Talking with Clemens Klopfenstein in Taipei, it's difficult to associate him with his latest film Who Afraid Wolf (Wer Angst Wolf), which plays tonight at 7pm at the Golden Horse Film Festival.
The Swiss-born, Italy-based director appears sanguine, always smiling, and has a playful attitude for the cameras taking pictures with his 13-year-old son.
But it probably takes a more sensitive eye and a theatrical appreciation, preferably in classic drama, to view Klopfenstein's disjointed version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
PHOTO: NIEN KENG-HAO, LIBERTY TIMES
"It is an experimental documentary, with famous actors playing actual drama in it," said Klopfenstein, defining his film.
Eight groups of people, all theater actors, are on the way to Rome, where they are going to meet Mr. Baumann at the city's Goethe Institute. The subtext "all roads lead to Rome" is evident early in the film.
The traveling actors are converging on the city in cars, vans and buses. The road signs indicate Rome as being to the right and then left. They are somehow incapable of making it to Rome, either through having taken a wrong turn, getting lost, getting into a fight on the road, or being stuck in a snowstorm. They all have to constantly call Rome, saying they will be late, that they got stuck, and so on.
The actors, including Bruno Ganz and Tina Engel, are rehearsing their roles and quoting passages from classics by Shakespeare, Shaw, Chekhov and from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee. They rehearse by the beach, inside cars, on the grass, in a small grocery store by a village and on snowy mountain sides. Sometimes they are just reciting the lines, sometimes they are really acting as if they were on stage. And very often, these groups of two, three or four people, have their personal problems between each other, and end up venting emotions during the rehearsals. The rehearsal segments reflect the actors' emotional turmoil, making it difficult for viewers to distinguish what is real acting and what is not.
Klopfenstein said it was unclear if the actors were rehearsing or expressing their genuine emotions through reciting the classic lines. "This was a challenge I faced during shooting and something I would like to present in the film," he said.
In a way, the whole film can be seen as another version of Waiting for Godot -- nobody reaches Rome, but they all act out excellent drama on the road. There are several couples rehearsing the classic argument scene in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but in this case it's in different languages, different locations and with different moods, adding different layers of dynamics between the couples.
One of the film's creative experiments is to create a kind of theater sensation in the wilderness of the Italian countryside near Rome. "It's like culture crashing against the wilderness, through the passing of landscapes," Klopfenstein said.
The landscapes at least provide some visual diversion that the audience can appreciate even if not familiar with the classic playwrights and their works.
"Just listen to the talk and follow the looks," he said.
Klopfenstein's preference for fragmented, improvised aesthetics is probably related to his other identity as a painter. Making this film, he said acted like a painter, first collecting the desired colors on the pallet and then beginning to paint only when inspired by the colors before him. Apart from being a prize-winning painter, he has also been a cinematographer for 30 years. His previous film Silence of the Men, a winner of the Swiss Film Prize, is a hilarious film shot in Egypt about a bunch of men babbling about their women problems.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had