On the Hunting Ground (Lie chang zha sha), 1984

On the Hunting Ground (猎场在狩), 1984
(http://www.56.com/w88/play_album-aid-2876112_vid-MjE5MDY3Njg.html)
no copyright infringement intended

...their traditions and rituals are often left unexplained, simply let play out for themselves in front of the camera. Like in all his movies, the landscape at times becomes the very subject. His long takes emphasize its vastness, its beauty, and its dangers...

(Tom Vick in Asian Cinema)

... high-speed, fast-paced, uninhibited wild hunting scenes...

(析田壮壮影片的以纪实手法表现人文价值与启示)

I learned about this movie (also about director Tian Zhuang-Zhuang) from Asian Cinema, an extensive monograph authored by Tom Vick. I used to live by then in DC Area and quite often I was going to the Freer Gallery, where Tom Vick was organizing sometimes screenings of Asian movies. I bought his book at the gallery bookstore, after such a screening. A splendid monograph covering the cinema across the whole Asian continent. The information Tom Vick was giving about Tian Zhuang-Zhuang showed me one of the greatest moviemakers of the Chinese Fifth Generation, in the same rank with Zhang Yi-Mou and Chen Kai-Ge (whose movies I already knew about). One of the first movies made by Tian Zhuang-Zhuang (actually the first made for the big screen, prior to this he had worked for television) had been On the Hunting Ground, in 1984. There was in the book a sentence or two about it: an experimental document/narrative hybrid about a traditional hunting society in Inner Mongolia. The movie was mentioned again by the end of the paragraph: in Tian's movies not only actors had to play, all else was left to play by itself, the universe of traditions and the surrounding landscape becoming active part in the whole, and this way understanding the language (or having it translated) somehow was no more so important - people in On the Hunting Ground were speaking Mongolian and there were no subtitles, not even in Chinese (while the movie was to be screened in China).

During the following years I was able to get most of Tian's movies, some of them on DVD copies, some others found on youTube: not On the Hunting Ground. Each of his movies was a great esthetic experience; with each one I deepened my understanding of his art, his exquisite treatment of everything surrounding the actors: each element plays an active role in his movies, furniture, landscape, magic of rituals - thus the lack of understanding the language (or the lack of translation) is really compensated by the way these elements are put in play. And with each of his movies my desire to watch the others was getting bigger. I was finding then another one, and so on. But On the Hunting Ground was no way to be found. No DVD, no video on youTube, nothing. I was thinking at it with melancholy. The first movie of Tian, spoken in Mongolian, with no subtitles, showing a hunting community far from the modern civilization. I could only imagined it.

A week ago I started to look again for it on the web. It could not be found by his international name (On the Hunting Ground), nor by its Chinese name in Pinyin transliteration (Lie chang zha sha). An idea came to my mind suddenly: to look for its Chinese title in hieroglyphs! I didn't know it, but there was a way I decided to try: using Google Translator, I could get the Chinese translation for On the Hunting Ground. I knew that Google Translator provided also a transliteration for the non-Latin alphabets, so I could compare the result with the Pinyin that I already had! I made several attempts till I got the transliteration: not the order of words as in the Pinyin title, however close. I tried then to change the order of the hieroglyphs till I got the matching title!

I started then to look on the web with the four hieroglyphs, and Gosh! I found the movie: four consecutive videos on a CCTV site!

(https://mubi.com/films/on-the-hunting-ground)
no copyright infringement intended

All this being said, let's discuss a bit the movie. If you are against animal cruelty, then don't watch it. The hunting scenes are real, in all their mercilessness and ferocity: a team of hunters on their horses, some with rifles, some with bows, some with maces, their dogs, monuments of brutality; and the abundant prey walking innocently on the abundant grass, deers, rabbits, big birds, without any chance to escape, dying without understanding what's happening to them and why. Nietzsche would have loved it.

But that's their life, of that community of hunters, doing it since immemorial times. That land has always been hunting ground, the imperial family was coming there in bygone times,  for huge parties of riding their horses, running their dogs, killing the prey... the emperors are no more, the villages of hunters are still there and will remain.

