This was the absolute best screening of the entire Taipei Film Fest.

Happiness [Xi, 喜]. Dir. Pai Ching-jui [Bai Jingrui, 白景瑞]. Perf. Zhen Zhen [甄珍], Yue Yang [岳陽]. Union Films [Lianbang, 聯邦]: 1970.

This is just one part of The Four Moods [Xi Nu Ai Le, 喜怒哀樂], in which Pai, King Hu, Lee Hsing, and Li Hanxiang each directed a segment. Pai kicks it off with an amazingly avant-garde historical costume scholar-beauty romantic ghost comedy. As if this eclectic blend of genres wasn't strange enough, he goes one step further by stripping the entire segment of any dialogue whatsoever, allowing the music by Zuo Hongyuan [左宏元] to really stand out.

Zuo Hongyuan is awesome. He's written some of the most interesting songs for some of my favorite Chinese oldies singers (including the hypnotic 臉兒紅心兒笑 sung by Yao Su-rong]. He's known mostly as a composer for the era's biggest pop stars, including Teresa Teng and Feng Feifei. I've noticed his name in the music credits for several films, but this might very well be the only time that he's had so much freedom to express himself in film music. He makes the most of it, blending Chinese instruments with twangy electric guitars, mickey-mousing and -- he even takes liberties with the Beatles' "Blackbird" at one point, which is truly something to hear in a 古裝片!

I'm really looking forward to seeing this segment again, and placing it in the context of the entire four-part film. All I can say for now is that it's exceptional and I've never seen anything like it from this era. Pai Ching-rui was truly one of most creative directors of his time -- or at least he was given the most room to experiment with film as a medium with its own particular language and technical possibilities. I wish his films outside of those released by CMPC and 大眾 were currently more readily available.

A Morning in Taipei [Taibei zhi chen, 台北之晨]. Dir. Pai Ching-jui [Bai Jingrui, 白景瑞]. 1964.

I've blogged about this previously after watching the DVD version released by To See [同喜] (part of a 15-disc compilation of Taiwanese documentary film). In the course of collecting my notes for this mediadiary entry, I noticed that the English program notes for this film were plagiarized directly from my blog. While it's only one paragraph and I don't really care, I think it's worth noting that this is how the Taipei Film Fest still fails to meet certain standards of professionalism. From technical problems (such as a butchered audio track during Cape No. 7 or misaligned aspect ratio during Yasukuni), allowing blatant commercials to slip into the selection, to poor English-language translations, there's a lot that could be improved about this film fest. They might start by not plagiarizing from a website that admits to being rather crudely written in the first place!

All that being said, this screening was truly the most complete, inspirational, and perfect screening I attended. Seeing Bai Jingrui's documentary in this particular setting made a big difference. Based on their recently completed soundtrack work for A Summer's Tail, someone made the rather bold decision to give local indie rock band Aphasia the task of providing live music to this silent film. Their style, reminiscent of Mono or Mogwai mixed with plenty of shoegazer fuzz, was not what I was initially expecting -- but then again, I've watched enough old, silent films to have expectations. Aphasia completely ignored conventions and instead provided their own half-composed, half-improvised accompaniment, adding a sense of contingency to Bai Jingrui's retro images. That is, Aphasia's music, being as incongruously modern sounding as it is, helped update the images and make them seem not merely historical, not merely nostalgic, but actually part of a developmental trajectory. As one of the band members explained after the screening, they were trying to tease out what they saw as distinct elements of "China," "Taiwan," and "Taipei" in the film. They also tried to recreate the march of progress through music -- the passage from industrialization to modernization to democratization (or as they named it explicitly, "自由," freedom -- not shying away from the political undertones in their use of this term). This documentary, having been filmed in the 1960s, wouldn't necessarily have anticipated Taiwan's democratic future. This idea of freedom was something that the musicians projected retrospectively onto the images, and all the better to allow the meeting of past and present. It was truly awesome. I grinned like a fool through most of the screening and loved the imprint of live, musical accompaniment on my skin. More sensuous and immediate than Dolby Sound, because nothing can be more real.

Not a very good picture of Aphasia