Film Review: Imagine

I saw Andrzej Jakimowski’s Imagine at the Polish embassy as part of the European Film Festival.  It has absolutely nothing to do with China, but it is a thing I did while in China, and it was too good not to blog about.

The basic premise: a new guy, Ian, comes to teach at a school for the blind (in Italy?  Everyone spoke English, but I think it was Italy) who fairly shakes things up.  He refuses to walk with a cane even though he’s blind as well, and encourages the kids at the school to use their imagination to understand the world around them.  Rather than tapping around with a cane, he listens to the city, to the school, sometimes claps or snaps and listens to the reverberations to better understand spaces.

(Source)

The head of the school (who is not blind) strongly objects to Ian’s teaching methods, insisting that Ian is a danger to himself and to the students.  He sees the lack of a cane as reckless, especially since Ian confidently does out of the school’s gates and into the city every night.  Ian slowly shows the students of the school what they can do even though they can’t see, and how to navigate the city by themselves.

It was an incredibly beautiful movie in terms of cinematography, direction, and the acting.  The acting as really superb as well.  What I liked best was probably how the director showed a really limited amount of space.  The viewer could only see what the characters could understand through touch or hearing.  One of the running themes throughout the film was the presence of a ship in the harbor.  Rather than ever show the harbor, though, the camera focussed on the characters as they talked about the ship.  We could only hear the bells tolling from a church, reverberating off of a large object, and the sound of motors that we were told were motorboats.

Towards the end of the film, when two of the characters go looking for the ship we never do get a shot of the thing itself, but only the pieces of it that the characters discover.  As a result, it’s never clear to us if what Ian describes actually exists, and this is a point of tension with the other characters as they’re never sure whether to believe him or not.  They accuse him of lying about the harbor, the ship, about being able to walk without a cane.

There’s also this really wonderful sort of love story running throughout between Ian and the woman above as he tries to show her how much of the world she can see without actually seeing anything, and how far her imagination can take her.  The scenes where they’re walking through the city together, both without canes, are some of the most beautiful in the whole film.

My other favorite scenes were the ones where Ian and the woman (I forget her name unfortunately) are at their windowsills, pictured above.  The woman puts seeds out for the sparrows every morning and listens to them pecking at the metal windowsill.  Ian starts mimicking a new bird, one she’s never heard before, by dropping sunflower seeds on his sill and tapping at it with a wire.  He flaps a sheet to imitate the sound of wings taking off.  At first, the woman is annoyed that he’s chasing off the sparrows with all the noise he makes, but by the end she’s putting out sunflower seeds too, hoping to catch the sound of Ian’s bird.  This interaction between the two really demonstrated the rationale behind the title–how imagination can be one of the most valuable senses through which we understand the spaces around us.

I also loved the underlying motivations behind the fight between the headmaster of the school and Ian–that being blind doesn’t mean you’re powerless and need to rely on a cane to get around.  Although the headmaster was insistent on the use of canes out of concern for his students–many of them got injured throughout the movie, and there was one man they saw briefly who had gotten into a nearly fatal accident that crippled him for life–Ian tried to show the students that they weren’t irreparably damaged and didn’t need to be afraid of the world, that they could see things in their own way and learn to live independently.

I don’t know if this is going to screen in other cities/countries, but I highly recommend it if you ever come across a copy.

I Live in 798 Now

Just kidding.  I only wish I did.  I’m there so often that I might as well say I do…

(This post is going to be mainly pictures because I already talked about 798 a bit over here.)

This is a picture of my friend’s mom vandalizing a wall in 798, as we all did all over the place.

It’s encouraged there, it’s not like we were being jerks.  The picture above is of our Chinese names.  The pictures on this post were taken across different days, though, as I went back once with Jessica, once by myself, and once with Jessica, Neil, and Jess’ mom.

A collaborative art project between the three of us.  When I had gone to 798 in the beginning of the school year, back in September, I barely scratched the surface of the area, so we’ve been going back to uncover more and more of it recently.

For example, the disused railroad surrounded by relics of the old industrial park.

If you cross the tracks you end up in the D-Park, which doesn’t have many galleries or shops or cafés (actually it’s dominated by corporations like car companies, which is disappointing on a variety of levels), but it does have a lot of old bits of the factories and an elevated walkway across the whole eastern side of 798.

You can climb on all kinds of things from the paths leading off of the walkway.

