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This year, 2005, has been named
the “Chinese Centennial Film Year” by
the China Film Archive; although motion pictures were
exhibited and shot in China by foreigners within months
of the first screenings in Europe and the U.S., 1905
is the first date in which there is concrete evidence
of films made in China by the Chinese themselves.
Thus, the Film Society and the College of Staten Island/City
University of New York take this occasion to celebrate
this most auspicious anniversary by presenting an
extraordinary selection of key works from Chinese
film history. Of course, any series can at best scratch
the surface of this immensely rich subject; there
is still much work to be done, much work to be restored.
Yet we hope our selections will provide a cogent introduction
to a cinema whose importance grows each year. Limited
as we are in time and resources, we early on decided
to restrict our selection for this program to works
from the pre-1949 “Shanghai” cinema and
to films made within the People’s Republic of
China after 1949. We hope to be able to present in
the future series devoted to the historical development
of the Hong Kong cinema (as we began, last year, with
our Shaw Brothers Tribute) as well as to the history
of Taiwanese cinema. As a special feature of this
program, we will also be screening 10 films that have
been digitally restored by the Venice Biennale Cinema
Department as part of the “Secret History of
Asian Cinema” project of the 62nd Mostra Internazionale
d’Arte Cinematografica, using materials preserved
by the China Film Archive with the support of Fondazione
Prada, the Italian Ministry of Culture (General Cinema
Department), Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia
and the Cineteca Nazionale. The films from this collection
are specially noted in the text.
** Directors Xie Jin, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Ning Ying, and Jia Zhangke expected to attend!
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Affiliate ticket price of $6.00 for Asia Society, China Institute, and Asian Cinevision members.
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Accompanied by the Ensemble Sospeso
playing an original score by Joshua Cody.
Long considered one of the greatest Chinese films
ever made — and one of the silent cinema’s
final masterpieces. The legendary actress Ruan Lingyu
is a Shanghai streetwalker raising her son during
the day while plying her trade at night. She falls
under the “protection” of a local gangster
but still manages to save enough to send her son to
a good private school. Yet when some of the parents
become aware of her line of work, they force school
officials to decide whether they’re willing
to educate the son of such a woman.
The silent film program at the Walter Reade Theater is made possible through the generosity of the Ira M. Resnick Foundation.
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Fri Oct 21: 7:00 pm
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China’s extraordinary economic
development, the intensity of its social transformation,
and its increasing importance in international politics
all point to the crucial role it will play in the
21st century. Yet what do these changes bode for the
Chinese cinema? What has been the impact of free market
policies on China’s films and filmmakers? And
what role will the Chinese state play in future developments
in Chinese cinema — aesthetic as well as industrial?
To look at these and other related issues, three noted
scholars of Chinese film will describe and discuss
the current state of filmmaking and its future. Professor
Cui Shuqing (Bowdoin College) will speak
on the work of Jia Zhangke (Platform). Professor
Jin Guanjun (Shanghai University) will talk
about the rise of the private film industry and its
impact on the current scene. Professor Stanley
Rosen (University of Southern California)
will discuss the internationalization of Chinese cinema
in the era of globalization.
A major international symposium on Chinese cinema
has been organized by the College of Staten Island/City
University of New York on Mon Oct 24 and Tue Oct 25.
For more information, please go to http://scholar.library.csi.cuny.edu/modernchina/film.htm.
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Sat Oct 22: 2:00 pm |
Spring Silkworms established
the link between the emerging “left-wing film
movement” in Shanghai and the earlier “May
Fourth” generation of writers and intellectuals
who sought to open up Chinese culture to international
influences. Adapted from Mao Dun’s story, a
family of poor silkworm farmers struggles against
both local and increasingly foreign competition. When
Tongbao, the family patriarch, decides to venture
to a faraway market in the hope of getting a better
price for his silk, he finds himself caught up in
a battle between local warlords.
