Tribeca Film Festival 2012 Review: Seung-Jun Yi's "Planet of Snail"

Planet of Snail (Dalpaengi-eui byeol). 2011. Directed by Seung-Jun Yi. Essays and poetry by Jo Young-chan. Produced by Min-Chul Kim and Gary Kam. Edited by Simon El Habre and Seung-Jun Yi. Music by Min Seonki. Sound design and sound editing by Sami Kiiski.

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on Twitch.)


My personal favorite of all the films I viewed at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Seung-Jun Yi’s mesmerizing and lovely documentary Planet of Snail slowly and patiently reveals to us the dimensions of the love story at its center.  The film explores the daily lives of Young-chan, a deaf and blind man, and his companion Soon-ho, a woman whose growth has been stunted by a spinal disability.  As much as we can celebrate Planet of Snail for its myriad exemplary qualities in terms of filmmaking and its sensitive and deeply respectful portrayal of its subjects, it can also be greatly appreciated for what it is not.  It most emphatically is not a maudlin, earnest social-problem documentary that dwells on the difficulties of their existence and holds them up as sentimental objects of pity.  Instead, with uncommon gifts of close observation and an unhurried, meditative pace, we are taken into their tactile way of perceiving the world, communicating with each other by the Braille they tap out on each other’s hands.  They have full and rich lives of both quotidian daily tasks and art creation and appreciation and, on the evidence of this film, are a good deal more in tune with and attentive to the world they live in than most of us so-called able-bodied folks.

“All deaf-blind people have the heart of an astronaut,” Young-chan at one point says in the voiceover that punctuates the film’s episodes, and reveals himself as a poetic observer of both his own condition and of the universe that surrounds him.  In addition to being a talented writer who regularly enters literary contests and reads stories with a Braille reader he carries around with him, he is also a sculptor, molding clay into animals and human figures.  This latter skill, especially, is indicative of his playful sense of humor; one of the figures he sculpts is a man pissing into a chamber pot.  Young-chan’s reference to himself as an “astronaut” ties into the film’s title; he perceives of himself as a visitor to this world who comes from another world of silence, isolation, and darkness, using his sense of touch to make sense of and revel in the natural world.  His love of nature manifests itself in such activities and putting his hand out to feel the drops of a spring shower, and literally hugging trees in a public park.

Of course, Young-chan is not alone in this quest to interact with the world.  Soon-ho is his nearly inseparable, loving companion each step of the way, assisting him with such daily needs as their meals (tapping out on Braille what and where the food is), as well as other activities as his essay writing and his playwriting (he composes a religious play for his church and is a consultant to another theatre production about deaf-blindness).  Their evident love for each other and mutual dependence on each other is such that it makes their friends envious.  The symbiotic nature of their relationship is revealed in a remarkable scene in which they work together to change a round fluorescent light bulb, an elaborate operation that they achieve with a satisfied sense of accomplishment. Even though Soon-ho at one point says that it would be ideal if they both died at the same time, she comes to recognize the importance of Young-chan’s developing his own self-sufficiency.  Late in the film, Soon-ho nervously watches from a distance as Young-chan attempts to navigate the streets by himself, and later sees him off on a shuttle bus to a facility where others can care for him as well.

Yi shot Planet of Snail over the course of two years, an extended period of time that deepens the intimate feel of the documentary, as well as enhancing the natural beauty of the visuals, which depict the passage of time and the changing of the seasons with a delicacy that is quite affecting.  This is an extraordinary work that is one of the most life-affirming viewing experiences I’ve ever had at the movies, and it’s hard to me to conceive of anyone else who’ll disagree with me after seeing it for themselves.

Planet of Snail opens later this summer at Film Forum, from July 25 through August 7.  Click here for more information at Film Forum’s website.

Tribeca Film Festival 2012 Review: Stephen Maing's "High Tech, Low Life"

High Tech, Low Life. 2012. Directed and photographed by Stephen Maing. Produced by Stephen Maing and Trina Rodriguez. Edited by Stephen Maing and Jonathan Oppenheim. Music by Brendon Anderegg, Brad Hyland, and Kevin Micka.

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on VCinema.)

Stephen Maing’s timely and fascinating documentary High Tech, Low Life, examines the subject of journalism and internet censorship in China through the eyes and experiences of two very different citizen journalists.  Both are people from humble backgrounds who found a new calling using the power of blogging and the internet to uncover stories hidden from the public by the government and to give other people like themselves (often in worse circumstances) a voice and an outlet for their grievances that they have been denied in official channels.  High Tech, Low Life has its world premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

27-year-old Zhou Shuguang, known by the blogger handle “Zola,” before embarking on his new internet life, was a vegetable seller from Fengmuqiao, Hunan Province.  “I used to be a nobody before I discovered the internet,” he says by way of introduction.  After deciding on impulse to investigate the forced eviction of citizens of a neighboring province by city developers, and posting what he found on his blog, the overwhelming response and the measure of fame he received encouraged him to pursue citizen journalism full time.  The next major case we see him reporting on is the rape and murder of a young girl by a high official’s relative, and the apparent subsequent cover-up of this crime.  This episode is illuminating not only for its demonstration of Zola’s tenacious efforts to expose the government’s complicity in protecting well-connected criminals, but also the potentially negative aspects of Zola’s attention-seeking personality.  Zola gets his information by disavowing any sort of journalistic identity, posing as simply a curious onlooker and blogger.  He attends the dead girl’s public wake, and rather ill-advisedly snaps a photo of himself smiling by the girl’s coffin, drawing an outraged comment on his blog condemning his lack of respect for the dead.  Certainly, there is an egocentric aspect to Zola’s activities: he often wears a T-shirt emblazoned with his own image, and at one point he takes a picture of himself that makes it look as if he is leaping over the Great Wall of China, which he makes into a large poster that he displays at a Chinese blogger conference.  However, he consciously sees himself as a representative of the youth of China, with their distracted, short attention spans, and his brash, outsized antics seem designed to appeal to them.  And of course, it’s not only about fame, since there are far safer and less controversial ways of achieving fame than flouting censorship; he is no activist, but he tirelessly strives to bring to light practices of corruption and exploitation in his society that are kept from the public.

