MOViE MOViE Magazine #68 - THE ARTIST IS ALWAYS THERE
Publisher MOVie MOVie
editOrial directOr
PhOebe chiu
creatiVe directOr renatus Wu (edited hK)
chief editOr leah Kee
dennis fung
editOrs
eMMy chan
PinKy hO
JereMy KWOK
english editOr
KeVin Ma
designer cathy chan (edited hK)
illustratOr Jenny tsOi
sPecial thanKs
brOadWay/Palace/b+ cineMa/ brOadWay cineMatheque/ MOVie MOVie Pacific Place/ MOVie MOVie cityPlaza/ PreMiere eleMents/ My cineMa yOhO Mall
edKO filMs liMited
analOg dePt. recOrds
eslite
hOng KOng arts centre
Jccac
PMq White nOise recOrds zaPJOK café
EDITORS’ NOTES
As the new year unfolds, people often set fresh aspirations or seek change—and at MOViE MOViE (MM), we’re embracing this spirit with a bold new initiative. Starting with this issue of MOViE MOViE Magazine, we’re launching Life Behind Movies, a column inviting creatives from diverse fields to share their cinematic stories. Kicking off this series is director/actor Chun Yip Lo, who delves into this month’s Valentine’s Special theme. He reveals how films have helped him understand his partner, alongside sharing his personal movie top picks.
But that’s not all! We’ll also periodically spotlight upcoming releases at MM Cinemas. This February, we’re thrilled to highlight Maria, a riveting portrayal of opera legend Maria Callas by Angelina Jolie. Both Jolie and Callas embody relentless dedication to their crafts—a mirror of MM’s own mission to scour the globe for premium films, inviting cinephiles not only into our theatres but also onto the MM Channel (Now TV ch116), realizing our vision of “MOViE everywhere.”
一年之始 ，大家都會為新一年作出期許或希望有
所改變 ，MOViE MOViE （MM）都有同一想法 ， 並作出了新嘗試 ： 從今期 MMM 開始 ，我們邀 請到不同界別的電影人 ，在新欄目 Life Behind Movies 跟我們分享他 / 她的電影故事 。打頭陣的 有導演兼演員盧鎮業 ，就著本期主題 Valentine's Special 訴說他用電影了解另一半的小趣事與及 他的心水電影 Topicks。 MM 亦會不定時地向影 迷們推介將會在 MM 戲院上映的電影 。二月份 ， 我們率先會為大家重點介紹《 美聲歌后：瑪麗亞 》 (Maria)。 Angelina Jolie 完美地演繹歌劇傳奇人 物 Maria Callas，無論是 Angie 或是 Maria，她們 都為了自己所熱愛的事業去打拼及奮鬥 ，追求極 致 。就如 MM 一樣 ，我們著力在世界各地搜羅優 質電影 ，務求吸引熱愛電影的你走進電影院 ，並 延伸至 MM 頻道（Now TV ch116），實現 MOViE everywhere 的宗旨 。
teXt by PhOebe chiu directOr Of MOVie MOVie
LEAH
It's okay if it takes a little longer than you thought.
EMMY
the VieWs, infOrMatiOn, Or OPiniOns eXPressed in the Magazine are sOlely thOse Of the indiViduals inVOlVed and dO nOt necessarily rePresent thOse Of MOVie MOVie
I had just got off school. My phone read 6:20 p.m., leaving me an hour and a half to catch the movie I bought tickets to weeks prior. My octopus was in the negative, and after scouring the depths of my schoolbag and pockets layered with receipts and used tissue, I realised I was two dollars short of the fare for the trip to the cinema and back home. I had no time to return home and then set out so I naturally made the choice of taking the train to the cinema, with the hopes of somehow conjuring the difference. Turns out my film was at ten. With no way home, I spent the next three hours looking for change – vulture-necked and squinted scanning the sidewalks and station floors, reaching my hands in vending and ticket machines. Needless to say, I came up empty, and eventually had to call my dad to pick me up after the movie.
