As Mark Cousin’s The Story of Film marches into the 1990’s, we are now on the cusp of a technological step forward that will change the face of cinema itself. But before we cross the digital threshold, let’s focus on the filmmakers emerging during the waning days of celluloid.
Though he began his film career in the 1970’s, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami wouldn’t be embraced by world cinema until his film Where Is The Friend’s House? in 1987. A simple story of a boy trying to return a friend’s school notebook, Kiarostami would revisit the film twice, creating the critically acclaimed Koker Trilogy, named after the village where the films are set. The second film, And Life Goes On, tells a semi-fictionalized account of the director’s journey back to Koker in an attempt to find the previous films’ actors following an earthquake in 1990. The third film, Through The Olive Trees, again tells a semi-fictionalized story, but this one is set during the making of the second film as the director attempts to counsel one of the actors through their romantic troubles.
Where Kiarostomi’s films blended fictional and documentary techniques to blur their boundaries, Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai’s films used saturated colors, fragmented narratives, and semi-improvised dialogue creating films where style becomes substance. Following the crime film, As Tears Go By, Kar-Wai developed more personal stories with the films Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. But it was the romantic melodrama In The Mood For Love, with its lush imagery and quiet storytelling, that would be hailed as his masterpiece.
A world away in style and content, a new contingent of Japanese directors were gaining recognition with extreme, nightmarish films that would become known as “J-Horror.” With his film Tetsuo: The Iron Man, director Shinya Tsukamoto explored the disturbing fusion of flesh and metal, as a businessman tries desperately to halt his transformation into an organic machine. Director Hideo Nakata brought the ghost story into the digital age with Ringu, a film where a cursed videotape brings about the death of anyone who watches it. Finally, Takashi Miike, a prolific, genre-switching filmmaker, directed Audition, the story of a widower whose search for a new wife takes an exceedingly dark turn.
Europe produced its own provocateur during the decade, the Danish director Lars Von Trier. Von Trier was one of the founders of the Dogme 95 movement, whose adherents followed a set of rules limiting the production tools filmmakers could use, hopefully allowing audiences to concentrate solely on the story and the actors’ performances. Von Trier would abandon the movement with his critically acclaimed films Breaking The Waves, Dancer In The Dark, & Dogville but remained controversial due to the suffering their scripts inflicted upon the lead female characters. And like many directors, Von Trier would eventually embrace the use of the digital effects that were threatening to erase the “reality” the Dogme movement had hoped to rescue. ~ Posted by Deanna H.
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