Monthly Archives: June 2006

Unshown Cinema

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The Los Angeles Film Festival–officially in its fourth year–is still finding its groove, but it’s improving. A few years ago, Chicago critic Roger Ebert called the Sundance Film Festival the “de facto Los Angeles film festival,” and said that as the world’s film center, Los Angeles needs a festival less than almost any other place in the world: “There’s no need for one in a town where every commercial release plays usually before it plays anywhere else.” Well sure, if all festivals do is premiere industry films; fortunately, festivals are where hundreds of international films that won’t ever play on local screens are also exhibited.

Ebert’s comments were included in an article a few years back that pointed out that of the roughly 1,600 festivals around the world, none of the more than two dozen festivals in the Los Angeles area ranked in the top ten, which include Cannes, Toronto, Venice and Berlin–all noted for their stellar international line-ups. The festival in Palm Springs is the closest thing Angelenos have to a competitive world cinema event, but it’s over 100 miles away in the desert. Yet the illusion persists that Los Angeles is somehow the “movie capital of the world.”

This precise illusion came under fire last night in a lively LAFF panel discussion moderated by critic Robert Koehler entitled “Unshown Cinema: Inside the World of ‘The Films That Got Away’.” That last phrase refers to a sporadic but ongoing series initiated by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association that has recently screened such sensational works as Peter Watkins’ La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), Celina Murga’s Ana and the Others (2002), Michael Almereyda’s Happy Here and Now (2002), and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998). This panel discussion included a handful of distribution reps, a couple critics, and one filmmaker–the inimitable Monte Hellman (whose first film in seven years just screened at Cannes).

Koehler began the discussion by asking the distributors why so many great films he sees at festivals never get theatrical distribution. Paul Federbush of Warner Independent answered by saying he didn’t believe there is a problem with distribution, claiming we live in a golden age with expanding DVD, satellite, and internet options; further, he contended that Americans simply aren’t interested in foreign films. Koehler questioned whether we should blame the audience for this “disinterest” and rattled off at least a dozen filmmakers–including Akerman, Angelopoulos, Hou, Rivette, Resnais, and Sokurov–whose films sometimes play in commercial theaters in New York but are never released in Los Angeles.

“L.A. is a particularly tough market for foreign films,” admitted acquisitions consultant Marie-Therese Guirgis. High advertising costs make it a particularly unappealing market for distributors, and convincing the mainstream press to interview and engage offshore talent is often a major hurdle in an industry town. (She remembered bringing former Chanel spokesmodel and actress Carole Bouquet to the US for three days to promote Cédric Kahn’s Red Lights, and only getting two interviews the entire time.) Publicist Ziggy Kozwloski added, “I do feel like the mainstream press is less supportive than it used to be,” noting how Time regularly consigns its reviews of foreign films to its online edition rather than its print edition. Los Angeles is often cited as the “number two market” in the US, but Guirgis remarked, “as a distributor, I’ve certainly started questioning that.”

Greg Laemmle, the current president of Laemmle Theatres, the family-owned, Los Angeles art house chain formed in 1938, acknowledged that great films with strong reviews often still do not entice audiences even when such films are released in theaters. He cited Duck Season as a film Warner Independent really supported; regardless he claimed “nobody came” to its Laemmle run. “Maybe because of this,” he said, “distributors and producers have become seduced by crossover films. If you can do Sideways, why worry about L’Auberge Espagnole?” Yet given Los Angeles’ renowned transportation problems as a series of villages connected by freeways and sub-par public transit (the Los Angeles Times recently reported that the head of public transportation drives a Hummer), Laemmle’s typical practice of burying films at their Beverly Hills Music Hall or Santa Monica theaters for a week or two at most isn’t exactly market saturation, either. (Both of these theaters are at least two-hour commutes for me in Pasadena.)

“Paris is less xenophobic,” critic Scott Foundas noted, but he highlighted how Parisian cinemas rotate films on a larger time table (say, one title every Tuesday and Thursday), allowing them to screen more films on a weekly basis. He also cited how the LA Weekly‘s three-page coverage of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu didn’t seem to do the film much good given that it only grossed $2,300 in its opening week at the Music Hall. “That is the sort of film,” wryly mused Kozlowski, “where I think, God, this sounds good, but I hope other people go to see it,” referring to its two and-a-half hour running time and its premise of a dying man being wheeled from hospital to hospital in Budapest; as if these elements where intrinsic dramatic anathema. (The film remains my own favorite picture distributed this year.)