57-year-old Zhang Shihe, known as “Tiger Temple,” lives in Beijing, and has a much more low-key personality than the younger Zola.  Similarly to Zola, he got into citizen journalism pretty much by accident: he witnessed a brutal murder being committed in public and posted stills on his blog.  It was eventually taken down, but not before being circulated widely by others on the internet.  Tiger Temple finds the outlet for literary expression and his wish to help others less fortunate that had heretofore eluded him, regularly traveling on his bike to the countryside and reporting on farmers who have been neglected and ill-treated by government authorities.  He interviews and reports on people who have had their land used as dumping grounds for toxic industrial and human wastes, and on those who have suffered the broken promises of government to assist them during changing agrarian policies.  Tiger Temple’s age and personal background provide a sense of history and cultural context that forms a counterpoint to Zola’s relative inexperience.  Tiger Temple’s family suffered from persecution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which his family lost everything and he became homeless; thereafter Tiger Temple embarked on the itinerant lifestyle that he practices today.  Tiger Temple, also in contrast to Zola, sees his brand of journalism as activism and advocacy for the people he reports on.  He arranges for legal representation for the farmers, and he also tries to help the homeless in Beijing around Tiananmen Square find housing after the city destroys their makeshift shelters. 

The film alternates between Zola and Tiger Temple’s separate trajectories, until the two finally meet at a Chinese blogger’s conference.  During their meeting, Tiger Temple sizes up Zola immediately: he calls him a “playful warrior,” a great phrase that perfectly describes Zola’s approach to his journalistic activities.  Zola is also quite self-aware of his own generation: “We’re selfish,” he says of himself and others of his age; he sees this attitude as the first step in “breaking out of the Communist mindset.”

Zola and Tiger Temple are far from fire-breathing radicals, but their activities in reporting uncensored news nevertheless puts them squarely on the government authorities’ radar.  Even though both are careful not to call themselves “journalists” to avoid government regulation and censorship, this doesn’t prevent them from regularly being followed during their travels and having their plans thwarted.  Zola is refused permission to leave the country to attend a blogger’s conference in Germany, and Tiger Temple is detained in the middle of the night and forced to leave Beijing during a national conference.  Their efforts to evade the “Great Firewall,” China’s massive internet censorship mechanism, by providing information unfiltered by the state, cause them to be regarded as threats to national security.  The heat on them only increases during such sensitive times as the Beijing Olympics and the state uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the so-called “Arab Spring.”

As indicated in title High Tech, Low Life, Stephen Maing gives us a thorough sense of how the latest technological tools can be used to illuminate the lives of those who live far from the places where such tools are commonly available.  In China’s case, many of these people are those who have been left behind, and often trampled under, in the wake of the country’s rapid economic progress.  High Tech, Low Life travels from Beijing to the remote countryside, binding the experiences of the two contrasting blogger personalities who are its subjects with evocative visuals that vividly illustrate the social context that surrounds these two men and their search for the truth.

Macrocosmos

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. 2009. Written and directed by Jessica Oreck. Produced by Jessica Oreck, Maiko Endo, and Akito Kawahara. Cinematography by Sean Price Williams. Edited by Jessica Oreck and Theo Angell. Music by JC Morrison and Nate Shaw. Additional music by Masami Tsuchiya, Haroumi Hosono, Mishio Ogawa, Logic System, and Paul Grimstad. Sound by Nate Shaw.

Jessica Oreck’s film Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, now at Film Forum through May 18, is not, as its title would seem to indicate, a cult science-fiction film. Instead, it is an impressionistic, non-linear, and often visually stunning documentary exploring Japan’s fascination (indeed, obsession) with insects. This is illustrated by the initial scenes of the film, where we follow a beetle hunter as he stalks new specimens through a forest, and observe a boy hounding his father to help him buy a $47 beetle at a pet store. Later on, we meet a man who keeps boxes of crickets inside his apartment because he so loves their sound, and cruise along with the beetle hunter, driving the bright-red Ferrari he bought with his earnings from selling beetles. It quickly becomes apparent that Oreck is not depicting some bizarre subculture; to the contrary, the Japanese love for insects is something that is deeply engrained in their culture and illustrative of their unique approach to nature and their sense of aesthetic beauty. Interspersed between these scenes of insect enthusiasts (never identified by name) are narrated sequences explaining how insects symbolize art, history, and literature stretching back to Japan’s origins.

Oreck connects the brief lives of insects with the Japanese concept of mono no aware, which relates to the transcendent beauty of all things in nature, and the idea of existence as fleeting and temporary, putting a primacy on appreciating each moment of time as fully as possible. Haiku poetry is the literary form that perfectly embodies this philosophy; many of these three-line poems are dedicated to insects. This belief in life as ephemeral is also connected to Japan’s volatile environment; its history is filled with many natural disasters caused by floods and typhoons. One commentator in the film remarks that ten percent of the world’s recorded earthquakes have occurred in Japan. The hypnotic, sonorous narration which fills in this cultural background match well with the mesmerizing visuals which come courtesy of cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who brilliantly captures microscopic scenes of bugs in grass or on pavement, as well as the neon panorama of Tokyo’s cityscape. Avant-garde cinema deeply informs this documentary; such scenes as fireflies buzzing in grainy low-light and insects flying in blinding floodlights would not be at all out of place in a film by Stan Brakhage or Nathaniel Dorsky.

