Seattle International Film Festival May 19 - June 12
Globalization and the consequences of economic isolationism are explored in a few films from this past weekend at SIFF. Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke dramatizes the introduction of globalization in Chinese society in two films paired at the Harvard Exit in Platform and The World, and Dutch documentarian Pieter Fleury exposes the economic and cultural confinement of urban North Koreans in North Korea: A Day in the Life.
Jia Zhangke’s earlier films, with the exception of his recent film The World, were produced independently without government approval, and regarded as part of the emerging Chinese film “underground” in the Nineties. Platform (2000), his second film after Xiao Wu (Pickpocket) (1997), focuses on a traveling Communist Party performance troupe in rural China’s Shanxi Province, where Jia Zhangke is from, and their ambition to stage theater and dance productions in small towns and villages. Set in the mid-1970s during the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and spanning through the period of reforms in the 1980s, Platform, in its depiction of change and encroaching globalization on rural Chinese life, is neither nostalgic nor optimistic about its characters and the changes they experience.
The film’s title is an extended metaphor for the troupe’s passage in time and cultural transition, and by association, references one character’s dream of a train, something he’s never seen before. Their performances, however, take them around the country to remote villages and allow the characters to “see the world.” Platform gradually depicts the performance troupe abandoning Communist Party entertainment – seen as stock variety performances exalting the countryside – in favor of boombox techno and glam, a Western import introduced in the form of a Taiwanese pop cassette recording. In their newer guise, the troupe takes on a new name as the All-Star Rock and Breakdance Band and improvises performance routines with freer Westernized flair. Jia Zhangke evokes the troupe’s tumultuous changes, and how the superficiality of consumer culture -- including fashion, pop music, and smoking – fails to transport them substantially. Rather, it is the artificiality of consumer products that threaten to secure their interpersonal relationships and individual integrity. By film’s end, many of the characters return to Fenyang, the small dust-bowl town where they’re from, and leave behind their dreams on stage for the banality of village life. In the film’s final scenes, is it the shrill pitch from a tea kettle or the train whistle blowing?
Jia Zhangke returns to form in The World, his first “established” government-approved film. The World is shot on location at Beijing’s World Park – a modest hybrid of Las Vegas-style performance revues and world landmarks (Paris Hotel’s Eiffel Tower, Luxor’s pyramids, New York, New York’s Manhattan skyline, et al) and Disney’s Epcot Center.
Pulsing with Taiwanese pop star Lim Giong’s techno soundtrack, The World, like Platform, positions its characters with a faux facsimile of the world stage on the edges of Beijing, but this time the platform is the world, not in it. Tao, played by Zhao Tao, is a cultural cross-dressing dancer and performer– appearing in exotic costumes ranging from colorful Orientalist harem dress to formal geisha kimonos, and whose relationship with a park security guard (Chen Taishen) gradually deteriorates. Their melodramatic story unfolds, revealing his affair with a designer and her lonely friendship with a Russian female coworker (Alla Chtcherbakova), and juxtaposes their internal range against the park’s colorful but one-note buoyant façade. Jia Zhangke’s The World, with its bright bubble tea spectrum and hallucinatory landscape, exposes the friction of young rural Chinese drawn to the city for its wealth and modernity, but fraught with its false allure.
In stark contrast to China’s hyper-Westernization depicted in Jia Zhangke’s fictional narrative The World, Kim Jong-Il’s impenetrably-closed People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea is the subject of Pieter Fleury’s documentary North Korea: A Day in the Life. The Dutch filmmaker was permitted by North Korean authorities to document one family’s workday routine, and is a curious glimpse at their world in urban Pyongyang, the nation’s monochromatic capitol. Without narration, Fleury unfolds their story in their cramped apartment, as family members prepare to eat breakfast before commuting to work and school. Grandfather carefully dusts silver-framed images of Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il Sung that hang in their living room, their illustrated faces beaming in front of bright red backgrounds. Little granddaughter gets ready with Hello Kitty backpack tightly strapped to her small frame.
Mom takes her daughter to a school where she will learn about the Great Leader’s childhood and his snow boots. After, Mom enters the cavernous subway filled with the scratchy strains of the Republic’s national anthem blaring from a loudspeaker at the foot of an escalator crowded with sullen commuters. Outside the state textile factory where she works, the entry’s steps are flanked with her coworkers preparing to exercise, symbolically genuflect before their beloved Kim Jong Il, and contribute the effort in the battle against the “American dogs” and imperialism. Visually, their routine suggests a performance – not only for the film’s audience, but for passers-by as well.
At Mom’s son’s computer class, students learn both computer science and English language. The instructor loses her class, however, when none of the students can accurately describe what the Internet is. Back at the textile factory, an electrical failure – from over-consumption of limited resources – brings the factory workers to a halt. A management conference is summarily arranged and participating employees express apologies for communication and management errors to prevent such problems. The women, who are under pressure to finish sewing the day’s 150-coat quota, sing revolutionary songs and exercise to pass time before their pressured to resume when electrical generators restore power.
The film ends with a close-up of Kim Jong-Il smiling in military dress behind his trademark sunglasses, and zooms into a televised image of young patriots in uniform jumping ecstatically. The film’s final image is of a woman in the crowd whose open-mouthed expression is frozen with what looks to be either the face of fear and terror or submission to the glory of the state.
Late last week, Radio Takeover was screened preceding Punk: Attitude at the Broadway Performance Hall revealing a David-and-Goliath story between grassroots media and federal regulations. Radio Takeover, a short film by Seattle natives Mike Seeley and Serena Down, documents the struggling micro-radio station SFLR 93.7 FM – San Francisco Liberation Radio – that broadcasted live radio from a small FM band signal that reached a local San Francisco community without an FCC license. The short conveys the DIY ethic with emergent American micro-radio, a trend towards localized community broadcasting in a corporate-dominated medium.
SFLR started broadcasting live radio with an interest to reach audiences and produce programming from segments of the Bay Area population that are not represented on commercial radio. Gay teen and homeless news radio programs have been part of SFLR’s independent news programming, and have gained participation from volunteers who support their broadcasts.
After nearly a decade of broadcasting, the FCC cracked down on SFLR in October 2003, and removed their radio equipment and computers in an effort to shut down the station. SFLR’s legal counsel and station owners sought FCC licensing through the proper channels, but the station was denied license approval – twice. Despite this, SFLR continues to broadcast radio on the Internet, but Internet broadcasts marginalize some of their listening demographic, such as the homeless. Attorneys representing the station have been challenging the constitutionality of the FCC’s equipment seizure against the station.
Seeley and Down’s film Radio Takeover exposes a compelling story, little-known outside of the Bay Area, with a look at SFLR’s efforts to not only survive FCC’s equipment raid, but to continue broadcasting an esteemed community service.
For more information about these and other films included in this year’s 31st Seattle International Film Festival, check out http://www.seattlefilm.com/ for details. SIFF screenings are held daily at select Capitol Hill, University District, and Lower Queen Anne theaters. Additional events will be at EMP, neumos, and the Guild 45th in Wallingford. SIFF’s three-week run is from May 19 – June 12. Tickets now available online, and at Pacific Place downtown and at the Broadway Performance Hall on Capitol Hill.
