harrylimetheme

Helen: Review round-up

2008-07-05T23:52:00.000-07:00

Well, its been a couple of weeks since Helen premiered at Edinburgh. Thought I'd give a quick round-up of links to reviews - mainly for posterity. The first review to appear was Allan Hunter's for Screen International's website, Screen Daily. They didn't review a lot of Edinburgh premieres, but Hunter singled out Helen as a "hypnotic first feature", praising Joe and Christine's "sense of restraint and understatement unusual in contemporary Irish and British cinema". He was quick to point out it might prove "too monotonous for mainstream tastes", but ends his review admiring Annie's performance as one that "makes Helen a character whose past we yearn to discover."

After that we had Neil Young's piece for Hollywood Reporter, which begins well enough, calling the film "an intense, downbeat psychological character study that feels infinitely closer to recent Austrian and German cinema than anything from its native Britain", but he goes on to bemoan its "humorlessly glacial atmosphere", although this is countered by high praise for the cinematography - "you can’t beat old-fashioned 35mm celluloid".

The last of trades, Variety, had a review by Leslie Felperin, which was an unequivocal rave - expect to see the line "an impressive, beautifully shot debut" on posters soon. Felperin really seems to get the film, and unsurprisingly she seems to have seen the Civic Life short films that preceded it, and which in many ways, the film is a development out of. In classic trade style she assesses the 'tech' elements, judging that the cinematography is "breathtaking with its rich colors and austere, painterly compositions. Sound design reps another standout element."

Joining all of the above reviewers in connecting the film with European and un-British film-makers, was Jonathan Romney (scroll down the page) in The Independent, who name-checked Michael Haneke, Atom Egoyan (Exotica is a very different film, but Helen has a few very similar images), and the maestro himself, Antonioni. Trevor Johnston in Time Out, also concurred that “Widescreen compositions and tracking shots stand comparison with Angelopoulos or Antonioni.” He also seemed to prefer Helen to Duane Hopkin's higher profile Better Things. Back to Romney - “A stand-out discovery...The latest vital sign of a UK art-cinema resurgence.” That'll also look good on the poster.

Lastly, we had someone called Charlie Olsky for Indiewire, who felt it was "Mesmerizingly creepy" and a "deliberately paced study in mood, menacing and touching in equal parts." Not a bad haul all in all. Lets see where it goes from here...

Helen

2008-06-09T00:31:00.000-07:00

This is a very evocative still from the film Helen, directed by Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy. They shot it last year in Newcastle, Birmingham, Dublin and Liverpool, finished editing this year, and it will have its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in about 10 days. Helen is in competition for the Michael Powell Award among others. It's a special one for me because it is my first official on-screen proper feature film credit ever, and I'm down as Script Editor. I saw the final, final cut about a week ago and I'm very pleased with the results. It's a strange, unusual and beautiful film. Its not a loud film, it doesn't grab you aggressively and demand attention. But it has a very compelling, slow-burning quality that builds up strongly across its nearly 80 minute running time. It was made on a very low budget, but it looks and sounds absolutely stunning (anamorphic 35mm, 5.1 Dolby sound no less). Joe and Christine wanted it to be a piece of cinema, and they have certainly achieved that. The lead, Annie Townsend is an unknown, non-professional who'd never acted in a film before, and she turns in a powerful, subtle performance. She's also, amusingly, competing against Keira Knightly for the acting award at Edinburgh.

Check out the official website for trailers and loads of info, and if you are attending Edinburgh, or Sydney, where it makes its international debut - then please, please write something about it.

cinemacities

2008-04-01T18:18:00.000-07:00

(Something I'm involved in...)

CINEMACITIES: URBAN SPACES ON FILM IN THE UK AND SINGAPORE

Sunday, 6th April, LASALLE College of the Arts, 2.00
pm – 5.00 pm

Film has always been linked to urban space. Cinema was
born in the major capitals of the world, and cities
continue to be the only places where film industries
are sustained. Cities are also locations and subject
matter, and cinema changes the way we perceive our
cities, transforming landmarks into icons or clichés,
re-imagining streets and suburbs and the communities
that inhabit them.

CinemaCities is an informal mini-symposium that will
discuss and explore this rich territory in the company
of leading film-makers, programmers, producers,
writers and educators from the UK and Singapore.
Chaired by journalist Ben Slater.

Guests:

Alfian Sa’at, playwright
Sun Koh, producer, Lucky 7
Wee Li Lin, director, Gone Shopping
Tan Pin Pin, director, Invisible City, Singapore Gaga
Herman Van Eyken, Head of The Puttnam School of Film
Mark Cosgrove, programmer of Encounters Short Film
Festival, UK
Joe Magee, director (UK), Hypnomart and Gearhead
Carrie Comerford, producer (UK), Red Road
Lenny Crooks, Head of the New Cinema Fund, UK Film
Council
Lynda Myles, producer and Head of Directing Course,
National Film and Television School

Programme

1. Imagining

A joint presentation by Mark Cosgrove, programmer of
Encounters Film Festival (UK) and film-maker Joe
Magee. Mark and Joe will discuss the ways in which
British short films have captured and imagined urban
space and communities in the UK in recent years.
Preceded by a screening of a selection of the best in
UK short films, Inner City in the UK (11.00 am – 1.00
pm).

2. Shooting

A discussion with producers Lenny Crooks, Carrie
Comerford and Lynda Myles about the logistics of
shooting such city-based films as Shallow Grave, The
Commitments and Red Road. This session will be
chaired by Herman Van Eyken.

3. Representing

In Heartland, Hinterland, Home: Affective Topography
in Singapore Cinema, Alfian Sa’at, poet and playwright
will address the issue of representation of urban
spaces and communities in Singaporean film, exploring
the conflicting ways in which the city-state has been
depicted during both the ‘Golden Age’ of Malay movies
(pre-1970) and in the current Singaporean film revival
(Post-1990).

4. Capturing

A dialogue with Tan Pin Pin, Wee Li Lin and Sun Koh
about the issues involved in writing and directing
films which attempt to capture and evoke aspects of
urban space and life.

5. Panel discussion

Entry is free.

To register for the morning screening of Inner City in
the UK (11.00 am to 1.00 pm), please send an email to
ker.layhong@britishcouncil.org.sg, quoting FILM in the
subject line. Numbers are very limited.

To register for the symposium CINEMACITIES (2.00 pm to 5.00 pm), please send an email to
ker.layhong@britishcouncil.org.sg, quoting CITY in the
subject line. Numbers are limited.

HERE is coming

2008-03-23T18:14:00.000-07:00

Went up to the film set of Ho Tzu Nyen's debut feature HERE to be an extra this weekend. People there kept asking me 'do you do this often?' which forced me to admit that I hadn't stood in the back/foreground of a shot for many, many years. Tzu Nyen is shooting in an abandoned mental hospital and the script is about a real event that took place in a working mental hospital, so the vibes and atmosphere of this place are seriously appropos. We shot from about 3.30pm to 7pm and got two short single-take sequences. The crew had been at it for about 8 days but the atmosphere was very calm and relaxed, exactly what you need. Click through into Flickr for a few more pics.

Vista 8

2008-03-02T00:55:00.000-08:00

I haven't won anything in a competition since I was seven years old when I scored second prize for a school painting contest. Well, today I discovered to my surprise and delight that I have won the Ballardian Home Movies contest that was run by the excellent Ballardian website along with HarperCollins to mark the publication of JG's autobiog Miracles Of Life.

The competition challenged us to make a film, of no more than 60 seconds using our mobile phone cameras with absolutely no editing or post-production whatsoever. And of course it had to be Ballardian.

I wanted to enter, and had a few half-formed ideas, but procrastinated for a fortnight, finally getting up and shooting it the afternoon of the closing day.

Living in Singapore gave me an immediate advantage to grab some Ballardian High Rise imagery, and I've always thought that the faux-art-deco sign for Vista 8, a modern apartment complex round the corner from my 25 year old block of flats could have featured in a Ballard short story. I tried to fuse my own experience of living in Singapore while thinking about Ballard, and a narrative about suicide did begin to emerge as I improvised the film.

All details of the competition entries (with really thoughtful citations from the judges Simon Sellars and John Rivers) and the runner-up winner Pablo Sgarbi are here. My personal favourite is Russell Miller's haunting (also black and white) Journey Through A Distant Land.

Be Kind, Remember

2008-01-29T02:04:00.000-08:00

"Twenty-two years at this location, before that it was Super-8, started in 1977, 78. That was retail."

"Chaps would drive around the villages, stick up a sheet, collect a few cents from everyone and and run the projection. My father would sell them the film"

"Our market was the ex-pats, and they are all going. They aren't on the same packages as they were before, they don't have the spending power. It wasn't VHS, that wasn't the issue."

