Nagoya University Associate Professor Ma Ran's new book recommendation:
Independent Filmmaking across Borders in Contemporary Asia
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Book Purchase Link:
https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462986640/independent-filmmaking-across-borders-in-contemporary-asia
Author's Note:
In short, the book weaves through two overlapping contexts, one is the independent film and digital film culture that has emerged and continued to develop in East and Southeast Asia since the late 1980s, and the second is the geopolitics of post-Cold War contemporary Asia, with a particular focus on the large-scale population dispersion, migration and dynamic correlation with inter-Asian socio-cultural changes.
I proposed the concept of "border-crossing cinema" precisely to open up new ways to think about the research framework of "national cinema" and "transnational cinema", and to further develop through "place-based imagination" and especially "translocality" The research perspective makes the two research frameworks dialogued with each other. At the same time, this book also explores the aesthetics and politics of this type of "cross-border film", especially its implications for reimagining Asia, based on the discussion of identity politics that is not limited to the essentialization of national, ethnic and cultural, based on the case analysis of several independent film authors, film groups and artists who have "crossed the border".
Rather than a new concept, the "border-crossing cinema" is actually more of a clue, taking us on a journey through Asia from visible or invisible borders, borders, etc., and also taking us through an irregular mapping: in addition to the first chapter of the general discussion, I then moved roughly from north to south, with the exception of the Korean director Zhang Lu, the Japanese independent film group "Kong", the Chinese director Li Miao in Japan, Okinawa director Takashi Takashi, visual artist Tomokako Yamashiro, and Chinese Burmese director Cho Tak Yin are discussed in chapters. Some of my interviews and comments on these directors have also been published in the journal Of Drama and Film Review of Nanjing University.
Although the book focuses on video writers from the late 1990s to the new millennium, I begin by drawing an incomplete "genealogy" back to Japan in the 1960s and early 1970s, paying tribute to the legendary Japanese film group Nihon Documentarist Union (NDU, roughly translated as a group of Japanese documentarians; in fact, it is based on the dropouts of Waseda University in the chaotic era). I focused on their 1973 work Asia is One ( アジアはひとつ ; although borrowing the title of Okakura Tenshin 's famous treatise , they proposed "Transboundary Theory" and reflected on the legacy of Japanese imperialism and colonialism in Asia. In the final chapter, I also reflect on the gender politics of "transboundary cinema," or more broadly, the issues of gender and the body; most of the authors I discuss throughout my book are men. Unfortunately, although I wrote in the afterword of Tetsuaki Matsue's controversial semi-AV work, Idolentity, and contacted the director himself, he did not have a copy of the work and could not provide any stills (let me take a screenshot myself...). ）。
If all goes well, the new book will be officially released on October 1 this year; currently on the official website of the University Press of Amsterdam, the pre-sale of this book shows the price of hard-shell books, and the figure (99 euros) is very unfriendly to friends who generally like Asian movies and independent movies, that is because academic books are generally extremely unpopular, hard-shell/hardcover editions are rarely distributed, and most of them are configured for university libraries and other institutions, please understand. There should also be an electronic version of the Kindle after that, and I hope it will have a lite version, and I hope to win the fund to make it Open Access. The main purpose of doing a little publicity here is to have a chance to communicate and discuss with more friends; of course, if your university library is exactly what it takes, it is perfect (Khan).
Thanks to everyone.
Book blurb in English:
This book examines an array of auteur-driven fiction and documentary independent film projects that have emerged since the turn of the millennium from East and Southeast Asia, a strand of transnational filmmaking that converges with Asia’s vibrant yet unevenly developed independent film movements amidst global neoliberalism. These projects bear witness to and are shaped by the ongoing historical processes of inter-Asia interaction characterized by geopolitical realignment, migration, and population displacement. This study threads together case studies of internationally acclaimed filmmakers, artists, and collectives such as Zhang Lu, Kuzoku, Li Ying, Takamine Gō, Yamashiro Chikako, and Midi Z, all of whose transborder journeys and cinematic imaginations disrupt static identity affiliations built upon national, ethnic, or cultural differences. This border-crossing filmmaking can be viewed as both an aesthetic practice and a political act, reframing how people, places, and their interconnections can be perceived—thereby opening up possibilities to reimagine Asia and its connections to globalization.