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Sat
Oct 22: 5:00 pm
Mon
Oct 24: 1:00 pm
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Yellow Earth marked
the arrival of what became known as China’s
Fifth Generation, young filmmakers whose works challenged
the style and stories that had dominated filmmaking
in the PRC since 1945. Set in the late 30s, Yellow
Earth follows a communist cadre, Gu Qing, as
he travels to a remote village in Shaanxi province
to collect folk tunes to be used later as marching
songs. Gu impresses young Cuiqiao, a teenage girl
soon to be forced into an arranged marriage, with
his account of the new freedoms the communists offer
women. Aided by the spectacular landscapes captured
by cinematographer Zhang Yimou, Yellow Earth
is unquestionably a milestone in Chinese film history.
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Sat
Oct 22: 7:00 pm
Sun
Nov 6: 4:00 pm
Tue
Nov 8: 3:30 pm
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“Fifth Generation director
Tian Zhuangzhuang's first film since The Blue
Kite (NYFF '93) is an exquisite remake of Fei
Mu's classic melodrama about a sickly young landowner
named Liyan whose lovely, dissatisfied wife finds
her passion for her old lover unabated. To make things
more complicated, the lover happens to be her husband's
oldest friend. Tian renders the interplay of conflicting
emotions with an unearthly delicacy that reaches a
peak during a birthday dinner for Liyan's sister,
in which each gesture and glance sets off a new vibration
of feeling. The director is aided in no small measure
by Hou Hsiao-hsien's customary cinematographer Mark
Li Ping-bing, who brings every shade of springtime
to eye-filling life.” — 2002 New York
Film Festival
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Sat
Oct 22: 9:00 pm
Mon
Nov 7: 6:15 pm
Tue
Nov 8: 1:15 pm |
“Spanning the decade between
1979 and 1989, Jia Zhangke's second feature is a chronicle
of social change, from Maoist fanaticism to capitalist
indolence, as traced through a group of young performers
who live in a small town in Shanxi province. Initially,
they are all members of a cultural commune, singing
propaganda operas before an impassive audience; as
time passes and the old-time ideological structures
fade away, the troupe privatizes and takes to the
road, eventually offering break-dancing spectacles
and punk rock concerts before crowds just as impassive
but very much smaller. Warm, lively, rich in character
and beautifully staged, Platform recalls
the early work of Hou Hsiao-hsien but with a political
engagement all its own.” — 2000 New York
Film Festival
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Sun
Oct 23: 2:00 pm
Tue
Oct 25: 2:00 pm
Mon
Oct 31: 4:20 pm
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A major effort of the Film Bureau
of the People’s Republic in the early years
was to produce “national minority” films
that focused on the various non-ethnic Chinese citizens
of the PRC (approximately 10% of the population).
Five Golden Flowers is one of the most charming
examples of this genre. At the Butterfly Spring Festival,
Ah Peng, from the Bai minority, is taken with a young
woman he meets there, Golden Flower. The two promise
to meet again, but when the date comes, Golden Flower
doesn’t appear. Knowing only her name, Ah Peng
sets out to find her; everyone would like to help,
but does he mean Golden Flower the truck driver or
Golden Flower the stockyard worker? Full of comic
misunderstandings and musical interludes, the film
celebrates the solidarity of all the people of China.
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Sun
Oct 23: 5:30 pm
Mon
Oct 24: 3:00 pm
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A Pearl Necklace was produced by Chang Cheng,
a company founded by a group of young intellectuals
hoping to create a more socially conscious cinema.
Based on a Guy de Maupassant novel, the story concerns
a family of modest means that’s invited to
a dress ball by the wife’s old (and more prosperous)
classmate. Hoping to make a good impression, the
wife borrows an expensive string of pearls — which,
after the ball, goes missing. Faced with social disgrace,
it now falls to the husband to come up with a way
of replacing the pearls.
preceded by
The earliest existing Chinese film, Cheng
is a delightful slapstick comedy about an ambitious
fruit vendor who falls in love with a doctor’s
daughter. The doctor is against the match, but he’s
also having trouble keeping his practice going, so
Cheng devises an ingenious method to guarantee him
a steady supply of patients.