Yes, the hunting scenes in the movie are dreadful, but one cannot make otherwise a documentary about the real life there, within that community so remote from the references of modern civilization. Apocalyptic images: the camera follows uninhibited the hunters, the dogs, the prey, and captures perfectly the rhythm, the dynamic of the whole. We are told this way an essential story, about the primary instincts defining our nature: the fight to kill and to survive. In contrast, the scenes showing the village life, and the animal farming, are quiet, serene, slowly following sunsets and sunrises over the immense pastures, populated by flocks of cattle and sheep: here is another story told, the coexistence of man and nature. Hunting and farming, like two universes in a fragile balance.

And like in all these movies of Tian Zhuang-Zhuang, a spiritual sense sublimated in the story. The hunted deer is beheaded, and the trophy is hanged on a post. Then hunters bow in deep worship: the paradigm of deity accepting in innocence to be sacrificed for redeeming the world, a primary truth beyond any religious convictions and affiliations, just that: you kill the innocent, you kill the divine, and the divine is revealed.

On the Hunting Ground (猎场在狩) - part 1/4

On the Hunting Ground (猎场在狩) - part 2/4

On the Hunting Ground (猎场在狩) - part 3/4

On the Hunting Ground (猎场在狩) - part 4/4

(Tian Zhuang-Zhuang)

Delamu (The Tea Horse Road), 2004

Delamu (Cha ma gu dao xi lie), 2004
(http://dvd.nl/recensies/2769/delamu/dvd/)
no copyright infringement intended

There is no place like home, as the word goes. Well, sometimes it's different. For Tian Zhuang-Zhuang, one of the greatest Chinese film directors, home seems to be one or other of those regions at the border, as remote from the center as it can be, whose inhabitants still live following ancestral rhythms, sometimes speaking an idiom of their own, unknown even in the neighboring regions, sometimes observing traditions and rituals long time forgotten anywhere else, almost totally  decoupled from what's going on in the rest of the country. One of his first movies, On the Hunting Ground (猎场在狩, 1984), was a docudrama about a traditional community of hunters from Inner Mongolia. His next film, The Horse Thief (1986) was unfolding its plot in Tibet in some indefinite time (a year, 1923, specified in the first scene, while everything there breathing the eternal). A movie made much later, The Warrior and the Wolf (2009), definitely immersed in legend: a story of longtime ago, taking place (again) at the border, with people becoming wolves when falling in love...

Parajanov comes to mind (first of all his Тіні забутих предків, but also his other works, maybe not so directly). I would call this kind of movies cinematic anthropology - observing traditional societies not yet altered by modernity, as a way to better understand our own identity, where we come from and who we are.

And this anthropological flavor can be noted also in other of Tian's movies, not dedicated to faraway regions: Springtime in a Small Town (2002) revives a forgotten masterpiece from 1948 of Chinese cinema; The Go Master (2006) is a deconstruction of a Chinese genius of Go who has spent all his life in Japan. The same tendency to go away in time or in space, in a quest of understanding our collective and individual identity. Well, we know what happened when Tian tackled the recent history of China, in Blue Kite (1993): he was banned from making movies for ten years.

Delamu, made in 2004, is a documentary dedicated to the Ancient Tea-Horse Road, a mule caravan path used for more than two thousand years, connecting Yunnan (the origin homeland of tea, it seems) and Tibet, from there opening its gates toward India and Western Asia, and ultimately toward Europe. The name comes from the trade of Yunnan tea-bricks for Tibetan ponies, and it is through this road that tea spread across the world. It can be considered an alternate Silk Road.

Anyway, this Ancient Tea-Horse Road is an extremely dangerous route, winding through high mountains, on narrow paths sometimes carved between vertical slopes and precipices, traversing gorges on very unstable suspended bridges, or even on ropes stretched between the two sides: men and animals tied to these ropes.

So it is not for everyone to make the Tea Road, while it is the occupation of people living there, in the tiny villages from the region. An occupation passing from one generation to another, since the very beginnings. They make a living from traveling on this route with their mules, carrying tea, salt, grains, bartering them in the other villages.

