CINE AENIMA

The Sun also Rises (Jiang Wen, China 2007)

2009-02-06T20:23:00.001-08:00

Jiang Wen can without a doubt be considered one of the greatest Chinese filmmakers, his masterpieces Yangguang Canlan de Rizi (In the Heat of the Sun, 1994) and Guizi lai le (Devils on the Doorstep, 2000) are among the most spectacular in Asian cinema, and transcend cultural elements into universal works of art. His latest film Tai yang zhao chang sheng qi (The Sun also Rises) is very different from these, not just because of its various timelines, more incomprehensible story and strangeness in general, but also because it takes elements from other cultures and tries to combine surrealism and magical realism with traditional Chinese art.

The film´s structure can be compared to a puzzle, which means that certain elements that doesn´t make sense in the beginning have to be regarded again, and put into another context in order to fit together, although the audience inevitably has to feel confused during many scenes and must have problems to accept the odd relations between its protagonists, does Jiang Wen offer the possibility to rethink ones conclusions, and find answers where before couldn´t be found anything, in that sense transforms what first is presented as just surreal into something more meaningful.

The cinematography is astonishingly beautiful, and Gu Changwei, who worked in some of the most important Chinese films of the 1980s and 90s understands it create a colorful and dreamlike reality with his use of complex tracking shots and highly unusual lighting. “The Sun also Rises” is one of the technically most perfect Chinese films to date, and its images persistently contrast with the absurd actions of its protagonists and the unexplainable results of their actions.

“The Sun also Rises” is a recommendation for those interested in the possibilities of cinematographic and narrative experiments, as well as for those in search for new expressions of postmodern art. Jiang Wen must have certainly been aware that he would disappoint a lot of viewers with this film, but one has to accredit that he was willing to walk that line and take a risk. The audacity of an artist is mostly part of his greatness, and one has await if Jiang Wen continues his path into artistic puzzles, or if he returns to his habitual style.

Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (Aparna Sen, India 2002)

2009-02-04T17:42:00.000-08:00

Aparna Sen who was born in 1945 began her film career at the young age of 15 when she first appeared as an actress in Satyajit Ray´s episodic film “Teen Kanya” (1961), and since then she starred in over 30 mostly Bengalian films, and directed eight features of which “36 Chowringhee Lane” (1981) was her touching debut about an old widow who seemingly finds new friends in a young couple who she decides to share her apartment with. While that film was meant to show a nostalgic view of postcolonial India sets "Mr. and Mrs. Iyer" ground in a more politically troubled and dangerous modern India, and begins with newspaper reports on fights between Muslims and Hindus, the film was released in July 2002, only five months after the Godhra train burning wher Muslims attacked treaveling Hindu pilgrims took place, an event that finally led to the Gujarat violence series of communal riots between Muslim and Hindu groups.

Aparna Sen´s surprisingly mellow cinematic response to the violence in her hime country is a tender and impossible love story between a Muslim photographer and a young Hindu woman who is traveling with her child. They take a bus trip together that is disrupted by a group of Hindus which are searching for Muslim travelers in order to kill them, and Mrs. Meenakshi Iyer immediately decides to save the life of her unknown attendant, and passes him off as her husband, a dangerous concealment that soon leads them into forced isolation.

The quote “For what shall I wield a dagger, o lord? What can I plug in out of or plunge it into when you are all the world?” by 10th century Indian poet Devara Dasimayya is the central message of “Mr. and Mrs Iyer”, and leaves one with a feeling of incomprehension towards religious conflicts, if so much can be achieved through love and comprehension. As every serious filmmaker has to accept doesn´t art have the power to achieve true reconciliation, or to clean up with all the hate and dogmatism out there in the world, but as Aparna Sen understood can it arouse emotions and lets one reconsider the meaning of love and death, what makes “Mr. and Mrs. Iyer” an important statement.

The film describes with remarkable sensitivity how two strangers gradually begin to know each other, and have to give up their preconceptions towards other religious groups to find closeness and understanding. The realistic and sometimes tormented love story Aparna Sen tells is miles away from anything Hollywood could possibly invent, and never has to become direct in order to transmit the understated feelings. The director proves herself as one of the most extraordinary female filmmakers working today, alongside Naomi Kawase, Chantal Akerman, Sofia Coppola or Samira Makhmalbaf.

