The Man Who Has a Camera (1933)
Liu Na’ou’s The Man with a Movie Camera is comprised of five episodes, shot in four cities across national boundaries: Tainan, Canton, Shenyang, and Tokyo. It displays impressionistic street spectacle and images of quotidian life, as well as excursions by train and ship, unfolding as a private visual journal and a sort of souvenir, but with refined framing, camera movement, and rhythmic editing. With his own perspective and artistic sensitivity embedded in this film, struggling between being a Japanese colonial subject and a Taiwanese/Chinese litterateur, Liu attempts to transcend geological, national, racial/ethnic, linguistic and medial boundaries, to establish a depoliticized, internationalist, cosmopolitan cinematic utopia, a pure cinema, and a fluid and contested identity.
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Reviews
Excellent, a Must See
Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay
Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.