Goodbye Dragon Inn - Tsai Ming Liang

Tsai, newly awarded with Medal of Honor by French government, is probably unknown outside film festival circuit. The slow pace and depressing themes have made his films not quite accessible for mainstream audiences. Even in Taiwan, he has trouble raising money for his new projects regardless of how critically acclaimed his previous films are.

His very first debut in 1992, Rebels of the Neon God, set the color and tone for all the following films he made. Working with the same actors and actresses and with loosely connected but largely different plots and settings, he created a bleak and oppressive world where his protagonists yearned for connections in vain and often set out for actions that only led to self-destruction and disappointment. 

Goodbye Dragon Inn is showing in this year's international film festival and it made me crave for a drink after it was over. All the signature styles of Tsai are here: Excruciatingly long shots, scarce dialogues, the desolate and dilapidated urban setting, heavy shadows and blinking lights. Even the tropical torrential rain, his favorite metaphoric subject, was pouring through the film. Loneliness, alienation, repression, the words that have been used to describe all his other films, fit perfectly well here. Beyond all that is the same nostalgia. The nostalgia is more explicit than ever: Dragon Inn, a popular martial-art film made in 60s, was showing through the film in the background. It represents a lost past, a death of cinema, an era when heroes and fairy tales still existed.

Gay subplots appeared frequently in Tsai's films. In Vive l'amour, in one scene the main character lied underneath the bed and was ultimately turned on while his object of desire was having sex with a woman. In The River, a father went to a bathhouse only to find out he almost had sex with his own son in the dark. Goodbye Dragon Inn also has one of the most intense and comical gay cruising scenes in cinema. But I heard Tsai himself is not gay. He is fascinated with gay sex probably because it gives him the best plot devices to portrait repressed desires and despairs for human intimacy.

All of Tsai's films can be seen as various explorations of the same theme. He never seems to succumb to the pressure of commercial films and stubbornly stick to his own vision and interpretation of the modern world. In the end, he finds himself a true artist who is revealing and continues to reveal the stark reality of modernization.

Belle and Sebastian

On one of the rare sunny summer afternoons in 1998 I came across an album named “Boys with Arab Straps” in Tower Records sample stations. I don’t remember whether it was the name or the album cover that caught my attention, but the curiosity of the moment led to my longest commitment to a band. The songs were catchy and moody, and the lyrics were witty and poetic, fitting perfectly well with my own sense of being on that day: Life is full of youthful adventures and excitements, with a hint of melancholy and nostalgia hovering on the horizon.

Over the six years I collected almost every album they released in North America. In the meantime they rose from an obscure Glasgow-based indie band to something much bigger, becoming kind of cult band for certain demographic section who deviate from more mainstream taste. It even made into the list of the music junkies in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. On the other hand, I found myself listening to them less and less, and the last album in 2002, a soundtrack written for Todd Solenz’s film of the same name, was largely uninspiring and forgettable. Just when I thought they would disappear without a trace like so many others, I found their latest album in my neighborhood music store. This time I had to ask the opinions of the staff who had an all-knowing look. Was it just as good as their old stuff? Yes, he said. But definitely a happier one.

Strangely enough, I do find myself liking this album a lot, even if it is slicker, more sugary and pop than any of their previous works. One of my favorite, Sleep On a Sunbeam, has lyrics like this:

Think about a new destinationIf you think you need inspirationRoll out the map and mark it with a pinI will follow every directionJust lace up your shoes while I’m fetching a sleeping bag, a tent...Another summer’s passing byAll I need is somewhere I feel the grass beneath my feetA walk on sand, a fire I can warm my handsMy joy will be complete

What happened to me? What was gripping on me and making me so high whenever I hummed these lines? Is this the sign of me still holding on to a belief when everything is still possible and life still holds infinite possibilities? Or, is it just the travel bug affecting me?So when Belle and Sebastian came to town and performed in Warfield last night, Diego got me a ticket so that I could see them live for the first time. It was a soldout show, proving its continuing popularity. The crowd was mostly white or Asian, comfortable middle-class kids who think they are cool and smart and rebellious. The vintage and retro style were everywhere, a step up from grunge and punk and a couple of years from becoming bobos. This same crowd would feed on bands like Nick Drake, Rilo Kely, White Stripes, Neutral Milk Hotel or Postal Services, and ironically they are all my favorite bands -- maybe I am just a make-believer among this groovy bunch, trying to make up for my missing part as a disenchanted but sophisticated American youth.