Voyage to Cythera (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece 1984)

2009-01-31T05:58:00.000-08:00

The film “Taxidi sta Kithira” (Votage to Cythera, 1984) can be regarded as a central piece in Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulos´ œuvre, and not because it´s his best or most innovative one which would be far from the truth, but because it stands in between his epic historical films (of which “O Thiassos” (The Travelling Players, 1975) and "O Megalexandros" (Alexander the Great, 1980) can be seen as his astonishing masterpieces) where there are almost no real protagonists but history itself is the protagonist, and his later more personal accounts on individuals from which especially “To vlemma tou Odyssea” (Ulysses´ Gaze, 1995) and the more emotional “Mia aioniotita kai mia mera” (Eternity and a Day, 1998) found international recognition.

Most of his films have been stories of a voyage with the often obvious roots in Homer´s literary work, and like Greek poet Giorgos Seferis once put it is there no possibility to be born as an artist in Greece, and not to built on the ruins of its past. The old wanderer Spyros, who returns from a 42 years absence to his home country and reunites with his wife and son is a clear descendant of the original Ulysses. The title is a translation of Charles Baudelaire´s original poem Un Voyage à Cythère which first appeared in “Les fleurs du mal” (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), and centered around the disillusion of a traveller who returns to his promied land and finds it has become a desert.

But the reworking of various themes does not always work out like it can be noticed in “Taxidi sta Kithira”, the elements Angelopoulos tries to combine become often confusing, and his reluctance to focus neither on the father nor on the son makes both figures remain as shallow and expressionless as they were at the beginning of the film. Especially the son Alexander, who works as a film director and was possibly meant as an alter ego, is a true “man without qualities” and without any action or dialogue that would characterize him. Many critics compared this film to Fellini´s 8 ½ which is based around the protagonist´s dreams and fantasies, and one can surely regard Alexander´s reencounter with his father as a fictional proyection of his thoughts into reality, but while Guido Anselmi is always connected to these fantasies through his character seems Alexander as alienate towards his own creation as the spectator towards him.

There is no doubt that the cinematic style Angelopoulos developed throughout the 1980s doesn´t primarily serve characterization, but other directors like Béla Tarr who also use extremely long takes don´t have this problem. Angelopoulos would need a couple of films more until he truly depicted his protagonists as individuals. As talking about Angelopoulos is there no real need to mention the stunning long lens photography and precise staging techniques that can be found in every one of his films, so that despite the mentioned flaws does he remain one of the predominant directors of world cinema.

Benny´s Video (Michael Haneke, Austria 1992)

2009-01-30T18:22:00.000-08:00

Michael Haneke, who had gained international fame in 1989 when his suicide drama "Der Siebente Kontinent" (The Seventh Continent, 1989) was selected at Cannes, began his career as uncompromising and radical as few directors before him, and he still remains an outstanding figure in world cinema. In his second important feature “Benny´s Video” which was meant to form part of a trilogy did he even go a step further in his denunciation of modern life in Austria, and builds an incredibly shocking story around a teenager whose life centers around media violence and estrangement, that is both an inconvenient reminder of the country´s past as an important critique on the new media age.

The actor who played Benny was then 16 years old Arno Frisch, who would later appear in Haneke´s most infamous film “Funny Games” as one of the cold-blooded killers, and his changes between juvenescent innocence and diabolical irony cause a constant uncertainty for the spectator in order to decide how to judge his actions. He plays neither a victim of society nor an apparent perpetrator, and the way media influences his daily life is the same like it does for many adolescents today, so that the question what makes Benny a murderer isn´t that easy to answer.

He is a Rodion Raskolnikoff without compassion, a Travis Bickle without frustration, or a Norman Bates without psychosis, but while Hitchcock for example put his effort in explaining why his protagonist had to act like he did and ends his film with a psychologist’s analysis of his mental condition isn´t Haneke at all interested in disburdening the spectator through giving him easy answers, and it´s in fact the problem that many “normal” teenagers can be easily identified with Benny that is meant to let the audience reflect on what is going wrong in society, and how a life built around consume can slowly let an individual loose emotions.

Michael Haneke sees a clear responsibility in working as an artist in modern society, but what makes him such an outstanding filmmaker is that he never becomes a moralist, but observes everything with a detached view, a quality that sets him alongside such important earlier directors like Robert Bresson and Kenji Mizoguchi. The comparision to Bresson is particularly crucial since both have been constantly accused of being cold and emotionless, a misjudgement that ignores the tragedies they quietly observe without attempting to exploit them in a perverted hollywood-esque grandeur.

Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland 1987)

2009-01-30T14:27:00.000-08:00

For many years Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski had exclusively worked in documentary films, which mostly centered around political and social injustice under the communist governments of PZPR (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza) party chiefs Władysław Gomułka and Edward Giereck, and his first feature films in the 1970s were a continuation of this insurgence. Although or maybe because the situation in Poland didn´t considerably improve during the 1980s and even deteriorated under Stanisław Kania did Kieslowski finally begin to distance himself from political cinema, he became more resignative towards the possibility of achieving social changes through art, and started to dedicate his work to more existential questions and human beings in general.

The original title “Przypadek” can be translated as “chance” or “accident”, an ambiguity that gets lost through its English title. The film marks an important change in Kieslowski´s career, and its protagonist whose various destinies depend on if he catches a train or not show how he slowly distances himself from politics, while first working for the Polish government and getting confronted with his own involvement in miscief, then attacking the regime, and finally deciding to keep out of everything, an development that unrelentingly leads him towards what is the main concern of Kieslowski´s later “Decalogue”-series: death.

None of Kieslowski´s Polish masterpieces got the same attention as his French co-productions and especially the Three Colors-Trilogy did, and those who associate his cinema with the bright colors of his later films will foremost be surprised by the grayish and cold tones, but soon find themselves intrigued by a more precise and authentic depiction of reality and existence whose pessimism reminds of Schopenhauer´s works, especially since Witek is never allowed to find happiness in life despite all his efforts.

Without the film´s complex structure of three different story lines wouldn´t exist later and more prominent works like “Lola rennt" (Run Lola Run, 1998), and director Tom Tykwer later even adapted the screenplay of “Heaven” on which Kieslowski worked before his death and which he was planning together with long time collaborator Krzystof Piesiewicz as another trilogy on a famous theme, Dante Alighieri´s “Divina Commedia” which has finally been completed between 2000 and 2007 by three different directors from three different countries (“Heaven” by Tom Tyker; “L´Enfer” by Danis Tanovic and “Nadzieja” by Stanilaw Mucha).

When the Tenth Month Comes (Nhat Minh Dang, Vietnam 1984)

2009-01-10T09:20:00.000-08:00

Nhat Minh Dang´s wartime melodrama Bao Gio Cho Den Thang Muoi (When the Tenth Month Comes, 1984) about the struggle of ordinary people in a small village was made nine years after the Vietnam War had ended, a national tragedy which caused the deaths of more than three million citizens, and left the country devastated. Nhat Minh Dang who was born in 1938 and had made his start in documentary films while the war was still going on decided to make his feature debut about the impact the warface had especially on indivdual human beeings, far from any kind of propaganda, and so created an astonishing tragedy about a young woman who had lost her husband in the war, and now desperately ranges between her grief and the futile intent to find love again. The tenth month in the title of the film refers to the time of forgiveness in Vietnamese culture.

The film begins with Duyen, the heroine returning from the front where she had discovered that her husband had been killed, and her decision to conceal this information from her sick father-in-law and her son to not cause them pain. She soon finds herself trapped because of the difficulty to keep on dissimulating, and finally asks a befriended school teacher called Zhang to write her letters in the name of her dead husband. The arrangement suceeds in order to tranquilize the family members, but her oppressed feelings towards Zhang begin to trouble her, and cause a feeling of guilt.

The impossibility of taking a chance on a new love become clear when the society finds out about the strong relation between Duyen and Zhang, so that the alleged lovers see themselves confronted with incomprehension and repression. The complexity of reciprocal emotions make Duyen´s situation almost insupportable, so that her only resort becomes a world of dreams and cultural myths.

When her son meets with a soldier who knew his husband does she have no more opportunities to conceal the truth, and her avowal is certainly one of the most emotional scenes in world cinema. The unusual strength of how human emotions are displayed make When the Tenth Month Comes an unforgettable experience and explain why the film had been listed by CNN as one of the 18 greatest Asian films ever made.

A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, Taiwan 1991)

2009-01-09T14:11:00.000-08:00

Edward Yang´s powerful 240 minutes epic Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian (A Brighter Summer Day, 1991) stands out as one of the greatest masterpieces of New Taiwanese Cinema. It´s an authentic document of 1960s Taiwan where an emerging Chinese subculture of expatriots who had to flee the mainland after the Communist Party of China gained control in 1949 resulted in the formation of street gangs and an outburst of violence among adolescents.