But Foundas and Kozlowski’s comments began to touch upon a growing conviction I’ve had that became more pronounced during the discussion (unfortunately, I wasn’t among the few called upon during the brief audience Q&A to test my theory): while I wholeheartedly subscribe to the notion that festivals need to program more venerated international works, critics need to write about them, publicists need to promote them, and distributors and theater owners need to exhibit them, enthusiasm for foreign and indie films is simply not being cultivated on a local cinephilia level. “I go to theaters all the time and all I see is a sea of grey hair,” Kozlowski said. “Where are all the 25-year olds who used to be excited about these films, and not simply the Run Lola Run‘s or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon‘s?”

In my experience, they’re all online, where film culture has increasingly shifted to an internet-based realm of information and reviews, commerce (multi-region DVDs), and exchange of ideas through various transnational blogs and listserves. I’ve spent my early-’30s living in Los Angeles for the past five years, and virtually all of my cinephile friends are online–if I want to discover and research a film, track down a copy on video, and hear other people respond to it, I do it online rather than in person, in theaters or community events, or even at local video stores.

Despite the benefits of an online film culture, I’m not convinced it’s an adequate replacement for local film clubs, discussion groups, and communities. As a cinephile born in the 1970s, I often dream of living in other eras–Paris in the ’50s where activists like AndrÈ Bazin and Henri Langlois established film culture, or America in the ’60s where so many of today’s Baby Boomer critics cut their teeth on 16mm prints and open debates in cafÈs, universities, and now-extinct art house and repertory theaters.

“As much as I personally like foreign films,” Guirgis said, “whenever I go to the theater, I watch mainstream films because that’s what everybody’s talking about.” Of course, she means everybody offline, everybody immersed in social networks that reference films in the context of their everyday lives, not just moments and spaces for online interaction and dialogue. If audiences no longer attend art films, it’s at least partly because cinephilia has become an entirely private affair mediated through the computer in the privacy of our homes.

At the beginning of the panel discussion, Koehler remarked that the “Films That Got Away” series was inspired by a critical desire to “get out from behind our computers and do more than just complain,” and in the past few years, this discussion was one of the few times I myself have ever encountered a vigorous local discussion of this issue–critics, distributors, filmmakers, and audiences together under one roof, all of them claiming to love world cinema but claiming somebody else was preventing it from being embraced. Is a critical mass really that unimaginable? Public forums like ‘Unshown Cinema’ would be a great place to start.

In 1945, Europe has to drag itself out of the rubble of World War II and rebuild its culture; Bazin saw film as part of that renewal. According to his biographer, Dudley Andrew: “Beginning in 1942 in a little classroom with three or four other film buffs, [Bazin] had helped bring about a consciousness of film that could be seen in factories, in literary journals, in cultural centers, and youth organizations throughout Europe. He had also helped to construct film groups of all sorts, from children’s and worker’s clubs to the prestigious Objectif 48.” Likewise, what Los Angeles seems most in need of is not better critics or distributors or audiences, but better disseminators, builders, and organizers of film culture, and more opportunities to channel, share, and debate the enthusiasm felt by many.

The Road to Guantanamo

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Given the kneejerk partisan response to An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s informative documentary about the realities of global warming, I have little expectation that Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ new visceral docudrama about human rights abuses in US prison camps will provide a wake-up call to the dwindling numbers of internment policy loyalists–but one can always dream.

The Road to Guantanamo (winner of the best directing award at the Berlin Film Festival) comes to US screens at a time when the mainstream media has rediscovered the prisons in Cuba used for people captured in the war on terror: imprisoned indefinitely without charge, legal representation, or due process of law, these “enemy combatants” are believed to be interrogated by torturous means (including beatings, stress positions, and sensory deprivation). Of the 750 people from 40 countries imprisoned in Guantanamo since 2002, only 10 have been charged with a crime, and the US Supreme Court (prompted in part by the historic Rasul v. Bush ruling involving two prisoners featured in this film) is supposed to determine the legitimacy of military tribunals by June 30.

In late-2001, three British youths from Tipton–Shafiq Rasul (23), Asif Igbal (19), and Rhuhel Ahmed (19)–travelled to Pakistan for a wedding, and took a side trip into Afghanistan that landed them in a skirmish between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. The film tells their story on location (when available), juxtaposing news broadcasts, interviews with the “Tipton Three,” and recreations of their testimonies: how they were captured by the Northern Alliance, interrogated, handed over to US forces, beaten and interrogated further, and ultimately flown to Guantanamo Bay where they spent more than two years at Camps X-Ray and Delta. In March 2004, they were transferred to a British Anti-Terrorist squad in London, where they were released without charge.

