Thursday, December 24, 2020

Top 100 #100-81 12/24/20 Revision

Before: 100. The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
99. Sparrow (2008, Johnnie To)
98. Stop Making Sense (1984, Jonathan Demme)
97. Dirty Ho (1979, Lau Kar-leung)
96. Cure (1997, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
95. Taipei Story (1985, Edward Yang)
94. Manhunter (1986, Michael Mann)
93. Two English Girls (1971, François Truffaut)
92. Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock)
91. 2046 (2004, Wong Kar-wai)
90. Paris, Texas (1984, Wim Wenders)
89. The Terrorizers (1986, Edward Yang)
88. The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007, Adam Curtis)
87. The Rocking Horsemen (1992, Nobuhiko Obayshi)
86. A New Leaf (1971, Elaine May)
85. All My Life (1966, Bruce Baillie)
84. Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks)
83. A Star Is Born (1954, George Cukor)
82. Out 1: Spectre (1972, Jacques Rivette)
81. Yearning (1964, Mikio Naruse)

After: 100. The General (1926, Buster Keaton)
99. The Day He Arrives (2011, Hong Sang-soo)
98. The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
97. The Terrorizers (1986, Edward Yang)
96. Out 1: Spectre (1972, Jacques Rivette)
95. Pedicab Driver (1989, Sammo Hung)
94. Two English Girls (1971, François Truffaut)
93. A Star Is Born (1954, George Cukor)
92. Stop Making Sense (1984, Jonathan Demme)
91. Manhunter (1986, Michael Mann)
90. Paris, Texas (1984, Wim Wenders)
89. Sparrow (2008, Johnnie To)
88. The Rocking Horsemen (1992, Nobuhiko Obayshi)
87. A New Leaf (1971, Elaine May)
86. Cure (1997, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
85. The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007, Adam Curtis)
84. Dirty Ho (1979, Lau Kar-leung)
83. All My Life (1966, Bruce Baillie)
82. Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks)
81. Yearning (1964, Mikio Naruse)

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Goodbye, Dragon Inn First Draft

Complete first draft written for The Film Stage.

