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THE 3RD CHINA ONSCREEN BIENNIAL Xu Haofeng the Final

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THE 3RD CHINA ONSCREEN BIENNIAL Xu Haofeng the Final FILM AT REDCAT IS PROUD TO BE A PART OF THE 3RD CHINA ONSCREEN BIENNIAL SPOTLIGHTING CHINA’S PLURALISM “The most diversified collection of Chinese films” chinaonscreen.org EXCEPTIONAL SCREENING AT REDCAT Mon Nov 7 |8:30 pm| Jack H. Skirball Series $11 [members $8] Xu Haofeng The Final Master (Shifu, 2015, 109 min) Winner, Best Action Choreography, Golden Horse Film Festival Preceded by Chantal Akerman Nightfall On Shanghai (Tombée de nuit sur Shanghai, 2007, 15 min) For his third film, The Final Master (Shifu, 2015, 109 min.), Xu Haofeng, famous as a novelist and co-writer of Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster, (re)locates its titular martial arts master (sifu) from Southern China to 1932 colonial Tianjin. Xu’s sarcastic, elegantly minimalist cinema has been described as what martial arts movies would look like if directed by Straub-Huillet—or David Mamet. With a gift for witty, sassy dialogue, he surrounds his protagonist with an appealing retinue of friends and foes, from a bitchy femme to a female sifu in Western suits. Xu’s pungent exploration of cultural hybridity echoes the rare Chantal Akerman short that precedes it, Tombée de nuit sur Shanghai (2007, 15 min.), which captures the changing light as dusk creeps over the metropolis, its immemorial waters rippling gently under neons and gaudy ads to a cover of “Nights in White Satin.” “In Xu Haofeng’s thoroughly winning 1930s-set drama, The Final Master, the talking is as good as the fighting. Xu may not be a household name, but the film proves that he's the next big thing in martial-arts cinema.” —The Village Voice “The Final Master is a smart and stylish martial-arts film.” – The Washington Post “Offbeat but involving, sardonic yet infused with an authentic love of Chinese martial arts, Xu Haofeng’s The Final Master is one of the most stimulating kung fu films in recent times.” – Asian Film Strike “Boats and passers-by occasionally traverse the frame, but they are mere blips on a screen pulsating – appallingly, seductively – with the incessant wink and blink of Shanghai’s skyline and the pixelated images on its colossal LED ‘billboards’. Akerman’s full-frontal projection shows quite bluntly how the image is no longer built into the architectural fabric of the city, but rather swarms all over its surface like an army of luminous insects gathering visual information, reproducing the Mona Lisa here or a beverage advertisement there.” – Frieze Program THE FINAL MASTER A most unusual martial arts film, The Final Master abounds with elements of martial arts and Chinese film history. Its protagonist, Chen Shi, is inspired by the master (sifu) of Ip Man, himself the teacher of Bruce Lee and the protagonist of Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster. He is played by Liao Fan, who won a Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 64th Berlinale for his role in Diao Yinan’s Black Coal Thin Ice (shown in the COB 2014), after having worked with some of the most exciting directors of contemporary Chinese cinema (Li Shahong, Liu Fendou, Zhang Yibai, Zhang Yang, Feng Xiaogang, Jiang Wen, and even Jackie Chan). Liao is not a martial artist and Xu had to train him for the film. But some of the other actors are coming from the world of martial arts, such as Song Yang, who plays Chen’s disciple, and has appeared in Xu’s two previous films as well. Others are legends of the wuxia pian (martial arts film): the Taiwanese-born Jin Shijie, a respected veteran actor of the genre; Xiong Xin Xin, famous for his work with Tsui Hark; or Shaw Brothers legend (in particular for his work with Zhang Che/Chang Cheh), the 71-year old Chen Kuan Tai. Like Wong Kar-wai in The Grandmaster, Xu is fascinated by strong women within the Chinese tradition (his contribution to the screenplay consisted, in particular, in fleshing the character of Gong Er (“Master Two”) played by Zhang Ziyi, and Chen’s two most formidable opponents on several fronts are the waitress-with-a-tarnished- reputation he recruits to pass as his wife to perfect his cover (actress/singer Song Jia, who has already been paired with Liao fan in a 2006 film by Zhang Yibai, Curiosity Kills the Cat); and the powerful head of Tianjin’s martial arts syndicate, played in alluring Western- tailored cross-dressing suits by actress/director Jiang Wenli, who received the Best Actress Award at the Rome Film Festival for her starring role in Gu Changwei’s And the Spring Comes (2006). Predicated upon the traditional Southern School/Northern School split that is the base of many a wuxia pian – a Wing Chun master from Foshan (in Guangdong Province, by the South China Seas) comes to challenge 8 dojos (martial arts school) in the northern city of