The aesthetics of the film–particularly the first half from Tipton to the three’s arrest in Afghanistan–owe much to Winterbottom’s exceptional 2002 neorealist road movie In This World (which Whitecross assisted on). The film’s DV camera chases its inexperienced actors (all the more authentic because of it) through several countries as they traverse crowded markets and dusty roads, mosques, houses, and a wide array of vehicles. Their journey is fast and furious, and it’s motivated by chance and whim as much as necessity in the face of an encroaching war; at times their itinerary is hard to follow. Ironically, it slows down and becomes more comprehensible once the story shifts to Cuba. For a film as devoted to experiential realism as this, one would expect the sensory deprivation, lack of information, and stress to produce a less coherent perspective, but such extremes would be nearly impossible to cinematically duplicate.

To its credit, the film isn’t sensationalistic nor is it political agitprop. While the violence is concrete and upsetting, it’s virtually tame by contemporary Hollywood standards. Bush and Rumsfeld appear in a few brief shots providing public spin statements, but like the British radio broadcasts heard throughout the film, it’s a practical reminder of the time and place of the film, as well as the kinds of official rhetoric offered in the last few years regarding the camps. Ultimately, the film seems less conceived as a political document than a memorial to its victims.

I saw the film earlier this week with Amnesty International USA spokespeople Jumana Musa (Advocacy Director for Human Rights and International Justice) and Eric Sears (Project Manager for the Denounce Torture Intitiative) in attendance. Both of them acknowledged the possibility that genuine criminals could exist within Guantanamo prisons, but emphasized that without adherence to international standards for human rights, the potential for serious, unlawful abuse would ultimately continue.

Mr. Arkadin

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Like many cinephiles, I’ve been slowly making my way through Criterion’s DVD set of Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin the last couple weeks. Welles was never allowed to finish editing his 1955 picture and it has appeared in various forms throughout the years, so Criterion includes the producer-finished Confidential Report version, the so-called “Corinth” version that corresponds most closely to Welles’ vision, and a newly reconstructed “comprehensive” version created by the Munich Film Archive that combines five different versions; plus various essays, interviews, radio shows, and a novel attributed to Welles but likely adapted from the screenplay by somebody else. For those determined to sift through the whole package, it’s a significant commitment…but a genuine pleasure; a film archive in a box.

The best feature of the set, however, is the commentary by Welles experts James Naremore and Jonathan Rosenbaum, who breezily exchange observations about the film and its relation to Welles’ career while tossing in comments on the French New Wave, Cold War paranoia, the grotesque in art, and a wide array of themes and topics. It’s the best DVD commentary I’ve heard in a while; highly informed yet conversational and multi-faceted.

Rather than simply regurgitate the idea of Arkadin being a “failed” film, Naremore and Rosenbaum champion it as an incomplete but striking and influential one. (Taking an auteurist stance in 1958, Cahiers du cinÈma provocatively voted it among the best films of all time.) Naremore calls Welles “the first American director of an international art film,” and celebrates the movie’s contrasting elements. Made after a series of Hollywood films were taken from his control and re-edited, Welles shot the film (as he did 1952′s Othello) in various countries, piecemeal style–a production mode mirroring the film’s story of an opportunistic adventurer traversing the globe in an attempt to uncover the secret history of an aristocratic titan.

The film’s hook has little to do with story, however; what sings is its startling visual ingenuity in shot after shot: cramped attics filled with the detritus of WWII are distorted into shifting, enveloping spaces by a wide-angle lens (“I work,” Welles said, “in 18.5 only because other filmmakers haven’t used it…If everyone worked with wide-angle lenses, I’d shoot all my films in 75mm, because I believe very strongly in the possibilities of the 75mm”); a foggy dockyard plunged in low-key lighting is accented with leering close-ups of a dying man; the shadows of tree limbs expand in moving headlights over immense stone walls; European castles, towering ruins, street markets, cafes, and cavernous airports provide more locations. While the plot sometimes seems too fragmented for its own good, Welles’ consistently inventive imagery nevertheless ensures that the action remains thoroughly engrossing.