While far better known by its English title, the appropriately elegiac Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 masterpiece bears a far different title in Mandarin (rendered here in pinyin): Bú sàn, which roughly translates to “never leaving,” or, if one prefers the Sartre connotation, “no exit.” It forms the root of two distinctly contradictory Chinese idioms, which perfectly encapsulate the lamentation and beauty of Tsai’s film: Tiān xià méi yǒu bù sàn de yán xí, which is the infamous “all good things must come to an end,” and Bù jiàn bù sàn, which basically means “even if we don’t see each other, don’t give up and leave,” or “I’m not leaving until I see you.” From its title on down, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the greatest films in the history of cinema and which received a long-awaited restoration last year, construes itself not as the simple paen to a dying artform that it is often perceived as, but as a constellation of complex, aching desires, both wholly in keeping with Tsai’s oeuvre and standing starkly apart from it. Of course, the timing seems too on the nose, given that theaters across America remain shuttered and spectatorship in its ideal form has temporarily ceased to be. But Goodbye is, above all, a resolutely present-minded film, less concerned with the future of theatergoing than with the material longing and mystery that its inhabitants experience. A brief description is in order: Goodbye, Dragon Inn takes place over the final night of operation at the Fuhe Grand Theater in the Yonghe District of Taipei — the actual theater closed before filming began — which is showing King Hu’s landmark 1967 wuxia film Dragon Inn as its last picture show, and follows a few workers and spectators as they experience both the film and the space of the theater, which is possibly haunted and suggested to be a hotbed of gay cruising. This sense of compression is notable in and of itself: the shortest of Tsai’s theatrical features at just 82 minutes, it is also the only one of his films to take place in a single day and in one setting. But what is even more striking is Tsai’s choice of central subjects: one is the theater’s ticket taker, played by Tsai regular Chen Shiang-chyi — wearing a brace on her right leg and who possesses a seemingly unrequited love for the projectionist — and the other is a Japanese tourist played by Mitamura Kiyonobu. The name missing from this list is Lee Kang-sheng, the leading man in every other one of Tsai’s features and the subject of, to put it frankly, his erotic fixations, and who here plays the projectionist, unseen until the final ten minutes of the film. In addition, though these characters are the primary foci, the key character in a scene shifts with more fluidity than any of his other films: Lee himself takes the center stage in his few scenes, along with some of the more memorable, possibly spectral denizens of the theater: a woman eating a mountain of melon seeds (Yang Kuei-mei, another Tsai regular), groups of men loosely gathered in the dark backrooms of the theater, including frequent Tsai actor Chen Chao-jung, and most significantly of all Miao Tien (who played Lee’s father in many Tsai films) and Shih Chun, two of the main actors in Dragon Inn. If Lee is the fixed subject of all of Tsai’s other films, it is surely vital that Goodbye, Dragon Inn operates without a personified center. Instead, all the erotic fixations and intense longing are transferred to totemic figures and objects: a smoldering cigarette, a makeshift hallway of cardboard boxes, and above all the space of the theater, and by extension the masterwork unspooling on its screen. Dragon Inn, and King Hu’s direction, is masterful on the precise opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum from Tsai’s famously static, long-take style: quick cuts, rapid tracking shots, elaborate fight choreography. But they each share a particular relationship to Taipei; for all of the universal applications of cinema’s decline that Tsai’s film invites, these are both films and filmmakers intensely interested in a Chinese identity and sense of place. Hu’s picture provides the necessary counterbalance for Goodbye’s near-wordlessness — the film contains just eleven lines of dialogue across two scenes, the first coming 44 minutes in — offering a realm where its characters can express anything, move in whatever manner they choose. Tsai’s characters have no such recourse: the ticket taker is forced to walk with a pronounced limp, and the tourist is limited by his total unfamiliarity with the building. Instead, they project their desires and greatest wishes onto both the screen and the people around them. The ticket taker’s encounter with the film, where she sees the showcase fight scene of Lingfeng Shangguan and the projected beam forms a speckled light pattern upon her face, is understandably the most famous, but even more central to Tsai’s project is the scene early on where the tourist sees Shih Chun in the audience and sits next to him. It is unclear what his intentions are as he leans in — perhaps it is to ask for a light, perhaps to inquire about his acting, perhaps for carnal reasons, or maybe it is all of the above — but what is unmistakable is the look of pure longing on his face, and the disappointment with which he gets up and leaves the auditorium as Shih stays fixated upon the screen, watching his past life live the heroics he can no longer experience. Tsai’s filmography is one of the most concrete and teleological ever created, yet his individual films rarely resolve themselves in so neat a fashion, and Goodbye, Dragon Inn is the pinnacle of this inclination. Yes, the theater is closed and its residents scattered into the rainy Taipei night, but Tsai affords his characters the barest hint of a connection, which in this context registers as the most magnanimous of gestures. And then there is the Yao Lee song “Can’t Let Go,” dubbed “an oldie from the ‘60s” by Tsai (the same decade in which Dragon Inn was released), which lingers long after the final image of the theater fades away. Both wistful and accepting, bitter and sweet, it, and Goodbye, Dragon Inn refuse to side with one feeling over the other, and instead to embrace the irresolution, the mixed emotions that resonate no matter the end result. It is all in the passing of years, the endless possibilities: though we may have lost the space that connected us, that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to find each other, in another place, at another time.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn Incomplete Draft

Incomplete draft written for The Film Stage.

