[flowerytale]

Quattro strade, dir. Alice Rohrwacher (2020)

[grusinskayas-archive]

One Fine Spring Day | 봄날은 간다 (2001) dir. Hur Jin-ho

[celluloidrainbow]

新宿ボーイズ | SHINJUKU BOYS (1995) dir. Kim Longinotto & Jano Williams In the glitzy Shinjuku neighbourhood of Ni-Chome, the elegantly dressed hosts of the New Marilyn Night Club pour champagne and charm female guests. ‘Each customer thinks we’re her special boyfriend, but they’re fooled,’ explains one host, Kazuki. ‘Thats how we do business.’ But the employees of New Marilyn are all onabe, Japan’s transgender men, living a lifestyle not openly accepted by society while running an elaborate business that caters to its lonely core. (link in title)

[cinematicjourney]

Ocean Waves (1993) | dir. Tomomi Mochizuki

[treethymes]

This essay touches on a lot of what I think makes tsai’s films so unique and powerful to me. these thoughts are half-baked but i think he captures a particular sense of “reality.” of course there’s the “naturalistic” anti-dramatic performances and still camera, the minimal dialogue and minimal cuts. the result of which is a sort of documentary effect. but documentary style does not actually capture reality. it just records it, flattens it for preservation. tsai aims not just to show us people behaving non-dramatically (as we might when no one is watching or when there is no one to “perform” ourselves for), but to invoke particular feelings that come with modern alienation and existence. to this end he conceives of scenarios or character actions that are maybe strange or oblique. not too much, just enough so that ordinary actions and spaces come off as a little strange as well. he injects the image of the ordinary with ambiguity and mystery, setting us up to reconsider the ordinary. bc in reality nothing is as ordinary as the documentary image of the ordinary presumes. reality, the notion of presence, consists of ambiguity and uncertainty. art that manages to tap into this transcends the trappings of its material form and the certainties of the audience’s assumptions.

[treethymes]

In contrast to the works of some of his fellow directors, Tsai’s images are consistently and self-consciously still and minimalist. Be it in the form of a “corpse” in the river, the mother bringing up customers in the restaurant elevator, the father eyeing and picking up a young man in the shopping arcade, or Hsiao Kang riding his motorcycle, the visual/visible as deployed by Tsai has the eerie quality of allegory—sections, fragments, broken parts, whose whole has somehow been lost. Although, simply because they are concretely present on the screen, the images tend to invite readings of themselves as symbols (with full symbolic meanings), I’d argue that, in this case, precisely such visual concreteness becomes Tsai’s paradoxical means of enlarging and dramatizing an ontological and social dysfunction whose origins, nonetheless, cannot immediately be seen. […] As much as they are ruins in the aftermath of a missing past, Tsai’s images are at the same time runes to be deciphered and speculated on for an as-yet unknown future. This open temporality of Tsai’s visual compositions, which at once scavenge materials from the chance situations of the everyday and assemble them as parts of a mesmerizing, artificial medium, one that points simultaneously to the past and the future, to melancholic disintegration and redemptive transformation, is what makes the discursivity in production that characterizes his works to date so fascinating to contemplate.

[…]

The spectators are left [in The River] with an ending that is suggestively introduced by the light let into the room as Hsiao Kang opens the curtains and the balcony door and steps outside. This closing—or opening, rather, which is placed visibly at the center of the scene—is as enigmatic in its indeterminacy as it is refreshing in its sidestepping of the classical-tragic/psychoanalytic-traumatic conclusion. It marks the discursivity of Tsai’s film with one more evocative surprise, endowing his allegorical social figures with an unpredictable, rather than fatalistically (pre)determined, sense of the life still to come.

