Striking Hunger

The screening of Steve McQueen's Hunger brought a full house to Wexner Wednesday night. I knew Steve McQueen was a big deal, but I didn't know he was such a big deal. Admission was special priced; Sherri, Wexner's Director, was there for the introduction; and everybody was there, film studies people, college of arts people, all those artsy and filmsy faces.


When you see this poster, what do you think this beautiful pattern is? Would you have a better clue if you were told first that the film is about a famous hunter strike in the prison of Northern Ireland? It is shit, poop, human discharge...however you name it. It's the trace of shit on the wall after a prison guard cleaned it, or tried to, with high-pressure water. There is no toilet in the prison cells, so prisoners pour their urine out through the gap between the cell door and floor, and they paint their poop on the wall, with their bare hands.

Steve McQueen is an extremely normal looking African-British. If you don't know who he is, you probably would assume he is one of those cleaners with a broom, paper towels and detergent waiting outside a lady's bathroom. No racial profiling here I swear to god, but the way he dresses and his look are just not artsy or schorlarly or nerdy or weird in any way.

The movie will definitely make one of the top 10 movies I see in 2009. It is filled with control, power, and defiance. The tension never stops. I could barely remember to blink my eyes or to breath. I could feel vividly how my body was being electrified again and again and again. It's different from the kind of shock created by fast editing or huge explosion. The tension of the movie runs under the skin, constantly. I would want to watch the movie for a second time or even more, not to appreciate the art of it, but just to experience the movie.

The tension of the movie is created by extremities. The violent and appalling imagery counters the rigorous image composition and patient construction of pace and rhythm. Good movies are not the perfect ones. Good movies teach you how to watch them. Like Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Hunger trains you to be observative. Hunger leads you through a maze of daily rituals of prisoners and prison guards with great patience. Movie starts with a man soaking his hands in the water. The knuckles are seriously wounded, red. Why? The way he puts on his rings and his clothes are neatly folded and placed, you know it must have been like this for however many years in his adult life. Before he leaves his house, he looks around and checks if anyone has placed any bomb under his car. Again, you know he does it everyday. But why? Only after a quarter of the movie has gone by, the movie reveals that he is a prison guard whose job is to beat up prisoners, which explains his wound and precaution.

Another instance is the shit on the wall. With the prisoner who first appears in the movie entering his cell, he sees the inside of the space, unevenly browned walls. He looks around, probably trying to figure out what it is as all the audience are. His curiosity and ours, his fear and ours, encounter and merge at this moment through a point-of-view shot. You're so taken over by a desire of wanting to know that you almost forget you're watching a movie. You are no longer watching a movie. You are watching the walls. First I thought it was blood. Then I knew it is not blood from the texture of it, but I still didn't know what it was. As a matter of fact, it was still hard for me to believe what it is when I saw the scene of a prisoner sticking his hands in his pants and his ass. It is just beyond my imagination that any human would want to live in the middle of our own shit, but obviously it was not a matter of choice, and that's probably the best way to dispose it according to prisoner's experience after years.

McQueen comes from a fine art background. When an audience asked him about his poetic imgery, he said it was easy. Compared to the history of painting, that of film is nothing. He gains his inspiration from painting. McQueen speaks through image, so do the characters in his movie. A character who only appears twice, in the form of voice, in the movie is Margaret Thatcher. However, her voice is such an important vehicle in contextualizing the political environment of the hunger strike, virtually the only vehicle. Thatcher's voice is always accompanied with images. The second time, it is the image of the inside of prison. With her voice filling the hallway, her politics takes an invisible existence that haunts every prisoners and prison guards.

The core scene is a 17-minute long negotiation between Sands and a priest. It is seemingly the most laid-back scene of the whole movie: people are communicating, occasionally with a joke, with each other in a non-violence way. Both parties elaborate on their stance, but neither surrender. The encounter of verbalized opinions is violence in another form, and it takes you further in their mind and identity. The moment the priest is convinced, or let's say he gives up, you know it's the end of violence in the movie, but the start of Sands struggling in hunger.