The timing seems almost too on the nose, to release a restoration of one of the definitive films about the decline of cinema and moviegoing at a moment when theaters across America remain shuttered and spectatorship in its ideal form has temporarily ceased to be. But to dwell on such ideas does a disservice to the film in question: Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), one of the very greatest films in the history of cinema, which received a long-awaited restoration last year. Far from a simple paen to a dying artform, it is freighted with complexities, perspectives, and histories that I can only begin to unpack here. There is no better place to start than with Tsai — quite literally within the film, as the back of his head appears in the final shot of the opening credits of Dragon Inn, alongside prominent Taiwanese film critic Alphonse Leigh — and the place Goodbye holds in his filmography. It is probably fair to say that Goodbye, Dragon Inn is, with the possible exception of Rebels of the Neon God, the best-known film Tsai has made, and notably it is his own personal favorite; Tsai went as far as to place it on his own Sight & Sound ballot in 2012. I happen to agree with this, yet when the film is examined beyond the basest elements of aesthetic style — Tsai’s penchant for long, static shots is in full effect here — Goodbye stands out as a wholly atypical entry within his body of work. A brief description is in order: Goodbye, Dragon Inn takes place over the final night of operation at the Fuhe Grand Theater in the Yonghe District of Taipei — the actual theater closed before filming began — which is showing King Hu’s landmark 1967 wuxia film Dragon Inn as its last picture show, and follows a few workers and spectators as they experience both the film and the space of the theater, which is possibly haunted and/or a hotbed of gay cruising. This sense of compression is notable in and of itself: the shortest of Tsai’s theatrical features at just 82 minutes, it is also the only one of his films to take place in both one day and in one setting; the rest sprawl out over indefinite timespans and across numerous locations, sometimes moving outside the environs of one particular city or even a stable timeframe; even 1998’s The Hole, which revolves around the interactions between upstairs/downstairs neighbors in an apartment complex, has a few trips to the grocery markets. But what is even more striking is Tsai’s choice of central subjects: one is the theater’s ticket taker, played by Tsai regular Chen Shiang-chyi — wearing a brace on her right leg and who possesses a seemingly unrequited love for the projectionist — and the other is a Japanese tourist played by Mitamura Kiyonobu. The name missing from this list is Lee Kang-sheng, the leading man in every other one of Tsai’s features and the subject of, to put it frankly, his erotic fixations — Tsai is openly gay, and Lee is straight, though the two have lived together for a number of years now — and who here plays the projectionist, unseen until the final ten minutes of the film. Kiyonobu, on the other hand, is the only lead actor in a Tsai film to not become a regular (assuming that, as hinted by the director, that Days’s Anong Houngheuangsy will become one of his regular actors going forward), and who only appeared in one film after. In addition, though these characters are the primary foci, the key character in a scene shifts with more fluidity than any of his other films: Lee himself takes the center stage in his few scenes, along with some of the more memorable, possibly spectral denizens of the theater: a woman eating a mountain of melon seeds (Yang Kuei-mei, another Tsai regular), groups of men standing in the bathroom and the dark backrooms of the back theater, including frequent Tsai actor Chen Chao-jung, and most significantly of all Miao Tien (who played Lee’s father in many Tsai films) and Shih Chun, two of the main actors in Dragon Inn. If Lee is the fixed center of all of Tsai’s other films, it is surely significant that Goodbye, Dragon Inn operates without a personified center. The closest thing the film has to a center is thus the space itself, and by extension the masterpiece unspooling on its screen. Dragon Inn, and King Hu’s direction, is masterful on the precise opposite end of the spectrum from Tsai’s aesthetic style: quick cuts, rapid tracking shots, elaborate fight choreography. But they each share a particular relationship to Taipei; for all of the universal applications of cinema’s decline, these are both films and filmmakers intensely interested in a Chinese identity and sense of place. Dragon Inn was Hu’s first film made in Taiwan, as he sought to establish his own production methods apart from the Shaw Brothers, and became a blockbuster hit, inaugurating the flowering of his almost spiritual approach to the wuxia, drawing from the rhythmic movements of his actors and the grand landscapes of nature surrounding them to suggest a transcendental potential within the historical Chinese epochs and intrigues that formed the backbones of his narratives. Tsai, by contrast, is one of the great documentarians of the evolution of a city, with the majority of his films taking place within a slowly developing Taipei. His filmography is perhaps the most narratively cohesive of any non-franchise filmmaker, with each feature conceivably forming another chapter in the life of Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) as he grows up and grows old. Lee is the linchpin for Tsai’s oeuvre, and no other actor has been so intently, even fetishistically filmed by a single director over such an extended period, as Tsai maps his own longing and loneliness onto that of Kang’s. Without Kang as the central presence, Tsai seems to invest that same tortured eroticism into every facet of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, as every single character seems to evince multiple strands of desire, each of which are embodied much more than spoken: the film contains just eleven lines of dialogue across two scenes, the first coming 44 minutes into the film. But

Wong Kar-wai First Draft

Complete first draft written for Hyperallergic.

