by Mark Cousins
The most popular films in Britain in the 1990s were comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) penned by Richard Curtis and produced by Working Title Films. The country’s most distinctive director was Mike Leigh who, like the French filmmakers of the period, focused on disenfranchised protagonists, mostly suburbanites. Using improvization to develop characters, he went beyond the French in finding the often comic nuances in the British class system. In Life is Sweet (UK, 1991), for example, the mother teaches dancercize classes for tiny children, the father’s big scheme to make money is a new hot-dog trailer, one daughter is a plumber and a grotesque family friend opens a hopeless French restaurant called “Regret Rien” (348). Most of Leigh’s films are full of such tragi-comic detail. Former jazz musician Mike Figgis was more formally experimental. After the atmospheric debut Stormy Monday (1988) he went to the US to make Internal Affairs (USA, 1990), an unusually bleak portrait of a Los Angeles policeman. Neither, however, was as original as Time Code (UK, 2000), a remarkable film in which four unedited takes following characters whose stories intersect, are presented simultaneously on four quadrants of a split screen. At some screenings Figgis himself varied the sound levels of each take to emphasize different sections of dialogue and, therefore, action. Four continuous takes would not have been possible on film, of course, and Time Code was the most innovative digital film to date.
The polar opposite of this but equally innovative was the latest meticulous film from the Spaniard Victor Erice, whose The Spirit of The Beehive (Spain, 1973) had so beautifully taken the film Frankenstein as its starting point. El sol del membrillo/The Quince Tree Sun (Spain, 1992) was a documentary of sorts about a famous Spanish painter, Antonio López, doing nothing more than painting the fruit of the tree of the title, measuring how it drops slightly as the tree’s branches sag, listening to news about the Gulf War on the radio (see page 436, 325). As he paints the fruit begins to decay and his work is an attempt to defer that decay. Erice’s approach was as detailed and loving as López’, each artist mirroring the other. The film’s patience and spirituality make it almost as great as the 1990s benchmark for such things, Iranian film.
CONTEMPLATION AND HORROR IN NEW ASIAN CINEMA.
While the most significant European films of the last fifteen years – those by Von Trier, Dumont, the Dardenne brothers, Haneke, Tarr, Muratova, Kossakovsky, Leigh and Erice – were sober and rigorous, the best work from Asia was often far more sensuous. In South Korea, there had long been a populist mainstream tradition of martial arts films and melodrama. In May 1980, an anti-government uprising at Kwangju, though violently suppressed, catalyzed a new spirit in the arts. By 1986, an independent film movement had emerged and its directors collaborated on a documentary about peasant farmers, Parangsae/The Bluebird. Some of the filmmakers involved were prosecuted but another oppositional film O Gumenara/O Dreamland (South Korea, 1989) went further, portraying the events at Kwangyu and being shown at universities across the country.
The stage was set for Korean filmmaking to mature and the career of its most distinguished director shows how it did so. Im Kwon-taek had been making popular films from 1962 but in 1981, with Mandala (1981), his approach became more serious. Thereafter he became the Kurosawa of Korean cinema, addressing the increasingly humanist themes of enlightenment and sexuality, as well as shamanism. His Seo-Pyon-Jae/Sopyonje (South Korea, 1993) did well internationally and splendidly at home. Set in the crucial decade of 1950s, after Japan’s thirty-five-year occupation of the country, its division into North and South Korea and the subsequent Korean War, it follows three travelling singers of the country’s remarkably melancholic narrative music, Pansori. One Pansori singer who found fame after Sopyonje was Cho Seung-Hyun, who dominates Im’s even more splendid Chunhyang (South Korea, 2000).
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The beauty of cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s work for director Wong Kar-Wai was evident in their first collaboration, Days of Being Wild, a sensual updating of Nick Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (page 226). Hong Kong, 1990.
From an established mainstream Korean director whose work became more artistically ambitious, to a Hong Kong innovator, twenty-two years his junior: Wong Kar-Wai was born in China, moved to Hong Kong in 1963, and trained as a graphic designer. Finding the martial arts films of the Shaw Brothers too detached from the realities of young people there, he began improvizing scriptless films about drifters and existential loners, the sort of characters that had dominated the French “cinéma du look” in the 1980s. Together with Australian-born cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who would become central to his rambling and anarchic way of working, he replicated some of the gloss of those films. Ai-Fei Zhengchuan/Days of Being Wild (Hong Kong, 1990) was his first distinctive film, the first shot by Doyle, and a landmark in Hong Kong non-martial arts cinema. An updating of Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (USA, 1955), it established Wong’s central theme of loss. Doyle’s imagery (349) creates fleeting moments of beauty in the lives of the characters, the memory of which leads to longing and unfulfilled desire. At one point a character in Days of Being Wild says “I always thought that one minute flies by. But sometimes it really lingers on. Once a person pointed at his watch and said to me that because of that minute, he’s always remember me. It was so charming listening to that. But now I look at my watch and tell myself I have to forget this man.”
