Xiaomeng Lu(III)
- Cinematographer
- Director
- Writer
Graduated from the School of Visual Arts, Cinematography Major in 2018, and started MFA Directing in 2019 at Columbia University.
I was born in Beijing, and I have been interested in cinema since I was in primary school. I started to watch Kung Fu / action films and foreign comedies on TV. Specifically, I focused on films by King Hu, Yuen Chor, Cheh Chang and many other great Asian martial-art film directors. Certainly, I did not know the names of Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Eldar Ryazano and the Marx Brothers, but they brought me laughter despite language difference. The dubbing and Chinese subtitling of their movies did not distract me from the storytelling, on the contrary, I discovered how great movies could be. They were magic that affected my life without doubt. I started to mull over what the cinema is, and what is art? My interest in films continued through high school. European Cinema and Japanese Cinema inspired me, as did some directors who recently passed way: Jacques Rivette, Andrzej Zulawski, Jan Nemec, Andrzej Wajda, Seijun Suzuki, and Juraj Herz. Their passing made me acutely aware of how much the art of film has quickly been superseded by commercial interests in the film industry. But it also has strengthened my resolve to follow in their footsteps in order to find my own voice and vision within the language of film. Victor Erice once said: "As cinema is the most secret of all artistic languages, it is also the least understood." English is my second language, and I am not fluent enough in it to express myself as fully as I can in Chinese. But the language of film can tell stories without boundaries, and it is the primary language I am holding to illustrate my visual world and share it with my audience.
Andrei Tarkovsky wrote that "In art, as in religion, intuition is tantamount to conviction, to faith." I think the way to interpret art is not as an illustration of logical thought. It is more about faith, a state of mind. For example, the films of Luis Buñuel represent the methodical rebellion against bourgeois morality, cultural taste, and religion, often enacted in terms of an absurd comedy of manners, immoral behaviors, fetishism and hypocritical etiquette. Buñuel's works are never merely political metaphors or illustrative performance; they are the projections of his imagination, his unconscious, and his faith. I try to understand Bunuel's work, to follow what I believe is his method, so that I can put my passion for cinema to work every day, through watching films, reading about films, and making films.
In the world I attempt to create with my films, sex, politics, and religion are inseparable foundational elements. My 2016 short film "Masturbation" is dedicated to the Polish director Walerian Borowczyk. Drawing on Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian in art, Borowczyk presents sexual pleasure within "caged" images. His boxed in spaces ritualizes erotic behavior. In "Masturbation," a man with obvious intentions follows a woman in a cyaneous-color dress at midnight and reaches orgasm after this "masturbatory trip." My production designer and I fabricated a copy of the little "French Policeman Craft" used in Borowczyk's work "Une collection particulière" (1973). This erotic toy sculpture has a hand operated lever that simulates the movement of a penis becoming erect. Through parallel cutting, I used this puppet sculpture as a humorous metaphor for the man's experience as he follows the woman who has absolutely no interest in him. "Masturbation" also pays tribute to the people who did the complete restoration of Borowczyk's films in the past two years. That is what I can do as a film student to pay homage to the deceased filmmaker.
I shot my thesis film "The Discreet Apparition of Liberty" at the beginning of this year. My goal was to pay my respect to Luis Buñuel and Cinema itself. The story is about a novelist whose name is X. He travels, through his imagination, first to a vintage cinema and then to a live-action theatrical stage, where the crisis in his political beliefs and religious faith manifest in hallucinatory images that are founded in real-life concrete elements and verbal references. I hope that this movie, like a Bunuel's movie, has the logic of dreams, that it is, at once, absurdly funny and terrifying. For me, this kind of movie leaves a mark in waking life.
I was born in Beijing, and I have been interested in cinema since I was in primary school. I started to watch Kung Fu / action films and foreign comedies on TV. Specifically, I focused on films by King Hu, Yuen Chor, Cheh Chang and many other great Asian martial-art film directors. Certainly, I did not know the names of Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Eldar Ryazano and the Marx Brothers, but they brought me laughter despite language difference. The dubbing and Chinese subtitling of their movies did not distract me from the storytelling, on the contrary, I discovered how great movies could be. They were magic that affected my life without doubt. I started to mull over what the cinema is, and what is art? My interest in films continued through high school. European Cinema and Japanese Cinema inspired me, as did some directors who recently passed way: Jacques Rivette, Andrzej Zulawski, Jan Nemec, Andrzej Wajda, Seijun Suzuki, and Juraj Herz. Their passing made me acutely aware of how much the art of film has quickly been superseded by commercial interests in the film industry. But it also has strengthened my resolve to follow in their footsteps in order to find my own voice and vision within the language of film. Victor Erice once said: "As cinema is the most secret of all artistic languages, it is also the least understood." English is my second language, and I am not fluent enough in it to express myself as fully as I can in Chinese. But the language of film can tell stories without boundaries, and it is the primary language I am holding to illustrate my visual world and share it with my audience.
Andrei Tarkovsky wrote that "In art, as in religion, intuition is tantamount to conviction, to faith." I think the way to interpret art is not as an illustration of logical thought. It is more about faith, a state of mind. For example, the films of Luis Buñuel represent the methodical rebellion against bourgeois morality, cultural taste, and religion, often enacted in terms of an absurd comedy of manners, immoral behaviors, fetishism and hypocritical etiquette. Buñuel's works are never merely political metaphors or illustrative performance; they are the projections of his imagination, his unconscious, and his faith. I try to understand Bunuel's work, to follow what I believe is his method, so that I can put my passion for cinema to work every day, through watching films, reading about films, and making films.
In the world I attempt to create with my films, sex, politics, and religion are inseparable foundational elements. My 2016 short film "Masturbation" is dedicated to the Polish director Walerian Borowczyk. Drawing on Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian in art, Borowczyk presents sexual pleasure within "caged" images. His boxed in spaces ritualizes erotic behavior. In "Masturbation," a man with obvious intentions follows a woman in a cyaneous-color dress at midnight and reaches orgasm after this "masturbatory trip." My production designer and I fabricated a copy of the little "French Policeman Craft" used in Borowczyk's work "Une collection particulière" (1973). This erotic toy sculpture has a hand operated lever that simulates the movement of a penis becoming erect. Through parallel cutting, I used this puppet sculpture as a humorous metaphor for the man's experience as he follows the woman who has absolutely no interest in him. "Masturbation" also pays tribute to the people who did the complete restoration of Borowczyk's films in the past two years. That is what I can do as a film student to pay homage to the deceased filmmaker.
I shot my thesis film "The Discreet Apparition of Liberty" at the beginning of this year. My goal was to pay my respect to Luis Buñuel and Cinema itself. The story is about a novelist whose name is X. He travels, through his imagination, first to a vintage cinema and then to a live-action theatrical stage, where the crisis in his political beliefs and religious faith manifest in hallucinatory images that are founded in real-life concrete elements and verbal references. I hope that this movie, like a Bunuel's movie, has the logic of dreams, that it is, at once, absurdly funny and terrifying. For me, this kind of movie leaves a mark in waking life.