2020 Top Ten List #4 I Wish I Knew (Hai shang chuan qi)

Director Jia Zhang-ke







 

 

I WISH I KNEW (Hai shang chuan qi)                   A-                                                          China  (119 mi)  2010  d:  Jia Zhang-ke

If you don’t care, why let me hope and pray so?
Don’t lead me on, if I’m a fool just say so.
Should I keep dreaming on, or just forget you?
What shall I do, I wish I knew.     

⸺Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, from Diamond Horseshoe, 1945, Betty Grable - 'I wish I knew' (2:06)                

Premiering at Un Certain Regard at Cannes ten years ago but never released here, this film has a belated distribution with a slightly shorter edit, an extremely poetic time capsule made in coordination with the upcoming 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, commissioned by the Expo’s planners, as Jia explores and re-evaluates Shanghai’s identity as transnational, unstable and in constant flux, drawing a connection between the historical and contemporary setting, inquiring about the history of the city by speaking to older, influential people whose lives were shaped there, heard describing their family memories, revealing how the city affected their often shattered lives, delivering a personal meditation on China’s recent past.  Initially interviewing over 80 people, it is cut down to only 18, very rich in detail, with the same sense of urgency as Jia’s majestic film STILL LIFE (2006), using an elder generation for historical purposes, as they lived in an Old Shanghai that no longer exists, having transitioned to a modern global city, yet an essential component of the film is capturing their memories before they fade away, as their personal testimony is as revealing as it is riveting, providing a collective living history that often deviates from official accounts, describing an era of assassination and revolution, pitting Chinese against one another in a civil war, where the military leaders were familiar with one another, having attended the same military schools, now divided strictly on political grounds, where the cost of Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists was enormous, resulting in a fractured nation and constantly changing Chinese identities.  Perhaps the most revealing were open discussions about the impact of the Cultural Revolution, where the city was a stronghold of radical leftism, requiring mandatory confessions on what was perceived as counter-revolutionary activity, which included family migrations to Taiwan and Hong Kong, often for safety purposes to avoid arrests and political persecution, but these visits had negative repercussions long afterwards, as the state was interested in the reasons for leaving Shanghai.  Using clips from older films, while speaking to artists associated with those films, Jia cleverly interweaves images of past and present-day Shanghai, suggesting the thriving film industries in Taiwan and Hong Kong were nurtured by Shanghai refugees who fled the mainland during the Communist takeover.  Omitted, however, are the films of Stanley Kwan, a Hong Kong director whose historical pieces set in Shanghai are legendary, Center Stage (Yuen Ling-yuk) (1991), Red Rose, White Rose (Hong mei gui bai mei gui) (1994), or Everlasting Regret (Changhen ge) (2005), where the latter film is set through different historical periods spanning some fifty years from the 30’s to the 80’s, and is as much a love story to the city of Shanghai as to the people whose lives passed through there, where the roving eye of the camera curiously becomes an unseen character.  In much the same manner, Jia links his connecting pieces with an anonymous character portrayed by his wife, Zhao Tao, who never speaks, dressed all in white, walking through the contemporary city as an eye witness, sailing through the seemingly interchangeable straits of both Hong Kong and Shanghai, gazing upon the futuristic architecture or the muddied Expo construction site filled with workers in hard hats, where streets still under construction reveal demolished buildings, vacated lots, and newly renovated neighborhoods, with Zhao soaking it all in, mirroring the perception of viewers watching and evaluating this film. 

