Flying Yangban

Y'all go see the Gwangju Film Festival

(NOTE: This is for the 2004 film festival.) The Gwangju International Film Festival kicks off this Thursday (September 2) in, oddly enough, Gwangju. According to OhmyNews International, there will be a ton of cool films there, including short films, features, documentaries and some old classics such as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. As an added Bonus, if you go, you might be able to check out some of Lady Yangban's translation work. Here is a list of some of the translations she has done along with descriptions from the festival web page (Note: these are not reviews). You can click on the links to see the films' schedules:

Note: The fist one on the list is Lady Yangban's first full-length feature film. Unknown Soldier 78 minutes Ellison (aka L) just graduated high school and life is breezy. But after his father suddenly dies, all his security is gone. He bounces from place to place staying with a series of friends before landing on the street, and into a shelter. Desperate, he tries to enlist, but the asthma he got from government housing disqualifies him for the Army. Finally, he turns to Zee, his charismatic wealthy neighbor, who has hustled his way up from the streets. Will L honor his hard-working father, or go the way of the streets? “In the end it’s clear L has become a man...He’s left without a home, but his body and soul are intact” (Ferenc Toth) Shattered Dreams 100min Lee Daw-ming, documentary director and TV producer, portrays a weary life of a Thai illegal immigrant. As a wage labor, these Thai workers come to Taiwan to get more wages, and this makes their life more miserable. This film was invited to several film festivals such as 2004 Hong Kong International Film Festival, 2003 Taipei Film Festival and 2003 Taiwan Interntional Ethnographic Film Festival. From Short Films 1 Choosing Love, Judging Love 16min [It] is the story of how the love of two people affects their relationships with the other around them. The love Rosemary chose as a young lady has forced her to live as an outsider. Her daughter Elizabeth serve as a living reminder of her chosen, lost love of her past. What could Rosemary do to her daughter? From Short Films 2 R.E.M 57min Amit, a promising filmmaker, suspects his wife Adi is having an affair. While trying to verify his life suspicions, sophia, a mysterious actress invades his life, pulling him into a whirlpool of doubt. Oblivion 23min A man is headed for the city of oblivion. There is not much time. He wanders around the city looking for a woman. However, the city deeply immersed in oblivion is getting to be a strong labyrinth to him. From Short Films3 When the things get confused 6min An angel and a devil come, out of nowhere, in front of a girl trying to commit suicide. An angel keeps saying "linger on", whereas a devil encourage her to do it. The girl's got confused to whom she needs to listen. What in the world can happen to her?

It's just to bad she didn't get Ross McElwee's Sherman's March (which I heard was great) or Bright Leaves (which is set in my home state of North Carolina). I would have loved a free screening. UPDATE: Arggghh! I met Lady Yangban earlier this evening and we had this conversation:

LY: I feel good. Y: Why? LY: I helped a friend (from her old KBS translation class). Y: Really? LY: Yeah, I helped her get a film to translate at the festival. Y: Oh. What kind of film? LY: A documentary about some general. Y: 'Sherman's March?' LY: Yeah, that's it. Y: Arggghh!

Life can be cruel.

Katsumoto was wrong: Oriental romanticism in "The Last Samurai"

Stick a sword in him, he's done. Katsumoto doing his best to keep the peasants in their place.

I'm teaching some elementary school teachers in a special winter program put on by my college. As a kind of break, we went out for lunch and an afternoon movie. I had been wanting to see The Last Samurai for a while so I was happy to go with them to check it out.

Here is a brief synopsis from Yahoo Movies:

Set in the late 1870s, this epic film depicts the beginnings of the modernization of Japan, as the island nation evolved past a feudal society, as symbolized by the eradication of the samurai way of life. We see all this happen from the point of view of an alcoholic Civil War veteran turned Winchester guns spokesman, Captain Woodrow Algren (Cruise), who arrives in Japan to train the troops of the emperor, Meiji, as part of a break away from the long-held tradition of relying on employed samurai warriors to protect territories, as the emperor's new army prepares to wipe out the remaining samurai warriors. When Algren is injured in combat and captured by the samurai, he learns about their warrior honor code from their leader, Katsumoto, which forces him to decide which side of the conflict he actually wants to be on.

What do I think?

The violence was good (in one scene, Tom Cruise uses his sword to hack through a rifle and split a man's head open in one swing) but I had a slight discomfort watching many parts of the film. It wasn't enough to prevent me from enjoying the movie but enough to make me want to post about it here.

To get an idea about my problem with the film, check out this quote from a review by Roger Ebert:

"The Last Samurai" breaks with the convention that the Western hero is always superior to the local culture he immerses in. It has been compared to "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Dances With Wolves," films in which Westerners learn to respect Arabs and Indians, but this film goes a step further, clearly believing that Katsumoto's traditional society is superior to the modernism being unloaded by the Americans. Katsumoto is the teacher and Algren is the student, and the film wonderfully re-creates the patterns and textures of the Japanese past; its production design, sets and costumes are astonishing.

No, I don't have a problem with the sets and costumes. They rocked.

I do have a problem with the kind of romantic notions that a lot of folks in the States have with East Asia. The problem is pretty well stated in another review of the movie by Ty Burr of the Boston Globe:

Why do our movies look to other cultures for what we feel we lack? As Goldwyn's colonel sneers in one scene, ''What is it about your own people that you hate so much?'' That's an interesting question, but Nathan (Tom Cruise's character) never comes up with an answer, and neither does the movie.

I'll ask it again. Why do some Americans keep assuming that we are missing something and that someone else has it?

Yeah, there were (and are) many problems in western culture. But that hardly means that non-western cultures are somehow superior.

The simple fact is that Katsumoto (the Samurai rebel) was wrong. Japan needed to modernize and the samurai who fought against that were xenophobic reactionaries. To make matters worse, Saigo Takamori (who Katsumoto was based on) advocated attacking Korea in 1873 and left the Meiji government after other leaders refused to back his plan.

So we have this war-mongering, feudalistic reactionary who finally goes into open rebellion after his rice stipend is cut off by the government and I'm supposed to have sympathy for the guy? I think not.

"Yes, but what of the beautiful traditional Japanese culture that was corrupted by Western culture and Western imperialism? Wasn't that lost cause worth fighting for?"

As a southerner, I know all about lost causes. My ancestors fought bravely for their own set of archaic values and got the tar smacked out of them just like Saigo's Samurai. And you know what? Both had it coming.

The Samurai were fighting to maintain their privileged position in Japanese society. Under the new Meiji government (of which Saigo was initially a member), Japan was being reorganized to make it competitive with western nations. Part of that modernization included changing from a feudal to a central-state system. For all that jazz we hear about the loyalty of the Japanese, when the samurai found that their privileged position was challenged, they revolted.

I just hope that the soldier who wounded Saigo came from the lowest burakumin village in the country.

(UPDATE: Once again, the comments section is at least as interesting as my post, so go check it out.)

UPDATE 2: Check out this report from National Geographic. Good Stuff.