Jessica Oreck, currently an animal handler at the American Museum of Natural History, reinvents nature documentary with Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, transforming what could have been an unbearably dry lecture with visual poetry that makes it a beautiful work of art. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is at Film Forum through May 18; Oreck will appear in person on May 14 at the 6:30 and 8:20 shows with live exotic insects. She will also be at the 4:40 show on Sunday, May 16 with Hugh Raffles, author of Insectopedia, available from Amazon. 

Click here to purchase tickets.

Update, May 17, 2011: Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is now available on DVD, with three deleted scenes of interviews with philosopher Dr. Takeshi Yoro, whose insights greatly inform Oreck's documentary. To purchase, visit Factory 25's website. The film also has its TV premiere on PBS's Independent Lens tonight at 10pm. For more information and TV listings, visit the Independent Lens website.

New Directors/New Films 2010 Review: Lixin Fan's "Last Train Home"

Last Train Home. 2009. Directed and photographed by Lixin Fan. Produced by Mila Aung-Thwin and Daniel Cross. Edited by Lixin Fan and Mary Stephens. Camera operated by Shaoguang Sun and Lixin Fan. Music by Olivier Alary.

The sharp contrast between the lives in cities and countryside always truck me. Submerged under the glamour of the modern metropolis, the poverty in the vast rural area is overwhelming. As I traveled, I started to focus on the migrant workers, whom I believe have contributed the most to China's prosperity but benefited the least... On a national level, China is dashing to become a richer country. Should tradition, morality and humanity be drowned in a world of tireless rumbling factories is the question we should ask.

-- Lixin Fan, from his director's statement.

Every winter, the world's largest human migration occurs in China, as many of its 130 million migrant workers in the cities make the arduous trek home to their families for the Chinese New Year. These scenes of the teeming masses of humanity clogging train stations, desperately trying to get their only chance all year to visit their loved ones, are some of the most startling images of Lixin Fan's superb, heartbreaking documentary Last Train Home. Fan, a Chinese-born, Montreal-based filmmaker, began his career as a journalist for the Chinese national TV broadcaster CCTV, and as the above epigraph indicates, it was there that he began to be interested in the ever widening gap between the rich in the cities and the poor in the countryside as China embarked on its dizzying rush toward world economic dominance. However, as China isn't exactly a bastion of journalistic freedom, it's not too far off base to speculate that Fan moved into independent filmmaking (as well as to Canada) in order to more freely explore the massive societal upheavals that have occurred in China as a result of its drive toward greater prosperity. What Fan illuminates with penetrating acuity and sometimes uncomfortable intimacy in Last Train Home is the fact that this prosperity is largely the result of the efforts of these many millions of migrant workers, who travel many miles from their rural homelands to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and other industrial hubs to toil for many hours in factories to make the products that those in more affluent parts of China and overseas enjoy. However, these workers have very little share in the massive riches that this activity brings to others. They are low-paid, have very little rights to workers' compensation and social services, and, most pertinently for this film, are prevented from bringing their families with them, due to China's very strict residency laws. This serves to break families apart, as parents are forced to be away from their children for months and sometimes years at a time, leaving children to be raised by their grandparents and other relatives. The absence of parental structure and authority causes a whole host of problems, not the least of which is delinquency and aimlessness among the younger generation.

These issues are given indelible life by the case of the Zhang family, the troubled unit Fan focuses on in the film. Zhang Changua and his wife Chen Suqin are factory workers in Guangzhou, who left their village home in Sichuan province and their newborn daughter 17 years earlier to seek work in the cities. They have since regularly sent money home, while their daughter Qin and younger son Yang were raised by their grandmother, so that their children will have enough money to attend school, and hopefully, escape the hard fate of their parents. Tragically, these hopes are dashed by Qin, who has grown up with seething resentment at what she sees as essentially abandonment by her parents, who are virtually strangers to her, since she has seen them so seldom over the years. She feels oppressed and smothered by their expectations of her, and sees their parental authority over her as illegitimate. "All they care about is money," Qin says at one point, her voice dripping with scorn. She also hates having to work on the family farm with her brother and grandmother, and describes her school as a "cage." Her restlessness and yearning to be rid of these strictures on her personal freedom eventually leads to Qin fulfilling her parents' worst nightmare: she drops out of school and becomes a factory worker in the city. Qin doesn't really enjoy this work either, but she takes solace in the fact that she at least earns her own money and can feel that she has greater freedom, however limited or illusory it may be. Qin's mortified mother and concerned father embark on a rescue operation to convince Qin to return to the village and finish her schooling; they also want to ensure that her brother doesn't follow her example. They all go back home for New Year's, Qin sullen and reluctant. Back home, this sets the stage for a dramatic confrontation, one that is predictable if we pay close attention to Qin's moods, but is no less shocking and tragic.