"The tape cost say 40 dollars, then it used to be 40 dollars to pay for them to look at the first hour, and then if a film was 90 minutes, we still had to pay another 40 again just for the extra half an hour. Then we had to pay them per cut. And it was not professionally done."

"They did not want him doing this. They said you cannot say what's been cut, and he said, I'm within my rights, he spoke to a lawyer who said we were within our rights. And so if the words had been cut, you could read them on the tape..."

"I rang up the polytechnics and said you can have all the tapes for free, and they said if they are on DVD we can, but not on VHS, I said, I'm not offering you formats, I'm offering content!"

"So I'm giving what's left away to charity. The thing is a lot of these films aren't available on DVD, might not ever be"

See earlier article

exploring the modern world

2007-12-19T17:12:00.000-08:00

(Suburban trees, suburban speed: a publicity image for Radio On)

By way of lengthy preamble to the actual Point of this, I want to kick off by saying that the film programming at the Gallery Theatre at the National Museum of Singapore has quietly, over the last year become really rather essential for cineastes. Last month there was a wonderful, one-time-only evening with Perfumed Nightmare director Kidlat Tahimik in traditional bahag, performing a tribute to the enduring power of cinema after the screening of his rather fabulous first feature film, which he says has been his "magic carpet around the world". But the bedrock of the programme has been something called the World Cinema Series, where once a month the curator, Zhang Wenjie, carefully selects 'masterpieces' of international film which are either impossible to see except on celluloid, or absolutely demand to be seen on the big screen, and asks a locally based writer, critic, academic to introduce the film, and to lead a discussion afterwards.

Each one so far has been rewarding and, and surprisingly, its often the discussions that have made these evenings memorable - even when they've hit a dead end. The last screening, Charles Burnett's Killer Of Sheep was intro'd by a lecturer from the newly unwrapped Tisch Asia, who had invited most of the faculty (staff and students) along for the ride. They dominated the Q & A, largely praising each others interpretations of the film, and then when a rather snarky Italian dude decided to puncture their bubble by lengthily bad-mouthing the film - "When I see all those sheep... all I can think of... ees my chops." They felt the blow, before quickly recovering and declaring definitively that if you aren't American then you "cannot comprehend" the film. After just having spent 2 days in the Asian Film Archive's symposium on digital cinema, my fatigued brain was unable to help me produce an articulate rebuff to an idea that I knew was very, very wrong (the fellow Tisch-ers gave it a round of applause). Admittedly, the mysterious Italian was leaning into dangerous territory with some of his statements, but to exclude all non-American opinions seemed a step too far. On the train home I constructed some wonderfully clever comments in my head, but it was all far too late...

Thanks to the series we've also had our minds blown by Shohei Imamura's feverishly sweaty progress-vs-'the old ways' potboiler Profound Desire Of Gods (on 16m scope no less!), Youssef Chahine 's turbulent Cairo Station, a story told from the killer's point-of-view that predates Peeping Tom and Psycho by several years, and King Hu's extra-ordinary Touch Of Zen, which begins as a rather slowly paced spooky period tale of empty houses and strange strangers, and ends three hours later as a full-on psychedelic head-flick. Because Touch Of Zen was released as Parts One and Two (which is the way we watched it), the climax of Part One, a long fight scene in the forest, is also the opening of Part Two. Rarely would you ever find yourself actually appreciating a 'rewind' like this - that scene is not only a stunningly choreographed piece of action, but it has an emotional intensity unlike anything else you've seen. Much imitated, never emulated.

OK. And finally to the Point. Well, on January 8th, the first film in the series for 2008 is going to be a British film, Chris Petit's criminally undervalued late-70s-into-the-80s black and white road movie, Radio On, showing for the first time ever in Singapore, alongside Chris' impressionistic revisiting of his debut feature Radio On remix (Click that title to read about my involvement with that particular project). And this time I'm honored to be doing the intro and Q&A. Rather than blather on about how wonderful Radio On is in this space, here's a link to someone else doing that.

After years of being only available on film, Radio On came out as a DVD from Plexi in Canada last year, but I now hear that after the BFI re-issued the print (also last year), they will do Region 2 DVD, with some interesting road movie-related extras that Chris is hopefully shooting soon. I would suggest when that DVD sees the light of day, it will make a splendid double-bill with the new Two Lane Blacktop disc for all of us existential tarmac-heads (I can't even drive).

But if you're in Singapore, and you want to see the film as intended, on the large one, with great sound-system pumping out all those classic post-punk tracks, come along at 7.30 on the 8th. Bring a raincoat and a long face.

Panel Over

2007-12-19T17:11:00.000-08:00

REELblogging

2007-11-15T21:19:00.000-08:00

The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Movie Blogs

DECEMBER 1st, 7PM 'til 8pm, The BLUE ROOM in ARTS HOUSE: FREE

So, I've been asked to curate/chair/organise and talk on a panel about film blogging that is happening as part of the Singapore Writers Festival coming up early December. Now, I don't have an active film blog right now, but I am an avid film blog-reader, and the blog format has been a really useful for me in experimenting with different kinds of film writing and developing (and promoting) my book.

I've persuaded/asked a few people to come along to the Arts House and talk about some of the issues that are thrown up by covering film in blogs, and I thought since there's so little space on the SWF website (and its so impossible to navigate through), I'd put something up myself, thus briefly reviving my own film blog into the bargain.

This is what I wrote for the SWF publicity:

"In recent years film blogs have become an international phenomena, introducing a new wave of film critics and writers to readers, blurring the line between professional and amateur critic. Film-makers are also increasingly using blogs as a promotional tool to connect with potential audiences. This discussion between several prominent film bloggers and writers, will highlight the best film blogging, and explore the key issues for movie bloggers."

Meet the panelists:

1.Stefan Shih

Stefan Shih started blogging occasionally in 2003 but it wasn't until
October 2004 that he put his focus into writing movie reviews on his
blog A Nutshell Review, and developing a keen interest in Singapore movies. Now he averages 5 movie reviews a week, and is a contributor to online movie sites movieXclusive.com and twitchfilm.net.

2.Yu-mei Balasingamchow

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow is a freelance writer and editor in Singapore with a strong interest in culture, the arts and new media. Until August 2007, she was the managing editor of sinema, a blog which provides news, reviews, interviews, commentaries and trailers --- anything related to Singaporean film and film-makers. She also maintains a personal blog, Tym Blogs Too.

3.Alexis Tioseco

Alexis Tioseco is a film critic from the Philippines who fiercely champions the old and new cinema of that country. He set up and edits Criticine, the only online film journal entirely dedicated to South-East Asian film, and you can also read his film-related thoughts and ideas at his personal blog. Alexis will be appearing at SWF courtesy of Skype and a webcam, which should be interesting.

4.Ben Slater

Ben Slater is a writer and editor specialising in film who has been based in Singapore since 2002. In 2004 he set up his first film blog harrylimetheme , where he first posted articles about the film Saint Jack, which had been shot under odd circumstances in Singapore in 1978. This led to him writing a book, Kinda Hot (Marshall Cavendish, 2006), about the making of the film, which had its own blog.

Stefan and Yu-Mei will be talking about the very different origins of A Nutshell Review (Go there for a superfast write-up of last night's utterly one-off Perfumed Nightmare screening with Kidlat Tahimik in 'person') and Sinema respectively, and Alexis and myself will discuss, in Alexis's words "creation of awareness about minor or neglected cinema through blogging-- bloghopping/linking, community forming". I predict that we will also be paying tribute to Greencine Daily.

That's all for now. If you want to talk movie blogs, are interesting in setting one up, or want to discuss issues about writing and film in general, then please come and join us on the 1st.

The Best Of (my stuff in) Time Out Singapore

2007-08-12T21:11:00.000-07:00

Hello fellow searcher!

Earlier this year I worked for the newly launched Time Out Singapore magazine (a monthly), as film editor and writer. I survived only one paltry issue as film ed, stepping down mainly because the pay sucked and it took a lot longer to edit those listings than planned. I did continue to write a couple more features...

Then, a week ago I got a mail saying that TOS had a website, and as I suspected, all the stuff I wrote is up there, archived for posterity... but to save you the bother of rooting around the fiddly, complex TO search interface, I'm giving you links to the pieces... only if you're interested...

For the first issue I did this piece on art cinemas (or lack of them) in Singapore...if you're a film fan coming into town this should give you an overview on the scene. Excuse the format f*ck-up at the end of the article.

Review of I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

Review of This Film Is Not Rated

Then I conducted an interview with Philip Cheah from the Singapore International Film Festival.