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Sun
Oct 23: 7:30 pm
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Leftist melodrama at its finest.
Dabao and Erbao (both played by Hu Die) are twin sisters
born to village ne’er do well Mr. Zhao. When
Zhao decides to leave, his wife begs him to take one
of the girls, fearing she cannot raise both; he takes
Erbao. Years later, Erbao is married to a warlord,
for whom her father now works. Back in the village,
hard times force Dabao to leave home looking for work.
Having just had a son, Erbao is looking for a nanny,
and she hires Dabao, neither woman realizing that
they are sisters. Chinese literature and consequently
cinema are full of “comparison narratives,”
parallel stories that compare the lives of relatives
or friends, championing the hardworking poor over
the decadent but wealthy ruling class.
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Mon
Oct 24: 5:00 pm
Thu
Oct 27: 9:00 pm
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As in Japan, silent cinema lasted
longer in China than it did in the West, into the
mid-30s. The Peach Girl stars the great Ruan
Lingyu (Goddess) as a poor young woman from
the countryside in love since childhood with a rich
boy from the city. When they grow up they secretly
marry, but by then the boy’s mother has made
it very clear that she wants her son to have nothing
to do with someone of such low status. Offering a
mild social critique and certainly asserting the right
of young people to choose their own mates, The
Peach Girl is especially noteworthy for its marked
use natural imagery.
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Mon
Oct 24: 7:00 pm
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Loosely adapted from Shakespeare’s
“Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Spray was set
in the far south of China, according to scholar Laikwan
Pang, in a “Shanghai Fantasy of the Western
world through the mediation of Hollywood movies.”
Combining romance, social justice and swordplay, the
plot involves a Robin Hood–type bandit and a
number of women warriors riding on horseback. The
all-star cast features Ruan Lingyu, Jin Yan, and in
her first leading role, Chen Yanyan.
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Mon
Oct 24: 9:00 pm |
One of the signal works of the
“leftist” Shanghai cinema. Six friends
decide to head “north” and become involved
in the construction of a highway crucial for the Chinese
army. (In China at that time, “going north”
meant going to Manchuria to fight against the Japanese
who had invaded China in 1931, a topic that could
only be discussed in muted terms due to government
censorship.) A hymn to the solidarity necessary for
China to move ahead (and defeat the enemy), The
Big Road shows its young protagonists only discovering
who they are when they become part of a collective
action. The theme song, “Dalu,” became
a popular song for left-wing groups.
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Wed
Oct 26: 1:00 pm
Wed
Oct 26: 5:00 pm
Wed
Oct 26: 9:00 pm
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One of the first Chinese sound
films , Plunder begins as condemned prisoner
Tao (a homonym for “peach”) meets his
old school principal in a jail cell. Tao begins to
recount the events that brought a once-promising graduate
to such an end. Married after graduation to Li (sounds
like “plum”), Tao is fired from his shipping
company job when he refuses to ignore safety rules.
Li gets a job as a secretary but leaves after her
boss sexually harasses her. From this point, a downward
spiral takes over the lives of Tao and Li, culminating
with Tao’s sentencing for murder. The inability
of China to make use of its new generation of educated
graduates was a frequent theme in films of the period.
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Wed
Oct 26: 3:00 pm
Wed
Oct 26: 7:00 pm
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Wei Ming (Ruan Lingyu) is a writer
and school music teacher. Years before, she had a
child out of wedlock, whom she left with her sister
in the country. When Wei rejects a pass by Dr. Wang,
a member of her school’s Board of Directors,
he gets her fired. Meanwhile, her daughter is in need
of serious medical treatment. Financially strapped,
Wei is left with but one option for making some quick
money. The changing status of women, often the surest
barometer in societies in transition, was a favorite
subject of the period. New Woman turned out
to be an eerie epitaph to the short, remarkable life
of actress Ruan Lingyu, who committed suicide just
weeks after the film’s release.