Last Train Home bears some stylistic resemblance to another recent Canadian documentary about China, Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze, which followed stories centering around the Three Gorges Dam project. Fan worked on that film as an associate producer and a sound man, and Chang was a consultant on Fan's film. Both directors share an emphasis on individual stories set against a larger societal backdrop, and making clear how the macro and micro aspects of their subjects' situations entwine. Fan eschews voiceover and uses music sparingly, constructing his documentary with a dramatic arc similar to fictional films. Fan prominently name-checks Jia Zhang-ke in interviews as a major influence; and indeed, Fan's concerns dovetail with Jia's ongoing project to record the effects of China's massive social changes on the daily lives of people. Fan, however, brings an intense intimacy to his material that is all his own. Fan's camera (he did his own cinematography) is an unseen character of this drama; it is not the Frederick Wiseman-like objective fly-on-the-wall, but rather a sympathetic confidante. Fan's prodigious gifts of observation (in abundant evidence in his depiction of the massive crush of travelers at the Guangzhou train station, just barely controllable by the police) honor all his subjects, whether they are the main characters like the Zhangs' or someone glimpsed for a few seconds, affording them the respect and dignity that they are too often denied. The overwheming impression that I took away from Last Train Home was not how unique the Zhangs were, but to the contrary, how typical they were. A film just as compelling could conceivably be made of the lives of any of the millions taking the trains every year, and I think this is Fan's main contention. A country that compels so many to tear apart their own families and toil away at numbing, repetitive labor with little to look forward to except a never-ending struggle, is a country that is deeply in trouble, despite the efforts of governments to whitewash this fact, or offer temporary distractions such as the Olympics. It is a situation that will eventually prove to be unsustainable. Last Train Home, beyond being a deeply moving work of art, is a passionate wake-up call, vividly illuminating issues that the powers that be will ignore to their peril.

Last Train Home screens tomorrow at 12pm at the Walter Reade Theater as part of New Directors/New Films 2010. It will be released later this summer by Zeitgeist Films. Click here to purchase tickets.

The Bourne Cinema Filmography: Frederick Wiseman, "La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet" (2009)

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet. 2009. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. Produced by Pierre-Oliver Bardet, Frederick Wiseman and Francoise Gazio. Cinematography by John Davey. Edited by Frederick Wiseman and Valerie Pico. Sound by Frederick Wiseman.

Documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s latest film, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, is a typically rigorous institutional examination, this time of the famed Paris Opera Ballet, getting up close and personal behind the scenes, observing rehearsals, administrative meetings, and many other minutiae of the day-to-day activities of this venerable institution. There is nothing especially earth-shattering or revealing that happens during the course of this film; the closest we get is a meeting with the dance troupe and the ballet’s artistic director about changes in retirement and pension policy that the French government is considering. Neither does this film break with Wiseman’s tried-and-true methods of filmmaking: fly-on-the-wall observation, eschewing interviews with subjects, soundtrack music, or onscreen identification of the subjects. Wiseman holds true with the cinema vérité techniques he has been practicing since Titicut Follies, his 1967 debut. He is less interested in personalities and drama than in process, procedure, and daily institutional life. This film focuses on lengthy, unhurried (La Danse clocks in at 158 minutes) and thorough observation of all the workers at the opera, from the dancers, choreographers, and administrative personnel, down to the cafeteria workers and janitors. Wiseman even gives us some shots of the basement and sewers underneath the opera house, as if to show us just how complete his document of this building is.

The heart of the film is the lengthy rehearsals of the opera repertory shows. These lithe, wiry dancers painstakingly perfect their movements, and under their trainers, refine everything down to the very smallest detail. And while the repetitive scenes of this process can at times be a bit wearying, it is still fascinating to watch, all of it happening at an intimate level that very few of us are privileged to witness in person. Behind the scenes, there are some telling moments that impress upon us the extreme physical demands ballet puts on a person’s body. One older dancer relates to the festival director her concerns that she is being scheduled for too many performances that will tax her physical abilities. “I’m not 25 anymore,” the dancer opines. This scene contrasts with another near the conclusion, in which a young, fresh-faced newcomer to the company gets advice from the festival director. “Don’t be afraid,” the director advises her.

All in all, La Dance: The Paris Opera Ballet is an interesting (if overlong) and worthy addition to Wiseman’s impressive body of work. It screens at Film Forum from November 4 through November 17; Wiseman will appear in person at the 8:30 screening on November 4. Click here to purchase tickets.

The Bourne Cinema Filmography: Peter Greenaway, "Rembrandt's J'Accuse" (2008)

Rembrandt's J'Accuse. 2008. Written and directed by Peter Greenaway. Produced by Femke Wolting, Bruno Felix, and Kees Kasander. Cinematography by Reinier van Brummelen. Edited by Elmer Leupen. Music by Giovanni Sollima and Marco Robino. Production designed by Maarten Piersma. Costume design by Marrit van der Burgt. Sound by Bram Boers.

Cast: Peter Greenaway (Himself), Martin Freeman (Rembrandt van Rijn), Eva Birthistle (Saskia Uylenburgh), Jodhi May (Geertje), Emily Holmes (Hendrickje Stoeffels), Jonathan Holmes (Ferdinand Bol), Michael Teigen (Carel Fabritius), Natalie Press (Marieke).

Peter Greenaway’s new film, Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, in which he subjects Rembrandt’s famous 1642 painting The Night Watch to intense forensic, visual, and historical analysis, is one of Greenaway’s very best films, and certainly his best in well over a decade. I have been greatly disappointed by most of Greenaway’s recent output, for example The Tulse Luper Suitcases, in which Greenaway puts into practice his long-standing theories about what he sees as cinema’s currently impoverished state, which he sees as essentially illustrated literature, and how Western culture is text-based instead of visually-based, leading to what he sees as a woeful lack of visual literacy in the public at large. (Early on in Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, Greenaway gives voice on screen to these opinions once more, in the scolding, schoolmarmish tone that is probably his most off-putting and least attractive quality.) Greenaway’s recent films have become increasingly impenetrable and hermetic, seemingly made only for an audience of one – Greenaway himself. The alternative he has come up with to conventional cinema, using text, calligraphy, and frames within frames within frames to form an ornate collage, however visually elegant it often is, turns out in practice to be not quite as compelling as he thinks.