MOViE MOViE
IN CINEMAS
MARIA
《美聲歌后:瑪麗亞》
導演 directOr
柏保羅賴尼因 PablO larraÍn
演員 cast
安祖蓮娜祖莉 angelina JOlie
皮爾弗朗卓斯高法費奴
PierfrancescO faVinO
艾芭諾宜娃查 alba rOhrWacher
高迪史麥菲 KOdi sMit-McPhee
MARIA
Academy Award®-winner Angelina Jolie is Maria Callas, one of the most iconic performers of the 20th century in acclaimed director Pablo Larraín's operatic MARIA. The film follows the AmericanGreek soprano as she retreats to Paris after a glamorous and tumultuous life in the public eye. MARIA reimagines the legendary soprano in her final days as the diva reckons with her identity and life.
I met Pablo Larraín many years ago and told him how much I respected him as a filmmaker and hoped to work with him one day. He reached out to me about Maria, and he took the casting process very seriously, which I appreciate. He wants to ensure the artist is up for it and understands the job. I’m also a huge fan of writer Steven Knight’s work; it’s a very unusual script and construction. There’s a lot of bravery in the choices they’ve made in their storytelling, which says a lot about how capable they are. I was happy that I was with a very serious filmmaker coming to me to do real work and expecting a lot of me and challenging me. That’s not always the case. It wasn’t just an opportunity to tell the story of Maria Callas, a woman I find interesting and care for, but it’s really to have a director who’s going to take you on a journey and is so serious about the work and tough on you. I like that he was tough on me! He’s a dream director, and I would want to work with him again and again. Also, I learned a lot from watching him work as a director myself.
IN CINEMAS: MARIA
How much preparation did you have to do for the role?
Well, Pablo expected me to work very hard, and he expected me to sing. I went into classes six or seven months before he expected me to really sing, to take Italian classes, to understand and study opera, to immerse myself completely and do the work, which, for Maria, there was no other way. The funny thing as an actor is when you first start acting, somebody says, “Can you ride horses? Can you speak this language?” And as a young actor, you say “yes” to everything. Then you go home, and you think, “Oh, I have to learn how to sing!” When Pablo said, “Can you sing?” I thought, “I mean, sure, a little,” but the truth is, as he said to me, “You have to learn how to sing opera, or I will be able to tell when we are close to your face because it’s who she is.” But it was much more than that. It was to understand Maria Callas and be able to play the character. The music was her life. Her relationship with her voice and her body, her ability to sing, her presence on stage and her communication with the audience it was her life. It was the key to her as well.
Although it’s a different era, is this another example of women in the spotlight suffering harsher criticism than men?
That’s just what happens when you have that level of success, and I think Maria understood that. She worked very, very hard to do her job. She understood that if she stood in front of people and they came out to see her, she had to be as close to perfect as she could be. She wanted to give everything she had, and she really did give everything she had, fighting through different things. It couldn’t have been easy to have a relationship with a mother who calls you names and tells you you’re not good enough. I just can’t imagine it because so much of what helped me be okay in life was having the kindness of my own mother. The film is about her relationship with her voice, her pain, and her deep love. Her true love is her music.
catastrophic earthquake pervades daily life, two rabble-rousing best friends are about to graduate high school. One night, they pull a consequential prank on their Principal, which leads to a surveillance system being installed in their school. Stuck between the oppressive security system and a darkening national political situation, the two respond in contrasting ways, leading them to confront differences they never had to face before. After directing the transcendent “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus”, Neo Sora makes his dramatic feature directorial debut with this socially relevant and melancholic cautionary tale about adolescent bonds and if they can survive the volatility of a tumultuous political and social landscape. Orizzonti, Venice International Film Festival.
A big part of the movie really came down to the casting. We trusted our intuition, so we kept auditioning people. For all of these main characters, we decided on the first moment they walked into the room. I was very fortunate, and it was almost like a miracle that I found these five kids. You can immediately tell that they're going to be in the film. The process of finding them was very intuitive.
Then the second miracle is that after we finished casting these five kids, they all became close friends. I was doing workshopping because four of the five of them were non-actors, but the workshops were almost an excuse to have them just spend more time together, and without my oversight, they just kept becoming friends. By the time we were shooting, they had already had great chemistry. What you see on the screen is real.
Something I like to tell is that, over the course of the shooting, the actors who played Yuta and Kou- actually became best friends, to the point that they are now roommates. So, in a way, they're speaking the dialogue that I imagined. Q Chi
Why does the movie feel timeless in the sense that it could be set in the future or from the past?
