Pai Hsien-yung has lent Chinese-language literature some of its most colorful and most memorable characters, and served as the inspiration of multiple generations of artists working in mediums as different as television, film, and theatre. From the youthful air of the Modern Literature magazine, which he helped launch at the age of 22, to the humanistic sincerity in his recent works My Father and the Republic and Healing the Pain, Pai looks back on his 29 years teaching at Santa Barbara, a four-decade relishing of Guilin rice noodles, and a return visit to the gardens of Suzhou after 10 years. Through the darkened realm of the stage, to the countless lectures and courses he taught, Pai has been at the forefront of literature for multiple generations, with his unique blend of resilience and tenderness reverberating through the film, and bringing audiences closer to his warmth as a novelist.
Pai Hsien-yung has lent Chinese-language literature some of its most colorful and most memorable characters, and served as the inspiration of multiple generations of artists working in mediums as different as television, film, and theatre. From the youthful air of the Modern Literature magazine, which he helped launch at the age of 22, to the humanistic sincerity in his recent works My Father and the Republic and Healing the Pain, Pai looks back on his 29 years teaching at Santa Barbara, a four-decade relishing of Guilin rice noodles, and a return visit to the gardens of Suzhou after 10 years. Through the darkened realm of the stage, to the countless lectures and courses he taught, Pai has been at the forefront of literature for multiple generations, with his unique blend of resilience and tenderness reverberating through the film, and bringing audiences closer to his warmth as a novelist.
2015-12-18
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0.0Cartoneras is a documentary that grapples with Latin America’s urban realities, and the cardboard publishing movement that has emerged from these in the 21st century. Reflecting on the different contexts that propelled this form of community publishing, like Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, the independent art scene, and the movements which formed around waste-pickers, the film’s narrative is developed through conversations with important actors from the cartonera world.
4.2This documentary contains dramatized episodes about the lives of Erika and Klaus Mann, the brilliant children of German writer Thomas Mann.
8.4Mark Gatiss explores and celebrates Dracula, an icon of popular culture, asking just why we keep coming back to the count.
8.5An installation film that consists of a six-hour-long monologue performed by Edith Clever, who reads texts by Syberberg and many different authors, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, Plato, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Mörike, Richard Wagner, William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, and Chief Seattle.
0.0The documentary is a true story of four real intellectual Europeans from different cultures who are worried about the decline of literature’s life and the destiny of the street level bookshops in every country. That is why they have a mission to save symbolically “the world's last quality books”.
7.3Well known for its exploration of seduction and revenge, the “Dangerous Liaisons” by Choderlos de Laclos caused a scandal from its first publication in 1782. Despite – or because of the scandal – the book was a top-seller. Since then, it stood the test of time. Combining eras, continents and people, the novel is adapted around the world. Marvelous tool for reflection on the female condition, social satire announcing the Revolution, remarkable work on the conflicting nature of love but also of the gender war, consecration of the power of the words, a libertine manual… “Dangerous Liaisons” is all of these at once.
6.0Hours and historical meetings, Pierre Assouline has composed an anthology of the best extracts presented in the form of a primer, which he had commented on by a surprised Bernard Pivot.
0.0Twenty years ago, novelist Salman Rushdie was a wanted man with a million pound bounty on his head. His novel, The Satanic Verses, had sparked riots across the Muslim world. The ailing religious leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, had invoked a little-known religious opinion - a fatwa - and effectively sentenced Rushdie to death. This film looks back on the extraordinary events which followed the publication of the book and the ten year campaign to get the fatwa lifted. Interviews with Rushdie's friends and family and testimony from leaders of Britain's Muslim community and the Government reveal the inside story of the affair.
0.0VPRO icon Wim Brands died on April 4, 2016. He was known to the general public as a presenter of the VPRO Boeken program and also closer, with six collections of poetry to his name. This documentary about his life and work, built entirely from archive material, pays tribute to this television personality. A portrait in which attention is also paid to his complicated relationship with death. With a.o. Karl Ove Knausgård, David Sedaris, Ellen Deckwitz and Pieter Boskma. Brands' work merges with his rich inner life and that he chose death at the age of 56 casts a shadow over everything.
0.0In a world that spins faster and faster, bibliomaniacs take refuge from the rush and the noise inside the library. Amid whispers, they confess the meaning of life. A celebration of thought and obsession, where libraries reveal their inhabitants
5.1A quotation from Aristophanes, "The desire and pursuit of the whole is called love," precedes views of a man and a woman's bodies, often in extreme close up. Off-screen, a voice recites fragments of oracular literature and purple prose. We see an eye, an ear, a mouth, a tongue, bits of hair, a hand, the tips of fingers, toes. Occasionally, the frame includes a larger scape of a body: a chest, a back, a breast. Usually the camera is stationery; sometimes, it moves across a body, remaining in close up. They hold hands for one moment. The bodies are without clothes; no genitalia are visible.
7.5An in-depth look at the Canadian rock band Rush, chronicling the band's musical evolution from their progressive rock sound of the '70s to their current heavy rock style.
8.0England, 1960. The Crown sues the publisher Penguin Books in order to ban the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a novel by the British writer D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), published privately in Italy in 1928, which celebrates nature and deals with sex without taboos.
0.0In this short documentary, Canadian poet Andrew Suknaski introduces us to Wood Mountain, the south central Saskatchewan village he calls home. In between musings on his poetry, which is tinged with nostalgia and the vast loneliness of the plains, the poet discusses the area’s multicultural background and Native heritage, as well as the customs and stories of these various ethnic groups.
6.8On January 31, 1857, the French writer Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) took his place in the dock for contempt of public morality and religion. The accused, the real one, is, through him, Emma Bovary, heroine with a thousand faces and a thousand desires, guilty without doubt of an unforgivable desire to live.
6.1In 1991, American Psycho, the third novel by controversial writer Bret Easton Ellis, provoked heated discussions among critics and readers alike; an extraordinarily disturbing book that transported its readers into the mind of Patrick Bateman, a cynical mergers and acquisitions executive obsessed with brands, inconsequential details, pop culture and brutal murder.