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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mark Peploe obituary
Mark Peploe, who has died aged 82, enjoyed his greatest success as a screenwriter with an Oscar for The Last Emperor (1987). It was shared with the director, Bernardo Bertolucci, who was also Peploe's brother-in-law, having married Mark's elder sister, Clare, in 1978. The project drew on the memoir of the final emperor of China, Puyi, from the Qing dynasty, who was crowned in 1908 aged just three. He was exiled after the Beijing coup of 1924 and appointed by Japan as puppet emperor of Manchukuo until the end of the second world war; in later years he worked as a gardener in the botanical gardens in Beijing. The challenges for the biopic were twofold: to combine epic sweep with telling interpersonal and psychological detail, and to get the script past the Chinese censors so as to access filming locations within the Forbidden City. The producer, Jeremy Thomas, recalled how Bertolucci and Peploe's judicious handiwork made negotiating with the Chinese authorities surprisingly easy: 'It was less difficult than working with the western studio system. [The censors] made only minor script notes and references to change some of the names, then the official stamps went on and the door opened, and we came in and set to work.' The results achieved a rare mix of scale and substance: David Thomson called The Last Emperor 'a true epic but with an alertness to feelings as small and humble as a grasshopper'. It won four Golden Globes (including best drama motion picture) and three Bafta awards (including best film) before scooping nine Oscars, including best picture and best director. Collecting his best adapted screenplay award, Peploe joked: 'It's a great honour and hugely encouraging to anybody else who wants to write impossible movies.' Two similarly ambitious though flawed projects with Bertolucci, the Paul Bowles adaptation The Sheltering Sky (1990) and the Tibetan lama drama Little Buddha (1993), fared less well. Peploe came highly recommended from an Italian film-maker of an earlier generation, Michelangelo Antonioni – who had a seven-year personal and professional relationship with Clare from the mid-1960s. He had enlisted Mark to write The Passenger (1975), his tale of a jaded journalist (Jack Nicholson) who co-opts a dead arms dealer's identity. That project had its roots in two earlier Peploe assignments: his short story Fatal Exit, and his screenplay for Technically Sweet, an Amazon-set adaptation of Italo Calvino's L'Avventura di un Fotografo that Antonioni intended to direct before mounting costs made the producer Carlo Ponti anxious. With the film theorist Peter Wollen, Antonioni and Peploe radically reworked the thematic core of these projects for The Passenger, planting one foot firmly in the bloody realities of the Chadian civil war of 1965-79 even as they pushed onwards towards rigorous philosophical investigation. 'Who we are is the central issue – and it turns out nobody knows who anyone is,' Peploe told Time Out on the film's release. '[Nicholson's protagonist] David Locke wants to change, wants to care, but he doesn't even know who he is trying to become.' Although Antonioni was frustrated by studio cuts, the finished film hooked viewers searching for meaning amid the moral miasma of the Watergate years; the critic Andrew Sarris suggested that 'it may turn out to be the definitive spiritual testament of our times'. Yet after inheriting the rights from MGM on winning an unrelated legal dispute, Nicholson withheld The Passenger from distribution until the mid-2000s. On its 2006 reissue, Peter Bradshaw called it 'a classic of a difficult and alienating kind, but one that really does shimmer in the mind like a remembered dream.' Born in Nairobi, in Kenya, Mark was one of three children of Clotilde (nee Brewster), a painter, and Willy Peploe, a gallerist and son of the Scottish colourist Samuel Peploe. Clare and Mark's younger sister was Cloe. Relocated first to Florence, later to Belgravia in central London, the siblings had an upbringing that was decidedly classical: Clotilde, the daughter of the painter Elisabeth von Hildebrand, insisted on having no art in the house that postdated Proust. Clare maintained she and her brother gravitated to film because 'it was one medium that [her parents] knew nothing about'. From Downside school in Somerset, Mark went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study philosophy politics and economics. On graduation, he joined the Canadian producer and director Allan King as a researcher, working on films about arts figures for the BBC series Creative Persons (1968), although he grew frustrated with the documentary form: 'I thought that if you wrote the script, you would be able to control the movie more than I did.' He gained his first writing credit alongside Andrew Birkin on Jacques Demy's atypically realist adaptation of The Pied Piper (1972), featuring the singer Donovan in the title role; he was also a co-writer on the French veteran René Clément's final film La Babysitter (1975). Neither was a great success, but Peploe soon began directing his own work, earning a Bafta nomination for his 26-minute Samson and Delilah (1985), adapted, with the poet Frederick Siedel, from a DH Lawrence short story. Other writing included Clare's artworld romp High Season (1987), set on the Greek island of Rhodes. Yet nothing quite matched the impact of The Last Emperor. Of The Sheltering Sky, Roger Ebert sighed: 'I was left with the impression of my fingers closing on air.' Despite cameoing in the film, Bowles dismissed it, saying: 'The ending is idiotic and the rest is pretty bad.' The critics were tougher still on Little Buddha, circling