Jeff Fuchs, the Canadian mountaineer and author, was the first Westerner to  trek the entire Tea-Horse Road, covering six thousand kilometers around there, and writing a book that I intend to read. And Tian Zhuang-Zhuang spent some months there, together with a  small film crew, befriending the people, quietly listening to their stories, patiently trying to understand their traditions and their ways, following them on the Tea Road with the camera. It resulted a gorgeous documentary. The people are approached with great empathy, it is a universe very different from ours, in the same time a world where anything can happen, and the sole rule is to expect the unexpected. Two brothers are married with the same woman, they explain that it's only normal, as each of them is missing long time with the caravans. A priest considered lost during the Cultural Revolution lives there. A family of devout Catholics lives in the village (actually only one of the spouses is Catholic, the other is Buddhist, and everybody's happy). An old woman (seemingly older than hundred) tells how she kicked off her lazy husband and found another one (presumably less lazy). A female schoolteacher wants to leave her job and go out to find the ideal man (who knows how to talk to her, and how to love her - a toxic mix, if you ask me). As one can see, the simplicity of life hides a certain sophistication of spirit.

People rely on their mules for their travels on the Tea Road. This creates a formidable bond between human and animal. The movie takes its title (Delamu) from the name of a mule: it's a Tibetan word meaning Peace Angel.

And above all this, the landscape, a road toward the transcendent. The journey to decipher all our unknowns starts here.Splendid movie!

However, there is something essential about this movie that I haven't said anything about. Like in all his other works, the contemporaneity is actually present (sometimes elusively, here directly). A large auto road is in construction, and the Ancient Tea Trail will disappear; the caravans on the perilous paths will become useless, and the raison d'être of these people will die. The mules of the last caravan on the Tea Road carry materials for the construction site. This movie is an elegy for a vanishing universe.

Delamu (茶馬古道：德拉姆), 2004
fragments
(video by James P)

(Tian Zhuang-Zhuang)

(Jeff Fuchs)

The Warrior and the Wolf

Director Tian Dzuang-Zduang during the Shooting

Traditional Chinese, 狼災記, Simplified Chinese, 狼灾记, Pinyin transliteration, Láng Zāi Ji: well, for an American or an European that could be a bit too much, so let's use the international title, The Warrior and the Wolf.

Based on a short story by Yasushi Inoue, it is the most recent movie of Tian Zhuang-Zhuang (2009) and it is more than challenging to the viewer. I found it on youTube: there are some intertitles (in Chinese and English) that explain now and then what happens on the screen (somehow reminding you the technique from the silent era), only they give you just the basics: anyway, with or without them the spectator can be lost.

I will try then to summarize the plot (I needed to go to Wikipedia to understand decently the thing). The action takes place in some indefinite period, long, long time ago. The populations living on the borders of Chinese Empire does not recognize the central rule, an army is sent to control the situation, rebels, wolves and extremely harsh winters make soldiers' life extremely miserable. The number of casualties keeps growing, fallen fighters are replaced with peasants enrolled by force.

One of the new recruits (played by Jô Odagiri) shows initially no interest for the military and tries to escape several times; eventually he becomes a seasoned warrior and gets the attention of the general; a special bond develops between the two men. When the general must go back to report to Beijing, the young warrior remains in charge. The army camps in a village whose people live underground and appear only during nights.

Maggie Q

The young warrior chooses one of the huts, rapes repeatedly the woman living there (the superb Maggie Q), till they fall in love (I wouldn't recommend though). It is said such a love is punished by gods, as he is an outsider, and the two lovers are cursed to become wolves.

Jô Odagiri

The army has to leave, the soldiers are attacked by wolves, a snowstorm follows and kills everybody except the young warrior who returns to his love.

Jô Odagiri and Maggie Q

After some years the general comes again with a new army, two wolves appear on the way. One of the wolves looks at the general intensely, the man tries to kill the animal, the other wolf beats the general mortally.

The Final Scene

Not easy task to follow such a story without knowing the language, without subtitles, based only on some intertitles; no wonder the movie disappointed some viewers (not me: I am kind of a warrior fighting to appreciate any movie against all odds).

Actually the use of intertitles gave me the clue. The details don't matter because this movie is not a biopic! The story should be understood only in its most general lines, it is just a frame for a graphical meditation on brutality, passion, fate. No need of plot details because all that counts is found in the images. Tarkovsky comes in mind, only the Russian is more precise, more specific, in his plots. Tian is much more elemental, in the sense that his universe is built just from the basic elements: rituals, war, passion, founding myths: that's it.

