最近的心情爛透了

休息沒多久又到新一季paper的死線，總覺沒完沒了的，幾天下來腦袋依舊空空的，情況嚴峻得很...工作嘛，也不太順利，東西翻來覆去仍是老樣子，沒絲毫進展，難纏透了；很想離開這個環境，歇一歇，卻又理性地知道問題不在於環境本身，而是自己的心態...我想：得找個機會讓腦袋輕鬆一下了......

HK Film Festival 2008

it's the annual gathering for all film enthusiasts again. every year there're just too many good films you wanna watch that time crash seems unavoidable. i've tried not to be influenced by those film excerpts but you just can't select one among the pool without a glimpse of the catalog. surprise only happens when you don't have too much knowledge or expectation on the event.

anyway here's my schedule this year, not too much but enough for me already. see if we can bump into each other in any one of the occasions :) see you all~~

18th, 7:15pm 儘管如此我沒做過, p23
21th, 8:00pm 我們的天父, p60
22th, 9:30pm 翠絲的碎片人生, p55
23th, 6:00pm 鐵木真, p10
24th, 6:00pm 警察樂隊來訪時, p62
25th, 7:15pm 千年善禱, p24
27th, 7:15pm 華麗安琪兒, p16
3rd, 7:00pm 出入人口, p22
6th, 8:45pm 電光滾石, p9

More on "Lust, Caution"

I am not a fan of Eileen Chang, nor am I a student with strong Chinese literary base, but Lust, Caution gave me a feeling that Chang was trying to play down, not to say 'hide', some parts of the content deliberately, particularly the sentiments between Chia-chih and Mr. Yee. The original story was largely narrated from the perspective of the heroine Chia-chih and basically only about an assassination. Other events within the story were part of Chia-chih's memory. We can hardly know the breast of the hero Mr. Yee, except the later fraction which contributed the only hint of his emotions towards Chia-chih. We were told that the two got two meetings before this last one but what has been done besides sex? And what has constituted to their intimacy in the very last scene that even hindered Chia-chih from her long awaited plan? How come such an old hand like Mr. Yee would fall into this trap of femme fatale? What has Chia-chih done to win over his trust? And above all why did Chang choose to omit these episodes? Obviously Ang Lee has tried to fill up the gaps with his own propositions, from which I would say most of them were reasonable and had in turn enriched the original story.

I agree with what Robert Stam mentioned at last in Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation that as critics 'our statements about films based on novels or other sources need to be less moralistic, less panicked, less implicated in unacknowledged hierarchies,' but 'more rooted in contextual and intertextual history,' and above all 'less concerned with inchoate notions of fidelity.' (75) There could always be accuses for being unfaithful to a source text if one has to be picky on every single difference found under direct comparison, not to mention the two mediums are intrinsically different in nature. In fact, I found the cinematic version a more thorough reading and interpretation to Chang's story from the focalization of Ang Lee, which has added more ingredients to the text but of course certain kinds of ideological transformations were suggested at the same time constituting the major difference between the two.

Mr. Yee has been a more humanistic person in the film, at least from the way he reminisced Chia-chih in the final scene. She certainly was not the one and only femme fatale in his life. We did not have such a bad feeling towards traitors–primarily with Tony Leung's long established positive image–which might probably not be the initial idea of Chang. The most controversial of all for sure is the three 'extra' sex scenes supplemented by Lee. They had amplified the fear of Mr. Yee as a traitor, which made the violence of the first sex scene perfectly sensible. He could trust nobody because everyone wants his head off for patriotism. The fear of death has tortured him to such an extent that only through sex could he find his true self, his own existence. Whether the sex scenes were a must is beyond our discussion because it was by and large a personal decision of Lee and what we as audiences have been confronted with is this text–already presented publicly and is now the only base for our criticism.

HK Poster Triennial 2007

Poster Triennial this year is more or less the same as previous years'. Perhaps the more your database expands, the less surprise you get from 'new' candidates. Who can defy that creativity does not bear the burden of history? Interestingly, I read the following article on a site the time I draft this post, featuring a small exhibition Typo China around two years ago. What this German said was actually phenomenon found in our Chinese design arena for long. For those who haven't been to the show yet, I hope after reading the passage you take another perspective in looking at these all-too-similar artworks and figure out a 'global picture' which is highly obvious if you do pay attention to them holistically. 'A poster is intended first and foremost to be seen, not read.' Perhaps anything analytical is just extra but I do believe a poster possesses its own power. After drawing your first sight, it wants you to walk away with something in mind and that is the enchantment of it.

Typo China - zeitgenössische Schriftplakate aus China, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Plakatraum, 3. Mai - 4. August 2006
Chinese posters had caught our attention some time before, as a satisfying contradiction of ideologically driven rigidity. The development of the poster in Hongkong and Taiwan may be ahead of the People's Republic, but seen overall this is a very recent years. Various international poster competitions have been instituted in China since the late 1990s, and here the designers want to lay themselves open to Western judgment as well. It is striking how frequently their posters focus on the characters, showing their desire to keep up with the times in terms of the unique richness of their own typographical culture. This was not the only reason why it seemed right to us to concentrate on choosing typographical posters. Chinese characters have a visual quality and a semantic complexity that go far beyond the possibilities our alphabet affords.

Our appeal to submit new works met with considerable enthusiasm. This gives a sense of the vitality of a group, small as yet, of young designers who are discovering international competition mechanisms. It is typical that many of the posters shown were produced on the designers' own initiative, because China still lacks clients who are prepared to commission posters; and thus has no real poster culture. So this selection is as welcome as it is provisional, and fits in with our attentively skeptical yet hopeful view of "booming China".It goes without saying that the fascination with Chinese typography we have succumbed to is fed on ignorance. Chinese text often affects us simply as a texture, because we do not have the necessary translations skills to be aware of the posters' expressive quality.

So can we do justice to these posters at all if we submit them to our usual selective scrutiny? Yes, if we are prepared to play by poster competition rules. For there too we make what we should see into what we want to see. And there too every poster operates by taking mutual clichés and expectations into account. Something that is part of the essence of a poster is always the perfect concession to positive misunderstandings: a poster is intended first and foremost to be seen, not read.
Felix Studinka [www.hesign.com]

看過的華語同志電影

也許是我看的不夠，為什麼同志愛戀都被描述為一種遺憾？從這幾套電影中，我感受到的是一種不確定性，一種把同性戀者視為既值得同情又充滿勇氣的一群的意識形態；只要他們仍然把自己當作受害者、革命家，他們所期望的公平是永遠不會來臨的，更何況這個世界根本沒有絕對的公平？