night walk #1
The moon was full tonight. Did you see it? "Luminous, weightless, transparent", it was almost a twin to the one in the sky over lovers in the Leonard Cohen song, perfectly covered by Madeleine Peyroux in her album with the same title, Half The Perfect World.
I was with a friend, walking from the new Esplanade to the old. Earlier on we were at a screening of the film Summer Snow that was part of the Ann Hui retrospective at the Arts House's Hong Kong Spotlight. The director was present and there was a Q and A session after the screening. Ann Hui said that she didn't know how to make big films like The Banquet and The Curse of the Golden Flower. She didn't say this but I was thinking, she can't be using small pejoratively; the divide between big and small is the difference between a Chekhov short story and Tolstoy's War and Peace.
(Not having seen either of the two aforementioned Chinese films, I must say my analogy is based entirely on gut feeling. Also, I confess: I have yet to finish War and Peace. Anna Karenina was the best thing I read in 2004, more than ten years after I first approached it and fled, like a fool, before the hundred-page mark. I am still waiting for the brilliant translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky to work their magic on War and Peace. That's one reason for waiting.)
Of course Ann Hui said other thoughtful things. And those things lingered, not long until they slipped off the edges of the mind into the recesses of memory. I asked her why the soundtrack was composed by a Japanese and she responded with a vignette about a chance meeting with the then penniless Japanese composer in a fellow Hong Kong director's sitting room. It seemed to be a scene from one of her films.
Ann Hui's craft is in coaxing the small into filling the space of cinema just so; there is nothing forced, nothing affected. We did not talk about her, or the film we saw this evening, as we took the night for a short walk, from the truncated marina walkway up to the start of the Singapore River. There was a shared sense of comfort and contentment, of being at home. Tonight the small shall suffice; tonight the moon is full; tonight there are at least two on this island who can say, without a single pang, that there is good after all in the small.
I was with a friend, walking from the new Esplanade to the old. Earlier on we were at a screening of the film Summer Snow that was part of the Ann Hui retrospective at the Arts House's Hong Kong Spotlight. The director was present and there was a Q and A session after the screening. Ann Hui said that she didn't know how to make big films like The Banquet and The Curse of the Golden Flower. She didn't say this but I was thinking, she can't be using small pejoratively; the divide between big and small is the difference between a Chekhov short story and Tolstoy's War and Peace.
(Not having seen either of the two aforementioned Chinese films, I must say my analogy is based entirely on gut feeling. Also, I confess: I have yet to finish War and Peace. Anna Karenina was the best thing I read in 2004, more than ten years after I first approached it and fled, like a fool, before the hundred-page mark. I am still waiting for the brilliant translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky to work their magic on War and Peace. That's one reason for waiting.)
Of course Ann Hui said other thoughtful things. And those things lingered, not long until they slipped off the edges of the mind into the recesses of memory. I asked her why the soundtrack was composed by a Japanese and she responded with a vignette about a chance meeting with the then penniless Japanese composer in a fellow Hong Kong director's sitting room. It seemed to be a scene from one of her films.
Ann Hui's craft is in coaxing the small into filling the space of cinema just so; there is nothing forced, nothing affected. We did not talk about her, or the film we saw this evening, as we took the night for a short walk, from the truncated marina walkway up to the start of the Singapore River. There was a shared sense of comfort and contentment, of being at home. Tonight the small shall suffice; tonight the moon is full; tonight there are at least two on this island who can say, without a single pang, that there is good after all in the small.
posted by wheyface at 12:02 AM
2 Comments:
Hiya,
A beautiful last paragraph. I like it a lot. *smile*
thank you, friend.
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