Essential Cinema
TIFF Bell Lightbox 180 magazine
September 2010
Eastern Promises
How cutting-edge Asian cinema redefined global film culture
—Noah Cowan
Much of my early career was devoted to cinema from East Asia. For a young film programmer in the late 1980s and 1990s, that’s where the action was.
The Asian cinema that so energized and inspired me during this time is represented on the Essential 100 list by two films by Chinese directors: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind and Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express. Two remarkable individuals used these films to teach me about the surprising fluidity of film criticism, the ability of the film business to open up new possibilities in our art form and the responsibilities and demands that come with a life in the movies.
Hou Hsiao-hsien is a towering figure in contemporary film. We could have chosen any of about ten of his films to be on this list. The late David Overbey, a legendary critic and programmer, championed Dust in the Wind above all other Hou films and used it as an instructional example of how to identify, write critically about and defend original talent early in my career. Seeing in Hou a direct lineage to the careful craft of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story), David was surprised on meeting Hou for the first time to learn that the young Taiwanese director had actually never seen any of Ozu’s films. But David remained convinced that great directors share certain aesthetic and narrative affinities, even when separated by geography, language, culture and sensibility. More than any other art form, the cinema—still a young and developing medium—defies linear models of influence. As I began sleuthing my way through the history of cinema, the tracing of these occasionally improbable connections brought added layers of meaning to every film I saw. (Hou, it turns out, watched Tokyo Story at David’s urging; it has become his favourite film).
Even though many critics argue that Wong Kar-wai’s previous film, Days of Being Wild, first introduced the Hong Kong auteur’s iconic elliptical narratives and medium-stretching visual sense, Chungking Express made it sumptuous and sexy. The film’s greatest champion was a former programmer-turned-sales agent named Wouter Barendrecht.
A contemporary and a great friend, Wouter leveraged the film into an enormous international success, ensuring the continuing distribution of cutting-edge Asian cinema in the global marketplace for years to come. He had an intelligence and sense of purpose around this film; he never spoke about it in the crypto-racist terms (“exotic and inscrutable!”) so prevalent in the period. He insisted this was to be the new mainstream of cinema, or at least of global art cinema. His example and his success inspired me to champion challenging films from around the world during a decade-long foray in film distribution.
It seems odd to talk about a canonical list in personal terms. But great cinema has more than an educational function: it adheres to our memories and allows us to recall moments of great happiness with the people who changed our lives.
—Noah Cowan is the Artistic Director of TIFF Bell Lightbox
