Aventurina King

Only two hours after I began turning the pages of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking did I finally manage to tear my nose from its print and wonder why it had absorbed me so completely.  Unlike a detective story, it has no trail of clues that shimmer with the promise of an answer.  Nor does it possess the cold hot shower of serenity and terror that tugs forward crime stories.  Instead, Didion bullets the main event, her husband and companion writer John Dunne’s December 30^th 2004 fatal heart attack, in a small section of her first chapter.  There is no mystery or suspense involved.  Just as her daughter Quintanna’s hospitalization from December 25^th 2004 on, appears and disappears throughout in factual whiffs. The major part of the work interweaves Didion’s thoughts and actions over 2005, with her analysis of them. 

What turns those pages then?  Is it the catharsis that addicts Greek tragedy-goers?  Or is it the fascination of abomination that turns the heads of drivers when they pass a road-accident and sends them crashing into the car in front of them?  No, Didion does not dwell on the events that changed her life.  Never does she dive into an adjective and detail-heavy account of nervous break downs or unstoppable tear ducts.

Her grief cannot be measured in our everyday emotions: "grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it […] we might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return".  Her writing does not fold in about herself.  Instead she places herself in a crowd of widows; in the statistics of science and literature.  Her citations of media and of such scientists as Freud and Emily Klein comfortingly re-evaluate her actions and thoughts of 2005 as various symptoms of grief.

After her husband’s death, she refuses to throw out his shoes in case he might come back.  It is the magical thinking of the title.  It is also the denial of death which she likens to that of a deceased nineteen-year-old’s mother on an HBO documentary.   She slices the flow of her year’s meager accomplishments and bitter-sweet flashbacks with italicized reminders that they are mere manifestations of grief.  "I tell you that I shall not live two days " harkens back to a literary passage which exemplifies how the dying sense their death beforehand.  The italicized sentence intrudes when she remembers her husband insisted on going to Paris just before that fatal New Year’s Eve.

Didion leaves the Goethe-like pouring of emotions to frequent citations of such poets as Auden, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins—“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.”  It is as though she deems herself less-worthy of a writer to struggle with the indescribable experience of death.

But Didion’s writing is superb and quasi single-handedly abracadabras her work into a page-turner.   She captivates by foiling sharp, poignant sentences describing events—“John was talking, then he wasn’t”—with the mellifluous poetry of her flashbacks—"It was an effect of light: quick sunlight dappling, yellow leaves falling […], a shower of gold, spangled, very fast, a falling of the bright."  

These poetic descriptions of an irretrievable past often move to tears.  But that is not the purpose of The Year of Magical Thinking, nor does it raise Joan Didion as a heroic model for stoicism and good-dealing with grief.  Instead, the work heightens the present’s worth and the urgency of embracing it fully.   Tragedy destroys, but even grief does not erase the beauty of memories.  Didion has proved this in her masterpiece.

 

The Chinese word for film is dianying, literally, electric shadow.  No better image could suit Chinese film as it has been leashed to its countries governmental policies as tightly as a shadow to its lamp post.  If American cinema is a precarious balance of money and art then its Chinese counterpart is the doll that can perform as long as it obeys its ventriloquist government.

Starting today, the Lincoln Center's "100 years of Chinese Cinema" provides an enlightening, varied retrospective of thirty two films that have remained high art despite being made within political restrictions.

The event celebrates the 100^th year after the first Chinese film, The Battle of Dingjushan, an adaptation from a Chinese opera.  But the retrospective opens with Wu Yonggang's Goddess (1934), this writer's favorite silent piece, as though to nail the origin of Chinese film in leftist cinema.   It stars diva Ruan Lingyu as a prostitute roaming the streets of Shanghai's flashing night district, striving to offer her baby son an honorable existence.   Ruan Lingyu incarnates the awing glamour of Marlene Dietrich or Ava Gardner without letting it pale the emotional depth of her performance.

Ruan Lingyu's male equivalent, actor Zhao Dan stars in the retrospective's Crossroads, another example of Shanghai's leftist cinema before the1938 Japanese invasion.  Zhao enacts an impetuous graduate reduced to a patched-shirt proof reader who falls in love with his shrewish neighbor.   Later, he becomes a journalist and champions the cause of the factory workers, at which point the love story is carelessly dropped, a mere prop for the film's political message.

There is a surprisingly fixed conjunction between the communist party's increase in power and its ebb on screen.  It is replaced by fervent patriotism - romance with the communist party.  In 1970's Red Detachment of Woman, affection sprouts between Chunghua, a land-lord's slave and the party member that delivers her and encourages her to join the army against the vampire-faced Nationalists.   But the prolonged glances and romantic violins turn out to be symptoms of a quasi-religious admiration for the man's accomplishments and more particularly for his membership in the party.  After an arduous application process (unlike contemporary China’s straight-forward genealogically based selection), Chunghua's acceptance in the party ends the movie.