around the casting of a kohl-eyed Keanu Reeves, though it fared better commercially. Peploe's feature directorial debut came with Afraid of the Dark (1991), an offbeam horror item about an 11-year-old voyeur (Ben Keyworth) peeping out at an adult world beset by a razor-wielding killer; drawing on Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, it featured a memorably nasty scene involving a dog and a knitting needle. Yet his textured Joseph Conrad adaptation Victory (1996), starring Willem Dafoe and Irène Jacob, ran into distribution issues, prompting Trevor Johnston of Time Out to ask: 'What's so terrible about it that it was consigned to three years on the shelf?' In the new millennium, Peploe served as a script consultant on Clare's lively Marivaux adaptation The Triumph of Love (2001) and as a mentor for the Guided Light scheme, run for aspiring film-makers by the Brighton-based Lighthouse organisation. Certain scripts remained unfilmed, notably Heaven and Hell, a Bertolucci passion project on the murderous composer Carlo Gesualdo, active around 1600, and action-thriller The Crew, from an Antonioni story. Peploe continued to tour the globe, though now as a guest of international film festivals. Asked at the 2008 event in Estoril, Portugal, where he sourced his best ideas, Peploe ventured: 'In cafes, watching the world go by.' He was married to the costume designer Louise Stjernsward, and their daughter, Lola, made a documentary film, Grandmother's Footsteps (2023), about Peploe family life, starting from Clotilde. After the marriage ended in separation in 1997, he had a 20-year relationship with Gina Marcou. Cloe died in 2009 and Clare in 2021. He is survived by his partner of the last seven years, the historian Alina Payne, and Lola. Mark Alexis More Peploe, screenwriter and director, born 24 February 1943; died 18 June 2025
South China Morning Post
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Interactive exhibition uses digital tools to show traditional Chinese patterns
Every week, Talking Points gives you a worksheet to practise your reading comprehension with exercises about the story we've written. Waves, blossoms and clouds are just a few of the patterns in traditional Chinese design. The Hong Kong Palace Museum is using technology to teach people about the meaning behind these patterns. The show is called 'The Ways in Patterns: An Immersive Digital Exhibition from the Palace Museum'. 'We hope to offer audiences a fresh lens for engaging with our heritage,' Louis Ng said. He is the Hong Kong Palace Museum's director. Museums usually show physical artefacts. But this one presents visitors with digital versions of traditional designs. It uses modern tools to show the patterns of the old architecture, ceramics and textiles in Beijing's Palace Museum. This museum is in the Forbidden City. China's leading fashion designer Guo Pei celebrated at Hong Kong's M+ museum Mixing modern and old This exhibition will run until October 13. It is the first time the Hong Kong Palace Museum and Beijing's Palace Museum have worked together on a multimedia gallery. Three-dimensional projections of the designs come alive as they move around each display. Artificial intelligence also helped find hidden links between the patterns in different artefacts. 'Many [artefacts] have already been digitised in high resolution, a process that took three years,' Ng said. 'Combining technology with our cultural and artistic heritage has become a key goal.' Ng hopes that technology can make learning about traditional culture more interesting for young people. This is especially important because 78 per cent of the museum's visitors are under the age of 45. 'We hope this exhibition will help the younger generation better understand China's outstanding traditional culture and encourage them to participate more actively in its preservation and innovation,' he said. In the Patterns and Fashion section, flowers are projected onto hanging curtains. Photo: Eugene Lee What you should see Dragons, peaches and bats are elements you can see throughout the exhibition. These motifs have long been part of traditional Chinese art. They represent long life, wealth and good luck. The exhibition also dives into the wonders of nature in Chinese art. It shows the beauty of the stars, flowers, birds and even mythical creatures like the phoenix and dragon. These patterns express a focus on beauty, harmony and joy. Ng said these designs could also be found across other parts of the museum. They can be seen in ceramics, calligraphy and paintings. He hopes that the digital exhibition allows audiences to engage with Chinese culture in a different way. 'Visitors won't just find it immersive, interactive and fun,' he said. 'They'll also walk away with a deeper appreciation of the artistic excellence found in the decorative motifs of the Palace Museum's collections.' In the fourth unit of the exhibition, visitors can look up at virtual versions of some caisson ceilings in Beijing's Palace Museum. These include the ceilings in the Hall of Supreme Harmony and the Pavilion of One Thousand Autumns. Another section of the show recreates the window grilles of the Forbidden City. The display projects shapes and shadows that change with the seasons. Near the end of the exhibition, visitors can create their own digital swimming fish. Their drawings can be instantly projected onto the wall. Ng had one final point of advice: don't just look at the exhibition. Use all of your senses to explore the digital art. Use your whole body to learn about these cultural treasures. Experience the changing seasons in the Forbidden City. Photo: Eugene Lee To test your understanding of this story, download our printable worksheet or answer the questions in the quiz below.
