A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1985)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The second part of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Coming-of-Age trilogy is based on Hou’s own childhood. Tong nien wang shi begins with Hou’s voiceover recalling that his father relocated from Mei County, Kwangtung Province, in mainland China to Taiwan shortly after his birth, with him and the rest of the family following a year after. Hou, in effect, knew only the new country; his difficult adjustment, therefore, was to his family, whose difficulty adjusting to Taiwan exceeded his—although, because of his connection to them, he also experienced an acute sense of loss of homeland.
     Tong nien wang shi comprises incidents—recollections, to which Hou has added imagination, especially regarding his mother, who is seen explaining things to the family that goes beyond what she must have said at the time. One infers from this Hou’s greatest need for reconciliation with the memory of the woman who spunkily spanked him and kept the family together. However, it is Grandma whose wanderings keep her searching for Mekong Bridge and the way home. Eventually Grandma returns to the mainland.
     We know the name of Hou’s father from her cries at hospital at his death. Fen-ming! A laterally moving shot records the children’s faces of grief. Ah-hsiao, or Ah-ha, as his peers teasingly put it, is bathing in an adjacent room when he hears his mother’s piercing lament.
     We watch the boy and other children at play and getting into more serious trouble. It is the portrait of a great artist as not yet a young man.
     Tong nien wang shi is a gently melancholy work, full of a sense of lost cultural moorings that Hou now can grasp as an adult. The film is his brilliant attempt to fill in the blanks of his aching heart.

YELLOW EARTH (Chen Kaige, 1984)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

“Of all us poor folk, girls are the saddest.”
     Reputedly the first work of the “fifth generation” of Chinese filmmakers, Huang tu di is gorgeous—Zhang Yimou is the color cinematographer—and poetic. Chen Kaige captures a dream of national unity under the threat that the Japanese pose in the late 1930s. Qing Gu is a young revolutionary soldier who visits the northern wilderness in order to collect folk songs to inspire comrades and bind them to the common folk. Staying with a peasant farmer, he discovers that the songs, all sad, wed haunting melodies to lyrics such as “Suffering is forever, sweetness is short.” Gu inspires Cuiqiao, the widower’s 13-year-old daughter, who wants to join the Communist army to experience the equality with men that “Brother Gu” from the south has told her about. In the world with which she is familiar, marriages are arranged for girls, whose singing gives them their only voice of freedom—the “freedom” of lament.
     Chen combines captivating lyricism and a documentary-style attention to the harsh conditions of the peasants’ lives. (Stunning: amidst drought, the communal prayer for rain.) The flowing Yellow River interrupts the mostly static shots of daunting terrain. In one radiant shot, Cuiqiao’s carrying buckets of water from the river appears to extend the river’s motion. Nature is arrayed against the people, but they are also a part of it.
     Qing must rejoin his outfit. “Take me with you,” Cuiqiao pleads. It is against “the rules.” “Can’t the rules be changed?” she asks. “We depend on rules for our cause.” But Qing does promise to return. “I’m afraid I shall not see you again,” Cuiqiao sings out as he leaves, a pair of reverse long shots recording the vast distance now between them. She is right, of course.

A SUMMER AT GRANDPA’S (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1984)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Based on co-scenarist Chu Tien-wen’s childhood, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dongdong de jiaqi revolves around Tung-Tung, an eleven-year-old boy who, along with Ting-Ting, his four-year-old sister, spends a summer in the country with maternal grandparents and his teenaged uncle, while Mother is in hospital. This is the first part of Hou’s Coming-of-Age trilogy.
     The Taiwanese film admits a wealth of incidents, and only the scarcest amount of plot, as Hou patiently, unhurriedly reflects on how children often feel lost amongst adults in the adult world, where they are rarely listened to and largely inhabit a shared world of their own. We watch a turtle race they conduct. They set loose wild birds a neighbor has caught and caged. They swim in the river. A boy tells Ting-Ting, who is watching, to go away: “Your eyes will grow germs!” Left out (again, is the sense of it), Ting-Ting retaliates by silently gathering up the boys’ clothes bank side and tossing these to the current—this, after observing the motion of a train.
     Dim-ma, “madwoman” with a tattered umbrella, is mentally slow. She is introduced in a high overhead shot from the perspective of boys in a giant, leafy tree: a projection of Hou’s wish to protect her even as one of the boys scorns her. Dim-ma snatches Ting-Ting in the nick of time from railroad tracks, carrying her piggyback to safety. Dim-ma has been raped and is pregnant. Adults discuss what needs to be done.
     Uncle, once he is tossed out by Grandpa, lives with the girl he has impregnated. The couple marry. Respect in marriage, the one officiating explains, is a building block of society.
     Numerous themes come together in this complex, beautiful film. One is this: for Chu and Hou, the birth of their feminist consciousness.

THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (Shohei Imamura, 1983)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The opening shot of Shohei Imamura’s Narayama bushiko is cunning. Accompanying a caption that sets the action in nineteenth-century northern Japan, the camera reveals vast terrain: miles of snow-covered trees. It’s a helicopter shot!—and the visual implication of this modern contraption draws our attention to something else that might otherwise have remained “invisible”: the camera it is transporting. All this has the effect of wittily collapsing the distance in time of about a hundred years. Imamura’s study of greed, the sex impulse and the survival instinct in a remote, wintry, primitive community thus will be, in reality, a reflection on how these elements still structure human behavior and activity.
     Orin is 69. At 70, elders in this village trek to Mount Narayama to die, thereby relieving the impoverished community of their burden. It is time for Orin to put her hut in order. Son Tatsuhei must get a wife!
     The hard work of farming, as well as other aspects of life in this community (such as Tatsuhei’s sexual encounters), are interrupted by inserted closeups of Nature: bugs and snakes copulating; a snake, later an owl, devouring a rodent. The villagers are always one bad harvest away from disaster, but winter keeps some of them warmer than others. Food, scarce, is precious, and when one of them steals crops the village comes together as an avenging mob, burying alive the offender and his entire family. Otherwise, “we will get no sleep,” “he will steal again.”
     The film’s last movement enchants. Orin has turned 70, and Tatsuhei carries her, piggyback, to her last end. She accepts this, as she must; wild animals cross their silent path. Spirits animate a tree, bringing it to sparkling life. It is the spirit of Orin. It is the ballad of Narayama.

IN THE REALM OF PASSION (Nagisa Oshima, 1978)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

A companion-piece to the swooning, painfully immediate Ai no corrida (In the Realm of the Senses, 1976), Ai no borei (Empire of Passion) again involves a passionate illicit couple, but is distanced and lacks the oversaturated colors of its predecessor, not to mention the slicing off of an erect penis.
     Again, Nagisa Oshima (brilliantly) directs. In a rural village in the late 1800s, a young man convinces his mistress that they should murder her spouse, a rickshaw driver. They dump the body down a well and continue their clandestine affair. But the husband comes back in two ways: as a communal memory, as the villagers wonder how he could stay away in Tokyo year after year; as a ghost, haunting the killers. The latter might be a guilty projection; or it could be a ghost.
     The former possibility is in keeping with the film’s understanding of human behavior. Oshima’s ghost story relates individual acts to communal justice. This “justice” suppresses its own real motives, sublimating these, much as the ghost may be a sublimated form of the couple’s guilty regret. Oshima already explored the possibility that capital punishment echoes ancient barbarism in Death by Hanging (1968). Empire of Passion, in this instance ironically referring to society as it metes out what it has convinced itself is justice, involves a painfully protracted punishment for the offending pair. Oshima goes further, suggesting (compellingly) that society desires, even requires, hideous crime for the sake of both the cathartic release and the reassuring sense of its own justice that the brutal punishment of wrongdoers provides.
     But, above all, it is the form of this burrowing work that captivates: dark, mysterious, eerily beautiful color images exquisitely lensed by Yoshio Miyajima, the cinematographer of Masaki Kobayashi’s Kaidan (1964).