For all its transparently communist screenplay, the scenic backdrop's bombastic explosions and melodramatic violin bursts strangely echoes Hollywood 's Independence Day or Pearl Harbor.

The retrospective is curated by Ying Zhu and Richard Peña, a professor of the Columbia University film department who taught Chinese film last spring semester.   Professor Peña, a trudging encyclopedia of cinema, paced through his lectures with a bright smile, coaxing out the flow of information with dramatic gestures and trailing "whatever"s.   Many of the films screened in this class have been incorporated into the retrospective's repertory.

I remember his arm gestures were a notch more theatrical when he introduced 1986's Yellow Earth.   Chinese film history is divided into the generations of its filmmakers.  The first and second generation turned out Shanghai's leftist cinema, the third and fourth labored on socialist realism films such as Red Detachment of Women.   Yellow Earth is the first film of the fifth generation, the first filmmakers to attend film school after the cultural revolution’s crack down.   Directed by Chen Kaige (Farewell my Concubine) and photographed by Zhang Yimou, the director of Raise the Red Lantern, Hero and House of the Flying Daggers, Yellow Earth rejects socialist realism's straight-forward plot and glorified party officials.

In the film, a party member meanders on barren mountain slopes to collect their inhabitants folk tunes and graft communist lyrics on them.   During his mission, he stays with a wrinkled old man whose daughter is the pre-destined victim of an arranged marriage.  The party member eventually leaves, but before doing so, promises the girl he will return in time to prevent her marriage and enroll her in the communist liberation army.   The movie ends on a dream-like sequence in which the villagers kowtow before the rain God.  The reality of the party member's return remains doubtful.

Yellow Earth combines many characteristics of later fifth generation cinema from man-dwarfing landscape stills—Zhang Yimou's Hero—to magical realism—Chen Kaige's Life on a String. 

Regrettably, very few fifth generation films are featured in the retrospective even though they are milestones of Chinese cinema.   Because of their politically ambiguous content, many were refused distribution inside the country.  Fifth generation film directors were responsible for the international premiere of Chinese film.   Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum was the first chinese film to be awarded an international film prize, for instance, the Golden Berlin Bear.

The retrospective largely jumps over Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, the two most famous directors of China.  It stops to salvage Yimou's widely recognized masterpiece To Live, a three hour epic reconstruction of a couple's struggle to survive through China’s drumroll of revolutions from the 1930's onto the 1950s and out of the cultural revolution.   It was awarded the Golden Palm at the Cannes film festival.

Because of his international exposure and the recent blockbusters Hero and the House of the Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou has often been accused of catering to foreign audiences with aesthetic stereotypes of Chinese customs and people.

In contrast, the rising sixth generation focuses on a no-fantasy contemporary China.  Featured in the retrospective, Jia Zhangke's Platform (2000) tracks a resource-less performing troupe across the desolate countryside.  Its long takes and medium shots that shroud facial features in their distance increase the documentary feel of the film.   Again, the retrospective passes by other masterpieces of the sixth generation.  Lou Ye's Suzhou River creates the reality feel by elegantly bleeding tacky nylon lighting onto the grunge of the Shanghai streets.  Jia Zhangke's The World is an insidious critique of Chinese citizens’ dead-end lives amid the shimmering colors of a theme park just outside of Beijing.

Platform was banned from distribution in China.  Four years later, The World's subtle political critique breezed through and even pleased the scrutiny of the communist board.  The shadows are no longer tied down as tightly.   Today, Chinese films can be non-political or even subtly rebellious like The World.  But if communist party officials have failed to get the film's message, what portion of the rest of the Chinese population will?   Chinese film may one day be completely unleashed, this retrospective is an invaluable opportunity for New Yorkers to imagine if the mindset of the Chinese people will be prepared to receive it.

Director Zhang Yimou's ballet Raise the Red Lantern is adapted from the film of the same name.  Should the ballet have kept the name?  As the plot on stage progresses, the original screenplay is like a father left behind on the road: its outlines gradually blur and efface themselves in the landscape.  How is the screenplay betrayed and for what reasons?

In the film, the heroin does fall in love with a young man, but he is the son of her husband.  They give each other a minimal dose of longing glances but chicken out from action.  Instead, the third preceding wife, has an affair with her doctor.  The heroin is not raped by her husband on her first night at the palace.  He is drawn away by the third wife and she more than willingly complies during the rest of the film. 