And finally I wrote this piece on the issue of Chinese dialects being dubbed over in films when they are shown in Singapore. I was hoping to kick up a stink with this one, but no one commented, hopefully it adds to a growing public feeling that these rules should change.

And that's it! I'd have loved to do more there and devote large amounts of time to being the film editor, and making the TOS film pages really marvellous... but

ben

The Best of Harrylimetheme

2007-02-22T00:34:00.000-08:00

Hello Googler!

Welcome to a blog that I ran from Summer 2004 until it petered out early in 2006. During the google/blogger transition period (a few months back), the blog disappeared from view, and so I was happy to forget about it. Then one day, I accidentally posted something meant for another blog on it and it was unexpectedly revived. Embarassed that this ancient bit of digital flotsam had resurfaced I intended to delete the thing from the surface of the web - but found I didn't have the heart. So, what I've done is delete crap/embarassing/substandard posts, and left up the ones that might stand a vague chance of being rereadable even today.

I've now collected the pieces into some groups, to make reading/searching a bit easier...all the images have disappeared I'm afraid, so you can read the captions and guess as to how good they were.

One: The Kim Ki-Duk Affair.
This whole thing began for me at the 2004 Singapore International Film Festival, where the opening film was Sping, Summer... I was a big fan of The Isle, and jumped at the chance to meet the director of these films, Kim Ki-Duk and ask him some questions. Then, in November I was horrified to read the Tony Rayns' piece about him in Film Comment, which seemed at the time to be the very definition of 'hatchet job'. My response to that online (and other people's own responses) led to a high energy flurry of forum debate on the merits of Kim as a film-maker and 'TR' as a critic/curator. This worked its way back into print via Chuck Stephen's review of 3-Iron in Cinema Scope, and later Tom Vick's strident letter-of-complaint in Film Comment, which two months later, Rayns replied to very strongly. This whole incident provoked much angry back-chat and eventually some we-agree-to-disagree type resolution. Although essentially rather trivial, it was quite an enlightening and interesting moment - revealing something about online vs print film writing as well as the whole issue of East/West reception of Asian cinema.

Introduction to my interview with Kim Ki-Duk
An Interview with Kim Ki-Duk
My response to Tony Rayns in Film Comment
My response to Chuck Stephens in Cinema Scope

Two: Tributes
Obituary for Alfred Odell, Singapore
A shout-out for The Cube Cinema, Bristol

Three: Tsai & Wong
2046
Goodbye Dragon Inn

Four: Digital Rights & Wrongs
I have wrestled for close to a decade with the notion of 'digital cinema' and whether the changes in the tech-aspect of making films have and will make a serious aesthetic difference in the long run. Its an issue that remains unresolved, but here are two pieces that touch on this area, one a gushing celebration and the other a embittered rant.
Hi-res make movies
Digital film festivals

Five: Journeys.
A selection of personal pieces, although all film-related. Firstly, an account of the 2005 Lovebytes festival, which was a real high-point in my event-curating career; then a shorter reflection of my only film producing experience; and finally, a description of travelling to Malaysia while passively breaking a number of international trade agreements, which after the Tony Rayns/Kim Ki-Duk article (see above) was probably my most popular, linked-to, and generally enjoyed post.
Lovebytes 2005
Radio On Remix
The Bootleg Bus

Miscellany.
A quartet of posts that didn't fit into any discernible box, but I liked them enough to not delete them off the face of the internet.
Nostalgia about films on TV in the '80s
Notes on 2005 Singapore International Film Festival
About origins of 'Who's the Daddy?'
About the Tsunamii

Ok... that should make life easier.

Thanks

Ben Slater

father figures

2005-06-10T17:27:00.000-07:00

(Ray Winstone circa 1979)

I have not intention of seeing it on anything other than somebody else's pirated version, and only if I have no choice, but the trailer for this weekend's action-eye-candy behemoth Mr And Mrs S***H has been loudly pumping out of every conceivable media outlet over the last 2 weeks and my ears did prick up when I distinctly heard Angelina and Brad trade verbal volleys over the crucial question of which one of them is "the Daddy".

It's Angelina who later (a split second later) concludes, perhaps after some rocket launchers have decimated some buildings, that actually, yes, she is in fact "your Daddy now".

Does anyone associated with the film, except maybe the screenwriter(s), realise that this is a direct reference to Alan Clarke's Scum, a landmark expose of juvenile prisons in the UK? Made in 1977 for the BBC, Scum was considered to be too intensely violent for the small-screen and promptly banned. Clarke had to then remake it a year later, with largely the same cast, and it was given a cinema release.

Bleak, shocking and grittily unpleasant, the film shows how Carlin, played by the young and now iconic Ray Winstone, turns the tables on his tormentors. After he's done some nasty stuff with an iron pipe he declares ferociously and perversely "I'M THE DADDY NOW!". Thus, the cycle of violence and power will continue.

Aside from co-starring in cult items, Quadrophenia and The Fabulous Stains, after Scum Ray Winstone languished into a British television "guest starring" kind of career for many years. He was a face you always recognised, but you could never remember his name. It was only after Gary Oldman cast him as the father in Nil By Mouth in 1997, that he had a full-scale career revival, and the "He's The Daddy Now" line was used to headline a hundred newspaper and magazine profiles to announce his newfound recognition.

Later he would completely sell-out Alan Clarke by sitting in a bar on a series of TV ads and ask the audience "Who's the daddy of beers?" or something like that, while sipping lager out of a bottle. The fact that you could sell a product by connecting it back to a primal scene of shockingly intense violence and dark sexual undertones, seemed to be a symptom of a culture that had no deep memories of anything.

Certainly, there was always something kind of hysterically over-the-top about the line which did make it funny when quoted out-of-context. But now, Mr And Mrs S***H turns it into just a mildly titillating bit of sexual role-play. The phrase was born in a moment of extreme cinema, and 25 years later, becomes dirty-talk for the PG-13 crowd.

mopping up

2005-05-09T08:03:00.000-07:00

(such beautiful losers: Asano and Hitoto in Coffee Jikou)

For the past three years I have been a regular at the Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF), but this year, because of prior engagements I found myself slipping in right at the end, and catching 6 films over the last few days. The programme remained strong all the way to the end, so it was definitely not thin pickings.

The festival is not known for many exclusives and premieres, located as it is right at the end of the festival cycle (a few weeks before Cannes), it mostly functions as a way of catching up with films you've been reading about all year. A mopping up, if you will, of the best in world (especially Asian) cinema. Over the years, it has also developed a repuatation as a place to see interesting documentaries. This is doubly important in Singapore, where 'factual' programming on television is extremely limited, the festival takes on the role as an alternative broadcaster for 2 weeks in the year, where you can see films on porn, revolutions, music, politics, history, marginalised lifestyles and more.

Philip Cheah, the long standing programmer, is the antithesis of most film festival programmers I've met or encountered over the years. Clad usually in jeans and a festival T-shirt, he hangs out in the foyer before films talking (about films) to anyone who approaches him, and you will almost never see him schmoozing with VIPs or wannabe VIPs, giving orders to underlings or getting visibly stressed. He maintains a serious focus throughout.

Philip is staunchly and quietly on the side of the independent underdog. This year, the (famously cash-strapped) festival has had to include pre-film adverts for two of its corporate sponsors - a hotel and a beer company, and every time I saw them I kept feeling Philip's pain.

Then, just as the festival was ending, the main government funding body for film in Singapore announced it was starting its own major (Asian) film festival for Singapore, which according to the organisers aims to reproduce both the glamour and the market of Cannes! They are working with a local production company with no experience of organising film festivals, so this will probably come to nothing, but considering how little the government gives to SIFF, the timing was deeply tactless.

Unlike government initiated and organised 'cultural' events, SIFF has had a genuine and powerful impact on the film culture in Singapore with a fraction of the budget. Indie distributors are bringing in titles that would have been only here for one screening at the festival five years ago. And although the quality of local films is still not there, everyone wants to be a film-maker in Singapore these days.

But anyway, enough about politics.

First film I saw was Green Hat, which was structured as a kind of diptych - with two connected but distinct halves (is this a trend?) It's a well made Chinese indie directed by Lui Fendou who wrote the script for Zhang Yang's widely seen Shower. The first half was charming, brisk and funny, as three child-men in silly wigs rob a bank and make their various escapes, but then it takes a darker turn and the film's main theme - what happens to men when their women betray them sexually - kicked into action. The second half concerned a cop (who can't perform properly in the sack), his wife and her lover. It's all pretty accomplished stuff, and well acted, but it had an air of pointless misery hanging over it. Archive footage of Mao at the opening of the film cued us to some level of ideological metaphor at work.

