Let's learn about Chinese history through film! (and more)
A few weeks ago I saw the avant-garde Chinese movie to end all avant-garde Chinese movies. A few days after that, by some happy accident I happened to watch another Chinese film (this one made some 20 years earlier) that, without my planning it, informed and transformed my reading of the first film. This is the kind of thing that happens all the time when you study literature, but with film it tends to be less possible—since the older a movie is, the less likely you are to be able to track it down. Especially in the case of foreign films.
The avant-garde movie was Jia Zhangke's Mountains May Depart, a triptych of three friends from a northern mining village across three different decades (1999, 2014, 2025). The friends run the gamut of life experiences—falling in love, hearts breaking, fortunes reversing, loved ones departing this life unexpectedly—so in a sense the movie is a fairly accessible melodrama. What sets the story apart, however, is the way Jia stations it in the midst of the rapid expansion and globalization of China's economy. To visually represent the runaway transformation of his country, Jia shoots the three acts of the film in three different aspect ratios; as the years progress, the size of the frame expands in correspondence with China's broadening horizons. The extra space on screen has a second meaning though: China's expansion also pulls the friends and their families apart, both narratively and in terms of mise-en-scène. When the frame is smaller every scene is staged more intimately—with less room to spread out, the characters hover close together so they can all fit in the shot. As the movie becomes progressively more widescreen, that intimacy is rent apart as characters physically have more space between each other.
The movie has a lot to say and equally as much weird stuff going on under the hood (some scenes are shot like soap operas, others like home video outtakes; there are lots of random explosions and unexpected objects flying on and offscreen; etc.). I was really digging it all up until the third act, which shifts the action to Australia and follows the teenage son of two of the adult characters. His name is Dollar, because his dad is a raging capitalist, and he speaks truly terrible English. (Choice quote: “Sure, you're my father, but it's like Google Translate is your son!”) Verily I sat in awe at what a tremendous misfire I was bearing witness to. Yet I couldn't shake the feeling that this was a great movie all the same.
Days later I watched Zhang Yimou's To Live (1994), not because I wanted to compare it with Mountains May Depart but because I had resolved months ago to track it down at a library and watch it this spring. So I tracked it down at a library and watched it and, lo and behold, To Live is the story of a couple who endures the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune across three decades of Chinese history. Unlike Mountains, To Live is faaaaaaaaar more conventional (the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” doesn't feature prominently as a leitmotif, for one). At times it's kind of preposterous—a middle class man gambles away his life savings, house and all, and lands him, his daughter, and his pregnant wife in the poor house in 1940s China before Communism strikes and upends everything—but only insofar as storytelling coincidences go.
Had I watched only one of these movies and not the other, I would have walked away with a gauzy, half-baked appreciation of modern China and its evolution. But watching them back-to-back filled in a lot of unexpected context that informs the frighteningly fast-paced nature of China's transformation. The hardships that the family in To Live endures from the 1930s to the 1970s and the spirit of perseverance with which they bear them feed into the optimism in 1999 of the aspiring capitalists of Mountains. That optimism of course is tempered by reality and the peaks and valleys of the world economy by 2014, and in the speculative 2025 segment the damage to China's cultural and historical legacy has already been done, its next generation symbolically named after the guiding idol of the West and his knowledge of his ancestors’ language reduced to zilch.
I doubt that very many people in the West have thought to watch these movies in partnership with one another (I mean, I'm probably one of like 12 people who saw Mountains May Depart in theaters). But man do they pack a punch together.
That's the awesome thing about movies. Good ones can stand on their own, but great ones exist in conversation with those that came before and those that, hopefully, will come after.
Articles, News, and Interviews
A writer asks why there aren't more women directors represented in boutique home video labels… http://bit.ly/1RTQhCK
…and the president of the Criterion Collection offers a response: http://bit.ly/1pUf8Ql
Meet the female action heroes of 1910s Hollywood. http://theatln.tc/1Vgcxwh
Is it the documentarian's job to be an investigator, or a flaneur? http://bit.ly/1MJKG63
The excellent, Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent just broke $1 million at the U.S. box office (yes!), but foreign language film distribution in the states may still be in trouble. http://bit.ly/1RgMsdI
Sofia Coppola is remaking the Clint Eastwood Civil War western/soap opera The Beguiled with Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning. Now is probably not the time for me to admit I still haven't seen Lost in Translation. http://bit.ly/1SuUrSb
Poster of the Day
The cats of Czech and Polish movie posters. http://bit.ly/1WQ8aGZ