Something that I was intending for is a lot of different temporalities to be in at the same time. So, sometimes, it feels old, and sometimes, it is very futuristic.
I wanted to make the film as if you imagine Yuta and Kou recalling their high school life from the future, maybe in their early 30s or something. So, it's a story told even further in time. Yet there is this perspective of remembering the past, which gives nostalgic feelings.
What inspired Happyend?
Every year and so often, they tell you that a big earthquake is about to come. Sometime in the next however many years, with some certainty, a devastating earthquake will hit Tokyo.
One of the biggest inspirations for the film was the Great Kantō earthquake in Tokyo in 1923. After the disaster, racist rumours began to spread by the media and the government, and it sparked a massacre. The Japanese banded as vigilante groups and massacred over 6,000 Koreans. It was a really horrible killing that happened in the chaos. And behind this tragedy was essentially Japanese colonialism. There was a lot of resentment among Japanese people that the earthquake unearthed.
Now, every time an earthquake happens, racism unearths as well, to bring up the racist comments, almost like a joke on Twitter, so unfortunately, this kind of racism and colonial resentment still exists today.
My fear is unless we reflect on this colonial past of Japan and how that affects us today, something similar could happen again if another big earthquake happens in Tokyo in the future. That's the theoretical basis of the film.
What is movie to you?
Personally, I'm not a verbal person. Word compresses feeling as if it collapses the full resolution of something you really feel for or have. And so what I love about movie is that it is a medium that lets all kinds of indescribable, inarticulable, complex emotions communicate without having to compress them.
LIVING IN TWO WORLDS
LIVING IN TWO WORLDS
《聽見兩個世界》
導演 directOr
吳美保 MiPO O
演員 cast
吉澤亮 ryO yOshizaWa
忍足亞希子 aKiKO Oshidari
今井彰人 aKitO iMai
中山裕介 yusuKe santaMaria
Dai is born to deaf parents and has been raised with deep love in rural Japan. However, as he grows older, he becomes troubled by his differences from others and begins to blame his deaf mother for his daily frustrations. When he turns 20, Dai leaves home for Tokyo as if to escape. Life in Tokyo was lonely at first, but when Dai starts working as a magazine reporter, he finds fulfilment in meeting a diverse group of people. Time eventually passes, and Dai returns home for the first time in eight years. In spending peaceful time with his deaf mother after a long time, a memory that has been sealed away unexpectedly comes back to Dai. Winner of Special Award and Best Actor Award at TAMA Film Awards.
Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton) were close friends in their youth, when they worked together at the same magazine. Ingrid went on to become an autofiction novelist while Martha became a war reporter, and they were separated by the circumstances of life. After years of being out of touch, they meet again in an extreme but strangely sweet situation.
華納兄弟榮譽發行 ，勇奪威尼斯影展金獅大獎 感人電影 《 隔壁的房間 》 (The Room Next Door)，由《 對她有話兒 》奧斯卡得主艾慕杜華 ，用 最個人深情探討安樂死主題 ，屬他再闖事業顛峰 的重要力作 。
IN CINEMAS
Escaping post-war Europe, visionary architect László Toth arrives in America to rebuild his life, his work, and his marriage to his wife Erzsébet after being forced apart during wartime by shifting borders and regimes. On his own in a strange new country, László settles in Pennsylvania, where the wealthy and prominent industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren recognises his talent for building. But power and legacy come at a heavy cost...
Peerless cook Eugenie has worked for the famous gourmet Dodin for the last 20 years. As time went by, the practice of gastronomy and mutual admiration turned into a romantic relationship. Their association gives rise to dishes, one more delicious than the next, that confound even the world’s most illustrious chefs. But Eugenie is fond of her freedom and has never wanted to marry Dodin. So, he decides to do something he has never done before: cook for her.
Talk to us about the origin of your film… I had been looking for a subject that has to do with gastronomy, both as a profession and an art. I eventually found a magnificent book about gastronomy, The Life and Passion of DodinBouffant, Gourmet by Marcel Rouff.
