Let’s take a break from the madness of America, Europe, Gaza and everywhere else in the world where despair, outrage and anger are the order of the day. We are going back in time to Asia, where all of this week’s films hail from, helping to highlight the influential and unique aesthetic of a continent that’s always had a hunger for cinema.
From the fast fading world of pre-partition Bangladesh on the banks of the Titas river to the turbulent changes enveloping post-World War 2 Taiwan and the richly textured world of historical China that provides the background for one of kung fu cinema’s true classics, this week’s films hopefully offer beauty, sadness, high-kicks and reminders of another way of looking, living and moving that remains one of the richest veins in the mine of global cinema.
Asian cinema has always had an oversized effect on the shape of broader mainstream movies and when one begins to dive into the many treasures held in its vast archive, it’s easy to see why.
THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL
A River Called Titas — Mubi.com
Hugely influential now but criminally undercelebrated before his death in 1976, director Ritwik Ghatak was a groundbreaking pioneer that social realist, issue driven Bengali cinema in India lauded in the work of his contemporaries Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen.
This 1973 epic, based on the book by Adwaita Mallabarma is considered by many to be Ghatak’s masterwork — a sweeping study of the interconnected stories of several members of the Malo fishing community on the banks of the Titas River. Set in pre-independence India and co-produced with funding from India and Bangladesh it’s a melodramatic but incisive examination of a way of life and traditions that were wiped out following partition in 1947.
Like many of Ghatak’s works, the film is notable for its meticulous focus on the details and rhythms of everyday rural life and its strong sympathy for the challenges faced by women in Indian society. The river along which its multi-character stories unfold is also given cinematic life and serves as a character in its own right — evoking spiritual and religious themes that hold this soon-to-be-extinguished way of life together.
Ghatak was suffering from tuberculosis while filming and after its conclusion his health deteriorated, leading to his death a few years later. Now regarded rightfully as masterwork in the history of Indian cinema, the film was voted the greatest Bangladeshi film by the British Film Institute in 2002.
THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC
A City of Sadness —YouTube
Taiwanese director Hao Hsiao-Hsien is a leading figure of the Taiwanese New Wave movement that sprang up in the 1980s and his slow, meticulously composed films have earned him global acclaim and reverence, with a 1998 New York Festival worldwide critics poll declaring him, “one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema”.
His 1989 political family drama was the first Taiwanese film to win Venice’s coveted Golden Lion and is considered by many to be the director’s masterpiece.
The film traces the often tragic trials and tribulations of the Lin family who live in a small coastal town near Taipei, whose lives are upended by the tumult between 1945 and 1950 when the era of Japanese colonial rule gave way to the murderous reign of the Kuomintang government from mainland China.
The first film made in Taiwan to deal with the history of the infamous “White Terror,” and the brutal events of February 28 1947, when thousands of Taiwanese were murdered by the KMT, the film handles its tragedy in typically elliptical Hsiao-Hsien fashion, opting to show the effects of the massacre rather than its gory violence, in signature long takes that allow emotion to steadily build.
As critic Tony Rayns wrote in his review for Time Out, it’s a film “loaded with detail and elliptically structured to let viewers make their own connections, … Hou turns in a masterpiece of small gestures and massive resonance; once you surrender to its spell, the obscurities vanish.”
THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
Come Drink with Me — Mubi.com
It would be a disservice to have a list of films from Asia that didn’t include at least one example of China’s hugely popular and numerous Wuxia genre.
Films about martial arts have been part of the output of Chinese cinema almost from its inception and this 1966 one from the vaults of the legendary Shaw Brothers Hong Kong based studio is arguably one of the finest.
Directed by King Hu and starring pioneering female kung-fu film star Cheng Pei-pie, it’s notable for its reduction of the genre to its basic elements and its foregrounding of the performance and still impressive fighting abilities of its stars.
Cheng’s previous experience in the Peking opera genre gave her acrobatic skills and an ability to use her body language that set the standard for future generations of Wuxia stars. The action is choreographed like a dance, the colours are bright and carefully selected and though the film moves at a satisfying high-octane pace, there’s always time in Hu’s direction for beauty and opulence.
