Curator Wang Pai-chang (王派彰) readily admits that audiences who see only one or two movies at Liquid Works (液態影展), the latest installment of the POP Cinema (國民戲院) program, are likely to feel bored and uninspired. Moviegoers who manage to make it through the entire lineup of 21 films will more likely appreciate the idea behind the project.
The subject isn’t weighty or impenetrable: the transformation in cinematic representations of water from the silent film era to the present day.
“As cinema becomes more and more grammatical, we believe that in order to innovate it, we have to create something new in editing, camera language and structure … But water is a carrier of emotions. It’s close to poetry and doesn’t follow grammatical rules of any kind,” Wang said.
Most of the films have little or no dialogue, beginning with the silent movie Tabu, a Story of the Southern Seas (1931), F.W. Murnau’s last work. Shot on location in Bora Bora, the film tells a deceptively simple story about doomed love and conveys the stirring power of myth and tragedy through Murnau’s dazzling imagery. L’Atalante (1934) is Jean Vigo’s only feature-length movie, often described as a cinematic poem about love that is lost and then found.
Decades before the advent of CGI effects, Czech animator and filmmaker Karel Zeman made his science fiction masterpiece A Deadly Invention (1958), inspired by French author Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Blending live action, animation, engravings and puppets, the film has a handmade feel that will be foreign to contemporary audiences brought up on Pixar animation.
Employed as a symbol of life, death, the unknown or of cleansing in these early films, the image of water becomes an omnipresent being in A Lake (2008). French director Philippe Grandrieux had a vision in which a lake is surrounded by trees, which make it inaccessible to humans. He wanted to film this lake and eventually found it in Switzerland. In the finished film, there are merely a few of shots of his long-sought vision.
“He didn’t feel the need to film it, because it’s present everywhere,” Wang said.
To Wang, all the directors featured in the program begin their work with an obsession: eliciting emotional responses in audience members. Following the films’ stories and understanding their characters is no longer important when watching these films. The viewing experience is marked by an awareness of time and of being driven by fluid emotions.
Nothing much takes place in Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island (1960), but by its end, audiences would most likely feel that some 90 minutes of their lives had been whiled away together with the film’s islanders, who throw themselves into daily routines to survive on a barren islet.
In Los Muertos (2004), by Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, a middle-aged man is released after serving a 20-year prison sentence for murder. Why and how the murder happened is never explained. The film slowly plods along, with the man traveling on a small boat into the jungle, which prompts comparisons with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Also on the lineup is Tren de Sombras (1995), made by Spanish filmmaker Jose Luis Guerin. Hired to restore a 8mm home movie made in 1930 by a father who died mysteriously when he went searching for better lighting while shooting by the side of a lake, Guerin was fascinated by what he saw and created a feature-length experimental piece by tearing apart, juxtaposing and reconstructing the father’s original footage.
The faded imagery has been given a new lease on life in Guerin’s hands. He gradually carries audiences deeper and deeper into the family’s life with mesmerizing visuals. Watching some of the scenes feels like seeing through the father’s eyes.
It seems fitting to use Armenian-born director Karen Gevorkian’s Spotted Dog Running at the Edge of the Sea (1990) to end the film festival. Based on Chingiz Aitmatov’s novel of the same title, the film is a parable involving a 10-year-old boy from the Nivkhis tribe in Sakhalin, Russia.
The flick generated much excitement when it screened at Spot’s Russian film festival in 2005.
“The film begins, and people would think: ‘Oh, God, I am watching a documentary about a primitive tribe.’ A few minutes later, they would say to themselves: ‘Should I leave now?’ Then all of a sudden, they get sucked into it, and leave the theater feeling completely drained,” Wang said. “This is liquid power.”
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and