To me, Enter the Void is without a doubt, the most cinematically innovative film that I have seen so far this year. I really do not know how to describe this film. It simply cannot be classified into any particular category. It has got something of everything. It's difficult to enough to make any film at all. But it is even more difficult to make a film on a subject as old as humanity and yet to somehow manage to make it new. But Gaspar Noe succeeded. Not only did he make it new, he made it visually stunning. It is his personal exploration on celluloid on the problems of individual freedom, human psyche and public morality in the context of drugs, sex, sensation and death and through all that of life itself.
I do not know how the film began at the Grand Theatre of the Cultural Centre. I was still in the last third of another French film, White Material at the Grand cinema at the Elements which began at 2 p.m. When the previous film ended, it was already about 3.40 p.m. In fact I had some hesitation whether I wanted to make the mad dash from the Elements to the Cultural Centre. I thought I'd never arrive in time for a meaningful snippets of my second film of the day, which was supposed to start at 3 p.m! At the time I bought the ticket, I thought the earlier film would start at 12.30 p.m. Anyway, I went through a literal maze of corridors, 10 fire exit doors before I emerged at the Mall and from there, made my way through another maze of walks, tunnels, overhead pedestrian walkways, up and down numerous escalators to reach the new Austin Station East Rail platform, took a one stop ride to the Tsimshatsui East Station and then through another series of tunnels through to the New World Hotel Towers to eventually reach my final destination.
When I arrived, I found on the screen three young Europeans and a young Japanese young man sitting on a sofa in a dimly lit tiny Tokyo apartment around a low coffee table in a haze of dull red light, comparing notes on the effects of various psychedelic drugs. One of them asked the hero, Oscar (whose back is incidentally always against the front of the screen so that we would be looking at the other characters through his eyes, with the the camera placed at his level, to enable us to look at that topsy turvy world of Shijuku (?)) if he had tried DMT before. He said he hadn't. His friend said he ought to because it was 100% pure and was simply "magical", like nothing in this world. He mumbled something which is a yes which is not really a yes. He simply said, "yeah, yeah, perhaps sometimes." Then his friend talked about "OBE" or out of body experience and asked him if he had read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He said it was as if he had gone out of himself and looking at everything from above as if he were a different person, like what is described as an "astral" experience by some ancient oriental text. With that, his mind seemed to wander off into space. We were then shown Tokyo from space, looking downwards, over the tops of one building after another in the dark, as if from a helicopter. We see buildings fringed by yellow, green, red, purple, orange, blue and white neon lights and the roads, highways, with cars moving along its motorways.with headlights on. It was as if suddenly Tokyo had been transformed into a kind of "virtual" landscape displayed on a video game screen. It was as if it had suddenly lost its normal aspect and become a "dreamscape" and completely lost its "reality".
In the next scene. We see a young girl, clasping him, and kissing his cheeks, his neck and then his ears. She said that she really missed him. She had just arrived in Tokyo. But he just stood there, held her and did not say anything. As they conversed further, we learned that she is called Linda and is Oscar's sister. Then the scene switched to an image of Linda, in a thin dress, in front of what looks like a frosty cake/icecream cabinet whose contents in patches of yellows, reds, greens could barely be made out through its misty glass pane front. She was standing there, bathed in some yellowish light against the background of some tables and chairs.She was standing with her profile against the cake/icecream cabinet in a thin pinkish almost translucent summer dress with small white floral patterns, exposing her two long and thin arms and her long curly brown hair. Next we see her in the corner of the miniscule verandah or staircase landing of the fire escape stairs outside of his brother's apartment. They were talking. In the background were the outlines and signboards, decorative fluorescent lights in dull and hazy yellows, reds, purple, oranges, greens, hugging the contours of block after block of rectangualr buildings, broken occasionally by round decorative shapes and right opposite to them there was a huge yellow sign on top of the building "Love Hotel", below which were rows and rows what looked like metal tops of CDs, DVD's with scale like discs embedded within the circumference of each of the bigger discs, shining with a weak and murky white light. She asked him if he remembered their pact that they would never be separated. His mindthen flew back to the promise he made to her. They were then sitting on a lawn in park, looking at the sunset, somewhere in America. They had just gone through their parents's funeral a long time ago. Both their parents died in a horrible car accident. She said they only had each other now, nobody else. Then his mind switched back to the traumatic experience of blood splashed all over the front seat, her mother's blood stained head lying motionless against the head rest right in front of him at the right front seat of the hapless car. He was screaming, "no, no, no, no, no " and crying and stamping his feet whilst her sister huddled at his side.
