They receive no pay for the first month of their employment. to 2 or 3 in the morning, sometimes all night (one shift lasts 27 hours). When orders are plentiful, girls like Jasmine and Orchid work in the blue-jeans jeans factory in Shaxi, in southern China, from 8 a.m. Textile workers in ShaxiĬhina Blue (directed by Micha Peled) documents the horrendous conditions of young, mostly female textile workers. Non-fiction film continues to contribute some of those elements. They miss the essentials, the simplest, most telling elements. At present most filmmakers are oriented differently, toward career and status, toward the tried and true. One has to have an interest in human realities and their infinite complications to make art out of life, one has to be in a state of anticipation, ‘available’ for the stimuli. I have seen insightful and thoughtful works, made with tremendous care and skill, but ‘great’ films, truly ‘immortal’ ones?. In any event, isn’t it possible that the superiority of Asian works lies in their carrying out the more or less ‘normal’ function of film, telling something honestly about the world and human relations, while Italian, Japanese, French, American and Russian cinema, for a variety of reasons, have for the moment largely abandoned their truth-telling responsibilities and sunk to unprecedented depths? In other words, might not the apparent brilliance of Asian films be largely a relative phenomenon. Let us contend that hardly anyone in contemporary cinema is entitled to pat him or herself on the back. It would be mistaken to idealize Asian cinema, as some have, or approach its temporary ‘advantage’ over European and North American filmmaking complacently. Everything depends on whether one has talent and something compelling to say. Nor is a non-commercial setting a guarantee of first-rate artistic work. “Likely to be,” not “guaranteed to be.” A giant, hostile corporate apparatus may engender the most trenchant oppositional sentiment within its own bowels, so to speak, particularly if such filmmakers have access to the most advanced technology and at least the possibility of addressing a mass audience. ’, and it’s on to the next.Ĭinema as a whole is likely to be in a healthier state wherever it does not form one portion of a vast entertainment-media industry. And this striking unevenness, or perhaps lack of commitment, fails to bother anyone terribly much, least of all the filmmakers themselves. With his or her next mediocre film, however, the relatively accidental character of the previous work becomes exposed. If the celestial bodies are properly aligned (i.e., a script of substance, top-notch actors, etc.), director X or Y may come up with something of note. These qualities have been in short supply in large studio filmmaking in recent years. It is difficult to accomplish anything important without painstaking effort, ruthless honesty and a critical attitude toward everything that oppresses human beings. A largely insulated and privileged social grouping makes cinema in North America, Europe and Japan, to whom discovering and revealing the truth about existence is a matter of no great consequence. In the final analysis, the overall superiority of these films lies in their closer correspondence to reality.
A specific contribution has been made in the field of lyrical social realism.
The best films possess an honesty, a directness, a type of brutal elegance unseen elsewhere at present. In the past decade films from East Asia (China, Taiwan, Hong Kong in particular), South Asia (India, Sri Lanka), Southeast Asia (Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam), the Middle East (Iran, Palestine) and even Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) have made their mark. And with a certain, if limited, legitimacy. When the undeniable crisis of cinema comes up in a discussion, one often hears “Asian films” advanced as an exception. In recent years Asian art films have accumulated a certain reputation in critical circles, if not within wide layers of the population (to whom, at least in the US, they are largely unknown), for their greater seriousness.
Waterworld movie anyone else feel no sympathy for the town series#
This is the third and final article in a series on the recent Vancouver International Film Festival