Imagine the way of Yunnan
Border-crossing Yunnan
Text/Ma Ran
Zheng Lingyun, "An Unsuitable Coat"
"Little Yunnan, three years and two seasons of famine, in the middle of the night to carry water hooks, torch festivals planted yellow seedlings, poor Yifang hungry factory, only grandma grave, no old father's grave" - obviously, this folk song is suitable for the recitation of Yunnan (Xiangyun) words.
Encounter Zheng Lingyun's "An Unsuitable Coat" or by chance. The narrator for this short film is herself, in Yunnan dialect, it is "I" who tell the story of the "old lady" piecemeal, the old woman who goes to Myanmar (the so-called "walking Yifang") to make a living is worried about the old lady, and the old lady's "close seams before the trip, I am afraid of delaying the return". Its homely content and speed seem difficult to form too deep a first impression for viewers who need a strong intellectual nourishment. The short film is interspersed with the fog and rain of New York, the hands of the old man in the sewing, the pattern of the wood carved window ledges, the mountains and clouds of Yunnan, the slow trains, and the colorful and noisy "Tanabata" in the countryside. Zheng's image is obsessed with silhouettes, silhouettes and ghosting, between seeing and not seeing, everything quickly disappears while showing, and the coat made by the "old lady" for the "old man" has become the physical evidence of the years, although it only exists in the author's fiction, you have not seen its full picture. The nostalgia that slowly dissipates is not indiscriminate, full of misplaced (for "inappropriate"), and its direction is whether it is the old father-in-law who left the old lady to go to the old banking factory in Myanmar for the sake of livelihood, or the Yunnan people in New York... It seems that there is no need to distinguish them one by one.
Perhaps I am slightly worried about whether people who do not know Yunnan dialect can experience that kind of depression, that kind of wet and marginal poetry. Paradoxically, this concern comes from a descendant of a third-line factory born in Kunming, and before the age of eight, the Kunming dialect was not at all the soundscape of my daily life: there seemed to be no natural affinity between me and Yunnan dialect, it could not annotate my identity, and I could not make a more realistic explanation of "hometown" through the rural tone. As I moved away from Yunnan, it became increasingly clear to me that Yunnan was no longer, or should not be seen, merely as the southern part of the mysterious clouds of folklore in Tian Zhuangzhuang's Dram; its historical geography, cultural marginality, and the wilderness and unknown (and therefore fascinating, and therefore dreamlike) constructed by mainstream imagination might just be an entry point for observing local, national, and global imaginations. "Yunnan" is a moving border, which is repeatedly defined by people, commodities, ideas and cultures that cross the border; and people who leave Yunnan at different times and under different social conditions are like those who arrive and enter here, and they all start from their own positions, tell her in a specific context, imagine her, remember her, and forget her. The important thing is probably not to distinguish between truth and falsehood in these tellings and imaginations. For many image writers, "Yunnan" is like an introduction, and the space it opens up for them is not limited to such symbols as the narrow "Yunnan landscape", "Yunnan people" or "Yunnan dialect"; in fact, it can point to the identities, experiences and memories that have been misplaced and suppressed between the gap between the large historical and regional geopolitical narratives, and what we see in these images are the marginalized discrete individuals or groups.
This reminds me of Zhao Deyin's 2016 "Emerald City". This solo work of Zhao Shattered Thoughts, after color grading to make the bare mines also overflow with orange light, seems to be to give a more layered spiritual core and lay an emotional clue to the observational predecessor "The Man Who Digs Jade": "I" followed the eldest brother who had been lost for more than a decade and went to the legendary "Emerald City" Pakan Town, where "I" carefully inquired about the reason why the eldest brother had left home and lost his voice. The answer is ambiguous.
