Some World Cinema:

Law of the Border (1966), directed by Lofti O. Akad. Imagine a Turkish western, and then watch Law of the Border. The film has a hero (or anti-hero), Hadir (Yilmaz Guney) who is reminiscent of Clint Eastwood in his Leone westerns, taciturn, menacing, and prone to outbursts of violence. At least one scene in Law of the Border clearly reflects the Leone films. Set in a village near the Turkish/Syrian border, the film follows Hadir, an impoverished man trying to raise his son in an area where just about the only means of making a living is through smuggling. This is dangerous business, the border lined with landmines, and the authorities on the watch and ready to use their firearms. What lifts this film above the pulp storyline is the realist picture of life downtrodden and lean. Into the community comes a female teacher. On her arrival, the village does not have a school and none of the children has any education beyond the skills it takes to survive in a dangerous and barren land. The teacher manages to convince, with the help of the new local commandant, the villagers to use an abandoned building as a school. Hadir’s son proves to be bright, and Hadir can now envisage a better future for his son. Of course, matters turn dire. We have shootouts and landmines exploding. All in all, this is a gritty exercise in film making. Law of the Border turned out to be an important film in Turkey, reviving the career of Akad who had retired, but who now returned to make several more important political films in his home country.

 

Muna Moto (1975), directed by Dikongue-Pipa. This film from Cameroon is a devastating critique of a system of oppression, especially against women. Tradition can be both sustaining and celebratory and also burdensome and retrograde. We see this in the story of two star-crossed lovers who fall victim to the dowry and patronage system. The two principle actors, David Edene as Ngando, and Arlette Din Beli as Ndome, give intense and compelling performances. The camera is fluid and poetic as it details life in a Cameroonian village. Life is difficult, partly because of the colonists depleting of the fishing resources. Ngando works at night fishing and during the day chopping trees in an effort to get what he needs for the dowry. His efforts prove exhausting and futile. His uncle, who already has four wives, one of whom is Ngando’s mother, pays the dowry and tries to take Ndome for himself hoping she will give him a child. She does have a child, but not the Uncle’s. This is a delicately emotional film that delivers a stark vision of the clash between tradition and modernity.

 

Insiang (1976), directed by Lino Brocka. We recently watched Red Cliff, a film nearly 4 and a half hours long with hectic activity, bodies of horses and men flying through the air in slow motion. The film probably took months to film. Insiang, a 94-minute film from the Philippines, took 17 days from the beginning of production to its appearance in theatres. Both are astonishing films. Insiang begins as a neo-realist look at life in the slums of Manila, turns to melodrama, and then to tragedy. The pre-credit sequence takes us inside a slaughterhouse where pigs are being gutted. The opening is visceral, and it sets up both the latent violence that exists in the impoverished lives of the slum dwellers and the ending of the film. The plot takes us close to the lives of one family, especially the lives of the eponymous character, Insiang (Hilda Koronel) and her mother, Tonya (Mona Lisa). These two have a difficult relationship because Tonya sees in her daughter the husband who left her for a young mistress. Tonya has taken on as a lover a young man from the slaughterhouse, Dado (Ruel Vernal). He, of course, has eyes for the luminous daughter. Insiang has more than one man seeking her attentions, and she hopes to escape her life with a curly-headed fellow named Bebot (Rez Cortez). Bebot proves as trustworthy as Dado or the husband of Tonya. Anyway, these characters live lives in a crowded, noisy, dirty, and closed in space. We often see them, especially Insiang and her mother, behind barred windows or gates or fences or lattices. The drama plays out with intensity and even a certain predictability, a predictability that does not fully prepare us for the end of the film. This is a powerful, and I daresay important film.

 

Taipei Story (1985), directed by Edward Yang. This is a film that examines urban malaise. It begins with a good-looking couple examining an apartment for rent. The man, Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien) seems bored and uninterested as he swings his arms like a baseball player. The woman, Chin (Tsai Chin) lists the commercial items that could fit here: stereo, tv, VCR and so on. Cut to the film’s near final shot of blood on the street adjacent to a pile of thrown out items such as a tv, a couple of soft chairs and bags of stuff and you see what such dreams come to. The film moves along at a slow measured pace, rarely, if ever, changing the pace. It is a slow burn. Throughout the film, we have references to the United States as a place of possibility and hope, but such possibility and hope are as illusory as all dreams. At one point a character asks Lung what Los Angeles is like. He replies that it is much the same as Taipei. Another connector is baseball. Lung, as a young person, was a fine baseball player with dreams of making baseball his success in life. Once again, we have a reminder of dreams failing to come true. Shots of the city in both daylight and at night keep reminding us of the combination of decay and glitter, of hope and its opposite. As I watched the film, I kept thinking of Kramer vs Kramer (1979), although the two films are quite different. Taipei Story is, however, about a couple’s strained and unworkable relationship. We also have a cast of peripheral characters nicely drawn. One of these characters, an architect, looks out a high-rise window at the city and remarks that he can no longer tell which buildings he has designed because all the buildings look the same. This pretty much sums up the vision of a world drained of energy, a world of boredom and ennui.

