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Review: Eastern Winds, Western Landfall (1991)
-- Screened at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco from April 3-5, 1991
by Harry S. Pariser

Perhaps the dominant feature of human cultural existence in the second half of the 20th Century has been the wide reach of American popular culture--a movement which began with the blossoming of the cinema in the 1920s and which was exacerbated by the effects of television in the 1950s and the popularization and propogation of VCRs and cassette recorders from the 1970s. Today the trend is so far reaching that one now finds video parlors purveying violence and kung fu in even the most remote Guatemalan villages, and distorted cassette players blaring local versions of Michael jackson on buses throughout Indonesia. Although virtually ignored by the corporate-controlled cultural mainstream, there has been a dramatic increase in films generating from the "underdeveloped" world which deal directly with "Third World" culture and cultural conflicts. Six of these were shown in San Francisco at the Asian Art Museum as part of the 1991 East-West Center Asia Pacific Film Tour.

The first film screened was the lovely Flying Fox in a Banyan Tree (New Zealand 1989). Filmed in Western Samoa, it could just as easily have been set anywhere in the Pacific. The film's protagonist Pepe finds his allegiances divided between the modern world and the traditional world which is represented by Toasa, the senior chief in his village. Tagatha, the "flying fox," is a half-breed midget misfit who becomes Pepe's accomplice but ultimately, finding life hollow, commmits suicide--hanging himself from the banyan tree, finding freedom only in death. Dealing with cultural conflicts, this powerful and beautiful film explores a conflict pertinent worldwide--traditional values versus the new unholy trinity of "God, Money, and Success." Directed by New Zealander Martyn Sanderson, the Flying Fox is adapted from the story by Samoan Albert Wendt.
Screened next was When the Tenth Month Comes (Vietnam, 1984). Overcoming the limitations imposed both by Socialist Realism ethic and inferior equipment, the film nevertheless gives insight to life in contemporary Vietnam with depictions of the local opera, the village shrine, and the local school. The plot of the film is simplicity itself: a beautiful young woman, learning of her husband's death in the war, persuades the local schoolteacher, who is totally infaturated with her, to continue to write imaginary letters from her spouse in order to shield her young son and elderly father-in-law from the truth. The subject matter shows the extent to which the war, already nearly two decades in the past, remains a festering open sore.

Another film produced under censorship, Tjhoet Nja- Dhien: A Woman of Courage (Indonesia, 1989) details the struggles of the wife of an Achenese guerilla leader who takes on the mantle of her dead husband from 1899-1907. In many ways the plot and cinematography of this Dutch vs. Achenese epic brings to mind a American Civil War film or a cowboys and Indians flick. The strongly feminist theme illuminates one of the major differences between Indonesia and other Islamic nations: the role played by Tjoet in in staunchly Islamic Aceh would be inconceivable in Saudi Arabia. Winner of nine Citra Awards (Inodnesia's top award), this epic by director Eros Djarot became the first Indonesian film ever presented in the Critic's Week at Cannes.

A City of Sadness (Taiwan, 1989), which followed the next evening, told the story of the years 1945-49 via the lives of the three surviving sons of the Lin family. During these turbulent years, Taiwan, newly freed from Japanese domination, might have taken any path. As the film's darker episodes so graphically illustrate, during these years Taipei was indeed "A City of Sadness." As a demarcation of Taiwan's new freedom of expression, director Hou focuses on the long hushed-up massarcre of Taiwanese Independence Movement supporters by Kuomintang (Nationalist) troops on Feb. 28, 1947. The presence of numerous Chinese dialects (including Taiwanese) in the film and Chinese speaking Japanese to each other attests to the remarkable melting pot that is modern day Taiwan. Although hard to follow in places, this film gives the viewer a sense of Chinese society on this small and increasingly economically potent Pacific island.

The Elephant Keeper (Thailand, 1990), the next film, was the festival's highlight and undoubtedly one of the most significant films ever to come out of the Third World. Suprisingly directed by Chatri Chalerm Yukol, an authentic Prince, this film graphically portrays the destruction of Thailand's rainforests. With 109 million acres beng lost throughout Asia and the Pacific annually, four square miles will be lost during the course of watching this film. While approximately 70% of the nation was forested in 1950, that figure today has dropped to a mere 18%, and Thailand has switched from being a net exporter of tropical hardwood to a net importer. Much of the land has been cleared for crop production with phenomenal expansion of the land used for rice as well as cassava, which is exported to Europe for use as cattle feed. Increased opium production in the north has also spurred rainforest destruction.

