KINO OBSCURA

"All I am is what I'm going after."

Sat, 26 May 2012 17:53:00 -0700

David Liu | 26 May 2012

Vincent Hanna is on to something. I recently viewed Heat for the fourth time after a friend suggested a late night movie to start the weekend, and for the fourth time came away admiring its visual compositions, its gritty yet figurative dialogue, its inherent affinity to literature and art.

Not unlike Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Michael Mann’s best films are brooding contemporary narratives defined by solitude, moral ambiguity and obsessive pursuit of elusive trophies. What continues to strike me about Heat — and similarly wired films like Ford’s The Searchers and Fincher’s Zodiac — is how Mann’s tireless devotion to method and mood results in a worthy analogue to great literature. Is there another American action picture that leaves its audience so wondrously full on a final sequence so tragically empty?

Art & Film: Michelangelo/Mann

Sat, 26 May 2012 17:44:00 -0700

David Liu | 26 May 2012

From the canvas (in this case, marble block) to the cinema.

Pietà (Michelangelo, 1498-99; marble)

Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)

Near the beginning of the film, Neil McCauley walks past a replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà. Near the end, world-weary Vincent Hanna fights to keep his suicidal step-daughter alive.

As I prepare to write my final undergraduate paper on the life...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:54:00 -0700

As I prepare to write my final undergraduate paper on the life and times of Chinese-American Hollywood actress Anna May Wong, I decided to collect some pictures for inspiration.

Two photos in this set are especially moving.

Row two, left: enjoying a light moment with German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and fellow international star Marlene Dietrich; Berlin, 1928.
Row two, right: posing with African-American actor-activist Paul Robeson and Chinese opera singer Mei Lanfang in front of Claridge’s Hotel; London, 1935.

And for what it’s worth, a humorous anecdote: In a 1936 visit to China, Wong stopped briefly in Tokyo, where reporters asked about her romantic life. Wong replied, “I am wedded to my art.” Nevertheless, Japanese newspapers reported the next day that Wong was married to a wealthy Cantonese man named Art.

A History of Violence

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 02:38:00 -0700

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation

David Liu | 20 April 2012

On the evening of February 18, 1915, The Birth of a Nation screened at the White House to an enthusiastic Woodrow Wilson, whose evaluation of the film now resonates in 20th century lore. ”It is like writing history with lightning,” the Southern-born, pro-segregation Wilson reportedly remarked, “and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

At once politically maddening and aesthetically groundbreaking, D.W. Griffith’s epic condenses the ideological disparities of post-Civil War America into a maelstrom of high fantasy masquerading as alternate history. Adapted from Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman, the film operates on the prevailing dichotomy of North and South as personified through two proud families, the Stonemans and the Camerons.

Russian-born critic Alexander Bakshy once wrote: “The development of Griffith is the development of American film.” He may not have been far from the truth. At 197 minutes, Griffith’s controversial race spectacle heralded the birth of an art form.

Notes on Style:

Griffith was a pioneer of off-screen space, and in The Birth of a Nation, we see complex cross-cutting that results in innovative compressions of time and space.
With his use of the “cut-back” or flashback, Griffith anticipated Soviet montage by nearly a decade.
More subtle gestures than earlier entries in silent cinema; in this sense, the film marks a significant departure from the theatrical expressionism of vaudeville, perhaps beginning the shift toward more narrative-driven cinema.
Foreground and background: strong visual distinctions between rich and poor, white and black, owners and slaves, Union and Confederate.
Intellectual montage: cutting from close-up of tousling pets to medium shot of young Stoneman and Cameron bachelors.
Recurrent image of opulence: the staircase in the Cameron mansion.
Spectacle within a spectacle: rich whites watching black minstrel dancers, Lincoln at the Ford’s Theatre.
Bird’s eye and panning shots: from the Confederate cavalry charge to the raiding of Atlanta.
Tracking shot: heroic dash of the Ku Klux Klan, led by renegade Ben Cameron, on a mission to reclaim the “Aryan birthright.”
Static shot: Individuals exit frame until only one remains; emphasis on the elusive nature of American progress.

Art & Film: David/Coppola

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 02:16:00 -0700

David Liu | 19 April 2012

From the canvas to the cinema.

The Death of Marat (Jacques-Louis David, 1793; oil on canvas)

The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

Enduring hallmarks of Reigns of Terror: blood and treachery, from the French Revolution to the Cosa Nostra. Coppola once said of cinematographer Gordon Willis: “He has a natural sense of structure and beauty, not unlike a Renaissance artist.”