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The Wong–Doyle collaboration continued in their semi-improvised In the Mood for Love, about a man (Tony Leung) and a woman (Maggie Cheung) who move into adjacent apartments in Hong Kong in 1962 and fall in love. Hong Kong–France, 2000.
This sums up Wong’s vision. He and Doyle sometimes became so carried away with alcohol-fuelled invention that what they had to say was barely discernible, making their films little more than post-modern mood pieces, but when they cohered, as in the downbeat gay love story Chunguang Zhaxie/Happy Together (Hong Kong, 1997) and a rapturous heterosexual one, Huayang Nianhua/In the Mood for Love (Hong Kong/France, 2000), the depiction of the transient beauty of young life was heartbreaking. In both, Latin American music represents passion from another world. As in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, hope has been so squeezed out of the human elements of the film that it has emigrated into form – photographic beauty (ill). As with the Italian neo-realists, Wong Kar-Wai weaves “dead time” into the incidents in the lives of his characters; and, as with François Truffaut, he sometimes freeze- frames moments of poignancy, somewhat indulgently so.
In neighbouring Taiwan, a Malaysian-born director the same age as Wong Kar-Wai showed a similar interest in the vacuities of modern life. Like Wong Kar-Wai, Tsai Ming-liang was influenced by the bleak human vision of Fassbinder. Also like Wong, Tsai used neo-realist style “dead time” in his work to capture the emptiness he saw around him, a static approach which he inherited from the great Taiwanese director of the previous generation, Hou Hsiao-Hsien (see page 421). In his third feature Aiqing Wansui/Vive L’Amour (Taiwan, 1994), for example, a young man arrives in an apartment and looks around (351). Fourteen minutes later he goes to cut his wrists, but can’t. Then a girl and a stranger arrive and start to make love. The young man hides under the bed as they do so, and becomes sexually aroused). Only twenty-three minutes into the film are the first words spoken. Over an hour into the story, we discover that the young man sells crematorium containers. The girl sells real estate so we see lots of empty apartments.
Then our young man tries on the girl’s dress. Each empty scene, each new building is part of the slow mystery of the story. Who are these people? Who owns the apartments, why is the young man suicidal? The ambiguities of apartments have been a rich seam in world cinema: Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (USA, 1960), Chantal Akerman’s films, Polanski’s The Tenant (France, 1976), Woody Allen’s Another Woman (USA, 1988), the Wachowski brothers’ Bound (USA, 1997), David Lynch’s Lost Highway (USA, 1997). Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (Italy–France, 1972) dealt with this theme more famousl
y perhaps than any of these, so it is appropriate that Bertolucci became one of Tsai’s most vocal admirers. At the end of Vive l’Amour, in a six-minute unbroken shot, the girl walks to a bench, begins to cry, the sun comes out, she lights a cigarette, then looks as if she is about to break down. It is one of the simplest and most moving endings in modern cinema. Tsai’s films thereafter continued to be about apartments, loneliness and sexual ambiguity, and thus can be seen as companion pieces to Wong’s. Where they differ is that the Hong Kong director would never film a scene as austere as the ending of Vive l’Amour. There is always movement and beauty in his work, if only on the surface.
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A mysterious, suicidal young man (right) hides in an apartment in Tsai Ming-Liang‘s enigmatic Vive L’Amour, which was influenced by Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Fassbinder. Taiwan, 1994.
The creative ambitions of world cinema in the 1990s were widespread: Sri Lanka and Vietnam, countries that thus far had only sporadically made ambitious films, both produced distinctive filmmakers. Purahanda Kaluwara/Death on a Full Moon Day (Prasanna Vithanage, Sri Lanka–Japan, 1997) made for the equivalent of just US$80,000, was one of the first serious Sri Lankan films.7 Beautifully exposed and composed, it borrowed the dead time approach of Wong Kar-Wai and Tsai but not to underline the emotional deadness of modern city life. Instead director Vithanage tells the restrained tale of a peasant villager who decides to dig up the recently buried body of his son, who was killed in the Sri Lankan civil war (352). He discovers that the body is not there. Either his son is not really dead at all, or the film is suggesting that in his death he became absorbed into the oneness of the universe.