A visual highwater mark for the film is a scene involving Arkadin (Welles) and a woman named Mily (Patricia Medina) on a boat in the ocean; the room they are in rocks back and forth as Mily stumbles around from one corner to another, half-drunk, and the near fish-eye lens envelops the viewer in ever-shifting space. Naremore and Rosenbaum correctly identify the fact that the set itself is rocking back-and-forth (and Rosenbaum humorously informs us that Welles “borrowed” the various decor in the room from the Hilton hotel Welles was staying in), but what seems to me especially unique about the scene is the fact that Arkadin barely moves at all; in fact, in close-ups he seems to be standing on the same platform as the camera (or perhaps Welles carefully leans in accordance with its horizontal plane), the room twisting and turning around him, visually emphasizing his stability in chaos and dominance over Mily.

A scene known for its thematic qualities is Arkadin’s re-telling of the parable of the swimming frog who is stung by the scorpion he carries even though it spells both their doom: “It’s my character,” says the hapless scorpion. Arkadin is a typically Wellesian power mogul doomed by his own success. In 1958, Welles told AndrÈ Bazin and a group of Cahiers critics:

“All of Shakespeare’s great characters are swine; they are forced to be…All the characters I’ve played and that we’ve been talking about are Faustian, and I’m against the Faustian outlook, because I believe it is impossible for a man to be great unless he acknowledges something greater than himself…I believe there are two great human types in the world and one of them is the Faust type. I belong to the others, but in playing Faust, I want to be just and loyal to him, give him the best of myself, and put forward the best arguments that I can in his favor, because after all we live in a world which was built by Faust. Our world is Faustian.”

Yet near the end of the commentary, Rosenbaum identifies what he feels is one of the film’s flaws: Arkadin’s character remains insubstantial and seems more alive in the memory of others. But in a sense, isn’t this Welles’ point? Arkadin is a monumental, Faustian type, yet his power has transformed him into a hollow vestige of his former self, a monolithic shadow of his humble beginnings. “So what’s funny?” Arkadin is asked as he chuckles bitterly near the end of the film. “Old age,” he whispers. And just as viewers hoping to discover a definitive Mr. Arkadin will never do so, Mr. Arkadin remains a fragmented character, a man not in search of his past but in flight from it. Arkadin literally vanishes from the screen, an ephemeral token of the life he once lived.

Arthur Lipsett, 21-87

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Several weeks ago, I managed to see Arthur Lipsett’s astonishing collage film, 21-87 (1964), in Toronto at the NFB Mediatheque, but I postponed writing more in-depth about it until I could obtain a copy on video. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that it isn’t available for individual purchase, even though the NFB offers DVDs of A Trip Down Memory Lane (1965) and Very Nice, Very Nice (1961), the film that earned Lipsett an Academy Award nomination and an invitation by Stanley Kubrick to create the title sequence for Dr. Strangelove. (He declined.)

21-87 is a particularly hard film to write about in specific without a copy of it in front of you, or a shot list at least–its brief multitude of images (pieces of documentary footage found at the NFB) reverberate against an equally complex montage of sound clips, sometimes in synch, sometimes in counterpoint, always in evocative juxtaposition. Among the images are street photography, interviews, war footage, carnival scenes, and machines; among the sounds are mechanical hums, singing, heavy breathing, and random dialogue. The net result is a fast-paced phenomenon of cinema that reverberates with complexity and nuance, generating a profound sense of human life intertwined with technology, facing the twin poles of mechanization and transcendence.

Recently, two brothers named Johannes and Lars Auvinen of Global A have been presenting Lipsett’s works at various film venues in Los Angeles (the Dudley Cinema, the Hammer Museum, the Echo Park Film Center, etc.); they’ve also minted a $10 LP of four remastered soundtracks, which Lipsett created previous to assembling his footage and thus make for impressionable listening on their own. Moreover, Global A have posted free MP3 versions on their website–you can listen to the complete soundtrack of 21-87 here, as well as an informative essay by Johannes that connects Lipsett with Erich Fromm, Marshall McLuhan, and the Situationists. (I’m hoping their Video section might eventually offer up some gems as well.)

Two other things worth noting: filmmakers Dennis Mohr, Martin Lavut, and Amelia Does are in the final stages of a Lipsett documentary they’ve been producing for the last three years; consulting producer Lois Siegel offers a fine mini-biography, here.

Let’s hope this resurgence of interest in Lipsett entices the NFB to make his work more readily available.

