Long Pauses

Tag: Director: Wang

  • Three Sisters (2012)

    Three Sisters (2012)

    Dir. by Wang Bing

    There’s a shot about two hours into Three Sisters that recalls Wang’s previous film, The Ditch (2010). Yingying, who at 10 is the oldest of the three subjects of the documentary, has been left behind to live with her grandfather in their small village after her father returns to the city in search of work, this time taking Zhenzhen (6) and Fenfen (4) with him. Their mother is gone for good, having left for another man and other opportunities. Yingying sits alone in her windowless, one-room house, lit only by the faint grey sunlight from an open doorway. She’s curled up at the small table where she eats her meals and occasionally attempts to complete her homework. (In another scene we see her pretend-mouthing the words of her lessons while her classmates recite in unison.) She stares straight ahead and, as she does throughout the three-hour film, sniffs and coughs like clockwork. This is Yingying’s home but it could just as well be the underground dugout where the prisoners sleep in The Ditch, Wang’s fictional recreation of China’s labor camps of the 1950s. There’s the same loneliness and hunger, the same daily struggle to fend off decay and despair.

    Wang introduced Three Sisters as “a simple film” that “might be too long.” I appreciate his humility (a hallmark of his filmmaking, too), but I think he’s wrong on both counts. There’s nothing simple about this precise assemblage of footage collected during several visits to the girls’ remote farming village, and the length of the film is, in fact, essential to its success. The sisters live a life of miserable poverty, but Wang rescues their story from the now-standard tropes of miserablist cinema and poverty tourism by respecting the temporal rhythms of that life and by acknowledging his own problematic role as a visiting observer. Yingying is never pitied by the camera (although her situation is nearly always pitiable); instead, she’s made dignified by it. We watch from a distance in long, unbroken shots as she struggles to carry a basket, throws a load of pinecones on her back, and slowly, patiently chops firewood. There’s a lived-in-ness to her movements that can only be represented on screen because Wang understands that cutting any of those behaviors into a sequence of shots would rob her work of its honor. The difference between a 3-minute, unbroken shot of a feather-light girl hacking at a tree branch and a 20-second shot of the same followed by an elliptical cut to a woodpile is the difference between documentary and fiction.

    As a work of drama, Three Sisters rises and falls with the returns and departures of the girls’ father, a world-weary young man with a kind smile and a deep affection for his daughters. It’s a bit of a shock when he first appears, one hour into the film, because Wang withholds explanation of his absence until a later conversation. When, in an early scene, one of the younger girls threatens her sister with, “I’m gonna tell daddy,” it’s unclear whether her threat is valid or if she doesn’t yet understand the permanence of death. Soon after he arrives, though, we see him sitting at that same small table with one of the girls on his lap and the others seated close beside him, each smiling and grateful, and that one moment of tenderness puts the entire first act of the film in relief and makes his inevitable departure all the more cruel. He buys new coats and shoes for Zhenzhen and Fenfen and washes their legs and feet in hopes that they can remain clean just long enough to make the long walk to the bus stop. Wang follows them onto the bus, rides along for a few miles, and then leaves them to their journey.

    The bus scene is worth noting because it’s the one moment in Three Sisters when Wang’s presence is commented on by another person in the film. The father, visibly nervous for the trip and for the commotion he is causing, explains that he already bought tickets for himself and his two daughters, but the bus driver is more concerned about “the guy with the camera.” It’s an important moment because it acknowledges explicitly what is obvious throughout Three Sisters – that there’s no such thing as “fly on the wall” observational cinema, that Wang and his occasional crew are affecting the conditions of their little social experiment simply by being there and looking. A few minutes after the shot of Yingying alone at the table, we see her again outside, high on a hillside, walking a few yards in front of the camera. Eventually she stops, sits, and looks out across the valley. The camera also pans to take in the view. It’s a remarkable scene because without being sentimental or naïve, it manages to share her experience of something beautiful as she shares it with Wang. It’s a generous act on both of their parts.

  • 2007 TIFF Days 1 and 2

    2007 TIFF Days 1 and 2

    My favorite scene in Persepolis takes place at a small kitchen table in the childhood home of writer/illustrator/co-director Marjane Satrapi. An anxious neighbor has dropped in to tell them that her 14-year-old son has been recruited to join the fight against Iraq. Satrapi’s mother — fearless, kind, intractable — comforts her friend, promising, “We’ll talk to him.” The scene ends with a simple voice-over: “Because of my parents, the boy did not go to war.” It’s the kind of moment that could very easily have been cut from the film for the sake of pacing. (And Persepolis does, I think, have some minor pacing problems.) But it’s the level of specificity in the scene, and in the film at large, that makes it so compelling. That moment at the kitchen table so radically transformed Satrapi’s understanding of her parents that now, more than two decades later, she’s still meditating on its significance from the vantage of adulthood. I should also add that the film’s animation is a real pleasure to watch — witty, surprising, and beautiful.