Zhao, who has long been a taiwan citizen, after the trial of the plot series "Homecoming Trilogy", finally presented his family history in the form of a documentary, and the ambition, loss and enthusiasm of the eldest brother to visit the Emerald City were set off by the seemingly insignificant sorrow and joy of an ordinary Chinese family in Lashio, Myanmar: when the eldest brother ran away, his mother was imprisoned in a detention center for the sake of making a living to help people with drugs; during the Burmese democracy movement, the small business that had just seen the improvement of the family was affected... Everything is told calmly, Zhao slows down, the dialect carries a kind of idleness, but the storyteller is not necessarily relaxed; near the end of the film, there are more collective "performances" of big brothers and brothers, everyone discusses Zhao's framing angle, while enjoying the pleasure of drugs (performance), and also disturbs the boundary between reality and fiction.
When reading the "Creation Record" published based on an interview with Zhao Deyin[1], I noticed such a detail: when filming "Methamphetamine", Zhao's team consisted of 7 people, and in order to avoid the interference of the Myanmar authorities on the filming plan, he and Wang Xinghong (the male protagonist of the trilogy) bought equipment on the mainland and chose to enter Myanmar through Yunnan through Yunnan.
He wrote, "Xinghong and I set off from Taiwan three days early, took the equipment all the way from Kunming to Kunming, and passed through border cities such as Mangshi, Ruili, Jiejiao, Mujie, Guiguo, and Mubang in order, and finally arrived at the destination - Lashio." This is the first time I have entered Myanmar from China. The three-day and two-night trip to the Yunnan-Burma border is actually the old road of my grandfather's migration from Yunnan to Myanmar. The scenes I saw along the way were intertwined with the scenes that my grandfather said when I was a child. How did my great-grandfather build the Burma Highway during the war? And how to retreat along the line? Those grandfathers said that Kunming United University, Dragon Scales, Mangshi, Shade ... When China's border towns jumped out of my childhood memories and became real and practical scenes... Suddenly, the filming plan of this trip back to the hometown (Myanmar) seemed to start from the original hometown (China), and many inexplicable feelings came to mind. ”
For Zhao, his association with his "hometown" (China/Yunnan) and his "Yunnan" Chinese identity, although a continuation of his personal family history, should not be regarded as an enduring attribute, because Yunnan is more of a fiction based on the narration of his grandparents and fathers, the names of places that are as awkward as road signs, and the dynamics of cross-border "migration" rather than entities. Perhaps corresponding to this imaginary "Yunnan" is the "Yunnan dialect" of the Lashio Chinese, this soft locally growing accent, which is so familiar but strange.
Emerald City (2016)
In a sense, "Emerald City" and Zhao's previous three feature films may not have a fundamental genre difference, they can all be seen as border road films filmed in limited conditions. The recurring images in the film, along with oral recollections, are subjective perspective shots that stretch along the bumpy road; Lin Qiang's extremely restrained soundtrack casts the atmosphere for this ghostly roaming dot. If most of Wan Ma Tse-dan's works present the potential subjectivity of Tibetans in the unfolding of their journeys,[2] Zhao presents a more complex and fluid ethnic landscape (ethnoscape), which has never appeared in a similar way in the imagination of Chinese independent films and mainstream films: Zhao's stage, scattered in Southeast Asian metropolises, small towns and mountains and forests, appears one by one and travels to and from China in a different and courageous posture. Myanmar's border with Thailand (taiwan should be added) is illegal laborers, hawkers, jade traders, drug dealers and prostitutes. Zhao's ambition is not to reconstruct the history and identity of this group, but to present the fragility, contradiction and contradiction of this "Chinese" identity. For example, although Zhao's story is often filmed in the Dagu Valley in northern Thailand (the "lone army" that is, the town where the descendants of the Kuomintang 39th Army live), he never deliberately highlights the historical and political significance of this formerly infamous Golden Triangle town; the newsworthiness of The Valley is lightly carried by a middle-aged woman who looks back on her withdrawal from the club to accompany the liquor business when she was young, explaining that she dares because she is a "military descendant".
