Month: May 2013

By Joe Bendel. It could be called a vanguard village. Now entirely encircled by Guangzhou’s urban sprawl, San Yuan Li was once a hotbed of resistance during the Opium Wars. However, drug abuse and other social pathologies have recently become comparatively more advanced there. Yet, new and old China persist, side-by-side each other. A team of artists document the neighborhood’s daily facts of life in Ou Ning & Cao Fei’s San Yuan Li, which screens with Huang Weikai’s Disorder as part of MoMA’s Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions film series.

Industrialization has left a questionable mark on the village. In rapid succession, the audience sees the cramped narrow alleys, dingy sweatshops, haunted looking factories, and the hardscrabble laborers toiling along the river. These are literal “fly-over People,” living beneath the constant approach of airliners. In contrast, viewers also encounter the modern consumerist class (often at booty level), as well as the young color guards and traditional performers representing the ideals of previous eras.

With its frenetically quick cuts and driving soundtrack, San Yuan Li is far more accessible than the term “experimental documentary” would suggest. Although shot in a very stylish black-and-white, the film is sort of like a National Geographic photo spread with a postmodern sensibility and an elevated social awareness. The net effect is often rather hypnotic. While not quite as pointed as Disorder, they are quite a compatible pairing, collectively clocking in at about one and three-quarter hours.

Still, there are plenty of telling images throughout San Yuan Li. Indeed, any appearance of Mao portraiture is now ironic, haunting either the go-go capitalism or mounting class inequities unleashed by the Party. Yet, there is also dignity in the faces of average citizens, particularly the diverse selection of work teams captured late in the film.

Neither documentaries have narrative structures per se, but they both convey a vivid sense of contemporary China. As it happens, both San Yuan Li and Disorder are distributed by the dGenerate films, the invaluable specialists in independent Chinese cinema. Highly recommended for China watchers who want to do exactly that, they screen together this Wednesday (5/22) and the following Monday (5/27) as Chinese Realities continues at MoMA.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on May 20th, 2013 at 2:19pm.

By Joe Bendel. That hardly took long. An oil boomtown in the 1990’s, Yumen is now a deserted ghost town—literally so if you believe some of the stories told by stragglers. Regardless, viewers certainly get a vivid sense of contemporary China’s “burn rate” in Huang Xiang, Xu Ruotao & J.P. Sniadecki’s Yumen (trailer here), which has its North American premiere tomorrow during MoMA’s ongoing Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions film series.

According to one disembodied voice-over, the abandoned hospital is and was haunted by the spirit of an infant. She once saw it with some friends, one of whom still bears a scar from the encounter. Another man also remembers the hospital, having frequently visited an ambiguously sickly woman there. These remnants of Yumen’s glory days are like ghosts themselves, often filmed like ant-like specks shuffling through the surreal post-industrial landscape.

The directorial trio consistently plays games with the doc format, incorporating what sound like staged reminiscences and showing the seams in between their 16mm reel changes. Nonetheless, there is no mistaking the reality of the northwest Gansu town. It is simply impossible to recreate ruins of such scale on an indie budget. It looks like Pripyat outside of Chernobyl, just without the background radiation (as far as we know).

For what it’s worth, the woman’s ghost story is kind of creepy. Yet more to the point, the intertwining memories and images clearly illustrate the pain and dislocation resulting from the death of a community, even one not especially beloved by its residents, such as Yumen.

Yumen is an impressive looking film, but even at its sixty-five minute running time, it feels a smidge stretched. Certain visuals start to repeat themselves and a late scene rather overindulges in globalist irony, as one of their POV figures strolls through a nearby open air market singing along to Springsteen’s “My Hometown.” As a multi-millionaire and self-appointed spokesman of the proletariat, Springsteen might actually be the perfect voice for today’s China, but the sequence just feels too long and stagey.

If you want to get a good look at Yumen this film is probably your best option, because the government is not likely to sponsor tours there anytime soon. It is not for everyone, but it should fascinate those with a taste for more experimental documentaries in the spirit of Disorder and San Yuan Li. Recommended for aesthetically adventurous China watchers, Yumen screens this Monday (5/20) at MoMA, presented in-person by Sniadecki, the former American expatriate filmmaker, whose previous credits include Chaiqian and Sognhua, two similarly naturalistic observations of Chinese daily life.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on May 20th, 2013 at 2:18pm.

By Joe Bendel. He has only helmed eleven feature films, but he defines the art of tasteless comedy. Mel Brooks more or less invented the movie spoof genre, before the Wayanses thoroughly discredited it. Now the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award winner gets the American Masters treatment in Robert Trachtenberg’s Mel Brooks: Make a Noise, which airs this Monday on PBS stations nationwide.

As the 2,000 Year Old Man, Brooks has quite a career to look back on. His first big break came on television as a writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, the classic sketch comedy showcase that would later serve as a model for the nostalgic Peter O’Toole dramedy My Favorite Year, which Brooks’ company produced. He subsequently made a name for himself with the aforementioned comedy act he developed with Carl Reiner, but a handful of classic movies would establish Brooks as a brand name.

Logically, Trachtenberg devotes considerable time to The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein, adding reminiscences from Brooks regulars like Gene Wilder and Cloris Leachman. He also includes some fitting archival footage of Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, and of course Anne Bancroft. Clearly, they shared one of the few true show business romances. Yet, to his credit, Brooks sounds quite gracious when discussing his first wife.

Brooks must be an exceedingly difficult interview subject, but Trachtenberg’s persistence is impressive. From time to time, he also surprises Brooks with the insight of his questions, as when he asks the writer-director when he first became aware of Hitler (who plays such an unusual role in Brooks films like The Producers).

There are not a lot of surprises in Noise, nor does Trachtenberg delve shockingly deeply into Brooks’ psyche. Nonetheless, he nicely captures the comedy giant’s dichotomies. Viewers see a smart, thoughtful man with a talent for fart jokes. We understand he is a private individual by temperament, but has a healthy disregard for his own public image. Overall, it is a highly watchable profile that should entertain Brooks’ many fans when it airs this coming Monday (5/20) as part of the current season of American Masters on PBS.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on May 17th, 2013 at 11:09am.