贾樟柯导演的《天注定》| a touch of sin, directed by jia zhangke

i think the first chapter with dahai battling the maserati coal boss in shanxi (spending the last two months in shanxi made that chapter hit even harder) was clearly directly riffing on lin chong in 《heroes of the marsh》/《all men are brothers》/《the water margin》/, 《水浒传》-- the part of the opera that dahai catches is the part where lin chong is FORCED to kill gao qiu's two thugs... which is what 《水浒传》 is all about: righteous men forced to resort to violence against those in charge because the rules of brotherhood and 江湖 ----The concept of Jianghu can be traced to the 14th century novel Water Margin, in which a band of noble outlaws, who mounted regular sorties in an attempt to right the wrongs of corrupt officials, retreated to their hideout. These bandits were called the Chivalrous men of the Green Forests or 绿林好汉, the "green forest" (绿林, lǜlín) was the antecedent to Jianghu.---- also the lin chong story and other water margin stories aren't just about fighting injustice but about being humiliated (gao qiu's son is trying to fuck lin chong's wife -- dahai is beaten in front of a crowd and given that nickname etc) and the lin chong story hinges on a weapon too.... and it sort of directs the rest of the film toward that novel in particular where good men are forced into violence

whether justified attacks on corrupt leaders that have violated a sort of cosmic REMEMBER THE WATER MARGIN BOYS CAME OUT OF STARS natural righteousness that's destroying the natural world and humans together
and just chaotic fucked up violence which is also well represented in wuxia literature and the water margin in particular
and even the righteous violence can't be controlled and you have a lot of righteous characters inflicting a lot of collateral damage in their quest for justice.

i took a lot of pleasure in watching wang baoqiang shoot people down

I'm actually shocked to find out that Wang Baoqiang is an accomplished actor who's been involved in many big name projects rather than just a farmer plucked from a village

He looks so weedy

Never read the Water Margin, am really intrigued by yer post now

I've been reading about lots of land disputes in China that follow the same exact pattern of the shanxi story

Rural land, as we know, is collectively owned by the farmers of the village & use-rights can only be created if the villagers vote on it

The village convinces the farmers that allowing the land to be developed will be beneficial to all, profits will be distributed to all the villagers, jobs will be created and given to the villagers

Magically, all the profit that comes in somehow is retained by the village leaders & the farmers maybe get a carton of cigarettes + black lung

omg only just found out that Suikoden is the Japanese translation of "Water Margin", old Playstation RPG makes sense now

wang baoqiang is the star of this i think. best performance in the film: puffing lit the cigarettes in the kitchen and paying obeisance to ghosts... raising his pistol to the sky while the village sets off fireworks... the interactions with his son and wife... the ice cold robbery scene....

having seen this now, it's crazy that it was ever even rumored to have a mainland release. a lot of the chinese lang reviews from mainland viewers seem to see it as a direct attack on the party/govt even if they sometimes use slightly euphemistic terms to refer to that direct criticism.... obv that obsession with china (r.i.p. ct hsia) thing--focusing on any work of art produced by a chinese artist as being totally 100% about china and unrelatable to the greater experience of mankind whatever--is not the most interesting way to look at it.

they note in particular the use of the city wall, the yellow plains, eternal symbols of 5000000 years of history blah blah blah and how chinese history seems to be trapped in a cycle of moral decay->violence.

plus how if you view it as a retelling of the water margin... and more than any of the other 4 classics the water margin figured big in communist party romantic views of itself (mao loved it and it must have made good reading while they were hiding out in the caves yanan imagining they were liangshan heroes revolting against a failing empire and its corrupt bureaucracy) and in, like, actual party policy (discussion of the book and its lessons about fighting capitulationists within the party among other lessons were important during the cultural revolution). ...i think the the water margin parallels are obvious and it has an important history of being used to sort of obliquely attack corrupt leadership and affirm the correctness of revolt.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/dd86b174efac3f893be3ca3cf76be4d4/tumblr_n0rfecSG6F1r6ivyno1_500.jpg

i enjoyed this, but had a hard time reconciling some of the 'genre' elements with jia's more usual 'realistic' mode

i loved that about it.

Yeah, the tension between naturalism (for lack of a better term for how Jia's style is coded) and street-opera theatricality was part of what made it so compelling for me, along with the film's masterful pacing.

yeah... although i never really thought of any of his films as being, like particularly "realistic" or naturalist in any sense

like platform is super stylized and formal iirc

i think it's harder to separate his last few from realism, just because of social context, mastery of super-modern-seeming digital video & the extent to which they foreground docu-fiction grey-areaness

i think my 'complaint' is maybe that jia doesn't subject 'genre' to the same interrogation and play as he does 'the real'? i dunno, you are all v. persuasive

the genre moments are so fleeting that their duration almost feels like like that interrogation in and of itself?

http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/how-china-made-sure-thered-be-no-touch-sin-oscars

i want to see this. it was in sight n sounds best of 2013 list. i did really like unknown pleasures, but thought that the second half, or third act or thereabouts, lost some of the realism and interesting stuff about the interaction between the characters and ended up with a few too many typically arthouse shots, things like the bike not starting up the hill, then having to stop on the motorway, i do like long unbroken shots and all the rest of it, but it seemed to almost be too easy after the momentum of everything that came before that, like a lapse into a romance of fallibility/the everyday, compared with the realism/reportage of the rest of the film. did love the ending though.

