First Impressions: Thinking Aloud About Film

https://notesonfilm1.com/2022/01/23/thinking-aloud-about-film-taipei-suicide-story-keff-taiwan-2020/

A medium length fiction film with a great central concept: A suicide hotel where people can only stay one night. They are permitted to leave in the morning if they change their mind but leave they must. What happens when a young woman chooses to stay and the desk clerk begins falling for her? We talk about the beauty of the compositions, the black humour of the film, the uses of colour, we praise the cinematography by Tzu-Hao Kao and the performances (especially Tender Huang's). But is the film still a bit thin? Richard and I debate.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2022/01/20/thinking-aloud-about-film-nocturne-29-pere-portabella-spain-1968/

The podcast touches on the Portabella’s bringing together some of the great artists of the 20th century to work on various levels of the film (music, script, art, cinema); whether it being the Marxist work of a bourgeois is inherently a problem, the significance of particular scenes (the poker games, the ending with the flags), the casting of Lucía Bosé and Mario Cabré, its form and its possible meanings. It’s a fascinating film and an extraordinary first work by a key director more people should be familiar with. It is currently on MUBI.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2022/01/03/ali-in-wonderland-ali-aux-pays-des-merveilles-rachid-boudjedra-achmed-rachedi-france-algeria-1975/

We talk Ali in Wonderland, currently on MUBI. It's an avant-garde political documentary whose play with form is intended to punch the spectator into awareness, and thus very much part of the deconstructionist zeitgeist of its time. We discuss the use of split screen, distortions, slow motion on beat, juxtapositions, its rendering of historical memory, the way the film connects colonialism with migration. It's a work you'd perhaps now expect to find more readily in a gallery rather than in a cinema like an installation, and worth seeing for many reasons, which we discuss in the podcast.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2021/12/21/the-youssef-chahine-podcast-no-44-le-chaos-2007/

We discuss Chahine's last film, Le Chaos, and are delighted by what we see; a political melodrama that offers all the pleasures of the genre -- one feels for these people who long for love and freedom but who aren't allowed to achieve their wants through repressive social and state mechanisms. The villain is a torturer and rapist. Chahine's achievement is that he makes him understandable, whilst offering a masterful mise-en-scene of a Marxist critique of a corrupt culture through a film that always sides with the powerless. We found it brilliant. Thanks very much to the kind friend who made it possible for us to see it. We have 15 more Chahine films we have not been able to source; so if any of you know where we can buy/source/see them, we would appreciate it.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2021/12/06/thinking-aloud-about-cinema-the-youssef-chahine-podcast4-shorts-by-chahine/

In 1997, 47 years after he first went to Cannes expecting to win something, Chahine was finally awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award. It was handed to him by a luminous Isabelle Adjani, who praised him for his humanity, tolerance, courage and clemency. That plus his intelligence, tact an his politics shine through in the shorts we discuss in this podcast: Lumiére & Co (1995); Lumiére sur le massacre (TV series, 1997); Chacun son cinema/ ‘47 ans après’, 2007;

September 11th/ ‘Egypt’, 2002).

https://notesonfilm1.com/2021/12/04/the-youssef-chahine-film-club-no-3-mandabi-ousmane-sembene-1968/

A discussion of Ousmane Sembène's Mandabi. José had never seen it before and found it a revelation. Richard's now seen it twice, once at the cinema in a beautiful restoration that's now been put out by Criterion. The film is currently screening on MUBI and we highly recommend it. We talk issues of representation, gender, colonialism, how structures seem designed to oppress a sector of the population which nonetheless constitutes 'the people'. We also talk film aesthetics and what it was about the film that Youssef Chahine might have found so appealing.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2021/11/22/thinking-aloud-about-film-encounter-at-the-station-hsin-chi-taiwan-1965/

Encounter at the Station (Taiwan, 1965) is the last of the 5 Hsin Chi films programmed by the Anthology Film Archives in New York and available for all to see for free until November 30. It is a melodrama in the truest sense, with songs narrating or underlining the action at almost every moment. And what action! The film takes on every melodramatic trope possible and when you think it can’t get any more extreme it surprises you by going even further still. A young high school student falls in love with a boy at the station. On her deathbed her mother reveals to her that she is really adopted and to beware of the stepfather. And for good reason, as soon as the mother dies, he sells the young girl to a nightclub to pay for the mother’s funeral. Her love surprises her at the club and buys her out. But it’s no good, her secret’s revealed and she will be forever a B-girl. People have to give up their children, some go blind, some go mad. It’s never boring. We discuss all of this and more in the podcast below:

https://notesonfilm1.com/2021/11/15/the-youssef-chahine-film-club-the-will-kamal-selim-1939/

In Egypt, The Will is often voted the greatest Egyptian film of all time, one of the greatest ever anywhere, and a precursor to Italian neo-realism. Youssef Chahine recommended it and provided the impetus for our viewing. In this podcast we discuss how much we liked it (the representation of a whole way of life with its structures of feeling, the melodrama, the resonances it still has to contemporary life); the limits of its comparison to neo-realism; its influence on Chahine, particularly evident in Daddy Amin; and how and why its claims to being one of the greatest films of all time nonetheless seem lost on us.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2021/11/01/taiwan-film-festival-edinburgh-2021-wrap-up/

In our final podcast on the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh 2021, we praise its programming, its accessibility, and its decision to also include live events alongside the digital. We also delve into other types of films in the programmer not covered by this podcast so far, Pai Jing-jui's Morning in Taipei (1964) with its similarities to Humphrey Jennings cinema and the 'city symphony' films of the 1920s' and with its superb new score by Lim Giong; Den Nan-guang's 8 mm home movies; and we delve with considerable depth into Chen Kuo-fu's The Personals (1998) , a film anyone interested in issues of gender and sexuality will be interested in seeing (it has a fantastic queer moment very relevant to current discussions)

https://notesonfilm1.com/2021/10/25/splendid-float-zero-chou-2004-taiwan-film-festival-edinburgh-2001/

A beautiful queer film, poetic, expressive, moving. Roy is a Taoist priest by day, a drag queen entertainer by night. One magical night, on the road, he meets a gorgeous fisherman, Sunny, and falls madly in love. But Sunny leaves without saying a word. It's only when he's hired to summon back his spirit for burial, that Roy/Rose discovers his love has drowned. Will he now return to him? We discuss this plus the film's many dualities, the fluidity of its gender representations, the beauty of its imagery and much more in the accompanying podcast.