From time to time, we'd zoom downward from an immense height into particular points of interest in that unreal city We see patterns, in black and white, as if it were a spiral. In fact from time to time, the camera does circle around the point of interest, as if it were some kind of giant bird hovering in the air, surveying and then zeroing in on its prey, hesitating before its final swoop downward at its target. What is even more amazing, after we touch down, we seem to burrow inside the surface of the relevant object, whether it be a candle, a dish, a pattern in a carpet, ta lift, a toilet and emerge into a micro world, a world of swirling lights, in yellow, orange and red, a virtual vortex with the light shining out from behind amidst a powerful low frequency whir wose sound level fluctuated as the energy of the primary low frequency tone rose and fell with the "peaks" and "troughs" as the energy of the reflected sound wave added or cancelled the the energy of the original or primary tone. Again, this is a technique which is repeated numerous times in the film. I suppose what Noe was trying to do in this film is to give us a concrete sense of what it felt like to be looking down on what is going on in this world from the sky, as if one were a "disembodied spirit" blessed with both telescopic and microscopic vision, with a built in zoom lens which would allow one to zoom in and zoom out at will. If that is what he is trying to do, he has succeeded beyond his wildest imagination. This has some really stunning effects. It hits us, viscerally, not just visually because of the skilfully employed sound effects which enhance this "hallucinatory" effect. This is particularly so in a scene where Oscar was shown to be getting down into an underground crystal palace with Linda, his sister. It was a mini-world of a thousand glittering lights in yellow, red, and orange.There we hear high frequency tingles and jingles. We entered the world of stars, the "astral: world that Oscar's friend was talking about. We are literally surrounded by that sea of twinkling and shimmering light of yellows, reds and oranges. It was completely aritificial of course. But whether or not it was real, Linda said, it felt "out of this world". She echoed the words of St. Peter when Jesus was with him and another disciple, on top of Mount Sinai where they saw a resplendent Jesus, appearing in amidst a cloud of light, when they woke up from a sleep. Peter said, "Lord, it is so good to be here.". There in that world, Linda felt so good, with the one person who mattered to her more than any one else in this world, his brother Oscar with whom she made a blood pact, when they were still very very young: never to be separated from each other and wherever one goes, there the other will be too. Well , Linda's brother went to Tokyo and became a drug pusher selling crack drugs in discos and other places of entertainment. Now she followed her to Tokyo, to become a table danver in strip tease a joint run by Matthew, Oscar's Japanese friend. She made some friends there. She shacked in with Matthew.
One day, Linda tested positive in her pregnancy test. She could not read. Her fellow Japanese strip-tease dancer helped her because the results were written in Japanese. She had an abortion. Here again, we first see the top of her building from a great height, zoomed in on her abortion operation, then after it was done and the tadpole like removed human embryo was placed in a kidney shaped metal container affer the operation, we entered the interior of that dead embryo to the cell level and then to even smaller and smaller microscale levels. We were also shown an endoscope of the interior of her vagina in the typical burrowing in fashion described earlier.
Then Alex, one of Oscar's teeange client, suspected that he was fucking her mother and went beserk and informed on him to the police. Oscar's flat was busted by the police. In the confusion it was not known if he was killed by the police or if he committed suicide by swallowing an overdose of drugs, inside the 2 feet by 2 feet crouching toilet of his minscule flat. One of the most shocking scenes of the film was zooming in from a great height from space into that tiniest of cubicle then on to that toilet with Oscar curled around its vagina like shape, dead. With his death, none of his "friends" dared to identify him out of "fear" of getting arrested. Alex tried to apologize to Linda for having freaked out but his apologies were not accepted. Linda drove him out and swore at him when he was at the door of her flat. Then we were finally shown an aerial survey of the tops of the various Tokyo buildings in the Shinjuku area with the focus on the Love Hotel, and shown various scenes of people making love, again zooming in from space onto individual cubicles in different buildings, different hotels, different rooms, in all kinds of postures, with all kinds of cries of mixed pain and joy and joy in pain. We were shown the head of penis as it entered the vagina coming towards us and from that back into that primordial microworld sperm and ovum, which is the world where all life began.
