Hawaii International Film Festival

To arrive at Waikiki is to arrive at cinema. Planted with palm trees and exotic flowers that sway lush and plastic against the facades of the stucco hotels, the bustling walkways and parking ramps feel as unreal as the cinematic simulacrum-cities of Southern California. And the streets feed in and out of the hotel lobbies and shopping centers as smoothly as if they were designed for the long tracking shots of film cities like the Soho of Absolute Beginners or (given the preponderance of Japanese among the tourists) the Edo of Shakaru. Then at night, as electric storms crack the sky like carbon arcs over the thong of beach, the hundred and one thousand hotel rooms become stacks of peep shows, each with a honeymoon drama glimpsed as fragments of shadow-play behind the curtains.

This interpenetration of cinema and tourism makes Hawaii the perfect location for an international film festival, especially one as good as this. Inevitably, the 110 films, brought in from 26 countries with an emphasis on the Pacific basin, provided a variety of spectacles; but no less remarkable were the similarities among them. All the features-at least the ones I was able to see - developed around three core underlying concerns, which I take as providing a morphology of the postmodern art film.

First, there is an emphasis on local places, on distinct cultures and geographies, richly rendered in the mode of tourist photography, with poverty and backwardness de-emphasized or prettified. Second, there's a return to a period in the past when signs of modernization indicate the imminent dissolution of the idealized community, and so provide the basis for a generalized nostalgia. And third, the interpolation of other mediums create the spaces of reflexiveness that references to Hollywood supplied to the post-war European art cinemas. The present moment finds film as a clearing house, the power of its images capable of incorporating and marshaling both earlier mediums - the novel, still photography, and, most important for all Asian cinemas, previous theatrical forms - and those that have succeeded to some of its functions: television especially, but also cellular phones, faxes, and so on. As the environment becomes more totally mediated, the kind of comprehensive representation to which film has historically aspired increasingly becomes the representation of our interaction with media apparatuses. But in this representation, cinema tends to conceal itself and the economic arrangements subtending its production.

Makoto Shina's Naran is a high-end version of this general model. Lavishly photographed in remotest Mongolia, its boy-meets-horse coming of age story is set in achingly beautiful meadows and mountains, punctuated with extended vignettes of local animal life. But the nomad community is shadowed by illustrated books from Hong Kong, a Toshiba radio, and eventually a wind generator that powers a single electric light bulb, illuminating the yurt's interior in new tones. And in the nearest township a television brings in MTV to supplement the primitive comedies still playing at the local movie theater. Against these cultural incursions, it is a given that the local griot's songs of earlier horsemen heroes, which are recreated as cinema and intercut with the main film to picture the boy's motivation, will not survive much longer than the short summer of his youth.

In Mani Ratnam's Bombay, controversial in India but already an international hit, the modernization is ideological. A Hindu boy's love for a Muslim girl leads them both to leave their village and elope to the city to marry. Their story unwinds between the comedy of their respective parents' anger and the tragedy of the religious riots of the early 1900s; but through it all are dazzling extended dance and music sequences that successfully parlay traditional styles through the languages of music videos. Another more contemporary version of the model is Hu Xueyang's Drowning, a welcome respite from the relentless anti-communism that has made recent PRC cinema so popular with western audiences; instead of attacking the cultural revolution, this attacks the capitalization of human relations in the new economic zones, where money buys everything and everyone is someone's whore. Again, with rich irony, music videos supply the intertext, but in this case they are a means of smuggling back in premodern values: clips for pop songs shot in the countryside that the protagonists have left for success in the city propose idyllic young love independent of the cash nexus, while in real life all relationships are bought and sold.

Given the ubiquity of the anxiety in the international unconscious that produces the most basic paradigm, it's all but inevitable that the best films are those that manipulate it with the most sophistication, and the less interesting those that simply cash in on its immediate pleasures. Kazuyoshi Okuyama's The Mystery of Rampo and Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Good Men, Good Women instance the first, with Park Chong-won's Eternal Empire and Zhang Yimou's Shanghai Triad the latter. Eternal Empire looks to be part of a general project of the new Korean cinema to use the international recognition gained by Im Kwon-taek's period films as the basis for a spectacularization of history parallel to the Japanese success with samurai legends. Set in the 19th century when Korea's long isolation was ending, it is a palace intrigue, the tale of a struggle between a progressive king and his reactionary bureaucrats over the interpretation of a secret document and the Book of Odes. But the thematic implications demand extended allegorical transpositions that are swamped by the brilliance of its costumes, the architectural reconstructions, and similar elements in its luxurious mise en scene.

Like Rampo, the two Chinese films are set in the '30s and their different uses for this, the period when the political forces of East Asia were crucially reconfigured, neatly bracket the stakes in the contemporary art film. Zhang Yimou, who, along with Chen Kaige, was essentially discovered for the international market at previous Hawaii festivals, is arguably the most successful postmodern auteur outside Hollywood, a fact that the festival recognized in giving him its highest honor, its Vision in Film Award, and mounting a retrospective of his films. When his work is seen as a whole, the conditions of his success are obvious enough: take a historical melodrama that will let foreigners visit the exotic Orient but make it be both sufficiently portentous to allow western critics to read it as an anti-communist allegory of Chinese politics, and elliptical enough not to bother the Chinese censors; and put at its center Gong Li, the thinking man's sex symbol and a Monica Vitti for the '90s. Add scintillating photography and you've got Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern.

Not all his films follow this formula, and his work his most interesting when he abandons the formula and asks more of Gong Li than to be there to be seen. But mostly his oeuvre has offered easy pleasures, and (except for the shadow puppets in To Live) he has not tried to add depth by incorporating intertexts as has Chen Kaige. Shanghai Triad, his most obvious (and obviously commercial) attempt at a Hollywood genre film, is a gangster flick set in the 1930s seen through the eyes of a young boy. We do get to look at Gong Li decked out in the costumes of the boss gangster's moll. But this time out, she shakes her booty self-reflexively: as a nightclub chorine in a frilly tutu, she sings songs about being looked at!

Good Man, Good Women takes a similar hand, but plays it a different way. A weave of two distinct stories, its gangsters are in the present and its '30s are overtly political. One plotline concerns a group of Taiwanese students who go to the mainland to help in the struggle against the Japanese invaders; back in Taiwan after the war, they create a leftist cell that falls foul of the Koumindang authorities when they attempt to circulate a reading of the mainlander's occupation in specifically class terms. The other concerns a young woman who had previously been a bargirl with a gangster lover but is now an actress playing a leading role in a movie that is being made about the first story. Sometimes the connections between her various roles are obscure and my single viewing left me suspecting that the film is unnecessarily complex; indeed, most of the general conversation about it I overheard bemoaned its difficulty. But in its attempt to understand the alienation of contemporary Taiwan historically, it is the most ambitious, sophisticated, and ultimately powerful film I've seen, well, since City of Sadness. It won the "Golden Maile" as the festival's best feature - and deservedly so.

Rotterdam International Film Festival & Berlin International Film Festival by Noah Cowan
Sundance Film Festival by The Editors
International Film Festival of Mannheim-Heidelberg by Diane Sippl
Hawaii International Film Festival by David James