1994: A Year of Cinematic Giants and Personal Discovery

In 1994, a year destined to be recorded in cinematic history as an outstanding year for world cinema, I was just starting middle school. Back then, I began to discover many films by patronizing screening houses on the street and gradually developed a habit of watching movies. However, I was still far from having the chance, as we do today, to watch major global premieres almost in real-time.

Thirty years ago, the god of cinema descended upon us yet again. This might’ve been its third divine manifestation since the invention of cinema in 1895 and the advent of sound films in 1927. The cinema god bestowed inspiration on artists worldwide, leaving behind a wealth of masterpieces, such as Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, Natural Born Killers, Burnt by the Sun, Léon: The Professional, Through the Olive Trees, Before the Rain, Three Colors: White, Three Colors: Red, The Lion King, Legends of the Fall, Chungking Express, and In the Heat of the Sun, just to name a few.

Growing up in a country with relatively late exposure to Western culture, I only gradually got to watch most of these divine works years after 1994. Perhaps Forrest Gump, which premiered in June that year, was the only one I got to see a few months later. I remember watching it in September, shortly after the start of the new school year. A classmate, who somehow got hold of a VHS tape, invited me to his house to watch it. “My dad says American culture is all in here,” he recommended. At that age, with budding sex awareness, certain alluring scenes tended to leave a lasting impression, even though there was nothing overtly explicit now that I look back.

I vividly recalled one scene where Jenny, following the hippie movement in San Francisco, stood on stage naked with nothing but a guitar, singing Bob Dylan’s iconic Blowin’ in the Wind. I’d just started learning guitar at the time, and this scene naturally found its way into my “musical dreams” afterward. Another scene features Forrest’s mother, who was willing to go to any lengths to get her intellectually challenged son into school. She met with the principal and suggested that “there must be something can be done.” Just when we heard thier heavy breathing echoing through the night, my classmate’s mom came home. Upon realizing what was happening in the film, she explained with parental wisdom, “They’re moving furniture, and it’s just tiring.”

Through the stories of these everyday characters in the film, I started to catch a glimpse of an absurd yet real picture of contemporary American history. I was also pulled into a unique emotional rhythm by Robert Zemeckis’s mix of fast and slow cuts. After seeing Forrest take to the road to run for a while, I felt loneliness and emptiness for the first time in my life. Would I also end up feeling so alone after becoming an adult?

For boys of my generation, learning the “knowledge you couldn’t get in class” through movies—especially adult tapes we sneakily got our hands on—was a shared secret. Often, our “learning space” was the street lined with screening houses in the city center, a secret base completely off the radar of our parents and teachers. Of course, aside from that “extra-curricular ‘adult’ knowledge,” I also began to cultivate a habit of watching films through the wide selection of bootleg screenings.

The largest screening house had six rooms. The first two rooms typically showed American action films, the third and fourth featured Hong Kong crime dramas (Hong Kong was in its golden age then), while the fifth and sixth played adult films from Hong Kong and the U.S. respectively.

At the magical end of 1994, the biggest hit on the screening house street was The Lion King. Even for pirated screenings, tickets were nearly impossible to get, and, for students surviving on meager pocket money like me, the prices were ridiculously high. A wealthier classmate treated me and two other guys to a midnight screening, which was prefaced with a zombie movie. I ended up finding that “bonus film” even more interesting and later discovered it was Braindead/Dead Alive (1992) by New Zealand’s now-famous director, Peter Jackson. That wealthy classmate ended up drawing too much attention to himself after flaunting his cash; a few days later, he was robbed and beaten by a gang.

As for most of the other classics that the god of cinema bestowed upon in 1994, I only managed to watch them years later. My high school library subscribed to two film journals, and every issue included a few highly readable film scripts. In a time without the internet and streaming media when films were only accessible through VCDs and DVDs, I could only read the stories of most films in those journals before ever having the chance to watch them. This gave me a space to imagine my own versions of the scenes and plots before finally seeing the films. Among the treasure trove of 1994 masterpieces, Pulp Fiction, Three Colors: White, Three Colors: Red, and Burnt by the Sun were all scripted in those journals. Oddly enough, the scripts that impressed me most were Mediterraneo and JFK, both from 1991.

In 1994, the Berlinale Golden Bear went to Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father, the Cannes Palme d’Or to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and the Venice Golden Lion was split between Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain and Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour. At the 1995 Oscars, which honored the previous year’s releases, Forrest Gump won Best Picture, and Burnt by the Sun won Best Foreign Language Film.

Years later, I entered university. One night, our film society—founded by some friends who later organized an anthropology film festival—screened Before the Rain and Vive L’Amour. Faced with these 1994 classics, a friend who later became a director himself made a furious comment: “Before the Rain is brilliant! Vive L’Amour is stupid!” From that night onward, I began to understand that a landmark film celebrated in the annals of cinema isn’t necessarily a great film for everyone.