The world that Noe introduced us to is that "hallucinatory" and "unreal" world of darkness, of drugs, of violence, of desolation, of desperation, of money, of sex, of the most primitive human desires expressed in a most unhinhibited way. It was a world within a world. In its own way, it too is a world of lights, of colour and in a strange way, a world of provisinal chumminess, of human warmth. In that world, it did not seem as if it mattered what the source of light was, whether its origin was " natural" or "artificial". Such a distinction seemed to have lost any meaning. It was sufficient that it was a fascinating and dazzling world of lights in a sea of darkness, so long as there are boose, drugs, drinks, snacks, men, women and beds. It did not matter that it did not and was not destined to last until the first ray of the morning sun. It was sufficient that it sprang into life with nightfall and vibrated with the electronic sound blaring and booming from speakers of the Shinjuku nightclubs, bars, discos, strip joints where their drug trips and sex trips began. It began with the last ray of the setting sun.
In more ways than one, this is a most unusual film. It is the first film in which the biological origin of all life was explored in such a spectacular fashion. Is Noe trying to tell us that the ultimate source of all sex and drug is life itself? Are they not embedded in our DNA? Our desire for sensory stimulation? Our sense of security and comfort and satisfaction from the love act? Is drugs not a substitute for the lack of such primordial satisfaction? If so, then in this sense, the film is not just about stunning cinematic and photographic techniques, it may also be read as a philosophic text or at least it leaves us wondering about that metaphysical question as we emerge into the "real" world from the darkness of that cinematic embryo which is the movie theatre.
3 April
White Material
The first HKIFF film today is a French production, a one time Versailles of the film industry but has since lost quite a bit of its lustre. But tradition is tradition. You never quite lose it. Claire Denis has put a brilliant feminine perspective on the lone battle of an ex-colonial of the "weaker" sex in the last days of its retreat from Africa. Her family has established a coffee plantation "Cafe Vial" for ages. Black anarchist "revolutionaries" using terrorists and extortionist tactics were gradually taking over the territory and the native "Government" was increasingly ineffective against the rising tide of African "nationalism" and making its running impossibly difficult. The French government was spraying leaflets from a helicopter and sent its officers to notify her that the French government is advising its citizen to leave the territory. Her husband was counselling selling it and returning to France. Her ailing father originally wanted to stay put because he was too old to go anywhere, eventually also gave up. Her son who was losing hope abandoned school and refused to do anything. But when he was robbed and had even his clothes taken off and left naked in the hillslope near their family farm, he acted. He shaved off his hair, took a gun from his grandpa and led a group of young black children and teenage "revolutionaries" to ransack the family larder.
In the meantime, Maria played by Isabelle Huppert, held out and fought on, singlehandded. All the men had become what the blacks were calling the whites, "yellow dogs". This was foreshadowed by the opening image of the film, some dogs running across the screen from right to left, in darkness, their shape becoming visible only briefly when they passed through a spot of light! The film proper opened with a thin French woman, walking alone in a field, trying to get on to a bus to the town because she needed some supplies for her plantation, some medicine for her father. There was no place. A black man sitting on the roof of the van offered to squeeze out a space for her. She tried to get up but there was really not enough space. So she hopped on, holding on to the metal ladder at the back of the van. When she reached town, she went to her usual phaarmcie. There was a guard outside and she was asked to pay in cash by the black nurse who said that in view of the situation, their policy had changed. When she returned a Frnech military helicopter was flying over her head. She was asked to evacuate, for her own good. She kicked on one of the boxes of survival kit raining upon her plantation. And asked where have the people's nerves gone! Her workers too were also leaving en masse. She pleaded with them to stay. But few did. The only one who did said that it was not because he did not want to leave but only because her daughter was so sick that she would survive any travel. The woman was desperate. But she would not give up. She went to town again. She was stopped by the government army in a road block. She was asked her how much she paid to the rebels. She said 100. But the Governemnt army wanted only 10! And the Government army officer blamed her. He said it was people like her who made the rebel strong! She reached town and got hold of one of his former foreman. A price was agreed, He brought along a truckload of workers back to the farm because it was harvest time. On the way back, she was asked for toll money again, but this time, it was the "revolutionary prople's militia". She tried to bargain down the price but had a gun pointed at her head. She paid, the conrer of curled upwards, and she looked up at them in a straight stare,then drove off.
