“[Wang Bing] crystallises all the tensions within a historical configuration.”
– Georges Didi Huberman
“The crystal thus indicates the point at which the immanence of virtual and actual reaches a kind of purity, the point at which the process of actualisation (where virtual causes actual) and the process of looping back (where actual affects virtual) become indiscernible.” (59)
“[T]he Aionic present is not a moment in or of time, it is the introduction of time as such; time does not…
It's been interesting to reflect on this fourth viewing of The Assassin after following it with a read of Pei Xing's (very) short story (The Assassin: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s World of Tang China, 197-201). What stands out is the manner in which director Hou Hsiao-hsien adapts and reconfingure's the Tang-era tale from one in which the protagonist, Nie Yinniang, appears at ease with her lethal prowess and wholly imbricated in the social breakdown of the times – observable in the obeisance…
If The Boys from Fengkuei is to be seen, as Wu Nien-jen sees it, as the inception of Hou's approach, this is certainly to be seen as its confirmation as a creative mode individually for the director and the creative of the New Wave. Edward Yang appears as the father and took duties on the score, while Chu Tien-wen – who allowed Hou to purchase from her the rights to the story that became Cute Girl and has since then…
Really interesting how the digital filmmaking here sits in contrast to its use of classical techniques (i.e. blocking, backlights, very set bound). It's a tension wherein the digital textures re-inforce and -double the whole theme of the constructed nature of images and identity. Everybody's caught up in and pushing against another's story (e.g. the nation's, the military's, a spy's, a wife's). Of course, the real centre of this is Satoko and Yusaka's mutual efforts to insert or remove her from…
Tarnished visions, lost films and abandoned or otherwise destroyed cuts are not unusual occurrences in the history of cinema. Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva México! and Ivan the Terrible, Part III, or almost any project of Orson Welles’ following The Magnificent Ambersons speak to the consequences that might await filmmakers whose ambitions stray to close to the sun or come up against the wariness of studios and producers who see a bottom line threatened by artistic largesse.…