(In commemoration of tonight’s screening of the XD restoration in San Francisco — for what it’s worth, a remarkable showcase of Willis’ game-changing work.)

GREAT SCENESTitanic (James Cameron, 1997) As reality sets in on...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:01:00 -0700

GREAT SCENES
Titanic (James Cameron, 1997)

As reality sets in on the RMS Titanic, the string orchestra plays “Nearer, My God, to Thee” — at least according to a handful of eyewitnesses and four films based on the disaster. The most recent of these, Cameron’s blockbuster romance, returns in 3D this weekend to mark the 100th anniversary of the ocean liner’s maiden voyage.

Did it really happen? Does it really matter? For a brief moment, anyway, Cameron captures the spirit of cinema’s pioneering populists, D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.

Art & Film: Zeller/Lang/Riefenstahl

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:28:00 -0700

David Liu | 2 April 2012

From the canvas to the cinema.

The Orator (Magnus Zeller, c. 1920; oil on canvas)

Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)

As a key figure in German Expressionism, Magnus Zeller went on to influence film contemporaries such as Fritz Lang (the depiction of the turmoil between workers and industrialists in Metropolis) and Leni Riefenstahl (the glorification of Adolf Hitler’s newly empowered National Socialists in Triumph of the Will). In a stroke of irony, the Nazi regime later banned Zeller’s works for their perceived “anti-Arian” nature.

A Cinephile's Instinctive Travels: Berkeley, California

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:32:00 -0700

Reliving the people and places I encounter through the sights and sounds of the films they inspired.

David Liu | 19 March 2012

The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)

Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross) walks across Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley. Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) sits in Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue, looking across the street to Moe’s Books.

Founded in 1957 and 1959, respectively, Caffe Med and Moe’s Books became activist havens during the Free Speech Movement and Vietnam War protests — both of which took place on Sproul Plaza over the following decade. Leading Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg wrote part of his iconic “Howl” on the coffee shop’s premises in 1955.

I currently live a block away from Moe’s and browse their new and used sections on a weekly basis. Recent acquisitions include Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther), Raymond Carver (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?) and James Baldwin (Another Country), along with a few other gems that I’ll probably have to shelve until after graduation.

—

THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971)

The characters of Lucas’ feature debut live in a dystopian future in which emotions, including sexual desire, are quelled by state-mandated medications. In a key scene, THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) and SRT the Hologram (Don Pedro Colley) discover organ-deprived bodies as they roam the city’s underground network.

Among other Bay Area locales, the film’s car chase sequence took place in the unfinished Transbay Tube, the underwater service tunnel connecting the East Bay to San Francisco.

The Downtown Berkeley BART Station today consists of a mezzanine level supported by arches and an underground platform connected by stairs and escalators. Its service to Berkeley’s students and residents makes it the second-busiest Bay Area Rapid Transit station outside of San Francisco.

GREAT SCENESThe Searchers (John Ford, 1956) Shot 1: Ethan...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:20:00 -0800

GREAT SCENES
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

Shot 1: Ethan Edwards arrives on horseback with Debbie.

A man will search his heart and soul

Shot 2: For a simple man like Mose Harper, happiness comes in the form of a rocking chair.

Go searchin’ way out there

Shot 3: Ethan returns Debbie to her relatives. He stands on the porch and looks on wistfully.

His peace of mind he knows he’ll find

The camera pulls back, revealing the visual motif of the framed doorway — the impenetrable barrier between danger and refuge, loneliness and fulfillment — one last time.

But where, O Lord
Lord where?

Enter Martin Pawley and Laurie Jorgensen, exuberant young lovers reunited at last. As they step inside the doorway, Ethan turns and walks off into the distance.

Ride away
Ride away
Ride away

In a stroke of visual and aural poetry, Ford closes the door on one of the most haunted figures in American cinema.

Illusions of Past Lives

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 11:31:31 -0800

David Liu | 25 February 2012

“The mystery is that even if we know that it’s only staged, that it’s a fiction, it still fascinates us. That’s the fundamental magic of film. Illusion persists. There is something real in the illusion, more real than in the reality behind it.”

— Slavoj Žižek

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

—

“When events are represented through cinema, they become shared memories of the crew, the cast, and the public. A new layer of synthetic memory is augmented in the audience’s experience. In this regard, filmmaking is not unlike creating synthetic past lives.”

— Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2011)

Art & Film: Hopper/Allen

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:54:00 -0800

From the canvas to the cinema.