Rey Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films

[twilightronin]

The Heroic Trio Anita Mui & Maggie Cheung & Michelle Yeoh

[celluloidrainbow]

きのう何食べた? | WHAT DID YOU EAT YESTERDAY? (2021) dir. Kazuhito Nakae Kakei Shiro is a 45-year-old lawyer who works at a small law firm. He is good at cooking and a meticulous and thrifty person who keeps the monthly food budget to 25,000 yen. Shiro’s daily routine is to leave work on time and head to a discount supermarket nearby. His partner Yabuki Kenji is an affable hairdresser also in his 40s. They share a two-bedroom apartment and the finer points of two men living together come up at the dining table every day. Although two of them have been in a relationship for three years and Shiro’s parents know of his sexuality, he never shares the fact that he is gay or Kenji is his partner to anyone. Based on the manga and series of the same name. (link in title)

[celluloidrainbow]

==> MEMORIES OF MY BODY (2018) dir. Garin Nugroho In a village in Java, Juno, a pre-teen abandoned by his father, joins a Lengger ( a traditional Javanese dance) centre where men assume feminine appearances but the political and social upheaval in Indonesia forces him on the road, meeting remarkable people on his journey. Loosely based on real life dancer Rianto.

[pega-chan]

hi! i’m aware this post provides a google drive link to the movie but if you’re Indonesian, consider watching Memories of My Body (Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku) over on Bioskop Online! it’s one of (if not) the only streaming platforms in Indonesia that hosts local queer movies, and you can watch this one for a very low price of Rp5,000.00 (it’s pay-per-view)! it’s currently in the top 10 movies on the site and if there’s demand for it they’re likely to host more queer movies and/or keep this one up for longer. other queer movies you can check out on Bioksop Online:

Dua Ikan dan Sepiring Nasi (Two Fish and a Plate of Rice): a woman tries to repair her relationship with her estranged husband but finds out he’s with another man (happy ending!)

Berbagi Suami (Sharing a Husband): Two women married to the same man in a polygamous marriage fall in love with each other

Her Soul: a documentary on Shinta Ratri (RIP), a trans woman who opened Indonesia’s first and only islamic boarding school for muslim trans women

[treethymes]

hou hsiao-hsien once said: “it would be impossible for me to ever make a film like wong kar-wai, and he could probably never make one like me. everyone’s artistic intuition is different. maybe this has something to do with the fact that my sign is fire and i’m an aries, while wong kar-wai’s sign is water and he is a cancer. the whole feeling is completely different. everyone has their own particular focus and parameters.”

happy together (1997) and millennium mambo (2001) are similar stories about people locked in volatile relationships. we watch them wrestle in cycles over and over again until eventually suddenly they are free (represented on screen by characters traveling, being cleansed in water and snow, respectively)

when i think of the way human beings process consciousness, it’s much more in line with the way i think wong tells that story. the movie’s not linear; it’s sort of almost circular. then when we think about the things we’re feeling, we often tie them not to what is happening to us right now, but to something either in the past, or to something we’re anticipating happening. i think that movie [in the mood for love] does an amazing job of translating what that feels like. –barry jenkins on wong kar-wai

i’m here at cannes at the moment, and a phrase i keep hearing is “beyond cinema.” hou hsiao-hsien is beyond cinema. i mean that not in the sense that his formalism is antiquated or de rigueur, but more to accentuate the synesthetic quality of his work. his craft is as evocative as any of the more brawny stylists we revere as auteurs, but the effect it arrives at is much more delicate, elusive by nature. –barry jenkins on hou hsiao-hsien

i like winter. i find the bracing cold comforting and enlivening. other seasons arrive at a much slower pace, but in a single sweep, a snowstorm—a coup d'état of whiteness—changes a landscape entirely. the world loses its detail when covered with snow. a new, minimalist beauty is revealed. –abbas kiarostami

[goodbyedragoninn]

[shihlun]

Edward Yang with the cast of A Brighter Summer Day.

[treethymes]

The Kid 小孩 (1991, dir. Tsai Ming-liang)

Lee Kang-sheng was never afraid of the camera; even during the very first screen tests we did, he was perfectly okay with everything. I also liked his appearance because he doesn’t jump out at you with classic good looks, but neither is he ugly—he has a kind of average look about him while maintaining his own style. I never like those tall and handsome leading men—I don’t believe for a second that one of them could be a college student or a construction worker, or anything else! (Laughs) But with an actor like Lee Kang-sheng, I can really believe in his performance.