 

Revenge (1990), directed by Ermek Shinarbaev. This film is part of the Kazakh New Wave, a movement in Russian cinema that arrived just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It begins with a prologue set in the seventeenth century in which we see the rise of a young Lord who comes into conflict with his best friend, the court poet. Then we move to 1915 Korea where the actual story begins. Before the film ends we have visited China and finally Sakhalin on Russia’s eastern coast. By the end, we have moved foreword to just at the end of 1945. The story finds impetus in the killing of a young girl by a drunken teacher back in 1915. This murder results in the father of the murdered girl seeking revenge, something he seeks vainly for years, ultimately passing on his desire for revenge to his young son from a second wife. The son seeks revenge for many years until … Well, you will have to see what happens. The film is noteworthy for its light. Scenes are filled with light, a light that counterpoints the darkness in humanity’s heart. We also have a number of cryptic but compelling images: a huge sea turtle far from the sea and seeking to return home, a rat dowsed in gas and set on fire running frantically until it finds a barn with hay, a hedgehog, a young man hemorrhaging blood from his groin, a fast-moving truck with an iron container chained to its bumper, more than one mute person, and more. The film seems to have something to do with time and space, as well as to the deleterious effects of seeking revenge. Some of what we see reminded me of images in films by Tarkovsky. All in all, this is a strange, yet powerful film.

 

Kalpana (1948), directed by Uday Shankar. This is the only film by the dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar, brother of Ravi Shankar. It is, among other things, a celebration of Indian dance, at one point noting that Hollywood often mistakenly presents Indian dance as if it were African dance. In any case, the film is much more than a celebration of dance. This celebration is part of a celebration of India, despite all its flaws. And flaws aplenty it has, according to this sumptuous exploration of what ails India. Shankar holds his ideology on his sleeve. He speaks openly here of injustices associated with caste/class, with rapacious capitalism, with education or the lack thereof, with misogyny, and so on. His call for equality of the sexes is forthright and moving. As for the viewers’ visual experience, we have magnificent dance sequences, surreal sequences, echoes of silent cinema, especially Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and painterly compositions, one of which reminded me of Jacques-Louis David. All of this serves a story of a child growing into a man wishing for more than a life controlled by the expectations of elders and tradition. The young man, Udayan (Uday Shankar), finds himself desired by two women, his childhood friend Uma (Amala Shankar), and the wild woman he meets in the wilderness, Kamini (Lakshmi Kanta). Jealousy and anger surface, in a narrative that blends dream and reality. Released in 1948, Kalpana (apparently this means ‘Fantasy’) reminds us that Hollywood was in the heyday of musicals at the time. The film also reminds us just how stubborn are the forces of neoliberalism; the film resonates still.

 

The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), directed by Ritwik Ghatak. Huge trees, a train passing, lattice-work, close-ups reminiscent of Eisenstein, deep focus, odd camera angles, all give this film a distinct feel. The tree we see in the first shot lets us know about stability, rootedness, shelter, nature. That same shot transitions to a close-up of Neeta (Supriya Choudhury) , our protagonist; in the background moving across the screen is a train, letting us know about people on the move, change, and an unknown destination. The lattice-work we see throughout lets us know of constraint. In the first shot, we also hear the singing of Neeta’s brother, Shankar (Anil Chatterjee). Throughout the film sound is either mellifluous or jarring, dissonant. The odd angles tell us of people and places out of joint. The story deals with a family displaced by the partition of India in 1947, and especially the eldest daughter Neeta who is effectively the head of the house. The learned, but feeble, father (Gyanesh Mukherjee), the domineering mother (Gita Dey), the flirtatious younger sister Geeta (Gita Ghatak), the sports-loving brother Mantu (Dwiju Bhawal), and the older brother Shankar all have their own ambitions and rely on Neeta to provide for them. The story follows Neeta in her self-sacrificing decline into illness as she watchs her uncaring family find what they wish for. Neeta is, for sure, a cloud-capped star. This is melodrama, but with a trace of humour and fantastic cinematography. I have neglected to mention Neeta’s boyfriend, Sanat, who is graceless enough to marry the younger Sister Geeta. Sanat, in a love letter to Neeta, calls her a “cloud-capped star veiled by circumstance,” and Neeta is indeed an intelligent woman whose life is ruined by the destructive environment in which she lives. This is melodrama touched by tragedy.

