By APA Staff
On the occasion of the overwhelming critical and popular praise for Danny Boyle's cross-cultural digital cinema frenzy and feel-good film Slumdog Millionaire, APA has decided to look back on -- and forward to -- films that the artistic director of the Venice Film Festival Marco Mueller has dubbed, for better or for worse, "nomadic cinema."
While the phenomenon of filmmakers crossing national borders and industries has been in place since the beginning of cinema, the usual dramatic trajectory consists of filmmakers from various countries being claimed by Hollywood. Another way to narrate that plot is Western filmmakers pointing the lens to other national/cultural contexts only to Anglicise/Orientalise them, or at the very least use that context as exotic backdrop. I'm thinking of Boyle's own The Beach.
On the other hand, Western filmmakers working in the East may not be the first thing one thinks of upon hearing "nomadic cinema." Mueller's choice of the term "nomadic cinema" to describe films made by film makers in a linguistic/cultural/national environment different from their own is at the very least ironic. "Nomadic cinema" recalls terms such as "diasporic cinema," "exilic cinema," or "accented cinema," terms formulated to examine and contextualise histories of alternative film making practices specifically by independent minority film makers working in the West.
Here's where Slumdog Millionaire comes romping in -- to revise the stakes and terms, and to make us forget (or forgive) The Beach. As Variety writers Nick Vivarelli and Ali Jaafar have noted, films like Slumdog Millionaire interact more with and give more cinematic space to the locals, locales, and/or their languages in a way that signifies more than ever filmmaking's global, transnational, cross-cultural (or whatever you want to call it) impulses. Vivarelli and Jaafar rightly contrast the ever increasing practice of an interaction of languages, locations, and stories from the so-called "euro-puddings" of previous decades, which were international co-productions consisting of an international cast, but whose "internationalism" was lined by Hollywood-speak, making for some awkward posturing in the name of the "transnational." As Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami preps to makes his first English-language film, he shares a "yes, we can" comment that "cross-country, cross-boundary films have a way of overcoming cultural obstacles and gaps."
"Overcome" may be overdoing it, though. There's always someone to pan something: if not "national" enough, then not "transnational" enough. It's a given that the films below can be read in a number of problematic ways. Easy enough to compare these films against Slumdog Millionaire's example and find them contradictory or lacking in one aspect or another. But another given is that some or most of them are not well-known outside of art house/festival circuits -- a point that shows "nomadic cinema" is older than Mueller, Vivarelli or Jafar imply, the difference being that they're now no longer quickly written off as esoteric, and that there are acknowledged other worlds beyond Hollywood-centered representations.
That they're not well known or little seen also expresses how we're dealing with filmmaking practices in different languages, where maybe the amount or choice of a certain language spoken against another is calculated to navigate through potential problems with budget, festival submission acceptance, award nominations, classification for distribution/exhibition, and overall commercial value. If the latter was the main criteria for this list, we could've then easily chosen a host of Hollywood titles that take place imaginatively and cinematically in Asia. But then we'd miss the whole point of Slumdog Millionaire's significance as a critical and popular knockout. Not bad for a film that's approximately 28% Hindi. At the very least, this list demonstrates how dated a concept is the "Best Foreign Language" category. Or the singularity of the director credit, which could arguably be extended to the interpreters/translators that fall through the cracks of any multi-lingual, cross-country films -- hence Boyle credits Loveleen Tandan as co-director. In this context, it doesn't hurt to recall Jean-Luc Godard's quadrilingual Contempt (1963), which among other things is nothing if not both a parody and material reality of "euro-pudding" as well as "nomadic cinema." --Rowena Aquino
The River
Jean Renoir, 1951
The film has several things going against it: a somewhat stilted cast, a voiceover that smacks of the ethnographic, a plot of remembering one's first love that easily unmasks itself as trite -- all of which are results of a very limited budget. But Renoir manages to overcome these elements to present a meditative, cyclical presentation of a rural Bengal that verges on the experimental. The documentary-like sequences of Indian rituals and lifestyles that Renoir inserts within the tedious plot of an English family in the Bengali countryside; the dream sequence with the dancer Radha performing during a wedding ceremony; her character Melanie (echoing Radha's own Indian-English identity) addressing the taboo of being in love with a Westerner; Renoir's decision to do away with a film soundtrack in preference to the Indian music he discovered -- all of this creates seismic ripples that express an attempt to understand the culture at hand and do away with the plot. Perhaps most significantly, Satyajit Ray was a consultant; The River's focus on the everyday and the complex relation between people and the land look forward to Ray's Apu trilogy.