David Liu | 20 February 2012

Queensborough Bridge (Edward Hopper, 1913; oil on canvas)

Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

Completed in 1909, the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge — also known as the 59th Street Bridge — traverses the East River and joins the New York City boroughs of Queens and Manhattan.

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

GREAT SCENESMr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:31:00 -0800

GREAT SCENES
Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (William Heise/James White, 1897)

Born today — February 11: American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, whose 1,093 credited patents include the kinetoscope, the first fully functional motion picture camera.

By 1893, construction was complete on the world first film production studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey. Here, cinematographers captured Edison at work in a mock staging of his actual chemical laboratory.

For Edison, who often employed ruthless tactics to advance his inventions — including bribing a theater owner in London for a copy of Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, then showing the film in New York City without compensating Méliès — the arrival of sound in motion pictures “spoiled everything.” In an interview with Reader’s Digest in March 1930, he cited D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as his favorite film.

Art & Film: Hopper/Malick

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:35:00 -0800

From the canvas to the cinema.

David Liu | 21 January 2012

House by the Railroad (Edward Hopper, 1925; oil on canvas)

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

The year is 1916. Bill, Abby and Linda ride the rails from Chicago to the Texas Panhandle, where they work as farmhands on the wheat harvest. Looming over the spacious fields, the farmer’s Victorian mansion evokes both grandeur and solitude. Like Hopper, Malick frames his edifice as an indelible yet impenetrable monument of American enterprise.

Notes on Evolution: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 11:00:00 -0800

David Liu | 1 January 2012

From Zodiac’s restless journalists and detectives to Seven’s ruthless killer, from Edward Norton’s white-collar waif in Fight Club to the troubled young entrepreneurs of The Social Network, the heroes and antiheroes of David Fincher’s films are forces of nature, obsessive and meticulous to a fault. Their hunger for progression and distaste for established norms reflect common psychological impulses connecting the director’s body of work.

It’s no stretch to say that Fincher revisits familiar territory with his latest The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.The film begins by giving us snapshots of the physically scarred, emotionally neutered Lisbeth Salander, played brilliantly by Rooney Mara. As her relationship with journalist Mikael Blomkvist develops, Salander evolves into a fascinating contradiction — alternating between cool detachment and feral intensity, she comes to embody both spectrums of the “Fincherian” archetype.

The more of Fincher’s films we experience (and experience again), the more they seem to share the same dialectical universe. Every line of dialogue, gesture and expression springs from an unconsummated desire for fulfillment, fragments of colossal puzzles that straddle the divide between revelation and oblivion.

Hip-Hop & Film: Art of the Sample

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:00:00 -0800

Throughout the years, feature film scores have provided rich sources of cross-genre experimentation for hip-hop artists.

David Liu | 27 December 2011

Song: “Blueprint²” by Jay-Z
Sample: “The Ecstasy of Gold” by Ennio Morricone
Film: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

Producer Charlemagne preserves the grandeur of Morricone’s iconic opening piano riff and ensuing operatic sweep. (See also: samples by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony on their 2007 track “We Workin’” and by David Fincher for an NFL commercial starring LaDainian Tomlinson and Troy Polamalu.)

Song: “Burnt Offering“ by Blue Scholars
Sample: “Moon River” by Henry Mancini & Johnny Mercer
Film: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961)

The Seattle-based duo of Prometheus Brown and Sabzi are self-professed cinephiles, and their jazz-tinged re-interpretation of the Mancini classic resonates with cosmopolitan refinement.

Song: “RoboCop” by Kanye West
Sample: “Kissing in the Rain” by Patrick Doyle
Film: Great Expectations (Alfonso Cuarón, 1998)

After skillfully juxtaposing string instruments with rap vocals on 2005’s “Gone,” West pushed the envelope further with this lush, angst-ridden arrangement of Doyle’s score.

Song: “It’s Mine” by Mobb Deep & Nas
Sample: “Tony’s Theme” by Giorgio Moroder
Film: Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983)

Larger than life: Queensbridge’s most illustrious products join forces over a prominent instrumental tribute to one of cinema’s most celebrated underworld figures.

Song: “Dance with the Devil” by Immortal Technique
Sample: “(Where Do I Begin?) Love Story” by Francis Lai
Film: Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970)

Drenched in irony, Technique’s 10-minute tale of a young would-be gang member’s vanishing illusions elevates its melancholy source material to unsettling heights.

Closing Shots: David Fincher

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:02:00 -0800

A collection of final shots from the works of David Fincher.

