YiMovi, a special movies website

[Luxi]

A website under the title "Chinese Film and the Cross-cultural Medical Humanities", that introduces itself as applying "traditional Euro-American medical humanities approaches to teaching with Chinese film" is not easy to bring to the attention of a broad audience. Not easy to find unless one happens to be in luck and looking for some special niche film.

 

If you're into Marvel Films, ignore it. But if you venture there, you may find some interesting films hard to find anywhere else. Not necessarily strictly art house, but more into introducing modern or near modern Chinese society to western medical practitioner students of Chinese. The purpose and contents are explained amply on the website by mainly British academics, who also provide very nice introductions to all of the films. All the films are free to watch, have English subtitles, and they seem to be mostly from the 1980 - 2010 period. 

 

I just watched "Woman Demon Human" (人鬼情), a 1987 film directed by a female director, Huang Shuqin (黄蜀芹), a rare feminist film and a treat for lovers of Beijing Opera. The site also has the famous "East Palace, West Palace", which I haven't seen yet, and several other movies that are new to me. One I know well and can recommend is "Little Red Flowers" (看上去很美, 2006), directed by Zhang Yuan ( 张元 ), funny and a tribute to the right to be different.

 

 

 

Edited November 8, 2020 at 10:36 AM by Luxi
bummer

[Jan Finster]

2 hours ago, Luxi said:

All the films are free to watch, have English subtitles, and they seem to be mostly from the 1980 - 2010 period. 

Looks awesome! 

Where do you get to watch them? On the website all I found were 1-3 minute clips (?)?

[abcdefg]

I also had technical difficulties. Was able to watch the short clips but not any of the entire films. I had assumed the film would be available by clicking the "video" tab, but that didn't do anything. For example, I had wanted to watch this one. 

 

 

The other links at the bottom of the frame work, just not the one marked "Video." 

 

I cleaned the cache, turned off my ad blocker, tried it on a different browser. No joy. What is the secret? Thanks. 

 

Several of these films look interesting and I would enjoy watching them.

 

[Luxi]

Oh no! I can't find the videos either. This is terrible! How did this happen? 

 

It happened because I wanted to watch "Woman Demon Human", ran a search and found this great site, and the full video I wanted was there: 

Woman, Demon, Human - YiMovi

I watched it and then had a look around the site and saw all those interesting movies, wow! Tried the clips and took note of the ones I wanted to watch, but never checked whether the full videos were there. Turns out they weren't...They may have been at one time, or maybe they were shown in class in better days. I wish I had checked before posting click-bait ?

 

Soooo sorry guys! I'll try to find links to some of those films to make up  for my blunder. At least I found one for Little Red Flowers (看上去很美). It's in iQIY, with English subs and all:

https://www.iqiyi.com/v_19rrgzl2c4.html

But you can only watch a few minutes without an iQIY subscription...sorry again ?

 

 

 

[Balthazar]

Still useful as a thematic catalogue with a lot of lesser known directors and film, though! With clips, intros and curated external links (through which I just discovered the blog of Stephen Jones, and his documentary "Li Manshan: portrait of a folk Daoist").

[abcdefg]

Thanks, @Luxi That's OK. Medical Humanities as a way to understand other cultures is an attractive topic. I've had some interesting conversations with Blind Massage Masters. (The subject of one of the films.) Always wanted to know more about their situation. 

 

I tried sending the "Yi Movie Team" a question about where to find links to actually watch the films. The "Submit a question" form on the "Contact Us" page did not work. It yielded this message. 

 

[Luxi]

23 minutes ago, abcdefg said:

I tried sending the "Yi Movie Team" a question

 

I was going to email them too! Looks like this was part of a seminar or course-related project a few years ago and then the videos were removed because of copyright/licence issues, and the rest was left behind - which is nice and certainly useful, but would be infinitely better if there were some links to the actual videos.

 

I looked for Blind Massage today but couldn't find it. I'll keep on looking.  It's sad that so many movies from 1980 - 2010 seem to have disappeared completely. It's not that there are no free streams, but that there aren't even dvds or pay streams. These films are important documents from a very special and interesting period in Chinese modern history, unique in many ways. A few of those films are very high quality cinema, not to mention that there was quite a lot of experimentation and innovation going on. In a way, I'm lucky to have seen many of those films (thanks to UK TV Channel 4), but am annoyed and sad that they're not curated, and not to be found.

[Balthazar]

13 minutes ago, Luxi said:

It's sad that so many movies from 1980 - 2010 seem to have disappeared completely. It's not that there are no free streams, but that there aren't even dvds or pay streams. These films are important documents from a very special and interesting period in Chinese modern history, unique in many ways. A few of those films are very high quality cinema, not to mention that there was quite a lot of experimentation and innovation going on.

 

Agreed. This is the raison d'être for private niche trackers such as Karagarga (for those who haven't heard of it, here's an article - and before anyone ask, I don't have any invites to the actual site) where you can find these otherwise almost completely inaccessible works.

[Luxi]

20 minutes ago, Balthazar said:

private niche trackers such as Karagarga (for those who haven't heard of it, here's an article

 

Interesting. Thanks for the article! I'll keep an eye on those sites. Fortunately European, American and Japanese cinema classics receive a lot more care and attention, old tapes are re-mastered, older films are still shown in niche channels like Mubi, sometimes there are revival cycles also on network TV channels, dvds can still be bought or borrowed from libraries.

 

I want to believe that there are some people in China curating their cinema classics in secret, and one day they'll appear with a bunch of  fully restored, uncut 1990s videos.