I recently mentioned a thought-provoking collection of essays called Movie Mutations that examines world cinema, and world cinephilia, from several different angles.

In one of the essays, Kent Jones looks at the work of Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, whose movies I haven't yet had a chance to see. The essay says a great deal about Tsai's work and why people outside of Taiwan are fascinated by it, but let me hone in on one aspect in particular: his depiction of city-dwellers.

Jones writes:

But what is odd and quite singular about Tsai is that, perhaps more than any other modern film-maker, he has successfully realised on film something that many of us who live in cities experience but few of us consciously understand, which is the melding of the public and the private. Those of us who walk the same streets, see the same faces, and find ourselves moved from one place to another by the same forms of transportation as we hear the same sounds and feel the same vibrations and breathe the same stale air, day in and day out, cannot help but make private, internalised rituals out of these supposedly neutral but nonetheless important parts of our lives, and key our desires and rituals of discovery and loss to their rhythms. Tsai is the first film-maker to somehow convey the antiseptic poignancy of modern urban life, its multiplicity of circumspect, guarded subjectivities dotting a landscape designed for 'functionality'. It has nothing to do with the old ideas of urban impersonality and alienation. There's no pre-existing, Edenic reality at which Tsai's ordinary people look back wistfully. This is their world, and all that concrete, asphalt and formica is just a regular part of it. Like New York or Tokyo, his Taipei seems to be operating according to a new physics, in which the city itself is set in motion by the private obsessions and biological quirks of the individuals who live within it, and within whom it lives — the reverse of the city films of the silent era.

I'm not sure which silent movies he's thinking of — I probably haven't seen many of them, The Crowd maybe? — but I do know that the inorganic cities in movies like Metropolis, City Lights, and Modern Times (the last two are pseudo-silents) seem to impose their large rigid structures on their inhabitants who are so disconnected from each other, so put upon by or kept at arms length from the other citizens, that their close proximity almost seems like a tragedy. But this isn't something I ever gave much thought.

It's funny, recently I was writing a capsule about the Hungarian movie Hukkle, and I very nearly described it as a "city symphony," a phrase often used to describe movies like Dziga Vertov's The Man With The Movie Camera, movies that train a quizzical eye on the rhythms of a city. The bustle of its sidewalks. The hum of its streets.

But Hukkle takes place in a rural village, not a city at all. It's the hum of bees and tractors. I wonder if the phrase came to mind because I live in a city. Maybe I mistakenly and subconsciously think of the rhythms around me as features of a city, even though they occur on farms and in nature, too. They're not features of a city; they're features of human, pattern-seeking perception.

Or maybe I jumped to the phrase "city symphony" because I'm not a native city dweller. I moved to the big city after college, and so while I've always been surrounded by rhythms — as everyone is — I wasn't conscious of them until they were new, until they were streetcars and subways and other rhythms I'd never lived among. I noticed this noise because it was unfamiliar. I gave it a name, citiniess, that I now (nearly) apply with knee-jerk recklessness to rural rhythms.

I recently picked up the book The Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria. The book has a compelling premise: democracy and freedom are two distinct concepts that we sometimes mistakenly conflate, at our peril. Zakaria aims to put both of them under the microscope. I've only read a few paragraphs, but look at this opening bit:

From its Greek root, "democracy" means "the rule of the people." And everywhere we are witnessing the shift of power downward. I call this "democratization," even though it goes far beyond politics, because the process is similar: hierarchies are breaking down, closed systems are opening up, and pressures from the masses are now the primary engine of social change. Democracy has gone from being a form of government to a way of life.

Consider the economic realm. What is truly distinctive and new about today's capitalism is not that it is global or information-rich or technologically driven — all that has been true at earlier points in history — but rather that it is democratic.... Today most companies — indeed most countries — woo not the handful that are rich but the many that are middle class....

Culture has also been democratized. What was once called "high culture" continues to flourish, of course, but as a niche product for the elderly set, no longer at the center of society's cultural life, which is now defined and dominated by popular music, blockbuster movies, and prime-time television.... The key to the reputation of, say, a singer in an old order would have been who liked her. The key to fame today is how many like her.

I wonder if the difference that Kent Jones sees in how silent filmmakers depicted cities and how Tsai Ming-liang depicts cities stems from our different attitudes about cities in general. Cities have been democratized. Where once a city was built by the Gettys and Carnegies and Vanderbilts for us to inhabit, now we believe it is built by us, "the individuals who live within it, and within whom it lives."

And do these observations about the democratization of government, economics, and culture apply to Taiwan as much as they do America? Probably, but that's only a hunch; I'm not the one to ask.

For a major part of his essay, Jones tries to figure out what's so appealing about foreign movies like Tsai's. Their foreignness is part of the appeal, he argues. Foreign filmmakers use the familiar language of film to tell us about unfamiliar cultures. But I've found that even when it's not immediately obvious, learning about other cultures often tells me something about my own.

I'm not familiar with Tsai Ming-liang's movies. I'd like to be. But just reading Jones' observations about them has exposed assumptions I've made about my own environment — that cities are the source of rhythms, that cities are our collective expression — assumptions that are not or have not always been correct.

(Note: Tsai's latest film, Goodbye, Dragon Inn will be showing next week at the San Francisco International Film Festival.)