In the meantime, some one stole into her apartment and when his son was taking a bath, his father just returning home saw two young African with a machete and a lance were eyeing him.in the pool. He shouted. They ran away. Then the next day, they stole into their house again, washed their feet in the bathtub, leaving dirt there and stole a necklace she placed on top of the clothes cabinet after she returned from town and on their way out, they took a chicken and held it by its feet, crowing all the way as they made their escape. His son heard something and gave chase but hurt his feet gashed by some sharp rock on the way. He continued, but was met by a gang of black revolutionary rebels and cut a lock of his hair which they smelt and called him a yellow dog, stipped him of all clothes and left him standing by a tree. He was later discovered by some of the workers she brought. That was a shock to her son, who then decided that it was no longer worth defending the farm and joined causes with the rebel, for survival. He shaved off his hair, took his grandpa's rifles and some rounds of bullets. He had to survive! In the meantime, her husband was in the house of the local head of government who wanted him to sell his farm to him and told him that the worth of the farm would decrease by the day and that he had little choice in the matter because the Government would not be able to protect him any more. He however had a personal militia. He retruned home and tried to talk to his wife but she would have none of it.
The situation was getting worse. She discovered a de-skinned goat's head amongst the coffee bean waiting to be de-husked. It was a warning signal. She buried it by quickly digging a hole with her bare hands and covered it over with some dead grass. But her husband found that out when he saw scratches and dirt on her hands. He asked her if she knew what that really meant. She said people should not submit to terror. Then suddenly the machine for washing the coffee bean suddenly stopped. Some one had cut her power line. But she would not be intimiated. She turned on the emergency power generator and continued to work. But her workers refused to work any more. They wanted out because they feared for their own lives for working for the white people. Despite their bargain, they wanted to quit immediately and get their pay, in cash! . She went to the safe. It was empty. Some one had taken the money. The maid denied any knowledge of it. It must have been a member of her own family.
Then the final straw was when his father signed away the title deeds and his son brought in the young revolutionaries to loot her larder. They were burning her house. She had no choice. She hacked her own dad to death. It was a bloody end to her struggles. She could not stand being betrayed by one of her own. Perhaps she did not want her own father to die at the hands of the black terrorists. The plantation was her her home, her family tradition, her reputation, her life's work , her personal identity and her life. Isabelle Huppert was superb as Maria. She brought this defiant woman with a will of iron alive. The title was the black man's term for jewels. Maria was that jewel. She had guts. She would not yield to terror nor to threat of violence. But she could not fight the corruption from the depths of her own family. That was too much.
This is a powerful film. But I do think that the director overplayed the close ups. She would always focus on the face of the characters, even while they were moving around. Thus there was a dizzying turning of the camera angle as huge images move from one side of the screen to another and back, which is literally dizzying. I didn't want a headache. So I left my seat at row 10 and saw the rest 90% of the film standing at the back of the cinema! Perhaps, the dizzying close-ups were deliberate. Perhaps she wanted to create the impression that it was a time of changes happening at a shockingly frenzied and and dizzying pace of that "bulversant" time. The mounting tension was indirectly enhanced by the comments of a black DJ on the local radio, always urging the people to fight for their rights, for justice and for the re-distribution of wealth. The pop music, which was supposed to provide a little relief from the constant violence, served instead to provide an insidious emotional undertone of verbal violence on top of the physical and political violence.
