shadow magic (xi yang jing) 2000 region free dvd5 mandarin bcbc

Shadow Magic (Xi yang jing) (simplified Chinese: 西洋镜; traditional Chinese: 西洋鏡; pinyin: Xīyángjìng) is a 2000 film directed and co-written by Ann Hu. The film was a US-China co-production starring Xia Yu, Jared Harris and Xing Yufei. The movie was Ann Hu's directorial debut.

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Synopsis

Director Ann Hu's arthouse drama tells the story of Raymond, an itinerant Englishman (Jared Harris) who is the first to bring motion pictures to China. While conservatives frown upon the Western invention, the images are a marvel to peasants and royalty alike. Raymond's hand-cranked projector casts images that all at once threaten and amaze the Chinese audience, many of whom have a difficult time reconciling technology and tradition.



Cast

Jared Harris, Xia Yu, Lu Peiqi, Lu Liping, Xing Xufei, Wang Jingming



Movie Review

Shadow Magic (2000)

April 6, 2001

FILM REVIEW; When Movies Fomented a Cultural Revolution

By A. O. SCOTT

Contemporary life sometimes feels like a flood of moving images -- hundreds of films, thousands of hours of television, video streaming through computer monitors. It's nearly impossible to imagine a time when the experience of watching pictures move was new, and we constantly risk losing the capacity to be enchanted by seeing the world come to life on screen. One of the ways movies try to renew their spell is by revisiting their own history, trying to recapture for modern film lovers the awe of first sight.



Ann Hu's ''Shadow Magic'' imagines an intriguing, culturally fraught moment in the early history of cinema: the arrival in China in 1902 of the latest movie technology (that is, hand-cranked, black and white, soundless cameras and projectors.) Raymond Wallace (Jared Harris), the Englishman who brings movies to Beijing, is hardly a Promethean figure, but rather a down-at-the-heels roustabout seeking to reverse his bad luck in a dusty corner of the city.



But the gizmos he carries with him and the images they produce are harbingers of profound change. The residents of Beijing intuit this; even before they understand what the machines can do, many of them perceive them as a threat not only to their traditional culture but also to the structure of Chinese society. Before long one character remarks, ''Men will cut their pigtails and omen will unbind their feet.''



Not everyone, however, is alarmed at the prospect of change. Liu Jinglun (Xia Yu), an eager young man who works at a prestigious photography studio, is fascinated by modern gadgetry. We first see him fixing up a discarded Victrola. The sounds that issue from it astonish his boss's young son (''put me in the box, too!'' he begs), but fail to impress Lord Tan (Li Yusheng), a star of the Beijing opera who has come to sit for a portrait. He finds Western music ''ostentatious and lacking in refinement.''



The film's slightly overcomplicated plot is built around the tension between old and new, Western and Chinese. Thankfully, Ms. Hu and the screenwriters manage to make the conflicts clear without making them overly schematic. Though their sympathies are obviously with Liu and they are biased in favor of the modernity and egalitarianism that Raymond represents, they give tradition its due.



Though Liu wants to work with Raymond and dreams of marrying Lord Tan's daughter Ling (Xing Yufei), he also wants to be an obedient son and a loyal employee. His troubles unfold like an old six-reel melodrama -- a bit stiffly and mechanically -- but ''Shadow Magic,'' in spite of occasional overstatements and awkward patches, is gentle and easy to take.



Liu's story is really a cobbled-together premise that allows the film's true subject, the power of movies themselves, to shine through. The best scenes take place in the dark of Raymond's makeshift theater and at the screening he and Liu give as part of the Empress Dowager's birthday celebrations. There, Ms. Hu cuts back and forth from screen to audience, allowing us to see both the flickering images of babies, acrobats and trains and the spell these images cast. (Some of the clips have the bleached-out, jerky look of authenticity; others have clearly been shot especially for this movie. It's a little too easy to tell the difference).



The best such moment comes at the end, when Liu screens the film he and Raymond have shot in and around Beijing, and members of the audience marvel at the sight of themselves on screen. This scene is an elegant resolution of the film's central argument: cinema is neither a demonic piece of Western trickery nor an unambiguous agent of progress, but rather a way of looking at the world and of infusing its most familiar aspects with magic. (And the movies, Liu and Ling discover, as many have since, are also a great place for kissing).



''Shadow Magic'' is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has a few scenes of mild violence.