Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet

Chen Kaige is one of China’s most prominent and influential directors, and perhaps the central figure in China’s Fifth Generation of filmmakers. Born Chen Aige in Beijing, he was the son of noted director Chen Huaiai, who directed a number of popular films during the 1950s and 1960s. As the chaos of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was gathering steam, Chen, a 15-year-old member of the notorious Red Guard, publicly denounced his father. He later partially reenacted that day during the heartbreaking climax of Farewell, My Concubine (1989). During the late ‘60s, he was sent to labor in a rubber plantation in southwestern Yunnan province. Later, he served in the army but remained in the area. In 1975, as Mao’s reign was drawing to a close, Chen returned to his hometown to work at the Beijing Film Processing Laboratory. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaopeng, set about undoing much of the destruction of Mao’s bloody final decade, which included opening the nation’s schools and academies. In 1978, Chen entered the Beijing Film Academy. He and such classmates as Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Zhang Junzhao would eventually become the core of the Fifth Generation.

Chen made Farewell to Yesterday (1980) for Fujian television and served as an assistant director under Huang Jianzhong. In 1984, he collaborated with classmates Zhang Yimou and Hu Qun to create the landmark film Yellow Earth (1984), which stunned critics and audiences in its international debut at the Hong Kong Film Festival and brought worldwide attention to the changing face of Chinese cinema. Yellow Earth’s detached tone, measured pace, and gorgeous visuals came as a revelation for a nation previously known for cranking out revolutionary operas that espoused the teachings of Mao. Chen’s second feature, also a collaboration with Zhang, was the military drama The Big Parade (1985) about a group of soldiers who endure rigorous and often brutal training for the National Day parade in Tiananmen Square. Although the film is less stylistically innovative than Yellow Earth, it explored fundamental questions of Chinese patriotism, nationhood, and identity. While finishing The Big Parade, Chen was invited by Xi’an Film Studio head Wu Tianming to make King of the Children (1987), based on a novella written by old Yunnan workmate Ah Cheng, about children growing up during the Cultural Revolution. Here, as in his earlier works, Chen delivered a visually inventive work that delved deep into matters concerning the country. Chen and Wu both hoped that the film could match the international success of Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, but it failed to win any festival awards. In 1987, Chen received a scholarship to study filmmaking at New York University. There, he received funding to make Life on a String (1991), a mysterious and philosophical work about two blind wandering musicians, in which Chen’s striking use of both visual and aural elements approached the avant-garde. For all its innovation, the film was a box-office flop. Moreover, at a time when Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou (1989) won festival prizes and an Academy Award nomination, Chen’s film failed to garner much notice.

His 1992 work, Farewell My Concubine, marked a clear turning point in Chen’s career, away from pure art and toward commercial success. He cast international art house star Gong Li and Hong Kong pop sensation Leslie Cheung in leading roles; although the film does pack an enormous emotional punch, it bears little of the stylistic invention of his previous films. The film eventually won a joint Palme d’Or with The Piano at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination, and it proved a commercial success, raking in millions of dollars in the U.S. alone. Chen made Temptress Moon in 1996, which again starred Leslie Cheung and Gong Li. However, the film received lukewarm reviews and disappointing box office. Chen Kaige’s film The Emperor and The Assassin (1999) was screened at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.

Chen has also acted in several films, including Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987) and his own The Emperor and the Assassin and Together. —allmovie guide

Spanish director Victor Erice made two of his country’s most important and critically lauded films, El Espiritu de la Colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) (1973) and Sur (The South) (1983). Erice had studied political science before entering the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas in 1960. Shortly after graduation in 1963, he worked as a film critic and worked on the script for Antonio Eceiza’s El Proximo Otoño (Next Autumn) (1963). He also collaborated on Miguel Picazo’s Oscuros Sueños de Agosto (Dark Dreams of August) (1967). Influential producer Elías Querejeta provided Erice his first opportunity to direct by assigning him a chance to helm one of three episodes in Los Desafios (The Challenges) (1969). Following his success with El Sur, Erice became a prolific director of television commercials and worked uncredited on numerous other feature films. In 1992, Erice reemerged on the film scene with his dream-like documentary of painter Antonio Lopez’s quest for perfection, El Sol del Membrillo (The Quince Tree Sun or The Dream of Light).