The Actresses
One of the advantages of a film festival is that you get to an amazing number of different film styles within an extremely short period of time. The Actresses, directed by South Korean director Lee Je-Yong, is billed as a "mockumentary". It belongs to a class of its own. It is part real life and part fiction. In introducing it before the start of the film, the director said that he thought it might be an interesting idea to bring 6 famous actors together and see how they react together in a filming situation. And it is indeed interesting!
It is practically impossible to describe the film in words. Everything happened so quickly. The general idea is that the fashion magazine Vogue has decided for its centenary edition to invite 6 famous Korean actresses to pose for its cover and central feature on the theme "more beautiful than gems". However, there was some mess up because of snow in a Japanese airport which delayed the delivery of the relevant jewellery. So the photo-shooting had to stop after mid-day to await the arrival of the jewellery. The film recounts how the different actresses reacted to the invitation before their arrival upon the photographic set, how they were treated and how they treated the magazine staff, the photgraphers, hair dressers, the project manager, the costume girls, and how they treated each other when they came face to face with one other. The actresses made use of the time to show off, to put down the others, to criticize each other, by veiled references or sometimes openly, to show good form by acting "decently" to give the impression they "care" for one another, of not losing control over their true feelings for each other and eventually hitting it off by revealing their "true" selves, pouring out their fears, their jealousies, anger, their frustrations, their admiration of some for the others, their personal failings, their hopes, their dreams by profitting from the lack of work by having a Christmas party for a "white Christmas" when snow suddenly fell.
The cutting was fast and furious , accompanied by the vibrant heavy 4 beat music one frequently hears in fashion shows. Since they were women, the talk and gossips never stopped for a second! We are shown the actresses in various stages of the shooting sessions, how they need to constantly "project" a good image almost "despite" themselves and how they were concerned with how they "look" in various outfits.. There was no lack of humour and some really beautiful pictures as we are shown in slide-show like rapidity to the sound of clicking shutters photos after photos and with one scene cuting into another at almost break-neck speed, perhaps in an attempt to give us a feeling of the nervous frenzy of the fashion world at a shooting session because of the prohibitive costs. At the start of the film we are shown one of the actresses, one in her mid-30s talking to the oldest actress before the shooting. The oldest actress was worried who would appear before she did. They had to manoeuvre to arrive the last to show how important they were! In fact, she arrived at 4 a.m. when she was supposed to arrive at 5 a.m. And she insisted that she was sure she had set the alarm clock right! And when she arrived, she wore her mink coat and was told not to smoke because it might ruin the clothes. And she was constantly pressing the actress in her mid-30s to come. But she took her time. But later when another actress in her mid-50s arrived, she was permitted to smoke! And when it was time for her to do the shooting. she was told she must change her hairstyle. She protested, "But I spent so much on this hairstyle already!" But despite her protests, she complied with the request.
The youngest of the group of 6 actresses was in her late teens or early 20's and the oldest was over 60! The idea is to have one representative for each decade from the 1950s to the 1990s . They all had different personalities: some innocent and easy going, some extremely aggressive, some very hypocritical, some more open with how they actually feel, some merely did not care. And there was marked contrasts in their atttitude to their work: some thought they must be very "professional", others think nothing of it. And three of them were divorced. But no matter to what age group they belong, they all share one trait in common: they were always concerned to look "beautiful", and for some, depsite their age. They talked about who their favourite actresss were, how they looked at marriage and boy friends and who feels unwanted and recounted how times have changed through the different epoques of film industry and how they must always do what their manager and public image consultant advised and how they could seldom really be themselves.
I like one scene in particular. During the lunch break, one of the ladies went to the toilet and on the way out heard someone singing a very beautiful love song on a guitar behind a closed door. Out of curiosity, she opened it and found a young hair stylist sitting on the floor strumming a guitar with his back to the door, totally committed and immersed in the emotions of that song. She listened, the others saw her. They were curious too. So they lined up behind her, three on each side of the corridor outside that door and enjoyed the song being sung by this talented young man in his practice session . When the young man finished and they were about to clap their hands in unison and compete with each other in saying something like "oh how cute, how sweet!" or some like expression,, they saw the young man abruptly put down the guitar, move his hands forward and said a cursory good bye to his girl friend and then switched off his mobile phone lying on the floor of one of the steps of the staircase!
