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Chinese opera, whether of the Peking variety or not, is a very demanding art-form, requiring decades of study to be even partly mastered. In this film, Yan Yuejun was a Soochow Opera performer who fell afoul of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, and who has served his time undergoing compulsory "re-education." Now he is living in Inner Mongolia, driving a truck for a living, which is surely proletarian enough to suit his earlier tormentors.
A portrait of the South Korean screenwriter, director and producer Lee Chang-Dong through his work, this documentary provides a thematic analysis of his films, most of which have been selected for and received awards at the Cannes Film Festival.
It is an experimental film where the filmmaker questions the desire of a film viewer to narrate. This film revives the spirit of research that began with silent cinema, with musical compositions as essential as the dialogue in a feature-length talking film. The ruins of the title visually represent an aspiration to rebuild another world from the old. Finally, the film questions the possibility of a child proceeding to this reconstruction from a narrative where the elusive meaning of everything around him is to be reinvented
A study of Holy Week (Semana Santa) in Seville, Spain.
A young aristocrat is seduced by a young man who appeared to her in a dream one spring afternoon. Captive of this impossible love, the young girl is dying of melancholy. But the constancy of her love is stronger than death; she wins the pity of the judge of the underworld, manages to find her lover and come back to life. The opera "The Peony Pavilion" was composed in 1598 by the poet Tang Xianzu (1550-1617), one of the greatest playwrights of the Ming period. Of all the forms of Chinese opera that have followed one another since the 12th century, the kunqu is the one that best preserves the image of a classical art highly appreciated in educated circles for its musical, literary and gestural refinement.
Here the codes are both amplified and distanced by an expressionist plastic that for the first time perhaps in Expressionism, takes humor into account. Some very close-ups of flowers, insects, are reminiscent of the prose of a Caillois that I did not know until this film equivalent cinema. There is a double movement in this film. At the same time, a sort of restraint of the plans and a bulimia, a frenzy to film, perhaps this is what mainly troubles us and takes us into a way of seeing that was unknown to us.
A girl uses spiritualism to escape her loneliness and neurasthenia. Inspired by practices more or less close to magic, she tries to create two characters that will be part of herself. She will be able to live without being alone, while fleeing the external reality. But little by little, the two beings that she created appear to be detached from her, as if the figure three could not agree to the harmony of the group. Her fantasies seem to turn against her, increasing her sense of isolation.
Special Jury Mention at Hyères International Film Festival in 1983. "When my eyes, closed for an icy terror, opened again, at my side, scented on the canvas, these faces were shaking confusingly."
In 1977, one year after Mao died, a French man ( played by Alain Bashung) comes back to China to work as a school teacher with his daughter. He quickly ignores the interdiction of getting in touch with Chinese people and finds himself drawn into mysterious meetings at the Red Pavilion. MY CHINESE SISTER is a movie about pretense and the mystification of reality.
The narrator looks for Khema, a missing shaman singer in Laos. His investigation progressively becomes an initiatic travel among outcasts, renowned for their magical powers, accused to be "phipop", supernatural creatures behaving like vampires, still terrifying laotian villagers. This traveller's diary in search of ghosts through the forests, is a true story which looks like a chamanic tale. For most Laotian people, the invisible world of spirits is more real than what we call reality in modern western life. This film shows this "other laotian reality", mixing rational and objective facts with events born from collective unconsciousness. Is it a documentary or fiction ? This question is the main theme of the film.