At the Museum
Goings-on at Museum of the Moving Image
“A singular being in a plural world” is how Jean Cocteau described the French director Jean Grémillon. His films are sensitive to the tensions between individuals and communities, between the cyclical patterns of daily life and the private obsessions or conflicts that break these rhythms.
An inventory of just about everything that the cinema could do in the year 1931, quite a lot of which still outlines its capabilities today.
Jia assembles oral histories from individuals shaped by the political upheavals of the last fifty years, opening a new window onto their history and ameliorating a vacuous modernity brought upon Shanghai by the frenzy of the new millennium.
If the critical community’s collective prejudice against the “message movie” becomes rigid dogma, then it will miss out on works such as those by pioneering Hong Kong filmmaker Patrick Lung Kong.