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Thu
Oct 27: 1:30 pm
Sat
Oct 29:
3:15 pm
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As the situation in China worsened
in the 30s, films became bolder and darker, yet often
still with an optimistic spirit. Crossroads
follows four recent graduates: Zhao wants to be a
writer but is stuck proofreading; Tang wants to be
an artist but is hired to dress windows. Xu has given
up hope, while Liu has “gone north” to
fight the Japanese. Zhao lives in a crowded boardinghouse
with an annoying female neighbor. Unbeknownst to each
other, the two meet on a bus and a romance develops.
Combining elements of screwball comedy with social
observation, the film features Zhao Dan playing the
writer Zhao, a superb actor with a Jimmy Stewart nonchalance
that made him a great audience favorite.
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Thu
Oct 27: 3:45 pm
Sat
Oct 29: 1:00 pm |
Zhao Dan stars as Chen Xiaoping, in love with Hong,
a young woman who fled Manchuria with her sister after
the Japanese invaded. When Hong is sold by her corrupt
guardian to a local gangster, Chen and Hong run away,
hiding in another part of Shanghai. Hong’s sister,
who herself had been forced into prostitution, visits
and muses about a new life, yet all these characters
will eventually have to accept that there is no real
escape. Loosely based on Frank Borzage’s silent
classic Seventh Heaven, a great hit when shown in
Shanghai, Street Angels shows how its characters,
even in a teeming metropolis as Shanghai, are abandoned
by society.
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Sun
Oct 30: 1:00 pm
Mon
Oct 31: 7:30 pm
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China’s first feature-length
animation was, remarkably, produced in middle of the
war; working in the French concession of Shanghai
with a team of 70 animators, the Wan Brothers created
this lovely rendition of an episode from the classic
Chinese novel Journey to the West. Sun Wukong,
the Monkey King, is asked to go with his master Tripitaka
to India; in order to bring his master across Flaming
Mountain, he needs to get a hold of the legendary
Iron Fan—but that is jealously guarded by its
keepers, Princess Lo Cha and her fearsome husband,
the Buffalo King. The film was an enormous commercial
success and was even seen at the time in Indonesia
and Singapore.
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Sun
Oct 30: 3:00 pm
Mon
Oct 31: 1:00 pm |
“Set in a secluded, run-down
house, Spring in a Small Town is a psychological
exploration of the female protagonist Zhou Yuwen and
her intricate relationships with her sickly husband,
Dai Liyan and her former lover Zhang Zhichen, a doctor
who unexpectedly comes for a visit... Communist historiography
censured the film for its petit-bourgeois ‘decadence,’
its ideological ‘backwardness’ and its
alleged ‘narcotic effect’ on the audience
at a time of war. Since the 1980s, however, it has
been critically acclaimed as the best Chinese film
of all time and a classic example of ‘Eastern’
cinema.” — Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National
Cinema
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Sun
Oct 30: 4:30 pm
Mon
Oct 31: 9:20 |
With a scenario by Eileen Chang
(Zhang Ailing), one of the most popular Chinese writers,
Long Live the Mistress represents a stream
of witty, sophisticated domestic comedies that was
later taken up in the Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas
but which largely disappeared from mainland filmmaking
after 1949. Jiang Tianliu, plays Chen, a woman with
a weak, unfaithful husband. Even after the husband
takes on a mistress, Chen is obedient and helpful
to her husband’s family. When fortune unexpectedly
smiles and the husband suddenly becomes successful
in business, his mistress grows more demanding—so
Chen helps her husband figure out a way to send her
packing.
