Beneath the ropeway cabin my friend Chen and I were riding were thin waterfalls winding through the valleys. Above us were cloudless blue sky allowing sunshine’s uninterrupted brace to the ground. Mindful of the mountains of around 507 meters high above sea level, I recognized how environments shape our way of life, in unconscious ways.
On the day of Mid-autumn Festival, the Po Lin Monastery has been full of visitors and festival decorations. Some bright-colored lanterns hung over the streets greeted the people paying tributes to the sublimely Tian Tan Buddha overlooking the entire Lantau Island.
It has been the very second time that I come here. The memory of my first visit with a friend has become a bit vague now but never faded away as I can still vividly recollect myself climbing the staircase of the monastery with the friend and taking the bus route 21 together heading towards the seaside fishing township of Tai O, whose locals made a living through tourism now with fishing traditions remaining vivid and evident in stilt houses.
This day, my friend Chen and I have been on the same route I had taken in 2018. Bus route 21 is crowed with tourists as usual. Before a big ceremonial wall erected to celebrate the National Day are bus stops where we get off the bus with other tourists speaking different languages.
It appeared that the seaside village’s special charm that existed in my memory has, in a sudden, faded away gradually. We bought some beverages at a local milk tea shop operated by two waiters or managers. One of the women in the shop told us to wait our drinks outside the store. Moucha Milk and Iced Lychee Water were what we had ordered.
At the very hot moment of the day in the afternoon, we bought two boat seat tickets to have a look of the sea around the Tai O village. It turned out to be the first time that I have ever been so close to the South China Sea and Chinese white dolphins whose pinkish fins can occasionally be seen around our small boat. The blond-haired woman who may come from Russia or US shouted out loud in excitement while filming the appearance of the dolphins.
Never once have I imagined to see a dolphin in the sea off the beachless Tai O village. When I asked the black-skinned Cantonese helmsman if there is beach in Tai O, he, motionless and emotionless, did not respond, concentrating his focus on his phone screens.
Apparently awed by the dophins and the bobbing boat, Chen said the boat-riding experience is exciting and unforgettable and worth the price and time we spent. And at some moments when I looked at the seemingly omnipresent ocean afar, I agreed.
Immersed in the southern sunshine that provides not only warmth but also a sense of life in control, one couldn’t help but think that all seasons that naturally comes and goes are simply like a relative that comes along just for a while and would never stay longer than necessary. But in the living memory of Hubei’s southerners, this river-and-lake province of the country is a mystic place, often regarded by those who historically resided here as climatically extreme because, in part, of its ferocious summer heat so brutal it is like the road is burning up things that happen to touch it miserably and abrupt winter storms coming from the north.
Life on the southern soil is one defined by lengthened boredom and dullness due to a traditional southern predilection for peacefulness. Life in the heartland of the south, it occurred to me, promotes social values that include interpersonal closeness and shared community support and an awareness that rather a journey, life is more like a battle to be fought, in part, because there is a farming tradition that recognizes the difficulty of maintaining self-sufficiency when all you have to rely on is your land. It guides people to pursue a much simpler way of life and to forge a closer engagement with nature becasue everything else is not easy. When thinking about going back home, I imagined living an adult life unlike what I have previously envisioned a non-typical male adulthood could be in Hubei’s Qianjiang city where being small and temperamentally unobtrusive defines almost everything we do with our life, thus influencing the way we deal with the outside world. It’s not an ideal otherworldly paradise where social regulation does not negatively dilute the content of one’s personal imagination. It has never been the case. So, very naturally, I come to dream of sky-embracing fields full of green corps in the summer and ridges and rivers resting in the vastly unoccupied countryside where a sea of poplar trees are touching the greyish sky.
There was a southern way of thinking that everything related to the traditionally rice-planting region, from the very dialect we converse in to the way we regard ourselves as town folks, is deemed powerless and considered by those from the outside of little to no importance. More often than not, the local way of life is no longer well perserved as more youngsters seeking opportunities outside, sometimes compromising, or in their words, ‘improving’ thier original southern identities, become reluctant to live a life more close to nature and family. Rather, independence and selfhood are concepts unilaterally linked to improved economic status and the number of nice cars they own.
The once quiet streets are no longer silent. My apartment was in Qianjiang’s southern blocks close to the city’s railway station and lobster catering center that attracts toursits attention. Outside the windows of my home were periodical passings-by of the high speed trains whose sounds were considered noisy by one of my firends. The sounds of passing trains from two to three kilometers away were hardly noticable to my ears as I often found myself daydreaming a future as a reclusive writer whose concerns about life are not so closely related to material wants.
Given the fact that once your way of life is transfromed into an urban one, there is no way back and everything you do requires money, seldom would there be any rational or sane man considering putting to much energy on caring about the purpose of making others happy.
The world is often reduced into a fragmented piece of glass reflecting only the light that touches it. It never occurred to me that this capitalist way of doing things could have done so much on people here. The traditional southern way of living is so badly adjusted to the capitalist values of competition and the very business of owning things. Reclusive-minded people are not getting any more reclusive here, let alone leading a life that thirves on shared community respects.
