D_Xueyan Reviews

Back to 1942 (2012)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of "Back to 1942"

[6/10 · 7 June 2013]

the bad: there is a lack of a decent plot, the movie is more an assembly of different episodes that happened during the famine, told through the eyes of a former landlord and his family. Unfortunately most (if not all) of these episodes are cliché' and predictable (there is a pregnant woman, guess when she will deliver; there is a girl with a cat, guess what will happen to the cat; there are corrupt officials out to buy women for their own pleasure, guess who they will buy;). The episodes told are so many that there is no time to sympathise for a character, or at least that was my feeling. Most scene are a brutal graphic depiction of what hunger is, but I found it less involving than, for example, Fires on the Plain.

the good: the subject treated is historically important, especially the fact that the government was aware/unaware able/unable to do something to prevent this catastrophe. The action scenes (the bombing of civilians) are shot with mastery and makes you feel uncomfortable all the way through. What I found more interesting though (but haven't seen anybody pointing it out so far) is that Feng Xiaogang is indirectly (and very subtly, of course) criticising todays government. There are many parallels with what is happening now in China, the top leaders who lost touch with the people, corrupt officials who take money and women, foreigners who have to point out faults of officials, Chinese against Chinese with their insatiable hunger for wealth. Even the Japanese, though enemies, are depicted as more human than the Nationalist officials.

The Ugly: Tim Robbin's role, or the whole religious part for that matter. It doesn't add anything to the, already thin, plot. Also why Christians and not Buddhists or Daoists?

Overall it's an interesting movie to be watched, not only for the famine, but also as a new step for Chinese cinema becoming more international.

6/10

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

first example of Pure Cinema: there is no more cinema.

[10/10 · 27 October 2007]

Viewed in retrospect, much of modern cinema can seem to flow from twin fountainheads: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). Though separated by World War II, the two movies symbolize the cardinal impulses that came to captivate serious audiences, critics, and filmmakers after the war. Where Citizen Kane heralded the age of the auteur and a cinema of passionate individual vision, Bicycle Thieves renounced "egoism" for collective concern, envisioning a cinema of impassioned social conscience. The film exemplifies De Sica's stated desire to "reintroduce the dramatic into quotidian situations, the marvelous in a little news item... considered by most people throwaway material."

The quotidian anecdote dramatized here concerns Antonio Ricci, a young husband who has been suffering a prolonged spell of unemployment when he is offered a job as a bill poster. The catch is that he must have a bicycle, and his is in hock. Rescued by his wife's willingness to pawn their bedsheets, Antonio set's out proudly and confidently on his new job, only to have his bicycle stolen on the first day. Desperate to stay employed, he mounts a wide-ranging search across Rome, accompanied most of the way by his young son, Bruno. (Godfrey Cheshire)

[...] it is a spectacle, and what a spectacle! Bicycle Thieves, however, does not depend on the mathematical elements of drama; the action does not exist beforehand as it were an "essence". It follows from the preexistence f the narrative, it is the "integral" of reality. De Sica's supreme achievement is to have succeeded in discovering the cinematographic dialectic capable of transcending the contradiction between the action a "spectacle" and of an event. For this reason Bicycle Thieves is one of the first examples of "pure cinema": no more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema. (Andre' Bazin)