There was no surprise from the performance. Stuart Murdoch, the lead singer, was charismatic and funny and stayed as the soul of the band. Since so many different kinds of instruments were used, the stage seemed to be more densely populated than usual. The best moment came when four audience, all Berkeley-looking girls, jumped onto the stage and played weird percusion instruments while dancing for a very cheerful song. Your spirit was lifted, but your soul got barely touched.

I guess I would keep on playing Dear Catastrophe Waitress whenever I need to be cheered up. But I would probably grow out of it someday soon.

Lukas Felzmann & John Priola

Photo Alliance in San Francisco is a wonderful organization for photographers or collectors to communicate and study from each other. Their lectures typically feature one or two established local photographers whom would show their works and talk about why and how they made them. The audiences usually have the chance to get a very comprehensive view of a whole body of works within 90 minutes. Last night’s lecture by Bay Area photographers John Priola and Lukas Felzmann, which kicked off a three-day workshop on book-publishing, was especially good. It brought together two very different artists in the same classroom who are also excellent presenters.

Born in a Swiss intellectual family, Felzmann graduated from SF Art Institute and spent most of his adult life in Northern California. His works thus embodied the dual influences of West Coast landscape and German philosophical traditions. They fall naturally into the “New Topographics” movement, whose main players include Robert Adams, Stephen Shore and the Bechers. The photos from the new book LandFallwere mostly shot in Sacramento Valley, where human activities and natural force are in a perpetual tug-of-war. While the landscape continues to change due to manmade underpasses, highways, aqueducts and nonnative trees, the nature also gives back flood, landfall, and rural decays. Not only is Felzmann interested in documenting these changes, he is also captivated by their poetic potentials and philosophic meanings. His series on migration birds are some of the most unforgettable images. Using the formation of the flocks, he shows to us that nature is full of wonders, and it is often more than what we can grasp. As an avid reader, Felzmann seems to be obsessed with knowledge and learning. His many shots of books and classrooms seem to be an unusual lifelong hobby of his.

Priola, on the other hand, made most of his photos in his studio, often with very controlled lightings and meticulous settings. While Felzmannm focuses on the nature and its relationship with humankind, Priola is more obsessed with the sentimental values of objects and memories. If Felzmann observes the world with a detached and analytic eye, for whom God renders itself as a rational, scientific but formidable force, Priola, thanks to his catholic upbringing, gets more fascinated by its mystics and melancholy power. Priola came out of age in late 80s and 90s, when AIDS took away many of his friends. This intense emotional experience affected him significantly, and they showed up under various disguises in many of his works: objects from diseased ancestors, dead butterflies, a fallen flowerpot, an apartment number lit in night. They speak silently and powerfully on time and on the ghosts we can’t see.

Though both artists started with very different aesthetic visions and photographic practices, they have a lot more in common. Both have done installation works, both ponder on traces of time, and both shoot mostly black-and-white photos and rarely do portraits. They look at the world and at the most ordinary with shock and awe, and their works express this feeling of being overwhelmed. Inevitably, they would cross each other’s path: In Priola’s latest works, he shot the same set of trees as Felzmann did. But they don’t necessarily see the same thing.

L’AGE D’OR and UN CHIEN ANDALOU -- Luis Bunuel

Going to screenings of classic masterpieces is a good intellectual exercise to find out how they influenced more contemporary films and film makers. L’AGE D’OR and UN CHIEN ANDALOU, Luis Bunuel's two earliest films in colaboration with Dali, have been well discussed in the art history and in the context of surrealism. But they only get a chance to be shown side by side until very recently. So when Castro Theatre finally put them on this week, , we decided that we could not possibly miss this rare treat. As a Luis Bunuel fan, I watched most of his later and more famous films. These two films are the missing link towards understanding where he started and how he developed an artistic style that is still so talked about in every film schools.