With all the stories told and all the details depicted through a relatively slow pace, it is almost hard to believe that the movie is only 96 minute long. Again it is the extremities. There's no grey area, no neutral zone, no time for a nerve rest. There is very little dialogue in the movie. When prisoners and prison guards are separately portrayed, all of them are leading a life filled with oppressed silence; when they meet, it's explicit violence in the sound of beating and screaming.

It is not a story that many people can associate themselves with. McQueen spent 5 years working on this movie. He interviewed hunger strike survivors and then prison guards. As for history and history-telling, this movie can be only one version of it, but McQueen sure has delivered his vision clearly and beautifully.

A Stranger Not So Close To Me

I made a mistake by reading an article about grandpa this morning. My uncle wrote the article and my mom sent it to me because grandpa's 100th anniversary is coming in April. I read one paragraph and my eyes were filled with tears. I am in the office! Stop it!

The first part is titled "A Stranger Close To Me". That's exactly who grandpa was to me. I knew he was my grandpa; he was always there; he smiled all the time; I knew he was someone great, but I never felt I knew him. Obviously that's not just me, not just because I didn't live close to him. I learnt a lot about grandpa from uncle's writing, his career, his music, his hobbies, his research, and how he survived all the attacks and tortures during the Cultural Revolution. To many, grandpa is considered the third most important Chinese composer in modern Chinese history, next to the two who co-composed the National Anthem of China. To me, for a long time, he was just a name, a face, a biological origin where some of my blood came from. I didn't know how I was supposed to think about him, his fame and all the words and evidence of his greatness until I heard The Nirvana of Pheonix at a concert held by China's Ministry of Culture for his 90th birthday. I was convinced. I started looking up to this small man. I understood why my aunt said there probably would be nobody in the family who will exceed what grandpa had achieved.

The Nirvana of Pheonix is a modern symphony piece. It was later accompanied for chorus with a poem/lyrics written by Guo Moruo (the Chinese writer who was the closest to receiving a Literature Nobel Prize. he committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution before the Nobel Prize was granted, the prize was withdrawn because Nobel Prize only goes to people alive). The Nirvana of Pheonix changed what grandpa meant to me. I could vividly feel my love for him, but he was becoming more of a symbol, a symbol of great talent, and more distant.

When grandpa was sick in hospital, I only visited him once in ICU. I remember I stood in a corner and cried insanely for over half an hour afterwards. Grandpa passed away at the age of 93. It's been 7 years. I have never been back to his apartment since, and I have never visited him at the cemetery after the funeral either, not because I don't miss him but he is the most haunting one among all my passed-away grandparents (all four of them), I am afraid that the physical presence of anything related to him will discharge all of whatever that's been accumulated for 7 years and destroy me. Just like how I have always stayed away from the yard and little street where I spent my childhood. I had a wonderful time there, but memory alone can be too scary.

I published an essay about grandpa on an art magazine when I was in college working for Beijing Concert Hall. I felt proud when I saw people reading my article. My family was proud too, I think. At a family gathering after the essay was published, my aunt read the article to the whole family. Mom told me that everybody cried, then she said she hopes I can write something like that about her someday. I thought to myself, luckily I was not at the family gathering.

I saw on a famous Chinese cultural critic's blog a list of artists banned by the Ministry of Culture of China. I was shocked at first, because I thought the reason they got banned was the content of their works, and a bunch of names in there are rarely associated with sex or violence or whatever unhealthy. Then I figured, politics is probably the bigger bitch here. Most of them probably have made some sort of statement, or have participated some activities or concerts that advocated for the independence or Tibet, the independence of Taiwan, the freedom of Fa Lun Gong (a group considered cult by Chinese government), or against Beijing Olympics 2008. I don't know how he got access to this list. As he works for one of the biggest commentary magazines in China, he might have got this as part of the policy package from the Ministry of Culture. I am sure this is not the ultimate list of all the artists that will get banned, but on the other hand, I also believe that if some agency wants to include some of the black-listed artist, there's a way to work it.