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Sun
Oct 30: 6:30 pm
Mon
Oct 31: 2:30
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Not long after the Japanese surrender,
Manchuria was turned over to Mao Zedong’s CCP
(Chinese Communist Party) forces, and with it came
the Changchun Film Studio, a first-rate production
facility well outfitted by the Japanese. Along
the Sungari River, one of the first films completed
there after the handover, set a model for what would
become the CCP-favored film style. Set against the
struggle against the Japanese in Manchuria, the film
tells the story of a young woman Niu’er, whose
parents are killed during the Japanese invasion. When
a Japanese officer attempts to rape her, Niu'er escapes
with her grandfather and a young driver, with whom
she’s fallen in love, to another town. The driver
finds work as a miner, but the Japanese take over
the mine and soon are cruelly oppressing the Chinese
workers.
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Sun
Oct 30: 8:20 pm
Tue
Nov 1: 1:00 pm |
Three Hairs was the name of a popular comic character,
a street urchin with a bald head save for three
thin stalks sticking straight up towards the sky,
adapted for the screen through the leftist Kunlun
Studios. After a night on the streets, Three
Hairs looks for work wherever he can get it; he
polishes shoes, picks garbage and even sells newspapers,
but finally decides to give up. He puts a “For
Sale” sign on his back and goes looking for
a buyer. A wealthy society lady takes him in, and
soon Three Hairs is washed, scrubbed, dressed,
combed and called Tom. The war had left literally
millions of homeless children in China, and Three
Hair’s misadventures in the comics were widely
read as a rebuke to government for their neglect
of this problem.
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Tue
Nov 1: 3:30
Tue
Nov 1: 7:30 pm |
;
Begun under the KMT Nationalist
government, completed during the battle for Shanghai,
and released for the first New Year of the People’s
Republic, Crows and Sparrows is not only one of the
best-loved of all Chinese films but also a fascinating
transitional work. In the chaos at the end of the
war, a Shanghai apartment house has been taken over
by Hou, a corrupt KMT official; Hou and his wife
announce they are selling the building and demand
the tenants all move out. These include Xiao (Zhao
Dan) and his wife, street peddlers with three sons;
the Huas, intellectuals with one daughter; Ah-mei,
a peasant surviving as the Houís maid; and Mr. Kong,
the building’s former owner whoís now a proofreader
at a newspaper, and whose son is in the Communist
Army. Each of the tenants will try to work out their
own ways of dealing with the Hous, yet itís only
when they realize that they must ally themselves
with the others that change seems possible.
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Tue
Nov 1: 5:15 pm
Tue
Nov 1: 9:15 pm |
Founded in 1946, Kunlun Film Studio
brought together a number of leading figures of Shanghai’s
leftist cinema. The title of Kunlun’s Myriad
of Lights refers to Shanghai itself, a place
of seeming opportunity that more often could become
a trap. Hu Zhiqing and his family are barely scraping
by when one day his mother, brother
and sister-in-law arrive from the country. Conditions
there have become unbearable, and they believe Shanghai
has treated Zhiqing well. But Zhiqing is fired
from his job, and the strains of all the extra mouths
to feed threaten his marriage.
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Wed
Nov 2: 1:00 pm
Sat
Nov 5: 1:30 pm |
Based on a novel by one of China’s
most important novelists, Lao She, This
Life of Mine is the
story of “I” — he refers to himself in
the first person throughout the story — a poor man
who finds work as a Beijing policeman near the end
of the imperial regime. Witnessing many of the major
events of modern Chinese, “I” is a simple,
essentially decent man who would like to do good
and see justice done, but who sees again and again
how easily the rich and powerful are able to do what
they like. At the heart of this remarkable film is
director Shi Hui, who also plays the lead role. Historical
incidents are perceptively integrated with personal
tragedies. Unquestionably one of the periodís major
film artists, Shi Hui was denounced in the so-called
“Anti-Rightist Campaign” of 1957; despondent, he
took his own life.
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Wed
Nov 2: 3:15 pm
Thu
Nov 3: 1:30 pm
Sat
Nov 5: 6:15 pm |
The mid-50s brought a brief wave
of films based on works of the “May Fourth” generation
— writers who sought to transform Chinese literature
and culture by opening them to foreign influences.
