DF ’15: Haze and Fog

A community is not just an assemblage of condos. Frankly, the complex in question is more of a concentration of angst than a communal body. Notions of community and the lack thereof feature prominently in Cao Fei’s hybrid documentaries, with the emphasis placed squarely on the “hybrid.” Contemporary Chinese life gets a strange but true-in-spirit genre spin in Cao’s Haze and Fog (trailer here) and iMirror, which screen together during MoMA’s 2015 Documentary Fortnight.

Initially, Haze feels very much like a standard aesthetically severe observational documentary, except Cao seems to have an eccentric knack for focusing on dark, uncomfortable moments. We see a prostitute going about her 50 Shades business with clients in the building, security guards peeping on tenants, and a pregnant housewife engaging in self-destructive behavior. Perhaps Cao’s cast really is part of the building’s universe, but hopefully they are playing fictionalized roles.

Clearly, everyone is alienated to some extent, despite their close proximity. Gao uses their daily frustrations to critique an increasingly fractured Chinese society and the continuing conflict between empty consumerism and traditional values. Then Haze turns into a zombie film. For real. It is all part of the allegory, but the zombies do what zombies do.

This is a strange film—and a bold pick for Doc Fortnight. It clocks in just over an hour, but it is unlikely Cao could have sustained the weird, anesthetizing vibe and frequency of understated, untelegraphed WTF moments much longer. It is a masterful piece of filmmaking that keeps the audience off-balance from start to finish, but Cao also gets some notably sensitive performances from Wang Chenxu as the young single woman and Liu Lu as the expecting housewife.

iMirror also falls a good deal outside the traditional bounds of Fortnight selections, but it is more deliberately doc-ish. Cao, billed as “China Tracy,” her virtual handle, chronicles a relationship she had with the avatar of an older man from San Francisco, within the virtual reality world of Second Life (SL). It is not really a catfish story, because he was more-or-less who he claimed to be and it is understood that everyone constructs idealized versions of themselves. Yet, it got pretty real, even though it wasn’t.

The second part of iMirror focusing on China Tracy’s virtual something with the younger and then older looking Hug Yue is considerably stronger than parts one and three, which mostly just establish the issues and environment of SL. Naturally, the animation looks very computer generated, as it must, because that is SL. Nevertheless, the film raises a number of questions for offline viewers, especially given the apparent freedom Cao found there. Is this a place where connected Chinese citizens can go to escape government censorship and surveillance? If so, why the hammer-and-sickle decorative motifs? Is a utopian ideologue inherently attracted to the presumptive perfectiveness of SL’s virtual world?

Given their genre elements, Haze and iMirror fit together rather easily, but the former is the far more challenging and inventive film. If you are a MoMA member you should drop in and see it when it screens, because love it or hate it, you will not see anything like it anytime soon. Highly recommended, Haze and Fog screens with iMirror next Thursday (2/26) and Friday (2/27) as part of this year’s Documentary Fortnight at MoMA.

DF ’15: Father and Sons

It is yet another example of the appalling lack of free speech and press protections in contemporary Mainland China. Documentarian Wang Bing had intended to follow the lives of subsistence laborer Cai Shunhua and his two tweener sons Yongjin and Yonggao in his typically in-depth, observational fashion, but threats from the father’s landlord-factory owner forced the filmmaker to halt the project after a few days of shooting. It is therefore hard to really judge the resulting film, but at least Wang gives the world a good hard look at the mean living conditions the exploitative boss presumably wanted to keep under wraps in Father and Sons, which screens during MoMA’s 2015 Documentary Fortnight.

We have no idea where their mother is or whether there might be anymore extended family back in the countryside. Since 2010, Yongjin and Yonggao have lived with their migrant worker father in a four meter square single room occupancy. There is a stove and you had better believe they have a TV, but that is about all the amenities life affords them. Watching them carefully allot squares of toilet paper before leaving for whatever outside facilities are available to them should give you an idea of the scarcity of their resources.

Wang Bing has certainly never been intimidated by long takes in his previous documentaries, but they usually framed considerable real life drama. Fengming: a Chinese Memoir simply focuses on an elderly survivor of the Cultural Revolution telling her story on-camera, but her oral history is absolutely riveting and heavy with historical significance. Three Sisters is an absolutely heartbreaking record of the difficulties faced by the titular rural siblings, particularly the eldest. ‘Til Madness DoUs Part might not have been as emotionally engaging, but its unvarnished look inside a provincial Chinese mental asylum is often quite shocking.

In contrast, the majority of the shots in F&S capture Yongjin and Yonggao watching television—ironically, they are usually watching something more interesting than we are. Wang seems to be trying to convey a sense of the indolence that comes out of a sense of hopelessness, but a little of this goes a long way, especially in a ninety minute film. Still, it is not fair to criticize Wang for the static repetitiveness of the film.

Frankly, it is admirable he was able to keep faith with the Cai family and cobble together a film representative of their hardscrabble lives from the limited footage he was able to shoot. We can look at Three Sisters and imagine what could have been had Wang been allowed to observe his subjects as their lives developed over time. Father and Sons is probably best seen and programmed in conjunction with other Wang films, so it can serve as another small piece in his overall documentary mosaic of contemporary Chinese life. On its own, it is not an especially rewarding viewing experience, but it is still cool that MoMA selected it for this year’s Documentary Fortnight, because of the wider circumstances surrounding it. For those who understand what to expect, Father and Sons screens this Tuesday (2/17) and Wednesday (2/18) as part of this year’s Documentary Fortnight.