I walked out the theatre playing name-dropping games with Diego. David Lynch came to our minds right away: The discovery of a single ear in the very beginning of Blue Velvet seemed to be a straight variation of the scene is Un Chien Andalou, when a piece of broken hand was lying on the street; and then inevitably the hot name Matthew Barney, whose Cremaster Cycles probably borrowed a few editing tricks and ideas from Bunuel. After all, all of them are obsessed with violence and sexual "deviances", aiming to subvert and shock. If David Lynch had to obey rules of narrative films driven more often by characters and plots, Matthew Barney went a lot further than Bunuel since he aspired to make real art without any consideration of an average theatre goer.

Another exercise while watching these two films is to recognize all the signature images and tricks of surrealism, thought-provoking and groundbreaking 70 years ago and still fresh and interesting at this moment. Body parts (eyeball, specifically, is always a surrealist's favorite), juxtaposition of discordant images, large live animals or nasty small insects, bizarre and illogical sequence of actions, etc. It still works well into the sub consciousness and invokes our deepest psychological reactions (fear and horror, primarily) after being used again and again and almost becoming cinematic clichés.

Manifesto

What is purpose of blogging? Self absorption? Existential crisis? Or, as one writer said, defiance of the time passing by? I also remember how one of my elder friends described a younger friend of his: He is one of those generation Y people who would keep on-line journals and put everything about himself there. A little pretentious, but damn smart and interesting. No, I don't exactly know why I want to start this. I doubt I would reveal everything about myself without any inhibition. That is not the point of writing. Whatever that point is, I would discover it from writting them, under the condition that I stay disciplined enough.

But the existential question is definitely one part of my thinking here. It was barely a hundred years ago when human voice got recorded for the first time. And now, all you have ever written, all the pictures ever taken of you, all the home videos ever shot about you, could be well stored in one tiny memory chip and preserved way past your own existence in this physical world. I could imagine that the future mausoleums or tombs not only store the ashes or bodies, but also a small chip with all the digital information about the departued person. Our future generation would be overwhelmed with information about their ancestors if they ever want to find out, unless, hm, you accidently crash your computer and lose all that stored information about yourself. But then, remember, they may be in a Yahoo or Google server too. This does make the life of future biographers or anthropologists a lot easier.

So, blogging, archiving, posting, they can be viewed as a means for leaving a trace in this ever-changing and fast-paced world, or more meaningfully, a way to help communicate our thoughts and understand each other, other than, say, to spread good gossips. But gossips are always fun to read, and in the end, who really cares?!

My Top Ten movies of 2003

It is that time of the year again when every film critic rushes to pick up their favorite ten, either to make a manifesto of one’s own taste or to promote some obscure gem. After watching three critically-acclaimed Hollywood box-officers (Lord of Rings, Cold Mountain, 21 Gram) over the Christmas season, I felt numbed and emotionally exhausted and in the end I did not remember much of them. I finally decided to write down my own favorite ten just to sort out my mind and re-live those unforgettable moments when I walked out of the theater and felt that world around me had changed a little, even if just for that short moment.

City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, Brazil)A mind-boggling rollercoaster ride through Rio’s slums and ganglands. The violence is both disturbing and numbing, and the myriad of stories are told in such innovative way that it draws you in immediately as if you were walking in and out of all these lives with time leaping back and forth and with bullets barely dodged. Such a pallet of vivid colors and exuberant rhythms!

The Pianist (Polanski)Polanski was born to make this film. Adrien Brody’s understated performance was not a singsong for the courage of survivors but went deeper to touch upon human instinct and dignity against unfathomable terror.