Both on stage and on screen, the heroin is a student.  On screen, this component is the most interesting point of the film.  She is educated and initially refuses to get pulled into the squirmishes of the other three wives who claw for the husband's attention.  But gradually, her highbrow attitude is corrupted by the feudal marriage system and she decides to champion it, pretending she is pregnant to get the exclusive favors of the husband.  She is successful until she is discovered.  This psychological dimension is wiped out in the ballet, instead, she remains outside of the squabble (the three minus one other wives high kick each other alone on the stage) and dives in for the loving opera actor.

How much of these changes can be attributed to the transition from film into a ballet (dance is a medium which cannot articulate as complex conceptions as words can)?  How much of it can be attributed to changes in the mentality of the director Zhang Yimou (supposing he is the one responsible for the plot changes) and his slide from conceptual to commercial mode of production? (his last two block busters "hero" and  "house of the flying daggers" point in that direction)

A lot of the changes come through molding the screenplay for a different medium.  The first wife is wiped off, she has no active role in the film and her presence on stage would be superfluous.  The love story with the opera actor adds the possiblity of zipping in resplendant silk robes and diamond headwear along with spear fights and kungfu jumps on stage.  The love story is also necessary from a choreographical point of view.  All the aestheticism of the slow motion portes, sensual leg lifts and arabesques around the man's waist, the body's rolling over one another, would be absent.  These moves are crowd pleasers, the equivalent of a bare leg here and there in 1940s post code american musicals, and a plus in a production that wants itself commercial. 

Most of the film's elements--the plot of the second wife for power, the third wife's love affair, the heroin's insanity--are rubbed out to leave the space for a simplified ballet plot.  There is one complicating scene added in though.  That is the rape.  A ballet rape is a challenge to depict.  The dancing is fluid, yet rape requires violence, aggressivity (without mentioning the act itself a no-no for the stage).  So why go to the trouble of including it?  It demonizes the husband, pushes him over completely to the dark side.  Whereas in the film at times he displayed confusing benevolence.  The rape's complication carves a clear divide between evil and good and erases the film's middle ground shades of grey.

Why does the second wife die for denouncing the heroin and her lover?  Is it to avoid the guilty simplicity of a black/white plot, one where the baddies triumph and the goodies die?  Something a tad bit obscure had to be placed in the end to make up for the screenplay's erased psychological complexities.

Zhang Yimou must be mad, either that or he doesn't understand the word "ballet".  In a ballet, the female dancers wear tight white tutus, not colorful qipaos or silk robes with water sleaves that leap into the air.  In a ballet, gracefulness occurs on one restrained portion of the stage or cloned over a larger space, there are not chaotic split kicks and staggering pirouettes all over the place.  There are no chinese opera characters on stage, none of their soaring squeels and spear fights.  There are no percussionists clanking away or melancholy voice of an erhu floating over the beats.  Characters do not shred red lanterns, paper windows or flip over tables and other characters.

Zhang Yimou has all that and more in the ballet staging of his award winning film "raise the red lantern".  So what is it?  A ballet?  No much more: it's a ballet con chinese opera con chinese film. 

The plot of yimou's original film is slightly visible in the ballet as though through the floating gauze of the costumes.  In the film, a young school-girl is force-married to a rich old shadow whose personnality is contained entirely within his voice, we never see his face.  During her pouting and boring days wading around her sumptuous cage, she discovers her husband's third wife is having an affair.  She pretends to be pregnant in order to attract his attention, is uncovered by the second wife and in a drunk fit uncovers the third wife.  The third wife is exectued, the protagonist goes mad pacing around her room bumping into the windows indefinitely.

In the ballet, the evil husband is a dancing cutie, a long black beard is pasted on to his chin and when he isn't thrusting one of his wives bodies in the air, he runs his two fingers down its strands.  The night of her arrival, he rapes her.

How do you depict a rape in a ballet?  Exactly the same as you depict it in the movies, that is in Zhang Yimou's movies.  The lens swerves away from the steaming couple and films some wind beating trees or pouring red silk.  On stage, a shower of red silk flies over the scrambling couple.  Silence as the sea of silk settles down on the two figures.  She peeps her head out and claws at the fabric drawing its abundance around her tiny frame. 

The day after, she falls in love with an opera dancer of her husband's palace.  The second wife stretches her hand out right to her finger tips and points at their entertwined arabesques behind a dwarfing transparent panel.  All three of them are thrown into jail.  Thousands of pirouettes, stretches, crawling and portes later, their bodies are criss crossed over each other, diamonds of paper shower down and ignite their figures.

Can there be too much beauty, too much gracefulness?  Yes there can be and I won't settle for anything under overdose now.

