Jia Zhangke, The World (2004)

Someone really should make a documentary about Jia Zhangke; he’s the voice of the next generation of Chinese filmmakers and most people in the West have never even heard of him (except these people at the Lincoln Center!). Who knows… perhaps someone amongst my vast readership of 17 people will have the forethought and audacity to make this film a reality.

The World, while not a documentary, succeeds in capturing the modern Chinese dilemma better than any film previously made. The setting and primary symbol of this film is the World theme park in Beijing, in which there are miniature versions of famous world sites such as the Eiffel Tower and the Sphinx- picture Disney World on a Walmart budget (this link highlights some of the great visual symbolism such as Chinese workers carrying bottled water jugs on their back with the miniature pyramids in the background).



The irony, of course, is that the only reason that so many Chinese go to World Park to view replicas of famous world sites is because so few have a passport to travel outside the country and see the real thing. In one scene, two characters stand near an airport; as the airplanes take-off and land in the background, one of the characters remarks, "Who flys in those things anyway? I've never met anyone who's even been in a plane before."

Unlike Jia’s earlier work, The World appears to have been made with a Western audience in mind. Jia’s directorial style in this film is also a mixture of Western and Eastern influences. The camera work could almost be mistaken for a Robert Altman film (watch the first 30 seconds of this link and you'll feel like you're watching a scene from Altman's Gosford Park (2001)). The film is filled with long takes with lots of characters, and the camera is constantly moving in and out, capturing the action in a subtle, almost voyeuristic way. The music sounds a lot like Air-soundtrack that underscored the modern classic, Lost in Translation (2001). Compare Air's soundtrack here with the soundtrack from The World. Both films use this music to set the tone for a discussion about freedom and loneliness.

Despite all these Western references, The World still manages to stay true to its Chinese film heritage. Jia never loses focus on the commoner laobaixing. The er hua Beijing accent is pitch perfect, as is the portrayal of both Beijing women and men. The women are almost obnoxiously loud but cutsie as they whine with cries of “Tao Yan!”, ubiquitous in China. Young Beijing men are still using every trick in the book to have sex with their girlfriends but are constantly denied. Like Jia’s early films, the women still hold the power in the relationship game.

Beijing awaits its opportunity later this summer to host the Olympics. Their primary goal will, no doubt, be to showcase Beijing and China as a modern and vibrant place. The pace of change is so fast in Beijing that in only a few years, we will probably look back with nostalgia at The World as a snapshot of Beijing in the distant past. The film should, however, stay relevant for a long time because China is so vast that the rest of its cities will still require years if not decades to reach first world standards.

Jia Zhangke, Unknown Pleasures (2002)

Like all Jia Zhangke film's, Unknown Pleasures is concerned with Chinese and their struggle to find a place in the new modern China. This film very effectively mixes the traditional Chinese culture such as Zhuangzi's philosophy about the butterfly as well as Peking Opera against the modern world represented by things like American movies (one scene takes a page directly out of Pulp Fiction) and commercials (selling Mongolian King Wine).

By setting the film in remote Shanxi Province, Jia is better able to show this stark contrast. Local citizens watch topics on the news ranging from the story of the American spy-plane landing in China, the announcement of Beijing hosting the 2008 Olympics to terrorism and modern crime (guns and bank robberies), but their lives are far different and have almost no relationship to this news. Upon discovering a one dollar bill in US currency, one of the characters has no idea what to do with it, and spends the remainder of the film trying to find a use for it.

Another of Jia's strengths is his ability to accurately portray the modern Chinese young woman and young man. The women are much more savvy and are able to easily manipulate the men emotionally. The men, on the other hand, are completely unable to show their emotions in front of women (instead they play the tough guy) yet behind closed doors they are completely vulnerable. Jia's films are not extremely user friendly to the Western viewer due to the slow pace, but his characterizations are spot on. Even Jia's directing style seems torn between his predecessors (the extended scene of the protagonist trying to drive his motorcycle out of the ditch is pure Zhang Yimou-type symbolism, while at the same time he takes a page from Western directors like Quentin Tarrantino and the jumps cuts of the French New Wave). However, in Jia's films, the male character is largely impotent, as illustrate in one of the funnier scenes when he tries to pull off a bank robbery Tarrantino-style.

Jia's films are not easy entertainment, but with a little effort you can get a lot out of it. Its amazing that this film even passed the Chinese censors to begin with- Jia shows DVD piracy even of his own films!

Jia Zhangke, Platform (2000)

The next couple posts will highlight the films of the best Chinese director whom you’ve probably never heard of, Jia Jiangke. First a little history lesson: the history of Chinese film in two paragraphs looks like this: Starting in the 1950s, Chinese film was defined by a Communist Realism movement- lots of heroes in Mao-suits, rising suns and long soliloqueys (often sung) about how great life was as a Communist.