In another scene, one of them, the actress in her mid-20s was talking in the toilet to her friend about how badly she was treated by another older actress in her mid-30s who asked about her zodiac sign Gemini. The latter said that Geminis are intelligent, materialistic calculating, selfish and the only good thing about Geminis are that they are successful. But when she was told that in her face earlier, she remained calm and even managed to squeeze out her trademarked "smiling face" and kept nodding her head in acknowledgement, as if she did not care. But to be fair, the other actress did admit that she herself was also a Gemini. However, in that telephone conversation with her friend, she said she was so angry that the older actress was so mean. Then the older actress suddenly emerged in the dark. She heard everything! You can imagine the embarrassment!
One still another scene, the actress in her mid-30s returned to the Chritmas party with the promised Dom Perignon and French cheese, but with her boy friend,who only stayed a little while. The oldest actress immediately blurted out that it was so unfair that only she got his boyfriend around without giving the others the chance to bring theirs along too! At the start of the shooting, they found a handsome looking young man standing by with nothing to do. They asked who he was and was told that he as a photographic assistant. Then one of them remarked it is always good to have good looking man around even if he did abolutely nothing to assist in anything. Just his presence is sufficient to make the shooting session more feel right!
The oldest actress was complaining that their remuneration got less and less with each passing age and that's why they had to spend enormous amount of money just to keep their skin smooth and unwrinkled and questioned why the men cannot look at their acting but must always value them according to the condition of their skin! But all agreed that how they looked mattered enormously, whether they liked it or not. The actress in her mid-30s was constantly worrying that she might be getting too fat but would do nothing to stop her eating and drinking. There was not a time when he does not have a glass of wine in her hands. It is not easy being an actress. They had to live for their public! No wonder so many of them drift into drugs, divorces and alcoholism!
However hypocritically they treated each other at the start of the film, by the end, they had formed a common bond: they understood each other much better and were able to smile over their differences. It did not matter for how long. They had certainly given us a wonderful opportunity to take a peep into the joys, the glamour, the pressures, the private miseries, fears, anxieties and frustrations of being Korean actresses. The gems had to be spliced into the photos. Thanks to E. J Yong there is certainly something much more than what is being shown on the cover of Vogue: we were shown the actresses as flesh and blood human beings, not the merely the divas that they are made out to be! In this film all six actresses played themselves and co-wrote the script: Yun Yeo-Jong, Lee Mi-Suk, Ko Han-Jeong, Choi Ji-Woo, Kim Min-Hie and Kim Ok- bin, really a first.
Crossing the Mountain ( 翻山)
The Mountain by Chinese director Yang Rui (楊 蕊) is a very personal portrait of a minority community at the border of Burma and China called the Wa (佤族). The director spent three years there. The idea for this film sort of grew upon her.
As the film opens, we see a static shot of what looked like a survey check point in an opening of some trees on some mountian. Then we see the shapes ofsome three or four soliders in camouflage uniform in hunched bodies proceeding gingerly from stage right to stage left . When the film ends, we see a young man, crawling on the ground gingerly towards a sow with half a dozen of her piglets fighting for her teats. In fact the entire movie is filmed in static shots, except for a few occasions, when the camera followed the movement of its characters. Then in the next scene, we follow a motor cycle into the village. And then we are shown some children walking through a mountain path, each carrying on a Chinese style shoulder pole with some grasses balanced on each side. They stopped by the hollow of a giant tree whose diameter must have been some 6 to 10 feet across. Then we are shown a blind-folded young man treading his way gingerly along a path through some bushes on some hills, silently, testing the ground with each step until he almost faced a waiting young girl who followed his every motion with great interest and attention. One could see from the way she looked at him that she is very fond of the boy. When he reached her, he stopped facing her. But she did not say anything to him, nor he to him. Perhaps he smelt her, like an animal finding its mate.
