Up The Yangtze - new Canadian Hot Doc

Up The Yangtze, a commentary on contemporary China from Canadian Director/Creator Yung Chang is a well conceived, beautifully shot “must see” documentary, toasted at Sundance and already currying what promises to be only the beginning in a long line of honours.

Originally titled Up Your Yangtze, the film really puts a face, several faces on the emerging New China. And what faces they are..a lovely young girl, Shui Yu, raised with Mother, Father and siblings at water's edge, in a lean-to of sorts, barely at the time we meet them, with food to eat. We follow her to her first job on the cruise ship, and how the family agonizes about sending her out to work, where she becomes Cindy (Americanized to suit the Tourists) and where we meet among others, Jerry, a male Counterpart.

Only a film maker who is living his story with an open mind and heart like Yung Chang, can bond with his subjects, and have them share for us, extraordinary moments of intimacy and personal truths.

Actors are very attune to being 'private in public' as Yung must also know from the Meisner classes he took in New York at The Neighbourhood PlayHouse. It is no surprise that this talented graduate of Film Production from Montreal's Concordia University, calls his movie “the Cassavettes version of what's going on”...in which he wanted “to capture the raw emotions” and he sure does.

Moving, illuminating, a real window and open door into a World that most North Americans can almost not fathom and must learn about. Even Chang, who grew up in Whitby, Ontario expected the China of his Grand Father, who's moving song at the beginning of the film guides us into the Four Gorges Dam scenario of the not only shifting sands of time but the floodgates that will immerse the homes of the riverside inhabitants and cause mass migration.

One expects next a Dramatic Feature from Chang as if Up The Yangtze is not dramatic enough. Chang: “The Cruise Ship became this kind of microcosm – above decks were the Western tourists and below decks were the crew workers looking above and trying to climb that ladder to join the tourists eventually”.

We follow the upward mobility of the young Chinese kids and their sometimes hilarious teachers who clue them in on their cruising customers, along for a last ride up the Yangtze: “ Don't say Canadians and Americans are the same” which brought a great cheer from the sold-out opening night screening at the Cumberland. “Never call them fat”...”say plump”.

Cindy buys her first new clothing, puts on make up, entertains a visit from her parents.. Cindy's Father like Lear's Wise Fool tears your heart out. Her Mother, intelligent and suffering because of what she comprehends about the changes. And watching Gerry scam the tourists has me thinking of what Yung Chang's feature could be: 'Jerry and Cindy get ----'!



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naiveté: Wild Mouth to The Sand Factory – More Blood on The Tracks

Monday night, February 4th at 7:30  I participated in the PRAXIS sponsored reading of a new play: THE SAND FACTORY by a talented young writer Taylor Sutherland at the Concord Cafe.
 
The play deals with some issues and thoughts that have been provoked lately in some of the material I've been seeing like the recent production of WILD MOUTH by Maureen Hunter..thought it was an amazing work tackling the great divide that WAR produces particularly between the sexes and particularly when we are talking about the two past World Wars. I was struck and intrigued by the exploration of Blood significance, the Christian male Christ fixation and the attraction/repulsion law of Magnetism - the eternal battle of the Sexes.

THE SECRET, that esoteric new Bible packaged like an infomercial but informative nonetheless addresses the Laws of Magnetism and you are what you think, hence drawing to you, attracting what you are being - (of course it's all true but sometimes the over-simplification is as annoying as the graphics)

In WILD MOUTH, the British teacher, who has lost a son in the ongoing War needs to find some explanation for why her Boy wrote of an experience where he laid beside a dead naked body and felt peace. She is tormented by her inability to understand what could have possibly happened to her son to have him write of something so alarmingly inexplicable, prior to his death and to try to comprehend the unique relationship those who have experienced WAR have to it.

I don't really want to critique The Tarragon's production, directed by R.H. Thompson, I am more interested in the play itself . The fact that I was introduced to the play and enjoyed some of the work is sufficient: The attraction/repulsion between the The Teacher (feminist) and the Ukrainian War Hero (brute): the grieving Mother's attempt to understand what men see in war, or what war is:
“The good and evil invented by people trapped in scenes” is a line someone says in the play and it took me to the Hollywood experience of seeing everything as a “scene”, while working on Tracks, a film that starred Dennis Hopper, I learned a great deal about people trapped in scenes, and about good and evil.

When David Fox says to the woman at the end of the play that what you want to tell the Man who attacked her sexually, and provoked her to shoot him, is that “you are grateful”, she finally understood what it meant to be 'at war' - it resonated with certain of my lessons in life administered in the school of hard knocks by less than nurturing teachers. But sometimes that's what it takes to learn something, like a particularly bad relationship I had, that actually taught me the most about myself.

I remember Dennis Hopper believed that in terrorizing certain women in his life he had given them a gift: The loss of naiveté, is different than loss of innocence. To be naive is a kind of privilege-ness – one discovers that naiveté neither protects you nor justifies ignorance. It is 'precious', in the negative sense of being oh so self conscious, protected, and though sometimes enviable, is not really valuable in the search for truth, for real living and ultimately it is unfair, the very first lesson in growing up..that life is unfair, becomes another lesson, that the real unfairness is the protected one who fails to understand the pain of reality as it impacts those who cannot escape it.
Subsequent to working on TRACKS, I wrote a teleplay for CBC Drama inspired by my experience working on the film. Like TRACKS it dealt with a soldier returning from Vietnam who ends up punching a 'round-eyed' woman,  when she tries to take his photograph and thereby capture his pain..."you want to feel my pain..try this" he says as he delivers a blow to her solar plexus.
In Wild Mouth, the woman is also a photographer,and I have been reading about Diane Arbus, the extra-ordinary photographer who revolutionized photography with her challenging stirring disturbing photos of so-called freaks and marginal types. Arbus delivered a humanity, a comprehensive penetrating and exciting new way of recorded 'seeing'. I ran out to get the movie FUR when I started reading the excellent biography by Patricia Bosworh. As for FUR, they couldn't have gotten it more wrong.