So it is with genuine pleasure (and relief) that I say that with Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, Greenaway has finally come up with a film that puts his visual and intellectual arsenal to brilliant effect, turning Rembrandt’s The Night Watch into evidence of an elaborate murder conspiracy. (Call it CSI: Amsterdam.) Greenaway appears on screen throughout to state the case for the prosecution, namely that Rembrandt’s painting is his “J’accuse,” or accusation of guilt towards the perpetrators of a conspiracy on the part of a group of Dutch military officers to murder their captain to gain more power for themselves. The officers planned to disguise this murder as a military accident. Greenaway is our guide to the evidence for this conspiracy, all of which he believes can be found within the frame of Rembrandt’s painting. His running voiceover and visual presence (usually in a box in the bottom center of the screen) relates 31 clues to the murder conspiracy (Greenaway’s well-documented obsession with numbers and lists continues unabated in this film) that can be found in the painting. Fully-staged reenactments with actors are peppered throughout to illustrate Greenaway’s thesis.

Greenaway identifies The Night Watch as the beginning of Rembrandt’s popular and economic decline, which he sees as a result of the successful attempt by the powers that were to suppress and bury Rembrandt’s accusation and force him into a later life of poverty and obscurity. As Greenaway intones at the film’s conclusion, “It is imperative that we reopen the case.” Greenaway uses the canvas of Rembrandt’s masterpiece to create one of his own, a film that is simultaneously a documentary, a murder mystery, an art history lecture, a political history of Amsterdam, and a seminar on the arts of both painting and visual analysis, and is endlessly fascinating and compelling.

Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is at Film Forum now through November 3. Click here to purchase tickets.

Review: Leslie Cockburn's "American Casino"

American Casino. 2009. Directed by Leslie Cockburn. Written and produced by Leslie Cockburn and Andrew Cockburn. Cinematography by Phil Geyelin, Gregory Andracke, Bill Cassara, Bob Goldsborough, and Sam Painter. Edited by Peter Eliscu. Music supervised by Susan Jacobs. Sound by Daniel Brooks, Tom Craca, Michael Karas, Erik Knox, Charlie Macarone, Lupe Mejia, David Mitlyng, Mark Wilson, and Everett Wong.

Just in time for the one year anniversary of the global economic collapse comes Leslie Cockburn's powerful and timely documentary American Casino, which opens tomorrow at Film Forum for a two-week run. Below is what I wrote on this film when it screened at this year's Tribeca Film Festival.

The title of Leslie Cockburn’s nothing-if-not-timely documentary American Casino says it all, an apt description of the world created by the reckless Wall Street financiers who have brought the U.S. economy (as well as the rest of the world’s) to its present sorry state. Much like Charles Ferguson’s Iraq War documentary No End in Sight, Cockburn employs a straightforward, just-the-facts approach to her devastating play-by-play indictment of the barely legal shenanigans that led to our current mess. From the initial stock market free-fall and the attendant billions in government bailouts to Jon Stewart’s recent mano a mano with Jim Cramer, none of this is new information for anyone who has at least been semi-sentient for the past year or so. But what makes Cockburn’s film an especially valuable addition to the burgeoning collection of economic crisis postmortems is that she goes beyond the facts and figures to show us the human faces behind the numbers. Cockburn offers specific, poignant examples of people who existed as simply a line on a brokerage firm’s computer screen, reminding us that these were not simply irresponsible and naïve would-be homeowners, but people with lives of value that are real, and in some cases, tragic. Cockburn also details the aftereffects of the spreading cancer of mass foreclosures and how they led to depressed neighborhood property values, crime, and disease. Class and race were very much a part of the picture also, as Cockburn persuasively demonstrates: the deregulated toxic sub-prime loans that were, and remain, a major part of this crisis were deliberately targeted towards minorities and low-income homeowners, many of whom actually qualified for prime loans. These were the chips that were the currency of the “American Casino,” since through derivatives, credit-default swaps, and other such unregulated financial products, bets would essentially be made on which consumers would default on loans made to them, and billions were made on both sides of the equation. Cockburn’s briskly paced yet sobering documentary makes its case powerfully, and is a humanist work in the best sense, always keeping the individual victims of Wall Street’s games as its central focus.

American Casino is scheduled to run at Film Forum from Sept. 2 through Sept. 15. Click here to purchase tickets.

The Bourne Cinema Filmography: Byun Young-joo, "The Murmuring" (1995)

The Murmuring (Najeun moksori). 1995. Directed by Byun Young-joo. Produced by Shin Soo-yeon. Cinematography by Kim Yong-taek. Edited by Park Gok-ji. Music by Oh Yoon-seok and Cho Byung-hee. Sound by Jang Ho-jun and Lee Young-kil.

This August 15 marks the 64th anniversary of the end of World War II, which is given different names in the countries involved. In the U.S., it known as Victory over Japan Day; in Korea, it is called Liberation Day, since Japan’s surrender meant the end of colonial rule. Among the many continuing legacies of the war is the plight of the “comfort women,” an estimated 200,000 women (some as young as twelve) from Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, and other countries who were kidnapped or otherwise tricked into sexual slavery, forced to service Japanese soldiers. The misery for these women did not end with the war; they continued to be victimized by both sides of the conflict – by Japan’s continued refusal to this day to give an official apology or offer adequate compensation to survivors, and by the shame placed upon them by their home societies, forcing them to spend decades living in isolation and shamed silence. It wasn’t until the early 1990’s that former comfort women began to come forward and tell their stories, and more importantly, to petition the Japanese government for reparations. The vast majority of comfort women (80-90 percent) were taken from Korea, a colony of Japan during the war, and their stories form the basis of Byun Young-joo’s extraordinary documentary trilogy on the comfort women of Korea: The Murmuring (1995), Habitual Sadness (1997), and My Own Breathing (1999). Taken together, this trilogy (called the “Low Voice” trilogy, after the Korean titles of the first two installments) is one of the monumental works of world documentary, entirely the equal of such films as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity. Much like Shoah, Byun eschews the normal clichéd methods of documentary filmmaking, such as archival footage, dramatizations, and expert talking heads, concentrating on contemporary footage of her subjects bearing witness to a horrific period of their own lives and their country’s history. The one time Byun breaks with this is in a brief pictorial montage showing Japanese atrocities in China, which serves to remind us that the comfort women’s experiences existed in a larger context of Japanese war crimes, and was equally as brutal and deserving of close examination.

