Bad news: The Grandmaster’s release is delayed to January 8, 2013.
Good news: New posters came along with the bad news, shot by Wing Shya.
Part one of Fruit Chan’s Hong Kong prostitute trilogy, starring Qin Hailu, one of my favourite actresses.
Fruit Chan basically launched the careers of Qin Hailu and Zhou Xun. So why are directors like Patrick Kong and Wilson Chin getting money to make films with zero redeeming qualities, like Lan Kwai Fong (喜愛夜蒲)?
Even more bizarre are the two Wing Shya directorial debuts, which Fruit Chan produced, and which were both surprisingly flat. Perhaps production companies are pandering to Chinese censor boards and the Mainland audience. But they really don’t have to, because there are actually really good films from China.
To rub salt in the wound, Lan Kwai Fong 2 did well enough in Hong Kong alone, that they are making Lan Kwai Fong 3. Reportedly, they will be tailoring the third installment for the Mainland market. I want to throw durians at people.
Silenzio, by François Fontaine / Su Li-Zhen, is that you?
Silenzio, by François Fontaine
The photographer reconstructs iconic movie scenes and characters in this homage to cinema, Silenzio. The intentional haziness and blur gives the images an atmospheric texture that relates directly to memory. As in films, Silenzio tells us that what might be visually inaccurate can still be emotionally intact.
Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung. Experimental short made by Olivier Assayas, for Foundation of Contemporary Art, starring Maggie Cheung.
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If you would like to get your hands on a Christopher Doyle photo book, there are some copies floating around eBay and Amazon resellers. My favourite is Backlit by the Moon, because it has some unusual pages with nothing but little rectangles of photos.
If you are in love with Happy Together, you might want to get Buenos Aires. It has some photos from the Happy Together Don’t try for me Argentina Photographic Journal, but without the tacky font. It is also out of print, but it is the easiest to find.
If you go to art school with a film or photography department and a good library, you might find one on the shelf. The Hong Kong Public library has two titles:《光之速記》contains photos from DOBW, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time.《放色海外》has shots from films Doyle worked on in Korea, Japan, Hollywood etc. The other titles they have are all filed under: Reported Stolen.
If you happen to be in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, or Japan, try hunting them down in secondhand book stores.
If you haven’t noticed, all the paragraphs started with if. Is this a sign?
I think of you, every time i lit a cigarette.
If this moment you lit one up too, who would you be thinking of?
After you left, this is the only way i could remember your hands.
你走後，我只有這樣懷念你的手。
“This is amount of work that goes into a hand printed photograph - Keep in mind all those figures (times) and tone setting’s are all made by hand.” via New Touch Lab
I don’t think it matters whether one prefers film or digital, but there should be no argument that photographers back then were way more intense.
Just trying to understand Ansel Adam’s Zone system in theory is already daunting enough. To know your way around the darkroom, such that these kinds of ‘methods’ give you a good print, is literally dancing in the dark.
Even if you know what you want an image to look like, to create it necessitates more than just trial and error: you need tonnes of persistence. However, like cycling and swimming, once you get it, dancing in the dark becomes instinct.
To your 'intermission', a blog is a blog and you should do whatever you want to do -- akin to a unique digital footprint. Of course, I'm not trying to impose a rule over you! I believe most of your followers admire your blog regardless of the things you post.
I guess it is also a matter of nitpicking for consistency on my part. Even on my bookshelf, I prefer to separate the English titles from the Chinese, the hardcover from the paperback. When I see something next to each other that don’t belong together, I feel an urge to rearrange. Maybe i need to tell myself that a blog is a “stream of consciousness”, less of a rigid folder.
Thank you for the reminder, I shall leave this as part of my “digital footprint”. (I really dislike that when after replying a message on Tumblr, the conversation disappears into thin air.)
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Sometimes I feel odd putting personal things in this journal, when most people are in fact just waiting for Maggie Cheung. Or there might be people who followed because of the “little life” photos, but are instead flooded with daily Christopher Doyle. (Little life is the literal translation of 小生命, by the way.)
But then this is a nice Thursday morning which I bizarrely mistook for a Wednesday until ten minutes ago. Which means Friday is tomorrow. Which means liberté, égalité, fraternité! This space is mine and this nice morning I just want to share photos of some kids and their flawless skin. And maybe someday the cool kid with the cape and bamboo-saber, or the kid with the hen will become Tony Leung.