The grand scale of A Brighter Summer Day which includes various subplots and around one hundred speaking parts centers around the family life of Xiao Si´r who is a dowered teenage student with a lot of problems in school and his private life due to his unability to communicate himself adequately. His final criminal act which is based on an actual case Edward Yang witnessed while still in school reflects the incertitude of the society his lives in and the problematic phase Taiwan was going through.

The production of A Brighter Summer Day took Edward Yang years, and marks a clear assignement from his earlier urban dramas from which he himself wanted to distance himself. That he found a new inspiration in his compatriote Hou Hsiao-Hsien can be seen in the opening shot of an electric bulb which is a clear hommage to Bei qing cheng shi (A City of Sadness, 1989). Although it may even surpass Hou Hsiao-Hsien´s predecessor in terms of universality of its theme didn´t it prove as succesful and did inexplicably sink into obscurity so that there still hasn´t been released an official DVD-release.

Although it may seem likely to compare A Brighter Summer Day to The Godfather since both films are about family life and crime, would it be rather unfitting, since they are very different in scale and intention. The only film that you be possibly thought of as similar would be Jiang Wen´s masterpiece Yangguang Canlan de Rizi (In the Heat of the Sun, 1994) which focusses on those who actually stayed in China after the takeover of Mao Zedong, and witnessed the 1960s Cultural Revolution.

Ley Lines (Takashi Miike, Japan 1999)

2009-01-09T11:32:00.000-08:00

Nihon kuroshaka (Ley Lines, 1999) is the third and final part of Takashi Miike´s Black Society Trilogy which began in 1995 with his first important feature Shinjuku Triad Society and continued two years later with Rainy Dog. Especially this last film of the trilogy differs a lot from the cinema of violence which made Takashi Miike infamous, and tells in often reposeful images and the tale of young outcasts who desperately try to get through in the metropolis.

Having just finished his depiction of rural life in The Bird People of China (1998) Takashi Miike demonstrates a great sense of highlighting the anonymity of a big city, while his portray of modern Tokyo focusses primarily on the difficult lives of foreign descendants he also points out the resulting alienation as a true problem for Japanese society.

Many of Takashi Miike´s protagonists are searching for an identity, and often become committer or victim of violent acts when they understand that all attempts were in vain. Many sadomasochistic acts that we can find in later films like Audition or Ichi the Killer must be understand as an adjustment of this original attempt. Although violation is not Ley Lines dominating force one can sense the desisastrous downfall into victimization which leads to the final confrontation of the film.

The band of outsiders around whom centers the film constantly think of escape, so that one supposed paradise gets swapt for another. Like Toshiro Mifune´s character in I Live in Fear does this finally become Brazil, a main country of Japanese emigration, and a possible resort after all seems to be lost for the film´s protagonists.

Three Crowns of the Sailor (Raoul Ruiz, France 1983)

2009-01-09T07:56:00.000-08:00

Chilean director Raoul Ruiz who had to leave his home country in 1973 because of the Pinochet dictatorship began to make films in France of which the most noteable may be Diálogos de exiliados (Dialogues of the Exiled, 1975), L´Hypothèse du tableau volé (The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, 1979), Les Trois couronnes du matelot (Three Crowns of the Sailor, 1983) and La Ville des pirates (City of Pirates, 1984) , and while the political context of those films abated during the 80s they became more stylistical experiments with a strong use of depth-of-field compositions reminescent of Orson Welles´films like Citizen Kane or The Trial.

The story of Three Crowns of the Sailor begins in 1958 in a city which may be Gdansk (Poland), where a student named Tadeusz commits a murder and gains three Danish crowns. While thinking about fleeing in a train to Warsaw he meets with a drunken sailor who tells him the story of a ghost ship. The dreamlike journey of Tadeusz begins when he changes his plans and sails into a hypothetical world of Portuguese or Chilean port towns where he meets with prostitutes and eventually falls in love with a girl.

The visual approach of Three Crowns of a Sailor is rather complex, and Sacha Vierny who also worked on Alain Resnais´masterpieces Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1962) used different color shemes which changes between the black and white of the real world and the yellow or blue tones of possible dream or alternative. The travellings invented by Ruiz and his cinematographer are highly inventive and suceed in advancing the viewer into incertidude if what it sees may be a drawing of reality.

The fascination for tales from the sea which made Raoul Ruiz film Three Crowns of the Sailor and later on City of Pirates may have its derivation in stories his father who was a marine captain told him. There can also be found a lot of similarities to Chilean and Argentine fiction, as we can find narrative patterns used by José Donoso, Jorge Luis Borges or Julio Cortázar which makes Three Crowns of a Sailor a miscellaneous conjunction of Europe and Latin America.