Byun’s first documentary, A Woman-Being in Asia (1993), dealt with the sex tourism industry in Asia, focusing on prostitution on Jeju Island. Byun and her crew were mostly dissatisfied with the results, feeling they had come into it with too much an imposed point a view, and a subsequent ambivalence toward the subject matter that filtered down to how they dealt with their interviewees. However, Byun serendipitously stumbled upon the subject of her next film when one of the prostitutes she interviewed revealed that her deceased mother was a comfort woman who became a prostitute after the war to pay for her own mother’s operation. Her decision to pursue this subject resulted in this trilogy.

The subtitle of The Murmuring, released in the 50th anniversary year of the end of World War II, is “A Woman-Being in Asia: The Second Report,” signaling that this new film was both a follow-up to and an improvement on her first film. Largely influenced by Japanese documentary pioneer Shinsuke Ogawa, Byun radically changed her methods of relating to her subjects in this film. Much of the film takes place in a house known as “Nanum,” or “House of Sharing,” a group home in Haehwa-dong, Seoul supported by Buddhist groups, where a number of former comfort women reside. Byun spent a few months before filming simply living with the women, until she gained their trust and they felt ready to tell their stories on camera. The stories they tell are truly heartbreaking; the women were taken at a very young age, and were commonly tricked with the promise of employment. One woman speaks of trying to kill herself on the way back home from Japan, because of her shame and knowing that she was effectively ruined for marriage; in terms of the rigid Confucian patriarchy that prevailed then, the fact that she served Japanese soldiers against her will mattered little. Most of the women living in the house suffer from numerous physical ailments, much of it resulting from their sexual enslavement; many returned with venereal disease and have scars on their stomachs from surgery. One woman talks about her wish to die, to end her continued suffering. Byun films these women in simple, functional camera setups, allowing them the visual and temporal space to tell their stories. Some confess their shame about telling these stories, which is quite understandable considering that it was only a few years before, in 1991, that Kim Hak-soon was the first comfort woman to publicly tell her story on television, making it possible for others to come forward.

Byun also documents the weekly protests organized by The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, which still continue today. Since January 2002, they have stood outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul every Wednesday at noon, year in and year out, regardless of the weather, to make several demands of the Japanese government. They insist that Japan make an official apology and acknowledge their responsibility for the plight of comfort women; give whole-hearted compensation to the women and their relatives; erect a monument to the women who died (about 70 percent died before the end of the war); and include this history in Japanese textbooks. To this day, none of these demands have been met, and therefore the protests continue. Byun shows in the film that Korean governments are also partly responsible for this state of affairs, since for many years they were very reluctant to press the issue, loath to jeopardize trade agreements and other compacts with Japan.

Byun also traveled to China to interview Ha Koon-ja and Hong Gang Lim, two comfort women who were never repatriated to Korea, effectively exiled because of their shame. These interviews provide some of the most powerful moments of the film: Ha tearfully recounts being forced to serve as many as twenty soldiers per day, and Hong, starkly framed so that her face floats in the darkness, relates the brutal story of having her vagina mutilated because of soldiers' complaints that, because she was taken so young, that she was “too small.” This section of the film also contains the footage of other Japanese war atrocities.

However, as sad and horrific as the stories these women tell are, this is only one part of Byun’s film. The Murmuring is also a very inspiring portrait of the women’s resiliency in the face of their hardship. They are still able to laugh and enjoy other people’s company, and most importantly, to sing. There are many scenes in the film of the women singing the liberation and love songs of their youth, both in the house and at the weekly protests. This speaks to an inner spirit that the horrors of war cannot extinguish. The women also express themselves through painting, which also gives them an outlet to cope with their memories and to heal their damaged psyches. The Murmuring is a rich and revealing film, quite literally so in the film’s last shot, as the camera pans across the naked torso of one of the women. Byun’s film is a beautifully constructed vessel allowing the “low voices” of these women to speak out fully and tell the collective story of this tragic period of history, a story that has yet to reach a fully satisfying conclusion.

Links for resources and more information:

Nanum (House of Sharing)

The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan

Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues

Review: Li Ying's "Yasukuni"

Yasukuni. 2007. Written and directed by Li Ying. Produced by Zhang Yuhui, Zhang Huijun, and Hu Yun. Cinematography by Yasuhiro Hotta and Li Ying. Edited by Yuji Oshige and Li Ying. Sound by Takayuki Nakamura.

Li Ying's eye-opening and intensely visceral documentary Yasukuni, a controversial film about the equally controversial shrine commemorating fallen WWII soldiers in the heart of Tokyo, opens today for a one-week run at Film Forum, timed to the August 15th anniversary of Japan's surrender. Below is what I wrote on this film when it screened at last year's New York Asian and Japan Cuts film festivals.