Tianjin – The Final Master escapes from the mold through a witty infusion of non-traditional elements, from dry humor to painstaking historical accuracy. Most remarkable is Xu’s take on the colonial culture that pervaded Tianjin at the time: during the second Opium War, in 1858, Tianjin had become a “treaty port” with a heavy Western presence that affected its architecture and its social fabric. Many sequences take place in colonial buildings, such as restaurants serving loaves of French bread, and large avenues where residents in Chinese dress elbow blonde Russian showgirls and passers-by of various ethnicities clad in the latest Western fashion. The film’s art director, Xian Ruiqing, took special care in securing historical architectural decors. Obsessed by the historical accuracy of the wushu world during China’s Republican era (1911-1945) – “the last time traditional weapons were used,” he says – Xu displays the use of knives and blades in meticulous details, but also a rigorous sense of restraint, against the flourishes and slowed-down choreography of Hong Kong martial arts films that have become the norm. His fighting sequences are crystal clear, like short pieces by Webern, and minimal, as if Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet had directed a wuxia pian. A lethal move can take place in the fraction of a second, almost quietly. This “anti- spectacular” approach does not prevent Xu from staging a remarkable 7 minute sequence in a hutong (narrow alley) toward the end of the film, an homage to Lau Kar-Leung (Liu Chia-liang)’s most successful martial arts choreography (Martial Club, 1981; Legendary Weapons of China, 1982). The Final Master courtesy of United Entertainment Partners. Special thanks to Golden Network. NIGHTFALL ON SHANGHAI A lost short by Chantal Akerman, found in the vaults of the Portuguese foundation Calouste Gulbenkian, that had produced (in collaboration with China expert Vanessa Hope) this precious fragment as part of the omnibus State of the World (O Estado do Mundo, 2007) – shown at Cannes, and containing also contributions by Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wang Bing etc. In a way, the film is an off-shoot of a feature about impossible love and repressed desires between an older woman and a younger man that Akerman was planning to shoot between Shanghai and Paris, and it bears the marks of its origin: over the spectacular cityscape of the hyper-modern Chinese metropolis, with its skyscrapers and its neon advertising signs, floats a popular British love song of the late 60s, while boats and barges pass in silence and darkness grows. Tombée de nuit sur Shanghai courtesy of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Special thanks to Isabel Carlos. The filmmakers Born in 1973 in Beijing, Xu Haofeng is the scion of a noble family – one of his ancestors was a fallen hero of the First Opium War. When he was a teenager, his great uncle, Li Zhongxuan – who, at the age of 17, had been kicked out of the family for his pursuit of the martial arts (an activity not proper for a nobleman), came to live with his parents after being jailed for 20 years during the Cultural Revolution – then disappeared again, but not without having ingrained a fascination for the martial arts into his great-nephew. After graduating from the Beijing Film Academy in 1997 and spending years practicing calligraphy at home (an art which is not without connection with the philosophy of wushu), Xu set out in search of Li, found him, and convinced him to write a series of articles with him, that became a best-selling book in 2006, The Bygone Kung Fu World, eventually read by Wong Kar-wai as he was doing extensive research for The Grandmaster (2013) – which led him to invite Xu to collaborate on the screenplay of the film. By that time Xu had published a number of well-reviewed wuxia novels (such as Taoist Mountain, 2007 – eventually adapted into a 2015 Chen Kaige’s film) and short stories (as well as an essay on Borges), directed two martial art films, The Sword Identity (2011, premiered in Venice) and Judge Archer (2012). Xu teaches in his alma mater, the Beijing Film Academy, where his lectures are so popular that you have to secure a seat by queuing in the wee hours of the morning. When Chantal Akerman (June 6, 1950-October 5, 2015) died last October, she left behind a prolific and singular oeuvre. A truly independent filmmaker, she used to write or co-write all her screenplays, and her films outline an autobiography of sorts. She worked in a variety of formats, exploring both documentary, fiction and the personal essay form – in most than 60 works: 18 features, countless shorts and featurettes, and a dozen multiple-screen installations that were often variations of her single-channel films – always mixing high art with popular culture, minimalist rigor with physical exuberance.
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