He goes for his movies in extremely remote regions with extremely remote traditions, and (at least here, in The Warrior and the Wolf) in extremely remote times, just to be freed of any everyday. It was said that his preference for remote areas was motivated by the need to escape from the constraints of the censors. It is much more. Tian wants to escape from the constraints of the everyday: to be free to show what he intends to show, in all nudity. To be elemental.

I said rituals. It's not only about religious traditions. Everything is a ritual, because everything has sense. War is a ritual: people kill each other. Rape is a ritual, people control each other.

I said fate. It's about our relation with Nature. Humans trying to live in history, History dissolved by Nature, because History is a lie: what matters is Nature: people facing wolves, becoming wolves, facing snowstorms, facing death, becoming dust.

狼災記 - Láng Zāi Ji / The Warrior and the Wolf, 2009
(video by SHaFilms)

(Tian Zhuang-Zhuang)

(Yasushi Inoue)

Dao Ma Zei - The Horse Thief

A Tibetan village living in its universe of traditions since ever. Harsh mountains, harsh storms and winds, flocks of vultures in the high among scarring clouds, or pretty close over herds. Villagers find their answers in rituals. Norbu is a horse thief, while a devout Buddhist. He robs from the shrine offerings, while giving most of his loot to the shrine. Banished from the community, he repents and seeks readmission. His first son dies, a second son is born, again he needs to steal horses.

Dao Ma Zei (The Horse Thief), made by Tian Zhuang-Zhuang in 1986, tells us a story of such an elemental power that words are almost unnecessary. Chinese censors insisted that the first image of the movie should indicate a year, 1923, meaning that the story was long time before Communist era. Actually the story is timeless.

It is, on my knowledge, only one other film director who spoke so forcefully about a universe of rituals and traditions: Parajanov. About the importance of the rituals, as a fundamental dimension of our system of values.

Like Parajanov, Tian has a profound respect for traditional cultures. Both of them, Parajanov and Tian, leave rituals freely in their movies. No explanation is needed, the ritual speaks for itself.

But it is more than that. Life is not only ritual. Life is destiny in the same time. You live within rituals, you live also within sin. This paradox of human condition, to live far from godhead, while within godhead. Norbu is a horse thief, a highwayman. He is also a devout Buddhist. Is here destiny? Or maybe is it that sin is also necessary in the divine order, together with rituals?

click here to watch the movie

(Tian Zhuang-Zhuang)

Tian Zhuang-Zhuang

I already wrote about Tian Zhuang-Zhuang on my blog; I had watched by that time Springtime in a Small Town, which is a masterpiece. I found the movie on youTube, recently, and I intend to post the videos here, along with Fei Mu's movie from 1948, Spring in a Small Town.

I watched meanwhile The Horse Thief, and I found it on youTube, too. I will post the videos here. I found also The Blue Kite on youTube and I would like to watch in near future and to write here about it.

What I would like to see and I cannot find is one of his first movies, Lie Chang Zha Sha (On the Hunting Ground), a documentary about a primitive tribe of hunters from Inner Mongolia , and of course his newer movies (The Go Master, for instance). He is one of the greatest directors nowadays.

• Spring in a Small Town, 1948 / 2002
• Dao Ma Zei - The Horse Thief
• The Warrior and the Wolf
• Delamu (The Tea Horse Road), 2004
• On the Hunting Ground ((Lie chang zha sha), 1984

(Chinese Cinema)

The Five Best Movies According to Gray

James Gray (director of Two Lovers) gives his list of five preffered movies in Newsweek. Here you go:

1. Le Notti di Cabiria (Fellini's peak: raw emotion, pure and simple, with the best ending in the history of pictures)
2. Il Gattopardo (Visconti's epic vision, a majestic spectacle about a Sicilian prince - Burt Lancaster, who's simply great - trying to come to grips with a changing world)
3. Vertigo (Hitchcock's hypnotic and haunting story of obsessive love, with a brilliant twist; James Stewart and Kim Novak are fully committed to their wounded and vivid characters, and it shows)
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick's classic remains perhaps the only great narrative picture without a true lead character)
5. Ran (music and image the Kurosawa way, with a Shakespearean sweep; every frame is worth looking at)

It's time for me to announce that I'm waiting for a DVD with one of the most haunting movies ever:Tian's Dao Ma Zei (The Horse Thief); Scorsese considers it the best film of the nineties.