    All of Fengming, A Chinese Memoir is summed up in the opening minutes of the first interview. He Fengming takes her seat in front of the camera, where she will remain for nearly all of the next 180 minutes, and begins to tell the story of how her life was forever changed in 1949, when at the age of 17 she left the university to join the staff of a newspaper. “And that,” she laughs, “was the start of my revolutionary career.” Her laugh is sarcastic and a little bitter. “We were so naive back then,” she later tells director Wang Bing. “Back then,” she and her husband were branded as “Rightists” by the Party and were separated from each other and from their two young sons in order to undergo rehabilitation at labor camps. Her husband died in his; she returned briefly to her family before being detained again during the Cultural Revolution. We learn relatively late in the film that Fengming wrote a book-length account of her life in the late-1980s, which proves to be an important detail in understanding the form of Wang’s remarkable film. Shot entirely in long static takes, with only a handful of cuts and quick dissolves, it seems to present an unedited account of Fengming’s story. But her story has been edited — over the course of nearly sixty years, changing slightly with each of the tellings and each of the hours spent hunched over a typewriter and notepad. So, for example, when she describes the night when she discovered her husband had died, her language takes on an uncharacteristic literariness, with extended metaphors and hand-picked symbols. Recounting this most “rehearsed” of her memories, she remains composed and calm, despite the horror and sorrow. When she describes a more recent event, however — one that occurred after she’d written her book and that she’s yet to fully integrate into her life’s narrative — she chokes and sobs. I have two pages of hand-written notes on Fengming, one of my favorite films of the fest, and hope to return to it later.

    Hou Hsiao-hsien might be my favorite living director, so I had assumed that the lukewarm reviews of Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge coming out of Cannes weren’t to be trusted. I was right. At this point, midway through the festival, Voyage is among my two or three favorites. I’m hopeless when it comes to writing about Hou, whose films are visceral and emotional experiences for me. A friend asked after the screening if I thought the red balloon was integral to the film — if it was necessary at all — and I realized in answering that, for me, the balloon had acted as a kind of emotional locus: a splash of color and beauty, less symbol than catalyst or accelerant.

    Last year at the festival, I assumed I had missed something when I came away ambivalent from Manufactured Landscapes. I discovered Friday night that what I had wanted from Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary was, in fact, something closer in spirit to Peter Hutton’s At Sea, a 60-minute, silent triptych about the birth, life, and death of a modern ship. Hutton’s film begins at a massive boatyard in Korea — one of several aspects of At Sea that reminded me of Claire Denis’s L’Intrus — where we watch, in a series of strange and awesome compositions, the workings of modern technology at its most forceful and elegant. In the middle act, Hutton turns his camera to the sea itself. He booked passage on a trans-Atlantic freighter and filmed the water as it churned beneath him and as it turned the moon’s reflection into abstraction. And the final twenty minutes take place on the shores of Bangladesh, where poor men and boys participate in a growing and dangerous trade: breaking ships with their bare hands and the simplest of tools. The structure of the film makes a compelling (if obvious) argument: “The developing world is our dumping ground,” as Hutton said during the Q&A. But that was less interesting to me than the form of his shot selection and cutting. When a member of the audience challenged Hutton, suggesting that his film would be as effective as a series of still photos, Hutton, non-plussed, responded with a phrase I’ll be regurgitating for years. (I’m paraphrasing.) “It’s very difficult for us to watch a silent film today. Cell phones ring. We’re easily distracted. I’m interested in countering the emotional velocity and the visual velocity of contemporary films.” The film’s form, then, which deliberately challenges our “emotional velocity,” offers a more radical political position than its content, I think.

    At the very end of Mutum, a middle-class, urban doctor rides into the isolated Brazilian village where the film takes place and offers a young boy a pair of glasses, opening his eyes to the world around him. I was relieved during the post-screening Q&A to hear director Sandra Kogut acknowledge the similarities between herself and that doctor. I’m deeply ambivalent about films like Mutum. They’re a kind of genre, really — stories of the poor in the developing world, shot by well-educated, middle- to upper-class filmmakers, that are then taken to film festivals, where they’re easily digested by well-educated, middle- to upper-class audiences. A surefire cure for those annoying bouts of liberal guilt that plague folks like me. When children are the focus of the story, it’s even easier. Kogut seems to be aware of all of this and has crafted a solid film from the source material, a classic Brazilian novel by Joao Guimaraes Rosa. The key to the film’s success, I think, is Kogut’s camera, which never escapes the subjective perspective of her protagonist, a ten-year-old boy who struggles to make sense of the adult world around him. Because of that p.o.v., the film is full of ambiguities and, occasionally, oversized emotion. This is Kogut’s first feature, and I look forward to seeing whatever comes next from her.