Chinese director Jiang Wen
wins the Cannes 2000 Film Festival’s Grand Prix.
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Cinema
is, of course, the most international art.
Sergei
Eisenstein, Soviet film director (1898-1948)
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The Three Continents
Festival
The Three Continents Festival
Created in 1979 in Nantes (France) by brothers Philippe and Alain Jalladeau, who
were both inspired by a love for cinema and travel, the Three Continents Festival
became the very first in the world devoted to Asian, African and Latin American cinema,
and has so far showcased over 1,000 films. By including premieres of feature films,
retrospectives of noted directors, tributes to an actor or actress and programmes
of films from just one country, the festival has provided a host of different ways
to gauge the movements of world cinema. This year’s event will take place from November
21-28.
The selection panel chooses films that reflect the social, historical and cultural
conditions of the three continents. From Uzbekistan to Iran, Palestine to Egypt,
Mali to Niger, India to China, passing on the way through Korea, Brazil and Bolivia,
the festival never fails to present radically different cinematic points of view.
By discovering the first films of a number of directors, the festival has also helped
win recognition for some of cinema’s most distinctive new auteurs: Mali’s Souleymane
Cissé, China’s Chen Kiage, Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien
and Tsaï Ming-liang and Kazakhstan’s Darezhan Omirbayev. The festival has also
contributed to the renown of Indian directors like Satyajit Ray, Ritwick Ghatak and
Guru Dutt, Japanese director Shohei Imamura, and Brazilian Pereira dos Santos.
For more information:
www.3continents.com www.cinema.
diplomatie.fr
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Astonishing and moving
films from Asia and Iran are giving cinema a fresh impetus and countering American
attempts to dominate the world’s film industry
 Cinema
is alive and well, and filmmakers are still surprising and enthusing us. More often
than not, the most promising come from Asia, the continent at the head of a new cinematic
movement. The quality of films being made in this vast region is improving all the
time, and new talents are cropping up to compete with American and European directors.
The 2000 Cannes Film Festival underscored this extraordinary vitality. Iran’s Samira
Makhmalbaf and her wandering teachers in Blackboards pushed out some highly sophisticated
competitors, such as the American Coen brothers’ ironic O Brother Where Art Thou?
Danish director Lars von Trier may have won the Golden Palm for his very nordic Dancer
in the Dark, but China’s Jiang Wen took the Grand Prix, Tony Leung from Hong Kong
the Best Male Performance prize and Taiwan’s Edward Yang the prize for Best Director.
The Locarno Film Festival confirmed the trend in August by awarding its Golden Leopard
prize to Chinese director Wang Shuo’s Baba and the Silver Leopard to Hong Kong’s
Fruit Chan for Little Cheung. Asian films also figured prominently at the Venice
Film Festival in September, with The Circle by Iranian director Jafar Panahi reaping
the Golden Lion.
Such surges of new talent are nothing new in cinema. In the early 1960s, the “new
wave” in the French film industry provided the paradigmatic example of how this could
be done. Since then, there have seen many such creative rebellions–in Poland (Roman
Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski), Czechoslovakia (Milos Forman, Ivan Passer), Japan (Nagisa
Oshima, Shohei Imamura) and Brazil (Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra).
Wherever they arise, these new waves–since the term has become part of our basic
vocabulary–share common traits. They reflect a protest against traditional concepts
of filmmaking, led by artists calling for greater freedom of expression as a way
of escaping from the straightjacket imposed by the film industry of that time. A
few strong personalities carry others with them, a movement takes shape and then
blossoms.
But today one factor has changed in the equation: the American movie business has
since strengthened its grip and taken over nearly all the cinemas around the world.
Its commercial strength remains unrivalled, even though the quest for domination
has badly eroded the creativity of American film. It would be hard to find the modern
equivalent of a John Cassavetes, whose emblematic Shadows (1960) inspired a whole
generation of filmmakers.
In the face of this U.S. juggernaut, how have today’s new waves managed to take hold
the world over? First of all, they have been recognized by international critics,
who have always done the spadework when it comes to spotting new talents. One need
only remember the pivotal role played by Henri Langlois, head of France’s National
Film Library, critics like André Bazin, directors such as Jean-Luc Godard
and François Truffaut and a whole team of “Young Turks” at the French Cahiers
du Cinéma magazine in bringing to light a pack of directors from the U.S.,
Japan, India, the ex-Soviet Union, Scandinavia and elsewhere.
Freshness
and simplicity: the keys to Iranian success
Film festivals,
such as Cannes, Venice, Berlin, London and Nantes, sought out new high-quality work
to enhance their programmes, helping important filmmakers get established. Obviously,
neither critics nor festivals can create new cinematic movements. But they can give
them the chance to break through and enable directors to continue making films, while
sometimes even attracting support from authorities in their home countries.
Taiwan’s case is instructive. The Three Continents Festival in Nantes (France) gave
prizes in 1984 and 1985 to two films by Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, who went
on to win international acclaim. The Taiwanese authorities then decided to back the
most promising directors and help spur the growth of a new film industry. Unfortunately,
this policy was soon abandoned. Hou, Yang and Tsai Ming-liang have enough of a reputation
to raise backing abroad, but for younger filmmakers, things are much tougher (see
page 33).
Although American hegemony has had devastating effects in some Asian countries (in
Indonesia, for example, American companies control 99 per cent of distribution and
have stifled local film-making), the continent’s overall scene is one of buzzing
creativity.
Iran provides the finest example of dynamic cinema. Modern Iranian films are enrapturing,
with an element of surprise and a human sensitivity that is hard to find in American
movies. A sense of freshness and simplicity explain the appeal of these films. The
country was producing such films long before the ayatollahs took power in 1979 (see
page 26). In
the 1970s, Abbas Kiarostami had already made such remarkable films as Traveller (1974)
and The Report (1977). But it was not until the 1988 Three Continents Festival that
a Kiarostami film, in this case Where is the Friend’s Home (1987), was shown outside
Iran. The new government had done nothing to help the industry sell its films abroad,
and few festivals were able to show the works of Iranian directors. It took many
years for people to realize how creative their films were, and how filmmakers had
managed to overcome censorship with a strong, personal and original style. Elsewhere
in Asia, Japan stands out as a leader in the creative arts. Beginning with a Hollywood-style
big studio system, its golden age, in my opinion, has never won the recognition it
truly deserved. In the 1950s, Japan was producing about 650 films a year–more than
the United States–and could boast great directors like Kenji Misogushi, Yasujiro
Ozu, Mikio Naruse, Akira Kurosawa, whose talents were sometimes slow to be recognized.
As the big studios declined and these directors disappeared, another generation arose,
including names such as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura, who expressed themselves
with greater freedom by tackling subjects that were more social and violent. Today
the country is turning out a new wave of provocative directors like Kiyoshi Kurosawa,
Shinji Aoyama, and Shinya Tsukamoto (see
page 28).
These new film movements–and there are many more, such as in South Korea (page
31) and Argentina
(page
35)–guarantee
cinema’s survival. Critics and festivals have not invented them. They are simply
helping such work reach audiences eager to support quality films. So long as this
continues, there is reason to remain optimistic.
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