I preferred telling the story as a prequel to Marcel Rouff’s novel. That gave me the freedom to imagine the relationship between Eugénie and Dodin Bouffant. And it was also an opportunity to explore something rare in the cinema: conjugality. And even rarer when it works.
There is in this couple an otherness and complicity unusual at the beginning of the twentieth century… Yes, it is marvellous to see people their age, in their autumn years as Dodin would say, with a lust for life that I would describe as being classically French. No romance or burning passion, just something ordered and restrained in a calm relationship with the world and nature. I appreciate the douceur and measure found in French art and mentality. In that sense, I think that my film is eminently French.
This is actually a film about sharing and transmission…
I come from Asia, where people do not readily hand down their knowledge. We prefer taking it with us to the grave. After Eugénie’s death, Dodin’s friends become obsessed with helping him reconcile with life. Dodin is still in mourning and categorically refuses to hire a new cook. It is Eugénie’s promise to take Pauline on as an apprentice that forces him to find a cook to form Pauline. And so, handing down knowledge to Pauline and Dodin’s resurrection both proceed from the same narrative stroke.
與導演的對話
和我們談談你的電影的起源 我一直在尋找一個與美食有關的主題 ，既是一種 職業又是一種藝術。我最終找到了一本關於美食 的巨著 ，Marcel Rouff 的 The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant: Gourmet 《 美食家多丹 布方特 的生活與激情 》。
“In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
《奇異女俠玩救宇宙》
導演 directOr
關家永 daniel KWan
丹尼爾舒赫 daniel scheinert
演員 cast
楊紫瓊 Michelle yeOh
史蒂芬妮許 stePhanie hsu
關繼威 Ke huy quan
吳漢章 JaMes hOng
珍美李寇蒂斯 JaMie lee curtis
岑勇康 harry shuM, Jr.
CHANNEL PREMIERE 頻道首播
16/02 (SUN) 22:00
17/02 (MON) 24:10
Every choice in life divergence of interweaving streams, each opening a door to an infinitude of states within a multiverse of limitless possibilities. The multiverse they speak of in Everything Everywhere All At Once is not just a reflection of the main character’s life decisions, big or small, but a representation of mankind’s unlimited capacity to evolve. But every instance of You that exists in the expanse of the multiverse, remains You, and it is this unchanging fact that forces the film’s protagonist, Evelyn, to confront life’s challenges; even if some timelines may shine brighter than others, those versions of you remain entangled with life’s regrets.
Nihilism works much like a mirror, an unflinching reflection of life’s meaning. In the face of reality’s absurdities, giving up and letting go seems like the only release from an existential crisis. When Joy gradually strays towards this path of selfdestruction, she entices her mother to walk beside her. We, along with Evelyn, learn that this nihilistic version of her daughter is a result of her own multiverse missteps, and the fateful bond between mother and daughter is inescapable, transcending timeline and universe. A mother at the end of the day, Evelyn’s ultimate goal was always her daughter’s salvation. She takes on the role of the “verse-jumping” cosmic hero, traversing universes and breaking dimensional borders. Eventually, amidst her universe-hopping adventures, Evelyn realises that Jobu Tupaki, the omnipotent being hell-bent on destroying the universe, is Joy, her daughter, and the tool she threatens the entire universe with? A bagel – a sesame-crusted torus of life’s absurdity.
In all its nonsensical surrealism, Everything Everywhere All at Once contains a great profundity: when we witness, or even consider our own endless possibilities, what lies behind the radiance of our vast potential is the haunting, consuming shadow of regret and disappointment. When Joy has her consciousness split across all realities of the multiverse and becomes Jobu Tupaki, overwhelmed by everything, she creates a blackhole capable of consuming reality, a product of the infinite weight of possibility collapsing on itself: “The Everything Bagel” – a symbol of life’s despair, a materialisation of Joy’s belief that in the presence of unending existence, nothing matters. Despite its pontifications about life’s lack of meaning, the film’s central theme is, as trite as it may sound, “love”. With its unnerving commitment to its surrealist brand of humour, with its electrifying pace and energy, this worn-out subject is potent and moving. Michelle Yeoh mentioned in an interview, “This ordinary Evelyn Wang, at the end of the day, finds what she will never give up - that's her love for her family, her daughter.” This Evelyn, the failure of all Evelyns, witness to the indifference of the universe, tempted by despondency, at the end of the day, realises the bonds of love she has with her husband and daughter are far more tangible than the abstractions of meaninglessness. Alongside the people who foolishly walk with us in this life of untenable, ungraspable chaos, the absurdities of the everyday hold meaning – of magnitudes far greater than the immeasurable boundlessness of the universe.