Quasi-legendary Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien was the subject of a retrospective and an academic conference. I caught the not-quite-new Ozu 'tribute' Cafe Lumiere aka Coffee Jikou, which (like all Hou's films) is a real slow-burner. In his long intro (which he delivered partly in Hokkien, the main local Chinese dialect in Singapore, which is rarely spoken in public here, and therefore went down a storm) Hou recommended we sleep through some of it. Still a tad jet-lagged I expected to be following his advice, but once I'd got into the rhythm of this medium-sweet episode of urban ennui, (dis)connection and discovery, I was in a prime state to be nudged towards the personal emotional revelations of the films closing moments.

Set and shot in Tokyo, Lumiere is essentially about a week or so in the life of a single(minded) Japanese woman-girl called Yoko (played by Yo Hitoto, a half-Taiwanese musician/singer in her first acting role) who drifts around her neighbourhood, occassionally setting out on research trips to find out about a Taiwanese composer who once lived in the city. Yoko sees her parents a couple of times, and announces casually that she's pregant, a fact that her father is totally unable to deal with.

She hangs out mostly with her friendly local bookshop owner, Hajime, who is apparently even more withdrawn from the capitalist rat-race than she is. He likes nothing better than to close up his shop and travel Tokyo's overhead train network with a MD recorder and a microphone.

He is played by Tadanobu Asano, and to my mind, no SIFF (or any film festival for that matter) is complete without a film starring Asano. He is probably the boldest (in terms of choices) and most charismatic leading actor in the world right now, closely beating Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (who still has to make crummy HK genre films every year). Asano's particular charms are hard to pin down without resorting to cliche. He's able to suggest great depths of suppressed pain and emotional scarring with the simplest and most natural of gestures, movements and line-readings. A powerful physical presence, he seems to be devising ways to undercut that in his performance - withdrawing into himself, turning blank. Asano's characters are often in a state of shut-down, temporarily or permanently - and yet as a viewer you still feel able to reach him.

He's also a graphic designer, and in the film, Hajime's laptop remapping of an imaginary train network was made by Asano.

Amy Taubin, in a short piece in Film Comment (sadly not online) expounded eloquently about the play of light in Cafe Lumiere. But for me this is a film about patterns. The micro and the macro. The routines that emerge from the choices we make, the strategies we design to get us out of bed each morning. The connections that we make, and the moments that slip through our fingers. It's both achingly sad and truly uplifting to see this nailed so lucidly in this slender piece of cinema.

As an aside: I heard Kiarostami on the radio last night (World Service) talking about the absurdity of sitting on juries at film festivals (he is on one at Cannes this year), because the true test of a film is time. OK, its only a 10 days since I saw Cafe Lumiere but I can still feel it unfolding and taking shape, and I've a strong sense that this process will continue.

Cafe Lumiere shared some narrative tropes with This Charming Girl by Lee Koon-yi. A more-than slightly decentred female lead, living alone in a big city, impenetrable to her family and friends, coasting through life with seemingly no plans and no future. Shot with a heavy-breathing hand-held camera, which quietly stalks the titular 'girl' (Kim Ji-soo) from the postal office where she works, to friday night drinking sessions with her colleagues, back to her home, which is clearly a memorial to her past life and her dead mother. Gradually through intricately intercut and interconnected flashbacks, the problem of the girl is revealed, and if I disliked the film eventually, it was because the convenience of the revelations and the way she finally comes to terms with her past.

I left halfway through Serik Aprymov's Hunter, mainly because the film's relentless treatment of women as pliant sexual playthings for lonely men in the Khazak tundra got quite tiresome. I'm rarely so politically correct, but I'd just watched This Charming Girl (so the hunter's 'hunting' down of a reluctant female, and her subsequent enjoyment of his attentions, made me feel pretty uneasy), and was gripped by a sudden desire to go home.

A lot has been written about Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady, so I won't say much. Apichatpong is an installation artist who has found a way to take on cinema in the cinema, and miraculously it works. The much trumpeted second half of the film (its the other diptych) which takes place entirely in the jungle with virtually no dialogue, is intense, sensual and hypnotic.

Finally, the festivals closing film - Ghost In The Shell: Innocence. A visually luscious blending of CGI and 2D cell-style animation, which works amazingly well, and offers up a large number of exquisite images. The CGI never works against the cell - rather they complement each other, and Oshi is able to sustain his rich atmospherics through the interplay of these two forms. The narrative is pure pulp, intelligently rendered, and teetering on the right side of coherence, but it is ultimately reworking tropes that felt dated in late-90's science fiction novels.

Futuristic Anime needs to move on - please, no more hardboiled stories about (sexy) cyborgs killing humans, people uploading their personalities into cyberspace, and decaying, retrofitted dystopic cities. I've enjoyed it since the mid-80's, but we are in the future now. It's happened. Lets start imagining again.

digital rewind

2005-04-26T22:55:00.000-07:00

Just returned to Singapore after a manic two weeks in the UK. The first week was mainly taken up by Lovebytes 2005, as previously mentioned, a digital arts and media festival in Sheffield which is hosted at the cinema where I used to have a day-job.

Lovebytes asked me back this year to curate a strand on 'digital feature films', which was my way of deliberately avoiding the tyranny of the 'digital short', although there were plenty of those to go around, and people do really love that stuff - CGI robots, CGI aliens, CGI slapstick. Personally, unless its Pixar, it drives me mad. The greatest antidote to that was the DV Asian Underground series, which combined the social satire of Amir Muhammad's The Big Durian, the extreme cinema of Khavn De La Cruz's Pugot , the intense low life of Zombie Dogs (from Singapore) and the more sedate DIY cellphonetronics of Sasaki Yusuke's Letter . These were screened to small audiences (except for Letter which was running on a loop on a screen outside the cinema), who were interested enough to take a risk on such material. Difficult these films may be, but I maintain they are infinitely more stimulating and compelling than any number of CGI film parodies.

Granzon Nodo' faced off against the CGI onslaught of Kerry Conran's Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow with flair and ingenuity in their sonic rescoring of the pristine digial wonderland. The idea was to sprinkle snow-flakes into the blackbox of Conran's imagination, pace Walter Murch, and what they showed at Lovebytes was for me, a decent first draft. Stripping the orchestral themes off the dialogue and reworking the big action set-pieces to electronic music was a no-brain pleasure, and they made the whole film hum and rumble to a relentless soundtrack of invisible machines, which was inspired, however, the sound could be even more interventionist. In the Novotel bar afterwards, over Pims and beers, we kicked around some ideas to use sound (and dialogue) to radically mess with the narrative. I hope they take this further, because its a genuinely interesting experiment. David from GN has some stuff about this on the cube weblog.

On friday Jonathan Caouette was due to arrive at 4pm to have a talk about that evenings screening of Tarnation . However, there was no sign of him, his minders from the films UK distribution company Optimum, or even his mother, Renee, who we had been forewarned might be along for the ride. Meanwhile tickets for the film were selling fast, and Sheffield station, which is situated opposite the cinema, was disgorging wave after wave of hyped-up Derby football fans for that night's match.

Team Caouette finally arrived at 7.30, the films actual start time, and although the ladies from Optimum had rung ahead to say he wouldnt do an introduction (they'd been stuck in traffic for hours), Jonathan was more than happy to walk straight down into the packed cinema and do his thing. Renee was indeed with him, hidden inside a long raincoat and big shades, she and Jonathan sat down on the back row with a bucket of popcorn each and preceded to watch the film. Renee also has a tendency to laugh during the film's most harrowing sequences.

The film is extraordinary, and its confessional, performative intensity was only heightened by Jonathan's presence. Not a single person left after the screening, and the Q and A was lively and overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Jonathan has done literally hundreds of these events, and after the flight from New York the day before, he was a tad tired, but he genuinely loves talking about the film and responding to his audience, which was great to see. He told us that he's planning his next film as a found-footage remix of three 1970's films starring Sissy Spacek (guess which!), and that Tarnation 1.5 or Tarnation 2 is probably on the horizon, as well as casually mentioning the 'sub-plot' about his 9 year old son, which he didn't feel he could include in this version. (For more on this, read the excellent profile by Scott Foundas).

When it was over, the Optimum ladies wanted Jonathan out of the building ASAP, but as we were leaving the cinema I was told that the police had shut down the venue because the football match had just finished and they didnt want any of the Derby fans trying to get a drink in the cinema bar. Hastily we decided to get a drink in the cinema cafe, a quiet and hardly used adjunct to the bar, where we could call for and wait for a cab.

Getting to the cafe wasn't easy, as Jonathan was now being surrounded by new fans and wannabe film-makers, and the poor guy was unable to say no to a request for an autograph, photo or question. Renee was now getting a fair bit of attention, and this was not necessarily a good idea. She seemed to be enjoying the experience, but was clearly not able discuss the film with strangers. She did keep asking me whether I liked the pumpkin, to which I could only answer - "yes, I loved it".