We are then shown an old lady recount how their ancestor would sacrifice a man to the mountain god in return for getting a good harvest, how she got married and how she lost her husband many many years ago because one day, he tried to go home quickly by following an untried path. But she said that it did not matter now because she could live without him. Then we are shown various other scenes of village life. One such scene shows two girls from a great distance, playing a game of stone throwing and catching in the meadows., another scene in which the young was told which mushroom is poisonous. One of the girls said how nice it would be nice if the mushrooms they found growing so freely in the meadow were coins! On the left of the screen were the back sof two boys. They were watching the girls from a distance. Then we were then shown a dilapidated school in which a young man was trying to cut in half an abandoned TV with a handsaw for some reason or other. In a later scene, we discovered the TV was still there, save that there was now a line across through its middle but it was otherwise intact. Is that a protest against the lack of TV or does that show a break with the past. We are also shown scenes in which there was a family conference on when to plant the crops and then a girl telling her brother that another boy whom she liked was fighting with another man over her. Then we were shown a scene in which the villagers attempted to urge a black pig to grow plenty of lean meat by holding it down by two men and using what appear to be magical or ritualistic words. In the meantime, an old man with a knife was doing something to its backside which caused the pig to squeal in pain. There were also scenes in which some one was trying to listen to some undeground pipes supplying the village its water by hitting various parts of a maze of pipes by hitting it with his monkey wrench. This scene was matched to another in which we see a young man tying to dig into the ground, deeper and deeper until he pulled out a string of what looks like small pototoes or other underground rhizome plant all connected by different "tubes". Then finally some one came to investigate why two Russian made hand grenades left over from a previous war exploded. And we hear different people giving different versions of what and how it happened. Most of the shots were static shots. Perhaps the director wanted us to concentrate purely on the visual images. There was no entire in the entire film. There were very few human communication between people. Anyway, we are seldom shown them talking. They seemed to want to communicate more with their body langauge and with what they actually did than with words. Because of the "apparent" lack of structure, a few people left in the middle of the film. Perhaps they could see the "connections" between contents and form and between one form with another. Perhaps they did not get the hidden "symmetry" of the director's cinematic shots..
Unlike any other film in the 34th HKIFF, it does not really have any formal plot structure. It's more like a free-flowing series and idiosyncratic snapshots of various aspects of the life, the beliefs and the rituals of that particular community. As the director explained at the end of the film, she treats the film as if it were a person, with eyes, ears, mouth, nose and a mind of its own which she respects. She said, "you can interpret it in any way you want, just as if you were seeing and reacting to another living person.". She says, "I am not a very rational type of person. The film is very much dictated by my feelings and the feelings the various scenes and various people evoked in me in the very process of shooting it. There is a constant interaction between me and the materials of the film". Therefore, if there is any stucture at all, such a structure is based on the very fluid conditions of her psyche and by the accident of what is happening at the moment that such materials were being filmed and the kind of emotions evoked in her during the very process of the shooting itself. It's a Fellini type of film direction and is thus very spontaneous. She would connect different scenes by their emotional similarity or contrast as the case may be, For that reason, it's an intensely personal film.
At the end of the film, I asked thd director why she seldom make use of conversation and why she always shoot her characters from a great distance so that they appeared almost a part of the natural scenery and why she often shot the characters frozen in time for 10 seconds to half a minute facing each other and not saying anything or hesitated a long time before they spoke. She said that was just her perception that it would be the best way to do so. She said that it was not necessary always to use words to communicate. In fact, sometimes if we did not use words, we would pay more attention to the other's emotions. To me, the reason why she always filmed people from a distance is that she might want to emphasize that in the lives of the Wa people, Nature is powerful, myterious froce and is to be revered and coaxed to produce what life required and at the same time, people just belong to and is inseprably bound to Nature and can never lose their link with Nature. She approached the filming of the life of the Wa people as a poet and gave us some almost "cubist" view of that community! It was in complete constrast with the film I saw earlier in the day, The Actresses, which is all about the pettiness of human glamor and the star system in Korea! Why is the film called Climbing Mountains? I suppose to her, the mountains is a symbol of the life of the Wa people: it dominates everything, its livelihood, it customs and its rituals. The mountains isolate them from the outside world so that they are able to live in a world of their own, almost untouched by what is happening across the mountains.
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