Visitor of a Museum (Konstantin Lopushansky, Russia 1989)

2009-01-09T01:39:00.000-08:00

The films by Konstantin Lopushansky who has been Andrei Tarkovsky´s disciple and worked as an assistant on Stalker (1979) have never gained worldwide recognition and remain mostly unknown outside of Russia, which may be partly affected by his more pessimistic themes and environmental concerns for the destruction of nature and living space as a whole. His critical denouncement of modern society which had found its climax in his Pisma myortvogo cheloveka (Dead Man's Letters, 1986) set ground for his more opaque and disturbing film Posetitel muzeya (Visitor of a Museum, 1989) which also advanced to more universal concerns like the constitution of good and evil.

The dark, often grim tone of the film makes it a truly hard watch, Visitor of a Museum is a hymn to destruction and decay which doesn´t take interest in showing a more hopeful side of the world but gallops unrelentingly into the heart of darkness, where madness seems to be the last resort for mankind.

Konstantin Lopushansky worked with hundreds of genuine insane actors in order to convey his apocalyptic view of the world, and mostly filmed hardly illuminated spaces which creates a claustrophobic and frightening atmosphere. Although Visitor of a Museum wasn´t designed as a horror film does it use various shock effects to transmit its message, and often gets unpleasant.

Visitor of a Museum is not at all a pleasant watch, and may be considered as way to disturbing by many viewers. Konstantin Lopushansky is an uncompromising director who has no interest in diverting his viewers while showing his vision of the apocalipsis. One could argue that his films doesn´t have the same grace as Tarkovsky´s Stalker or many of Bergman´s films which centered around the same theme, but he is certainly an author whose work should be seen by a wider audience.

The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Taiwan 1993)

2009-01-09T00:55:00.000-08:00

Hou Hsiao-Hsien´s masterpiece from the 1990s called Hsimeng Rensheng (The Puppetmaster, 1993) centers around the life and career of Li Tienlu, a Taiwanese puppeteer, and combines his personal life with the history of Taiwan from 1909 until the end of Japanese domination of the island in 1945, very similar to his earlier film Bei quing cheng shi (A City of Sadness, 1989) which showed Taiwan´s 1940s history while focussing on the destiny of a family.

The Puppetmaster is one of director Hou Hsiao-Hsien´s most rigorous cinematic experiments as far as there are almost no camera movements in the whole movie, many scenes are played out in the darkness and important actions can be seen in the fare background. The camera often observes the action from a distance as one may be accustomed by the earlier films from Theo Angelopoulos (The Travelling Players, Alexander the Great).

While many of his films proceed in limited spaces, particularly a village or a district in town, Hou Hsiao-Hsien now uses landscape in a stylized manner to expand the dimensions of the actions and focus on the story of a voyage. His locations were found in the Fujian Province in South-East China and around Taiwan.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien manages to masterfully demonstrate the individual human being as well as the collective of history, his ruminant shots and beautiful camera angles often let The Puppetmaster appear like a canvas, and the director himself often acknowledges his influences by classical Chinese paintings. The film is a quiet meditation seldomly found in modern cinema, and a rare aestetic delight.

Himala (Ishmael Bernal, Philippines 1982)

2009-01-08T22:10:00.000-08:00

Ishmael Bernal´s most internationally acclaimed film Himala (The Miracle, 1982) is not only a milestone in Phillipine Cinema, and often compared to the importance of Lino Brocka´s Maynila sa mga kuko ng liwanag (Maynila in the Claws of the Neon, 1975), but also a brave intent to show the ambivalence of Christian belief in one of Asia´s most religious countries.

Nora Aunor gives an astonishing performance as Elsa, an intelligent young girl who claims to have seen the Holy Virgin while walking in the desert during a solar eclipse. Her statements soon cause an uproar in the whole country, transforming the quite village into a pilgrimage destination with lots of visitors from the capital Maynila.

But Elsa sees herself loosing control when tragedies begin to occur and people try to make her the culprit for the death of their beloved. She becomes desperate and already thinks about fleeing from the village, until a new miracle occurs.

Himala is certainly one of the most important films about religion and spirituality that have ever been made, and is situated somewhere between the religious approval found in the works by Carl Theodor Dreyer (Day of Wrath; Ordet) and the atheism of Luis Buñuel´s films (Viridiana; Simon of the Desert).