(Ming Pao) Sunday, June 08, 05:05AM
[Ming Pao News] (Abstract: A review of Richard Brody's original Gundam, "Everything is a Movie: The Creative Life of Jean-Louis Gundam" "The long-awaited release is a great joy this week.)
The book has just arrived, and I only have time to read its preface and the first two chapters, so it is difficult to accurately identify its pros and cons. But judging from the content of the more than fifty pages, at least it can be said that as a commentary, Richard Brody seems to tend to "comment" more than "biography". This is understandable. As Jonathan Rosenbaum points out in his Weekly Village Voice book review, writing biographies for well-known filmmakers presents the Met with a problem: The team involved in a film is often too large , let alone a person who has made dozens of films, it will inevitably be a huge project to interview their collaborators on stage and behind the scenes, and detail the life achievements of the filmmakers one by one. Compared with Colin McCabe, Brady's biggest disadvantage is that he doesn't have the deep personal relationship between McCabe and Gundam, which makes him lack first-hand Gundam's first-hand materials in the end, no matter how rich his data collection is. (In fact, when he interviewed Gundam in 2000, he was suddenly interrupted by Gundam—the morning after having dinner with Gundam, he returned to Gundam's studio to find that the floor-to-ceiling windows were pulled up. He closed the curtains with a note for him: "Gundam says he can't continue the interview because it's 'not a real discussion' and 'the focus is vague.'") Xu Yi, McCabe Flowers Nearly a quarter of the length of his book, about the thirty years from his childhood until the shooting of "Breathless" (his formal years), Brody took less than a quarter of it. . Lu Senpang commented that he used a lot of effort in the middle, trying to get the word from Gundam's works
Brody admired Gundam, and felt that his later video work and several feature films that mixed digital and film were as successful as his foundational works of the "New Wave" period. It's rare (the biggest reason for this has to do with the inaccessibility of these works--whether it's voluminous or obscure, or its narrow distribution network), but it's perhaps one of the defining features of this book. Brody described Gundam's status in the 1960s and 1970s, citing Susan Sontag as "one of the greatest cultural heroes of our time." Cultural Hero is a long-lost term. I was thinking: Well, what about our time? Who is our cultural hero, whether Chinese or foreign? I couldn't think of it for a long time. This may be the crux of the problem of our time!
(Part 2, End)
Shu Qi
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