“I don’t get what love is”, Kasumi tells her colleague. But how does one operate in a society that is gripped by the notion of love? While her mother tries to arrange a marriage, and even the children at her workplace are in a “love triangle”, Kasumi tries to find her own way of living. The movie depicts asexuality and the intergenerational differences in Japanese society in a touching way.
It wasn’t until the post-screening Q&A of Caught by the Tides that I realised that Zhao Tao, in a decade-defining performance, did not utter a word of spoken dialogue. Perhaps a more damning reflection of my character and literacy, but a more generous, and I believe to be the more accurate interpretation of this belated epiphany, is a testament to the power of her performance in Jia Zhangke’s latest film. The acclaimed director’s wife and muse reprises her role as Qiao Qiao in Jia’s 2002 Unknown Pleasures. Like the Qiao Qiao 20 years ago, Zhao Tao plays an aspiring dancer and model who is in a relationship with her agent, a role revisited by Li Zhubin. There is a captivating immensity that is concealed and revealed with Qiao Qiao’s every glance and expression, like a blank canvas of affect; in her muteness, I felt a sorrow, a resolve, emotions not necessarily just belonging to her, but feelings in the large that can be historicized and materialized within the collective Chinese metropolis.
Zhao Tao’s arresting performance, which seems to exist beyond her character, can also be attributed to the nature of Caught by the Tides. Filmed over the span of 20-odd years, the project started with repurposing footage from the outtakes of Jia’s films, Unknown Pleasures and Still Life. The film is comprised of these scenes from his previous works intercut with new scenes and handheld documentary footage Jia filmed decades ago: a group of women gathered in a circle, taking turns singing; an audience of old workers appreciating song; an interview about the Workers’ Cultural Palace, a place of cultural refuge for labourers built during the Mao era. Beyond just vague expository purposes, the documentary footage that Jia captured of China at the turn of the millennium, the fading and fleeting interstitials of milieu, and the recontextualized scenes of the other Qiao Qiaos, contour her journey, beyond just her personal journey of tumultuous selfdiscovery and perseverance, but one anchored by the similarly changing cultural landscape. This rich tapestry of incongruous materials, dissenting
textures and evolving mediums – in addition to the first half’s mixture of analogue film and low-def DV, the pandemic-set second half features HD footage, darting shots that evince qualities of smart surveillance footage, and a TikTok dance video – is the visual currency of change in Caught by the Tides, Jia’s chimera of a film that maps and charts this accelerating constant of life.
There is a point in the film where we see Qiao Qiao for the first time after the film jumps to the modern day. She works at a supermarket, and during her break, she takes off her mask, and we get a view of her face in its entirety. In almost an instant, you feel the real weight of the decades elapsed from the minutes we last saw her. For a moment, time has rendered Qiao Qiao unrecognizable from the nightclub dancer we saw just an hour ago. It is a quiet but monumental moment of compressed time unfolding in an instant. More importantly, we are confronted with, at its most lucid and steadfast, the feeling that continually the old and hobbled Li Zhubin in the film’s second half – the feeling that the tides have washed over the ground we once stood over. Within this feeling of unfamiliarity, we, along with Qiao Qiao and Li Zhubin, are faced with a choice. How does one react in the face of this unavoidable changing current? Caught by the Tides seems to propose an answer to this question of adaptation and, finally, mortality. More than simply reusing old, unused footage out of wistful nostalgia for a world that is no longer, Jia’s transcendent work of fragmentation feels just as much an act of forward-thinking retrospection, a historical recontextualization that holds the past up as something unreachable, and ultimately a beautiful embrace of the uncertainty of what’s ahead. In the end, Jia’s answer to this question seems to be in the fashion of hopeful resignation, his sentiments lying with the indomitable Qiao Qiao – the tides of time are inescapable, we might as well learn how to swim.