David Liu | 18 December 2011

Seven (1995)

“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for,” narrates Detective Lt. William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) in a world-weary voice, quoting from Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, before adding: “I agree with the second part.” David Bowie’s “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” surfaces after the fade to black.

The Game (1997)

You can never be sure anymore. After reaching an uncertain catharsis in the form of a impromptu dinner date, Nicholas Van Orton — cinema’s contemporary Ebenezer Scrooge — looks left and right in weary bemusement. Fincher cuts out to a wide shot of the nighttime San Francisco locale, and Jefferson Airplane’s haunting “White Rabbit” creeps into the final credits.

Fight Club (1999)

In the heat of the moment, the Narrator (Edward Norton) grabs the bewildered Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) by the hand. “You met me at a very strange time in my life,” he says, as glittering monoliths of consumer culture crumble to the opening chords of The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”

Zodiac (2007)

“The last time I saw this face was July 4th, 1969. I am very sure that’s the man who shot me.” A haunted survivor affirms the implausible, wrapping up Fincher’s monumental chronicle of fears and obsessions at the dawn of the Information Age. The use of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” both here and in the film’s opening sequence, echoes with sinister vitality.

The Social Network (2010)

Dead silence is punctuated only by The Beatles’s “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” and the sound of fingers typing on a keyboard. A close-up of Mark Zuckerberg’s face confirms his evolution from obscure wunderkind to lonely sovereign of a virtual empire.

GREAT SCENESA Better Tomorrow / 英雄本色 (John Woo, 1986) In a...

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:59:00 -0800

GREAT SCENES
A Better Tomorrow / 英雄本色 (John Woo, 1986)

In a spirited homage to Johnny Boy’s entrance in Mean Streets, Mark Gor (Chow Yun-fat) sashays his way into a restaurant before a shootout.

With A Better Tomorrow, Woo ignited the “heroic bloodshed” genre of Hong Kong action cinema, combining operatic montage sequences, charismatic criminals as protagonists and recurring themes of redemption and chivalry.

GREAT SCENESLate Spring (Yasujiro Ozu,...

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 03:26:00 -0800

GREAT SCENES
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

“That’s the order of human life and history: to expect such immediate happiness is a mistake. Happiness isn’t something you wait around for. It’s something you create yourself. Happiness comes only through effort.”

—

Born today — 12 December: Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (小津安二郎), who, despite never marrying, captured gentle, profound portraits of families through the lens of marriage, death and generational differences in postwar Japan.

After a protracted battle with cancer, Ozu passed away in his hometown of Tokyo on his birthday in 1963. He was 60.

Ozu’s signature style — static visual compositions and austere, contemplative frames — has gone on to influence a generation of contemporary filmmakers, among them Jia Zhangke, Mike Leigh, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang and Wim Wenders, who once called Ozu his “only master.”

Age of Turbulence

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 02:22:00 -0800

Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins

David Liu | 9 December 2011

Call it a requiem for the Age of the Samurai — Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins opens with a disgraced man committing a public act of seppuku and ends with a lone samurai walking off-screen in the aftermath of a violent showdown, navigating his way through an irreversible swath of ruin.

Set in the turbulent years of 1840s Japan, the film begins by dividing its time between two narratives. We witness firsthand the repulsive sadism of Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki) and his ruthless determination to hold onto power in the waning years of the shogunate government, and then follow veteran samurai Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho) as he assembles a team of courageous men on a mission to assassinate Naritsugu.

The parties converge in the form of a bravura battle sequence sustained over the film’s final 45 minutes, in which the samurai — relentless guardians of a dying way of life — clash in breathtaking fashion with Naritsugu’s corrupt legions. In its exquisite recreation of a lost world, Miike’s strongest picture to date attains poignant, masterful dimensions.

Distant Voices, Still Lives

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:00:00 -0800

Globalization and modernity in Jia Zhangke’s The World (世界)

David Liu | 22 November 2011

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.

— Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903)

In light of China’s fragmented progression through periods of reform and renovation, the idea of “modern life” shares intricate connections with urban progress and the struggle to separate culture from consumerism. A similar fine line distinguishes the so-called Fifth Generation of filmmakers from the enfants terrible of the Sixth Generation, two cinematic movements symbolically connected by the events in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989.

Whereas the first group channeled the spirit of China’s rural roots by mourning and mythologizing the past in human dramas such as Xie Jin’s Hibiscus Town (1986) and Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987), the second group shifted its focus to the vicissitudes of urban life in modern China through films like Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days (1993) and Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000). Made without bureaucratic consent, the latters’ critical success in foreign festival circuits signaled a shift that was, in many ways, prophetic. The rapid evolution of China’s modern metropolises would inevitably arrive hand in hand with globalization in irreversible fashion.

