Fascinating documentary, focussing on the Shanghai Film Studio. Rayns shows substantial clips of early Shanghai films, and then gives us a snapshot of early 80s Shanghai Film Studio productions. Fascinating interviews with Sun Yu, Zhang Ruifang, Xie Jin, Sun Daolin, and others. You can watch it at vimeo.com:
tinyurl.com/sn254hzn
In typical Lokman Leung style (see: ANITA), this gets a bunch of important stuff right; and a bunch of important stuff wrong. Leung knows the stakes: his big subject is how power infuses Hong Kong’s double colonialism, specifically the translation between British colony and PRC dependency. So the stakes are high. But the film (so far, because this is really a half a film, whose plots, trajectories, and meanings, if it sustains any, will only become clear when COLD WAR…
I subtitled this one in English [note: the current subtitles aren't mine; they seem to have changed them], so I'm not totally objective here. But this is such an impressive accomplishment. It's almost sociological/anthropological in its ability to capture, through subtle narrative mastery, the complicated but always vividly sensible relationships within a large rural family in Henan, China, and especially how this family works the land. Most films elide labour: this film captures what its like to work the land,…
A little film that thinks it can simply will itself into a big film. There’s very little this film understands: especially its ferociously inappropriate paean to naive Zionism. The Holocaust dump in the epilogue is just embarrassing. But the film does sporadically understand emotional logic: the tortured love of a couple desperately separate when together; the boss’s astonishing but utterly believable attack.