Li Ying’s extraordinary documentary Yasukuni examines one of the most politically contentious spots of land in Japan: the Yasukuni Shinto shrine in central Tokyo, a memorial to Japan’s fallen soldiers during World War II. Or, to be more accurate, it is the final spiritual resting place of some of the most notorious war criminals of the Pacific War. In August 15, 2005, on the 60th anniversary of Japan’s surrender, Japan’s then prime minister Junichiro Koizumi caused a major international scandal by going to pay his respects at the shrine. This act, in effect, gave official imprimatur to a site that, while celebrated and venerated by many, for many others – Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Okinawan – is a symbol of Japan’s war of oppression and subjugation of the Asian continent. To those and others who oppose the shrine, this would be akin to placing a Nazi memorial in the middle of Israel. Koizumi justified his actions, as we see in the film, by claiming that it was “a matter of freedom of belief.” The speech he gives to the crowd at Yasukuni elaborates on this. He claims that his prayers represent a wish for all wars to end, and a gesture of respect to those who fought bravely and died for their country. However, the glorification of the military on display in the exercises of the shrine worshipers who prance around wearing WWII-era gear, and exhort with megaphones the glory of those soldiers, gives the lie to Kozumi’s claims of pacifist motives.

What is most remarkable about Li’s film is his approach to this material. As a Chinese, he clearly has strong feelings about the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers during the war. However, he eschews a Michael Moore-type in-your-face confrontational approach, which proves to be a wise strategy. There is no narration; he structures the film as a series of mini-plays, all of which illustrate what this shrine means to people at all points of the political spectrum. There are those who support Koizumi’s praying at the shrine, and see it as simply a benign war memorial. There is also Chiwas Ari, the Taiwanese woman who gives us a very different perspective, speaking powerfully to the role that those countries colonized by Japan played in the war. Colonial subjects were forced to fight on the side of Japan, and some of them are enshrined in Yasukuni along with native Japanese. Chiwas Ari’s impassioned plea for the return of her father’s remains is a virtual aria that is incredibly moving. For comic relief, we have the clueless American whose ham-fisted attempt to support Koizumi, combined with the stunningly boneheaded idea to wave a big American flag in the middle of the shrine, sends this quixotic figure packing by an angry crowd. The protestors who interrupt the speeches at the anniversary event are set upon by some of the crowd in a disturbingly violent confrontation, as they are chased away and beaten by members of the angry mob. Li’s chaotic camera framing, as it does in much of the film, puts the viewer in the center of the action, giving us a visceral sense of the physical dangers of dissent in this space. This is history as blood sport.

Far from the action, tucked away from all the fighting, is Naoji Kariya, the last living Yasukuni sword-maker, still continuing to practice his craft in isolation. The mythology of Yasukuni is bound up in the sword, which is the spiritual symbol of the shrine. Li constantly prods him for memories of the war, and the long, painful silences that follow Li’s questions tell their own story. Whatever memories he has remain hidden away inside him, and hidden from us. He is a curious figure; a metaphor, perhaps, for the historical memory of Japan. He seems unwilling to confront the past, yet is unable to move forward, stuck in a limbo where everything is reduced to rote, refined physical movement, craft divorced from meaning. The swords he has crafted over the years likely were used to commit some of the worst atrocities visited by Japanese soldiers upon their victims, one example of which is the chilling account of a 100-man beheading competition engaged in by two soldiers who were executed and later enshrined at Yasukuni. But Kariya willfully separates himself from this reality, and his stoic silence in response to Li’s queries about the war represents an unsettling side to vaunted notions of Japanese propriety.

The film’s concluding montage steps away from the warring factions and provides evidence from the historical record that demonstrates the truth behind the propaganda peddled by the shrine’s war museum, and the attempts to whitewash history by the petitioners who wish to “refute” the 1937 Nanking massacre, which they claim is a fiction created by aggrieved Chinese. The response to this film by Japan’s ultra right-wing factions all but demands its own follow-up feature. Harassment and death threats directed toward Li and his producers, along with relentless pressure from conservatives, caused the film’s initial Tokyo release to be cancelled in early 2008. (It finally premiered in Tokyo in May 2008, with heavy police security at screenings.)

Ten years in the making, Yasukuni is more than simply a film. Li puts his considerable journalistic and artistic skills in the service of the best use of the power of images: to illuminate, to enlighten, to cut through self-serving rhetoric and propaganda, and reveal unadorned truth.

Click here for more info on Yasukuni and to purchase tickets.

Yasukuni trailer:

Li Ying's press conference following the cancellation of his film's initial Tokyo release:

A report from Al Jazeera English on Yasukuni:

The Old Man and the Ox

Old Partner (Wonang sori). 2008. Written, directed and edited by Lee Chung-ryoul. Produced by Goh Young-jae. Cinematography by Ji Jae-woo. Music by Heo Hoon and Min So-yun. Lighting by Yang Jin-young.

Lee Chung-ryoul’s documentary Old Partner was a surprise hit in Korea this year, expanding through word of mouth from an initial release on seven screens to becoming number one at the box office, beating out both Hollywood blockbusters and high-profile local releases. The popularity of the film grew to such an extent that the director made appeals to the public to prevent them from overrunning Choi Won-gyoon and Lee Sam-soon, the bickering, cantankerous husband and wife farmers who are the film’s subjects. The producers of the film worked with police to launch a special campaign to prevent illegal downloading of the film. All of this seems a rather counterintuitive fate for such a quiet, observational film concerning an old couple and their work ox, all three of whom are in the very late stages of their lives. But when one actually sees the film, which recently had an extremely brief, almost completely unadvertised run in New York at the Imaginasian Theater (me, myself, and I was the entire audience at the screening I attended), it is easy to see why the film struck such a deep chord when it was released in Korea. Many people who saw this film almost certainly saw their own parents or grandparents in this couple, whether they were farmers or not.