What is even more intriguing is that from the beginning of Zhao's student short films, the relationship between these Yunnan people from Lashio and Taiwan has been cut down continuously. Zhao's authorship is subtly constructed between three or more "hometowns" that multiply and overlap each other, and the existence of this plurality, from the mutual dialogue and negotiation between "Meth" and the new work "Goodbye Wacheng" and "Taiwanese Film", also points to the lack of the latter as a concept of "national cinema". For example, Zhao's work is used as an example of Taiwanese representatives entering the Oscars, which can be compared with the case of Yang Yong-hi, a second-generation Korean in Japan, who entered the same award competition on behalf of Japan in 2012, "The Kingdom of the Family," which is also the family autobiography of Half-Beam, about his brother who was sent back to Japan from Japan as a young man who was a cadre of the Korean General Company from Japan to return to Japan for medical treatment.
Methamphetamine (2014)
My third example comes from Li Yan, the director of Yasukuni Shrine.
Li Miao, who used to work at CCTV, arrived in Tokyo in 1989 with her wife who came to Japan to study. His documentary "2H" (1999) begins with a "personal accident" on the Tokyo subway, in which seemingly calm passengers wait for the train to start again, station staff hurriedly shuttle between the two doors facing each other in the carriage, and kindly instruct passengers to "don't look", someone is contacting the police, someone is carrying a stretcher, and it is difficult to imagine that they are handling a corpse without paying attention to the content of the conversation... The film begins with a sudden death and ends with an unexpected funeral. If you think about it carefully, Li Miao's works, including "Jingguo", are so full of ritual, he records the stage of history and politics, and also the stage of life, with appearances and farewells.
Unlike Zhao Deyin's wandering road perspective, "2H" is almost always indoor shooting, usually only borrowing indoor light, and the characters sit in the shadows and make a powerless confrontation with time. The bustle of the Tokyo metropolis swept past the tram window, and the old man returned home, wearing a pair of thick glasses, and he picked up a magnifying glass and pointed it at the camera, a moment of one-on-one confirmation. Much of the work records the boring and formulaic life of the elderly in the apartment, and the background sound is very simple, nothing more than a television program or radio, and the soundscape of the urban outdoors. This is the last day of the old man. The female artist Kobetsu, who also lives in Tokyo, occasionally visits as an old man's old friend, and the old man is increasingly dissatisfied with the nanny who is a fellow countryman, venting his dissatisfaction and curse at the camera like a child, conducting contradictory preaching, telling loneliness, but always unable to reconcile and seek care in a soft way. The moment of the outburst finally came, and the old man came to visit his son and ordered the bear to never come again. He said, "I've never bowed my head to any one, and I've never shook my head and wagged my tail and been self-righteous to any one, and that's my strength." Immediately after a tearful reconciliation, the bear worries that the old man will die alone in the apartment when the nanny is not around; the old man knows that he is short of years and cherishes her company.
However, we do not know where the old man came from, and why he lives alone in Tokyo, and the only thing that can identify him is his Yunnan dialect. In the second half of the film, the old man stands in the dark of the study, talks about excitement, lights a cigarette, and shows off the medal from the US government to the camera, explaining that this is an honor that can only be obtained by the general and the fuehrer. At this time, Li Miao tried to persuade the old man who did not believe in taking pictures to believe in the power of recording history with images, because he was a witness to the history of China in the twentieth century (if not a participant), and the old man said what history is, gently taking it. There is a wonderful detail in the film, which is a long-distance view of the old man watching the live television broadcast of Hong Kong's return to China until the Chinese national anthem is played, and the host says that "Hong Kong is back to be part of China"... He didn't have any comments and didn't move his body.