Anyway, we finally got into the cafe and drinks were bought. But it didn't take long before people figured out where we were and started coming in to talk more with Jonathan. There is some irony in the fact that Jonathan puts so much of himself into the film, gives so much away, and yet, people want more...

The film is Jonathan and Jonathan is the film.

Next morning I had to be at the cinema at 9am to meet Peter Greenaway who was being driven from Manchester airport after catching an early flight from Amsterdam where he lives. As soon as he unfurled himself, smartly suited, from the car, Greenaway was ready to perform, and before we'd had a chance to pour him a coffee in the cinema foyer he had begun to good naturedly harangue me about the 'death of cinema'. Greenaway was giving a talk at 12.30 about digital film, which I'd hastily titled the Future Of Cinema, even though I'd been dealing with Greenaway through an assistant and hadn't actually had a chance to discuss the talk with him at all.

We were also showing all three parts of the Tulse Luper Suitcases films, which were being projected on a high definition format on a fancy-pants projector which the cinema has just acquired. Having seen Tulse Luper One in Singapore on 35mm, I was stunned by how different it was when shown 'properly'. The image is startlingly clear and pure, and this perfectly suits the layering and splitting and general complication of image, sound and narrative Greenaway exercises. It felt like a different film.

Although he's used to red carpets all over the world, Greenaway was surprisingly low maintenance, and seemed genuinely interested in other people, from myself, the festival organisers, through to the young Dutch guy who was videoing the talk. But he does have an ability to create fantastic discursive monologues out of the embers of previous discussions, lectures and talks, and this he did with great skill to a sold-out crowd at Lovebytes. Having spent the best part of an hour mastering Lovebytes producer Mat's Apple Powerbook, so he could show video clips and interact with a rather elegant interactive flash version of Tulse Luper, he opted just to talk.

An entertaining and enthusiastic speaker, he moves from art history, architecture to pop cultural references with an ease and self-deprecating wit that reminded me of J.G. Ballard.

He does his 'cinema is dead' bit, and then he moves on to embrace new media and get excited about the possibilities it has opened up for him. He vows never to shoot on film again, and gives some lucid reasons for the existence of Tulse Luper. What's exciting about the project is the way it can operate across and within different media around the world, therefore after the cinema incarnations, the various websites, installations and DVDS, there is now talk of books, a Japanese soap opera, a feature length animation in Bulgaria and (perhaps dubiously) a film in Israel called Luper In Zion. Tulse Luper becomes a kind of globalised anti-brand, a rich ur-text that can be plundered by any culture for any format.

Greenaway is, of course, profoundly anti-copyright and pro-open source - and announced to the audience that any one can do whatever they want with any of his material. Although he did mention an Australian group who wanted Tulse to lose an arm in a nautical accident in their version, which he vetoed for reasons of continuity...

Another priceless moment was when Greenaway was explaining the wide opportunities he has in Amsterdam, as opposed to London, which runs the gamut from rehanging Rembrandt pictures in the Rijksmuseum to "VJing at the city's largest discotheque". You had to be there...

I wasn't sure how Greenaway's oratory would go down with the no-nonsense Sheffield crowd, but the reaction was extremely positive, again there was a lively Q and A, with mainly excellent questions, a few hardcore fans grabbed him for a photo before we got Peter back into the car and on the way to Schipol airport.

***

Thanks to Jon and Janet at Lovebytes , and especially Mat, who did amazing cool-headed logistical/organisational stuff in order to make the festival happen the way it should happen, and let me stay at his house.

gee, thanks chuck

2005-03-28T17:47:00.000-08:00

Our man in Bangkok, Chuck Stephens, has weighed in on The Great Kim Ki-Duk debate in his review of Bin-Jip/3 Iron for the marvellous Cinema Scope, and apparently us "blustery blog-buddies" misread the infamous Tony Rayns hatchet-job, thus proving that we "are simply in need of remedial reading drills".

I guess it's nice to know that Chuck actually reads blogs, which I'm sure he discovers through regular mainlines of Greencine daily, and the fact that he feels the need to keep raising the spectre of "muddled" and "spittle flecked" internet nerds during his article is as peversely flattering as it is totally insulting.

Defending our writing would be tiresome and pointless, it's all online anyway, so people can make up their own minds, and plenty have. But there's a 'print guys' versus the bloggers thing kicking off here...and i'm interested to see if it goes anywhere...

club nostalgia

2005-03-23T01:14:00.000-08:00

It's all too easy to get lulled into thinking that the internet can provide the low-down on any area of geek interest. Obscure children's TV programmes, unreleased video games, forgotten adverts, all of these things are present and correct with the appropriately unwieldy HTML coding. However, recently reading (online of course) David Thomson's tribute to G. Cabrera Infante, suddenly shifted a gear in my memory, and made me need to seek out something on the web, and for once, there was nary a trace.

I had a distinct memory of seeing Infante on TV in the UK in the late 80's early 90's introducing a double-bill of Sam Fuller films, one of them was House Of Bamboo, I cannot remember the other one. So, it all came flooding back, a formative memory of cinema education and revelation. At that time, BBC2 was showing very good films introduced by very significant but by no means 'famous' people, in the mainstream sense of that term. The slot was called Film Club, and it ran for several years.

I am of the generation for whom TV was the main source of exposure to films (now, for the aspiring buff, it has to be DVD), I grew up outside of London, in small towns with only one cinema, and next to zero chance of seeing a decent film. On my 14th birthday I was given a Video Recorder, and after that my life changed - I taped everything, and the things I loved would be kept, rewatched relentlessly, swooned over fetishistically.

In those days, the diversity of films on TV was remarkable, but more than that, you had shows like Film Club, where you got a chance to hear from very articulate critics, writers and directors, talking about films that influenced them. For a kid, this stuff was often essential.

One that really stands out for me was Julian Temple, not-so-fresh off the Absolute Beginners debacle, introducing a double-bill of Coppola's The Outsiders and Rumblefish . Rumblefish was the second film in the bill, and I remember videotaping them both without much hope for their quality. I had gone out with friends that night, and came back, turned on the TV and caught the last few minutes of Rumblefish . The look, the music, the whole feel of the film devastated me (I was 15/16 at the time). As soon as it was over, and the VCR stopped whirring I hit rewind and watched it from the start.

Older, and jaded today, I'm not sure Rumblefish still has the same grip, but I don't think I could hear Stewart Copeland's urgent and melancholy, percussive score without being transported to a time full of teenage possibility, dangerously cool people, and films that could consume your life.

But just as important to the experience was Temple's introduction, delivered in the inevitable screening room setting, he referenced Albert Camus, Orson Welles and Larry Clark's Tulsa (the first time I had heard of Clark). Temple had a soft-voiced, plummy-but-cool style of delivery, turning his partly scripted intro in a compelling near-monotone which I probably tried to imitate. The key thing was he took the film very seriously, and it made me feel that my passion was vindicated.

Another Film Club double-bill that I treasured was Bernardo Bertolucci introducing Godard's A Bout De Souffle and then Joseph Lewis' Gun Crazy. The pairing is inspired, and for me crucial, because on really 'discovering' cinema, I had immediately fallen for film noir, and while A Bout De Souffle referenced and riffed on noir, Gun Crazy was a hardcore mainline of of the real thing. In his intro Bertolucci admitted, and he was clearly a little embarrassed by this, that he had never seen Gun Crazy before he was asked to do the show. I remember being slightly shocked by this, at that time assuming that anyone in the film business and so much older than I, must have watched every film ever made. But later it made me feel like we were stumbling across great films together. And Bertolucci didn't quite forget the experience either .

One Film Club speaker was Alex Cox, who introduced Point Blank. I missed that show, but Cox was later hired by cinephile producer Nick Jones to introduce a whole season of cult and offbeat flicks (from Django, Kill to Electra Glide In Blue) that the BBC had stockpiled, and they called it Moviedrome. Now, Moviedrome is well documented online, partly because of the geek-factor, and partly because they published some slim books, but Moviedrome, while fun (and it showed some terrific films) didn't quite have the gravitas of Film Club.

The trend of having dynamic hosts introducing film seasons reached a certain level of popularity around 1990-91, and I recall the eccentric genre move specialist (and another Film Club alumni) Kim Newman fronting up a series of never-before-seen-on-TV giallo (Mario Bava mainly), as well as a female film critic (dressed in formal evening-wear) spieling lead-ins to film noirs renowned for their femmes fatales, such as Mildred Pierce and Woman In the Window. Even on the regional commercial station, ITV, some hack local presenter who knew nothing about film would do a quick by-numbers briefing about the weekly Science Fiction feature in front of a blue screen. It was in that setting that I first saw Blade Runner.