The dying ox in Old Partner is a huge bone of contention between the couple. Choi dotes lovingly on the ox, and talks about how important this animal is, how it helped to feed his nine children and send them to college. The couple’s way of life seems virtually unchanged from that of similar people centuries ago. There is no internet, cell phones, or television; their only connection to the rest of the world is a beat-up old radio. Lee resents her husband for taking better care of the ox than his own wife; she constantly laments her rotten luck in life, saying over and over that she “picked the wrong man,” and complains that she has been worked so hard over the years that she now cannot stand upright. The couple suffers from as many ailments as their ox: Choi’s leg was ruined by a bad acupuncture job when he was a young boy, and now awkwardly gets around on a cane. The couple has many grown children, but Lee doesn’t want to live with them, even though presumably her life with them would be infinitely more comfortable than what we see on screen. “Better to die than to have to walk on eggshells all the time,” she says. This is a hard life, but obviously one lived by choice, by a couple who puts a premium on proud self-sufficiency.

Even though the couple seems to exist in complete isolation from the outside world, the film astutely shows us that their lives are very much affected by events in the larger society. In one scene, as Choi drives his ox on the street, he passes a demonstration against the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement, which among other things is helping to drive down cattle prices. This fact becomes pertinent to a later scene in which the man attempts to sell an unruly calf and is told that it is too small, and that prices are going down because the Korean markets are now being opened to American beef. When Choi passes the street protestors, a man on a megaphone yells, “Here come one of the mad cows now!” This is a reference to the massive protests that occurred last year when President Lee Myung-bak announced he would relax the ban on American beef (a key component of the Korea-US FTA), raising concerns among many that tainted American beef would enter the Korean market.

The film ends with a dedication to the farmers who fed their children and sent them to school with the fruits of their hard labor, and who have now been nearly forgotten in the modern technological world. Old Partner beautifully and movingly honors a way of life that is rapidly disappearing, and although to all appearances this is a harsh and unforgiving existence, it is unfailingly respectful and sympathetic toward the old man at its center, while not shying away from the less appealing aspects of his personality, such as his neglect of his wife and his ornery stubbornness. However, one cannot help but have admiration for Choi’s reluctance to give up on his trusted animal companion, and his refusal to use machines or pesticides on his land, even though this would make his work much easier. He lives, and will die, by his unyielding insistence on doing everything by hand, and remaining connected body and soul to the soil that literally gave him life.

Old Partner won the Mecenat award for best documentary at last year’s Pusan International Film Festival and had its US premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Review: Risa Morimoto's "Wings of Defeat"

Wings of Defeat (Tokko). 2007. Directed by Risa Morimoto. Written by Linda Hoaglund. Produced by Risa Morimoto and Linda Hoaglund. Cinematography by Francisco Aliwalas. Edited by Maya Stark. Art direction by Joe Wu. Animation by Jef Castro. Sound design by Tom Lino. Music by Extreme Music.

Risa Morimoto’s documentary Wings of Defeat sheds valuable light on one of the most notorious yet least understood aspects of World War II, the Japanese pilots known as kamikaze (or in Japanese parlance, tokkotai), considered in the popular imagination to be fanatics who eagerly sacrificed themselves to inflict damage on US personnel, the equivalent of present-day suicide bombers. This film, with a thorough focus, counters these popular notions. While not excusing or making apologies for these soldiers’ actions, the film puts these pilots’ actions into illuminating context. Through interviews with those who survived or abandoned their missions, and by examining the way the kamikazes functioned within the propaganda prevalent in Japanese society at the time, it becomes clear that the strategy of using kamikaze pilots was in large part an act of desperation by Japan’s leadership, faced with an outmanned, losing army lacking in basic resources.

Morimoto adds a personal dimension to this story, relating her discovery that her own uncle had trained as a kamikaze pilot in his youth. Her process of uncovering her family history intersects with her exploration of Japanese wartime history, in both cases revealing stories shrouded in silence, obfuscation, and mythology. Wings of Defeat unfolds in a straightforward, linear manner, which works to its advantage as a fascinating work of journalism that is remarkably nuanced in its approach to this still-sensitive subject. Through interviews with kamikaze pilots who survived their missions (there were in fact hundreds who did so) either through failure or outright desertion, and with U.S. veterans who survived a kamikaze attack on the USS Drexler, a Navy destroyer ship, we learn that the divisions between the two sides are not as pronounced as we would believe. The U.S. veterans reveal a surprising level of understanding towards the kamikazes who attacked them. “We would have done the same thing,” one says, expressing their willingness to sacrifice their own lives if they had been told that would be necessary. The recollections of the former kamikaze are also quite revealing, and a sharp contrast to the popular notions of them as faceless, fanatical automatons. Many of these pilots were drafted unwillingly into this service, often at the last minute and with inadequate training. The kamikazes were glorified in the Japanese popular media, portrayed as noble warriors and saviors of their country, rather than what they truly were, which were unwilling pawns of a last-ditch strategy by a leadership unwilling to admit defeat. Distortions in both Japanese and western notions of these soldiers, on the one hand as self-sacrificing warriors, and on the other hand as mindless fanatics, are given a valuable corrective in this film. Archival footage and original animation also effectively evoke the frenzied propaganda campaign waged by the Japanese government, especially at the late stages of the war, when all Japanese citizens were essentially considered potential kamikaze recruits.

Wings of Defeat screens at Japan Society on March 18, and will be introduced by Morimoto and her co-producer and writer Linda Hoaglund, and a Q&A will follow the screening with the filmmakers and former kamikaze pilots Takahiko Ena and Takeo Ueshima, along with U.S. Navy veteran Fred Mitchell, one of the survivors of the attack on the USS Drexler.