Singapore cinema

Singapore's film production is less and the film skills are not very mature at all. But nowadays, Singapore's movies are slowly in progress.

I watched a very nice Singapore movie when I was in junior high school. It called Homerun. The director is Liang Zhiqiang. This movie tells the story of a boy decided to attend a cross-country race and get shoes as a prize to give his sister. This movie filmed in Malaysia. Its rural scenery, the midwife, the language teachers, the headmaster with Indian accent, and police wearing shorts have a very strong social background.

I like the film's plot settings. The difficulties came one by one. Children use their love resolve one by one. Every victory and failure are not the end,it just the beginning of another race. The film also talks about the friendship and the relationship between the brother and sister. It was really a worth film.

Taiwanese New Wave

Taiwan movies has its own mode. It concentrated on the director's styles. The famous director Li An is also from Taiwan. He was the first Chinese director won the Oscar, the British academy, and the golden ball in the history of the cinema film. On the other hand,  I think the Taiwan most popular movies type is the youth movie. The youth movies slowly became the symbol of Taiwan movie.

My favorite Taiwan movie is the You Are the Apple of My Eye. The director is Jiu Badao. This movie talks about the growth story between five boys and one girl. It tells the story of a pure friendship and a innocent love. When I watched this movie, my heart are full of touched and memories. I think this film's success is depend on the details for the youth without reservation. The film shows the most primitive youth to the audience and made them miss the beautiful first love.

Taiwan youth movie is very attentively in details, pictures and music. It makes the viewers feel very comfortable. They used the long, deep and fixed focal lens constitute the basic pattern of Taiwan youth movie.

Korean New Wave

I like Korean movies very much. Because South Korea movies always have full of life's vitality, sincere characters. They tend to choose the movies theme for some young people. Since the south Korean abolished the film censorship, the grading system make the Korean movies revitalized. From the content, the most successful and popular south Korean films are politics, sex and violence. But my favorite types also is romantic love story. 

We watched the south Korean love story II Mare in class. I really like this movie, so I went home and watched it again. This movie tells the story of two characters lives in the same room on the different time. They wrote letters to communicate each others through a mysterious mail box. The whole movie's picture are beautiful and pure. The typical good emotional detail master of the Korean movie was vividly showed in this movie.

A small house on the sea is the beginning and ending of the two main characters's love development. I like the beautiful sea house. All the characters' mood came in with those letters and small objects. The film was showing a little sadness mood. And the music are most piano, violin, and viola. It was slow and gentle, sweet and touching. It was consistent with the two protagonist's introvert style.

Japanese Cinema

Japan has the traditional aesthetic, unique artistic clothing and traditional culture and custom. Japanese movie presents a kind of graceful and slim oriental style. But the most famous types in Japan is the horror movies. The movies are full of horror and tragic. 

We watched the movie Confessions in class last year. This is a famous Japanese suspense horror film. The director is Island tetsuy. The film talks about a female single mother as a junior high school teacher revenge to two her daughter's classmates for her dead daughter. I think this movie is primarily concerned with the contradiction between juvenile crime and juvenile protection law. The film use the skills of enlargement and exaggeration, described the ugliness of human nature. I have been very afraid of watched horror movie. But this film didn't made me feel uncomfortable. Every scene in this film like a MV. The laughter in the classroom, the campus bullying, the corpse fragment in the refrigerator, the action of the boy killed person by knife, everyone's confession are very beautiful and artistic. In addition, the vision of the film presented a kind of different dark tone. The tone was repressed and cold. It really had the director's personal style. The bizarre audio impact also played a supporting role in the film .

Chinese 5th and 6th Generation

Over the past few years, Chinese films are continually improve. Because I am a Chinese, so I watched many Chinese movies. 

Yellow Earth is a Chinese film that Chen Kaige directed. I think he is very good at put Chinese traditional culture into his films. This film tells the story of Shanxi rural girl Cui Qiao was be arranged marriage with others by her father when she was very young. She could not get rid of misfortune, she just could express her pain inside with a kind of Shanxi local melody. The main tone of the film are yellow, gray and black. It shaped the massy and barren external appearance of yellow earth. The caliginous light and the Cui Qiao's heart that yearning light produced a strong contrast in the movie. Cui qiao was eager to break the bondage of the closed villages has brought her. She wanted to be free, had perfect love, came true dreams, and grasped the fate. She was different with most of the rural women that hastily married a people who didn't love. When she finally have the courage decide to go with Gu Qing, she still missed her own happiness. The film starts with singing, ends with singing. It gave viewers a kind of feelings of a new life break the constraint from the dark. 

