This March, the Silver Lake Film Festival programmed some of the best new Asian cinema you can't see anywhere else. So where were the audiences?
Last year, I prematurely declared that there were no international film festivals in the Los Angeles area that presented a decent slate of Asian films that audiences couldn't see anywhere else. At the top of my hit list were the AFI Festival, the Newport Beach Film Festival, and to a lesser extent, the Los Angeles Film Festival, all of which programmed Asian films that would eventually receive theatrical or video distribution, or esoteric films that seemed like leftovers from an international film party that never made a stop in L.A.
Well, as it turns out, 2005 didn't see a new edition of the Silver Lake Film Festival, and my ignorance of the mini-event exposes the fact that I really haven't been immersed in the L.A. festival scene for that long. In 2006, I know better. This year's Silver Lake Festival had four crowning programs: a retrospective of independent filmmaker Harry Nilsson (recipient of this year's Filmmaker of the Year Award), a series entitled “New Croatian Films” (curated by Ziggy Mrkich, director of the Dubrovnick International Film Festival), a program of films from the Armenian diaspora, and the awesome Fusion Asian Cinema sidebar. Curated by Erika Kao-Haley, the Fusion Asian Cinema series is a “fusion” not of east-west, but of various Asian cinematic cultures. What impressed me most about the series is how it seemed to surpass all similar Asian film sidebars (see APA's Santa Barbara coverage) by seemingly catering to no single group. By group, I mean nationality (here are films from India, China, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, France, Sri Lanka) as well as audience (despite the word “cult” in much of the festival literature, relatively few of the films fall under that problematic banner). Festivals typically pigeonhole not only Asian films, but Asian film audiences; this year's “Fusion Asian Cinema” did neither.
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Song Il-Gon's "The Magicians". |
The range of filmmakers represented was also impressive. I hate to perpetuate an Andrew Sarris-type hierarchy of auteurs, but such a hierarchy definitely exists in the film festival world, with upper-tier festival superstars (Zhang Yimou, Takeshi Kitano, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Park Chan-wook, etc.), mid-level auteurs (Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Hong Sang-soo, the Pang Brothers, Hideo Nakata, etc.), and the lower-profile filmmakers (up-and-comers and filmmakers not represented by one of the major sales agents). I don't describe these approximate "circles" (to borrow Sarris again) of filmmakers to create hierarchies of talent (in fact, brilliant filmmakers are found in all three), but to describe the disparate ways foreign filmmakers are categorized, promoted, and pitched by film festivals. For example, a new Zhang Yimou film is considered an event, Ratanaruang is pitched as a rising star, while the lower-profile filmmakers are rarely mentioned by name in the program notes.
Since Asian cinema tends to be on the fringes of most international festivals (Silver Lake included), most festivals program films by directors in the first and third categories. Bluntly, the superstars bring the crowds; the up-and-comers fill out unofficial or official nationality quotas. Silver Lake's Fusion Asian Cinema programmed directors from all three, which demonstrates the extent to which selling the festival was less important than simply coming up with a diverse slate of quality films. In the first category were Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Olivier Assayas, in the second were Shinya Tsukamoto and Cui Zi-en, and in the third were Song Il-gong, Royston Tan, and other noteworthy up-and-comers.
The Fusion Asian Cinema series took place over a single weekend at small venues in Little Tokyo. Saturday featured the Bollywood thriller Ek Ajnabee, the only new film in the series (if not the entire festival) that has already received an American theatrical release, a pair of "cult"-type South-Korean films (Antarctic Journal and Red Eye), and the genius thematic pairing of Taiwan's Magical Wash Machine and Assayas's Clean. Sunday featured several important Asian documentary projects: Yen Lan-chuan and Juang Yi-tseng's popular The Last Rice Farmer (a.k.a. Let it Be), the peace-seeking Japanese/Korean co-production Annyong Sayonara, maverick Cui Zi-en's Night Scene, which combines fiction and non-fiction to depict the struggles of gay male prostitutes, and Jeevika, a selection of documentary shorts from the South-Asian Livelihood Documentary Festival. Also on Sunday was the spectacular collection of three digital shorts commissioned by the Jeonju International Film Festival.