(Filmofilia)

Spring in a Small Town (China, 1948 / 2002)

(http://oggsmoggs.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html)
no copyright infringement available

(click here to see the movie from 1948)

A Chinese movie from 1948. Banned later by Communists for being too bourgeois style, hidden in the archives of the political police of the regime, rediscovered in the eighties. Some consider it the Chinese masterpiece. Wong Kar-Wai puts Spring in a Small Town in his world top five (along with movies by Ray, Ozu, Hitchcok, Godard).

One year before the Communist victory in China, a film director who would die in the early 50's (Fei Mu) made a movie about love and loyalty, about spoiled lives and smoldering passions... he told us so much in 90 minutes...

There are just a handful of movies that differ from all other movies by their singular composition. Each of these has a unique architecture, not to be seen elsewhere. Человек с киноаппаратом is such an example: a movie that's creating itself in front of our eyes. Spring in a Small Town has also a unique architecture, making it different from all other movies.

Two parallel streams - the female lead character tells us the story, leaving her thoughts to flow freely while the images go along with her recitative (using a very modern technique for that time - each image is turning up and rising on the screen, just to dissolve itself in the next image).

It's about a failed marriage. The husband has been years ago a rich man, a landlord or something. Meanwhile the household was destroyed by war and now he indulges himself in an imaginary sickness, just to make an inferno from his own life as well as from the lives of everybody surrounding him.

The wife goes for shopping every day, and takes advantage to make always a walk along the town walls (damaged also by war). It is her own pleasure. And this scene (that appears several times in the movie) has a surreal beauty. It contains joy and nostalgia, the awareness that's the only joy, the desire to prolong it, make it contain the whole life. It says us more than thousand words, and with such poignancy!

I found in a poem written by an Iranian poet, Forough Farrokhzad, a string of amazing verses - it was like they were speaking about this scene from Spring in a Small Town:

Perhaps life is
A long street along which a woman
With a basket passes every day

They got married ten years ago (arranged marriage of course, as was the custom those times) - they have been living in separate rooms for eight years.

Suddenly an old friend of the husband comes to visit. They haven't seen each other for around ten years. The friend is now a medical doctor in a big city. Looking very modern, handsome and full of life. And the house gets filled with life.

There is an unexpected surprise though: the doctor and the wife had been in love long, long time ago. He had left (we can guess that in order to fight in the war against Japanese, then to follow his medical studies). She had not waited for him. The passion springs again, tempestuously. Both of them value loyalty while blood stirrers them both and nears them dangerously. When one of them is on the brink of forgetting honor, the other keeps strong.

What follows is a horrid erotic game, played perversely, with ups and downs, with ambiguities, with simulations, with regards telling a lot, advancing toward the sin, remaining there, on the brink, just to savor the mental image.

And here comes the evening when there is too much alcohol and their feelings explode.The loyalty still wins, just in the last second, making them crazy.

The husband observes now the obvious and his reaction is unexpected: as his wife looks now so happy he realizes how much he loves her. His jealousy is fighting with a sudden generosity that we wouldn't have presumed at him.

How does it end all this? As expected, without resolution, because that's life, it never gives resolutions.

Think at Chekhov's plays and stories and you'll realize the beauty of this movie. The mirage stays in the details: it is the subtle analysis that counts here, not the outcome. And each detail is loaded with poignancy, up to explode.

So, this was the movie of 1948. Tian Zhuang-Zhuang did a remake in 2002, Springtime in a Small Town.

(click here to watch the movie from 2002)

A few words about Tian: belongs to the so-called Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers (all of them lived the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution as teens, with public humiliations, work in the camps and all that; all of them were able to attend movie art studies in their late twenties only; they were then the firsts to be allowed to express freely in their artworks; or rather freely, with ups and downs from the censure; and all of them were marked by the terrible experiences they had passed through in their youth).

One of the first movies of Tian was On the Hunting Ground, in 1984: a composition on the border between documentary and fiction, shot in Inner Mongolia, the life of a small hunting community observing traditional values, surviving from archaic times. I didn't have the opportunity to see this movie: I've read about its haunting images telling the whole story by themselves and making words unnecessary (anyway the hunters were talking Mongolian, and Tian didn't feel the need to offer any translation).

