IN THE DARK REVIEWS

A chronicle of scholar's revival of Chinese culture

Kirk Boxleitner | Nov 02, 20230

Courtesy photo count

Port Townsend's Bill Porter, aka "Red Pine," translator of historic Chinese Buddhists and Taoists, stars in director Ward Serrill's "Dancing with the Dead: Red Pine and the Art of Translation," now playing at the Rose Theatre in Port Townsend.

I saw "The Bowmakers," by director Ward Serrill and producer Rocky Freidman, as part of the 2019 Port Townsend Film Festival, back when Freidman still co-owned the Rose Theatre.

Even as one of 15 films I saw that weekend, "The Bowmakers" stood out for Serrill's deft weaving of multiple nations' cultural histories, its detailed view of workpeople's processes and its idiosyncratic first-person biographies.

I shouldn't be surprised to find that same alchemy in Serrill's follow-up collaboration with Freidman, "Dancing with the Dead: Red Pine and the Art of Translation," a brisk and contemplative 84-minute profile of Bill Porter, also of Port Townsend, who's translated the poems and teachings of historic Chinese Buddhists and Taoists under the pen name of "Red Pine."

The film's two-night premiere Oct. 27 and 28 again at Port Townsend's Rose Theatre emulated "The Bowmakers" by taking advantage of a fascinating subject, and it drew surprising (and perhaps unintended) parallels between Porter, a Western autodidact with a past that's amusing and harrowing, and Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha himself.

Like most traditional accounts of the Buddha's life, Porter was raised in spiritually impoverished wealth, and like many who suffer trauma at an early age, Porter sought out the pleasures of an untroubled existence, to the point he was relieved by the dissolution of his family's wealth.

Porter's yearning for freedom from burdens and trite trappings was complicated by the recurring practical obligations of his life, from an undistinguished stint in the military, to a misdirected course of higher education, which culminated in him following his discovery of Buddhism to its source in Eastern Asia.

Although Porter spent several years as a virtual hermit in Chinese Buddhist monasteries, it seemed to have sharpened his edge as a raconteur. He holds forth with the confidence, eloquence and honed comedic pitch of Richard Harris during his appearances on "The Dick Cavett Show."

As entertaining as Porter's tales of his escapades can be - the man balanced full days of studious, meditative translation with lively, social nights of celebration, even turning to smuggling to prove to his future wife's parents that he could provide for her - Serrill does more than cede the floor of his film to his subject.

Seattle's Drew Christie provides simplified animation sequences whose playful personalities mirror Porter's own to compensate for the lack of period photos or film footage available from the man's past. Redmond's Spring Cheng, who emigrated to America from China 30 years ago, contributes her talent for furnishing musical accompaniments for historic Chinese poetry.

Porter is hardly one of the "hobbits working in man-caves," whom Serrill profiled in "The Bowmakers." The translation of ancient texts doesn't lend itself to dynamic cinematic visuals, so it's a testament to the filmmaking skills of Serrill, and the compelling experiences and insights of Porter, that "Dancing with the Dead" captivated my attention as effortlessly as the most pleasant and meandering dinner-table conversation.

It's especially heartening to witness how the popularity of Porter's translation work among the Chinese people led him to return to the Chinese countryside, this time accompanied by cameras, so he could make contact with China's modern Buddhist hermits, among whom his elevated fame had preceded him.

By the turn of the millennium, Porter was teaching Buddhism and Taoism to others, and the respect (and consumer success) with which his scholarship and multimedia works have been met by the majority of Chinese people - including a TV scene devoted to discussing his books, on what Porter described as the Chinese equivalent of "Sex and the City" - has allowed him to achieve perhaps the most improbable of dreams for a career academic when he paid off his financial debts nearly a decade ago.

Broader distribution of "Dancing with the Dead" is being worked out, but if you're on the Olympic Peninsula, it's worth checking out showings at the Rose Theatre.

I wish I could offer as positive a recommendation for the other film I caught this weekend. Production company Blumhouse's adaptation of the "Five Nights at Freddy's" video game franchise that my friends' kids love so much would seem to have the ingredients for an creepy horror flick – what's actually playing in theaters, and on the Peacock streaming service, falls far short of its source material.

Josh Hutcherson does the best he can at playing a protagonist whose sloppy, first-draft writing renders him inadvertently unsympathetic, while former live-action "Shaggy" Matthew Lillard throws himself into this grim-and-gritty variation of the "Scooby Doo" formula with all the aplomb that genre fans have come to expect from him.

In spite of capturing the uncanny valley-triggering aesthetic of the video games, whose premise amounts to, "What if a Chuck E. Cheese-style restaurant was created by a sadistic engineer like Jigsaw from the 'Saw' series?" The gruesomely animatronic stars of the show feel neutered by their "twist" backstory, which had the benefit of being doled out over multiple installments of the video games, but which is far too carelessly info-dumped in the middle of this film's barely sketched-out plot.

Kids, I sympathize. I remember my own disappointment when Golan-Globus' 1987 live-action film adaptation of "Masters of the Universe" failed to resemble the He-Man I'd watched in weekday afternoon cartoons. I've come to appreciate Frank Langella's performance as Skeletor, but I'm afraid "Five Nights at Freddy's" fans will find little to enjoy in this film, even decades later.