Respect to nature and individual dignity, it appears, has been compromised in order to find a more materialistically rewarding life that centers on business and community seperation. It has never occurred to me that this kind of penetration could go so deeply that I started missing the very old moment when people are not so concentrated on becoming an owner. Since the train has again passed me by, it’s too noisy to remain here, waiting for the next season to come.
Since when have filmgoers started to expect something truly artistic rather than adopted for popular interests to watch? Perhaps not long after the ongoing artistic revolution that merits personal sensibilities rather than serving a bigger goal in today’s cinematic world around the early 2000s. Now for some filmgoers appreciating artistic expressions on the film, the number of directors that see art as an indispensable element to filmmaking is rising, including those eyeing the effects of social stratification on the socially marginalized groups in modern France, and some others focusing on the complicated relationship between personal sensibilities and social realities in today’s South Korea to the Italian director, Paolo Sorrentino whose specific style of filmmaking poeticized and transformed contemporary cinematography.
With the public appetite for film switching from movies aiming at commercial success to ones that investigate and explore human life in detail, the tendency for filmmakers to see film as yet another form of serious artistic expression is evident. Few would disagree that film does reflect certain aspects of human life ; but perhaps many would argue whether or not it can be used as a means to poetically represent human life, especially the way that literature did. Seriously, watching movies is unlike reading books; while people see the same scenes before a film, they imagine differently before one specific scene.
Given the fact that filmmaking is deeply influenced by film producing companies and pressured by need for profits, it’s hard for filmgoers to expect, let alone see in reality, a film featuring something impressively artistic, personal, or poetically beautiful. When film, especially in the ’40s, was used as tools for propaganda, mass entertainment, documenting historical events, it was not unheard of to discover that film was still seen as one of the most expensive ways and the least viable form of artistic creation for ordinary people.
Photo by Lou Hsienhua
Till today, one still finds it hard to use film as a means of artistic creation as freely as writing. Filmmaking, to many, is still too expensive a way towards artistic transcendence even after so many decades of relatively steady economic improvement and development in certain parts of the world. One may still deem it impractical to make films specifically focused on exploring something new and underrepresented before when the lack of representation of anything—be it a country, a group of people or another side of a story—reaches a breaking point. But you, some would argue, could choose to write as it’s still the most affordable way to artistically present a previously unrepresented world. But writing, in the end, is unlike filmmaking. And that makes the whole difference.
That said, in today’s world of filmmaking, the tendency for directors and screenwriters to mix their personal imagination with contemporary social reality to create something reflective of the sensibility of a generation is growing. Unlike writing, which requires a lot of soul searching, an obsession with and tolerance for solitude, filmmaking is, comparatively, a collective activity. That’s means to achieve one same end in creation of art in filmmaking, there must be a lot of effort put on communication between actors and directors. That’s why the harmonious, yet impressive experience of watching Sorrentino’s the Great Beauty seemed so rare.
Born in Naples in 1970, the Italian director is perhaps best known for his ‘philosophical movie’ the Great Beauty or La Grande Bellezza (2013) wherein he explored the meaning of a city full of sacred elements for an individual on the journey of exploring human nature. And that city is Rome. The Great Beauty, in some way, could be seen as an ode to Rome in the form of motion pictures. From This Must Be the Place to Youth, Sorrentino demonstrates his ability to turn cinematography into poetry.
Could films like The Great Beauty be cited as the evidences of filmmaking world’s unobvious turn to a certain kind of sentimentality and sensibility previously unexamined before? The answer remains hard to find. But the surge of movies exploring this kind of sentimentality is actually very evident. Besides Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, we have Todd Haynes’ I’m not Here (2007), Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere (2011), Hong Sang-soo’s Hill of Freedom (2014), Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016). The list could vary and be extended in a reader-by-reader fashion. But the trend is here.
Photograph by Lou Hsienhua
Economic advancement lowers the prerequisite for entering the filming world, thus allowing more diverse sensibilities being explored on the film. But with this diversity on hand, what makes Sorrentino’s works unique from so many other films is his very use of a certain kind of poetic imagination in the making of a film.
His understanding of cinematography involves the full use of various contradictions and conflicts in his filmmaking as if using the literary device of contrast in writing to present something familiar in a completely sharp and alien reflection.
Also common is his use of flashback in The Great Beauty. When the protagonist in the film, Jep Gambardella, a writer working as a journalist in Rome, dated his old friend’s forty-something daughter, Ramona, the film flashbacks to the moments of protagonist’s adolescent relationship with his first love decades ago. The profaneness and messiness of these characters’ private life seemed on many occasions at odds with the sacredness of Rome. Living in Rome, as we see it on Sorrentino’s film, appears to require a certain kind of numbness to the ills of the real when everything, on the surface, looks so contradictory in a city where the relation between the secular and the sacred is more entwined as to be incomprehensible.
Adding to the charm of Sorrentino’s films is his specific preference for certain kind of music that often involves classics and symphonies. The soundtracks of his films often resemble a classic music concert.
It’s too hard to find someone else whose artistic inspiration originates from the desire to capture the beauty of the uncapturable; but here in Sorrentino’s world, the indescribable is truly on the film.