Early on, a woman tells the story of her Communist father’s execution at the age of 24, ordered by Chiang Kai-shek just before Shanghai was liberated, now a little known revolutionary martyr, an event that happened shortly before her birth, recorded by a Hong Kong journalist in black and white photos, where the last image moments before execution is described as a brave revolutionary with a fearless smile.  “I only know my father through these images,” she tearfully reveals, recalling that her mother went a little crazy afterwards, running alongside the Communist troops when they entered the city in 1949 still searching for her dead husband, much like the wives and girlfriends of lost or missing German soldiers greeting each incoming train to Berlin in Fassbinder’s THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1978).  This personal recollection of family heartbreak is contrasted by propaganda images from the Wang Bing film TO LIBERATE SHANGHAI (1959), featuring deliriously happy crowds greeting victorious Communist soldiers, red flags waving, with an officer proudly declaring, “The liberation of Shanghai marks the complete smashing of imperialist forces in China!”  In accordance with the revolutionary fervor, Jia speaks to textile worker Huang Baomei, who recalls being called into an ordinary factory plant meeting and being floored to see none other than Chairman Mao Zedong present, congratulating her on her profession, as the nation was relying on her for clothing, becoming one of the “model workers” in a 1958 film by Xie Jin where she plays herself in a film named after her, becoming the face of the Great Leap Forward, emblematic of a patriotic Socialist working class heroine and a household name in Mao’s China (occurring simultaneously to the great famine when millions starved to death), spending decades in the same factory, now seen shut down and empty (with songs of union solidarity faintly heard offscreen), an abandoned relic of what it once was.  Wang Toon, director of the Taiwanese film RED PERSIMMON (1966), reflects on his childhood recollections of fleeing Shanghai as the Communists closed in on the city, where the chaos surrounding a departing ship to Taiwan was so severe his grandmother had to tie together ten children to prevent them from being lost in the swelling crowd.  Other elderly Shanghai residents stranded in Taipei since 1949 are interviewed as well, offering their experiences, including legendary Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, interviewed on a train crossing through the mountains, recalling similar imagery from Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986) while also showing brief moments from the luminous introductory scene from Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), where he expressed great curiosity about returning to the city to shoot the film, describing how prominent arranged marriages have been throughout Chinese history, with little concept of love, yet was excited at the prospects of opening up 20th century floodgates for romance, also showing clips from Hong Kong director but Shanghai-born Wong Kar-wai’s DAYS OF BEING WILD (1990), where actress Rebecca Pan plays an aging Shanghai refugee.  Speaking to the director, Ms. Pan is herself the daughter of a Shanghai woman who fled to Hong Kong in 1949, choking back tears as she describes her mother’s plight, seen singing bits of a song she recalls, perhaps the title song of the film.  It’s curious how these other cities of Taipei and Hong Kong play a part in Shanghai’s legendary history, but Jia’s film does a formidable job connecting them all to one another, as that’s something not seen in other films with this degree of complexity.  According to film historian Tony Rayns (Currency | I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke. China) - Cinema Scope, who provided the English subtitling for the film, “these Taiwanese voices have never been heard in Mainland China before.”  

Wei Wei, the heroine in Fei Mu’s SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN (1948), describes the dismissive hostility on display from the city while shooting the film, eventually fleeing to Hong Kong afterwards, while the director’s daughter, Fei Mingyi, also describes how political unrest was so severe that the family also fled to Hong Kong, believing at the time it was only temporary, but the situation altered drastically, as Fei Mu’s reputation was ruined, vilified by the Communist Party, dying in exile only a few years later in 1951.  The film was ultimately banned for many years in China, but over time is now considered one of the greatest Chinese films ever made, voted # 2 in a 2019 poll conducted by Time Out Shanghai, The 100 best Mainland Chinese films - Time Out Shanghai.  When Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni came to China during the Cultural Revolution in 1972 to make a documentary film CHUNG KUO – CINA (1972) about China at the invitation of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, he was welcomed with open arms to make a 4-hour film that Western viewers found sympathetic, where we hear the story from a Shanghai TV journalist that accompanied him around the city, surprised by what he felt were “backwards” images, believing it was not featuring the positive aspects of China’s resurgence.  When the film was released, providing a somewhat detached, neo-realist view of daily life (as is Antonioni’s style), it was instantly denounced in the People’s Daily, claiming Antonioni had “evil intentions,” labeled a counter-revolutionary, claiming he had defamed the image of a new China, setting off nationwide criticism (Repudiating Antonioni's Anti-China Film), officially banned by the Gang of Four, not shown in China until a 2004 screening at the Beijing Cinema Institute, and roundly condemned by people who never saw the film, including the journalist who was himself punished, losing two years of his life suffering his own political persecution, forced to attend self-criticism sessions.  Of note, China offered a public apology to the filmmaker in 1980.  Ironically, this Jia film received much of the same criticism in China, claiming it didn’t capture the boldness of the city’s colors, but much of that can be attributed to his use of a digital camera, lighter, and easily transportable, making it easier to move around with ease.  The film supposedly lacks contextualization, according to the critics, as there are no archival photos of Old Shanghai, and the director fails to provide revolutionary sentiment.  Largely overlooked at the time of its release, what critics failed to comprehend was the depth of humanism provided by those interviewed, as it’s their life stories onscreen that vividly encapsulate distinct moments in Chinese history, providing a tragic and sorrowful assessment of what it was like to live during historical times, describing the ordeals of parents and grandparents as told by the family survivors, where oral history is akin to Vertov’s symphony of voices, finding universal themes of displacement, lives uprooted, families split apart, providing innovative editing techniques showing a city under massive construction, but also under the influence of Hong Kong and the nation of Taiwan, revealing how they are all interconnected, as an ancient city is transformed into a modern metropolis seemingly overnight, revealing a natural progression from then until now, with younger people featured more towards the end.  The continual presence of Zhao Tao onscreen is significant, giving voice to the voiceless, a bystander on the threshold of history, becoming a stand-in for all the citizens of Shanghai, as it’s not just about those 18 voices.  Jia’s film construction is a composite of many forces working together, showing great insight in challenging the official explanation of history which has been appropriated by the Communist Party, with evocative music by Lim Giong, becoming an impressionistic mosaic of art and journalism, uniquely allowing viewers to make up their own minds about the human toll exacted by progress. 