You’re probably not supposed to climb on some of them, but if it’s not expressly forbidden…

There’s some good architecture to be seen from up there as well, like the Audi R&D center.

Audis are probably the biggest foreign cars in China; they are to this country what Toyota is to America.  Also, Audis are the official cars of the Chinese government.  I suppose Chinese cars aren’t quite good enough and the only alternative would be Japanese cars, which would be… awkward.  To say the least.

We came across this thing, where people were setting up some lighting rigs and putting together a stage inside, so either there was a concert or another show of some kind.  We weren’t entirely sure what this was, but it’s definitely worth looking into because a concert inside of a water tank would be so awesome.

We were also part of an interactive art piece.

The idea is to stand in the metal figures and then you email the pictures to the artist, who will put them all together in one exhibit sometime next year.

And of course, the graffiti was spectacular, as always.

Above, a legacy of the Sino-German cooperation that founded 798 in the first place.

I made this the background of my desktop, which the TA for one my classes thought was cute.

Also a Mondrian wall!

Mondrian is 100% my jam.

We actually went into some galleries as well, which had more interactive art.

There was also some good food.

And by food I mean candy.  Above, people make caramel sculptures/beads with little pictures on them.

And a dark chocolate matcha truffle.

Coming up sometime tomorrow, more substantial things, like what I do when I’m not doing “picture-worthy” things.

Also, here’s one of your stereotypically cute children:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

香山（The Fragrant Hills)

This past Sunday a bunch of us trekked out to the Fragrant Hills, which is the mountain we see every day on our commute to Tsinghua (assuming that the air is clear). Luckily the air was really clear, though it was a bit cold.  We got there at the tail end of the best time of year to see the mountain since the leaves were all autumn-colored.

First we went to a Buddhist temple that was structured like your typical ancient Chinese space with a long series of courtyards joined by corridors where the further inside you went, the more sacred the space.

Some people lit incense in the first courtyard area.

They weren’t sure what to do with it once they’d lit it so Aaron’s Chinese language partner explained that you lit the incense, bowed three times, and put them in with the rest of the incense after praying.

This particular temple attracted a mix of tourists who had no clue what was going on and fairly devout people who kowtowed before the statues of Buddha.

In the innermost courtyard was a giant temple that we had really wanted to go into, but it was closed.

After the temple, we walked through the park to one of the paths that would take us to the top of the mountain.

Although first we got a bit distracted and ended up sitting by a pond for a while.

There were a ton of people at the mountain, that day since it was the most popular season to go.

Although actually it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  And the mountain was so big that, depending on the trail we took, we didn’t run into too many people.

Although at one point we ran into quite a lot of people because we had gone off the path through the winding trail in the woods that we eventually realized didn’t join the main path again unless you scaled the wall.  And so we stopped with everyone else at this particular juncture and hauled ourselves over with varying degrees of pain.  (And I helped not at all by sitting on top of the wall and playing ukulele.)

Finally we made it to the main path from which you could get some really spectacular views of Beijing.

It’s hard to comprehend from within the city just how massive Beijing is.  At one point, for example, it was nestled securely in mountains surrounding it on three sides.  Now it curls around the mountains and goes on seemingly forever.

Here is the chairlift that we did not get to take on the way down the mountain because it was closed due to the wind.  Which was sort of okay because it was pretty costly, anyway, but we had also just hiked up an entire mountain before being told that we would then have to hike back down the mountain.

You can’t see very well in this picture, but we actually found our apartments, the Summer Palace, the World Trade Center, and the CCTV tower.

In any case, we eventually made it to the top where it was very cold and quite crowded.

The view on the other side of the mountain was stunning as well.

I also got this great picture.

(I have no idea who these people are.)

At the bottom of the mountain again, we walked down the street leading to the busses eating everything in sight.

Some choice 小吃 were: mango ice cream, glutinous rice shaped onto a stick and coated with a different topping on every side, knife-shaved noodles, baozi, and a peanut brittle-type thing that’s made by pounding the hell out of the ingredients with a giant mallet.

For the video version of this trip, go here!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inner Mongolia

Get ready for a massive amount of pictures.

Some weekends back, you may remember, I mentioned that my program sent us all to Inner Mongolia for a short trip.  Well, finally, here is the post about it, which I have been putting off because I took so, so many pictures.

Mainly because I am a big fan of sand dunes.  Much as I love cities, I would absolutely live out in the desert for a short time.  Possibly this desert, because it was gorgeous in Inner Mongolia.

