Among the films screened at the Toronto film festival last month that will turn up here eventually was Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee & Cigarettes, which taught me something about the complex ethics of celebrity–including the resentment fame can foster in noncelebrities and the defensiveness this resentment can provoke in turn. It also showed me how a cycle of comic black-and-white shorts can become a thematically and formally coherent feature. Other festival films were equally edifying, in their own ways. Ann Marie Fleming’s The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam–a playful, speculative documentary about Fleming’s once-famous great-grandfather, a Chinese stage magician who toured around the world–tells the story of his life by telling the history of the 20th century.
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None of these features, which are all about power–especially the power of film–is screening at the Chicago International Film Festival, but as entertainment and as edification they’re easily matched by festival offerings. In previous years the festival tended to cram most of its strongest films into the first week, but this year most of my favorites are playing during the second week: a feature by Taiwanese master Tsai Ming-liang, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, and his short The Skywalk Is Gone (showing as part of “Shorts 2: Where You Stand”); Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold; Manoel de Oliveira’s A Talking Picture; Hakim Belabbes’s Threads; and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant. There’s also a fascinating duo by the Makhmalbaf sisters: Samira’s At Five in the Afternoon is a fiction film about a young woman in post-Taliban Kabul sneaking off daily to a secular school and dreaming of becoming president of Afghanistan; Hana’s Joy of Madness is a documentary about Samira trying to cast At Five in the Afternoon (you can catch them back-to-back at the Music Box on Wednesday night, which I highly recommend).
Cinema wields power in many parts of the world, particularly in relation to powerless people, whether they’re potential viewers or potential participants in the filmmaking. This is evident in one way or another in all the films I’ve mentioned so far, as well as in many new commercial releases. (The popularity of martial arts among powerless people in Asia and elsewhere is at the root of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill diptych, composed as a tribute to the parts of his youth spent in grind houses watching such stuff when he was powerless himself.) The threat of urban renewal in Taipei hovers over both of the Tsai films: a movie palace is about to close in Goodbye, Dragon Inn and a pedestrian bridge has already been removed in The Skywalk Is Gone. Cinema figures as a dying empire in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a contemporary kind of ghost story; in The Skywalk Is Gone it’s our only means of perceiving the subtle consequences of urban renewal on the two lonely individuals who met on the skywalk in Tsai’s previous feature, What Time Is It There?