D'Est

D’EST                                     A                    

aka:  From the East

Belgium  France  Portugal  (107 mi)  1993  d:  Chantal Akerman    Official site [United States]

With Chantal, everything seemed so easy.  For D’Est (1993), we went from Brussels to Odessa by car.  Sometimes we drove the whole day without shooting anything.  Then, all of a sudden, she would say, “We’re getting out” and she would direct one shot.  It is only now that I realise this. She used to say she was lazy.  She had a joyous energy and a phenomenal capacity for hard work.

—Marilyn Watelet, December 9, 2015, With Chantal • Senses of Cinema 

Chantal Akerman is Jewish, lesbian, a French-speaking Belgian, and a major artist, who among all things is totally anti-commercial, and defiantly so, where there are major walk-outs in some of her films, especially this one, as she refuses to conform to other people’s expectations.  Arguably her best film, though never receiving anything like the critical praise for Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976), which is decidedly more impactful and influential, but this film is completely original, where there’s nothing else like it, defiantly unconventional, made by a free-spirited artist, where it feels lightyears ahead of its time.  In a hundred years, maybe 500, perhaps people will begin to understand.  If an alien came down from another planet, nothing would explain what it is to be human any better than this film, which literally immerses the viewer in a sea of humanity.  No filmmaker, from the Lumière brothers to today, could duplicate this film if they tried, as they could not capture the textures that Akerman creates, including a vividly expressive sound design that is a mix of what was captured live on the scene, but additionally music is superimposed over the track, interspersed throughout the film, some coming from outdoor speakers at beerhalls or an outdoor concert, but also a radio offscreen, a record player, or a television, adding invisible layers underneath.  Notes Andréa Picard from Cinema Scope, Winter/Spring 2010, Columns | Film Art | Orphans and Maniacs: Chantal Akerman's Maniac ..., “A recent viewing of a gorgeous 16mm print of D’Est (1993) not only convinced me that it’s her greatest film, but that her love of the world and her ability to be moved (by faces, landscapes, movement, music, etc…) is itself heartrending, like a reflection of meaning that inheres in, but also gives generously to the viewer.”  Shot after the fall of Communism, the Berlin Wall, and the breakup of the Soviet Union, when the Eastern bloc started falling apart, Akerman traveled through East Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia, eventually making her way to Moscow in three trips during 1992 and 1993, capturing life as it is lived, articulating reality and truth through a wordless photographic essay in the manner of Vertov’s cinema of truth, which later became cinéma vérité, comprised of a continuous montage of images and sounds from unspecified locations, like a symphonic construction, contrasting long and short sequences, street scenes and lone individuals, indoor and outdoor, day and night, from the end of summer to deepest winter, using fixed camera positions and what seems like endless tracking shots, along with silence, musical excerpts, and natural sound, becoming a personal as well as collective history, all without dialogue or commentary.  