I am going to watch this again tonight because it's characters have been haunting my thoughts all week.

Which characters haunt your thought the most?

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/03/14/jia-zhangke-explains-why-censors-are-scared-of-his-award-winning-film/?mod=WSJBlog

The kid who works in factories probably, saying that there isn't a weaker part of the anthology.

Which Haunting Touch of Sin Character Are You?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Yujiao_incident

I like the way Jia has inverted the hollywood trait of female depictions always being younger than the real characters.

in his casting? that's his lover/muse so I don't think the casting decision was deliberately provocative or anything, also why in hell would he be responding to Hollywood conventions in particular?

i assume you mean zhao tao.

the way he casts her in everything has given me pause, there's that scene in "i wish i knew" where she's wandering in the rain in shanghai and the camera lingers over the wet t-shirt clinging to her body and it's like ENOUGH, JIA ZHANGKE! ENOUGH! the scene felt so out of place (like other stuff in that film) that it exacerbated the sense of total indulgence.

he's an interesting filmmaker to say the least but i do think he peaked with platform, at least so far. something a bit glib about his recent fiction/doc hybrids that doesn't sit right w/ me. that includes still life/dong, useless, i wish i knew, 24 city.... i'd say the most interesting filmmaker working in china was Jiang Wen but his last film was a disappointment... stylistically bold and narratively intriguing but also kind of incoherent, and too many action films that played the same.

action SCENES

Let The Bullets Fly? Yeah that was trash

Lol didn't realise she was his lover, I preferred it when I thought it was a casting decision. I am watching 24 City this week on the strength of how much I loved AToS and suppose am trying project extra auteur points on Jia to an extent.

i didnt know she was his lovermuse

too bad prince won't let that one out of the vault

Let The Bullets Fly? Yeah that was trash

― 龜, Tuesday, March 18, 2014 5:32 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wouldn't say "trash" but it didn't add up to much

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/03/18/taiwan-is-afraid-that-chinese-movies-are-becoming-too-good/

that's a weird headline for an article that's mostly about trade protections etc.

btw european cinemas worried about this re. american films in silent/early sound eras. well, european film producers did. the distributors were happy to cash in on distributing/exhibiting american movies. actually one reason france's film industry was fairly dysfunctional in those days was this split in priorities between producers and distributors/exhibitors. similarly i'm sure that the folks who own taiwan's cinemas would love to have popular chinese films to show (I don't really count jia's films in that group though).

finally released on DVD in a couple weeks

and blu-ray I hope?

My write-up, from PIX: http://centrifugue.blogspot.com/2014/04/cphpix-day-5-touch-of-sin-bastards-real.html

Liked it. But I knew I would. Loved how many stories was put into it, on the margins of the four main tales.

Godo review, Frederik.

This was as a whole terrific but the conventional moments -- the lovers discussing their future over tea; the effete boy and his prostitute girlfriend -- were a drag. The horse-beating scenes were among the more wrenching I've seen in years.

"the effete boy and his prostitute girlfriend"

That part of the story is absolute fire.

The brothel scenes and Party chic worked.

for anyone in/near DC, this is showing at the Freer Gallery in a couple of weeks, with Jia and Zhao Tao in attendance:

https://www.asia.si.edu/events/films.asp?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D109070385

On netflix instant

for anyone in/near DC, this is showing at the Freer Gallery in a couple of weeks, with Jia and Zhao Tao in attendance:

https://www.asia.si.edu/events/films.asp?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D109070385

― Aglet, Wednesday, April 9, 2014 4:31 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

On netflix instant

― Insane Prince of False Binaries (Gukbe), Wednesday, April 9, 2014 5:35 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

film culture in a nutshell, folks.

lol yeah.

in my defense i've written that date down and i'm gonna request that day off work to go.

oh, i didn't mean it in a bad way.

got tix for a screening of this next week, woohoo

That is sweet and sick

dunno what the venue will be like, it's a new-ish cafe-bar-performance space and i'm told it's pretty compact but a chance to watch this on a decent-sized screen is v. welcome, Hull's not been great for foreign language movies the last few years

This is definitely a big screen movie. God it is so shit Wessie side for these type of films, you have to travel to Manchester, Bradford or Leeds for foreign language movies. It is always too much train + bus action for my liking or finance.