Sunday, June 5, 2011
THE SEARCH directed by Pema Tseden
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTAwODE0MDM2.html
Director Seeks To Capture Life In Modern Tibet
Pema Tseden is the son of Tibetan nomads, the only one of three siblings to have finished his schooling. He is also the first director in China ever to film movies entirely in the Tibetan language.
This is a sensitive issue, since the exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, has accused China of "cultural genocide" since it occupied Tibet in 1951. But The Search, Pema Tseden's latest film, won the Grand Jury Prize at Shanghai's recent International Film Festival and is slated to be shown at the upcoming Locarno film festival in Switzerland.
Journey Through New Tibet
Pema Tseden's Tibet is not the land of soaring peaks and picturesque monasteries. It's a land of stark brown hills and squat, featureless, one-story brick houses.
He feels he is setting the record straight.
In his first interview with a Western media outlet, the 40-year-old filmmaker — who is also known as Wanma Caidan — tells NPR that for too many years, Tibet has been depicted by outsiders who pander to their own imagination.
"I think Tibet has always been mythologized and worshipped, and made more remote," he says. "People's psychological expectations and experiences of Tibet are stuck in the past. They don't understand the new Tibet."
The Search is literally a journey through new Tibet. It looks like a documentary, but it isn't. Filmed near Qinghai Lake in the far western Chinese province of Qinghai — the same area where Pema Tseden was born — the movie uses nonprofessional actors speaking only the Amdo dialect.
The movie follows a film crew looking for a singer to perform the part of Tibetan opera character Prince Drime Kunden. This deeply symbolic character epitomizes selflessness and the virtue of charity; he is a previous incarnation of Buddha, who gave away his children and wife, and all his possessions to those in need and eventually plucks out his own eyes.
But in modern Tibet, the film crew struggles to find anyone who can remember — or perform — the story.
"That's really how things are," Pema Tseden says. "In some areas, villagers always used to perform the Tibetan operas, and everyone would go to watch. But people aren't interested anymore, and it's harder to see them performed. Some places still want to continue, but they've received many challenges. Tibetan opera is a symbol of Tibetan culture."
Search For Disappearing Culture
At times, the film feels like Tibetan Idol, with the film crew recording bizarre and amusing auditions in frost-swept brick courtyards, cavernous rehearsal rooms and dimly lit anterooms.
They encounter a Tibetan opera troupe consisting of girls performing stylized dances and using butter churns as props, but who can't actually sing Tibetan opera. They hear a boy monk in a monastery who recites the English alphabet for his audition, and a Tibetan Charlie Chaplin who leaves them in stitches.
The film also features a man who used to sing the part of Drime Kunden and now performs in a nightclub. Drunken and furious, the nightclub singer tells them he hates the role, and asks them whether they really believe love still exists in this world.
Pema Tseden says that, on one level, the film reflects a search for Tibet's disappearing culture.
"It's being buffeted by modernization. It's not obvious, but it's being affected. It's like those sacred stones with Buddhist sutras carved on them. They've been standing like that for hundreds or thousands of years with no apparent change. But, in fact, they're being slowly changed all the time. I think Tibetan areas right now are like that," he says.
Woven into the film are two love stories that accompany the search for the singer, and often the camera is simply perched in the back of the car, recording as a Tibetan businessman tells of his lost love. The style and pace of the film is idiosyncratic, with shots mostly static and sometimes held for as long as two and a half minutes.
Celebrating Tibetan Aesthetic, Avoiding Controversy
The jury at the Shanghai International Film Festival called The Search the most challenging film they saw — "almost a meditation in patience and an exercise in it."
Pema Tseden explains.
"It's a traditional Tibetan aesthetic. Tibetan tankas, or wall hangings, are like that — they're like a panorama. All the story is in one picture. It's very peaceful, but it's very detailed," he says.
Pema Tseden's own route to filmmaking was circuitous. He studied Tibetan literature in college and worked first as a primary school teacher in his hometown, and then as a civil servant. Eventually, he returned to school as an older student at China's top film school, the Beijing Film Academy. But he believes it is his experience living and working in Qinghai that has had the greatest influence on his films.
The film and its director tread a delicate tightrope, tiptoeing around controversial political issues. As a Tibetan film, the picture underwent stricter censorship than other Chinese films. It was vetted by the State Administration of Film, Radio and Television, as well as by the Religious Affairs Bureau and the United Front Work Department, which manages relations with ethnic minority groups in China.
The Search is Pema Tseden's second film; his first, The Silent Holy Stones, won a Golden Rooster, a major Chinese award, in 2005, the year Beijing celebrated 100 years of film.
Multifaceted Role As Tibetan Auteur
Pema Tseden is circumspect when asked whether there is a danger of being co-opted by the establishment, only commenting that all those working in film in China must have a clear idea of what they are trying to achieve.
His film was feted as China's first movie made in Tibetan, with a Tibetan director and crew. But he says it's wrong to celebrate this achievement.
"Lots of people asked me if I felt it was a very glorious and very proud moment. But I felt very sad that it's taken 100 years to have a Tibetan film. I'm not proud; I think it's a matter of great sorrow," he says.
Pema Tseden is now working to get his films more widely shown in Tibetan areas. He will fund free screenings of his second film for local audiences in the more remote Tibetan regions.
"I think it's important for them to see it," he says, noting that his showings of his first film were welcomed by Tibetans. "They were very happy to see their everyday life. They felt it was very close."
But still, he admits, his parents — who keep herds of goats and a few yaks — don't understand what a film director actually does.
At the end of The Search, the film crew finds its singer, a teacher whose government job won't allow him to go home to sing for the traditional festivals. And despite the long search, the film director can't decide whether he is right for the part — a bittersweet conclusion, perhaps reflecting Tibetans' dislocation and doubts about their own identity.