While it was obviously perceived at the time that audiences liked a bit of context to set the scene and tone for late-night films, the pattern soon faded away. Moviedrome was resuscitated a few years later, hosted by a 'serious' film critic Mark Cousins, whose distinctive Ulster drawl and frequently absurdly pretentious claims, made him far more a figure of unwitting mirth, than the more self-deprecating and goofily charming Alex Cox.

But by that time, the quality of films on terrestial TV had plummeted. Foreign films didn't exist before midnight, and then hardly at all; the days when you could drift joyously through an all-summer-long Bertolucci, Wenders, Altman season were long gone.

But things like Film Club weren't just about watching films, they were about hearing people discuss, illuminate and reveal things about them - and this was so important for a young pup like me. Where else was I going to hear these people speak? And the things they said could change the way I felt about films, it instilled a passion, forced me to have patience about films which I might otherwise have given up on. It made me fall in love with the love of cinema.

Another final memory: A Channel 4 show from the same period as Film Club where directors broke down a favourite film (in front of an audience of admiring film students - a clunky device, but...) and the one that comes back to me so strongly was the late Lindsay Anderson analyzing and appreciating John Ford's My Darling Clementine. I was really into Sergio Leone at that time, and felt that any classic Western was pretty lame, but watching Anderson's masterclass and then seeing the film, was an extraordinary lesson that I needed to have in the beauty of pure and simple film-making and storytelling.

Distance

2004-12-29T16:21:00.000-08:00

Some kind of update is called for. I was going to write about some DVDs I'd watched over Christmas, but as the death toll rises in this part of the world, it seems a little trivial to be getting into that right at this minute.

Singapore was physically unaffected by the quake and the tsunamis, although apparently there were some parts of the island where the tremors were felt. When the news first came in this was reported, but now its a tiny, tiny footntote. Up to 300 Singaporeans are missing - while less than a handful are reported dead - this gives us a clue to how big the numbers will be for the 'final' death count.

The numbers. Somehow when they first come in I was able to get a handle on the horror. A few hundred, a thousand, a few thousand. OK, I can imagine that. It's quantifiable. Now, we're up to 80, 000, and its become abstract, impossible to process the scale of it, to appreciate the astonishing level of personal loss and pain that must accompany the statistic.

We watch the TV news when we come back in from work. A reflex action. They are struggling too. There should be a sign up in all the newsrooms, to those who write the scripts for newsreaders - "When referring to tourists in Phuket or Sri Lanka - Do Not Use The Phrase 'The Dream Holiday That Turned Into A Nightmare'".

Some things go without saying.

Tony Reigns

2004-11-26T23:14:00.000-08:00

(Kim Ki-duk: seeking a Korean translation of Film Comment urgently)

It's long been the case that the Western cinema industry, by which I mean everything from film festivals to remake-happy studios, needs to endlessly feed off and 'discover' cinema from Other sides of the world - far-flung and exotic places where anything might be possible. European and American product is on the doorstop, it's here, it holds few surprises because we know too much about it; but Asia is a vast and mysterious landscape where the cinematic maps are still being drawn up, and any film festival director casting his eye towards the Orient is going to need a guide.

Fulfilling this curiously 19th Century Colonial logic of exploration into the unknown are various movers and shakers, critics and producers, know-it-alls, cultural brokers and passionate evangelists who are constantly on the look-out for the 'next big thing'. Western film festivals don't just programme auteurs like Tsai Ming Liang, Wong Kar-Wai, or younger ones like Jia Zhangke and Park Chan-wook, because they watched a submitted VHS tape and thought it was great - they are kept carefully informed about these directors by sources. Usually, but not always, these sources are themselves American or European, ex-pats or nomadic festival-hoppers, professional networkers existing out of suitcases and room service. Hot tips are their special currency. They keep their ears to the ground, searching for the right movies, the right film-makers and crucially, exactly the right moment to place that call to Cannes, Venice, etc.

One of the best-known of these chaps is Tony Rayns, avuncular British film critic-curator and a man whose critical enthusiasm for East Asian cinema has spilled over into collaboration with those he has championed - a script for the best-forgotten Christopher Doyle film Away With Words, and more productively he has helped with English subtitles on many films, most recently 2046 . In East Asia, the name 'Tony' is almost totemic in film-making communities, it is a powerful name - a signifier of acceptance into film festivals, and therefore film culture, the world over.

Approval from Rayns means plane tickets to Rotterdam, London, Vancouver (and that's just to start with). It could mean TV sales, limited distribution, and even the next film deal. As a result Rayns is greeted with a certain kind of awe by those young (and not so young) film-makers he encounters in this part of the world. Like the Man From Del Monte in a series of classic Orange Juice commercials from my youth, they are all waiting for him to say - "Yes".

Rayns cannot take sole credit, but he is certainly a key factor in the sudden rise and rise of the late Japanese helmer Takashi Miike in English-speaking parts of the world. But it goes both ways. For instance, he is not known to be a big fan of the Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku. A programmer I know who organized a season of his films in the UK a few years ago found that Fukasaku's studio was charging an extortionate rental for each print. To cut costs, the programmer tried to tie-up with a major art cinema in London, but they passed on it. "Why?" I queried at the time, "Because they listened to Tony" came the weary reply. The Man From Del Monte said No (Although, the season went ahead).

Of course Rayns needs to be critical, he is a critic after all, and I'm the last person to chastise him for not praising everything that he comes across, but people like him are in a very unique position of responsibility.

Regular film critics have a marginal influence on careers these days, but when you can regularly decide whether or not a particular film-maker's work will travel to key festivals in Europe or America, or whether they will remain unknown outside Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc for another year, then you are in a very powerful and significant role indeed. The roles of critic and curator blur and maybe you need to think beyond simply your own critical prejudices and peccadillos.

One film-maker who Rayns very much dislikes, but who has 'broken-out' to his obvious displeasure, is South Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk. I was aware of Rayn's antipathy towards Kim a few years ago when I noticed the press-book for Kim's film Address Unknown featured a quote in which Rayns begrudgingly acknowledged the visual beauty of Kim's work, but the tone was disdainful. In the latest Film Comment, Rayns has gone one step further and written an extended hatchet job on Kim that I suspect reveals a lot more about 'Tony' than it does about his target.

His critique of the eccentric director ranges from bitchily personal (comments about his sex life, his pride in his gym-honed physique, and his supposed "harping on about class resentment" ), to box office gloating (Kim's films don't make any money at home in South Korea). A claim that all of Kim's films are autobiographical collapses immediately, especially when Rayns is reduced to admitting (probably with a wry smile) that, "To the best of my knowledge Kim doesn't beat up women or force them into prostitution". Rayns can do better than this - an onscreen alter-ego does not an autobiography make, and he knows that as well as anyone. After this mischievous warm-up, Rayns slips in some high praise (he can't help but admire Kim's occasionally bravura visual set-piece) but this is just a feint before the sucker-punches start flying. From then on the article soars to new levels of ferocity

He spends a paragraph archly puzzling over why the Venice Film Festival programmed The Isle in 2000 and thus transformed Kim into an art-house celebrity. "Was it because they were looking for cheap shock value and an easy source of controversy?" is the final and clearly his favourite option. Four years on and Rayns is still irked by Venice's decision. By openly questioning this pivotal moment in Kim's career, he seems to be wishing that Ki-duk had remained obscure, that no one in the West had ever heard of him, and to take that desire further, that Kim had been unable to continue making films (which given his lack of success in South Korea is a likely scenario). This is a worrying line of thought for any cineaste to take. Especially one who is so well-known for encouraging new talent. Is Rayns becoming like the killer in The Vanishing, who saves the life of a drowning girl and decides that if he has the power to do good than maybe he should also do some bad?

Rayns states as fact that after The Isle's reception at Venice "Kim quickly figured out that the best way forward was to play up sensation", then he sideswipes The Coast Guard as "repulsive", Samaritan Girl as "sexual terrorism", and Kim's latest, 3-Iron, as a blatant rip-off of Tsai Ming Liang.

He puts down Kim's success, particularly with Spring Summer Autumn, Winter and Spring Again to the "the blind spot that some Westerners have for East Asian films. It's as if they are so hung up on the 'otherness' of Oriental cultures that their bullshit detectors stop working". OK, I'm with Rayns on this, like when Crouching Tiger blew all the middle-aged English broadsheet hacks away because they thought Kung Fu was a series starring David Carradine. So, it figures that the festival juries castigated by Rayns for bestowing awards on Samaritan Girl and 3-Iron must be a bunch of ignorant white guys dazzled by Kim's 'otherness', right? Well, no actually - stand up Samira Makhmalbaf and Spike Lee.

