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.

Illusions of Past Lives

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)

Distant Voices, Still Lives

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.

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All Quiet on the Eastern Front

With the monumental City of Life and Death, Lu Chuan crafts an affecting canvas of wartime brutality

David Liu | 22 September 2011

Shells fly, walls crumble and bodies fall in the first 25 minutes of City of Life and Death, Lu Chuan’s monumental account of the Japanese occupation of Nanjing in 1937. Shot in stately chiaroscuro, the sequence recalls the scope of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica: Chaos reigns as a once-proud national capital falls victim to the vagaries of war. Whirling in and out of ruined buildings, Lu’s wide-angle compositions capture Nanjing in its final hours of resistance with uncompromising veracity.

What ensues is a film that confronts the darkest depths of the human condition. After quelling the final regiments of Chinese freedom fighters, the Japanese soldiers engage in a six-week period of wanton debauchery that would take hundreds of thousands of lives. Civilians are ordered to dig their own graves, women are enlisted into makeshift brothels and pleas for peace fall on deaf ears.

It’s a descent into madness painstakingly orchestrated by writer-director Lu, whose previous two films — 2002’s darkly comedic The Missing Gun, 2004’s sparse, ruminative Kekexili: Mountain Patrol — have established him as one of China’s most versatile contemporary auteurs.

Read more at dailycal.org

Of Time and the City

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, New York City filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee crafted vivid tributes to a wounded metropolis.

David Liu | 8 September 2011

Fifteen months after the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, New York City was reborn in glorious fashion on celluloid.

It took a pair of feature films from two of the city’s most influential filmmakers to do it. The first, Queens native Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, framed a father-son revenge saga around immigrant life in Civil War-era New York and the 1863 draft riots. The second, Brooklyn resident Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, followed a convicted drug dealer as he navigates post-9/11 New York City before serving a seven-year prison sentence.

Set 140 years apart, the films coalesced remarkably in their portrayals of the turbulent divisions shared between the city’s past and present.

Read more at dailycal.org