Tag Archives: acting

Hou Hsiao Hsien 13: Contexts 4 – May 13, Day of Sorrows, Lin-Tuan Chiu (1965)

We once more thank the Taiwan Film and Audio-Visual Institute for the opportunity to see these marvellous copies of Lin Tuan-Chiu films. In the podcast we discuss the combination of genres in the film — melodrama, court-room drama, documentary, murder-mystery, musical. We discuss the acting in relation to revue theatre. We wonder if a scene from Hou’s Cute Girl finds its inspiration here….and much more.

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

We refer to some images concretely: The Newspaper Headlines

The allusion to politics:

The possible inspiration for a similar moment in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Cute Girl

The framings and compositions:

The countryside:

Listeners might also be interested in the following illustrative clips:

The melodramatic framings of the opening scene

revue acting:

Musical number – Love and threat:

Documentary Sequence:

The reveal:

Court-room flash-back:

Taiwanese Widescreen Process:

Other telling images (or sub-titles) from the film:

The Taiwan Film & Audio-visual Institute’s You Tube page may be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv9cNssVud_2AtBVzykUieg

and the next films its made available for the next few days are:

The Bride Who Has Returned From Hell, 1965

Foolish Bride, Naive Bridegroom (1967)

and

Dangerous Youth (1969)

all by Hsin Chi, so that’s what we will be exploring in the next few podcasts.

Richard has also provided the following links, adding, ‘

nothing particular to add to these but interesting reviews’: https://www.easternkicks.com/reviews/may-13th-night-of-sorrow

 

There’s a wonderful introduction to Taiyupian Cinema: an introduction to Taiwan-language cinema on youtube here:

 

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies 56 – A Quiet Place

 

a quiet place.jpg

Thrilling to be in a cinema where you can hear a pin drop. The film sets up a brilliant premise. The world has been invaded by aliens who respond to sound. Once the aliens hear the sound, the living being who originated it will be killed in a manner of minutes. Thus, endless possibilities for generating suspense; and a platform for many experimentations with style and form, including giving actors the opportunity to convey emotion with their faces, gestures, postures; without dialogue.

We talk over its performances, its ending, the way it manipulates and moves characters to generate threatening situations, the intelligence of its editing in moving between storylines, the shortcuts it takes with its internal logic in order to keep the story moving, the theme of family and whether the film can be read as a metaphor for Trumps America. We also mull over a potential for a sequel and decry one plot decision in particular.

But fundamentally, we urge everyone to see it.

 

The podcast can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes.

We appreciate your feedback so do keep on sending it.

José Arroyo and Michael Glass of Writing About Film

 

The Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, French/Switz/ Germany/USA/Belgium, 2014)

Clouds-Of-Sils-Maria-2014-720p-BluRay

Can a film be both fascinating AND dull? In The Clouds of Sils Maria Juliette Binoche is Maria Enders, a celebrated actress and star, who first became famous in Maloja Snake a work about an older woman, Helena, who falls in love with a much younger girl, Sigrid, and is driven to suicide. Then, she played Sigrid; now she is asked to play Helena. Kristen Stewart is Valentine, Maria’s super-efficient, smart and cool assistant. The relationship between Maria and Valentine is the opposite side of the coin of that of Helena and Sigrid but as Valentine is helping Maria with her lines, one often can’t tell where the boundary lies between the real and fictional relationship between them; and the film creates an interesting tension between the layers of fictional worlds in which this tension gets played out and in doing so complexly dramatizes questions on the nature of acting and being.

The interplay between Stewart and Binoche, and the differing styles in which the act it out, also adds an interesting twist on this. Everything people claim for Streep, I feel for Binoche. I simply think there’s no one of her generation better, and layers of conflicting emotion are conveyed absolutely transparently. In this film she’s beautiful and plain, feminine and masculine, flirtatious and castrating; she runs through the gamut and it’s all clearly understandable as coming from one character. Plus, she is also a star and one can’t take one’s eyes of her, at least until Kristen Stewart comes in to split our gaze. She’s not transparent at all but she is mesmeric. You don’t know what she’s thinking really but one keeps on looking intently in the hope of finding out. They’re great together. From their interplay, interesting ideas about the connection between age, desire, and vulnerability are played out, with Stewart forcefully making a claim for the desirability of Maria/Helena and the desire and vulnerability of the much younger Sigrid.

The film is fascinating on acting, performance, performing, stardom, aging, celebrity culture and on debates on the nature of cinema and cinematic art in our time. It gets even livelier when Chloë Grace Moretz, playing Jo-Anne Ellis, a star of X-Men type sci-fi action films and active participant in paparazzi-infused internet celebrity culture, gets cast opposite Maria in the role of Sigrid. Jo-Anne will contradict all of Valentine’s interpretations, whilst Maria, who has learned form Valentine in the process, will start to think about ways of asserting them. This is a fascinating film on the nature of acting, its relation to being, the thin line between them, and how that thin line is made even thinner when the unreality of celebrity culture is thrown in the mix.

The Maloja Snake, a cloud bank that winds its way through the alpine pass like a river or a snake by a twist of nature, thus providing the illusion of winding and forward movement whilst observing it from the top of the mountains but obscuring that which is below, is used as a metaphor for the film. Excerpts from Arnold Fanck’s 1924 film, Cloud Phenomena of Maloja, are used in the film.

The Clouds of Sils Maria is a much more fascinating film to think about then to watch. But one has to undergo the latter in order to engage with the former.

José Arroyo