Ouroboros

I watched Annie Hall today. It’s a seminal film, funny, intelligent, beautifully shot, incredibly acted. It’s a film which should speak to me, a film which has influenced dozens of my favourite films and which has crafted a thousand bad impersonations.
And it’s a film I just can’t get on with.

My feelings towards Annie Hall have absolutely nothing to do with the film itself, like I said I can recognise it’s a truly great piece of cinema. The problem was that everything felt old hat, which is odd considering this was the first time I’d seen the movie. The problem is how influential the film was and how it would go on to shape the cinematic landscape in the years that followed its release.

It’s partially my fault, I grew up transfixed by the numerous ‘Top 100 *Insert Genre Here* Films of All Time’ shows that clogged up terrestrial TV. Living in the UK it was pretty hard to get away from them but if you managed to somehow avoid the madness the shows were essentially clip shows. Some nebulous list of films would be formed, and then clips from said films would be shown with celebrity voiceovers explaining why the film was so great.

They’re a great form of cheap and entertaining television; the problem is that the nature of the show requires scenes from the films to be shown in their entirety. Sometimes you can get up to ten minutes worth of footage from a single show. Take into account how many variants on this format there were and it becomes easy to see how a film could be comparatively spoiled. What these shows aim to do is give a flavour of the films they showcase, and as such certain scenes are always repeated. For example whenever Taxi Driver is listed you’ll get the ‘You Lookin’ At Me’ sequence and the ‘Porn Theatre’ sequence, largely because they’re the most well known and most easily quantifiable moments of the film. Showing segments of a film like Taxi Driver is fine; it gives a taste of the film but doesn’t really give away the entire film.

With Annie Hall, it’s essentially episodic nature and wide variety of quotable scenes meant that its entire running time was essentially shown. The cocaine gag will always get played, that’s an archetypal moment of Annie Hall and it’s an easy to get joke. The problem was that by showing key sequences out of context you’ve already had one key elements of Annie Hall removed.

Watching Annie Hall when you’ve already seen the cocaine gag, the subtitles bit, the ticket line bit, the dual therapy segment and Christopher Walken’s entire part is a hard experience. The more overt jokes in Annie Hall help to balance against the more serious elements of the story. There’s a constant vein of humour which runs throughout Annie Hall but the more obvious jokes serve as punctuation and break up the neurosis a little. When these jokes are already ‘old hat’ in disrupts the flow of the film. In taking the punch out of the jokes the film becomes centred on the neurotic breakdown of Alfie and Annie’s relationship and it loses something of its power. It’s still a wonderful piece of work, but it just feels somewhat disjointed.

When taken with the fact that Alfie is a character who has been parodied and spoofed a dozen times over, his character ticks replicated to the point of perfection, it becomes almost trite to watch Annie Hall. It’s a dark film about self destruction, lightened by humour and wit, but if the humour and wit has been overplayed by imitators then all you are left with is the darkness. As such watching Annie Hall becomes more about intellectual appreciation than emotional appreciation.

As culture cannibalises itself more and more I fear that films are going to have their teeth pulled out more and more often. How will Empire Strikes Back play when the truth of Vader’s identity is part of the cultural psyche? At what point does the initial ‘You Lookin’ At Me’ become a parody of itself, a cultural cornerstone turned into an easy gag?

My generation grew up with 'Are You Lookin' At Me' as a cultural icon completely divorced from Taxi Driver. The generation after will grow up with ‘Say Hello to my Little Friend’ as a punch line, and in twenty years time current cultural memes may have become overused and overstated. So what’s the solution? There probably isn’t one, in fact as media becomes more and more pervasive the cultural net is going to be cast further and further for things to consume. The only way to truly appreciate fine pieces of cinematic art will be to catch them before they become the zeitgeist, or pray the true classics of today remain culturally insulated (like the underseen but utterly superb Zodiac).

Lost in Translation: Emotional vs. Factual Truth

Seeing as its Chinese New Year I thought I’d blog about some great Chinese movies. The original thrust of this blog was going to be about the Chinese Odyssey films which are released each year. These all star productions are essentially like a mixture of a pantomime and a movie spoof, poking fun at elements of recent movies whilst keeping everything contained in an energetic and silly storyline. But aside from the previous sentence there’s not much too really say about them, they’re entertaining diversions which showcase a particular brand of sardonic Chinese humour. A humour which is evident in the Fong Sai Yuk films.

If that seems like a belaboured introduction to a blog entry on the Fong Sai Yuk, then I have some disappointing news for you. Fong Sai Yuk is actually a part of a belaboured introduction for the grander theme of the blog, so bear with me whilst I maim the English language a while longer.

Fong Sai Yuk is a series of Jet Li films made in the early 90s; to a casual observer such as myself them seem to be a direct reaction to the popularity of the Wong Fei-Hung films (known over here as Once Upon A Time in China). Like the Wong Fei-Hung films they take a classic hero of Chinese history (in this case the rebellious Fong Sai Yuk) and have Jet Li play a high kicking version of him. Whilst the Wong Fei-Hung films are rabble rousing, crowd pleasing, nationalistic spectacles, the Fong Sai-Yuk films are more amiable pieces of work, aiming for broad laughs more than anything else.

Made around the same time as Wong Fei Hung, one of Fong Sai Yuk’s major jokes is when the titular hero is forced to go undercover. When asked his name he quickly responds ‘Wong Fei…’ the iconic Wong Fei-Hung theme kicking in, before finishing off with ‘Jin’. It’s a great joke, largely because of the well implemented use of music. Of course if you’re American or British you’ll have never heard this joke.