The Saga of Anatahan
Josef von Sternberg, 1953
It's little known that von Sternberg's last film was made in Japan in 1952-1953, in the wake of the Allied Occupation. Based on a well-known news report by one of the survivors stranded on the Pacific island of Anatahan in 1944, who refused to believe in Japan's defeat until 1951, the film chronicles the haunting communal life of more than ten isolated Japanese men and one Japanese woman on the tropical island, and their desires for survival and the power of nostalgia for home. Shot entirely on the studio set in Kyoto with Japanese crew and cast and two translators by his side, Sternberg struggled but enjoyed authorial control over every aspect of production for the first time in years since his glorious days in Paramount in the 1930s. The highly controversial feature was, however, a commercial/critical failure. Japanese audiences were perplexed by Sternberg's "anthropological" distant voice narrating/commenting on various Japanese customs and the peculiar yet traumatic war-time event. Producer Kawakita Nagamasa replaced Sternberg's voice with a Japanese one, while Sternberg's deep attachment to the project and Japan led him to re-edit the film later. The film fell into deep obscurity after his death in 1969, but has begun to receive critical attention as emblematic of Sternberg's tireless quest for artistic freedom.
Hiroshima, mon Amour
Alain Resnais, 1959
At one point in the film, the nameless male character asks the equally nameless female character if the film of which she's a part is a French film. She replies, "No, international..." An apt introduction to this visually stunning, and indeed international film. And highly ambitious: a complex attempt to represent the complex twining of history and autobiography. In the case of these lovers spawned from the mind of Marguerite Duras (representing herself the complicated meeting of East and West), their individual stories and coming together cut across France and Japan, before and after the war, through archival and staged footage of fractured postwar nuclear lives. The film is mainly in French, but the crew was bi-partite: a French crew for the French portion, and a Japanese crew for the Japanese portion, neither of which apparently communicated with the other for continuity's sake. Which would've defeated the whole purpose, as this film is about rupture and fragmentation, visually and thematically. That Japanese actor Okada Eiji learned his French lines phonetically underlines best this point.
Shakespeare Wallah
James Ivory, 1965
Not exactly the greatest Merchant/Ivory film made in India, but one of the earliest. It's also the one time that Satyajit Ray as film composer joined the triumvirate of producer Ismail Merchant, Ivory, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Declaring its place within a "nomadic cinema," the actual Kendal family acting troupe portrays its itinerant life with English and Indian colleagues traveling around India to stage performances. Things become melodramatic when daughter Lizzie and Sanju fall in love offstage. But the problem is more Bollywood actress Manjula as Lizzie's rival, than the fact that one's English and the other Indian. Ultimately their different lives/desires outside of each other, and the stage/film contrast, stand for the passing of a colonial India to a post-independent India. Stereotypes still exist, and there's even a sequence where the English characters voice their nostalgia for the colonial. But that the father, Mr. Buckingham, asks "Why are we here?" and that Lizzie doesn't miss "home" because she's never been there express the conflicted nature of belonging and should count for something.
Chung Kuo -- Cina
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1972
Between his globe-trotting filmmaking in England, the U.S., and Spain, Antonioni made an extensive stop in the People's Republic of China to make this little-seen documentary at the request of the Chinese government and produced by Italy's state-owned RAI. At a time when little visual evidence of -- let alone invitation to film -- the PRC existed outside the country, even before Nixon made his visit to China Antonioni was allowed to film for 5 weeks in specific areas, including Suzhou, Henan, Shanghai, and Beijing. Though politically "neutral" and characterised by a nondescript voiceover, slow pans, and wide shots, the film was later banned by the Chinese government for articulating negative aspects of the country. "Negative" is certainly relative, but for detractors and supporters alike, its importance as a visual record of the PRC -- during the Cultural Revolution, to boot -- is undeniable.