Sunairi:
Inception (2010) Directed by Christopher Nolan.
The opening scene of sea, wave of water was so beautiful
Confessions (告白 Kokuhaku) directed by Tetsuya Nakashima.
- Filmography
- Bakayaro! I'm Plenty Mad (1988) (segment 2)
- Happy-Go-Lucky (1997)
- Beautiful Sunday (1998)
- Kamikaze Girls (2004)
- Rolling Bomber Special (2005)
- Memories of Matsuko (2006)
- Paco and the Magical Picture Book (2008)
- Confessions (2010)
sunairi: It was great and fantastic, in a way like "Dogville"
HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA at Anthology of Film Archives
HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.
Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema, and his seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.
HAPAX LEGOMENA was recently preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.
PROGRAM 1:
(nostalgia) (HAPAX LEGOMENA I)
1973, 36 minutes, 16mm, b&w.
POETIC JUSTICE (HAPAX LEGOMENA II)
1972, 31 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent.
CRITICAL MASS (HAPAX LEGOMENA III)
1971, 26 minutes, 16mm, b&w.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.
PROGRAM 2:
TRAVELING MATTE (HAPAX LEGOMENA IV)
1971, 34 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent.
ORDINARY MATTER (HAPAX LEGOMENA V)
1972, 36 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound on CD.
REMOTE CONTROL (HAPAX LEGOMENA VI)
1972, 29 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent.
SPECIAL EFFECTS (HAPAX LEGOMENA VII)
1972, 11 minutes, 16mm, b&w.
Total running time: ca. 115 minutes.
Sunairi: The first program I enjoyed so much, maybe I had more concentration?? "Nostalgia" started out with precise idea of talking about film maker's past life as a photographer, while burning picture by picture, telling stories of his experiences of taking photographs of things, people and observation and friendships and so on, while dropping names. Then slowly he would talk about one photograph while showing another photograph burning, so you have to remember what he is saying while looking at burning photo of the story he told before. Then elegantly, he finishes with a story while showing another photograph about his taking picture of a corridor while missing the moment by a truck driving into that corridor and later finding out there were mirroring reflection of a building's window to a window of the truck, scaring him to quit taking pictures while declaring to become a film maker with this film. It is sort of "Blow Up" scenario while discovering an image on the photograph he took, which brings the photographer into an unknown problem, in Framtpon's case, end of his photograph.
As I remember Frampton's name often from "October" magazine, he is structuralist. That shows in the first, "Nostalgia" as well as "Poetic Justice" which is basically a film with flickering script/poetry type of narrative. I would almost say it was imaginative, but most of the times were dry, and here and there especially in the sex scene, as depicted in text, like outside of the window of a couple having sex, there were pigeons, people, scenes and Hyenas.....doing all kinds of things which were imaginative and it seemed maybe the whole script could have been just while a couple is having sex........However, it is great structural excursive and as often with experimental works, it was long.
"Critical Mass" was interesting, couple fighting. Constant humor in observing two bickering, repeating, cutting almost like music while the images repeats, sometimes they won't synchronize with the sound, beautifully turning white with countless circles appearing.
Then, the second program was just excruciating. Maybe the first one with fast motion landscape was nice. Ordinary Matter with filming TV? in fast motion was just so long and excruciating. Special Effects was nice sound and it was mostly about that.
Short films by BRUCE BAILLIE/Quick Billy (1967-70)
MASS FOR THE DAKOTA SIOUX (1964, 20 minutes, 16mm)
YELLOW HORSE (1965, 8 minutes, 16mm)
TUNG (1966, 6 minutes, 16mm)
CASTRO STREET (1966, 10 minutes, 16mm)
ALL MY LIFE (1966, 3 minutes, 16mm)
STILL LIFE (1966, 2 minutes, 16mm)
ROSLYN ROMANCE (IS IT REALLY TRUE?) (1978, 17 minutes, 16mm)
at Anthology Film Archives
/Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Bruce Baillie: Quick Billy (1967-70): Screening and Discussion
Sunairi: It started out with Apichatpong's series of presentation on his film, installation, "Primitive" and a screening of his inspiration, Bruce Baillie: "Quick Billy (1967-70)," in which Bruce himself came and talked and talked by approaching the central issue left and right as he explained to be his age, he is not good at talking at late night.
"Quick Billy" was structurally provocative as I can see as well as Apichatpong himself explained of its dual structure of two stories co-existing without necessarily relating to each other.
It was basically very Avant-Garde with layering of images, scenes so there is constant flow of moving from one subject to another obscuring and juxtaposing meaning on top of each other. I see the beauty in terms of how Apichatpong took a clue to elaborate his structural duality in films like "Tropical Malady" or "Syndromes and a Century"
However, the shorts at Anthology were beautiful. Since I saw films one after another, I couldn't twll which was which, but as far as I can remember, the nature, cinematography, B&Wness of "TO PARSIFAL" was amazing starter. "YELLOW HORSE" was mesmerizing in terms of out of focus focus of fragments of actions of bikers in vivid colors and motion. Presence of deliberateness and the tension, as well as excitement was captured without any stories. The written text and the lyrical visual of "TUNG" was so serene and contemplative. It seems like juxtaposition of layers of images were successfully mastered in this short. The image of figure was not necessary it seemed for it specifies that it is Asian female, though it was not bad. "ALL MY LIFE" was short but precise and beautiful with such a poetic invocation and declaration of who he is as a film maker:optimist. "Still Life" though I am not sure how the audience was reacting, but I thought it was such a simple but beautiful gesture of use of light, slight actions within a room changed the way the light was casted on the still life while there was a discussion of things in the background as sound.
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