South China Morning Post
05-06-2025
- General
- South China Morning Post
Why China youth find special spots to cry for stress relief such as Forbidden City, courthouses
A growing number of young Chinese adults in search of emotional release are taking things to a new geographical level. Advertisement They have turned to designated so-called City Cry spots such as courthouses, psychiatric hospitals, and even tourist landmarks like the Forbidden City, to freely weep in public. Young Chinese people are increasingly overwhelmed by work stress, rising unemployment, economic uncertainty, and a growing sense of urban fatigue, prompting many to seek emotional release. Experienced 'crying veterans' have begun sharing lesser-known but surprisingly effective places to cry. The Forbidden City in Beijing is considered a good place to cry because of its 'poetic' atmosphere. Photo: Shutterstock Some recommend courthouse entrances and cemeteries, while others choose Peking University Sixth Hospital, a well-known psychiatric facility.
South China Morning Post
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong Palace Museum holds first fully digital show on Forbidden City
The Hong Kong Palace Museum has launched its first entirely digital show, creating reimagined versions of its Beijing sister site's exhibits, and a beloved pet cat, to use in interactive displays packed with visual effects. The show includes projections of moving images of the Forbidden City icons such as dragons, phoenixes, lotus flowers, peaches, egrets and ocean waves – all rendered at immense scale for visitors to enjoy. The event, titled 'The Ways in Patterns: An Immersive Digital Exhibition from the Palace Museum', is being held in the West Kowloon Cultural District and uses technology to refashion a wide array of motifs and designs used in the former royal residence's architecture, ceramics and embroidered textiles. 'This is our first entirely digital show,' Maggie Cheng, the Hong Kong Palace Museum's head designer, said. Technology took the centre stage for this exhibition, contrasting with past displays that focused on highlighting historical artefacts, she added. She noted that the museum's sister site in Beijing had a collection comprising 1.86 million pieces, with only 1 per cent of them ever going on display at any one time for an exhibition.
Express Tribune
12-04-2025
- Climate
- Express Tribune
Flights canceled, millions ordered to stay indoors as severe winds batter China
Chinese emergency team members cut off tree branches following strong winds that damaged a power pole in Beijing. PHOTO: REUTERS Listen to article Hundreds of flights were grounded, parks closed, and millions urged to stay indoors as strong winds swept across northern China, with Beijing issuing its second-highest gale alert for the first time in a decade. Driven by a cold vortex from neighbouring Mongolia, gusts toppled trees and crushed vehicles across the capital, prompting authorities to warn the city's 22 million residents to avoid non-essential travel. Meteorologists warned that wind speeds could break April records dating back to 1951. As of Saturday afternoon, Beijing Capital and Daxing international airports had cancelled 693 flights. Severe weather conditions also impacted other regions, leading to further flight and train cancellations nationwide. In parts of northern and coastal China, wind speeds reached up to 148 km/h (92 mph)—the strongest recorded in over 75 years. The extreme weather also brought rare April snowfalls in Inner Mongolia and hailstorms in the south. In Beijing, iconic landmarks such as the Forbidden City, Summer Palace, and Temple of Heaven were closed to the public, while Universal Studios suspended operations until at least Sunday. Outdoor sporting events, including football matches and a high-profile half-marathon featuring humanoid robots, were also cancelled. Online, residents expressed concern for delivery workers operating in the treacherous conditions. 'In weather like this, we can choose not to order delivery – it's too hard for them,' one user wrote on Weibo. Meanwhile, sandstorms stretching from Inner Mongolia to the Yangtze River region disrupted road travel in at least eight provinces, with state media warning Shanghai would also be affected between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. China's dry northern regions, flanked by the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts, are particularly prone to high winds and sandstorms due to their arid landscapes, surrounded by grasslands, mountains, and forests. Authorities continue to monitor the weather system, with warnings of further disruption as the cold front moves eastward.