Winged Migration (Michel Debats, France)You got to see this in wide-screen, or the I-Max for the best. I bought the DVD just to find out how they made this film. We all have dreams in which we could fly like a bird, and this film almost made that dream come true. In eighty minutes we followed the birds around the world, from Amazon to Antarctica, from Vietnam to Senegal. What else could be worth my $9?

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Kim Bartley and Donnacha Brian, UK) The directors intended to film Cesar Chavez but instead witnessed the whole coup and filmed the entire historical drama from the inside. Intense and thought-provoking, it showed how media could be so maliciously manipulated by the right-wingers and shed some true light on an event largely ignored and misunderstood by Americans due to their own media’s biased propaganda.

Bolivar Soy Yo (Jorge Ali Trana, Colombia)A political satire that was both sad and hilarious, in the same canon with “Z” and “Modern Times”. In a tangle of soap operas, leftist guerrillas, pompous government and over-used revolutionary icons, the movie captured the idiosyncrasy of the Latin American psyche so well and made us laugh in tears.

Pepper Mint Candy (Lee ChangDong, Korea)Story told backwards can be mentally challenging and suspenseful, and sometimes can be annoying and confusing. Lee made this ambitious film in 2001, same time when “Memento” came out and two years before “Irreversible” was made. It unfolds the charaters’s life chapter by chapter, carefully tracking back two decades of turbulent times when the innocent protagonist slowly lost his grip on life and degenerated into a wounded despair. In the end we saw how humans are just tiny boats in that treacherous sea of history, and a few wrong turns could easily lead one to an inevitable tragic end.

Carla My Dog (Lu Xue Chang, China)Lu never gained much recognition in the international circuit since neither is he interested in exploring the oriental exotica nor does he want to cater to the political underground and settle for the subversive. His last film, “How steel is made”, raised the poignant questions for a generation who grew up in a grand ideology but ended up losing them all in the capitalistic booms. This latest film changed the angle and looked more closely on a more ordinary and underprivileged class of Beijing citizens, putting humanity under a microscope of realism and see how it shines in a chaotic times.

Marooned in Iraq (Bahman Ghonbadi, Iran)Iran continues to be the movie power house, and their films can be both politically urgent and profoundly poetic. Set in post Iran-Iraq war and following an aged musician’s journey (with his sons) into Kurdish Iraq, it dived right into the suffering and terror faced by the Kurdish people but never lost the sense of humor and optimism. Heart-wrenching and uplifting.

Yossi and Jagger (Eytan Fox, Isarel)When I saw the film in the gay and lesbian film festival, some protesters busted onto the stage and were greeted by the shouting and cursing of the audiences. Actually I thought the drama after add another dimension to the bittersweet love story between two gay soldiers on the war front. The love was so real, the loss was heart-breaking, but the harsh reality is still more complex and authentic. 

Spanish Apartment (Cedric Klapisch, France)It is not a brilliant film, but I ultimately enjoyed it, probably out of my own nostalgia of the life as a foreign exchange student, or the fantasy of quitting corporate job and joining the international drifters while there is still the last drop of youth left. Hm…why do all the dropouts universally become writers of some sort? Plenty of European stereotypes are created here, but you got to love that raw energy.

Other art-crowd pleasers, such as “Whale Rider”, “Swimming Pool”, “21 Gram”, or “Dirty Pretty Thing” would not make my list. They were well-made but broke no artistic grounds. But I have to single out a few runner-ups:Weather Underground (Sam Green and Bill Siegel)Documentaries are suddenly getting so much attention, and this one is surely one of the diamonds in the crown. 

Piedras (Ramon Salazar, Spain)Multiple stories told simultaneously with crisscross plots have been done again and again (Magnolia, Short Cuts), but this latest entry from Spain added some Almodovar type coincidences and gay subplots to that standard formula and made it a bit more enjoyable. I noticed that all the gay men ended up finding love and the straight ones breaking up in the end. Hm?

25th Hour (Spike Lee, US)Not Spike Lee’s best but certainly his somber study of personal crisis in the post 9-11 times. Is there any hope to rebuild life from the wounds and relics of the past? The film gave an ambivalent answer.