentary films: Having watched a few Herzog films, I realize that there is no boundary between fiction and documentary and that, in cinema, every fiction is a documentary and every documentary is a work of fiction, in a way,
No category for Foreign Language films: “Foreign” to whom?
A separate category for Casting: A largely ignored facet of production and an integral part of the filmmaker’s vision, Actor casting is yet to get its due recognition.
A special “For the Love of Cinema” category: A film buff’s desire and invention, these are for films that just love what they are doing and where they come from.
Three tiers for each award – denoted by the shorthand Gold, Silver and Bronze – for the Winner, Runner-up ad Second Runner-up. There may be ties within each tier which means that I just wasn’t able to select one over the other.

Without further ado, I present The Seventh Art Awards (!) for 2009:

Best Film

Gold: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
Silver: The Maid (Sebastián Silva)
Bronze: Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira)

Best Director

Gold: Manoel de Oliveira (Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl)
Silver: Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
Bronze: Claudia Llosa (The Milk of Sorrow)

Best Actor

Gold: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
Silver: Hye-ja Kim (Mother)
Bronze: Steve Evets (Looking for Eric)

Best Casting

Gold: Lars von Trier & co. (Antichrist)
Silver: Quentin Tarantino & co. (Inglourious Basterds)
Bronze: Jim Jarmusch & co. (The Limits of Control)

Best Screenplay

Gold: Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
Silver: Juan José Campanella, Eduardo Sacheri (The Secret in Their Eyes)
Bronze: Marco Bellocchio, Daniela Ceselli (Vincere) (tied with) Francis Ford Coppola (Tetro)

Best Cinematography

Gold: Mihai Malaimare Jr. (Tetro)
Silver: Christian Berger (The White Ribbon)
Bronze: Binod Pradhan (Delhi 6) (tied with) Robert Richardson (Inglourious Basterds)

Best Editing

Gold: Jay Rabinowitz (The Limits of Control)
Silver: Sally Menke (Inglourious Basterds)
Bronze: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen (A Serious Man)

Best Production Design

Gold: Eugenio Caballero (The Limits of Control)
Silver: Christian Marti (Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl)
Bronze: David Gropman (Taking Woodstock)

Best Sound Design and Mixing

Gold: Liam Egan (Samson and Delilah)
Silver: Sin Cohen, Colin Guthrie, Walter Murch, Pete Horner (Tetro)
Bronze: Paul N.J. Ottosson, Ray Beckett, Jeffrey J. Haboush (The Hurt Locker)

Best Sound Editing

Gold: Federico Esquerro, Francisco Pedemonte, Leandro de Loredo, Juan Ferro (Tetro)
Silver: Stephane Rabeau, Francis Wargnier, Caroline Reynaud, Cyrille Richard (A Prophet)
Bronze: Guray Gursel, Mustafa Durma, Danton Tanimura, Sacha Walker, Burak Topalakci (The Breath)

Best Musical Score

Gold: Osvaldo Golijov (Tetro)
Silver: Various (Inglourious Basterds)
Bronze: Alexandre Desplat (Fantastic Mr. Fox)

“For the Love of Cinema” Award

Gold: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
Silver: Vengeance (Johnnie To)
Bronze: Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola)

So what are your picks of 2009?

February 21, 2010

Flashback #74

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Yugoslavia, Flashback | Tags: Cinema of Yugoslavia, Dušan Makavejev, Eva Ras, Josip Tito, Ljubavni slučaj ili tagedija službenice PTT, Love Affair, Love Affair: or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, Man Is Not A Bird, Novi film, political films, political pornography, Ruzika Sokic, seuxuality in films, Slobadan Aligrudic, Sweet Movie, William Reich in cinema, WR: Mysteries of the Organism |
[6] Comments

Ljubavni Slucaj Ili Tragedija Sluzbenice P.T.T. (1967) (aka Love Affair, Or The Case Of The Missing Switchboard Operator)
Dušan Makavejev
Serbo-Croatian

“The threat posed to man by rats has still not been fully grasped here. Rats devour enormous quantities of food and other goods. They eat winter coats, entire libraries of books, corpses in autopsy rooms, even film stock.”