Family, based on the novel by Ba Jin, tells the story
of the Gao family, a large, well-off family whose
fortunes begin to decline after the end of the Imperial
government in the early 20th century. Focusing on
the Gao’s three sons, we see how each deals with
love, marriage, the social transformation of Chinese
society as well as the rising difficulties of their
family. Family paints a rich portrait of the period,
as we see the impact of the world outside the walls
of the Gao’s home on even their most intimate personal
relations. As the novel was written in 1933, the
film partially updates it, showing the fate of the
Gaos in light of the eventual victory of the communists.
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Thu
Nov 3: 3:30 pm
Sat
Nov 5: 3:45 pm |
Set on Hainan Island, in the far
south of China, The
Red Detachment begins as Chunghua, a servant
girl, tries to escape an abusive household. She’s
about to be brutally punished when a visiting overseas
Chinese, Hong Changqing, proposes to buy her from
her master. Hong turns out to be an organizer for
the Communist Party and drops her off at a communist
base, where Chunghua joins up eagerly and works hard,
but her desire for revenge against her former master
overshadows her commitment to the revolution. One
of the greatest films produced during the “Seventeen
Years” — the period between the establishment
of the PRC (1949) and the Cultural Revolution (1966),
Red Detachment laces its politics with great
expressions of personal passion. Xie Jie, a great
director of women, was attacked in the Cultural Revolution,
but this film was a favorite of Madame Mao (Jiang
Qing), and in fact was the basis for one of her “Eight
Model Operas.”
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Fri
Nov 4: 2:00 pm
Sun
Nov 6: 8:00 pm |
A powerful, if controversial,
work that represents the other side of the “national
minority” films so frequently found in Chinese
films of the period, Serfs is set in Tibet just prior
to its takeover by the PRC. A young orphan, whose
parents were killed by a cruel landowner, Jampa seems
condemned to a remorseless existence toiling as a “human
horse”
for the landowner’s son. When the Chinese army
enters Tibet, Jampa finds
that change might really be possible.
Presenting the Chinese invasion of Tibet as a humanitarian
act,
Serfs works the familiar theme of how the
Han Chinese provide a catalyst for the various ethnic
groups in China to radically reform their traditional
societies, and evokes a major theme in Chinese international
politics: national liberation struggles as a form
of class struggle.
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Fri
Nov 4: 4:10 pm
Fri
Nov 4: 9:00 pm |
Set in the 20s, Xiao Jianqiu (Sun
Daolin) travels to a remote town in Zhejiang province.
Disgusted with the chaos in the cities, Xiao has
decided to teach, hoping that through education he
can bring about change. Once settled, he befriends
a poor widow, and even allows her daughter to attend
school for free. Meanwhile, Xiao notices Tao Lan,
the beautiful daughter of a local landowner. When
the widowís small son dies, Xiao, out of sympathy
for the woman, offers to marry her. But the news
of the match is received very badly by the locals.
Based on a “May Fourth” novel, Early
Spring in February meditates on a favorite political theme
of the era: the ineffectiveness of personal charity
to spur real social change, yet the film was roundly
criticized — for
offering such a positive portrait of a “bourgeois
reformer” — by the factions that would later
form the vanguard of the cultural revolution.
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Sat
Nov 5: 8:30 pm
Mon
Nov 7: 1:30 pm |
With the defeat of the “Gang
of Four” and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s
era of reform, Chinese filmmakers began to create
works that cast critical looks at the injustice and
excesses of the preceding decades. Xie Jin, already
the “grand
old man” of Chinese cinema and its most respected
director, made this deeply moving study of the clash
between personal feelings and Party loyalty during
the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign. When Song Wei's
fiancée Luo Qun is denounced
as a “right-wing
traitor”
by Party official
Wu Yao, he is sentenced to ten years' hard labor.