In a movie capital called Nyallywood, Gene dreams of becoming a film director and works as an assistant to the famous film producer Pompo. One day, he spots a new script written by Pompo and tells her that he would like to see it at the cinema soon. “If you’d like to see it, go direct it yourself,” says Pompo. Gene finally gets the opportunity to direct his debut film.
In the Makarenko public elementary school on the Paris outskirts, children want to learn and be cheered while teachers know they not only teach, but also educate. With care, tenacity and effort, children are trained to become responsible citizens and human beings.
A Dog’s Way Home chronicles the heartwarming adventure of Bella, a dog who embarks on an epic 400-mile journey home after she is separated from her beloved human.
Every year, thousands of people in Japan vanish without a trace. Known as the Johatsu, or “the evaporated,” they abandon their lives for various reasons, such as a troublesome relationship, mounting debts or threats from the mafia. Some get support from so-called “night moving” companies, which help people to disappear and start a new life somewhere else. Taking an intimate look at the phenomenon of “evaporating people,” the film depicts the inner conflicts and attempts at reconciliation of those who have disappeared and those who have been left behind.
The extraordinary true story of eccentric British artist Louis Wain, whose playful, sometimes even psychedelic pictures helped to transform the public's perception of cats forever. Moving from the late 1800s through to the 1930s, we follow the incredible adventures of this inspiring, unsung hero, as he seeks to unlock the "electrical" mysteries of the world and, in so doing, to better understand his own life and the profound love he shared with his wife Emily Richardson.
Time only seems to keep its promise on the hands of a clock. When extended beyond the plane of a timepiece, time abandons punctuality. Ensconced in our spirit and minds, time’s amorphousness is only adequately measured by excess and insufficiencies. How often do we wish for more time with loved ones? Or for time to speed up when we carry out banal tasks? Time always seems to work against our favor, showing up uninvited during moments we wish it gone.
We extend this same attitude towards cinema. It has been ingrained in common parlance that a film that evades the presence of time is one with merits. Meanwhile, a film that crawls to a halt and embraces time’s presence is to be avoided. We wish to kill time without being witness to it.
Yet, cinema at its very conception was about the compression of time. Cinema was initially called “motion pictures” because it consists of twenty-four frames of instantaneous stillness harrying every second to form a new temporality.
Yet, we often hold adverse attitudes towards films that embrace this fundamental aspect of the medium, and films that stall, hold and wait. With the proliferation of new modes of expression, each seemingly more fleeting in impact and duration, it is no surprise to see the rise of so-called “Slow Cinema” in recent decades. With the disparate poles of speed – between the temporal platform proposed by “slow cinema” and the populist status quo of rapid consumerism and productivity –approaching a binary, slowness seems all the more transgressive and novel to the modern viewer.
In opposition to the burgeoning increase of pace in mainstream cinema, a narrative aesthetic of slowness began to emerge, most notably on the international film festival circuit in the 1990s.
The “aesthetic of slow”, as coined by Matthew Flanagan in 2008, identifies the discernible formal characteristics employed by filmmakers to constitute not an abstract notion of slowness, but a rigorous formal structure to foreground slowness: long, uninterrupted shots; condensed, minimalist narratives; and emphatic emphasis of
the everyday. Slow cinema’s transgressive form is a defiant antithesis to the hurried movement that stemmed from the proliferation of music videos, marked by rapid shots and cuts as well as the constant diffusion of narrative information cinema, conventions that aim to elide and restructure dead time into productive narrative time, and to unify and homogenize our senses of time into one that is inconspicuous. What culminates in the aesthetic of slowness, instead, is a rupture. In the experience of the slow, there is an uncompromising and unmistakable reckoning of the multiplicity of temporalities that exists among the viewer and the film; the same co-existence we find in the act of waiting. In this integral aspect of slowness, cinema possesses a potential to confront and engage, an effort to connect with ourselves in relation to art and the Real. In this spark of alchemy that is so inherent to the medium, we find many artists who have identified slowness as a tool of cinematic power.