Here we go:

A Tribe Called Quest
Alanis Morissette
Ben Harper
Beck
Biz Markie
Blur
Bjork
Beastie Boys
Buddy Guy
Buffalo Daughter
Blues Traveler
Blackalicious
Blondie
Celibate Rifles
Cibo Matto
Dadon
De La Soul
Dave Matthews Band
Eskimo Joe
Eddie Vedder & Mike McCready
Foo Fighters
Fugees
Garpa
Gerling
Garbage
Herbie Hancock
Jon Spencer
John Lee Hooker
Jebediah
Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros
KRS-ONE
Kraftwerk
Live
Luscious Jackson
Lee Perry
Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Mad Professor
Michael Stipe & Mike Mills
Mutabaruka
Money Mark
Nawang Khechog
Not From There
Noel Gallagher
Neil Finn
Otis Rush
Pavement
Porno for Pyros
Pearl Jam
Pulp
Patti Smith
R.E.M.
Radiohead
Rage Against The Machine
Richie Havens
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Rancid
Regurgitator
Run DMC
Sonic Youth
Sean Lennon
Spiderbait
Taj Mahal
The Smashing Pumpkins
The Skatalites
The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
The Wallflowers
The Cult
Tracy Chapman
The Roots
The Mavis’s
The Avalanches
The Living End
Urban Dance Squad
U2
Wyclef Jean
Wu-Tang Clan
You Am I
Thom Yorke
Trans Am
Yoko Ono
Yungchen Lhamo

The whole thing is stupid.

First, all of these artists, or most of them, need education. Do they really know what the issue at root is of those subjects? They simply can't resist the sexy appeal of the name "protecting the freedom of religion" or something like that.

Second, instead of giving credit for what these artists said, Chinese government could have been smarter and just ignored them. I highly doubt any of these artists would be shouting "Free Tibet!" in their concert in China. Once they're in China, their eyeballs and their mind will be too busy looking around learning and getting their new brain-wash from this country to remember their never-has-been-firm stance on those issues. Plus people in the cities, those that could be possible performing destinations, are educated well enough to hold their always-has-been-firm stance on those issues. The government should have more faith in the people that they won't change their political opinion just because some pop singer says so and so.

Deep down it is the rivalry of two ideologies, which might never be resolved, with many many people like me caught in between.

Recently a friend who is going back to China told me that when she was booking her plane ticket, because it was a single trip, the ticket agent asked whether she's a U.S. citizen. The ticket agent said right now Chinese government does not allow U.S. citizens to buy single-trip tickets to China. Our speculation is that this is partly a job market protection policy. While the unemployment rate in the U.S. has flown up over 8%, China is working on maintaining an economic growth of 8%. If what that ticket agent said was true, basically Chinese government has said no to the U.S. labor export and no to U.S. emigration. Not that either is necessarily going to happen on a large or visible scale, but the translation of power shifting has never manifested faster.

Siren

It takes a little courage to describe the sound/light show of Ray Lee Siren last night.

Siren is a sound installation, and it is a light installation too but only after all the lights in the room go out. The whole installation is composed of 22 machines powered by electric motors. For each machine, there is a metal tripod on the bottom with a metal stick on top spinning like two arms. There is one siren and one small red spot light attached on each end of every arm. While the two sirens on one arm are same, each machine is attached with different sirens.

I was the first to arrive in the theatre. An usher explained to me that all the audience would be taken onto stage behind the curtain, so it didn't matter where to sit for the moment, and I was warned in advance that nobody would be allowed to enter or leave throughout the 45 minutes of performance, so I should take care of all my personal business before the performance. Before the performance started, an usher read a statement from the artist, in which it says please don't touch the installation because it's very dangerous. Then we were directed onto the stage. After all the audience had entered the room on stage behind the curtain, Ray Lee and his partner started all the machines one by one. The arms started spinning at different speed and sirens started singing different tones.

I was intrigued by those tripod machines as well as Ray Lee and his partner. They wore dark gray suits in very thick and raw fabric, looking like cavement playing with technology. The technology is really not high, but very basic physics. They have little expression on their face. They walk around those tripod machines gracefully, like well-choreographed dance (I'm sure it's because they've practiced many many times), having their hands in the front of back so that they wouldn't hit the machines. The somewhat rusty machines had their own rawness too.