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:89074)

One of the most influential filmmakers in New German Cinema and one of the most extreme personalities in film, Werner Herzog quickly gained recognition not only for creating some of the most fantastic narratives in the Film history, but for pushing himself and his crew to absurd and unprecedented lengths, again and again, in order to achieve the effects he demanded. Born Werner Stipetic in Munich on September 5, 1942, Herzog came of age in Sachrang, Bavaria, amid extreme poverty and destitution. After Herzog turned seventeen, a German film producer optioned one of his screenplays, then promptly destroyed the contract when he discovered the author’s age. Circa 1962, 20-year-old Herzog enrolled in the University of Munich as a history and literature student, and produced his first motion picture, the twelve minute Herakles, his second short Game in the Sand, and his third, the pacifist tract The Unprecedented Defense of Fortress Deutschkreuz.In 1963, he established his own production banner, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, to give him complete autonomy over all of his projects.

He won a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh in 1965 or ’66, and immigrated to the States, where he held down a job at a television station, purportedly shot films for NASA. He returned to Deutschland in 1967, where he won the top prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival for his short Last Words, then migrated to the Greek islands to shoot his premier feature, Signs of Life (1968), a story about a stricken German infantryman (Peter Brogle) who lapses into unbridled insanity. The film drew well-rounded critical praise, won the German National Film award for a debut feature and ran at the New York Film Festival.The director followed Signs of Life with two shorts in 1969, Precautions Against Fanatics and The Flying Doctors of East Africa, and a 1970 documentary about the disabled,Handicapped Future. His second feature film, the 1970 Even Dwarfs Started Small, depicts the daily activities of a bunch of dwarfs and midgets in a German penal community. Horrified, the German authorities banned it, but critics everywhere raved over its disturbing allegorical portrait of life.Herzog issued his third feature, the critical darling and arthouse mainstay Fata Morgana, in 1971. After completing the documentary Land of Silence and Darkness that same year, Herzog embarked on the first of a series of collaborations with the maniacally intense actor Klaus Kinski, Aguirre the Wrath of God (1972). This story of insane Spanish conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre, (Kinski) and his ill-fated quest to locate El Dorado, the Incan city of gold, forced Herzog and the crew to venture deep into the heart of the Peruvian jungles, where they battled now-legendary conditions to obtain the images. Critics and the public instantly heralded the film as a masterwork. Later, Herzog emerged with The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1975) and the uber-cerebral drama Heart of Glass.

After a 1975 documentary, the 47-minute The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner, Herzog produced his 1977 Stroszek, a tale of three German social outcasts who immigrate to Wisconsin. In the late seventies, Herzog masterfully re-filmed F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu (1978) with Kinski as his vampiric lead; he followed it up with yet another Kinski collaboration, a big screen adaptation of Georg Buchner’s stage work Woyzeck,which drew additional critical praise. He followed it up with another a TV drama work God’s Angry Man (1980). Between 1980 and 1982, Herzog managed to top the insanity of that film shoot with the most difficult production in movie history. With Fitzcarraldo, he sought to tell the story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, a 19th century eccentric opera lover, determined to bring the music of Enrico Caruso to the Peruvian indians by actually pulling a steamship over the top of a mountain. During the production, a plane crashed and killed several locals, lead Jason Robards acquired amoebic dysentery and had to be replaced with Kinski, the central steamers became mired in the mud and could not be moved until rainy season, a tribal war nearly erupted, and the steamer that the film crew attempted to drag over the top of the mountain became stuck midway. Famed documentarists Maureen Gosling and Les Blank foresaw the calamities prior to the shoot, and filmed the ordeal in their haunting documentary Burden of Dreams (1982), a work that was itself lauded as a masterpiece.

