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 shape of various solider in camouflage uniforms 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 shot, 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. In a later scene, we see the same boy carrying two girls going into the forest at the back of the motor-cycle. In the third scene, 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 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 they would sacrifice a man to the mountain god 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 and lost his life. But she said that it did not matter now because she could live without him. Later we hear the same lady recount how two grenades went off at the site near to the now abandoned school. Then we are shown various other scenes of village life. One such scene shows two girls from a great distance, in which we hear off screen some voices in which an adult was telling someone less knowledgeable what kind of 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! They were playing a game of stone throwing and catching in the meadows, being watched over from a distance by two boys. Then we were 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. Later we see another family in that same room in which the father was teaching her children how to play a kind a card game in which if one gets a chance to become a killer who can decide which one to kill off so that the killed will be removed from the game. The magic number for that game is 5. In that scene, we discover the TV was still there, save that there was now a line across through its middle but it was otherwise intact. 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 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. Then finally some one came to investigate why two Russian made hand grenades left over from a previous war exploded. Most of the shots were static shots. Perhaps the director wanted us to concentrate purely on the visual imager. There were very few communication between people. Anyway, we are seldom shown them talking. They seemed to want to communicate more with their body langauge than with words. Because of the apparent lack of structure, a few people left in the middle of the film.
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 that particular community. Scenes are merely juxtaposed by their emotional tone, which may either be similar or opposite. 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. And as a person it develops and takes on a life of its own. She said, "you can interpret it in any way you want, just as if you were seeing and reacting to another 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 process of shooting it. There is constant interaction between me and the materials of the film, as happen in life". Therefore, if there is any stucture at all, such a structure is based on the very fluid conditions of her psyche as the materials being filmed evoked in her during the very process of the shooting itself. It's a Fellini type of film direction and is thus very spontaneous but there is a difference, Fellini's film has a story line. Yang Rui's hasn't got any. For that reason, it's an intensely personal film.
At the end of the film, I asked thd director why she seldom made use of conversation and why she always shot 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 a 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 film people from a distance is that she might want to emphasize that in the lives of the Wa people, Nature is powerful, myterious and is to be revered and 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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