Rayns has made his position clear - only people who don't know anything about Asian cinema would embrace Kim Ki-duk. Where this leaves Asian critics who admire him, and programme him into their film festivals, and the Asian audiences who admire his work, I have no idea...

In his absurd confidence about his own superiority in 'the strange case of Kim Ki-duk', Rayns seems to have developed his own "blind spot" when it comes to his accusations about Kim. Claims that Kim is just a cynical manipulator of controversy and that the festivals that programme him are looking for a cheap thrill - are all charges that could so easily be levelled at Rayns fave Takashi Miike. Kim certainly has an eye on the Western market, and when I interviewed him he admitted that his lack of dialogue was in part a deliberate strategy to allow his films to travel, but I cannot for a moment question the intense, extraordinary sincerity of his work (all of which was in place long before Venice made him famous). And Miike is surely a far more willfully provocative "sexual terrorist" than Kim has ever been, American and European filmfests have long used Miike's pervo-sadean-splatter shtick to placate the extreme cinema crowd.

So it all comes down to personal opinion, and with Kim we just have to agree to disagree. But the article left a sour taste. As a critique it doesn't convince, and its main argument - that Kim has somehow fooled people into believing his terrible films are good - reveals that Rayns' target isn't actually Kim himself, but rather all the critics, curators, programmers, juries and audiences who have apparently committed the ultimate, unforgiveable mistake. They didn't listen to Tony.

UPDATE: OK, so people don't post messages here, but they DO discuss this stuff in other places, join in the debate here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And another critical response to Rayn's article here.

(19/01/05) YET MORE UPDATES: The debate is revived!

Critical Futures

2004-11-08T21:43:00.000-08:00

(Coming to a commerical break near you)

There's a kind of utopian hyperbole that has long been associated with the digital media frontier. An all-too-eager embracing of the bleedingly fresh and straight from the hard drive that fails to ask the harder questions about form and content. The celebration of the 'cutting edge' is too often a depthless pursuit of the newest and the best. Now more an ever we need considered and critical reflection on where this is all leading.

Two major digital film festivals which promise to provide a glimpse of the future of film-making are Onedotzero (UK) and Resfest (US). Every year they make it their business to deliver us programmes of the most innovative and groundbreaking short films from all over the world.

Features are a rarity in this field, we're in the land of short attention spans - adverts, pop videos, idents, stings, clips, animations, cut-scenes (from videogames), self-promotional films and yes, the occasional personal project, shot on borrowed equipment between paying jobs.

This is the self-styled intersection between art and commerce, where global brands are often producers, creators are now called creatives, and where a three-picture deal with a major studio's 'indie' wing is the holy career grail. It's clear that the territory of the 'cutting edge' is largely a corporate domain, both in terms of the technology, and also content.

After an inaugural premiere in their hometowns (London and Los Angeles respectively), Onedotzero and Resfest tour their packages of films, discussions and events around the world. Both are highly successful and to a certain extent lucrative. Film festivals, media centres and arts-house cinemas have a remit to track the new, but they lack the resources to find it themselves, so they need to show this stuff. It's a kind of clairvoyant protection racket. A one-stop survey of the global contemporary scene; to resist it is to risk being left behind.

There are usually quite a few overlaps in the content between Resfest and Onedotzero, expecially the directors who they ceaselessly champion - Mike Mills, Jonathan Glazer, Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, and a whole lot more. None of these guys were actually discovered by the festivals, but in their seemingly effortless ascendance from ads and pop clips to acclaimed feature films, they epitomize the spirit of the enterprise.

There are some differences - Onedotzero's content has the edge in terms of experimentation. The London-based outfit is funded generously by the Arts Council Of England, and has not been afraid to dig further back into the history of non-narrative, experimental film-making. Whereas Resfest, a branch of the Res Media Group, an off-shoot of Chris Blackwell's Palm Pictures, only ever has its eye on the brighter future.

Resfest is a spin-off from the magazine Res (or is that the other way round), which began concentrating purely on digital film-making, but then realized that this focus was too narrow and has gradually rebranded itself into a kind of cultural life-style magazine for aspirational creative types. Film is still dominant, but music, gadgets, videogames, visual art, graphic design, fashion, graffiti, internet - are all covered on a monthly basis. I enjoy Resmag, and there is the occasional thoughtful piece of writing and some nice photographs, so it took me a while to figure out why it was such an unsatisfying read. Then it hit me: it has no critical content, it has no bite, it is an endless list of praise and hype. Res doesn't have a bad word to say about anybody, which results in a serious lack of edge. Sure, it pays attention to culture-jamming, oppositional webfilms, open source, mods, hacking and other forms of media resistance, but even this is subsumed into an all-consuming discourse of cool. Just another neat thing to be appropriated by Nike or BMW. Res may vote for Kerry, hate war, and dig Naomi Klein, but it loves nothing better than when the suits from branding (in some monolithic global behemoth) start commissioning animators, graphic designers and the latest, hippest pop video auteurs. Long live the new creative-corporate flesh!

I saw Resfest at its London debut a few years ago, when it was a lot less well known than it is today. Sat through a full day of it at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, watched the shorts programmes, a flash animation programme, a badly pitched talk with a hilariously hung-over Tim Hope (a darling of Res and Onedotzero and deservedly so, he is a rare talent), and finally a deeply mediocre pre- Tadpole Gary Winick DV feature called Sam The Man. It all felt a bit lacklustre back then, there were even grumblings in the audience, people had traveled from Europe to see what they thought was going to be a vision of the future, and they hadn't really seen much. Digital was being fetishized, but to what end? One of the best shorts I saw was made using a 35mm stills camera, sure it was assembled on a digital suite, but wasn't everything these days?

Cut abruptly to last Friday, when I sat in an auditorium in Singapore for the first screening of Resfest Shorts One2004. The Resfest machine had moved to the Lion City for the first time ever and was being hosted by The Asian Civilisations Museum, a refurbished old colonial building by the river (although Res were brought in by some independent operators). I'd just been upstairs to the Res Lounge, which was less a place to 'chill out', than a well-presented trade show, where Motorola, Apple and Nike logos and products made their considerable presence felt.

Back to the films. The programme kicked off with a very moody Australian short entitled We Have Decided Not To Die, a triptych of visual scenarios in which those dead or about to die (by drowning, by car collision, by jumping off a tall building) are suddenly resurrected - the drowned woman levitates above water, the car-crash guy levitates above the cars, and the suicidal boy is reborn through the act of leaping. Performances and cinematography were impressive, but this was Bill Viola meets The Matrix with all the po-faced metaphysics and intense slow-motion that such a hybrid implies. It's a classic 'calling card' film - a proof of stylistic life for a young, talented film-maker, but its images, no matter how well-rendered and how sincerely heartfelt, were cliches already, decontextualised by countless jeans and sneaker ads.

The other blatant 'calling card' in the programme was the two-minute long Bikou , where a skinny and naked model-type woman wakes up on a deserted desert highway and is harassed by a glitching holographic geisha (like an avatar from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash). Beautiful and totally pointless, it was clearly intended as a fragment of show-reel talent. A brief taster to be screened in the boardroom during a pitch.

The Mood directed by Fredrik Bond is the opposite, it's the work of an experienced ad-director who wants to prove he can do story over minutes rather than seconds. A brow-beaten guy, driving his nagging wife to a wedding is commanded to run an errand for his angry boss when he runs out of petrol. Mayhem ensues. The escalating disaster has been the staple basis for short films for eons, and while this is by no means the worst of its type, I couldn't see any possible reason for its inclusion in Resfest.

The curators always lace the programme with lighter fare, and this year we had Jason Wishnow's Oedipus Rex and Ward 13, both animations. Wishnow's is a very polished web-film, incestuous greek tragedy told with fruit and vegetables. The programme copy talks of his recreations of 1950's epics, but it seemed more of a riff on Gladiator and Hollywood action-flicks in general. It's well done, but the joke is getting old now, and it wears thin long before the end. Ward 13 is a way-too-long claymation tribute to Aardman and 1980's horror. Silly and fun in places, but the director's desire to stage increasingly elaborate set-pieces gets rapidly tiresome unless you find movie-movie kinetics performed by animated clay funny - and I know, a lot of people do.

Aside from all being very well produced, almost all the films had grandiose orchestral soundtracks droning on throughout, bullying the audience into experiencing a simulation of cinematic emotion and texture.

The one exception was Nicolas Provosts' Papillon D'Amour, a disturbingly beautiful bit of found-footage mutation involving a scene from Rashomon . It's use of Kurosawa's masterpiece threw everything else into sharp relief. That was a movie, but what actually were these other things we were watching?

