Though directors usually receive the most star credit in the world of arthouse cinema, cinematographers are the craftsmen who carry out the auteurs’ visions and orchestrate the magic onscreen. Last month at MoMA celebrates the work of one such master, Taiwanese cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing, best known for his collaborations with pioneer of the Taiwanese New Wave, Hou Hsiao Hsien, and for Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. The retrospective showcases a wide variety of his work, and even the three films featured in this article show the depth of his versatility.
Springtime in a Small Town. 2002. Directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang
Springtime in a Small Town, directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang in 2002, is a remake of the 1948 film of the same name, one of the most celebrated works in the history of Chinese cinema. A story fraught with the tension of past love, Springtime in a Small Town depicts the lives of three characters in the wake of the Sino-Japanese war. The film’s action precipitates from a single event, in which the sick, diminished Liyan and his loyal but unhappy wife Yuwen welcome a visitor into their home. The robust doctor Zhang Zhichen, Liyan’s childhood friend who turns out to be Yuwen’s former lover, returns to his hometown to visit and treat his ill friend. The film, which stays within the courtyard house with the exception of repeated walks to a nearby ruin, uses the physical environment to emphasize the characters’ sense of confinement. Unable to change their situation despite their awareness of what would make them happy, the characters are paralyzed by inaction. Lee Ping Bing’s slow camera movement and low lighting highlights the restraint that dominates the drama. Though faithful to the original film and beautifully executed, Springtime in a Small Town is less powerful than the 1948 version. The staging of the action in key scenes has changed in the remake, and the air of melodrama is lost. The backdrop of the war is also less palpable, which is unsurprising considering how soon after the war’s end the original film was made. Springtime in a Small Town, with its themes of repressed love and fallen youth, has become even more muted and nostalgic a second time around.
In the Mood for Love. 2000. Directed by Wong Kar Wai.
Dust in the Wind. 1986. Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Dust in the Wind (1986) portrays the quiet innocence of young love and the trials of growing up and leaving home. Set in a village in northeastern Taiwan, the film focuses on the daily life of humble characters and avoids a highly structured plot. Though not as well known as other later collaborations between this director and cinematographer such as Flowers of Shanghai and Millennium Mambo, Dust in the Wind epitomizes the simplicity, naturalism, and pacing that characterizes later, more iconic works. The static landscape shots, brief acoustic melodies, and unobtrusive camerawork create an unusual ease and pace to the film. Time passes fluidly and without explicit explanation; a slow pan across silhouetted trees or verdant hills indicate temporal or spatial transitions. The film therefore does not feel marked by events; everything unfolds in an ordinary, lifelike way without the drama of anticipation. Perhaps the most dramatic moment in Dust in the Wind occurs when Ah Yuan, the male protagonist working away from home, faints as he watches miners on television–a sight that prompts a vision of his father’s accident working in a mine. (The shot of the tunnel here makes the beauty of these frequent, high-contrast images of trains and their paths relevant; the characters lives’ and work revolves around this movement from light into dark.) For the first time (more than half way through the movie), the camera is not stable, and it shakes the reality of the film. What has happened–has the father really had an accident or is it nightmare? The confusion of this moment makes it stand out, and the vision suggests an almost supernatural insight produced by the strength of a relationship. In this instance, as in the entire film, distance and time are made unimportant; only emotional ties bind lives together.
Flowers of Shanghai. 1998. Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Claustrophobia, which also features a restrained and unspoken relationship, is a representation of the feeling that gives the film its title. Ivy Ho’s directorial debut in 2008, Claustrophobia depicts the lives of four coworkers and their ordinary encounters with strangers in contemporary Hong Kong, a place ripe for physical and emotional confinement. The story unfolds in contained episodes moving backwards in time, and so the narrative structure reinforces the stifled quality that dominates the characters both physically and psychologically. We are only left to imagine that they might have some breathing room in the spaces in between, in what is left unsaid. Many of the scenes take place in cars, during rides that seem to go on too long, another sign of physical trapping. Lee Ping Bing’s cinematography is graceful, and the camera acts as our window into these private spaces. The camera makes particularly important moves in a memorable conversation between the main character, Pearl, and a doctor, whom she suspects had an affair with her mother. The kind, gentle doctor–not unlike Tom, the married and yet naive object of Pearl’s attention–responds to Pearl’s query about his relationship to her mother with honest hesitation and near speechlessness. Throughout the scene Lee Ping Bing slowly hovers towards the characters, creating a mounting tension that is broken only by serene images of the carp in the office fishtank. The scene suggests a possible parallel between mother and daughter, and emphasizes that such relationships cannot be reduced to words.
Taking these three films as examples, Lee Ping Bing’s works favor image over word– they allow the camera the power to speak more loudly than the characters. In stories fraught with pent up feelings and tacit understanding, Lee Ping Bing’s camera serves at times to augment those emotions, and at others to subvert them and offer a form of liberation impossible in the narrative.
