Ren xiao yao, 2002
[Unknown Pleasures]
Jia Zhang-ke

• The in-construction Datong-Beijing highway is symbolic of a bright future, but Xiao Ji's motorcycle is going nowhere fast.
• The recurrent presence of the amusingly self-absorbed, operatic singer speaks volumes about cultural disconnection.

Notes from Lost In An Open Society by Dennis Lim (CinemaScope, Spring 2003):

• [An] empathetic tale of alienated youth, characterized by an unresolved mood of corrosive [almost bitingly sarcastic] statis.
• Trapped in disused, emptied-out spaces, Jia's characters find themselves constantly chafing against something - a feeling literalized in burts of repetition: Bin Bin awkwardly fending off a masseuse; a tearful Qiao Qiao being restrained by her mobster boyfriend; Qiao San's cronies slapping Xiao Ji to the pulse of disco strobes.
• Jia: "I feel strongly about maintaining an unbroken relationship between the audience and the characters, both with respect to time and space (and maintain a unity of time and space). From the perspective of the spectator, the feeling of the passage of time is extremely important. Even those long scenes where nothing is happening and it seems like everything has stopped, even those scenes are important. It's possible that nothing at all happens over a long period of time; it's also possible that a lot of things are happening simultaneously in the same space, and I love that juxtaposition. In my films, i never want to use an all-knowing time as if God knows what's happening. I want this feeling of waiting and of not being able to anticipate what's going to happen"

Notable selection from 2005 SFIFF:

Must Watch:

• The Forest for the Trees [Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen], Maren Ade
• The Hero [O herói], Zézé Gamboa
• L’Intrus, Claire Denis
• Kings and Queen [Rois et reine], Arnaud Desplechin
• Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July
• Los Muertos, Lisandro Alonso
• Saraband, Ingmar Bergman
• Tokyo Magic Hour & The Year of Living Vicariously, Amir Muhammad
• Pin Boy [Parapalos], Ana Poliak
• The World [Shijie], Jia Zhang-ke

Should Watch:

• Delamu, Tian Zhuangzhuang
• The Holy Girl [La niña santa], Lucrecia Martel
• Little Sky [El cielito] , María Victoria Menis
• The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, Adam Curtis
• 10th District Court: Moments of Trials [10e chambre: instants d’audiences], Raymond Depardon
• A Social Genocide, Fernando E. Solanas
• Ronda Nocturna, Edgardo Cozarinsky

ps: some notable omissions that i feel like cribbing about: there is practically nothing from all the remarkable work coming out of Japan this year, the absence of both Hou's Cafe Lumiere and Tsai's The Wayward Cloud, Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight , blah, blah, blah, ...

Ni neibian jidian, 2001
[What Time is it There?]
Tsai Ming-liang



Technique:

• Slender and patient narrative made abstract by using very limited dialogue and camera movement.
• Remarkable rendition of a tourist's loneliness as Shiang-chyi, unable to speak any French, wanders alone through a cold Paris' cafes and cemeteries.

Notes from Time Traveller by Jason McBride and Mark Peranson (CinemaScope, December 2001)

• Tsai entwines the narrative threads, interweaving the events in Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-kang's irregular, yet quotidian, lives, moving towards a denouement that is equally cathartic and enigmatic.
• Opening scene shows Miao Tien sitting, waiting and smoking. But in a sudden cut, Miao's ashes are being transported through a long, dark tunnel.
• We're made to anticipate when someone will actually speak; anticipation of what a rare pan or track will reveal beyond the edge of the frame. But the anticipation burns in the characters as well, who wait, usually in silence, for relief to come in the form of a kiss, a proposition, a voice, a hand, or the return of a deceased loved one. (Hsiao-kang waits, we presume, for Shang-chyi to return, as his mother waits for her husband's reincarnation. Shiang-chyi just waits for someone to talk to.)
• But this anticipation is muted in the film. For most of the film, the anticipation that something will happen is replaced by the mourning for what has occurred.
• Cyclical ending, both literally and metaphorically (the symmetrical shot of the giant wheel, surreally resembling a clock) attests to the influence of Buddhism in Tsai's films: path to reincarnation involves suffering. Perhaps What time is it there ? can be considered a reincarnation of Tsai's oeuvre ?

