Chinese Art Movies

[Steingletscher]

I'm looking for Chinese movies in my vein.

Favorite movies (only top 5 are ordered):

1. Trois Colours: Rouge

2. Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage

3. 2001: A Space Odyssey

4. Trois Colours: Bleu

5. Tree of Life

Last Year at Marienbad

L'Avventura

Lost in Translation

Stalker/Solaris (1972) (tied)

The Seventh Seal

Favorite Directors:

Ingmar Bergman

Stanley Kubrick

Terrence Malick

Wong Kar-Wai

Andrei Tarkovsky

Favorite Chinese films:

In the Mood for Love (excluding 2046 and My Blueberrry Nights, anything by Wong Kar-Wai)

Stolen Life

Yi YI

I've seen Tián Zhuàngzhuàng's Springtime in a Small Town, Jiǎ Zhāngkē's 24 City, and a few other movies I can't recall at the moment. I can't seem to find a copy of Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day.

I do enjoy many of the more alternative Chinese movies, they are still very different from the list above as subject matter and treatment tend to be more akin to a documentary. It's probably a cultural difference, but I'm just guessing.

[daofeishi]

I'm not sure if this is up your alley?

[jbradfor]

I thought Suzhou River was rather artsy.

[animal world]

"I'm not sure if this is up your alley?"

Very funny

Yeah, i would love to see something in Chinese a la Last Year in Marienbad. I saw that movie a long time ago and for the duration of the movie I was wondering what the movie was all about. Now, throw Chinese language and culture into the mix and there you have it: a recipe for massive confusion!

Edited: my apologies. I don't mean to sound sarcastic. Was merely reacted to the Last Year in Marienbad mention. I do hope this thread will deliver good suggestions.

[tooironic]

Have you seen Chungking Express?

[character]

Favorite Chinese films:

In the Mood for Love (excluding 2046 and My Blueberrry Nights, anything by Wong Kar-Wai)

Stolen Life

I'm a big WKW fan, but Stolen Life... well, let's say our tastes differ.

These suggestions are commercial films with touches of arthouse:

A touch of evil (1995)

First Love: Litter on the Breeze

Durian Durian

Lost and Found

Centre Stage

Made in Hong Kong

Green Snake

The Blade

Perhaps Love

Just one look

Sparrow

Green Tea

Baober in Love

[Steingletscher]

Yeah' date=' i would love to see something in Chinese a la Last Year in Marienbad. I saw that movie a long time ago and for the duration of the movie I was wondering what the movie was all about. Now, throw Chinese language and culture into the mix and there you have it: a recipe for massive confusion![/quote']

We could argue about it for a while, but trying to piece together the story of Last Year at Marienbad is more important then the story itself. The only things I could find similar to this are from Japan. But I don't want to hear Japanese, most of them call themselves 'mind-fucks' and are jumbled up and confusing for the sake of being confusing. Very few of them are rewarding to spend time on (and the ones that are tend to be similar in style and still convey a mood not as grave and heavy [though perhaps darker] then Marienbad).

You don't need to apologize for the sarcasm as it is understandable. I realize I'm probably hitting a deeper note as I'm asking for a Western style movie (in mood, treatment of material, and philosophical ideas) from China, which has a vastly different and equally developed culture and literary tradition. The religiousness present in Tarkovsky and Bergman would be extremely out of place in China. But still, a Chinese take on those subject matter (if possible) would be very interesting.

Have you seen Chungking Express?

Love it. Fallen Angels was even better. The fickle subtleties and quirks of the characters are very enjoyable. Of course' date=' the ecstatic feeling of free youth is what makes the films, overshadowing any possibility of loneliness and isolation that comes with freedom. At least the characters aren't assholes like most are in Jean-Luc Godard's films (which often try for a similar feeling and are a huge influence on Wong Kar-Wai).

I'm not sure if this is up your alley?

Added to my Netflix queue

I thought Suzhou River was rather artsy.

Haven't seen it yet. It's sitting on my computer and I don't know when I'll get around to it (since I tend to decide which movies to watch on a whim). However' date=' Zhou Xun is in it, so it's quite tempting. [i']Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress [/i]is another movie on my long 'to watch list.'

I'm sorry if I'm not saying the Chinese names for the movies. I generally get my movies off of Netflix, but occasionally other sources when the title isn't on Netflix.

I don't have my list with me, so I'm probably not mentioning all of the Chinese movies I want to see (or have seen). I'm putting it up for other people so they see what I'm looking at and you can discover things from. But here are what I can remember:

Mainland

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Suzhou River

Summer Palace (banned in the mainland)

Stolen Life

The Blue Kite (banned in the mainland)

Springtime in a Small Town (2002 remake)

Perhaps Love

Red Cliff (both parts, so the 5 hour version)

Platform

Unknown Pleasures

The World

Still Life

24 City

Peacock (can't find)

Lost in Beijing

Blind Shaft (banned in the mainland)

Kekexili: Mountain Patrol

Postman (can't find)

Beijing Bicycle (can't find)

