More on Asian Cinema

Discuss what movies Bill, Scarlett, and Sofia, the producers or musicians are working on or in now as well as film influences for LIT etc.

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jml2
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More on Asian Cinema

#1 Post by jml2 » Wed Dec 08, 2004 5:34 am

this article is about cinema in China, with a mention of Sofia Coppola

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Chinese film and the return of glamour

By Manohla Dargis The New York Times
Tuesday, December 7, 2004



NEW YORK Once upon a time in Hollywood, the stars shone with a radiant glamour. In Chinese film, they still do. In movies
from Beijing to Hong Kong, actresses like Zhang Ziyi and actors like Tony Leung Chiu-wai fill the screen with heart-skipping
beauty and charm. In May at the Cannes film festival, audiences swooned for Wong Kar-wai's romantic drama "2046" and
Zhang Yimou's latest swordsman epic, "House of Flying Daggers."
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Although they could not be more different in story, sensibility and visual pleasures, what the films share in addition to Zhang Ziyi
is an extraordinary glamour born from the tension between release and repression.
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In American film, in which violence invariably trumps sex, glamour tends to surface in period stories like "L.A. Confidential," in
which the director Curtis Hanson explored the distance between gleaming false fronts and hard-boiled reality. David Lynch
wields glamour to similar if more disturbing effect in films like "Mulholland Drive," while Steven Soderbergh likes to put an
old-studio polish on bagatelles like "Ocean's Twelve."
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Meanwhile, in the major Chinese cinemas - those of mainland China, Hong Kong and, to an extent, Taiwan - glamour is serious
business. Much as it was in old Hollywood, glamour in contemporary Chinese film is a device and a disguise, but it is also a
luminous end in itself.
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American screens are now awash in interchangeable blonds with hungry mouths and empty eyes, but in the 1930s and '40s,
movie stars were divine, agleam with enchantment. By the end of the 1950s, glamour was as eroded as the studio system.
No-holds-barred rock 'n' roll and foreign-language cinema did their part to kill glamour, as did Alfred Kinsey, by taking the
mystery out of sex and leaving less and less to the imagination.
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By the time Marilyn Monroe laid down her peroxide head for good in 1962, glamour was a goner. With sex banished from the
screen, it was left to these photographers to manufacture desire, to turn mortals into deities. In their lustrous images of
modern-day Venuses swathed in furs and Achilles in a helmet of hair, photographers like George Hurrell sold a suggestion of
carnality, a patina of eroticism. Often photographed against dark backdrops, faces surrounded by a nimbus of light and erased
of imperfection, Hollywood stars looked like gods because, to us, they were.
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There are images of Zhang Ziyi in "Flying Daggers" that look as if they could have been shot by Hurrell. With her alabaster skin
and dark, pooling eyes, her body adorned in rich brocades, and bathing alfresco while discreetly veiled by green woodland,
Zhang does not just look bewitchingly lovely; she looks like an MGM pinup.
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If she were still on watch, Madame Mao would have had a fit and then probably had someone executed. Film production in
China was put on hold for several years during the Cultural Revolution, and the Beijing Film Academy ceased normal
operations. Two years after the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, the academy began accepting undergraduates again.
Among the students in that first class were Zhang Yimou , Chen Kaige ("Farewell My Concubine") and Kaige's childhood
friend, Tian Zhuangzhuang ("The Blue Kite").
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Among the first films made by this group, known as the Fifth Generation because it was the academy's fifth graduating class,
were social-issue stories set in the countryside where all three filmmakers were sent as teenagers during the Cultural Revolution.
Following the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and facing tough restrictions at home, the filmmakers ventured into more
commercial terrain with stories that could travel around the world.
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Since he began directing, much of the appeal of Zhang Yimou's films has rested in their bold visuals and his equally bold
women. Zhang helped return sex, or at least its suggestion, to mainland cinema and, greatly aided by his long-time star and
lover, Gong Li, a burgeoning glamour.
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In early 1990s films like "Ju Dou" and "Raise the Red Lantern," the color red is inexorably connected with the central female
characters. It is a crimson that announces a radically different world - that of pleasure, individual freedom and beauty for
beauty's sake - from that represented by Mao's Little Red Book. Given this, it's no wonder that "Ju Dou" and "Red Lantern"
were initially banned. (Mainland audiences, meanwhile, would catch banned films on pirated video copies.)
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The Chinese censors who nixed "Ju Dou" were, post-Tiananmen, clearly sensitive about the implications of a story about a
young couple's rebellion against a decrepit tyrant. But the sight of Gong's character bound, gagged and violently sobbing in a
flimsy top during a prelude to ravishment did not go unnoticed. The film's relatively tame sex scenes, one censor said, were "a
bad influence on the physical and spiritual health of young people."
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Just as Zhang and Gong were becoming the toast of international film festivals, Wong Kar-wai began putting his glamorous
stamp on Hong Kong cinema. In films like "Days of Being Wild" and "Fallen Angels," the characters are at once glamorous and
isolated, trapped in their gleaming casings like flies in amber. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung circle each other with adulterous
longing in Wong's 2000 romance, "In the Mood for Love."
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Wong's influence has reached around the world, inspiring imitators from Sofia Coppola to Lou Ye, the Shanghai-born director
of the visually lush "Suzhou River" and "Purple Butterfly."
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Though glamour is a construction for these filmmakers, it is also sincere; there is nothing ironic about the downcast eyes and
yearning mouths they immortalize. "There wasn't much laughing in those photos," said Laszlo Willinger in the 1930s of his
photographs for MGM. "You couldn't have happy sex. Sex and earnestness - together those spelled glamour." He could have
been talking about "House of Flying Daggers."
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The slow sexing-up of mainland cinema in the past decade and a half has occurred during what headline writers are fond of
calling China's sexual revolution. In 1981, the Communist Party took aim at this nascent revolution, stating that young men and
women should control the "sluice gates of passion" until marriage. Twelve years later, the first state-sponsored sex shop opened
in Beijing. Thousands of such shops have opened since and Kinsey-style sex reports have hit the country, as have sex-related
health epidemics, prostitution and Internet pornography.
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And yet in moves that seem to speak to the country's contradictions, earlier this year officials canceled a production of "The
Vagina Monologues," and censors deleted some sexually based scenes from the movie "Cold Mountain" for being too "spicy."
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China's much-discussed sexual revolution raised the national temperature, but it runs hot and cold. By contrast, Deng
Xiaoping's 1980s dictum that "getting rich is glorious" has taken solid root. One consequence of its short march toward
capitalism is that mainland directors now compete against foreign films, including those from Hollywood.
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The movie industry seems to be responding. Some previously banned directors, like Jia Zhang-ke ("The World"), are earning
support. And just a few weeks ago, the censors gave the thumbs up to "House of Flying Daggers," with its very mildly spiced
scenes.
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That's good news for Zhang and mainland moviegoers. Still, it is hard not to entertain qualms about officials' apparently new
relaxed attitude, if for no other reason that it may one day end Zhang's and Wong's cinemas of longing.
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Source http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/06/ ... /glam.html

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