Although actually we landed in Ningxia province and had lunch in Yinchuan before getting on a bus to Inner Mongolia.  From the air, it looked like Mars.  I was leaning over the guy sitting next to me so I could get a good look.

We arrived at our “resort” (I wouldn’t really call it  a resort, but I don’t have a better word for it) in the evening after the bus ride and then a half-hour-long sand dune rollercoaster in some jeeps.

Our driver played the same song on repeat the entire time.  By the end, we could sing along to parts of it, though he seemed confused/put off when I asked what the song was and said that I liked it.  I mean, what do you expect after half an hour of the same goddamn thing?

That night, after a big, Chinese-style dinner, we ducked out of the resort and went off into the surrounding desert, climbing the highest sand dune within reach.  Unfortunately we could’t see many stars since the moon was full, but that in itself was spectacular, combined with the vast, empty expanse of sand dunes as far as we could see.

Although you can actually see what I suspect to be Yinchuan in the corner there.

In any case.  We stayed up there for a bit while Mollie rolled down the dunes and Anastasia did martial arts.  I tried to take long-exposure pictures that weren’t blurry, which meant laying on one side of the dune and balancing my camera propped up on one shoe (leaving one foot freezing) on top of the dune.

Now you know what goes on to get these pictures.

The next morning we brushed our teeth in the frigid outdoor tap water and had a massive breakfast before riding some camels into the desert.

As one does.

Typical weekend, you know.

We rode them for such a long time, from the edge of the resort, past the lake where the resort was built, and to another lake where there was absolutely nothing nearby except scrub.

After a week (month) of disgusting smog, the blue skies over Inner Mongolia were heavenly, and the view unbelievable.

And the dunes, my god.  I love dunes.  I hate walking on them, but I love everything else.  Mostly because of their aesthetic, but I think part of it comes from Le Petit Prince, which has some goings on in the desert.  I loved that book so much that I bought a copy last night that in English, French, and Chinese in one volume.

Anyway.  Actually, aside from the dunes, what I liked best about the camel ride was the guides.  They were by no means friendly people (I wouldn’t be either if I dealt with shrieking tourists), but they were from Inner Mongolia and spoke a mix of Chinese and Mongolian (the dialect, I think, spoken in IM, not in Mongolia itself).

I did some reading on Mongolian before we left (though I did not get the chance to learn a few phrases like I intended!), and it turns out it’s much closer to Russian than Chinese.  In fact, many Mongolians (so I heard) resent having to learn Chinese now on top of Russian and English if they want to do international work.

What was really interesting, though, was when we had seen signs at the resort in the traditional Mongolian script.  Mongolia (the country, not the province) adopted the cyrillic alphabet, but I guess the province still uses the traditional writing system.

(A touching moment between Dan and the camel.)

At one point we had to get out and walk over this one dune, possibly because it was too steep for the camels to go over with us on top?  No one knew exactly.

Getting to the top of a sand dune is a huge pain.  Especially because I always feel the need to run to the top like a maniac.

But okay, running down a dune?  Best thing.  Best thing by far.

And we took jeeps back, which was quite nice.  A long-ass camel ride is evidently a ten-minute jeep ride.  I knew there was a difference in time, but I felt like we spent half a day on those camels.

We also headed to the lake that afternoon, where I fulfilled a long-standing dream of mine to sand-board.

When I was in high school and had time to read Wired a lot, I saw an article on their website about sand-boarding in China.  This was before I cared about China even remotely.  But I decided then that I would go to China so I could sand-board. Conceivably you could do this anywhere where there is sand, but I wanted to do it in China.

So after… maybe four years?  I finally, finally did.

Annnnd it was great.  It could have been a little more freestyle, but I’ll take what I can get.  (That’s me about to race.)

This is the lake, which was apparently freezing.  I didn’t go near it, but some of the guys jumped in because… I don’t know why.  I don’t know, but it was so entertaining.

Everything was great, in summation.  I mean, the yurt was cold as balls, but other than that, the actual trip was really great.

That night, we had a bonfire, which helped with the cold somewhat.

(I got to light it with two other people.  It was great, except I thought I would end up searing my eyebrows.)

So here, my delayed post, after which Beijing-related things will resume (although I’m devising ways to get back to Inner Mongolia; the next trip is Hebei next weekend, which is interesting, but not the same.)