Raise the Red Lantern

Ju Dou

The Story of Qiu Ju

To Live

Not One Less

Dam Street

Electric Shadows

Please Vote for Me

Devils on the Doorstep (banned in the mainland)

Ip Man

Ip Man 2

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Drifters

Tuya's Marriage

The King of Masks

Zhou Yu's Train

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles

The Last Emporer

Last Train Home

Spring Fever (banned in the mainland)

Luxury Car

Wasted Orient

So Close to Paradise

Quitting

Warm Spring

Going to School with my Dad on my Back

Together

Take Out

Rickshaw Boy

Iron and Silk

Hong Kong

Ashes of Time (Redux)

Police Story

As Tears Go By

Days of Being Wild

Chungking Express

Fallen Angels

Happy Together

In the Mood for Love

2046

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

Wing Chun

Taiwan

Yi Yi

Lust, Caution

Millennium Mambo

Three Times

Still, nothing like The Seventh Seal.

[icebear]

To Live (活着) is probably my favorite Chinese movie, good to see it on your list. Another that I enjoy is In the Heat of the Sun.

[skylee]

Two observations -

1) Ip Man, IP Man 2, The Last Emperor and CrouchingTiger are not Mainland films. But I don't really know how you group them.

2) I had never thought anyone would think the Ip Man films have "art house" quality. Perhaps they appear so to people who don't speak Chinese, but still.

[rezaf]

I think 觀音山（Buddha Mountain）is a very good art movie

[gato]

I don't like the "art film" label because it's snobbish and misleading. Art vs non-art is a false distinction because it's not commercial films can't have artistic standards but rather that the audience for movies has changed. The movie-going audience is much younger than before, and most commercial movies today are targeted towards the 15-25 age bracket. That's true for China, too. That's why the popular movies of today are so different from those 50 years ago in the US (pre-1980s), and 10-20 years ago for China (pre-2000s). Another factor is that Hollywood today also is more interested in making movie that sell well around the world, so they need to simplify the dialog and the story and make them non-cultural-specific to make it understandable for foreign audiences.

The audience for TV shows today is much closer to the audience we once had for movies. A lot of people in their 30s and 40s hardly ever go to the theaters for movies, but do watch TV series. That's true for the US, and even more true in China because movies tickets are so expensive (you can buy 10 pirate DVDs for the price of one movie ticket). That's why some of the TV shows that are popular in the US might be considered "art films" if they were shown in the theater. Something like the original "Law and Order", for example. In fact, one of the my favorite movies is actually a TV series called "The Best of Youth". It was a wildly popular TV series in Italy and was an "art house" favorite when it was shown in the US. The local theater near where I lived in San Francisco kept on extending its run because it was so popular. I wouldn't call it an art film.

This shift in commercial film industry was made abundantly clear to me when I saw a string of 1930-40s detective movies at a film noir festival. Many popular movies of that period would be considered "art films" today.

This article below has more on the changes I described above:

http://www.pages.dre...ross_Points.htm

Gross Points: Is the blockbuster the end of cinema?

By Louis Menand

The New Yorker, February 7, 2005

In 1946, weekly movie attendance was a hundred million. That was out of a population of a hundred and forty-one million, who had nineteen thousand movie screens available to them. Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million.

Hollywood studios distribute two hundred movies a year (down from between five and seven hundred a year in the studio era), and only a handful are blockbusters. But the blockbuster is where the money is. Every once in a while, there is talk about the return of the midsize film—the picture that costs twenty million or so to make, and that attracts interest and attention on its own merits. “Sideways” is this season’s poster child. “Sideways” is reported to have cost around sixteen million dollars to make (exclusive of marketing costs). After ten weeks, it had grossed twenty-two million dollars. You might be able to get Tom Cruise to walk across the street for twenty-two million dollars, but that’s about it. “Elektra,” a widely panned fantasy adventure which opened in the middle of January, the deadest month in the business, grossed twenty-two million dollars in two weeks. “Sideways” was unbranded by stars or title (and was not, in marketing parlance, “toyetic,” susceptible to merchandising deals). In those first ten weeks, it was shown on three-hundred and seventy screens. “Elektra” was based on a comic-book character, and it opened on thirty-two hundred screens. To put both pictures in true blockbuster perspective: “Troy,” which is considered a failure, has grossed just under half a billion dollars. The poor reviews for “Troy” didn’t matter, because seventy-three per cent of its box-office revenue came from overseas.

Foreign box-office income started exceeding domestic box-office income for Hollywood movies in 1993. For the typical top-ten box-office hit, sixty per cent of exhibition revenue comes from overseas. This is a reason that the women don’t have much dialogue, and the men are too occupied with driving, wrecking, and leaping to utter more than an occasional mal mot. In the first “Terminator,” Schwarzenegger had seventeen lines. Foreign audiences aren’t paying to hear an interesting conversation. That’s not what domestic audiences are paying for, either. The ideal product to market is a “four-quadrant” picture, a movie that appeals to men and women in both the over- and the under-twenty-five age groups. That’s one reason performers with high adult recognition—Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Robert De Niro—are paid so much for cartoon voice-overs.