In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, his exploration into the history and trauma of colonization, meditative slowness is deployed in service to the corporeal hypnagogic consciousness that the Thai auteur so often devotes himself to. We can observe a similar sense of dream-like slowness in Bi Gan’s films, though in place of static long takes are nearly hour-long single shots that traverse through the Chinese countryside in all possible directions. With Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s aesthetic of slowness is most potent at its most tranquil. Against the idyllic scenes of naturalistic beauty, slowness becomes something truly meditative and primordial. The slowness that exists in these four arthouse films should neither be denigrated or praised simply for slowness itself. Instead, they should be recognized as integral as narrative or cinematography. They should be embraced as an opportunity for introspection and engagement, and as refuge from a society that has categorized and reappropriated our time exclusively for production.
teXt by JereMy
SLOW CINEMA
DAVID DREAM A LYNCHIAN DREAM
擦紙膠頭 (1977) ERASERHEAD
迷離劫: 與火同行 (1992)
TWIN PEAKS FIRE: WALK WITH ME
According to director Guillermo Del Toro, Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost once told him that despite all his bizarre eccentricities, David Lynch was actually unironic and that he earnestly enjoyed everything that he professed his love for — including the bluebird in the end of Blue Velvet and all the coffee and pies in Twin Peaks. “[Lynch] really has the two things — the weirdest mind and the most wholesome mind, and I think that those paradoxical creation is essential to art,” said Del Toro. In other words, as odd as Lynch’s art was, he sought beauty rather than logic in the bizarre, and that made his art all the more otherworldly.
This month, we celebrate the one and only David Lynch, the legendary cinematic surrealist who recently passed away at the age of 78. Right now, you can catch three of his classics on MOViE MOViE on Demand: his breakthrough masterpiece Eraserhead, Twin Peaks prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and his unfairly maligned cult classic Lost Highway Lynch was an artist who defiantly went against our traditional ideas of film and storytelling. He was so radical that his name is literally an adjective to describe his signature brand of surreal, dream-like films and all the pale imitations that have come afterwards (“That film was so Lynchian!”). While most of us tend to forget our dreams, Lynch took his and turned them into the stuff of unforgettable cinema. Even when we cannot explain Lynch’s imagery, his creations can still be hilarious, bizarre and terrifying, like they skipped past the rational parts of our brains and dashed straight for our most primitive emotions. And as dark as his work could be, they also seduced us in with inexplicable poetry.
妖夜慌蹤 (1997) LOST HIGHWAY
If anyone asks me the best way to approach David Lynch’s films, I draw on this quote from Christopher Nolan’s Tenet: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” Our first instinct as audiences is to decipher what a creator is saying. Not only do we often forget to appreciate how the creator is saying it, our first instinct is to dismiss films for irrational logic. So, it’s no surprise that a few of Lynch’s films have been met with polarizing responses from critics and even worse from audiences, particularly those who demand easily digestible answers and entertainment from films.
But that’s not to say that Lynch’s films lacked ideas or themes. Eraserhead used cinematic tools to amplify one man’s fear of human reproduction and impending parenthood; Lost Highway filtered popular themes of film noir – voyeurism, sex, violence and perversity – through Lynch’s own dream-like lens into something much more psychologically disturbing; and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me fulfilled Lynch’s wish to finally breathe life into the character of Laura Palmer, who was the center of Twin Peaks but spent all two seasons as merely a victim of heinous acts.
However, my own favorite memory of David Lynch didn’t come from his films. Two of the top American film critics who didn’t like Lost Highway were Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, whose weekly television program were so popular that a “two thumbs up” rating from them were often placed on films’ newspaper ads as a stamp of approval. When Lost Highway received the negative rating of “two thumbs down” from the two men, Lynch had the rating placed prominently on top of its newspaper ads the following week as both a sign of defiance and his own idea of approval. I may not have loved all of David Lynch’s films, but I will always love him as an uncompromising artist who didn’t care about pleasing audiences. All he wanted us to do was to dream with him.
DAVID LYNCH
teXt by KeVin Ma
KeVin Ma
Kevin Ma is a writer and English subtitler in the film industry, and the Hong Kong Consultant for Italy’s Udine Far East Film Festival. He was an English Editor at YesAsia. com and the Entertainment Editor of Cathay Pacific’s inflight magazine. He has contributed to publications by the Asian Film Awards. South Korea’s Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, Poland’s Five Flavours Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Hong Kong Asian Film Festival and the Hong Kong Film Archive.