Miramax, bane of Asian cinema fans everywhere, acquired the rights to a lot of Jet Li’s work and subsequently released DVDs versions of Fong Sai Yuk 1 and 2 under the imaginative title of The Legend 1 and 2. Like all Miramax releases the DVDs contained an American Dub and no option for English subtitles with the original audio track (a problem that also blighted Jet Li’s Fist of Legend). As well as being as crappy and as uninspiring as you’d expect from a Miramax dub, the DVD also completely replaces the score and neuters the Wong Fei-Hung joke (it’s been a while but I think he gives the name of Jack in the dub).

That’s an example of a bad dub, a situation where an attempt to Americanise a foreign production leads to moments actually being lost in translation. Anyone who grew up with Cockney dubbed Kung Fu films will know the lengths distributors will go to, to ensure their product is market friendly. The problem stems when there’s no choice in the matter, I have no problem with some fuckwit not wanting to read a film, give him a dub but give me the original audio track and subs as well.

The thing is that sometimes, just sometimes, I find fidelity to the original language to be a bit jarring. A great example of this is the Miyazaki movie Porco Rosso. Porco Rosso focuses on a pilot who operates around a string of islands in the Mediterranean. The movie is largely a character piece, and the characters are introspective sorts and as such a large part of the dialogue relies on tone and delivery over what is presented. Inference is paramount in the film and the brash original Japanese dub is just too alien to allow any understanding. Not only does it jar with the Sicilian backdrop, but it renders the film incapable of subtly due to the histrionics of the voice cast. The English dub allows the kind of tonal changes required to convey the story. Hilariously it’s the French dub, with the legendary Jean Reno as the main character that Miyazaki prefers. Jean Reno absolutely nails the character, his manner and intonation translating across general language divides to present a great interpretation of the character.

By insisting on subtitles we allow ourselves to see the truest representation of a film, but in doing so how much is lost in translation? I’ve often questioned Choi Min-Sik’s performance in Oldboy, as someone who doesn’t speak Korean I just have his physicality to base my assumptions of performance on. But maybe his wild histrionics are in fact hilarious, it’s impossible to tell because we have no way of knowing how he delivers his lines; we just have half of his performance to look upon.

It’s why I sit easier with my admiration of Tadanobu Asano. This Japanese actor is very much a psychical performer, often taking roles where his lines are at a minimum. More silent film star than anything else, he often portrays emotional shifts and character changes with glances and eye movements, and it makes it easy to judge how great an actor he is. Tong Leung’s performances in 2046 and In The Mood for Love are other examples of sheer physicality overcoming a language barrier to showcase a truly great performer.

Either way, with subtitles or dubs you’ll find that something has been lost in translation it’s just about what you want to lose, factual truth or emotional truth.

Why Asian Girls With Wet Hair Are Scary

Whenever I say to people I like Asian Horror films I always get funny looks. This is a pretty standard reaction. The non cinematically literate wonder why I bother reading and shit when there are perfectly good remakes and the cinematically literate wonder why I subject myself to what are by and large cinematic abortions. Whilst there are some gems in the ever increasing ‘wet haired girl terrorises people’ genre by and large most films are horrendous constructions. What is fascinating about J-Horror is the attitude towards ghosts; one of the many cultural differences between the East and West is the perception and reality of ghosts. The West takes a decidedly sceptical approach to ghosts, the believers often coming across as the craziest motherfuckers ever; in the East (particularly in Japan) ghosts are still viewed as being something of a factual proposition.

It’s not that there’s more belief in the afterlife, the idea isn’t about spirits of people coming back to haunt folks, but more about negative energy amassing due to violent or unpleasant deaths. Because of this many J-Horror films take the threat of ghosts as seriously as Western cop films take the threat of serial killers. In a western film if a character goes to the police saying they are being haunted the police are going to be hardly forthcoming, in Asian cinema if a character goes to the police and says they’re being haunted the police will get out ‘The Big Book of Ghosts’ for proper identification.

If you go to Japan you’ll often come across little trinkets and vessels on the ground to try and ward off spirits, and it’s this acceptance of spiritual energy and power which makes Hollywood remakes of Asian Horror films so untenable. It’s a completely foreign ideal and it’s almost impossible to translate it meaningfully to a western setting. It also gives context to how low key a lot of Asian horror films are in terms of their ghostly attacks. If you take the end of Ringu as an example then you’ll see how the entire composition of the scene is almost Cinéma-vérité. That’s because there is no need for a suspension of disbelief, no need to force audiences to acclimatise to a notion they haven’t invested in. The threat of a ghost stuttering out of your TV and destroying you is enough to justify a pared down approach to the attack itself.

If you compare it to a similar western scene, in this case the TV attack in Poltergeist, a lot more work has to be done in laying the foundation of the attack. The audience is already on edge because of the static of the television screen and because of the creepily disturbed performance from Heather O’Rourke, these are devices used to pave the way and lead the audience into becoming scared by something they have no rational fear of. Even taking the remake of Ringu as an example you can see changes made to the attack as it incorporates at least one major jump scare into the scene.

That’s the key defining feature of J-Horror and probably why it is such a love or loathe genre, it requires a great deal of input on behalf of the viewer and it also demands that the viewer buy into a fear which is not a particular developed fear.