The scene that Cui Qiao was angry driving the boat to the yellow river is still one of my most memorable movie scene.

The New American Cinema (1967-1979)

The New American films reflected the social revolution in the US. It's a new Hollywood. They innovate the films' form and equivocal morally. Their work was considered Golden Age in American cinema. 

In my opinion, I think the Psycho is the representative film for the American film in 1960. This is a psychological horror film. The film tells the story of Marion Crane was killed by a schizophrenic men in the bathroom and then Marion Crane's sister and her boyfriend joined the police investigation, finally gradually reveal the the truth. I think this movie is very successful, its classic bathroom murder scene is very impressive. When they shooting this murder scene in bathroom, the director refused the artificial person with full of blood that the props department provides. He choose using real person to shoot. The scene that Marion was disorderly attacked by knife.In fact, the knife didn't come into her body. It just the horrific illusion of montage editing skills caused. Through various angles after fast splicing, they formed a effect of disorderly knife killed person. I feel very ingenious, and the effect is also used very good. This shot is not only short and depressive, and by the light switch and scene changes, let the audience feel the fear atmosphere.

Hong Kong Cinema

Hong Kong film is the pioneer of the Chinese movie industry. Its main types are kung fu, gangster movie and comedies. As far as I'm concerned, I prefer to watch comedies. Hong Kong's king of comedy actor Zhou Xingchi has loony tone comedy style. I've seen his comedy movie called the King Of Comedy. This movie was directed and acted by himself. This movie has expressed his psychological journey of comedian career over the years.

In addition, I think the portray of the south busy city really have feelings in the Hong Kong movies. Hong Kong movies don't care about the change of the characters thinking mode, the growth of the personality and the rationality of the plot development. Every time I watched, I feel very comfortable and special.

We watched the movie Chungking Express in class. I have seen this film before, but this time I also feel very good. The film tells two love story. One is a urban encounters between the brokenhearted police and the mysterious woman killer. The other one is a love story between the policeman 663 and the fast-food restaurant girl. This movie is the representatives work of the director Wang Jiawei whom I appreciate. it depicts the confusion and alienation and the  loneliness brokenhearted in the city life. The photographer used a lot of style. He used the shaking hand and using special the effects of trance, colorful bright colors and lighting. In addition, there are foreground that lift the cup in slow motion and the background crowd quickly into the lens. It's amazing. The two unrelated story in this movie had the trivial dialogue. But there had a lot of classic lines make viewers touched.

Italian Cinema(1940s-1960s)

Italian film has a pivotal status in the history of the cinema in the world. The most characteristic movie style is the Italian neorealism films. Its main characteristicis is shooting in live-action with a realistic actors, and use the local dialect. Their narrative feature is the loose plot, all the time regardless of the cause and effect. And they tend to have an open ending. They use the movie methods to reflect the actual life of the people and psychology.

The most characteristic movie style is the Italian neorealism films. Its main characteristicis is shooting in live-action with a realistic actors, and use the local dialect. Their narrative feature is the loose plot, all the time regardless of the cause and effect. And they tend to have an open ending. They use the movie methods to reflect the actual life of the people and psychology.

I watched the movie The Bicycle Thief. By the sad experience of Italian workers after the second world war, it reflects the social conditions in Italy at that time. It tells the story of a person losing bicycles, looking for bicycles, and finally be compelled helpless to steal cars. The film's practical technique shows in the location shooting.  For example, characters' shabby clothes, rough housing, Rome messy pedestrian streets, and people in a hurry. The movie also use direct narrative method. It adopted to the lost bike for clues, into every corner of the society. It showed the consequences of social crisis and poverty like unemployment, black market, prostitution, selfish. And through these appearance to reveal the political, economic, and other deep philosophy.

This film used a full-length shot and the camera moved with characters. For example, in the beginning of the movie is a scene that a car was coming, a group of people was getting off the bus and walking toward the stairs. This shooting method restored the real life scene at that time in Italy.

