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@treethymes / treethymes.tumblr.com

so much of the past lingers in my heart bxd my podcast ; my video essays
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When Cinema Reflects the Times: Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang is a tv documentary produced by Hirokazu Kore-eda in 1993. It follows Edward Yang during the shooting of A Confucian Confusion (1994) and Hou Hsiao-hsien following the premiere of The Puppetmaster (1993) and during the production of a commercial for Mitsubishi.

Literally the day I started working on translating this, subtitles by another group were uploaded. Their subtitles translate the speech of the Taiwanese subjects directly (as opposed to only going off of the Japanese subtitles) and included translations of Chinese text, whereas I can only translate whatever’s in Japanese. I ended up taking out some of their work which would not be understandable to a typical Japanese viewer, but I also kept some of it in. I also retained some of their phrasing here and there.

Anything in Japanese, I went through as thoroughly as I could on my own and consulted my friend @aaaamuddy on some bits of dialogue I couldn’t understand.

#hou hsiao hsien#edward yang#hirokazu kore-eda#my translation
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how am i supposed to meet a swell gal who's been brushed off by some bozo at the ballroom through the hinge app?

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lord ive seen what you've done for others (in this piece of fictional media)...

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thinking about some of the worst movies ive ever seen. i should probably complain more on letterboxd now that i have one but im afraid to be too confrontational... anyways not good to keep it all pent up so i will rant a little about some movies i remember not liking very much.

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obscuritory

The Legend of Lotus Spring was the only game produced by Women Wise, a company dedicated to making games by and for women. It started as a project by a group of 3D artists who wanted to recreate the old Chinese imperial gardens, Yuan Ming Yuan, and in an effort to get more funding for their elaborate, labor-intensive project, they turned it into a game.

It’s a game that runs counter to what was happening in the industry when it was released in 2000 – a slow, romantic game with no puzzles, marketed for women. It’s a heartaching journey through love, loss, and remembrance.

The detail is exquisite. The game is charged with melancholy. And how it came together is an unlikely story about trying to make a new space in gaming.

The Legend of Lotus Spring (read on The Obscuritory)

The world can feel empty and at times devoid of purpose, fitting the fact that it was adapted from a model of the gardens which was lavishly created without a narrative or function in mind, but the scenes you walk through in The Legend of Lotus Spring are beautiful in their ordinariness. When you step aboard the vacant Marble Boat and find a dim sum picnic box, you can unpack it one layer at a time, clicking on each basket of tea cakes and dumplings. In another house, you light a stick of incense and watch it silently burn, or you can water a plant. The game is a series of these intimate moments with objects from an old life.
The focus of the Lotus Spring isn’t mastery, discovery, or victory. It’s a meditation on the fragility of life.
“Although there is pain in saying goodbye,” the narrator says, “there is acceptance and joy as well.” Coming to terms with his loss, the emperor writes one final epigram in his dream book: “The life in which we part forever is not for grieving.”
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thinking about koreeda's monster and some criticism it's drawn for its use of perspective changes, the inevitable comparisons to rashomon. ive seen it called a cheap and unnecessary gimmick but idk how much i agree with that. i thought it was fine for the story that it served (though i didn't care much for that story; and maybe im not invested enough to have a vision for how the movie could've been "better" with some adjustments to form). if monster's differing perspectives contradicted each other then it would've been more like rashomon, but monster is not really trying to unsettle you too much. like rashomon, it uses its perspective changes, of course, to emphasize the gulf of misunderstanding between its characters, but unlike rashomon that's where it wants to stop, where it sets up camp and builds its insights and story. it doesn't want to then make the perspectives be contradictory. ultimately it knows where it wants to end up; the emotional thrust of the film lying in the resilience of the two boys. the fact that the differing perspectives are perfectly complimentary gives support to that emotional thrust. it does not want to muddy the waters too much or else it would lose the clarity and simplicity, the "power," of its ending. for me at least, it is that simplicity that underwhelmed rather than the "gimmick" itself.

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