Miike: Chûgoku no Chôjin (The Bird People in China) (1998)

In some ways, Takashi Miike’s reputation for ultra-violence has eclipsed his lyricism, perhaps explaining why this earlier feature has fallen out of critical circulation. By Miike's standards, it’s almost a children’s film, centred on a Japanese businessman and yakuza who make a journey to the remote Chinese hinterland to investigate a rich seam of jade. For the first half, the film plays as a tantalising travelogue, as Miike takes us through a series of spaces that are ever more lyrical and unbelievable, shot through with the peculiar exoticism of a Japanese director working in China. However, it’s not merely the subject matter that makes these spaces so memorable – from the first extraordinary montage sequence, Miike nurtures an awry porosity between his spaces and shots, meaning that spaces open up in unusual, unexpected and oblique ways, and interfaces emerge at the most unlikely moments and junctures. That creates quite an airy movement from shot to shot, which makes conventional montage and composition feel static and earthbound by comparison. As the travellers are forced into ever more exotic, elliptical and vertiginous landscapes, so Miike’s exquisite compositions give every space a precipitous edge, until it feels like you’re on the verge of jumping into the void with every cut; these are cuts that open up space, rather than constrict it. By the time the travellers – and the audience – arrive at their destination, the only option for moving forward is flight, and the rest of the film plays out as a kind of fairytale, as the travellers are distracted from their mission by legends of flying people in the area. That’s not to say that the issue of jade becomes irrelevant – if anything, Miike’s rich, green palette announces the seam of jade before the narrative does; in the later part of the film, in particular, it feels as if the lens is beaten out of translucent jade, imbuing it with an affinity for liquid surfaces that announces digital cinema as a new sensitivity to ambience, atmosphere, the air. And, like classical Chinese landscape painting, Miike’s digital camera offers a new kind of sky, a sky that’s no longer tethered to the earth, but surrounds and interpenetrates the earth, dissolving geographical boundaries into a syncretic, synthetic global community.