Sans Soleil
Chris Marker, 1982
This essay film is often described as an alien globe-trotter, much like the film maker himself. But it's more a collaboration of voices/images/memories, across various continents, helmed by Marker. A woman's voiceover, soft and familiar (unlike the stiff-sounding English version), reads the letters of Sandor Krasna -- actually Marker's fictional counterpart -- from Iceland, Guinea-Bissau, the U.S., and Japan. Intermixed with Marker's documentary footage are video game designer Yamaneko Hayao's images running through a synthesizer, which allows images to be no longer anything other than just that: images. But Sans Soleil is far from being "image for image's sake." If Sans Soleil is a globe-trotter, it's also a time-traveler: though focused mainly on Japan, it tackles political history (Amilcar Cabral, kamikaze pilots), literary history (Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book), and cinematic history (Marker's obsession with Vertigo) among other things, and demonstrates Marker's wonderful revision of cinema verité to cine, ma verité ("cinema, my truth").
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Paul Schrader, 1985
It's an understatement that the pairing of director Paul Schrader and postwar Japanese writer Mishima Yukio can't be more fitting. From the cacophonic beginning of Philip Glass's music that opens the film, you know you've entered a nearly hyperbolic world of drama, violence, and spectacle, book-ended by the institutions of military and masculinity. Mishima wouldn't have had it any other way. An incredibly rich and multilayered production in its detail, collaboration, and interpretation that, regardless of your problems with the film, puts to shame other attempts at biopics of figures different from one's own national/cultural context. This choice is also a tribute to the late Japanese actor Ogata Ken, who died two months ago.
The Last Emperor
Bernardo Bertolucci, 1989
Bertolucci's English-language, Oscar-winning epic is typically talked about either as a masterpiece of cinematic scale, or as the West's Orientalist fantasy of the East's primitive ways. But thinking about it as a nomadic film helps us consider more productive possibilities of cross-cultural cinematic encounters. One is Jonathan Rosenbaum's reading of the film: that Bertolucci utilizes an outsider to Chinese history (Pu Yi -- China's "last emperor") to narrate his own outsider status in China. Another is to think of the film's politics as an interpretation not of Chinese political history, but of Europe's (or perhaps Bertolucci's) take on Communism. Most important is that The Last Emperor is, despite what some might claim, an important entry in the canon of Chinese cinema because it set the scene for such fifth generation period pieces as Red Sorghum, Raise the Lantern, Ju Dou, and Farewell My Concubine to be distributed and comprehensible in the West. The Last Emperor even includes a brief role by noted Chinese director Chen Kaige, cast while he was studying in New York -- adding further to the multi-directional nomadism the film represents.
Firefly Dreams
John Williams, 2001
You mean the Star Wars film composer? No. More like a Welshman expatriate based in Japan. Williams' debut film is surprisingly assured in its handling of the city-vs.-countryside context and multi-generational gap between 17 year-old city girl Naomi and 80-something relative Koide-san. Their eventual bond despite the grace period of indifference on Naomi's part is surely predictable. But their eventual bond quietly gives way to dealing with issues such as family (Naomi's mother sends her to the countryside for her rowdy city-girl behaviour) and memory (Koide-san demonstrates the onset of Alzheimer's disease) in the post-bubble economy. Its all-Japanese cast, oh-so-delicate pacing, and intimate look at the colliding experiences of Naomi and Koide-san have in fact contributed to its being dubbed a "Japanese" film that happens to have been directed by a non-Japanese director.
Tokyo! -- "Interior Design" segment
Michel Gondry, 2008
The tribulations of finding one's own place in the world -- or in this case, Tokyo.
compiled Rowena Aquino, Brian Hu, and Sachiko Mizuno