Usually,
it is the French who supposedly celebrate artists who are under-valued in their
own countries, but apparently it was Japan that best appreciated Jean Cocteau’s
poetry in the early Twentieth Century. Among his greatest admirers were a
circle of expat Taiwanese poets and scholars. They were ardent nationalists,
but nearly their entire literary oeuvre was in Japanese. There is no known film
footage of the Fushashisha writers, but viewers will meet them through their
poems and letters in Huang Ya-li’s impressionistic essay-documentary, Le Moulin (trailer here), which screens as
part of What Time Is It There? Taiwanese Film Biennial at the UCLA Film & Television archive.
Le Moulin, taking its name
from one of their key literary journals, is a hefty one-hundred-sixty-two-minutes,
but there is nary a talking head in sight. Instead, Huang uses Ozu-esque
recreations of their empty homes and offices as well as Ken Burns-esque still
photo shots, as the backdrops for narrated poems and excerpts from their work.
Clearly, a lot of biographical detail is sacrificed, but we still get the broad
strokes of their lives and times, along with an intimate sense of their loves
and fears.
They
were Taiwanese, but the French surrealists significantly shaped their artistic
development, as well as prominent modernists like James Joyce, Salvador Dali,
Charles Baudelaire, and Charlie Chaplin. Yet, they were synthetizing all these influences
and their own colonial resentments in Japanese, which explains why their work
is largely forgotten today. Which national canon should claim them? Of course,
the Fushashisha school also had a hard time of it during the White Terror, but
the extensive time they spent in Japan probably would have made the Mainland
just as bad for them, if not worse (they were truly bourgeoisie poets).
There
could be room for a more traditional documentary on the Le Moulin contributors, but Huang’s film is certainly distinctive
as a work of non-fiction cinema. Viewers might need to acclimate themselves to
its rhythm, but it is worth the effort. Their
verse is quite evocative and their prose is indeed rather poetic. It is also
strangely compelling to watch their lives fly by from such an oblique vantage
point.
Le Moulin could be the most
carefully crafted film you will see all year. It is also one of the most
poetic. At the risk of sounding like a philistine, it probably could have been
trimmed to a mere two hours without irredeemably damaging its artistic
integrity, but at least this way viewers definitely get their money’s worth. Recommended
for poetry lovers and experimental film patrons, Le Moulin screens this Sunday (11/5) at the UCLA Film & TV
Archive.