On the Hunting Ground was followed by The Horse Thief, in 1985, shot in Tibet this time. I haven't seen this movie either, and I would be very interested in it: a cinematic poem about simple people living in communion with a universe where old traditions mix with an archaic sense of the surrounding nature, simple people having to fight with huge existential challenges while keeping their old beliefs and rituals. Like in his previous movie, Tian doesn't need to explain rituals; he lets them speak for themselves. A story that reminds me a masterpiece of Parajanov, Tini Zabutykh Predkiv.

For the censors these two movies about communities from remote regions living in accordance with archaic values were still graspable (though highly suspect, either), but Tian came in 1993 with The Blue Kite, and this time it was too much for the regime. Tian was so open about the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, that he was simply banned to make another movie for about ten years (and I'm thinking again at Parajanov: after Tini Zabutykh Predkiv came Sayat Nova, and the director was sent by the Soviet regime to the camp for a good couple of years).

And then, in 2002, when Tian was finally allowed to make again movies, he took the forgotten masterpiece from 1948 to give it the life it deserved: and he made Springtime in a Small Town!

It's not just a remake. It's much, much more: you feel the tender love of Tian for the original film. A film that had been a masterpiece and was virtually unknown. A masterpiece with a life cut short. Tian wanted badly to give the original film from 1948 the life it deserved - to make that old movie known to the whole world, to make everybody aware about the masterpiece of Fei Mu.

Tian knew much more about the story in the movie than the story had been aware itself: because the story from 1948 could still believe that after the long winter of the WWII, there was now spring, a renewal of life, to be developed in the burgeoning of summer. All the personages were still recovering from the traumas of war, while trying to come to terms with their own intimate traumas.

The story could not be aware then, in 1948, that spring would be followed by harsh winter: the husband and wife would be judged as class enemies, humiliated publicly, sent to the camp or shot by a firing squad. The doctor that had fought against Japanese would not escape either, as he had fought within the rangs of the Kuomintag army. Now, in 2002, Tian was able to tell not only us, for we already knew the history as it followed; to tell to the story itself its fate.

A story telling with delicacy about the tumult of family passions could not be other way than beautiful and fragile, as Chinese spring was in 1948: Tian wanted to protect this fragility against all storms that would follow in China from 1949 on.

The original movie was black and white. Tian made a color movie and associated with a great cameraman, Li Pin-Bing, to give the story the gorgeous images it deserved.

He renounced at the architecture of the original film. His movie should not have been just a colored copy. So he replaced the two streams (the recitative of the wife - the images dissolving each one in the next) with a unique flow: the plot is developing this time in great images where settings and landscape are active participants. A universe where humans and objects are pairs, each of them playing a role in her or his own right.

The camera is scanning the whole scene, gliding from left to right, or from right to left, looking without haste for the personages - meanwhile it is caressing the objects it finds on its move (be them pieces of furniture, or trees, or old narrow streets, whatever). The personages are found eventually by the filming device, and framed by objects that become significant as well - the hero is near a chair, or near an electrical lamp, or among run down walls, or near a tree, and you feel that the object is there to support the personage - it is a story told by images in a universe created by the director; a universe where objects speak their wordless language.

Tom Vick, the remarkable specialist in Asian cinema, tells us about an episode that happened during the shooting of the movie: Tian hugged once a tree that was to play a special role in one of the scenes. The universe of humans and objects and nature was his own universe, his child, and he loved it with passion!

Each scene from the original movie was reconsidered this way. The action also was changed in each scene: it is happening slightly different, but you feel that the story in each scene is not just a copy, while not something new either; it's rather a commentary, to emphasize the greatness of what was done in 1948!

Well, Springtime in a Small Town is a great movie in its own right, and it's done with a sense of profound humility for the masterpiece that had been Spring in a Small Town.

I was touched to see (in an extra from the dvd) the actress who had played in the movie from 1948, Wei Wei, invited at the premiere of the new film; now in her old ages she has kept her beauties, and the distinction of her scenic presence.

(Tian Zhuang-Zhuang)

(Chinese Cinema)