Film at Lincoln Center’s virtual retrospective “World of Wong Kar-wai” offers the opportunity not only to see every feature film by one of the greatest directors who ever lived, many in new restorations, but also to shine some light on some of his lesser-seen works. While I will be the first to claim In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express as epochal masterpieces, they have received a surfeit of the attention, and every single one of his movies —even his much-maligned American effort My Blueberry Nights — is essential. To help elucidate this point, here are some further notes on six of the other eight films; I hasten to say that Fallen Angels and Happy Together are just as vital as any of the films listed. Wong’s 1988 debut, As Tears Go By, has often been compared to Mean Streets in its depiction of a gangster (Andy Lau) trying to protect his hot-headed friend (Jacky Cheung), but it bears even more resemblance to the waning crop of Triad films that formed a large part of the Hong Kong New Wave up to that point. In many ways, it is located precisely at a transitional point, equal parts governed by heroic bloodshed melodrama and a hazy, innocent hope embodied by Maggie Cheung. Two years later, Wong produced his first masterwork with Days of Being Wild, tracking the lives of numerous young people and their romantic entanglements and capricious whims, played by a who’s who of great Hong Kong actors, including all three main actors from Tears, Leslie Cheung, and Carina Lau. It is perhaps his most piercing film, overflowing with accumulating loneliness, and it has perhaps the greatest, most mysterious cameo in film history to cap things off. Another era-ending statement came in the form of 1994’s Ashes of Time, presented here in the Redux version that Wong supervised in 2008. A marvel in any form, it reshapes the codes of the wuxia film into a loose collection of stories and fragments, each haunted by past memories. Though its far-flung setting and overt generic framework set it apart from other Wong films, it retains much of the languorous atmosphere, and in the Redux version features some of the most eye-searingly vivid colors ever captured. One of Wong’s most underseen efforts is The Hand, his contribution to the 2003 triptych film Eros, which also featured films by Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni. Presented here in an extended cut running just less than an hour, it is a pas de deux between Chang Chen and Gong Li as a novice tailor and his client. His most forthrightly erotic work, it derives much of its power from a sharp condensation of the years that pass, passing by with even more force than usual. That sense of slippery, uncertain time is in full effect in 2004’s 2046, quite possibly Wong’s most ambitious film, acting as both a sequel to In the Mood for Love, following a series of affairs that Chow (Tony Leung) undergoes, and a quasi-science-fiction tale set on a futuristic train. Even more than most Wongs, it is a film of profound aching and messiness, of unexpected and indelible memories and glorious pain. Wong’s last film to date, The Grandmaster from 2013, was mutilated by The Weinstein Company upon its release, but is presented here in its Hong Kong theatrical cut. Another wholly idiosyncratic wuxia film, it refracts the story of Bruce Lee’s teacher Ip Man through the shifting eras in which he lived, crossing paths with other equally great kung fu practitioners, including Zhang Ziyi in one of her greatest performances.

Spies First Draft

Complete first draft written for MUBI Notebook.

Though Fritz Lang might be best known for the extravagances of Metropolis, he was even more at home when working with the bare essentials, all the better to use his skills at artifice and suggestion. Case in point: the opening sequence of Spies, which uses only a few distinguishable settings, some animated text and drawings, and frenzied faces to thrust the viewer into the middle of the film’s world of crime. It is a realm of blanks and façades, pitting an espionage ring spearheaded by the inscrutable spymaster Haghi (Lang regular Rudolf Klein-Rogge) against the state that stands for order and luxury, primarily embodied by a man going by the nom de guerre Agent 326. Yet none of these people appear in the sequence, where the movement of figures and information is paramount, no trappings of individuality required. This is taken to its limit with the third shot, which serves simultaneously as a moment of clarity, after the first two shots and their sole focus on hands, and as a further obfuscation. For few other shots in film history are so thrillingly artificial, as Lang shoots at an impossibly low angle from below where the wheel would meet the pavement. The viewer knows that there’s no conceivable way the motorcycle is actually moving, either on a road or in a studio, but the deception of this image announces itself so readily that it becomes enthralling. And the rushing wind, steam, and fog; the bug-eyed goggles; above all the wild grin on the criminal, who appears in no other scene but whose pure malice lingers in the mind: like everything in Spies, the actual thing being stolen is of no importance, the act is all that matters. With these elements, Lang distills the dark heart, the mad glee of his visions.

Obayashi First Draft

Complete first draft written for Hyperallergic.