After helming a series of underground features that put him on the world cinema map in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke was greenlighted in 2004 by the Chinese government to make The World, a story of twenty-somethings navigating their daily lives as employees of Beijing’s World Park.

The film is both an antithesis and summation of Jia’s previous works, which were neorealist meditations on the effects of socioeconomic progress on the dusty rural townships of inland Shanxi province. Platform (2000) documented a decade of reform spanning the 1980s through the eyes of a performing troupe, Pickpocket (1996) and Unknown Pleasures (2002) criticized the spiritual malaise caused by that progress by following the lives of disaffected small-town youth. By contrast, The World plays like an allegory of globalization seen through another group — the alienation of individuals working in Beijing with roots elsewhere in China.

Opening scenes in films often function as seductions or promises, inviting us into a world of thespians projecting humanity into fictional personalities; in The World, a world within a world, the lead characters take their names from the actors themselves. The film opens with Xiao Tao (played by Jia regular Zhao Tao), dressed in Bollywood dancer garb and yelling loudly for a band-aid. In an extended take lasting over three minutes, Jia’s camera tracks her walking through the corridors of a backstage performance center, illuminating a scene of chaos and madness that inches close to urban modernity through her perception.

Brimming with natural dialogue and environmental noise, the sequence’s evocation of the quotidian is uncanny; like the long takes that feature prominently in all of Jia’s works, they represent pure filmic attempts at capturing life in real time. Near the end of the credits sequence, the film cuts to a shot of an artificial city skyline, followed by another cut to a wide-angle shot of a theater audience. The implication here is the staging of urban progress, and in one cinematic flourish, Jia displays an emphasis on modernity affecting the “now,” instead of the documentation of progress stemming from the “then.”

By setting The World in Beijing’s World Park, Jia ensures that the narrative irony becomes immediately apparent. “See the world without ever leaving Beijing,” an on-screen motto proclaims, as tourists and employees ride camels through the Pyramids of Giza, patrol on white horses through Roman ruins and take the elevator up the Eiffel Tower for sprawling panoramas of Beijing. The existence of such images in Jia’s film immediately creates the impression of artificiality, and also one of ironic cosmopolitan unity — Asia’s preeminent emerging superpower taking revered world landmarks and placing underwhelming replicas of them in the heart of its national capital.

This atmosphere of artificiality that pervades the film also lends it its methodical quality, as Jia establishes both a yearning for and a conscious escape from real life that forms the motives of the film’s characters. The film’s subtle partition into narratives — one of which features a well-placed series of animated sequences — is backed by titles like “Paris in the Beijing Suburb,” “Ulan Batoor Nights” and “Tokyo Story,” surfacing like products of the characters’ conscious attempts at ameliorating their own emptiness by seeking comfort in the far-away promise of another fabled world city.

To the extent that the film’s artificial microcosm creates these psychological conditions — fleeting shots of empty park trams and elevators, stagnant long takes of alienated couples standing under replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe — it creates a deep contrast with what Simmel described over a century ago as “the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence.”

The film’s protagonists, Taisheng and Xiao Tao, both hark from the rural inland abode of Shanxi, relocating to Beijing for the promises offered by a life in the city. When Taisheng’s old hometown friend visits him, he takes him on an informal tour of the park, pointing proudly at a replica of Manhattan over a large pond: “Look, The Twin Towers were bombed on September 11, but we still have them,” to which his friend nods admiringly. Here, Jia takes the supposedly edifying nature of the park — to enlighten a new generation of Chinese urban citizens on what the “world” supposedly looks like — and reproduces it as a detachment from the real world, an abstraction of time and space that borders on surrealism.

By weaving a tale about the frailty of life, relationships and human communication in an urban setting, Jia offers a simulacrum of contemporary China in The World — a character piece that doubles as a caustic condemnation of globalization and its dehumanizing effect on Chinese denizens. Some three decades separated from a Cultural Revolution that sputtered in its ambitious excess, Jia’s film suggests a capitalist revolution that is destined for the same ends.

After spending the entire film crystallizing the trials and tribulations of his characters, Jia ends The World with a denouement that refutes narrative logic; the freeze between the film’s two lovers transforms into a literal reality. The film cuts to black and we hear Tao and Taisheng whisper to each other, capturing the moral ambiguity of China’s new generation through concise, despairing final words.

Taisheng: Are we dead?
Xiao Tao: No. This is just the beginning.