Cavite

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Just when we thought reality had lost its capacity to shock us in dramatic films, the threadbare DV production Cavite (2005) has popped out of the indie festival circuit. If you get the chance to see it at all, you’ll probably learn it was made by two film school graduates with a few dubious films under their belt and a website that reads like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Production. But it’s a film that is emotionally streamlined, elliptical in its construction, and morally complex in its suspense, and it offers a visceral look at contemporary life in the Philippines.

Adam, a twentysomething Filipino American, works as a security guard in San Diego. Although he’s trying to save a crumbling relationship with his girlfriend, he must travel to the Philippines to attend his father’s funeral. Immediately upon arrival, however, he’s thrust into highly tense situation–answering a cell phone in his luggage and leafing through gruesome photographs, he is informed that his mother and sister have been kidnapped and will be killed if he doesn’t stay on the phone and follow precise orders. The voice (later revealed as a representative of the militant Islamic group Abu Sayyaf) directs Adam through poverty stricken shantytowns where squalor breeds desperation and life is cheap, and eventually reveals a terrible agenda.

The film was created almost entirely by its two writer-director-editors: Ian Gamazon plays Adam and Neill Dela Llana operates the handheld camera. They present Adam bussing, taxiing, and walking the streets between the Manila airport and the slums of Cavite City, listening to his cell phone in a state of panic, lost in a country he should know but doesn’t, emotionally oscillating between obedience and resistance.

The film maintains an impressive narrative momentum throughout, but its documentary details make the biggest impression: the sunny streets are thick with dust, people, and cars; sharp turns reveal labyrinthine neighborhoods with rangy dogs and furtive inhabitants, a claustrophobic cock fighting arena, and open air markets; street urchins cluster in groups and dart in and out of hidden alleyways–and the action is enveloped in a cacophony of car horns, voices, shouts, barks, and revving motors. As Adam venture deeper into trash-strewn squatter settlements, the viewer shares his bewildered perceptions of an entire population forging lives in the margins of society.

Dramatically, the film rests on the crisis of its central conflict, but its ancillary elements register surprising notes of complexity. Adam’s humdrum job as a security guard is a far cry from the political realities of his heritage, and combined with his failing romance, he seems unable to achieve an ideal life in America. Yet he is a stranger in the Philippines as well, stumbling around in a situation completely over his head. One of the film’s most potent images is that of a scrawny child sharing a McDonald’s hamburger with his grandmother, an image with troubling implications regarding a globalized economy and the vagaries of fate. The Abu Sayyaf operative is cruel and malicious, yet as he ticks off the atrocities committed against his people in the southern Mindanao region of the Philippines, it’s difficult to regard him as a simple movie villain. Adam must ultimately decide to choose between saving his family or causing harm to others, and his choice is not an easy one. Impressively, the film resists the temptation to dramatically condone his final decision, ending on a note of muted ambiguity.

Cavite is a film with a solid conception and execution that benefits enormously from its method of production. According to the film’s website, Gamazon was cast as a last-minute replacement for a role intended for an actress, yet the antagonist’s constant jeers at Adam’s masculinity intensify the film’s themes of powerlessness in a way that would have been much less potent with a female lead. And the filmmakers’ decision to shoot in the Philippines rather than Los Angeles or San Diego (ostensibly for visual reasons) elevates the film’s documentary impact to extraordinary heights. Whether owing to lucky breaks or solid artistic intuition, the film is an effective, compelling, and uncommonly revealing thriller.

Buffalo Boy and Oxhide

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I’ve recently seen two significant films from Asia, Ming Nguyen-Vo’s Buffalo Boy (Vietnam, 2004) and Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide (China, 2005). While their details differ, similarities abound: both films are feature debuts by their respective filmmakers; both explore the impact of family trades (involving cattle) on the individuals that comprise them; and both are set in specific locales recorded in striking, elliptical ways. And both are available on DVD–Buffalo Boy was released in North America a few weeks ago; Oxhide should be out (with English subtitles?) from MK2′s CinÈma DÈcouverte in France, but it looks as if it might’ve been delayed.

Vietnamese American and UCLA film grad (and physics scholar) Nguyen-Vo crafts a visually sublime account of peasant life in French Indochina shortly before World War II. Shot by cinematographer Yves Cape (Dumont’s L’HumanitÈ), the film is set in and out of the vast flooded plains of Southern Vietnam during the rainy season. A teenager name Kim and his elderly parents scrape by financially from tilling a modest patch of land with their two buffalo, but when the waters submerge everything in sight, Kim has to transport the beasts to higher ground to feed them. He joins a tough band of herdsmen who sporadically clash with rival gangs, and in the process he’s introduced to the male rituals and family secrets that have existed for generations.

