When Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) was making Flowers of Shanghai (海上花, 1998), the only instruction he gave cinematographer Mark Ping-bing Lee (李屏賓) was “to make the images look kind of oily.”
Wong Kar-wai (王家衛) was no better. For the poignant scene in In the Mood for Love (花樣年華, 2001) when Tony Leung (梁朝偉) whispers to a crack in a wall at Angkor Wat in, the director only told Lee: “The secret is hidden inside the crack” and “be bold.”
These are just a few of the anecdotes included in the new documentary Let the Wind Carry Me (乘著光影旅行), which depicts Lee, 56, as an accomplished cinematographer, a loving son, and a famous artist in his own right. With a prolific career that has spanned more than 25 years and included a life-long collaboration with Hou that dates back to A Time to Live and a Time to Die (童年往事, 1985), Lee is one of the world’s most sought-after cinematographers, having also worked with directors such as Hong Kong’s Ann Hui (許鞍華), Japan’s Koreeda Hirokazu and Vietnam’s Anh Hung Tran.
Taiwanese director Chiang Hsiu-chiung (姜秀瓊) and Hong Kong cinematographer and director Kwan Pun-leung (關本良) began work on Let the Wind Carry Me in 2006. Three years of following Lee across the globe and one year of painstaking editing later, the director duo has delivered an intimate portrait of Lee as a ruggedly handsome virtuoso who is quiet and sensitive but always makes people feel comfortable around him.
Audiences are quickly drawn to the cinematographer’s artistic world through interviews with friends and colleagues that are carefully intercut with scenes from the movies lensed by Lee. The artist’s unique sensitivity and approach to cinema surface when French director Gilles Bourdos recalls how Lee used plastic bags to light a scene in A Sight for Sore Eyes (2003). Chinese director Jiang Wen (姜文) remembers how “Brother Bing” maintained his composure when a snowstorm suddenly blew in during the shooting of The Sun Also Rises (太陽照常升起, 2006) in the Xinjiang desert and filmed an enchanting scene while the rest of the crew panicked.
Through the lens of Chiang and Kwan, Lee is seen building his aesthetic vocabulary through keen observations on what is happening around him. A clip from Lee’s home movies, for example, shows him videotaping a leaf trembling on a branch. The cinematographer himself also sheds light on his philosophy on image-making with the documentarians, discussing colors, breezes, changing light and shadows, smells and textures, and how it is his job to capture them on film.
Lee’s words and images often amaze and inspire, but the emotional motif of the film lies in the brief moments that he shares with his octogenarian mother, Wang Yung-chu (王永珠), who was widowed early in life and brought up five children by herself. Lee doesn’t see his mother often, having spent most of his life away from home making movies. When mother and son meet, few words are exchanged, but they are spoken with tenderness and affection. By contrast, a brief appearance by Lee’s teenage son at their home in Los Angeles reveals the artist as an absent father and husband.
For Chiang, herself the mother of two young children, the sacrifices Lee makes to pursue his dreams strike a cord, since she also put her family aside to complete the documentary, which she and Kwan shot, edited and produced pretty much by themselves.
Deep down, Chiang believes, Lee’s mother plays a vital part in the cinematographer’s life. “Lee and his mother are very much alike. They are both warm and considerate of others’ feelings. The way his mother treats people and lives life influences Lee, and that in turn impacts on Lee’s images,” Chiang said. “I am always fascinated by his images, and in the end I realize that Lee and his images are the same: natural, tender and comforting, but all the while there is a an immense force and strength underneath.”
After screening in Taipei, Let the Wind Carry Me will hit theaters in Kaohsiung and Tainan on May 21 and Taichung and Hsinchu on June 4. For more information, go to thewind2010.pixnet.net/blog or www.letthewindcarryme.com.
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