Then Zhang Yimou comes along in 1987 and wins the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival with Red Sorghum (Hong Gao Liang), thereby putting Chinese film and the so-called Fifth Generation Directors on the world map. Zhang follows up with Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), all three of which are characterized by slow-moving, largely-depressing plots, amazing cinematography, all set in the feudal past but serving as largely anti-Communist allegories. Zhang became Public Enemy Number 2 behind rocker Cui Jian, which even further heightened his popularity amongst Western film critic set.

What’s missing in all that were filmmakers who focus on what China is today- real stories about the Mainland Chinese who are emerging from the Communist primordial soup into the modern world of fat only-children and middle-class television-induced bliss. Jia Jiangke and his 6th generation cohorts are focused on this world. Platform perfectly shows the struggle for modernity of Chinese citizens in the transitional period of the 1980s, when China was opening up to the West but hadn't quite figured out yet the implications of this "development". This transition is most difficult for the hundreds of millions of Chinese rural laobaixing who simply didn't have the skills to do anything beyond the manual labor of farming and mining learned during the Mao years.

Jia tells his story through a rural dance troupe of 20-somethings who desperately want to be modern (one gets a perm, another brings back a cassette tape of pop music to the village) but who are also stuck in the old ways. Their actions are awkward but pure. The slow pace of the film allows for plenty of pause of the viewer to interpret the subtext of the action (and in many cases non-action of the main characters). In one great scene where a boy and a girl are arguing about their relationship and whether they should consider themselves a couple, the characters walk back and forth behind a wall. In another scene, the youths are in a truck and offer to give a ride to the old cadre because its "faster"; the old cadre rebuffs their offer and is shown walking up a steep hill. In both cases, the images are actively supporting the words and actions of the characters.

This film is not for Jerry Bruckheimer fans, or even fans of Jerry Bruckheimer on lithium. But for those with a little patience and an eye for subtely, Platform will give the viewer a bird’s eye view into a China in a gawky stage of adolescence on the growth path to modernity.

And what happened to Zhang Yimou? Well, in the late 1980s, the PRC government started to get PR-savvy and realized that it was a lot easier to make Zhang rich and leverage his power as a film star than to fight him. Since then, Zhang has directed Turnadot, the opera showing in the Forbidden City in 1999, he's directed directed huge budget Hollywood epics Hero and House of Flying Daggers, and today is preparing to direct the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games. Wow. How’s that for a symbol of the Modern China?

Carol Reed, The Third Man, 1949

In any discussion of the greatest film of all time, many people are quick to mention Citizen Kane. While that may be true especially for the advances in cinematography and technical filmmaking that are on display in Citizen, another film with Orson Welles, Carol Reed's The Third Man, should certainly get a mention in this discussion.

From the opening credits, which feature a close up of Spanish zither strings vibrating to the film's theme song, Carol Reed seems to be telling the viewer, "Be prepared for your perspective to be manipulated like these strings". Orson Welles plays Harry Lime, the title character, and he is well remembered for the cuckoo clock soliloquey (*Careful: Link contains spoilers) which Welles wrote as well as his storied entrance into the film. However, in actuality Welles' screen time is minimal.


In my mind, this film is driven by the wonderful script of Graham Greene (back in the days when serious novelists like William Faulkner would write screenplays as a foot in the door to the serious literary world), the solid lead performance by Joe Cotten and the artful film noir direction and cinematography of Carol Reed and Robert Krasker. This is one of those films with images that are so powerful and pleasing to the eye that you'll want to hit 'pause' and take in frame by frame this world full of shadows and smattered with intense patches of light.




And oh what a great finish the Third Man delivers. Not only does it contain a great climactic chase scene through the sewers, which was totally ripped off by Andrew Davis' use of Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, it contains a poignant last scene, which has been mirrored in countless other films since then.

Sam Mendes, Jarhead (2005)

Sam Mendes won the Academy Award for Best Director for American Beauty (1999), a film he made when he was only 33 years old. While this seems amazing, there are numerous examples of a director's first film being one of his/her best: John Singleton's Boyz in the Hood (1991) and Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum (1987) come to mind.


Mendes, however, is no "one hit wonder". His Road to Perdition (2002) , which followed Beauty, was a stylish noir and Jarhead is perhaps the best film about the life of the modern warrior to date. It combines the depth and sarcastic wit of American Beauty but takes on a much more serious topic, putting the viewer in the shoes of the US Marines during Operation Desert Storm.



Mendes' take on modern warfare acknowledges its predecessor Vietnam-era films (clips of Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Dearhunter (1978) are part of Jarhead), while also highlighting the modern Marine's dilemma: trauma comes not from the killing but the non-killing. High-tech military equipment have dimished the modern warfighter from one of a killing machine to one of a front-line scout whose primary role is to prep the battlefield or clean-up after the battle is done.