As impressive as the features were, this is one of those rare festivals where the short films eclipsed the features not only in content but in hype. Royston Tan's short film Cut is a musical fuck-you to the Singapore Board of Film Censors, the organization responsible for slicing his unforgettable 2003 feature debut 15, which made the then-27-year-old an idol in the film festival and Asian indie world. The first half is a full-out comic castigation of Amy Chua, director of media content at Singapore's Media Development Authority, while the second half breaks out in an ironic Tsai Ming-liang style musical extravaganza exploding with confetti and back-up dancers flashing the red and white of the Singapore flag. Robin Lee's Magical Wash Machine is a world away from the long takes and long shots which have made Taiwanese cinema famous. Instead, it is whimsical a la Amelie, employing digital effects to capture the floating imagination and fleeting sensations of a Taipei dreamer.
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Tsukamoto Shinya's "Haze". |
But it is the Jeonju digital shorts that will stick with me the longest. Shinya Tsukamoto (whose 1988 cine-attack Tetsuo is an indescribable object of eternal cult worship) comes full-force with Haze, a visceral, full-bodied declaration of war on the festival audience, featuring truly maniacal (even musical) chords made by the sound of teeth grinding against metal. Part Cube, part Cronenberg, Haze takes bodily paranoia to sadistic lengths. Song Il-gong (Flower Island, Git) depicts the memories and longings of several friends across several time frames in a single 40-minute shot. Song's ambitions may outweigh the emotional punch, but it shows the acclaimed young director finding an original method to convey a lifetime of longing in what seems to be a single gasp of air. As per the instructions of the Jeonju commission, both directors innovatively use the digital medium to explore new directions; in the first case, the small cameras allow the director to shoot in cramped spaces, and in the second case, digital storage allows Song to shoot beyond the traditional time constraints.
However, both of these innovations have been seen before; before digital, 16mm, Super-8, and video have given artists greater mobility, while Mike Figgis and Alexander Sokurov have used digital's longer capacity to shoot entire features in one take, with more impressive results. It is Apichatpong Weerasethakul who truly and masterfully takes the Jeonju challenge in bizarre and exciting directions. His 42-minute Worldly Desire, like the director's Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours uses the forest as setting for spiritual encounters and trysts. Except this time, the love affair is between Weerasethakul and the digital camera; he's absolutely transfixed by its potentials, and as the audience, so are we. In an unforgettable scene, we hear the filmmaker asking his crew about the shot he's shooting (and we're seeing), and they joke about its poor composition. But he leaves the camera on, laughing off such outdated rules for outdated cinematic mediums. The accomplishment though is that the shots are in fact beautiful, albeit in unprecedented ways. The de-saturation of digital lacks the warmth of celluloid, but as shot by Weerasethakul, it gives the forest an other-worldly varnish, as if there's a joyous flip-side to our universe if we only had the eye (and the camera) to see in new ways. There's something truly Bazanian about that experience: the camera is revelatory to the point of religious, magical, or godly capabilities. I especially enjoyed the framing of the forest and the film crew within it. In nearly all such shots, Weerasethakul splits the frame in half vertically, such that the top half is comprised of branches and tree-tops, while the humans -- in long shot -- fill out the bottom, while usually partially obstructed by tree-trunks and bushes. The people sit in trees and their gaudy colored shirts look like colored plumage in the midst of the jungle. Like animals, they perch waiting, relaxing. As in Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours, the jungle in Worldly Desire is the primordial soup of life and love. For Weerasethakul and his fans, it is also the setting of cinematic discovery and the aesthetic epiphany.
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Nobuo Nakagawa's "Mansion of the Ghost Cat." |
I haven't yet mentioned Friday's program, a four-film introduction to Japanese horror pioneer Nobuo Nakagawa, whose Mansion of the Ghost Cat is one of the most gratifying works of the genre I have ever seen. Campier than Masaki Kobayashi, Nakagawa's films define Japanese horror of the 1950s and '60s. Hopefully, with efforts like the Fusion Asian Cinema's retrospective, Nakagawa's films will start seeing the light of day on American video shelves so horror fans can start staring gleefully into the blackness of hell.
Briefly, an important criticism of the Fusion Asian Cinema series. The program selections were incredible, but the promotion and venue-selection were not. Housed away at the inaccessible Japan America Theater and National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo -- while the main portion of the festival took place at Hollywood's glitzy Arclight Theatre -- the Fusion Asian Cinema didn't stand a chance in terms of audience turnout. The films that I saw on Sunday – as amazing as they were – weren't viewed by more than a dozen people at a time, some of which I believe were volunteers working the festival. It is a severe irresponsibility for the Silver Lake Festival to program such an amazing set of films and then shove them away into another corner of town, while not publicizing the series online or elsewhere until literally two weeks before the festival's start. If that's the case, I'd wish the Silver Lake coordinators let these films make their L.A. premieres at other local festivals, although if history repeats itself, there's no guarantee we'd see them there either.