Song Wei breaks off her engagement, and eventually
marries Wu Yao. Years later, political currents have
shifted; Song Wei demands that her husband
— now a powerful Party official — seek
Luo Qun’s rehabilitation,
but Wu Yao has no desire to open up old political
and emotional wounds. Xie Jin captures the sense
of a fear and caution of a generation that had experienced
over twenty-five years of devastating persecutions.
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Sun
Nov 6: 1:30 pm
Mon
Nov 7: 3:45 pm
Also
showing at Asia Society October 22 |
A perfect complement to Shi Hui’s
This Life of Mine, Ning Ying’s terrific
film also chronicles the life of a Beijing policeman
but if her film lacks overwhelming, dramatic events
such as the May Fourth riots or the Japanese invasion,
On the Beat still offers a revealing portrait
of a society decidedly in transition. There’s a surface-level
calm one feels as the policemen patrol modest neighborhoods
on their bicycles, stopping every now and then to
confer with the local neighborhood committee whose
job is to make sure people comply with birth control
regulations, or to chase down a rabid dog. Yet Ning
Ying gradually shows the cracks in the system: the
toll the new style police work takes on family relations,
the distance between Chinese cops and their American
television models, and the increasing combativeness
and resistance to authority of private citizens during
China’s “era of reforms.”
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Sun
Nov 6: 5:50 pm |
Based on the novel by Liu Heng.
Former prisoner Li Huiquan (Jiang Wen) arrives back
in his native Beijing, with no family and few job
prospects.
In a nightclub, he meets an aspiring singer, Yaqiu
(played by Chinese pop star Cheng Lin), and soon
becomes her unofficial bodyguard. As Yaqiu grows
more popular, Li grows more possessive of her; meanwhile,
his underworld contacts are trying to drag him back.
Using a classic crime genre storyline
— the former con struggling to go straight — Black
Snow becomes a powerful study of displacement,
of the fear felt by many Chinese that perhaps there
would be no place for them in the new, just-emerging
China. Winner of the 1990 “100 Flowers Best
Film Award” (the Chinese Oscar).
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Added screening!
Mon
Oct 24: 5:00 pm
Added screening!
Thu
Oct 27: 9:00 pm
Wed
Nov 9: 1:00 pm
|
“To Live is a simple
title, but it conceals a universe. The film follows
the life of one family in China, from the heady days
of gambling dens in the 40s to the austere hardship
of the Cultural Revolution in the 60s. And through
all of their fierce struggles with fate, all of the
political twists and turns they endure, their hope
is basically one summed up by the heroine, a wife
who loses wealth and position and children, and who
says, “All I ask is a quiet life together.” The
honesty of To Live earned Zhang Yimou and
Gong Li not only a two-year ban on further co-productions,
but a ban on even speaking about their film. It is
a big, strong, energetic film, made by a filmmaker
whose vision takes in four decades of his nation’s
history, and who stands apart from all the political
currents, and sees that ordinary people everywhere
basically want what his heroine cries out for, a
quiet life.” — Roger
Ebert
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Thu
Nov 10: 1:15 pm
Thu
Nov 10: 6:15 pm |
The
Master of Everything mixes two of the most popular
film genres in Asia —madcap comedy and kung-fu.
In a remote Chinese village, quiet Mi Jihong (John
Lone) shares his house with his dynamic sister, Mi
Alian (Tao Hong). Alian’s best friend, and the object
of Jihong’s secret love, is Luhua (Coco Lee), the
strikingly beautiful yet woefully under-talented
daughter of the village chief. When Luhua is humiliated
by an egomaniacal director during a movie audition,
Mi Jihong decides he can make a television series,
in which Luhua can star. Director Xin Lee serves
up a delightful commentary on movie madness and the
new “do it yourself” mentality that’s
become a new credo in a society formerly dominated
by communal identity and control.
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Thu
Nov 10: 4:00 pm
Thu
Nov 10: 8:45 pm |
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