Screening: The Love Songs of Tiedan

An illustrated lecture by Berenice Reynaud.

This year’s Cinema Pacific Festival Fellow Bérénice Reynaud will deliver an illustrated lecture on how independent Chinese cinema is addressing an overwhelming phenomenon currently taking place in China -- the production of ruins as part of planned urban renewal. She will also introduce an exciting new narrative feature from China titled The Love Songs of Tiedan, a larkish and erotic tribute to the er ren tai form of bawdy folk singing practiced for centuries in director Jie Hao’s home in the northwestern mountainous region of China. Reynaud’s visit is supported by the UO Confucius Institute and the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies.

About the Film
A larkish tribute to the er ren tai form of bawdy folk singing practiced for centuries in director Jie Hao’s home in the northwestern mountainous region of China, The Love Songs of Tiedan (Mei Jie) is shot in a dirt-poor village in this region and acted mostly by native nonprofessionals.

The temporary prohibition of er ren tai is just one obstacle that our hero Tiedan (Feng Si) must cope with. As a child, the precocious Tiedan becomes deeply attached to er ren tai-singing neighbor Sister May. As an adult he ends up having various romantic complications with all three of her children—identified only as First Daughter, Second Daughter, and Third Daughter. Sister May is the pupil and the singing partner of Tiedan’s father, a man so devoted to er ren tai that he will get into serious trouble during the Cultural Revolution for practicing a “feudal” form of entertainment. Sister May has a boorish husband who begets her three daughters, claims her as she is hiding in Tiedan’s parents house, and eventually takes her on the other side of the mountain to the Mongolian border.

Director Jie Hao focuses on male desire as in his debut, Single Man, a film that earned him an international reputation as one of China’s most exciting new independent directors. But The Love Songs of Tiedan, according to visiting critic Berenice Reynaud, draws from a broader “range of cinematic and visual styles from ethnomusicology to musical to comedy to expressionism.” Hao also pushes the envelope of romantic longing and erotic obsession much further than in his previous work.

About the Speaker
Bérénice Reynaud is the author of Nouvelles Chines, nouveaux cinémas (Paris, 1999) and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (London, 2002).  She has written extensively on Chinese cinema and video, US independent/experimental cinema, queer cinema and cinema by women for Sight & Sound (UK), Film Comment (USA), Cinema Scope (Canada), Senses of Cinema (Australia), Cahiers du cinéma, Le Monde diplomatique, Libération (France), Meteor, Springerin (Austria), and Nosferatu (Spain), among others. A Delegate for the San Sebastian International Film Festival (Spain) since 1993, she has also curated film/video series for the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the UCLA Film & Television Archive (Los Angeles), and is Co-Curator for the film series at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (Los Angeles). Reynaud teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.