That’s not to say that Buffalo Boy is merely the latest example of what used to be called the “peasant epic”; it’s a genuinely poetic and complex film made for a pittance (internationally co-produced for less than $1 million) in remote locales, using extant housing and mostly non-professional actors. Its images are virtually primal: an inhospitable water world filled with the detritus of life, swimming herds of cattle (seen from above and below the water), frail huts creaking in storms, and enigmatic characters struggling to survive. In a lesser film, the copious floods would signal pat themes of life and renewal, but Nguyen-Vo (inspired by Vietnamese writer Nam Son’s short stories) emphasizes the water’s destructive power as well, and the profound inconvenience and unpredictability it imposes upon rural life. Submerged grasslands rot and decay, the buffalo–and subsequently their owners–might genuinely starve, and there isn’t even dry land to bury the dead.

During the herding scenes, the male rites of professionalism, and group loyalty and competition surprising recall Westerns like Red River despite the film’s diametrically opposed setting. Kim’s search for identity and integrity would fit easily within the Hawksian universe, though the threat to masculinity here is the French authorities rather than a strong and intelligent female (although they dot Nguyen-Vo’s landscape as well, navigating the male currents with resourceful independence).

Nguyen-Vo constructs his plot piecemeal-style, highlighting small moments and transitions rather than big events, allowing the viewer to speculate and explore connections. A battle between two gangs is set up, but the film cuts to a private conversation between the leaders, and a subsequent cut reveals the gangs’ separation. Characters appear and disappear without fanfare, and references to time always come as a surprise as the narrative shifts and redirects itself like the precarious waters of its setting and TÙn-Th‚t TiÍt‘s halting, lyrical score.

What permeates the film, however, rises to the surface over time–an affirmation of family through interconnected lives. An aged, childless couple assists a stranded orphan, a young man buries a stranger, and the itinerant herdsmen both spawn and adopt children despite their erratic lifestyles. With stoic sensitivity to the cycles of life and death, dry season and wet season, responsibilities and freedoms, characters in Buffalo Boy shoulder one other’s burdens as a form of collective survival.


The cast and crew of Oxhide.

23-year-old Liu Jiayin’s film–shot in widescreen DV within the confines of her small Beijing apartment and starring herself and her parents–is comprised of twenty three static, one-scene shots, often obtusely composed and dimly lit. It is a narrative film, presenting a family in various stages of discussing their failing leather bag business, but the family dynamics are so well observed that their interactions reveal much deeper concerns of professionalism, self-respect, modernization, and existential fears in a changing world.

Liu is still a student at the Beijing Film Academy, and appearing at the REDCAT recently she told us she shot for 40 nights with her parents and herself as the sole cast and crew. But the film is not a documentary; it’s meant to evoke the feelings of living in a cramped apartment facing the anxieties of the age. (“For my parents, the whole shooting was akin to uncovering a scar,” Liu has written. “Through the lens I saw our life–even though I couldnít describe it.”)

The father is a prideful man who worries about the implications of reducing his prices almost as much as he worries about his daughter’s stunted height; he seemingly overcompensates by demanding correct methods of stirring traditional sauces or agonizing over the details of a sales flyer. The mother concentrates on her cooking and cleaning, but offers sharp advice about the business in no uncertain terms. The daughter demands her own individuation, a feat that poses genuine difficulties in so small a space and focused a family.

In nearly every scene, the family quarrels, yet a gradual sense of loyalty and kinship emerges, particularly in a scene when the mother and daughter model the father’s latest style bags. The tension momentarily lifts as the father delights in his creations and his wife and daughter play act imagined customer types. It’s the scene in which they seem the most relaxed–although touches of gentle humor and irony appear frequently in the film–forgetting their tasks and resources and simply enjoying one another’s observations.

Oxhide is a unique and memorable film. In its rigorous formalism, it offers an emotionally resonant portrait of a modern Chinese family. And just as the viewer must imagine and construct a larger locale through the offscreen sounds and claustrophobic spaces linked in the film, Oxhide stands as a microcosmic film amid a highly active film industry; a small, independent student production that nevertheless provides a remarkable example of China’s cinematic potential.