All the emphasis on box-office distorts the real financial profile of a movie, because theatrical distribution is just the first of many revenue streams. These include sales to pay television, sales to broadcast television, DVDs, and merchandising licenses. Blockbusters today aspire to be “tent-pole franchises”—centerpieces for multiple spin-off products, from lunchboxes to soundtracks, comic books, children’s books, arcade games, and computer games. “Batman” earned three times as much from merchandise as it did from ticket sales; the makers of “Jurassic Park” sold a hundred licenses for a thousand dinosaur products. Blockbusters today are commercials: they’re commercials for themselves. They also include commercials, in the form of product placement. The all-time record for product placement appears to be owned by the Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies,” which sold screen time to Visa, Avis, BMW, Smirnoff vodka, Heineken, Omega watches, Ericsson cell phones, and L’Oréal. This explains the brand names.

[animal world]

The last Emperor is by the Italian director Bertolluci. Good movie; saw it when it first came out.

Steingletscher, I am surprised to see missing from your list of favorites, i.e. the first list:

Bunuel - probably my favorite director of all. Great movies: Belle de Jour and Tristana. Both feature Catherine Deneuve.

Truffaut - Les 400 Coups

Antonioni - Blow Up

But: to each his own.

Thanks for the Chinese list. Most of the listings were unknown to me. So, i have a lot to look forward to! I did read the short story/novella Lust, Caution. A very powerful story. Would love to see the movie.

I have a Netflix question:

Are all the Chinese movies you listed available on Netflix? That would be outstanding. When Netflix shows Chinese movies will you also get the Chinese characters in addition to the English sub titles?

I am considering Netflix but couldn't find out whether they have a good offering of foreign movies. Hey, do they have Last Year in Marienbad? If so, i will watch again soon after subscribing. Perhaps I'll like it more this time around

[gato]

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, time for some movie suggestions.

Bergman and Antonioni aren't my favorites. My ideal is more Steven Soderbergh, Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, and Alain Resnais.

The Chinese directors that might be the closest to the Bergman/Antonioni axis are probably Tsai Mingliang and Hou Hsiaohsien. Both directors' films have very spare dialogs. Tsai Mingliang, like Antonioni, likes to focus on alienation. Hou Hsiaohsien is more sunny (relatively speaking) and likes to focus on history and family sagas.

I liked Tsai's Rebel of Neon God (青少年哪吒), Vive L'Amour (爱情万岁), and The River (河流), and Hou's 童年往年 and City of Sadness (悲情城市).

I'd watch anything by Edward Yang (杨德昌), and the early movies by Chen Kaige (Yellow Earth / 黄土地, King of Children / 孩子王, The Emperor and the Assassin / 荆轲刺秦王) and Zhang Yimou.

[gato]

A few old threads that might be of interest.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/4168-best-100-chinese-movies-how-many-have-you-watched/

Best 100 Chinese movies -- How many have you watched?

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/3826-peacock-%E5%AD%94%E9%9B%80/

Peacock-孔雀

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/20779-nanjing-nanjing/

Nanjing! Nanjing!

[jbradfor]

I have a Netflix question:

Are all the Chinese movies you listed available on Netflix? That would be outstanding. When Netflix shows Chinese movies will you also get the Chinese characters in addition to the English sub titles?

Netflix only purchases USA releases, from what I can tell. If a movie has a USA release, Netflix will likely have it; if it doesn't, Netflix won't. So e.g. Hua Mulan isn't on Netflix, but In the Mood for Love is (not to call them art-house, but a recent example of ones I searched for) . Your best bet is just to search Netflix for a handful of movies and check.

[gato]

If you are outside of China, you might have better luck finding these movies on eMule. Or ordering them from Dangdang.com.

Some of them are available on Youku and Tudou.

[skylee]

I don't like the "art" label either, but the OP used it in the title of this thread.

I like the best of youth very much. And we have a thread on it on this website -> http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/5482-film-the-best-of-youth-%e7%87%a6%e7%88%9b%e4%ba%ba%e7%94%9f

[skylee]

Now that Edward Yang has been mentioned I do have a suggestion - 《牯嶺街少年殺人事件》（A Brighter Summer Day） Watch the 4-hour director's cut. It's good.

[Lu]

I am also a bit surprised to see Ip Man considered an art house movie. And Red Cliff. But well, I suppose in many places in the west they are not mainstream cinema and therefore arthouse.

The International Film Festival in Rotterdam usually has a large number of very artsy and independent movies (many of them not shown in China, which you seem to like!), perhaps you can find some inspiration among the list of Asian movies of this year.

A few more directors:

Zhang Yang (seems to fit in your list)

Johnny To (HK mafia movies, doesn't fit on your list but very interesting and alternative)

John Hsu (fun Taiwanese movies on themes you never thought of).

[character]

@Steingletscher, interesting list.

Peacock (can't find) - http://www.yesasia.com/us/peacock-aka-kong-que-dvd-hong-kong-version/1004309148-0-0-0-en/info.html

Postman (can't find) - There's a Chinese subtitled version at yesasia.com . If by any chance you meant Postmen in the Mountains, that's also available there.

Beijing Bicycle (can't find) - available at yesasia.com and amazon.com