While my own favorite endorsement comes from Stuart Klawans, long-time film critic for The Nation:  “If this isn’t a masterpiece, tear the word from your dictionary.”  Listed as #3 on J. Hoberman’s Best Films of the 90’s, J. Hoberman's Top Ten Lists 1977-2006 - alumnus.alumni.caltech.edu, making Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 90’s list as well, Jonathan Rosenbaum's Top Ten Lists 1974-2006, the film opens optimistically from solitary images to the hustle and bustle of city streets in the afternoon sunshine, or patrons listening to blaring music while drinking beer at a seaside setting before the camera also curiously moves indoors to private moments of individuals alone, capturing small portraits, still life’s, resembling moving paintings, before day turns to night, returning back to vividly alive street scenes, with pedestrians, trains, and trolley cars, where offscreen sounds turn into an outdoor rock concert, with young kids dancing outdoors in coats, chantal akerman - d'est (1993) - lviv part - YouTube (6:22).  While the film mainly consists of elongated tracking shots of waiting crowds, where hundreds of people are standing around, presumably waiting for a bus, but it would take dozens of buses to collect this many people, and the few glimpses of buses that we do see are packed tightly together like sardines, or Tokyo commuter trains.  Presumably shot from a car, though always steady, slowly moving, where every single person in the shot has a relationship with the camera, some very agitated and disturbed, talking angrily, others offer only brief glances, like looking up from a newspaper, with some quickly moving out of the frame, though a few curiously follow the camera, even as it moves, while others boldly stare, for long periods of time, always viewed as a curiosity, like something out of place, as if an alien had just dropped down from the heavens.  Most people walking normally move faster than the tracking speed, which allows the viewer a studious glimpse of each and everyone that appears before the camera, becoming a cavalcade of faces, voices, creating a kind of living art, like a painting that comes alive with people moving within their own environment, with the natural sounds creating circular layers on top of layers, continually filling up the empty space on a constantly evolving canvas.  Easily Akerman’s most humane work, as it is literally inhabited by tens of thousands of anonymous people standing around waiting for something, like the ultimate Waiting for Godot film, with endless tracking shots of people huddled in the cold, wearing heavy coats and hats, whether inside or out, with so many scenes of people resigned to standing around in the dark waiting for a bus, or a train, who knows?  It seems to represent a kind of human paralysis, a Russian population in stagnation, as if the world is standing still for a moment in time, where every shot becomes a living memory, D'est - YouTube (7:56).   

Conjuring up a new way to see the world, we find babushka-wearing women in the fields picking potatoes, shot in real time, all in a row, working their way towards the camera, placing them in buckets they carry alongside with them, again startled that anyone would want to film them, yet their work is all part of a repetitious yet endlessly banal routine of human existence.  Winter arrives, and the scene shifts to an empty rural expanse covered in ice and snow, where a line of four men carrying bags and suitcases are seen coming up over a hill on a solitary road, like a scene out of Béla Tarr’s SATANTANGO (1994), though that wouldn’t be made until the following year.  More are seen walking across empty, snow-covered fields, where you can hear the crispness of the snow under their feet as we follow them across the landscape, perhaps on their way to work.  These scenes lead into urban streets, where there is heavy pedestrian traffic mixed with cars and buses, where so many shots are framed with grey, colorless, concrete structures in the background, maybe 8 to 10 stories high, capturing the look of Kieslowski’s The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89), where residents must walk or travel great distances to get anywhere, while in the foreground there are bare trees, silhouettes in grey, reflecting little or no growth, as if they were simply planted that way and have remained looking like that long afterwards, another image of being stuck or frozen in time.  The entire film is shot in natural light, where at night, only the street lights, the front and rear lights of passing cars, or lit windows in the nearby buildings provide any source of light, where one gets the feeling everyone is consumed in darkness, D'EST [Extracto] - YouTube (9:01).  One wonders, who goes to Russia in the wintertime?  Chantal Akerman, apparently, where there are as many as 12 lanes of one-way traffic on a city street at night, with lane markers obliterated by the falling snow, so it’s a free for all, with cars moving in all directions.  Because the camera car is traveling so slowly, people honk, or express irritation as they quickly pass by.  In the daylight, there’s even a toboggan slide for kids, basically an ice path down a small snowy hill, with that enormous concrete structure looming in the background, where no one has a sled or a toboggan, a few have a piece of cardboard, as everyone else just slides down by the seat of their pants.  The enormous train stations are equally packed, many carrying packages in their arms, observing row after row of every seat taken, overflowing with people asleep on the floor, using any available space, with some families sitting with large bundles, like huge bags of grain, farmer size, as many as 10 or 12, as they sit silently and wait with the multitudes of others, all stuck for long periods of time trying to get somewhere. 