In 1984, Herzog filmed two acclaimed shorts: The Green Glow of the Mountains and The Ballad of the Little Soldier. Herzog shot his feature Where the Green Ants Dream (1985) in Australia; it concerns a mining corporation’s ill-advised attempts to extract much-needed materials from sacred Aboriginal ground. Later on, Herzog embarked on his final collaboration with Kinski, the adventure drama Cobra Verde. In the 1990s and 2000s, Herzog largely drifted into hardcore documentary work. His documentaries from this period include: Lessons of Darkness (1992), Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia (1993), The Transformation of the World into Music (1994), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), Wings of Hope (2000), Wheel of Time (2003), Incident at Loch Ness (2004), The White Diamond (2004) and Grizzly Man (2005) – comprised of footage shot by ill-fated “Grizzly Bear expert” Timothy Treadwell just before his death in a bear attack – elicited particularly strong acclaim. 2001’s Invincible dramatizes the story of a Jewish man who rose to power with the Nazis, only to renounce his party affiliations and swear allegiance to his people as Hitler crested the height of fame and authority. The director’s 2006 Rescue Dawn culled inspiration from his 1997 Dieter Needs to Fly, with a fictional recreation of the true events captured in that documentary. In addition to his directing and screenwriting work, Herzog has acted in a number of films, most memorably in Les Blank’s documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe and in Paul Cox’s 1983 picture Man of Flowers, Herzog plays the central character’s stern, disciplinarian father during a wordless flashback. —AllMovie guide

With his trademark shock of white hair and ultra-cool rock star persona, Jim Jarmusch is the archetypal auteur of American independent film. Born on January 22, 1953, in Akron, OH, Jarmusch was the son of a former film critic for the Akron Beacon Journal. In University, he went to Paris as an exchange student and spend most of his time at the Parisian Cinemas. Upon his return to New York, Jarmusch transferred to Columbia University, where, though he eventually received a degree in English literature. With no film experience, he was accepted into New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and soon found himself a teaching assistant to legendary maverick filmmaker Nicholas Ray. Ray helped him get funding for his thesis project, Permanent Vacation (1980). Though the film was later released to critical acclaim, his professors were underwhelmed by his final project and Jarmusch never got a degree from N.Y.U.

Jarmusch’s break came with his next film; the 30-minute short eventually evolved into Stranger Than Paradise (1984), thanks to Wim Wenders, who donated a cache of unexposed film. Upon its release, Paradise was hailed as a masterpiece. It earned a Golden Leopard at the San Locarno Film Festival, a Best Film of the Year award from the National Society of Film Critics, and the Camera d’or at the Cannes Film Festival for best first picture.Constructed as a series of discrete long takes broken up by black leader, the film was a conscious reaction against the hyperkinetic visual barrage of MTV. Paradise revealed a number of nascent motifs that would pervade Jarmusch’s later work. Popular perceptions of America as seen by outsiders are a constant theme in Jarmusch’s work. Another theme is Jarmusch’s fascination with music. As he has noted he drew inspiration from the do-it-yourself ethos of punk rock, which reached its zenith in New York just as he was directing his first feature.

Jarmusch’s next film, Down By Law, refined his trademark ironic wit and laconic style, adding gorgeous black-and-white photography and elegant tracking shots. Telling the story of an ebullient Italian tourist (Roberto Benigni) and two hepcat petty hoods thrown together in a jail cell, the film makes knowing use of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escapes (1956), along with almost every other Hollywood prison flick convention. His next two films, Mystery Train and Night on Earth (1991), were praised for their cleverness and charm, but critics increasingly complained that his films were a retread of his previous works. His 1995 opus Dead Man provided a response to this criticism. Panned by mainstream reviewers while hailed internationally as a visionary work of genius, the film had little of the hip irony or mannered style that marked Night on Earth. Instead, Dead Man was a bold, lyrical depiction of death and a penetrating look through gauzy myths of the American frontier. In 1999, Jarmusch released his follow-up, Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. Borrowing from Seijun Suzuki’s loopy masterpiece Branded to Kill (1967), the film reworks the gangster genre, as Down by Law recast the prison film, gleefully combining clichés of the hip-hop gangsta, the Italian Mafioso, and the Japanese yakuza.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:95892~T1)

