In 1938, a beautiful and imaginative aspiring writer, Shen Shao-Hua (Brigitte Lin) leaves home following the death of her father to start a new life, as Japanese soldiers march into town to reinforce the occupation of China. Having spent her early years of adulthood imprisoned by her embittered father in the attic, Shao-Hua created a […]
Good Cats, 2008
Something like Jia Zhang-ke’s portraits of contemporary China by way of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s stationary long shots and sense of landscape, Good Cats returns to the hybrid fiction of Ying Liang’s previous film, The Other Half to capture the dislocation and moral vacuum left in the wake of China’s rapid economic development. Similar to The Other […]
The Other Half, 2006
In its fractured, interpenetrating (or rather, colliding) realities, Ying Liang’s The Other Half foreshadows Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City, capturing China’s transforming industrial landscape through its alienated and displaced humanity. The opening frontal shot of job seeker, Xiaofei being interviewed by an off-camera recruiter establishes a sense of division – the unseen economic, social, educational, and […]
Program 13: Peep “TV” Show, 2004
In an illuminating episode in Peep TV Show, an androgynously dressed young man sits in his favorite area of the street corner after he has placed a small yellow gift box on the sidewalk nearby (a ritual that he has repeatedly performed during the course of the film) – his jacket pulled over his head […]
Eros Plus Massacre, 1969
Like Shohei Imamura’s A Man Vanishes and Nagisa Oshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film, Yoshishige Yoshida’s dense and self-reflexive Eros Plus Massacre explores the murky, often turbulent intersection between reality and fiction, history and memory, angst and revolution – the implication of what Yoshida prefaces as the viewer’s “ambivalent participation” – in […]
The Ball at Anjo House, 1947
Filmed during American postwar occupation, The Ball at Anjo House is a curiously atypical Japanese film that hews eerily closer to the privileged, dysfunctional families and moral abandon of The Magnificent Ambersons or a Douglas Sirk melodrama than a Shochiku middle-class shomin-geki: the proud family patriarch, Tadahiko (Osamu Takizawa) who continues to harbor the illusion […]