The French New Wave (1957-1968)

I learned the French New Wave this class.  I think the most important feature of the New Wave film is that it usually has an indefinite ending and some occasional sense of humour. People always said that the New Wave is a revolution of production technology and production method. It heavy blows to those French Hollywood-style "Well-made film".

I watched the movie The Four Hundred Blows. The film tells the story of 13 year old teenager Antoine steal printer at school and his stepfather sent him to the criminal detention facility. It shows the real brutal cold social in a rebellious boy's perspective. This film filled with deep warmth and humanism concern. And this film shows the child's all the oppression in life. It is worth us to repeat viewing. In this movie, it has an ambiguous ending. The last shot was Antoine ran to the sea. When he ran, Truffaut's lens always followed and fixed the frame. It makes the ending to the  question that where Antoine would go. And this film also has a little sense of humour. The director let the important actors of the new wave Claude Brialy and Jeanne Moreau play a bit role in the film. He believes that this approach can reduce some seriousness of the atmosphere when they filming and the viewers watching.

German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, French Impressionism(1918-1932)

We learned the German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, French Impressionism in class. The German Expressionism is a film genre of film production that applying the expressionist principles of literature, theatre and painting. The screen presents a highly exaggerated, deformed, subjective world. with the absurd way. And I learned that in the representative works of expressionism, the genre is characterised, and obvious, terrorist, disaster, crime is the most common subject. And the soviet montage combined the different ways of lens shots from different distances and angles in a series of different locations to narrative the plot and portraying characters. The French Impressionism doesn't pay attention to the story of the film. It pays attention to create the atmosphere to the scenery or the background as an important role in the film. It pursue the modelling beauty, the novel visual image and novel shooting angle.

The Shawshank Redemption is a very famous and impressive movie I watched before. After this class, I watched this movie again. I noticed that the director used a lot of montage techniques inside. It include parallel montage, inverted montage, metaphor montage, comparative montage and so on.

In the beginning of the film, Andy was on trial in court. At the same time, he was recalling the incident happened in the night of the incident. The director used the narrative montage in the parallel montage during this time. He constantly switching in the crime scene and the court of the two space-time ledns. He intercepted the incident that night clips. It described Andy's conviction, and also left suspense. It make the audience questioned the plot, and it paves below the later plot of the story. Andy found the prison early in the prison to find a wall hole directed by Reid narrator using the inverted montage. In the morning that Andy was found out of prison, the plot led by Rhett's narration after the warden found that the hole in the wall, the director used the inverted montage. And there are two metaphor montage in the film, I felt impressed. One is the warden picked up the Bible from Andy's hand when the warden ward round and found Andy. He said that "Salvation lies within"when he leave. The mean is that the way of salvation was inside. From the later story, we can know that the small hammer was on the book. And we linked to these two scene, it was a word of double meaning. The other one is the warden's embroidery which covered the safe. "The judgment is coming" is just to say that the warden will get approval, and justice is done. The last one is the comparative montage. When Andy told Rhett about her plan to go out, the footage was close-up. It was slowly and nervous. It contrasted well with the next story, and it makes a good difference and makes the story more interiorised.

Module Introduction and Requirements

This class I learned some introduction about world cinema. I understand that what is world cinema. World cinema is a term used primarily in english speaking countries to refer to the films and film industries of non-english-speaking countries. And it has an unofficial implication of films with "artistic value" as opposed to "Hollywood commercialism."This new art form cinema are discovers during 1895-1918. And it became more common in the early 2000s. The first foreign and foreign language film to top the North American box office was Hero in the August of 2004.

I watched the Chinese movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon before. It was a swordsman action movie in 2000. And the director is Li An which very famous in China.

I think the most wonderful thing in this movie is not only rich Oriental colorific "jianghu". It is the emotional characterization of character inner world. Their inner heart imprisoned by feudal secular society and traditional Confucianism thought.

In addition, I also know some problems and issues with world cinema during class. The main criticism is that "world cinema" functioned as a perfunctory, contradictory term for a long time. They take for granted the centrality of Hollywood as setting the standard against which all other cinemas must define themselves.They fail to take into account the great diversity of other cinemas or the different historical trajectories of their origins and developments. And they disregard the diversity and complexity of cinema within the US itself, they provide a negative definition, the label "world" can sometimes be used in an almost derogatory way.