Although such hybrids tend to be heavily reductive, considering Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev’s early features as (stay with me) Godard meets Bertolucci meets Anger meets Buñuel meets Waters proves to be a fairly useful starting point for exploration. Bringing to mind Godard’s self-reflexive examination of cinematic medium, Bertolucci’s Reich influenced analytical fiction, Buñuel’s hyper-surreal interjections, Anger’s extravagant imagery and Waters’ camp outings, Makavejev’s films seem to be completely in line with the French New Wave’s iconoclastic sensibilities, which seem to have remarkably captured the revolutionary spirit of the sixties. Blending news reels, pseudo-documentaries and on-location fictional footage shot in cinema-vérité fashion, Makavejev’s features remain an essential voice of (cinematic and sociopolitical) dissent, analysis and critique of the Tito regime. Like Godard, the primary hurdle for Makavejev in this direction seems to have been the problem of cinematic representation and the consequent need for returning to zero.

His second feature, following Man Is Not A Bird (1965), Love Affair presents us the titular love affair between an Hungarian immigrant Izabela (Eva Ras, who also appears in the director’s previous film), the titular switchboard operator, and Ahmed (Slobadan Aligrudic), a Turkish immigrant, who has served in the army for a considerable amount of time, is a party worker and is currently working as a sanitation officer for the government. Punctuating the affair are instructive documentary sequences where a sexologist and a criminologist go about explaining historical and cultural aspects of sex and homicide respectively. Then there are sequences from the local morgue where a dead body is being examined for cause of death. There are also sequences of extended conversations between Izabela and her friend Ruska (Ruzika Sokic) about the various affairs they have had. To top off this seemingly immiscible collage work is a documentary track that informs us about the history and consequences of rat infestation in Yugoslavia, including a scene where an on-screen text reads an absurd poetry about rodents.

Makavejev uses an interesting flashforward-flashback structure that regularly announces the outcome of the love affair, in effect squelching the tension that could have been generated if the film had gone conventional. During the post-mortem, we see the necklace and the undergarments of the victim presented as exhibits. Makavejev immediately cuts to Izabela wearing the same. A three month old fetus is found inside the victim, following which we see Izabela going to the hospital for a pregnancy test. It is only after Ahmed is identified as the murderer that Makavejev cuts to the actual event. A Godardian bedroom scene where Ahmed admires Izabela gives way to a cold, scientific and disturbing description of her dead body. Makavejev’s intention behind employing this structure may have been mere playfulness. Or it may have been an attempt to shift our attention from specifics of the plot to the nature of the relationship between Ahmed and Izabela. But it is more likely that Makavejev employs this device to denote the Vertigo-esque inevitability of a tragic ending to this doomed love affair (The “murder” itself is visually and thematically reminiscent of the one in Hitchcock’s film).

Makavejev’s stance in this film, as in his other features of this period, seems to be that of William Reich, who was against pornography in sex and politics – a position that takes off from his ideology of free love and free-thinking. This pornography of the cinematic image is what Makavejev seems to be fighting against. His early films present themselves as attempts to work against the representation of workers and women in mass media by both (the then-popular) social realist films (in agreement with the maxim that realism does not mean reproducing reality faithfully but in showing how things really are) and Stalinist propaganda. The influence of propaganda art is visible everywhere in the film – through giant size posters of Lenin, Communist gramophone records and laudatory news reels and post card pictures – acting as a counterpoint to actuality. In Love Affair, like he did in his first feature, Makavejev continues to explore this chasm between the popular image of the worker and the truth about him (Here is an excellent essay that discusses Makavejev’s representation of the worker in Man Is Not A Bird).

One particular sequence exemplifies Makavejev’s discrediting of right-wing propaganda as nothing more than political porn. Izabela and Ahmed, after their first formal meeting, sit in her bedroom. She tells him that there is something good on television. Sipping coffee, they look towards the camera. Eschewing conventional eye-line match cut to a TV, Makavejev inserts news reels showing the Communist party destroying churches. She tells him that it is more intimate this way. They loosen up a bit. Ahmed calls Izabela a good homemaker. She places her head on his shoulders. The news reels again. A moment later they are in bed. Apart from this rendering of such Stalinist art as objects of arousal, Makavejev establishes the discrepancy between represented reality and the actual reality through his mise en scène by contrasting the joyous, dynamic, open spaces of the news reels with the empty, static and cramped apartment Ahmed and Izabela reside in. The two girls are often lost visually and aurally amidst the crowd and noise of the city. Even in the final scene, full of pathos, where Ahmed is arrested, Makavejev underscores this effacement of the individual for a faux nationalistic ideology by having exuberant Communist songs overpower Ahmed’s voice.