After a frantic camera in You Hua Hao Hao Shuo, Zhang Yimou has reverted back to the stone-steady shot in his following The Road Home and Not One Less.  The plots too, have steadied, adopting the pace of a winter garden snail.  Nothing happens.  Not nothing, surely there must be something to drag us through the 2 or so hours of each film. 
Yes, in the first one there is love.  Love that grows from a distance between village lolita Zhang Ziyi and the new teacher in town.  Out in the middle of nowhere, they spend their time smiling and spying at each other accross endless wheat fields, through thickets and the weak resistance of the jolly village crowd: "you are a villager, he is from the city, you two were not meant to be" ziyi's blind mother's words have no more effect on her than a slap with a feather. 
It is love at first sight.  From that point of view, not much to mold a thriller out of.  They have to be separated at one point, just for the sake of suspense.  And so it is, the teacher must return to the city and report to the communist government, a regrettable incident that makes ziyi fall sick.  But nothing comes of it later, she is cured as soon as she hears her lover's voice ringing out grammar lessons accross the prairie.  The purpose of this masquerade is not to cloud the city's communist government with bad vibes (this is a chinese mainland film).  It is to have an excuse to put us through endlessly fading picturesque vistas of ziyi's tiny black figure gulped over by the white storm.

After a series of big budget, prize winning movies, Zhang Yimou finally really dazzles in the comic, french avant-garde con documentary-looking "you hua hao hao shuo".  The screenplay, like the camera jumps all over the place.  In the first scene, the lens jogs then leaps along side Quqiang as he chases after his beloved An Hong.  He blocks her escape route off in a bus and she reminds him unceremoniously that she has dumped him a long time ago.  Unconvinced, he follows her to her grimy apartment complex and pays various street squatters (one of which enacted by director Zhang Yimou) to yell out what end up being inanities to her window.  Take the simple phrase "an hong, I miss you so much I can't sleep", the illiterate middle man transforms it into "an hong, I miss you so much i can sleep" "an hong, i don t miss you and i can't sleep" "an hong, i miss you so much i want to sleep".

Speech, or the inherent mysteriousness of speech is the theme and the motor of the plot.  How can you understand someone through their conversation?  Here, the answer is you can't.  The beloved pest, gives in, then on a whim, gives him out again to the streets where he is beaten up by her blinged-up boyfriend.  Enraged, he throws the labtop of some poor passer by at his aggressors.  The labtop breaks, the poor passer by, a measly intellectual that recites incomprehensible proverbs at every turn, demands reparation from the hospitalized Quqiang.  Quqiang just wants to cut his aggressor's hand--it must be the right hand--off.
Both, unaware of each other's intentions, together, sollicit a rendez-vous from the boyfriend in a kitchy hybrid of a karaoke and a restaurant.  He will be late and the two companions sit opposite side a pink tablecloth stuffed with food. 
Finally Quqiang cuts into the pork foot with the butcher's knife he kept in his bag for one reason.  The beady eyes behind the intellectual's glasses glaze over. "it will be, must be the right hand" Quqiang explains. 
The rest of the film is a mystery to me.  Which one of the two characters is clinically coo-coo?  Is it quqiang who flippantly hands over a brand new computer to the intellectual after one hour of pig-foot incision? or the intellectual who refuses and bleats out cautionary proverbs to prevent quqiang from committing his butchery?  Is it quqiang who ties the other up and beats him in the cellar upstairs? or the other who once freed, runs around wielding a knife chopping at walls?  or maybe the both of them when they decide to be friends in the end.

Capote begins with murder, or rather the morning after.  Rumbling silence of the fields.  A poly pocket dressed girl walks into a country house, up the stairs, a back's view of a sleeper with a cobweb of blood spat on the wall behind, she cups her hand over her mouth.

Cut.

The bustling of a party, clinks of ice on glass bounce off the expensive wooden floors of the apartment.  There is Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman), plum shaped, quasi albino cooing literary jokes through the cigarette smoke onto a ring of admirers.  And then silence again and the incisive close-ups of scissors plowing through the morning after paper, segmenting the murder story.  The chug of the train after the New Yorker sends him to the "out there" of Kansas to conduct the investigation of the murder that will produce his last and most famous work.

Capote is minimal, the lens devours its subject matter in close ups as if to concentrate the essence of the scene into its blown up frame.  A large amount of the film pounces on the marvelously contradictory quirks of Truman Capote's character.  The girlish numb of his voice, the urgency with which his pupils dart back and forth across the eyes of his murderer interviewees.  Everywhere he goes, he collects floods of compliments for his previous works with a smug " thank you", yet there is seldom one moment when his pale eyes do not seem on the verge of bursting with reddened tears.  Hoffman has every knack perfected and patches them all together seamlessly into a character that gradually sheds his reproachable mystery and reveals a red core compact with personality.  It's hard to not keep gasping as he balances every word, every hesitation with just the right rhythm.