But after the first three days on set, I ran into another problem with him. In the past when I worked with other actors, I told them what they needed to do and when they did it, it usually felt natural. But there was something off-center about Lee Kang-sheng because he is very slow in his speech and movements. Whenever I asked him to do something, I would always have to wait for it to sink in, so there was always a momentary lag. It was really strange, so I kept rushing him and telling him to hurry up. That continued until one day when Hsiao Kang got upset with me. We were doing an exterior shot on The Kid, I asked him to turn his head to look at another character. His movements were extremely slow, and I thought he looked like a robot. I kept instructing him to do it again, or to blink his eyes as he turned—I wanted him to do something so that the audience would know that he was still alive! He started to feel uncomfortable because I kept criticizing him, but he didn’t know what he could do to improve his performance. Finally he turned to me and said, “This is just how I am.” So we finished the scene, but afterward I kept thinking about what he said. His words proved to be very important to me. I think that we always have certain ideas about acting that we carry with us that we think are necessary to express certain emotions. I started to realize that he had something very special. His actions may be slow, but why do I always have to get him to hurry up? Why can’t I slow down to wait for him?

Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers

[treethymes]

Rebels of the Neon God 青少年哪吒 (1992, dir. Tsai Ming-liang)

Although you had already directed several television films, Rebels of the Neon God was your first major feature. What did you learn making that film?

I don’t remember! (Laughs) I remember that when the film came out, a Taiwan film critic criticized it, saying that it was too similar to a made-for-television-movie. But I strongly disagreed, I always felt it was a film and very different from my television work. But a lot of people typecast you in their minds and couldn’t get past the fact that I had been a television director for so many years. There were a lot of critics who made such rash judgments of my early work, but I always knew that I was working in a new medium and was well aware of the scale of the projected images I was working with. But at the same time I was constantly exploring just what the proper distance between my camera and my subject was. I was always flirting with distance. Often I would want to get in real close, but I knew that was dangerous. At the same time, I knew being too far away can be dangerous as well. It is very different from television, because in television you knew exactly what the parameters are. You are working with a small screen and can never get too far away. But film is very different […] and it requires a very different approach from television.

[…]

And the original script for Rebels was originally only two thirds the final length? And it was producer Hsu Li-kong who completed the story?

Actually, the conclusion was not in fact written by Hsu Li-kong. There is a story floating around that Hsu completed it, but that is because he wanted to send the script in to apply for government funding and the application required a completed screenplay. However, after writing the first two thirds, I couldn’t write anymore and had to get back to Malaysia for the New Year. So I told him to finish it any way he wanted, but I was leaving. (Laughs) But we never actually used his ending for the shoot. I think his version involved Lee Kang-sheng taking a fake gun to commit some crimes or something, but I didn’t use any of that.

There was another incident when I was at work on a screenplay for a mini-series. I had been working on the script for two years and had writer’s block when it came to one scene. My downstairs neighbor was a very famous female screenwriter. She was extremely quick and prolific, so was able to make a lot of money in the industry. Seeing that I had been working on the same screenplay for two years, she felt bad for me and invited me over for dinner. Over dinner she asked just where it was that I was having trouble. I told her that I couldn’t figure out how to write an argument scene between a woman and her mother-in-law; I didn’t know what kind of things they would argue about. The next morning she slipped the finished scene under my door. I was very moved, but I wouldn’t use it. I just laughed and wondered how she could do that. The same thing happened with Hsu Li-kong. They all think it is easy—after all, it’s just a screenplay. But for me it is very difficult. I get to a certain point and that’s it, my inspiration is gone. The same thing would happen when I was working in television; I wouldn’t be able to finish screenplays, but I was able to sneak by because I was also the producer. There were also times when I would start with a television writer’s script, but once I got on location I threw the whole script away and rewrote it myself. I still gave the original writer all the credit, but I couldn’t bear to use his work. I knew that if I made the show according to his screenplay it would have been really good—but it wasn’t what I wanted. There are some aspects of reality that you can’t write at home. So I wrote two thirds of Rebels of the Neon God, Hsu Li-kong wrote the last section to apply for funding, and then I just went and shot without regard to his ending. But Hsu Li-kong is really funny, and he would often joke with me and say, “Ah Liang, do you know why you got awarded funding for this film? It’s all because of my beautiful ending!” (Laughs)

Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers

[celluloidrainbow]

JOHANNA D’ARC OF MONGOLIA (1989) dir. Ulrike Ottinger Set on the Trans-Siberian railway, seven Western women are kidnapped by a mysterious Mongolian princess and her companions and join their caravan on a journey through inner Mongolia into the unknown. (link in title)

[goodbyedragoninn]

“The reason I call the audience ghosts is because it reminds me of a short story I read a few years ago. It was said to be a true story that took place in Udon Thani province. Coincidentally, I just found out that it is about to be made into a film by Five Star Productions. As far as I can remember, the story went something like this: The main character was a man with a travelling cinema show, he made open-air presentations in villages and temples. One day a very mysterious man hired him to show a film in a temple that was a long way off. By the time he had arrived and set up the projector and film screen, it was after dusk. Gradually people started to arrive in the darkness. While the film was running, the audience all sat still in an orderly fashion, their eyes looking up at the screen. They did not show any emotion, nor did they speak to one another until the film ended. Then they all got up and wandered away. At dawn the next day the film-show owner realized that he was in the middle of a cemetery, and that he had been paid to show a film for ghosts.

"When I finished reading this story, I felt sad: even ghosts wanted to watch films, just like everyone else. They were ghosts that still wanted to dream; they paid their final offering of money to buy dreams, which was film. If you notice the people around you while watching a film, you will see that their behaviour is like that of ghosts, lifting up their heads to look at the moving images in front. The cinema itself is like a coffin with bodies, sitting still, as if under a spell. The moving images on the screen are camera records of events that have already taken place; they are remains of the past, strung together and called a film. In this hall of darkness, ghosts are watching ghosts.

"I felt the same way last month, when I had the opportunity to visit an arthouse cinema in Taipei called Spot Cinema. It is run by a well known film director, a god, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and is supported by the government which had donated the premises. The decoration inside was marvellous. There was a bookstore, a shop selling DVDs, a restaurant and a coffee shop called Café Lumière. In several corners there were stills from Hou’s films, proudly used as decoration. On the stairway ceiling was a large black and white photo of a man riding a motorcycle with a girl sitting behind him, a scene from one of his classic films. The person showing us around was a man well past middle-age; he pointed to the picture of the young man on the motorcycle and said that they had been in the same class at school. It affected me deeply as I heard this; it wouldn’t be long now before everyone here would become ghosts. The old man showing us around was wearing glasses and already showing grey hair, but his friend on the motorcycle would always remain the same age.”

— Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Ghosts in the Darkness

[absencesrepetees]

hirokazu koreeda shares his favorite films:

boy (nagisa ôshima, 1969)

cold war (paweł pawlikowski, 2018)

le rayon vert (éric rohmer, 1986) 

the bridges of madison county (clint eastwood, 1995)

brokeback mountain (ang lee, 2005)

kes (ken loach, 1969)

contact (robert zemeckis, 1997)

a river runs through it (robert redford, 1992)

grave of the fireflies (isao takahata, 1988)

in the mood for love (wong kar-wai, 2000)

the sweet hereafter (atom egoyan, 1997)

[celluloidrainbow]

蝴蝶 | BUTTERFLY (2004) dir. Yan Yan Mak Flavia is a thirty-something married teacher who has nearly suppressed the memory of her first love Jin, a rebellious girl and outspoken girl in her high-school. Society forced them apart, and now Flavia is stuck in a stifling marriage to businessman Ming. A chance encounter in a supermarket with a beautiful free-spirited singer-songwriter named Yip reawakens dormant feelings and she begins to think back on her teenage affair with Jin. (link in title)

[henhao]

he’s a woman she’s a man 金枝玉叶 (1994)