 

Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (aka Joe). Dennis Lim describes this strange and mysterious film from Thailand as “part road move, part folk storytelling exercise, part surrealist parlour game.” This description is accurate, but it hardly touches the strangeness of the film. Viewers first see the words, “Once upon a time….,” and so we know we are in store for a fairy tale. But this is more like the building of a fairy tale as we meet characters who tell us bits and pieces of a story the arises from a mysterious small round object that falls to the floor early in the film. As each set of characters, and actors, tell the story, the story becomes more and more baroque. As we go along, we have a travelling fish seller, a crippled boy and his teacher, two deaf mute girls, a theatre troop, a gaggle of school children, among others, all adding to the story of an alien who comes to earth. Frankly, the story never does cohere for me, although I suspect it might for others. I get the sense we are being introduced to a story from Thai folklore. The filming is in grainy black and white, and it has a documentary feel, although this is not an out and out documentary. We also have moments I might call meta, where the making of the film is what we are seeing. Everything is quite odd, just out of reach, and yet compelling for some reason. The strangeness comes in the form of a sophisticated and complicated film looking primitive and naïve. This is quite an experience.

 

Before the Rain (1994), directed by Milcho Manchevski. This is the first film from a newly independent Republic of Macedonia. As for a summary, Noel Murray in AV Club (July 1, 2008) puts it succinctly:” In the film's first section, ‘Words,’ Grégoire Colin plays a young Macedonian monk who discovers an Albanian girl hiding in his quarters, and attempts to hide her from a local militia. In the second section, "Faces," Katrin Cartlidge plays a London photo-agent who's been having an affair with one of her foreign photojournalists, and struggles with how to tell her husband. In the third section, "Pictures," the photojournalist, played by Rade Serbedzija, returns to his Macedonian village and becomes embroiled in centuries-old skirmishes. Each section "rhymes" in different ways. There's a rumble of thunder in each, as well as a character vomiting, turtles, a snippet of Beastie Boys' "So What'cha Want," and the repeated line, "Time never dies… the circle is not round." For most of the movie, Manchevski subtly suggests that each section is taking place at roughly the same time; in the final five minutes, he reveals exactly which scene goes where, and underlines the idea that in the former Yugoslavia, it doesn't matter whether a person tries to help or stays neutral. Trouble ensues either way.” “Trouble ensues either way,” says it all. Clearly Manchevski has watched westerns and I can locate quotations from both Peckinpah and Ford in this film. The storyline turns on the futility of things, and somehow futility seems to be a word suitable to the situation humanity continues to find itself in.

 

Hive (2021), directed by Blaerta Basholli. Set in the village of Krusha in Kosovo in the aftermath of the 1999 massacre in that village. Many of the men have gone missing, and the surviving wives and families of the missing struggle to find news of their loved ones and to survive without the men in their lives. Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), along with other women of the community, organize to lobby the authorities to find their missing husbands, and also to create a company that makes and sells adjvar, a condiment made from red peppers and aubergines. These women have to contend with the deeply patriarchal villagers, including Fahrije’s father-in-law Haxhi (Çun Lajçi) and her daughter, Zana (Kaona Sylejmani). Fahrije also tries to maintain her missing husband’s bee hives. Those worker bees reflect the worker-bee mentality of the women who set about to control their lives. The handheld camera stays close to Fahrije as she sets out to make life work in an environment wracked by war, and held by misogynist traditions. The film is based on a true story, and it is a testament to independence and the will to survive. 

 

24 City (2008), directed by Jia Zhang-Ke. Filmed as a documentary, 24 City reminds me of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Review in its blending of fact and fiction, real people and actors. It tells the story of an airplane parts factory, and its destruction in order to replace it with luxury apartments. Most of the film depends upon “interviews” with people associated with the factory from its early days to its closing (actually it is moving and not just closing). In other words, the film slyly moves through time without actually depicting those various times. The people we meet all have a melancholy story to tell. The film is quiet, slow, intense, and somehow moving in its presentation of people whose lives have depended on a factory that controlled their lives, and that now, in its fall, leaves them unmoored, drifting too far from shore. This is an unusual film, well worth seeing for its picture of China as it was and as it develops in the present century.