By Brian Hu
In one of those rare but wonderful moments in which a movie review becomes as debated as the film itself, Tony Rayns's attack (Film Comment, Nov-Dec. 2004) on South Korean director Kim Ki-duk for being a hack filmmaker has shrouded his latest U.S. release 3-Iron with an aura of controversy and critical interest, that just could -- fingers crossed -- initiate intelligent conversation about the place of the Asian “film festival superstar” in the international stage, while getting people into theaters to support Asian filmmaking. Rayns's grievances are varied, but the one he unleashes upon 3-Iron is that it is a blatant copy of Tsai Ming-liang's 1994 Vive l'Amour -- both, he argues, using very few lines of dialogue, explore the relationships of urban 20 to 30-somethings who secretly and somewhat promiscuously inhabit the vacated apartments of others. Rather than argue the validity of his claims -- which would easily be biased by whichever direction one happens to lean toward concerning the love him/hate him director -- I want to use this opportunity to explore the relationship between “Tsai” and Asian art cinema in the global film festival imaginary.
When Asian art films enter the world of Western acceptance, the tendency is to locate them within certain strands of familiar Asian filmmaking. Thus, Hou Hsiao-hsien is a descendant of Mizoguchi or Ozu; Lou Ye's Suzhou River comes out of Wong Kar-wai; Infernal Affairs is the new John Woo film; Jia Zhang-ke and Lee Chang-dong derive from the Hou Hsiao-hsien tradition. Typically, this tendency toward genealogy is complimentary, as if to argue that the new film is worthy of its predecessors. For the most part, this practice has gone unchallenged and unquestioned despite the possibility that such a practice racializes the films in terms of a generic, stereotypical pan-Asianness rather than allowing for local specificities or political/economic positioning. Rayns's Kim/Tsai pairing is really of the same vein as the Ozu/Hou ones; only Rayns takes a negative approach, substituting “is reminiscent of” with “is a hack of.” With all the clamor between Kim fans and Kim detractors over the validity of Rayns's criticism, what's overlooked is the potential racial component of the pairing.
Granted, Rayns has been a long-time supporter of Asian cinema, and has been instrumental in promoting, subtitling, and programming films from Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, so I wouldn't accuse him of viewing these films and seeing simply a stereotypical “Asianness" --something I don't doubt happens all the time outside of Asia. In fact, if Rayns's comment elicits a critical debate over why the genealogical tendency exists, he will have done more to bring the problem to light than if we silently allowed it to go on without question.
Although there is a connection between Tsai and other Asian directors, we need to think more critically about why this is, rather than simply say Kim Ki-duk or Apichatpong Weerasethakul is “Tsai”-esque. First, Tsai is, if not a literal mentor, then a spiritual one, for many aspiring art film directors in East Asia, who take his style as a model for succeeding in the global art film market, or who are simply enamored by his aesthetics. At the literal level is Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai's leading actor, muse, and protégé, whose 2003 feature debut The Missing has been judged a “minor Tsai film” in a manner not dissimilar to Rayns's criticism of Kim. That Kim Ki-duk's style and themes are reminiscent of Tsai Ming-liang's could be more about just Kim being a hack -- Kim is building upon Tsai's achievements, and bonding with Tsai to form an unofficial aesthetic and thematic movement currently taking place in East Asia and spreading to other continents. Just as it would be ridiculous to say that Renoir is a wannabe Monet, we should observe the trends (as well as differences) in Asian art rather than antagonistically expect complete originality every time, as if we've all forgotten that when Vive l'Amour first appeared in 1994, it was labeled “Antonioni”-esque. Tsai Ming-liang has many fans in East Asia, directors included, so he's unconsciously forging ahead a cinematic movement that defies national boundaries, although not necessarily racial ones, and we need to be more sensitive to that possibility.
Second, Tsai's style has become a “language” legible to the film festival crowd, both West and East. Tsai has taught us how to read a certain brand of long takes, long shots, empty spaces, urban sounds, narrative minimalism, and quirky sexuality; filmmakers like Kim are simply adopting his filmic language to communicate their own ideas to audiences literate in that kind of expression. In an ideal avant-garde universe, every filmmaker would be expected to fashion a distinctive cinematic language, but for political, racial, and cultural reasons, we now know that's impossible, since our cultural baggage cannot be abandoned when we enter the movie theater. So why criticize a filmmaker, especially one from Asia, where there is already a Western tendency to think everything is too foreign to be comprehensible so it's hardly worth trying (see Lost in Translation), if he or she is trying to find ways to communicate and perhaps enlighten the viewer? 3-Iron adopts many of the Tsai signifiers (both visual, aural, and thematic) to communicate something very different from anything Tsai has ever done -- for example, the violence bubbling in upper-middle-class urban existence. While I personally don't think 3-Iron is even remotely as fascinating or emotionally wrenching as any of Tsai's films, I think he playfully makes use of familiar styles to create something fresh. My attitude toward this kind of appropriation reappeared when I saw Zhang Lu's 2003 film Tang Poetry as part of the UCLA Film/TV Archive's Mainland film series. The film had moments of overwhelming intensity, none of which I think I would have captured let alone appreciated if I hadn't seen a Tsai Ming-liang film before. The same goes for Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours and Gina Kim's Invisble Light, among many others, all of which would probably pass by the festival radar if it weren't for the Tsai connection.
It's clear that Rayns's attack on 3-Iron stems from his general dislike for Kim Ki-duk's films, which has never been much of a secret and which he is certainly entitled to holding. Kim's films, like most important films, tend to divide audiences sharply. So rather than dismissing Kim as a 50% rotten tomato, we should try to understand how it is that he communicates to us, and from there, what he has to say. I'm not naive enough to argue that we should “take Kim on his own terms” since no film or filmmaker exists in a vacuum. Instead, what are the terms in which filmmakers and critics position films together and what kinds of politics do they reveal?
Click here for APA's interview with Kim Ki-Duk