China 07

First chance this week to get to screenings in the China 07 season (10 years since the handover of Hong Kong). At Cornerhouse on Wednesday I watched Judou in the cinema for the first time since the early 90s. Somebody appears to have found the original UK 35mm print lurking in the ICA basement. The projectionist told me that it was 'fragile', but apart from the usual scratches at reel ends it played fine and the colours were just sensational. Judou is one of the most visually spectacular films I've ever seen and one that depends to a large extent on colour grading, especially the reds for which Zhang Yimou is famous. According to various sources, this was one of the last films to use the original Technicolor process. I don't know if this is true, but its rare to see anything like Judou today.

I'd skimmed through a VHS copy before the screening in order to prepare some notes for my introduction, but I sat and watched the film all through, mesmerised by its beauty and promising myself a Zhang Yimou feast. I've just bought some DVDs from YesAsia.com The Chinese DVDs of Red Sorghum and Shanghai Triad are terrible with poorly dubbed sound and awful colour (thankfully Apple's DVD player lets me tweak the colour) -- but they are very cheap. The 'digitally remastered' Hong Kong DVD of Raise the Red Lantern is excellent.

It was intriguing to go back and watch one of the early collaborations between Zhang Yimou and Gong Li in the same week that The Curse of the Golden Flower opens in the UK. I'm looking forward to the opening, though I'm a little apprehensive after Gong Li was wasted in Miami Vice last summer.

Today I joined Keith to watch The Arch (Dong fu ren) in Bradford. We both enjoyed the film, but were a little puzzled by the season's notes (presumably written by Mark Cousins). They tried to suggest that this was a film which heralded a new direction for Chinese Cinema in 1970 -- essentially pre-dating the breakthrough of Yellow Earth in 1984 (or "pre-figuring the modernity that was to come"). I'm not sure about this. The Arch is certainly unusual and I'm not sure I've seen many films from Hong Kong/Taiwan of this vintage in order to make comparisons.

The Hong Kong print we saw was in good condition and at first I thought it was going to be a fairly slow romance set in that indeterminate past (the notes say the Ming Dynasty) often featured in Hong Kong Cinema. But as it got going it soon became evident that it was indeed a melodrama with a familiar central figure played by Lisa Lu (an actor with a long list of Hollywood credits), a woman who is driven to desperation by the rules of patriarchy which prevent her from having an emotional/sexual life in middle age (40!). Without reading the notes beforehand we both felt that this was a film with elements of Indian and Japanese cinema and possibly influences from further afield as well. A black and white melodrama in 1970 already feels slightly old-fashioned and the various devices that the notes suggest are 'pre-figuring modernity' are all more associated with 1950s and 60s cinema: freeze frames, use of soft focus/blur and what seemed like optical special effects that would not have been out of place in the 1920s.

The production context of The Arch is difficult to research. (One of the other audience members told us that the dialogue was Mandarin. At least one of the web references I was able to follow claims it as Cantonese. My ear is not reliable and I don't understand either language, but by the sound I would have guessed Cantonese.) It was written and directed by Cecile Tang (Shu Shuen) who, according to IMDB was 29 when she made the film. She then made four more Hong Kong features in the 1970s. The film was produced independently and was apparently photographed by Subrata Mitra, famous as Satyajit Ray's cinematographer in Bengal in the 1960s. This isn't corroborated on IMDB but perhaps explains why some of the shots looked familiar. The editing is attributed to Les Blank, a well known American independent filmmaker with a string of credits as director, cinematographer and editor. Overall, the film appears to be a conventional melodrama presented in a hybrid style. It obviously depends on audiences, but I saw several shots (the departure of the daughter across a lake, for example that could have come from Mizoguchi and the use of visual devices that reminded me of early Kurosawa. I don't think the Yellow Earth connection is valid, but programming the film alongside Judou and Two Stage Sisters as part of the evolution of Chinese melodrama makes sense.