It seems to me, that for Makavejev, politics is sex and sex is politics. No, not on a metaphorical level, but quite literally. His films seem to present a notion that every authoritarian regime is fuelled by a distinct vision of sexuality – a possible influence of Reich, once again – and that this chauvinism/insecurity consequently shows up as the subjugation of one sex by the other. In line with that thought process, Makavejev fittingly boils down the larger picture down to sexual politics between the lead characters (Izabela looks at the camera, as she does frequently in the film, and shouts: “I didn’t sign up to be your slave”, thus opening up multiple plausible interpretations. Is she, apart from being the “everywoman”, a representative of Yugoslavia? Of represented Yugoslavia? Of cinema itself? A case could be made for each). There are lots of threads in the movie that can be neatly tied up together, I guess, only if the exact context of this film with respect to New Wave Yugoslavian cinema (Novi film) and the intricacies of the Yugoslavian politics is known. For instance, there are a number of stray slices-of-life sequences in the film that seem to serve no other purpose than to provide respite and true warmth to the couple, shielding them from the horrors of the external world. May be Makavejev wanted to avoid the criticism his earlier film received – that it was dark and pessimistic.

Love Affair begins with a quote: “Will there be a reform of man? Will the New Man retain certain old organs?” suggesting that the outward ideology of the nation may have changed, but underneath it amounts to one fascism replacing another, with one form of sexual oppression giving way to another (an idea that becomes more streamlined and incisive in WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974)). In the narrative track about the history of gray rats, the narrator explains us that these pests were let into Europe in order to get rid of the deadly black rats and that the gray ones prevailed being “stronger, tougher, and more bloodthirsty”. And that this new rat turned out to be more resilient than man. The narrator wonders “It’s still unclear who will rule the Earth in 100 years: People or rats?”. The political mapping is only too clear here. But then, that does not render Makavejev as a pure leftist leaning towards capitalism. He remains a centrist in all these early films (He presents Yugoslavia herself as straddling two ideologies as his mise en scène portrays a country in transition, borrowing politics and cultures from both sides of the world), holding both traditional capitalism and tradition Communism at a cynical, if not downright contemptuous, distance and embracing only the “individual” and his right to live and love freely.

February 16, 2010

Woody Allen Turns Critic

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts | Tags: Diane Keaton, Hollywood, Love and Death, Woody Allen |
[5] Comments

A play and its review, under a minute.

February 14, 2010

Short Films #8

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Short Films | Tags: Chris Marker, Frank Simeone, John Chapman, Junkopia, Short Films |
[5] Comments

Junkopia (1981)
Chris Marker, John Chapman, Frank Simeone
France
7 Min.

In Junkopia, Chris Marker’s filmography, which is more than a simple collection of travelogues that it appears to be, extends itself to a territory that one is tempted to call entirely alien. The short begins with a shot of a bunch of strange mechanical “beings” floating on what appears to be water. Marker and co. confirm our suspicion, that this might indeed be earth, by giving us the geographical coordinates of the place we are looking at – 37º45’ North. A slew of close ups of these “creatures”, powered by an eerie electronic soundtrack, places them on the same dais as the very many interesting people from across the world that Marker has introduced to us through the years. You almost sense them staring at you. The illusion of this post-apocalyptic, other-worldliness is once again shattered as the directors reveal the relative position (in contrast to the meaningless absoluteness of latitudes and longitudes) of this “community” as being just next to a speedy highway located in our own world, in our own time. The soundtrack becomes even more dense as excerpts from radio, satellite communication, TV programs and popular songs arrive in bits and pieces, trying to overpower each other. A shot of vehicles moving on a distant bridge like objects on a conveyor belt. The terror is registered on multiple levels. Is this how we treat things, ideas and people that we deem to be “less important” and “less beautiful”, while unanimously moving towards a pointless destination? Or is this what our entire civilization, the beauty of our arts, our present culture going to be reduced to? Haunting stuff that is perhaps only paralleled by Tsai Ming-Liang’s Fish, Underground (2001)