DF ’15: Hotel Nueva Isla

In Cuba, every building is dilapidated, but Jorge de los Rois’ home is particularly so. Perversely, he keeps making it worse and worse. Formerly one of Havana’s most exclusive luxury hotels, it is now a battered shell not even fit for squatters. However, de los Rios finds his reason for being bashing away at the walls and moldings in the dubious belief the pre-revolutionary owners left some great treasure somewhere within the guts of the structure. It is an increasingly lonely and Sisyphean existence documented (for lack of a better word) in Irene Gutiérrez Torres’ Hotel Nueva Isla (trailer here), which screens during MoMA’s 2015 Documentary Fortnight.

Once the Nueva Isla was a magnet for the city’s homeless population, but the unsound building has become too dangerous for all but the most desperate or committed squatters. Yet de los Rios continues to whack away. It is hard to speculate how monomaniacal he really is, given the narrative elements incorporated by Torres and her co-screenwriter and cinematographer Javier Labrador. Hopefully, the one-sided pillow talk mostly featuring de los Rios’ somewhat younger lover is entirely fictional, since he cannot be bothered to throw her the scantest of emotional bones. Still, the is something tragically compelling about him, sort of like Rinko Kikuchi’s character in Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, but about a thousand times less moving.

  

The symbolism of the broken down de los Rios and his broken down hotel are hard to miss. Betrayed by false promises and lean from poor nutrition, he is Cuba personified. There is simply no way to spin this fly-on-the-wall visit to the Nueva Isla as a positive for the genre. Yet, despite the added fictional veneer, HNI is a defiantly static film. Sometimes, it feels like watching the worst PBS handyman show ever: The New Socialist Workshop, starring Jorge de los Rios. This week, Jorge busts up debris with a hammer, just like last week, and the week before.

Without question, HNI makes Cuba look like an unremittingly crummy place to live. Since Torre and Labrador confine themselves to the Nueva Isla and rarely leave de los Rios’ side, the film necessarily feels claustrophobic. Nevertheless, wider concerns (such as the fate of his estranged son keen to try his luck with the desperate Florida crossing) occasionally manage to creep in.

Ironically, the treasure of Nueva Isla is right in front of his eyes, but de Los Rios cannot see it. The hotel once employed dozens if not hundreds of people and was a major multiplier for the neighborhood. It was something very valuable for many people, but now it is a wreck. Castro and his murderous ideology destroyed it well enough, but de los Rios keeps piling on.

Regardless, there is an awful lot of reality in HNI, but not much energy (you might wonder why Torres would compromise its vérité purity in a way that does not add much cinematic get-up-and-go). Honest in spirit with regards to the big picture, but more interesting in principle than as an actual viewing experience, Hotel Nueva Isla screens this Monday (2/16) and Tuesday (2/17) at MoMA, as part of this year’s Documentary Fortnight.

DF ’15: Storm Children, Book One

You can tell Haiti has a better lobbying arm than the Philippines. Five years after the 2010 earthquake, international aid is still flowing into the island nation, while filmmaker and former Culture Minister Raoul Peck wonders where all that money is going. In contrast, Typhoon Yolanda barely cracked the news cycle in late 2013. As a result, there has been precious little rebuilding in coastal communities like Tacloban. Three children will guide auteur Lav Diaz through the watery streets and dilapidated slums of their post-typhoon world in Storm Children, Book One, which screens during MoMA’s 2015 Documentary Fortnight.

Perhaps only Diaz could make images of privation and hopelessness so arrestingly beautiful. Arguably, Storm Children might easily play in a loop as an installation or to accompany a fund-raising soiree for typhoon relief. His characteristic long takes are as long as ever. As a result, it takes a bit of time (perhaps an hour) before we start to recognizing the recurring focal figures Diaz ostensibly follows. However, the neighborhood’s three-legged stray dog will start to look familiar somewhat sooner.

Diaz could still get elected mayor of Slow Cinema City, but at just under two and a half hours, Storm Children is a veritable short subject by his standards. It is not until late in the film that Diaz starts to ask questions of the kids, in a traditional documentary kind of way. Sadly, they will confirm many of our worst suspicions, such as why there seem to be so little adult supervision in their world.

Without question, Diaz has an eye for visuals, but the spectacle of the huge rusted-out freighters beached throughout the Tacloban coastline and amid the ruined smithereens of their tightly packed houses is hard to miss. It looks like a post-apocalyptic Lord of the Flies, except the atmosphere is remarkably quiet and still.

At times, Diaz’s visuals are so striking, we can understand why he holds them so long. Serving as his own cinematographer, supplemented by his son Sultan, Diaz demonstrates how artful documentary filmmaking can be. Nevertheless, at some point quietly observing these children orphaned and essentially rendered destitute by Yolanda becomes increasingly problematic over time (and there is always a lot of time to think in a Lav Diaz movie). There can be a thin line between conscious-raising and exploitation—and it is not always clear which side the film is on. Powerful, demanding, yet sometimes discomfiting in the wrong way, Storm Children still must be considered a major work from a prestige filmmaker. Recommended for those who appreciate slow cinema flavored with a guilt trip, Storm Children, Book One screens tomorrow (2/14, perfect for Valentine’s Day) and Monday (2/16) at MoMA, as part of this year’s Documentary Fortnight.