Daily Archives: April 8, 2025

Actress

From the April 9, 1993 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

A masterpiece by Stanley Kwan, the greatest Hong Kong film I’ve seen (also known as Ruan Ling Yu and Center Stage). The story of silent film actress Ruan Ling Yu (1910-1935), known as the Garbo of Chinese cinema, it combines documentary with period re-creation, biopic glamour with profound curiosity, and ravishing historical clips with color simulations of the same sequences being shot — all to explore a past that seems more complex, mysterious, and sexy than the present. Maggie Cheung won a well-deserved best actress prize at Berlin for her classy performance in the title role, and a large part of what Kwan does as a director is to create a kind of nimbus around her poise and grace. (If I had to pick Kwan’s Hollywood equivalent, I’d opt for George Cukor.) Kwan also creates a labyrinth of questions around who Ruan was and why she committed suicide — a labyrinth both physical (with beautifully ambiguous uses of black-and-white movie sets) and metaphysical — and keeps these questions perpetually open. You should be prepared for a picture that lasts 146 minutes and invites you to relish every one of them — not only the stylish beauty of an imagined Shanghai film world of the 30s, but also the flat abrasiveness of Kwan chatting with Cheung on video about what all this means and coming up with damn little. Read more

Intimate Passions: Rotterdam 1992

From Sight and Sound (March 1992). –- J.R.

There was a discernible change of emphasis this year’s Rotterdam

Festival under its new director, Emile Fallaux. Certainly, there were

fewer intellectual and scholarly interests than in the reign of Marco

Müller, who has moved on to Locarno,although the creation of a new

organization called ‘The Limits of Liberty’ to promote free expression

for filmmakers (somewhat after the model of PEN) signaled a new

activist impulse. With selections now made by a team of Dutch

programmers rather than a single individual, Rotterdam has arguably

become more of a Dutch event than it was under the extended rule of

the late Hubert Bals, who tended to shun native product. But one welcome

constant is a passionate defense of the marginal and surreptitious, and

an overall sense of equality that puts studio tyros and independents on

the same footing.

One of the most striking films this year was Zhang Yuan’s Mama, an

independently Made, banned work from mainland China about

mentally handicapped children. Alternating between an emotionally

subdued fictional story in black and white about a mother and her

retarded son and highly emotional documentary interviews in color

video with the real-life counterparts, the film sets up a neo-Brechtian

strategy with complex dividends.

En movimiento: Good for People, Bad for Business

My column for Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, submitted in late April for their June 2020 issue. Happily, both Her Socialist Smile and A House is Not a Home: Wright or Wrong are both readily available now via streaming.– J.R.

I suppose one could say that the coronavirus has been “good” for my web site because more people visit it now. In much the same fashion, and with an equivalent amount of innocent perversity, Donald Trump is said to be “bad” for the United States (that is, most of the people in the United States) yet “good” for television —meaning the handful of billionaires who own and control television, all of whom are felt to be distinct from the United States.

What does it mean, really, to call anything in the media (television, radio, cinema, the Internet, my web site, your web site ) “good” without matching the interests of the people who go there or live there? Like the American delusion that only three kinds of people exist in the world — Americans, anti-Americans, and prospective Americans — this means excluding most of humanity from the playing field.

I once heard that when Jonas Mekas in 1970 received the news that Nasser had just died, his first thought was to ponder whether this was “good or bad for cinema”. Read more