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A villager opens the grave of his son to find that the body is not there in Prasanna Vithanage’s Death on a Full Moon Day. Sri Lanka–Japan, 1997.
Indigenous Vietnamese filmmaking began in the late 1940s with documentaries about the country’s revolution of 1945. Its first fiction feature was made in 1959, and its first creatively ambitious work was Canh Dong Hoang/Wild Field (Hong Sen, 1980). In 1995 the Vietnam-born French resident Tran Anh Hung made the harrowing Xich lo/Cyclo (France–Vietnam, 1995), a kind of update of Bicycle Thieves in the country of his ancestry. Its story of a rickshaw man whose vehicle is stolen and whose life spirals into crime was filmed with haunting grace. Five years later, a line of dialogue in Tran’s French-funded A la Verticale de l’été/The Vertical Ray of the Sun aka At the Height of Summer (France–Vietnam, 2000) stated perfectly his theme, “One should live where one’s soul is in harmony”. The story of the relationship between a brother who is a bit-part actor and a sister who is a photographer, the film is short on economic or social information about the characters’ lives but detailed about their artistic sensibilities. Perhaps inevitably, Tran’s work is more detached from Vietnam than Wong’s is from Hong Kong or Tsai’s from Taiwan.
It is at this point too that filmmaking in Thailand makes its first major appearance. Rather exceptionally, until the 1960s, the most popular Thai films were silent, shot on 16mm, and often projected in villages, on improvized screens made out of sheets. By the 1970s, annual production stood at about 200 a year, consisting mostly of cheaply made musicals and comedies aimed at the domestic market. This had dramatically slumped to just ten films in 1997, when the country’s film industry looked as if it might die out. But then there was a revival. Around the turn of the millennium, several more realist-inclined directors emerged. In addition, the Thai royal family, which had long shown an interest in amateur production, entered the scene. Prince Chatrichalerm Yukol spent over three years and an astonishing US$15 million making Suriyothai (Thailand, 2000) which told the story of a queen in the year 1548 who sacrifices herself to save the king. The elephant-back battle scenes were striking and the film was released abroad after having been re-edited by Francis Coppola.
In the same year two identical twin brothers from Hong Kong, Danny and Oxide Pang, melded the influences of Quentin Tarantino and John Woo into the other great trend in Asian cinema of the last fifteen years: New Horror. Danny was one of the highest paid film editors in Hong Kong and Oxide was a lab technician when they decided to collaborate on Krung Thep Antharai/Bangkok: Dangerous (Hong Kong, 1999), about a killer who is deaf. So elaborate were the film’s production values that it ended with CGI-produced rain – a technical accomplishment that rivalled the evolving computer generated realism of West Coast America. Its opening, in which a brutal killing is shot from the point of view of a lizard clinging to the ceiling, signalled that these were filmmakers who wanted to do things differently. Their multi-textural film and video imagery was reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s work, but their story and aesthetic ideas lacked development. Their follow-up to Bangkok: Dangerous, Jian Gui/The Eye (Hong Kong, 2002), reworked the fear of sensory deprivation exhibited in the first film into the story of a young blind woman who is given corneal transplants and who sees disturbing things from the life of the donor. It was a more controlled and less flashy work, but the Pangs have yet to achieve any of the originality of the Coens or Wachowskis.
Their interest in horror derived from Japanese films of the last fifteen years. The country produced few major new directors in the 1980s, but at the end of the decade a striking new talent emerged from the filmmaking underground and experimental theatre. Shinya Tsukamato’s sixty-seven minute, black-and-white, 16mm Tetsuo/The Iron Man (Japan, 1991) mixed live action and animation in a dazzling updating of a theme first addressed in cinema by Canada’s David Cronenberg – that man and machine might merge and that repressed erotic energy would make them do so with destructive force. Tsukamoto’s 1993 sequel Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (Japan, 1991), was a richer elaboration of this idea. In it a skinny, bespectacled man is transformed when enraged into a human machine gun, becoming increasingly gun-barrel-encrusted as the film unfolds (353). Tsukamoto poeticizes this graphic novel set up by making his central character the father of a dreamy, wordless, “perfect” nuclear family whose very hallucinated innocence seems doomed in such a violent world. The man uses all his willpower to struggle against his violent transformations, but when he thinks his wife has been killed by mysterious assassins, he turns into a grotesque sea-creature-like killing machine.