As a writer, director, actor, producer, author, and entrepreneur, Spike Lee has revolutionized the role of black talent in Hollywood, tearing away decades of stereotypes and marginalized portrayals to establish a new arena for Afro-American voices to be heard. His movies, a series of outspoken and provocative socio-political critiques informed by an unwavering commitment toward challenging cultural assumptions not only about race but also class and gender identity, both solidified his own standing as one of contemporary cinema’s most influential figures and furthered the careers of actors including Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett, and Laurence Fishburne. Born Shelton Jackson Lee in Atlanta, GA, on March 20, 1957, he was raised in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. After attending Atlanta’s prestigious Morehouse College, returned to New York to make his first movie, 1977’s Last Hustle in Brooklyn, a portrait of the area’s Black and Puerto Rican communities. Later, he enrolled in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, earning his Master of Fine Arts Degree in film production. His senior feature, 1982’s Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, was the first student effort ever showcased in Lincoln Center’s “New Directors, New Films” series, and also garnered the Student Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

His 1986 comedy She’s Gotta Have It, took the Prix de Jeunesse award at Cannes and earned close to 9 million dollars at the box office. Soon Hollywood came calling, and in 1988, he released his major studio debut School Daze; however, it was his third film, 1989’s Do the Right Thing, which launched Lee to the forefront of the American filmmaking community. A provocative, insightful meditation on simmering racial tension, it was among the year’s most controversial and talked-about films and went on to net an Oscar nomination for “Best Screenplay.” The jazz world was the subject of ‘90s Mo’ Better Blues, which opened to lukewarm press; however, with his next film, Jungle Fever, Lee was again at the center of controversy over the picture’s subject matter, interracial romance. Afterwards he started his dream project, 1992’s Malcolm X. Shot at various points across the globe, the three-hour biopic of the slain civil-rights leader reached theaters in its intended form only after celebrities including Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Prince helped defray financing costs in the wake of Warner Bros.’ mandate that Lee trim the film’s running time by half an hour. Lee next shot the change-of-pace Crooklyn, a relatively light serio-comedy based largely on his own experiences growing up in Brooklyn in the early ‘70s and written in tandem with his sisters Joie and Cinqué. Next up was 1995’s Clockers, a highly regarded urban crime drama based on the novel by Richard Price. In 1996, Lee released two very different feature:. Girl 6, looked at the world of a young actress forced to accept work as a phone-sex operator,and Get on the Bus, paid tribute to the historic Million Man March. Upon signing a three-year, first-look production contract with Columbia, he then began work on He Got Game, a study of the politics of high-school basketball. Lee’s next film, Summer of Sam, set in Brooklyn during the long, hot summer of 1977 when serial killer David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz terrorized the city.The director’s subsequent project, Bamboozled (2000) was another testament to Lee’s status as one of the most complex and divisive filmmakers of both the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

In the following years Lee would tackle a quartet of more personal projects with A Huey P. Newton Story, Come Rain or Come Shine, Jim Brown: All-American, and a ten-minute segment of Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet before again turning to feature films with The 25th Hour. The film found Lee branching off to surprising effect, even if it didn’t score a direct hit at the box office. After stepping behind the camera to direct the Showtime gang drama Sucker Free City in 2004, Lee moved back into feature territory with the 2004 comedy drama She Hate Me. In addition to his primary work as a filmmaker, Lee has also written a number of books about filmmaking, as well as the 1997 Best Seat in the House: A Basketball Memoir. Additionally, he directed a number of commercials, most famously a series of Nike spots in which he appeared (in the guise of his She’s Gotta Have It character, Mars Blackmon) alongside basketball superstar Michael Jordan, as well as music videos for the likes of Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, and Prince. To aid aspiring filmmakers, Lee also founded the 40 Acres and Mule Film Institute on the campus of Brooklyn’s Long Island University

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:99175~T1)