Trailer Premiere: Mark Lee Ping-bing
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Wrapping the week last Friday, we pointed to Bradford Young’s interview with fellow cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing. That conversation begins with Young telling Lee that a cluster of filmmakers in Baltimore shares a deep admiration for “the films that you and director Hou Hsiao-hsien have made together: whenever we set up a shot that we want to try and do in one setting, a oner, we always say, ‘Let’s do a Mark Ping-bing/Hou Hsiao-hsien.’” This Friday, the Metrograph series Daring Motion: The Films of Mark Lee Ping-bing will open with Lee introducing and discussing his and Hou’s first collaboration, A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985).
“The subtlest of formalists, Hou Hsiao-hsien is a director whose considerations of film language are so foundational—placement, movement, duration—as to be imperceptible, and so organic to the larger narrative as to seem nonexistent,” wrote Eric Hynes for Reverse Shot in 2008. But “like the best of minimalist painting, sculpture, and music, his choices challenge audiences to consider their relation to the art, to acknowledge their own distance from the object before earning intimacy . . . True to his artistic strategy but no less surprising considering his choice of subject, Hou’s A Time to Live and a Time to Die tells his own personal history from a neighborly distance.”
In 2020, Kelley Dong wrote a brief and beautiful appreciation for the Notebook of a single shot in another Lee/Hou collaboration, Dust in the Wind (1986). “It was not until Flowers of Shanghai (1998) that I persuaded director Hou to set up tracks to capture what was going on in a more comprehensive way,” Lee tells Young. “Instead of just static shots, now we had moving components, which have become the staple of our later films . . . After Flowers of Shanghai, I think I earned my place; I think I earned his full confidence.” The Metrograph series also includes the neon-saturated Millennium Mambo (2001) and the Paris-set Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), starring Juliette Binoche.
On Sunday afternoon, Lee will introduce Norwegian Wood (2010), the adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel he worked on with director Tran Anh Hung, and in the evening, he’ll discuss Gilles Bourdos’s Endangered Species (2017), an ensemble piece Lee shot on the French Riviera. The series also features Lee’s collaborations with Wang Tong (Strawman, 1987), Hirokazu Kore-eda (Air Doll, 2009), and Huang Hsin-yao (The Great Buddha, 2017), and we’re delighted to premiere the trailer:
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