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The lead character becomes encrusted with gun barrels when enraged in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo II. Japan, 1991.
Tsukamoto has a field day with the transformations. At first, when they are premonitions, he brilliantly animates a sequence in which metal wire bristles like thorny wood all over the man’s body. As the transformations become more grotesque and, like Cronenberg’s central character in The Fly (see pages 416–17), the man becomes more isolated from reality, the director uses forty-three seconds of single frame images – the technique of Abel Gance way back in La Roue in 1923 – to represent the flickering decay on his cellular life. This series of over 1,000 pictures of molecules, planets, pornography, textures and torture becomes purely abstract and hypnotic. Eventually, in a flashback to his childhood, we discover the root of his anxiety and rage: he and his brother watched his father force his mother to fellate a phallic gun.
The Tetsuo films were clearly metaphorical. The Godzilla series of the 1950s onwards had demonstrated how deeply ingrained was Japanese culture’s interest in monstrous destruction. Here it was again, and critics once more related it to the national shock of the Atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever the roots of these anxieties, they found expression once more in the terrifying films of Hideo Nakata and Takashi Miike.
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Hideo Nakata combined elements of The Exorcist with Mizoguchi’s portrayal of ghosts in one of the best Japanese horror films of the nineties to have women as central characters, Ring. 1998.
Nakata saw, and was impressed by, Friedkin’s The Exorcist (USA, 1973) while at university, and admired in particular the dreamlike way in which Mizoguchi represents the ghost in Ugetsu Monogatari (Japan, 1953, see page 219). Combining the grace of the latter wi
th the demonic theme of the former he adapted a bestselling novel, Ring by Koji Suzuki, to make the most talked-about Japanese horror film of the decade, and the most commercially successful ever released in that country. The story of a cursed video which, when watched, brings about the viewer’s death within a week, Ringu/Ring (Japan, 1998) built upon a popular urban myth and itself spread like one. Using the slow and suggestive methods that the Pangs would later adopt for The Eye, Nakata changed the gender of the protagonist in the novel so that it becomes the story of a woman’s persecution and wrath (354). The video scenes themselves were filmed with no clues to location or light source, denying the viewer all reference points and perspectives. The sound in the same scenes combined a remarkable fifty tracks of effects; the noise of a ringing phone in the film was constituted from four different types of telephones as Nakata didn’t want it to sound anything like a Hollywood phone. While it borrowed some elements from American teen horror cinema, the scenes of the dead walking among us and its avoidance of the Christian idea of the human soul, made it distinctly Asian. Nakata made a sequel, Ring 2 (Japan, 1999), and Hollywood bought the remake rights.
His Honogurai mizu no soko kara/Dark Water (Japan, 2002) was an equally slow and creepy combination of Western and Asian horror traditions. Once again, like the work of 1930s directors Mizoguchi and Naruse, his story was about female suffering. This time the single mother’s psyche is damaged by guilt about neglecting her daughter (355). Ruined by an inelegant coda, the film nonetheless demonstrated how lacking in spirituality contemporary Western horror cinema was in comparison.
TakashiMiike’s Oodishon/Audition (Japan, 2000) was an altogether more brutal blood bath but again, remarkably, took an outwardly polite and withdrawn young woman as an emblem of the loneliness and rage beneath the surface of Japanese society. Takashi entered the film industry as assistant director to the master portraitist of impolite women, Shohei Imamura. Like his mentor he was interested in the disruptive power of raw sexuality, but his situations are drawn from the punk underground. As such his career runs in tandem with Shinya Tsukamoto’s. Like every other distinctive Japanese director of the period, including Tsukamoto, Takashi’s starting point in Audition is the apparently graceful stasis of contemporary Japan, the “floating world”. His story is that of a shy, modest young woman who attends the auditions of a film producer who pretends that he is casting for a new film but is really looking for a wife (356). Throughout these sequences, the camera is as stable as that of Ozu but after the young woman disappears in the night, it is hand held. Like the work of Michael Haneke, Takashi prepares for terror with blankness and minimalism. About fifty minutes in we visit the woman’s apartment. In the background of a shot is a sack. Later we will discover that a mutilated man is in that sack. Like Nakata, Takashi’s hints at what lies ahead are often sonic. Here animal noises like roaring dinosaurs are heard long before we discover, for example, that the woman feeds the amputee in the sack with her own vomit.