In one scene, the Marines in Jarhead watch Coppola's Apocalypse Now not as an anti-war statement on the fog of war but with youthful enthusiasm, cheering the scenes of US soldiers attacking the Vietnamese. Later these same soldiers find themselves in a position which mirrors the "Who's your commanding officer" scene in Apocalyspe. Jake Gyllenhaal's character Swafford hears a helicopter descending on the "battlefield" of flaming oil fields and playing a Doors song. While the scene in Apocalypse attempts to compare the fog of war to a drug-induced hallucination, Mendes' Marines are living in a completely different world. Swafford very lucidly quips "Can't we even have our own music?"; his character does not see any glory in battle and resents this feeling of inability to affect the war's outcome.


Still, these Marines do share at least one trait with the Marines of yesterday. Both remain faithful to the Corp, even after returning to the U.S., the experience of war has left an indelible mark on the rest of their lives. The difference is that the boredom that they experience back at home is juxtaposed to the boredom they experienced on the battlefield. Finally, speaking of boredom, check out this clip where some guy spliced together every time one of the characters in Jarhead drops the f-bomb... not sure but this may just rival Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) for some sort of "Most F-bombs in a Film" record here.

John Cassavetes, Shadows, 1959

With the proliferation of the Internet and low-cost means to produce movies, independent film has fully entered the mainstream. Sundance has become more of a photo-op for Hollywood's 'Who's Who' to wear their latest skicaps, than it is a venue to introduce innovative new filmmakers such as when Steven Soderberg made his debut with Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989).

Today's independent filmmakers can all thank John Cassavetes for becoming the grandfather of the independent movement. Cassavetes' directorial debut, Shadows, is remarkable on multiple fronts. First, Shadows is simply the coolest American film you will ever see made prior to 1960. Its uncompromisingly different than anything that was made up to that point, anywhere in the world. If Shadows had been a French language film it would have been known as the founding film of the French New Wave (Godard's Breathless wasn't issued until a year later).

However, because this film also deals with very American topics such as inter-racial dating and the Beat movement, it is solidly an American classic; you expect Neil Cassidy and Kerouac's "On the Road" crowd to show up and hang out with the Shadows protagonists as they roamed the streets of New York City. You'd be hard pressed to find a black protagonist in almost any other film of the era; keep in mind, this film was made almost a decade before Sidney Poitier played his infamous role in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967)!

Finally, there's a real feeling that the characters are not acting but are actually living the life portrayed on the screen. Jazz music underscores the film and gives it its pace, at one moment slow and reserved, the next moment bursting with energetic passion, sometimes even with violence. The sound quality and scratchy-ness of the film is sub-par but just having the opportunity to watch Shadows in any format is a treat.

Back to the Past

Bono once said that “Every artist is a cannibal. Every poet is a thief”, a quote which I think he stole from Picasso. This statement may seem self evident to every student at USC Film School but to the average movie consumer, our opinion of what’s new and innovative in the film we just viewed while eating a large tub of buttered popcorn is often subject to rash overstatement. We are easily impressed, as evidenced by the fact that we’re up to the fourth installment of the Saw horror series.

One of the reasons for this is that most people don’t watch many old movies so, with the exception of a handful of classic films which have spanned generations of viewers, most of us don’t really know what’s come before us. I spend a lot of time watching old films, which I find in most cases fascinating. Old films are really used in two major ways by modern directors and movie execs:

The first is the least interesting objective of pure revenue generation / exploitation with the primary example being sequels. When Disney saw an opportunity to slap a modern face on the classic Parent Trap (1961) and released a “modern” version of it in 1998, their primary motivation was the dollar sign. In most cases, sequels are marginally successful from a financial standpoint but result usually in watered-down imitations from an artistic standpoint.

What’s fascinating is the second use of old film: when a great director uses their film to open a dialogue with a director of a classic film by borrowing elements of older films which inspire them while adding new value to it. Most people were blown away by Ridley Scott’s futuristic vision of the Earth in Blade Runner (1983), a screen shot of which is shown on the right. However, many elements of Scott's (and Philip Dick) vision were contained and clearly influenced by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), as shown below. In fact, Metropolis is clearly the ground-zero film which influenced not only Blade Runner but a whole host of favorites such as Back to the Future (1985) and Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and The Matrix (1999). While most people have not seen Metropolis, Robert Zemeckis, the Coen Brothers and the Wachowski Brothers clearly have.

Finally, no discussion of re-visiting old films would be complete without Quentin Tarantino, the self-professed film junkie who may be most adept in the world at taking old film concepts, stealing the best parts of them and creating a truly uniquely new and modern product from them, a la Pulp Fiction. Indeed, generations of future directors will be using his style of non-linear storytelling for many years to come.

Bottom line: there are a ton of great old films out there and hopefully this blog can serve to highlight some of the ones which have aged well and are worthwhile for a wide range of today's movieviewers to watch.