Res seems to be caught in a double-bind. On one hand there is the willful valourising of hip design over genuine meaning - allowing it to brand itself as a stylish lifestyle accessory for its perceived demographic of creatives, students and ad executives who read the magazine (and make/watch the films). And yet it also stakes a claim to be pathfinding for a digital future. If that's the case then surely a low-budget DV melodrama from Nigeria's flourishing domestic film scene would be a far more appropriate choice for the festival's feature slot, than Sprout , another 'breath-taking' surfing documentary which was mainly shot on 16mm?

As it travels around the world (next stop Sao Paulo), Res is constructing a very specific notion of the future of film, a globalised spikey haircut kind of future, where film-makers and audiences are all homogenized into a definition of 'state-of-the-art' that owes more to design and branding than it does to the real world we live in.

This troubles me, because a festival dedicated to innovation needs to be doing a lot more than just checking to see if it looks good in the mirror. DV has fundamentally changed the moving image landscape. It's made possible films as disparate as Sokoruv's Russian Ark and Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation , which marry technology with real ideas, themes and emotions. Resfest may entertain, it may be 'eye-candy', and it may even inspire people to make something with their computer, all of which are good things, but if this is the future of cinema - then maybe it's time to go back and take another look at the past.

The Beauty Of Disappointment

2004-10-24T03:15:00.000-07:00

(A Tony Leung action figure, complete with trembling ennui)

Wong Kar-Wai devotees are a specific kind of film-geek. Straight, gay, male, female, young and old - his films shift across dividing lines to ensnare anyone who's a sucker for yearning, stumbling, melancholy romance. The style is a killer for sure - with his collaborators, William Chang on sets and cutting, and Chris Doyle (or one of his stand-ins) on lights and camera, Wong has created a look, or rather a series of looks, that are entirely his own. He's also that rare thing in the contemporary film world, an artist (who is working with decent budgets), transforming himself in every work, as opposed to choosing the next project. Each film seems to grow organically not just out of the last one, but out of all his films. His body of work shifts and changes constantly, as every new film throws flickering light on the old ones. The cult of WKW is also largely the result of his legendary love of improvisation and tension (or as he called it in the Time interview, "suspense"). Many of his most fervent fans are 'creative' people, be they in advertising or theatre, and the idea of "winging it" under pressure, of asking The Most Famous Actors In The World to run with some spontaneous thought, or of not fully understanding the story of your film until its finished, is breathtaking and delicious.

A new film by WKW is an event now. We look forward to it for years. We dream about it. We look at the pictures and try to avoid watching trailers (who wants to see those images move for the first time on a tiny Quicktime Player? This is cinema!). The anticipation becomes intense. But we have been disappointed before and I think now, we realize his films are not actually made for immediate gratification, but are here for all time. To be replayed, on screen and in the mind, for years to come. They are like great albums in that way, keep turning them over and eventually it will click into place.

Chungking Express is to blame for our craving for the quick-fix "blown away" feeling from WKW. That was the ultimate pop-art city-trash hip-love compilation. Riding (unconsciously) on the crest of mid-90’s dazzle (the emergence of global notion of 'cool', where London-Tokyo-Hong Kong and New York styles are fused forever), it was beautiful people making the mundane streets into an extraordinary playground of possibility and the imagination. It made us fall in love with the city again. It even had a Happy Ending (sort of), and a hummable theme tune (Faye Wong's note perfect recreation of The Cranberries' Dreams in Cantonese). It was as light as air (albeit the slightly polluted kind) and it tapped shamelessly into something cool people weren't meant to care about - falling in love. It was irresistible and if you were on its groove, it would blow you away without hesitation. You left the cinema feeling alive and giddy.

Fallen Angels was the first disappointment. The style was refined, developed, extended. It looked and sounded amazing, but cool had turned cold. Leon Lai and Michelle Reis were the absolute opposite of Tony and Faye, they had no capacity to dance, jam and get loose. They looked fantastic of course, but that alone couldn't be enough.

Happy Together lurched again in the opposite direction. If Fallen Angels immaculately garnered the dreaded epithet "post-MTV", Happy Together was determined to crunch itself into a shape that no one could ever mistake for a pop video. Ragged beyond belief, dirty with raw and bleeding emotion, it was a hard ride, and after the mannequin acting of Lai and Reis, WKW cajoled, manipulated and abused Tony and Leslie into giving astonishingly vital performances, the best of their careers perhaps. Happy Together may have felt like a chucked together scrapbook of bad memories, but Wong maintained an emotional control that hints at things to come, he keeps us removed from these two feuding, confused, stupid lovers, until the moment (towards the end) when Tony breaks down at the dictaphone, and then we realize how much he has us caring.

Control is the watchword for the next disappointment, In The Mood For Love. Yes, it was so fucking beautiful. Yes, the soundtrack was instantly covetable. Yes, the actors were stunning. Yes. Yes. Yes! It was a veritable elongated tantric orgasm of taste, style and emotional control. What was amazing about ITMFL, was that the same process of 'making it up as we go along' that brought the kicking and screaming delinquent Happy Together into the world could also give birth to this perfectly formed "masterpiece". Wong was on top of his game here, after years of multiple storylines and too many characters, he showed total narrative and spatial focus (Picking up a tip or two about economy from from Hong Kong colleague Johnnie To perhaps). No moment is wasted in ITMFL, no image is gratuitous, no shot is ever a second too long or short. ITMFL left me a little chilly on first run, although it had many of those 'dictaphone' moments, those incredible points of emotional realization when everything borders on collapse. It grew as a film for me in my memories, and subsequent viewings confirmed this, and now it is a thing of wonder, and only a few seconds of it is enough to make me palpitate.

So then we reach the future. We finally pull in at the station called 2046. I know I’ve skipped a few stops along the way. As Tears Go By (WKW's debut, think Mean Streets remade as a proto-Chungking Express), Days Of Being Wild (my first WKW, more on that later) and Ashes Of Time (saw it in a rare cinema revival, and was blown away, but it doesn't hold up quite so well). I finally saw 2046 three days ago, and by now, as you must realize, I was fully prepared for the bittersweet bliss of disappointment.

In the last scene in Days Of Being Wild, we see a man in cramped medium close-up, getting ready to go out while some music plays. That man was Tony Leung, and it was his first appearance in the film. At the time Wong explained that there was supposed to be another story about this character, which was never completed. Maybe one day he'd come back to it. Now, after ITMFL we realize that Chow, Leung's character in that and 2046, was that guy. And that 2046 is the final part in a not-so-loose trilogy of 'period' films set in a Hong Kong of the 1960's.

2046 is a symphony that majestically replays images, sequences, lines and ideas from almost every single previous Wong Kar Wai film, but miraculously, it never slides into self-parody (WKW got that out of his system by producing the mercilessly funny Chinese Odyssey 2002). It is a summation of sorts, but also a sidetrack, Wong's obsessive recreation of the period - and leaping forward to his fashion shoot manga future - is a way of transporting himself away from the present. Chow writes himself into the future, while Wong shoots his way back into the past. This is how he deals allusively with his own clear sense of crisis about Hong Kong's future.

There is a loneliness at the heart of 2046, and not just that of Tony's character, but of all the characters, and of course, of Wong himself - that aches and reverberates in every frame. Although in cinemascope, the film is shot almost entirely in medium shots and tight close-ups, for all this meticulous period recreation, we barely see anything of the character's surroundings. If interrogated we could not draw a plan of the layout of Tony's hotel room, which is, after all, where most of the film is set. Space is claustrophobic, emotionally charged and constantly playing tricks on us. All that rigorous control and mastery demonstrated on ITMFL is present, but applied to a sprawling, episodic narrative. In its essential portrait of loneliness it is a far bleaker, darker work that any of Wong's previous films. No hope for redemption for these lost souls. Instead, the Oriental Hotel, like the digital android-staffed train that Chow imagines in his pulp fictions, is a kind of hellish purgatory, where beautiful losers are doomed to repeat the same mistakes, gradually becoming walking monuments of guilt and regret.

So, 2046 is another magnificent disappointment. Do the Sci-fi scenes add much to Chow's story at all? Is there far too much of the luminous but slightly irritating Zhang Ziyi? Are the glimpses of Maggie Cheung too archly elusive (although they do provide one classic 'dictaphone' moment, apparently not present in the Cannes version)? Have we even seen a finished 2046? Given the presence of so many cuts, and the inevitability of more material on a DVD, is this anything but substantial preview of a work-in-permanent-flux?

But there is an almost erotic ecstasy in the lack, absences and flaws of 2046. It would be wrong again if it was pristine and perfect. It has the baggy density and detail of a great novel which demands to be reread. For Wong, I hope its the close of a chapter in his life and art and he can come back to meet us in the present.

It's only been three days, but 2046 is a place I return to often. Especially in my dreams.