The Elephant Keeper deals with the problems posed by illegal logging, and the Wild West atmosphere of Thailand's border areas is accurately portrayed. The plot is extraordinarily simple. Boonsong is one in a long line of mahouts who have trained wild elephants to haul logs for generations. Now, the forest has shrunk, and with it the job opportunities. Kamron, the chief ranger, is devoted to fighting illegal logging. The local corrupt law official is in the pay of the Chinese-Thai sawmill owner. The struggle between good and evil is the plot's core, and, as generally holds true in "real" life , evil triumphs.

In the course of the film one learns quite a bit about elephants--gaining quite a bit of admiration for them in the process--and even more about modern day Thailand: its social mores, lifestyle, and some of the immense problems the nation faces. The story is told some two decades later through the eyes of the assistant ranger, and his infatuation with his assistant, a local girl, is one of the lynchpins on which the film turns. At one point, while checking the girth a tree, she stops and stares off to the distance. She's watching a gibbon and her child, and she remarks that the mother is usually shot by poachers who take her child to the market for sale. There's no preaching here, only poignancy as the assistant ranger remarks that "people are despicable." Later on in the film the assistant runs into the girl at an illegal logging site. Why is she there? As she tells it, it's fun, she wants the money, and if she doesn't do it, somebody else will! The Elephant Keeper is that rare film that informs both local and international audience alike, courageously speaking out without fear of controversy or repercussions.

The final film of the series is one which returns to the initial theme of US influence. While all of these films utilize to some extent cinematic techniques garnered from American cinema, The New Morning of Billy the Kid (Japan, 1986) is an unabashed fantasia of American pop hybridized in Japanese form. Throughout history Japanese have not only been influenced by outside countries, they have taken what has been given and made it their own. No country has absorbed more American influence, for the most part uncritically, in the past 40 plus years since WWII than Japan. But, Westernized as it might appear from the outside, it's just that: outside. Sardonic, satiricial, and yet very Japanese, Billly the Kid is a brilliant exploration of that influence--even incorporating a prototypical climatic shootout in which nearly everyone dies--and its effects.
The plot, while simple in format, is also convoluted and episodic. Entering via Arizona's Monument Valley--a location immortalized in many an American western--Billy the Kid walks into the bar and restaurant Schlachten Haus (German for "Slaughter-house") which has advertised for someone to fend off a gangster attack in a part-time job periodical. Coming to apply for the job and having "walked all the way from Arizona," Billy is dismayed to find that the position has been filled. Volunteering to work for free nonetheless, he joins a remarkable cast of characters--each introduced by a black-and-white high speed descriptive photographic montage--which includes the dishwasher Marx-Engel, the Kurosawa epic samurai Miyamoto Misashi who is the janitor, maintenance man Sgt. Sanders (from the 1960s TV series Combat), and 104 (the phone information service number operator) who works as the cashier.

This surrealistic melodrama resembles something a Japanese Kurt Vonnegut might concoct while on acid. But the screenplay actually draws heavily upon the work of Takahashi Genichiro who collaborated with youthful director Yamakawa Naoto on the screenplay. As in most Japanese movies--just as in real life--there is no plot, only a series of episodes. A gangsterized Jesus Christ makes an appearance as does a personification of the youth magazine Popeye . The magazine come-to-life and his girlfriend are advised by a Catholic priest that these things come to pass from time to time and that they should live together and enjoy life, making the best of it. "I know , that's what I think, " the girlfriend ad libs. On one side of the bar, Sgt. Sanders tosses his grenade and plays hopscotch; later he repaints the backdrop of Monument Valley into an abstract vignette depicting "John Lennon and the Martian." the very name of the film Billy the Kid is a combination of two Bob Dylan album titles : New Morning and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. And this epic highlights the absurd, almost Dadaesque collaboration between the two nations that has seen everything from adolescents sporting Mickey Mouse tee shirts to the popular acceptance of American cultural heroes. As such, it is the calling card of international cinema and a portender of the difficult dilemma the so-called underdeveloped world is increasingly being forced to face: how to integrate indigenous cultural patterns with the American pop cultural melange.

Harry S. Pariser is an artist and writer based in San Francisco. His most recent books include Explore Costa Rica and Explore Barbados.

There is an Android version and an iTunes version.

St. John Visitors:

Please check out Explore St. John, our new travel app to St. John, which supplies comprehensive information (useful for residents and visitors alike) along with pictures, maps and links to hundreds of videos and relevant websites.

iPhone/iPad/iPodTouch version

Android version

	Web www.savethemanatee.com