Like everybody else, I walked around the whole installation setting to listen and observe the difference. The sirens on one side tend to be lower-pitched than the other. The very first siren Ray Lee started sounded like Scottish Highland bagpipe. After listening to 44 sirens for a little while, I started having a minor headache. Just as I wonder where the performance was going, all the lights in the room were out, leaving the red spot lights creating beautiful red circles in the air as they were spinning.

I didn't know the red light has such exciting mission. I had thought they were just signal lights to show whether the sirens were on. I was immediately intrigued by the fascinating spectacle. Ray Lee and his partner adjusted something and all the arms started spinning faster.

The performance came to an end as everything was slowly turned down. One great thing about the performance is that you get to see the whole process of opening and ending.

It is one of those shows that make you wonder does one have to be a scientist before s/he becomes an artist nowadays. I left the performance feeling like an earth woman whose mind had been intervened by aliens. it's quite an interesting delight.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Last night Jennifer and I went to Wexner for Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It's the screening of a new 35mm print. Jennifer invited me earlier this week. I got really excited when I saw that the film was 201-min long. When it comes to films, I am a sadist. I like really long films and I like challenging my own limit. So far my record stays 4 hours for a single film and 24 hours for a film marathon.

The film was magnificent. It is one of those master pieces that make me want to write a big fat paper on it. As a big film nerd, even the idea of watching a film like this for many times, taking notes and elaborating on the greatness of the picture turns me on.

-film spoiler alert-

The film tells the story of 3 days in a woman's life. Jeanne is a widow living with her son who is a student in school She prostitutes herself at home everyday to make a living and leaves her son in the dark. The first day, she lives as the machine she's always lived. (In my opinion) because of the short yet intense conversation between Jeanne and her son about whether one can and/or should make love with someone they're not in love with, her life starts to change. The machine that runs her body is out of order, starting with her overcooking potatos. Jeanne keeps screwing up more and more things in her life. On the second night, her son had another short yet intense conversation with her about his growing knowledge of sex intercourse and his earlier sexual fantasies over Jeanne. Jeanne's third day is aggravated by an out-of-stock condom vending machine. Later on the day, she experiences a sexual awakening during sex and kills the man-to-fuck of the day afterwards. Then she sits in front of her dinning table. At this point, I'm sure every audience is wondering how the film is going to conclude. Is her son coming home? Is she going to kill herself?...I looked at my watch. There were 5 minutes left till the time the film's supposed to end. For an over-3-hour film that tells a 3-day story, I knew that was it. The film ended with her sitting in front of the dinning table, her hands and shirt having blood on them, and a slight smile of relief appearing on her never-had-an-expression face.

It sounds like a very long and boring film, except for the ending which probably woke up many half-asleep audience. Three hours of a woman who and whose life are even more boring than bare bricks. There's barely any dialogue, or for that matter sound, in the film. However, we were all very absorbed by the extremely well-crafted details. The film is like a big puzzle. Like Hitckcockian suspense, the film intrigues us with an over peaceful face. You know there's more beneath it. You know something is going to happen, so you wait, with great patience and interest. Even though things begin to change from half way, but only in a very subtle fashion. So when Jeanne stabs her scissors into the man, everyone is shocked. Imagine an orgasm after a 3-hour foreplay. That's how mind-blowing the ending is.

The cinematography of the film is pristine. On the first day and a half, when everything is ''normal", every shot is an established shot, very well framed and very patient. Once things start going wrong, shots become cutting-edge and anxious. Shots are still long, the change is not dramatic, but as subtle as the change in Jeanne's body. Jeanne's face is never clear before and after her sex deal with different men, either in the dark or cut out of the frame. Only on the third day can we see her face while she's having sex. It's a high-angle shot which clearly shows all her facial expressions and body movement. This is the moment her body and mind awake and come into light.

Chantal Akerman is a female director, and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is obviously a feminist film. The awakening of identity (or whatever) of women has been part of French cinema history forever. This film slowly and thoroughly digests its feminism theme through several motives: clock, room(closure/space), machine, processing, cleansing...all of which are very connected yet strong on their own.

