Rithy Panh’s Top 10
Alone
Gudu Wang Bing Ten years after Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, which documented China’s transition to a modern industrial society and the growing pains this involves, filmmaker Wang Bing finds three sisters aged four, six and ten living with no parents 10,000 feet above sea level, in a small village in Yunnan province. Their mother has disappeared, while their father works in a nearby city and comes home every now and again to bring them new clothes. Family members and other villagers help keep the three children alive – efforts which, along with the communal vegetable garden, evoke the old days of socialism. This oscillation between modernization on the one hand and older values on the other is reflected by switching from long, patient observation by the camera to sudden accelerations and questions from the filmmaker, who operates the camera himself while recording the silent desperation and deprivations of this fragmented family. The mist that surrounds the village almost daily gives the impression that it has withdrawn from the rest of the world – although this proves an illusion. The surrounding areas are modernizing, the mayor explains, so the cost of living will have to increase here, too. All this escapes the children completely. They are too busy collecting food and delousing one another to notice.
Hong Kong, France, 2012 DCP, color, 89 min Director: Wang Bing Photography: Wenhai Huang, Wang Bing, Peifeng Li Screenplay: Wang Bing Editing: Louis Prince Sound: Wang Bing, Wenhai Huang Production: Sylvie Faguer for Album Productions Co-Production: Chinese Shadows Screening Copy: Chinese Shadows Involved TV Channel: ARTE France
Wang Bing:
West of the Tracks (2003) Fengming, a Chinese Memoir (2007) Crude Oil (2008) Coal Money (2008) The Ditch (fiction, 2010)
Dont Look Back D.A. Pennebaker
A few years after the birth of Direct Cinema, D. A. Pennebaker created the genre’s first undeniable masterpiece with this documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1965 British tour. At the invitation of Dylan’s manager, Pennebaker traveled alongside the singer-songwriter. Using his fly-on-the-wall style, he set the bar for all subsequent documentaries on pop music. Dont Look Back mainly concentrates on the events around the shows. Although the whimsical Dylan only seems to relax onstage, the film features almost no concert footage. With artists like Joan Baez, Alan Price and Donovan in his wake, the troubadour travels across the coal-dusted landscape by car and train and jams in dingy hotel rooms. Surrounded by shady impresarios and managers, hysterical fans and fanatical journalists, the singer regularly loses his cool. The secret of the film lies not only in Pennebaker’s ingenuity, but particularly in the fact that this was the first time the still somewhat timid Dylan was filmed so extensively.
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USA, 1967 35mm, black-and-white, 96 min Director: D.A. Pennebaker Photography: D.A. Pennebaker Editing: D.A. Pennebaker Sound: Jones Alk Production: Albert Grossman, John Court for Leacock-Pennebaker, Inc. World Sales: Jane Balfour Services Screening Copy: EYE Film Instituut Nederland
D.A. Pennebaker:
Monterey Pop (1968), Company: Original Cast Album (1970), One P.M. (1972), Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973), Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2006), Startup.com (2001)
D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus:
Town Bloody Hall (1979), DeLorean (1981), Rockaby (1981), Dance Black America (1983), Jerry Lee Lewis (1990), The War Room (1993), Keine Zeit (1996), Bessie (1998), Moon over Broadway (1998), Only the Strong Survive (2002), Return of the War Room (2008), Kings of Pastry (2009) a.o.
www.phfilms.com