The old man's body was found two days after his death. In the scene where she learned of the death and the bridge section of the funeral, Li Yan inserted a long shot of silence for more than three minutes, which was a ghostly camera, observing from a distance the scene of the old man dressing alone in the bedroom and preparing to go out: the old man stood at the other end of the room, calmly undressing and changing clothes, and could not see his expression, but he did not lose his elegance, slowly dressed... As if to prepare for the end of life. The old man is called Ma Jinsan (Chongliu), and at the end of the film, the picture is a frontal photo of the old man dressed in a military uniform, a family photo, and a group photo of Chiang Kai-shek and other generals, he wrote a good calligraphy, and his will began like this, "On December 26, 902, Dali, Yunnan was born in Xiaguan, and in the past hundred years, it has coincided with the turmoil of the century, the chaos of the motherland, and the hardships and pains. ”
Li Yan later wrote in a book titled "Jingguo" that he was of course attracted by the legendary experience of the old man, but his experience of becoming a stateless person in his later years was also sad, and like the old man, many Chinese were homeless under the twist of history, drifting in the world, and he seemed to see his future appearance in the lonely old man [3]. "2H" and Zhao Deyin's era echo each other, if it were not for Li Miao, who lived in Tokyo, to pick up the DV record, Ma Jinsan's story may be a different look; we may know his magnificent life at the beginning, and we have no intention of knowing his loneliness and loss trapped in a corner of Tokyo. But perhaps 2H wasn't meant to put Ma Back into the great historical latitudes and longitudes; the stateless horse, with his stubbornness, pride, and pain, made microscopic footnotes to the end of an entire century. While Li Yan recorded "history" for the elderly, he stood on another port of history, looking at the drifters like Xiao Xiong and the director. In the lonely death of the old man, li miao's sympathy seems to be his own foreigner. This is also the most personal joint of 2H.
《2H》 (2000)
Jonas Mekas talks about all the idealism he experienced when he was young and experienced war, "I had a terrible time. Anyway, I survived. But by this time, I was no longer complete, and I was one thousand painful pieces." Mekas said it wasn't until he came to New York and met many poets, artists and filmmakers like him who had become "painful fragments" that he saw the possibility of finding hope again after losing everything.
I think we can use Mekas's "pain fragments" to read 2H's claustrophobia, melancholy, and deep loneliness, which also seems to be Li Miao's illness. Perhaps it is with this discrete poetry that Lee continues to produce a "food documentary" "Taste" (2003) that does not seem to care about presenting food. In the film, Ito Mengjiang, who grew up in China, learned the essence of Lu cuisine in a large restaurant in Jinan in his youth, returned to Japan after World War II, and finally fulfilled his wish and opened a Lu cuisine restaurant called "Jinan Hotel" in Tokyo with her husband. The 78-year-old Ito was invited back to China by Jinan's chef school, but found that the "essence" of his old Japanese Ru cuisine in Tokyo could no longer satisfy the chefs and customers in Jinan who pursued new flavors. Ito's journey to "homecoming" did not go well, she remembered the city beyond recognition, and the friends she had met had also passed away, leaving only a song "He Rijun Again" to sing for people. And the taste represented by the "Jinan Hotel" is her misplaced nostalgia.
Note: This article was written for the Film Writer edited by Watsun; my long-term wish is to curate it in this way. My new book Kinda partially fulfills this wish. Thanks to several directors, thanks to Zheng Lingyun for allowing me to use screenshots.
[1] "Ju" published by Taiwan's "Tianxia Magazine". leave. Methamphetamine : A Chronicle of Zhao Deyin's Film Life, Zheng Yurong and Fang Peijing (interview), 2015.
[2] The Journal of Chinese Cinemas, No. 10, 2016, is a special collection of Wan Ma Tse-dan's works.
[3] See Li Miao, Yasukuni, Asahi Shimbun Publishing, 2009.
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