Film tells its story in countless ways for more than a century. Movies in mainstream tend to follow the conventions and norms of narration, which ends with a clear and soothing finale. In fact, with its gifted power to transcend, art can relate an old tale in a brand new way. We have selected six feature films which serve as the pioneers or style-setters in the history of cinematographic narration and will approach them with three different topics:

Mystery and Truth
Detective or suspense films may not tell you what actually happens. Starting with a search for someone missing, L’Avventura by Michelangelo Antonioni discusses how one reacts when facing loss and love. Being the milestone of films to the world of modernism, the work’s influence sees no boundaries. At the same time, Chinatown reveals the degeneracy and power game within the frame of film noir, Roman Polanski initiates a silent revolution in Hollywood, creating an American classic of the seventies. Neither of the films refuse to give us a closed ending.

Memoirs and Portraits
Good Men, Good Women traverses through several dimensions of time and space, bringing virtual and real females together and examining the torment to the history of Taiwan and individual lives, building an ultimate narrative structure created by Hou Hsiaohsien. In Dance Programme, the heroine decides to pay visits to the men she met in the past, each visit is then told with the style of a different film genre, resembling a rich and unpredictable course of life.

New Waves: New Ways of Storytelling
As a forgotten treasure in the Japanese New Wave, Silence Has No Wings lets a swallowtail butterfly caterpillar link up different locations, characters and happenings with refined images, making accusations through poetic narration in order to condemn how people forgets their war responsibilities. Celine and Julie Go Boating is actually a romantic documentary on filmmaking created by two women, taking us back to the days when the art of film was still taking its shape. Both works allow us to recognize the achievements made when feature films are given an avant-garde narrative style.

All films will be shown in 35mm, which is becoming rarer and rarer.

Hong Kong Film Critics Society