SPEAKING IN IMAGES

Michael Berry is a translator and an assistant professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Already you have enough info to write him off as an irrelevant egghead, composing knotty sentences full of big words that absolutely no one can understand, like some kind of deviant, academic demon.

It just ain't so.

He's just written a book "Speaking in Images" that is the best book of interviews with Chinese directors that I've ever read. Well, at least since Miles Wood wrote "Cine East". The best thing English-speakers can read about Asian film are interviews. Academic and historical articles are all well and good, but for the monolingual amongst us there's nothing more valuable than interviews with these filmmakers because there's no other way to know what it is they're trying to say with their movies. And the problem is that there just aren't enough good books of interviews.

But "Speaking in Images" goes a long way to rectifying that. While I wish Berry had ranged a little further afield in his selection of interview subjects, the interviews with Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Ang Lee are the best I've ever read. Clocking in at 20 - 40 pages each, these interviews can get bitchy and mean, and the directors are pretty blunt about which of their films they can't stand to watch, and they dish up plenty of behind-the-scenes gossip.

Split into three sections - Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong - the book covers the following filmmakers:

Mainland China
XIE JIN
TIAN ZHUANGZHUANG
CHEN KAIGE
ZHANG YIMOU
ZHANG YUAN
WANG XIAOSHUAI
JIA ZHANGKE
LI YANG

Taiwan
HOU HSIAO-HSIEN
EDWARD YANG
WU NIEN-JEN
ANG LEE
TSAI MING-LIANG
CHANG TSO-CHI

Hong Kong
ANN HUI
STANLEY KWAN
FRUIT CHAN
PETER CHAN
EVANS CHAN

While I want to see more emphasis on the mainstream directors, these interviews are still pretty great and I found myself absorbed by the Wu Nien-Jen interview, which I really had zero interest in.

You can buy the book here and that's about it.

Also, in case you're interested, here's two other books of interviews with Asian filmmakers that I think are invaluable. Feel free to add in other books you like.

CINE EAST by Miles Wood
THE SWORDSMAN AND HIS JIANG HU about Tsui Hark