There are glimpses of people in their tiny, claustrophobic rooms, one where a kid is listening to an authority figure on State TV while someone else is about 10 feet away playing the piano, both crammed together but sharing a common space.  Another shows a woman in her kitchen cutting a loaf of bread with a giant-sized knife, where each individual slice must be carefully cut to size, while also cutting slices of salami, nibbling as she goes along, where putting them together is a meal, Chantal Akerman - D'Est - YouTube (3:58).  One of the  few sequences expressing any sign of joy takes place on the dance floor of a cavernous hotel, a sad relic from the Stalinist era, Chantal Akerman D'Est - YouTube (3:20), a stark contrast to a similar scene from Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida where they play the transcendently eloquent music of John Coltrane, IDA clip - Jazz - YouTube (58 seconds), both films where history and the Holocaust are only a backdrop to the story, and where Poland’s complicity is a key component.  And let’s not forget, Poland became part of the Eastern bloc controlled by the Soviet Union after the war.  This contemplative aspect of the film is elusive, yet it’s important to understand Akerman’s personal connection to the territory she traverses, as it replicates, in reverse, the direction Jews were transported by trains to the extermination camps.  Akerman’s mother survived Auschwitz as a young girl, but most of her Polish family perished there.  The endless lines of subdued citizens waiting patiently mirror the lines for the trains bound for deportation and death.  The haunting silence heard throughout the film may be the collective voices silenced during the Holocaust, where the film is striking in the way it returns to the past, where memories are like buried ghosts, as there is otherwise no sign anywhere in the film of a Jewish presence.  For instance, there are no synagogues, no cemeteries, and she does not return to the town where her family is from, believing little could be gained from that.  It is through memories and lived experience that one accumulates knowledge of Jewish customs and faith, handed down generation by generation.  Akerman identified her Jewishness through her mother and early childhood memories.  Returning to the scene of the crime, so to speak, evokes haunting recollections, while the land beneath her feet is the same turf she felt exiled from her entire life, where rootlessness is a common theme throughout her work.  Herself coming “from the East,” a reference to the English film title, is a displaced kind of homecoming, as she no longer feels welcomed there, yet the film intensely studies the grim faces of the people who do live here, capturing random looks of people in transit, or in crowds, in their homes, or public places.  We learn no one’s name or identity, and no one is asked about their religious or political beliefs.  From the subjects of this film the filmmaker asks for nothing except the captured images, using her own artistic inclinations to turn it into a particular film aesthetic, where the conspicuous absence of any signs of Jewish culture is a daunting realization that silently haunts the film with a powerful emotional resonance.   Quoting from Alisa Lebow, Alisa Lebow, ‘Memory once removed: indirect memory and transitive autobiography in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est‘, Camera Obscura May 2003 (pdf), “The victims of Stalin are piled on the corpses of the Holocaust… If not for the past, in which her family’s history is directly implicated, there would be no D’Est,” where the film serves as a kind of elegy.  There is a brief musical recital late in the film by Russian cellist Natalia Chakhovskaya, who studied under Mstislav Rostropovich, a compatriot of Shostakovich, assuming his place as the director of the cello department from 1974 to 1995, teaching at the Moscow Conservatory after Rostropovich emigrated to America.  With a dozen or so men offering flowers after her performance, you might think this would offer a beautiful and harmonious finality, but instead Akerman returns to the streets, capturing the hordes of people on their way to work in the morning, with this intriguing sequence shot in a luminous blue tone, feeling like first light just after dawn, Chantal Akerman - D'Est (1993) on Vimeo (5:15).