If you know the name Nobuhiko Obayashi, it’s probably because of his 1977 debut feature House, which achieved cult status during its theatrical tour and Criterion Collection disc release in 2010. This veritable canonization, while likely well-intentioned, was also one of the greatest crimes against cinephilia perpetrated during this decade. While House is indeed a marvelous film, both its promotion and reception ogled over surface-level gonzo weirdness, willfully ignoring any deeper reading or appreciation of the film or the titan director who created it. For Obayashi is one of the signal Japanese directors of his era, who made some 40 features over a period of 60 years, in addition to numerous short films, television and advertising work, and film scholarship, none of which have been officially released in the United States, by Criterion or any other boutique label. Against this willful mischaracterization and neglect, a wave of cinephilia has emerged: spearheaded on Twitter in large part by Evan Morgan, Eli Berger, and Esther Rosenfield (full disclosure: I count all of them as very dear friends) over the past few years, Obayashi has achieved far greater renown and recognition in America. Upon his death at 82 in April of this year — after an improbably long battle with lung cancer that allowed him to complete two more features, including his passion project Hanagatami (2017), which had been in development since before House — the appreciation of his work was far more multifaceted and representative than it might have been just three or four years ago. To commemorate his passing, this year’s edition of Japan Cuts is showing his final film, the mammoth Labyrinth of Cinema (2019), along with a documentary about him and his wife and producer and a number of online conversations about his work. Labyrinth of Cinema is a fitting capstone, a riotous tour through the various manifestations of Japanese war cinema through the eyes of four teenagers, who exist both in the audience of a theater’s last picture show and as a host of avatars within the films, who shift between a dizzying number of genres while attempting to outrun histories of violence and destruction. In order to understand what this summative work is actually summing up, it is necessary to look back into Obayashi’s sizable oeuvre for a few of the more apparent commonalities; though of course this article cannot be in any way exhaustive, some of the greatest films of his career do provide a vital lens into his consistent concerns and interests. Foremost among these was Obayashi’s interest in the vitality and dreams of youth. The vast majority of his films heavily feature in some capacity young people, from the anarchic schoolchildren of Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast (1986) to the biker gangs of His Motorbike, Her Island (1986), frequently in the sun-kissed bliss of summer. Even a film like Beijing Watermelon (1989), which focuses primarily on a shopkeeper who befriends successive classes of Chinese students studying abroad, is careful to ensure that all of the students come alive as individuals in their own right, never merely symbols for a bright future or a far-off culture across the sea. Not that Obayashi is resistant to the symbolism that the young provide: especially in Hanagatami and Labyrinth of Cinema, they stand in for a certain purity and optimism, an innocence that is threatened by the passage of time and the ravages of war. The degree to which this innocence is lost varies from film to film. In perhaps his most straightforwardly optimistic film, The Rocking Horsemen (1992), the cover band of rock-obsessed high schoolers is dismantled upon graduation, but it is never depicted with the thudding strife of traditional music dramas; even before their performance at the school festival, the boys know that this will be their only truly significant show, and simply resolve to enjoy it while they can, playing their hearts out with abandon. That kind of freedom finds its perfect correlative in Obayashi’s sense of form, which is among the most innovative and eye-popping in cinema. It reaches its zenith in the digital extravaganza of his final films, all odd green screens and discomfiting, cramped close-ups, the better to capture the bracing haze of unreality that war brings. In the case of Labyrinth of Cinema, these are further alloyed by an overload of text boxes and obvious digital compositing; the result is something which renders the myriad recreations of something like a dozen different styles of filmmaking deliberately uncanny, a gap which points to the film’s level of metatextual involvement; past, present, and future are indistinguishable inside the projector. But such touches are present even in the less stylistically obtrusive works: the intensely disruptive edits of Labyrinth appear in the otherwise more conventional The Rocking Horsemen; Bound for the Fields features a gorgeous evocation of 1930s Shochiku filmmaking in grainy black-and-white; His Motorbike, Her Island frequently uses a dazzling technique where, in a film that moves with abandon between black-and-white and color, most of the frame is rendered in monochrome save for the center. This willingness to experiment stems in large part from perhaps the most crucial element: Obayashi’s radical sense of humanism. Amid the excesses and chaos of Labyrinth of Cinema, a stark, passionate message emerges: “a movie can change the future if not the past.” Obayashi very clearly believes in the healing potential of cinema, its capability to represent humanity and Japan at its most harmonious and to argue against war and self-destruction. All of his films carry this immovable truth, whether it’s in the virtual uprising of Bound for the Fields, the ebullience of music-making in The Rocking Horsemen, or the complicated, uncertain transcendence of Hanagatami. And the most powerful of these comes in Beijing Watermelon, in circumstances forced by reality: after plans to film the finale in Beijing were dashed by the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Obayashi filmed it on a series of studio sets in Tokyo, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall and characterizing the events as a dream of China, never openly stating the reason but making clear his solidarity with the students and their struggle in both his own voiceover and the to-camera monologue of the main actor. In doing so, he lays bare the illusion of moviemaking and its ability to capture something truly intrinsic and universal: the goodness of his characters, their essential resistance against brutality, and cinema’s power to honor them. Throughout his career, Obayashi never wavered in this conviction, nor his own artistic ability to harness and give life to this idea; there are few other directors as ripe for rediscovery as him.