BFI's 100 Years of Cinema

[Chuck Stephens]

This is slightly off-topic, but:

Khash Najib writes: **Actually I felt that Oshima devoted a bit too much time
for his own work and also for the Japanese Nouvelle Vague
(he mentions in the film that he always hated that name),
on the expense of the little time that was left for
talking about the most recent Japanese films. But again I
guess that a personal account, rather than an
?anyway impossible- encyclopedic work was what the
producers at BFI were aiming for.**

Yes, the BFI specifically asked directors for very personal films for 
that series; my favorites are Stanley Kwan's *Yang +/- Yin: Gender in 
Chinese Cinema*, and the Jang Sun-Woo:

**The personal stance is
actually even more visible in the Korean film where the
director takes the liberty to go around the country
visiting historical sites of pre-cinema peasant rebellions
and so forth, things that could be very important to study
certain contextual aspects of Korean Cinema but which are
not directly related to the film history of the country.**

I couldn't disagree more: everywhere Jang goes, he talks with people 
-- not all of them film-people, though most are -- about film, about 
the way Korean cinema has and continues to interact with Korean 
history, all of which is specifically, exactingly and excruciatingly 
related to "the film history of the country", which has an 
astonishing cinema of rebellion, rage, repression and uprising. The 
only "pre-cinema" history mentioned in it transpires in about two 
minutes of screen-time, during which time Jang redirects the 
conversation to an Im Kwon-taek film. Jang's doc is one of the most 
vital films-about-film I've ever seen: an exorcism of the demons that 
have plagued South Korea's cinematic expression. Oshima's banal 
name-checking and card-cataloging, on the other hand, I found 
painfully tedious, though perhaps it was more what you were looking 
for.