In the time of the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison, the world’s earliest filmmakers took their novel filmmaking gadgets with them when they traveled to record their experiences. This desire has generated different types of travel cinema, ranging from expeditionary and ethnographic films to home videos and road movies. The latest installment of POP Cinema, Voyage/Displacement (旅行─移動), revisits this essential cinematic form.
“We cut ourselves off from reality and the past in order to make ourselves ready for a cinematic experience,” says festival curator Wang Pai-chang (王派章). “But as a film unfolds, the noises of reality intrude … The real and the unreal, the past and present intertwine, split and reconnect. It is a process that never ceases to repeat, proliferate and change.”
In the brooding epic Route One/USA (1989), American independent filmmaker Robert Kramer, one of the US’ most forceful dissenters in the 1960s, returns home with a 16mm camera after 10 years of self-exile in Europe. Traveling with “Doc,” a fictional character played by his childhood friend Paul McIsaac, Kramer embarks on a five-month journey from the beginning of Route One in Maine to its terminus in Florida. The line between documentary and fiction is blurred as Kramer uses encounters with his fellow countrymen to create a portrait of America and how it has changed during his long absence.
Between 1993 and 1996 renowned French photographer, journalist and filmmaker Raymond Depardon took a voyage of his own through his beloved Africa. In Africa, How Are You With Pain (1996), Depardon questions his responsibility as an image maker and confronts his own prejudices. Like Kramer he is acutely aware of the difficulties he must confront while making his film and does so with great compassion and respect.
A different route is taken by a young couple in Lucie et Maintenant — Journal Nomade (2007). Traveling from Paris to Marseille in an old Volkswagen bus, the pair undertakes the same journey Argentine writer Julio Cortazar and his lover Carol Dunlop took 25 years ago and follows the same rule that requires them to stop at each service area they pass and spend the night in every second one. What is normally a seven-hour drive takes 33 days as nuanced details, small moments, humming sounds and voices are woven into a poetry piece of voyage and nostalgia.
Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, one of the most important contemporary directors in Africa, Waiting for Happiness (2002) tells a tale of departure. Seventeen-year-old Abdallah visits his mother in his hometown of Nouadhibou on the West African coast before embarking for Europe. Estranged from his own community and language, the young man struggles to decipher the world around him.
Taking the road movie genre in an alternative direction, Home (2008) opens with a family living in a ramshackle house alongside an abandoned highway. One night, workers and their machines arrive to resurface the road and put it back into service. Facing four-lane traffic day and night, the family, unable to leave, quickly disintegrates as its members are forced to deal with inner turmoil and eccentricity.
In 1965, legendary Polish director Wojciech Has (often compared with David Lynch) made what has now become a timeless cult movie, The Saragossa Manuscript. Based on the massive novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Count Jan Potocki, with its rich folkloric elements, surreal sensitivity, bawdy humor, Jewish mysticism and supernatural themes, the film follows a charming young Belgian captain traveling across 17th-century Spain. The officer becomes spellbound by an old manuscript he finds in an abandoned house, and dreamlike adventures ensue, which escalate into a mind-bending, labyrinthine narrative where characters pass from one story to another.
Other highlights by several all-time greats of cinema include Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) starring Jack Nicolson, Wim Wenders’ Wrong Move (1975) featuring 13-year-old Natasha Kinski, and Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami’s remarkable feature debut, The Traveler (1974).
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located