After the screening, Jennifer, Catherine, me and another girl whose name I don't quite remember, went to a cafe for some chitchat. This is why I love Jennifer. She left her husband, her one-year old son and her 4 cats home and hung out with 3 single girls at a cafe after midnight. It was a Friday night. Party people were everywhere. We were probably the nerdiest bunch. At the cafe, we talked about the film and joked about it too: how retarded Jeanne's son looks; how Jeanne and her son look like a sexless old married couple; how the baby cried like an old wild cat, blah blah blah. It was so much fun! Master pieces like this, you have to take it with a grain of salt.

Two Dreams of Lewis Klahr

When I was in New York, I complained to Chris about how I missed James Benning's Landscape Suicide because of work and how I was going to miss Saul Levin's show at Anthology and Bruce McClure's Only in Darkness Is Your Shadow Clear at Light Industry. As a consolation award for the successful survival of my nightmare job in NYC , after I came back to Cbus he gave me two new films by Lewis Klahr and Landscape Suicide by James Benning. I watched them last night.

Lewis Klahr's two films:

The Diptherians Episode Two: The Rhythm That Forgets Itself

Fake Aging

Both films were made in 2008 and haven't received much publicity yet. Diptherians was recently screened as part of a short film program Cracking The Surface at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in late Jan 2009. As a west-coast based filmmaker, Lewis Klahr's films are screened in L.A. a lot more than the east coast. Googling two films, I found that two films are only on the screening schedule of Rotterdam. Hopefully Rotterdam is just a kickoff not the end of their screening journey.

In Diptherians, Lewis Klahr uses the cut-out of photos of Wooster Group members like Willem Dafoe and Kate Valk. According to Lewis Klahr, he and those Wooster actors improvised their way "through a series of photo shoots trying to determine exactly what a 'Diptherian' is. Here's the first definition-- an elliptical narrative of what could become an ongoing serial of feature length duration".

Quote Chris from the website of CalArts:
The video-based Episode Two: The Rhythm that Forgets Itself is an elliptical narrative that presents a group of sartorially gifted demigods or super-villains (played by Wooster Group all-stars Kate Valk and Willem Dafoe, among others) as they go through their extra-temporal paces. The arcane mythology that surrounds them indicates that they exist outside of the laws of physics and man but, despite that, are trapped in their own patterns of asymmetrically cyclical behavior, somnambulistic decadence, and cosmically petty intrigues. And, similarly, the fumetti-like use of photographs gives a verisimilitude to the characters that almost grants them a sense of individual agency but the flatness of the cutouts squelches any sense of free will. That even the flattest of objects casts a shadow is one of the many paradoxes and mysteries that is hidden within The Diptherians.

Quote Tom Gunning (Chair of Film Studies Committee at Univ. of Chicago) on Lewis Klahr:
Miming the processes of memory, Klahr pulls together 'the discards of contemporary life into scenarios that seem like Hollywood films dimly remembered after a night of serious drinking.

I watched both films for three times. They are both under 15 minutes, so it's quite affordable timewise. At the second round, I finally found my best way to watch and understand his film. Instead of watching and thinking, I started living the films like my own dreams. Suddenly all the seemingly illogic fragments started to make sense. I don't know how Slavoj Zizek or any psychoanalyzist might put my case into theory, but I do believe if I could understand my memory, me dreams, and why and how my brain selected and invented them, if I could reach my unconsciousness and manipulate it consciously, I would be able to read Lewis Klahr like riding a bike.

It is really difficult to describe what Lewis Klahr's films are like. Every film is like a mystic episode of a superhero movie. He's a collagist and his films are collages. The material he uses is very nostalgic. Cut-out from old comic stripes, photos, stamps...I don't know if he really cut them out somewhere or he actually made them and made them vintage-looking. There always seems to be a narrative, but never easy to decipher. Fragmented aesthetics and narratives. One word, delirious.


A big part of Diptherians is uploaded on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OpIMf8N0hM

I want this!

30 of Millenium Film Journals for $304, shipping included o_O!
a decision to be made before the end of march.