Category: Trailers

By Joe Bendel. Wang Qingyao’s words have an eerie resonance. He is determined that his wife’s murder during the Cultural Revolution will not be denied or forgotten by the guilty and embarrassed parties. Despite his personal pain, he documented his family’s tragedy with remarkable thoroughness. It is an acutely personal story, but one with national significance for China that unfolds in Hu Jie’s Though I Am Gone, which screens during MoMA’s Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions film series.

During the Cultural Revolution, Beijing schools were the incubators of the institutionalized insanity. Unfortunately, Wang’s wife was a middle school vice principal in the wrong city, at the wrong time. When the Red Guards began terrorizing the country, their children followed their lead. Even though Bian considered herself a loyal Communist since before 1946, she was forced to endure physical beatings and public humiliations on a daily basis. Fearing for her family’s safety, Bian resigned herself to the torments. One day, the students took it too far and rather than taking her to the hospital literally one block away, they just threw her out like a sack of garbage.

Her husband was not on hand to witness the torture she endured. It only would have made things worse for her. However, the trained journalist photographed her battered body and saved evidence of her ordeal, including the blood and excrement soaked clothes she wore during her final hours. Years later, an anonymous source came forward to give him an exact accounting of the events. Not surprisingly, though, only Bian’s fellow victims agreed to participate in Hu’s documentary.

As a filmmaker, Hu’s approach is as simple and straight forward as it can be. Even eschewing soundtrack music, he focuses his camera on Wang and his photographs, allowing the man to tell her story in his own words. He also incorporates archival recordings of the state sanctioned madness as well as personal testimony from Bian’s colleagues.

Speaking of the need to bear witness, Wang Qingyao echoes sentiments often heard in Holocaust survivors’ oral histories. When he eventually produces a photo of the smoke coming from the chimney of the crematorium where his wife’s remains were incinerated, the symmetry becomes profoundly unsettling. While Hu maintains an intimate focus on Bian’s story, he masterfully conveys a sense of how truly representative it was of rampant, widespread horrors.

On a technical level, Though I Am Gone is a simple film, but it is emotionally devastating. This is an incredibly brave expose of events the Party would prefer to forget. Highly recommended for general audiences, particularly including middle school aged students, Though I Am Gone (also distributed by dGenerate Films) screens this coming Tuesday (5/28) and the following Saturday (6/1) as part of Chinese Realities at MoMA.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on May 23rd, 2013 at 12:37pm.

By Joe Bendel. It could be called a vanguard village. Now entirely encircled by Guangzhou’s urban sprawl, San Yuan Li was once a hotbed of resistance during the Opium Wars. However, drug abuse and other social pathologies have recently become comparatively more advanced there. Yet, new and old China persist, side-by-side each other. A team of artists document the neighborhood’s daily facts of life in Ou Ning & Cao Fei’s San Yuan Li, which screens with Huang Weikai’s Disorder as part of MoMA’s Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions film series.

Industrialization has left a questionable mark on the village. In rapid succession, the audience sees the cramped narrow alleys, dingy sweatshops, haunted looking factories, and the hardscrabble laborers toiling along the river. These are literal “fly-over People,” living beneath the constant approach of airliners. In contrast, viewers also encounter the modern consumerist class (often at booty level), as well as the young color guards and traditional performers representing the ideals of previous eras.

With its frenetically quick cuts and driving soundtrack, San Yuan Li is far more accessible than the term “experimental documentary” would suggest. Although shot in a very stylish black-and-white, the film is sort of like a National Geographic photo spread with a postmodern sensibility and an elevated social awareness. The net effect is often rather hypnotic. While not quite as pointed as Disorder, they are quite a compatible pairing, collectively clocking in at about one and three-quarter hours.

Still, there are plenty of telling images throughout San Yuan Li. Indeed, any appearance of Mao portraiture is now ironic, haunting either the go-go capitalism or mounting class inequities unleashed by the Party. Yet, there is also dignity in the faces of average citizens, particularly the diverse selection of work teams captured late in the film.

Neither documentaries have narrative structures per se, but they both convey a vivid sense of contemporary China. As it happens, both San Yuan Li and Disorder are distributed by the dGenerate films, the invaluable specialists in independent Chinese cinema. Highly recommended for China watchers who want to do exactly that, they screen together this Wednesday (5/22) and the following Monday (5/27) as Chinese Realities continues at MoMA.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on May 20th, 2013 at 2:19pm.

By Joe Bendel. That hardly took long. An oil boomtown in the 1990’s, Yumen is now a deserted ghost town—literally so if you believe some of the stories told by stragglers. Regardless, viewers certainly get a vivid sense of contemporary China’s “burn rate” in Huang Xiang, Xu Ruotao & J.P. Sniadecki’s Yumen (trailer here), which has its North American premiere tomorrow during MoMA’s ongoing Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions film series.

According to one disembodied voice-over, the abandoned hospital is and was haunted by the spirit of an infant. She once saw it with some friends, one of whom still bears a scar from the encounter. Another man also remembers the hospital, having frequently visited an ambiguously sickly woman there. These remnants of Yumen’s glory days are like ghosts themselves, often filmed like ant-like specks shuffling through the surreal post-industrial landscape.

The directorial trio consistently plays games with the doc format, incorporating what sound like staged reminiscences and showing the seams in between their 16mm reel changes. Nonetheless, there is no mistaking the reality of the northwest Gansu town. It is simply impossible to recreate ruins of such scale on an indie budget. It looks like Pripyat outside of Chernobyl, just without the background radiation (as far as we know).

For what it’s worth, the woman’s ghost story is kind of creepy. Yet more to the point, the intertwining memories and images clearly illustrate the pain and dislocation resulting from the death of a community, even one not especially beloved by its residents, such as Yumen.

Yumen is an impressive looking film, but even at its sixty-five minute running time, it feels a smidge stretched. Certain visuals start to repeat themselves and a late scene rather overindulges in globalist irony, as one of their POV figures strolls through a nearby open air market singing along to Springsteen’s “My Hometown.” As a multi-millionaire and self-appointed spokesman of the proletariat, Springsteen might actually be the perfect voice for today’s China, but the sequence just feels too long and stagey.

If you want to get a good look at Yumen this film is probably your best option, because the government is not likely to sponsor tours there anytime soon. It is not for everyone, but it should fascinate those with a taste for more experimental documentaries in the spirit of Disorder and San Yuan Li. Recommended for aesthetically adventurous China watchers, Yumen screens this Monday (5/20) at MoMA, presented in-person by Sniadecki, the former American expatriate filmmaker, whose previous credits include Chaiqian and Sognhua, two similarly naturalistic observations of Chinese daily life.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on May 20th, 2013 at 2:18pm.