Newshufa’s Weblog

In pouring rain I find my way to Elements, the newest supermall in Hong Kong, where Hana Makhmalbaf’s Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame is screened. Set in Bamian, where the Taliban destroyed the huge statue of Buddha in 2001, this is an extraordinary film of children playing the cruel games of war. Baktay is a 6 year old girl who wants to read and write within a stark economy of knowledge, in which the raw cost of an exercise book means she can’t afford a pencil, so her mother’s borrowed lipstick becomes a powerful means of writing.

This is Hana Makhmalbaf’s first feature (she made her first film when she was 8 and she turns 20 this year) – the youngest filmmaker of the Makhmalbaf dynasty, these filmmakers-without-borders.

Yasukuni, (Li Ying) took out the prize for best documentary at the festival and it touches a raw nerve for both China and Japan (although the film has Japanese funding, screenings have been controversial there, with news that cinemas in Tokyo have dropped plans to show it and widespread blog discussion about it – with complaints that Japanese taxpayers money has been spent on an anti-Japanese film)

Had a long discussion about the film with Chris Berry – it provokes thought about the difficulty of memory beyond the compulsion to speak, which has seemed to be the cure of trauma in European historical experience. The core of the film is an interview with Kariya Naoji, the shrine’s last remaining sword-maker, who is asked to speak of the past, and although he says he has many memories, he refuses to disclose any of them. At the City Hall screening, someone asked the filmmaker why he didn’t interview Japanese intellectuals, rather than concentrating on the reticent sword-maker and the shrine itself – as if somehow rational discourse could explain away the depths of feeling involved here.

Unhappily I missed the seminar on memory, history, fiction and testimony which followed the screening of Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing), a riveting testimony of the Cultural Revolution, which ignores all the cinematographic rules (such as lighting) and simply allows a story to be told for 186 minutes. There is no ’speaking bitterness’ here, no sense of absolute evil, which is a feature of Holocaust stories, but just the facts of history and the failings of humans and the excesses of power abused. Wang Bing’s newest film, the fourteen hour Crude Oil was also shown in the festival and although I had planned to sit through it, I managed only one hour, inside the oil-workers restroom/hut, in the middle of the night, tired bodies moving in and out, sleeping or huddling over a heater to keep warm, and conversations in Chinese, Russian, Mongolian with no subtitles. I’ve seen stills outside the hut, with lots of light and space, so perhaps if I’d held on for another two or three hours, there might have been a change of location. Apparently he had planned a week-long version, but chose to edit it down to a mere fourteen hours.

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The festival finishes tomorrow and it was my good intention to write little notes on all the films I’ve seen – so these scant, hastily assembled notes will have to do.

Good Friday seemed like a good day to be watching two films by Sokurov, starting with Alexandra , starring Galina Vishnevskaya, set in Chechnya; a soldier’s grandmother comes to visit the encampment where his unit is stationed (you need to set aside the implausibility of this) and we feel the heat, the dirt and dust of military life, the boring everyday of war (‘You’ve been fighting for so long, you’re used to it’). She climbs inside a tank, handles a Kalashnikov, wryly noting how easy it is to use and then when she’s tired of wandering around the camp, she decides to walk to a nearby market, striking up conversation with another woman, who takes her to see the bombed out house where she lives; this is a war movie without war, a commentary on language and culture and on the closeness of Russia and Chechnya, taking no clear position on the conflict (except perhaps for a civilian one: ‘I’m sick of this military pride. You know how to destroy. When will you learn to rebuild?’

There’s a very good discussion of the movie by Nancy Condee on the Kinocultura site

After Vishnevskaya’s masterful performance in Alexandra I had high hopes for Elegy of Life, Sokurov’s documentary about Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, and although there’s fascinating discussion of music (Rostropovich’s comments on Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Bach), a 50th wedding anniversary dinner in Vienna, with a bizarre mix of European royalty, Boris Yeltsin & his wife (Rostropovich is buried beside Yelstin in the Novodevichy cemetery), a somewhat patronising portrait of Vishnevskaya, this is not a great documentary. But it was finished just a few months after Rostropovich died, and he would have been dying while the film was made, a fact which is not acknowledged in the film, so this is truly an elegy of life. [Around the same time the film was released, Alisher Usmanov, the oligarch who had earlier paid £75m for a stake in Arsenal Football Club, bought the Rostropovich/Vishnevskaya art collection, which Sotheby's had listed for auction in London last autumn, and part of which we see in the documentary. It will end up in the Konstantin Palace in St Petersburg]