Notes from Peter Bradshow writing in the The Gaurdian:

• The whole thing has such gentleness, reticence and intelligence...

Akarui Mirai, 2003
[Bright Future]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa



Technique:

• Lack of 'depth' in DV (distance between the characters and the camera) compensated by placing objects (columns of chairs leading up to the camera; a green plant close-up on one side with characters further away) between the characters and the camera.
• Extensive use of subdued lighting in interior shots interleaved with bright natural light in 2-way dialogues.
• The long takes sometimes register a slight hand-held tremble.
• Colours are sometimes halucinogenically saturated (a bowling alley of rich blues and greens; and shiny red balls)
• Use of lowlight grain.
• Exterior shots are bleached.
• Overhead shots reveal streets webbed with phone lines and power cables.
• Evening exterior shots, in natural light, of people looking inside lit houses where characters swim in yellow light.
• Stark contrast of protagonists' radical sense of fashion with that of the banausic world around them.
• Establishing shots mislead and demand to be recontextualised in retrospect: a dank cafe interior is shot through light when a 90-degree shot reveals it to be outside, on the street.

Notes from Ambivalent Future, Affirmative Nihilism - Notes on Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Indeterminacy Principle by B. Kite (CinemaScope, Winter 2003)

• The glowing jellyfish is as a good emblem as any for freedom, Kurosawa-style: deadly, diaphanous and mutable.
• Kurosawa Kiyoshi's films are a series of fluctuations between rigid and chaotic elements, grids in which emphasis is place variously on the lines and the spaces.
• The lines: a) hard angles of this long-take long shots sectioning the screen in balanced but asymmetric compositions; b) the confines of genre; c) habitual codes of consensual reality.
• The spaces:unexpected activations of elements within those strict compositions
• Kurosawa: "I think that most humans live with deeply repressed rage and hate. We are repressed by such things as conventions and morality."
• Critics seem to think that Kurosawa perversely abandons control at some point in his films and allows promising situations to dribble away into incoherence. I think the aim is somewhere else: combining traditional elements in unexpected ways to transcend habitual response to the ocean of conflicted and unnamed thought/feeling that lies beyond.
• The film returns at the end to a gang of teens, earlier rhymed with the fleeing jellyfish through an overhead shot of the group drifting , illumined by their glowing headsets. The Che Guevara shirts resonate on indeterminate frequencies: revolutionary sympathy or commodification of rebellion ?
• The extent to which indeterminacy is a guiding force at every stage of Kurosawa's artistic process is exhibited when he expresses an almost Bressonian refusal to either create psychologically defined figures ("I can't invent a character...with a reason for everything") or help actors find their way into a role ("I'm terrified that the more we talk, we'll clarify motivations, which I hate"). He searches, he says, for the proper balance between "freedom and form", so it's easier to make films "in and out of the conventions of genre."
• Much to the irritation of viewers expecting tidy twists on favourite formulas, Kurosawa's heroes move fluidly between positions, refusing to treat actions as blocks in a prefabricated narrative architecture. Any given occurrence functions as a pivot, opening new directions for movement.
  

Notes from Introducing Hou Hsiao-Hsien : A Deeper Shot by Phillip Lopate (Cinema Scope, Spring 2000)

• American scriptwriters are taught to make one point per scene and move on. With Hou, you feel your way into a scene, sorting as you go the characters' relationships and objectives. After a while you abandon your quest for the "key action" and surrender to the perplexing, multifarious life unfolding before you. In a sense, Hou's work is not difficult at all: you need only slow down your metabolism and submit to the pace, the images, the information onscreen. What he offers, finally, is a plenitude of life as it accumulates in the moment; the screen fills with being like water in a fish tank.

Depuis qu'Otar est parti..., 2003
[Since Otar Left]
Julie Bertuccelli

• Shot in the town of Tblisi in the new republic of (post-communist, modern-day) Georgia.