The Formation of Chinese Art Cinema

1990–2003

Li Yang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319972107
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319972114
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

© The Author(s) 2018

Li YangThe Formation of Chinese Art Cinemahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97211-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Li Yang¹

(1)

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures Lafayette College, Easton, PA, USA

Li Yang

End Abstract

In the winter of 2007, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke (b. 1970) insisted on opening his Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner Still Life (2006) on the same day as the domestic debut of Curse of the Golden Flower , directed by famed director Zhang Yimou (b. 1950). Still Life tells the story of two unrelated individuals in a small city by the Yangtze River, a place radically transformed by the government’s Three Gorges Dam project. Curse of the Golden Flower is a star-studded sumptuous costume drama punctuated by gravity-defying martial arts sequences. The result was not difficult to predict: Curse of the Golden Flower became the top grossing Chinese film to date, while Jia’s Still Life brought in only a meager domestic box-office share. What the box-office numbers failed to show was the symbolic gesture of a young art film director, openly challenging a towering figure in the Chinese film industry, who himself had started out as a renegade art film director two decades earlier. The Chinese media was quick to pounce on this rare off-screen drama with extensive coverage. For years, Chinese art cinema remained a form of subculture that existed primarily in the international film festival circuit and was celebrated by just a handful of cinephiles feeding on pirated videos and DVDs. Despite the suspicion of self-marketing, Jia Zhangke’s public challenge to Zhang Yimou, first and foremost, presented Chinese art film to the mainstream media. More than just a passing tabloid altercation, Jia Zhangke’s suicidal challenge testified to the growing power and ambition of Chinese art cinema, which sprouted in the mid-1980s and started to develop in earnest since the 1990s.

For much of the Chinese film history, art film as a genre or school has remained underdeveloped. Film was introduced as a commercial medium in China, just as in many other countries, at the turn of the twentieth century. In the 1920s commercial filmmaking dominated film production. In the 1930s, the Chinese film industry was gradually subsumed by the national crisis and employed for patriotic mobilization against Japanese invasion. When European art cinema took shape after World War II (WWII), China was in the throes of the Civil War (1945–1949) and soon succumbed to the mass-line cultural policies mandated by the Socialist regime established in 1949. As Mao Zedong (1893–1976) clearly stipulated, literature and art should be “subordinate to politics.”¹ The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) carried this Leftist cultural policy to the extreme, turning film into “the main conveyor of a new, mass culture” and rendering any individual artistic aspiration impossible.² Indeed, because of frequent national crises, prolonged warfare, and authoritarian rule, there was hardly any room for a film practice that championed artistic autonomy and targeted selected audiences to grow. While there is no lack of artistically worthy individual films in China’s long filmmaking history, the kind of art film movement that boldly advocates the artistic properties of films, or helps art films grow into a recognizable film category , had never occurred in China prior to the Reform Era (1978–present).

Since the late 1970s, the Chinese art cinema has experienced three developmental stages and witnessed two major art waves, which were commonly known as the Fifth and Sixth Generation cinema. The first art wave initiated the first developmental stage in the mid-1980s. Lasting about a decade by the long account , the first art wave rationalized the individual artistic pursuit and cultivated a trailblazing presence in international film festivals. The second art wave, which was ignited by independent production at the beginning of the 1990s, marked the start of the second developmental stage and eventually helped to solidify China’s art cinema. It continued into the third developmental stage after 2002/2003 in the new millennium in a radically transformed industrial environment. Nevertheless, the aesthetic parameters of artistic filmmaking did not depart far from those set in the 1990s. Together, the two art waves produced some of the most significant films in Chinese film history as well as some of the highest-profile Chinese directors known to the world. In addition, the numerous awards these films won at various international film festivals in the last three decades, including Berlin , Venice, and Cannes ,³ also testify to the importance of Chinese art films to the contemporary international art cinema.

How did Chinese art film come into being? What were the enabling social and industrial conditions? What were the stylistic characteristics of these art films? These are fundamental questions that this study seeks to answer. I argue that the formation of art cinema in Mainland China, or the People’s Republic of China (PRC), was not enabled by democratic liberalism, which Steve Neale cited as one of the factors fostering the post–WWII “efflorescence of Art Cinema” in Western Europe,⁴ and which many may believe intuitively. The two Chinese art waves started before the Chinese film industry underwent the most substantial measures of decentralization and commercialization. Furthermore, the Chinese film industry is never entirely free from governmental regulation and interference, despite significant changes in the perceived function of the film medium and the philosophy of management over time. I contend that the Chinese phenomenon was created by the particular film industrial development in the 1990s, in which the system was transitioning from Socialist propaganda into a commercialized entity. It was exactly the conflicts between the old and new during the 1990s’ industrial transformation that allowed Chinese art film to grow but denied its legitimacy. This paradoxical process, underpinned by the changing relationships among the governmental regulating body, filmmakers, and audiences, unwittingly helped to shape Chinese art film’s alternative character, both institutionally and aesthetically. Thus, it was the second art wave in the 1990s that fundamentally defined Chinese art cinema. And it is also this book’s main subject of investigation.

We can compare this period to the formative years of a person, which one enters as a child and exits as an adult. The childhood is essential in preparing the physical form and intellect, and one continues to mature in adulthood. However, it is during the formative years that one acquires definitive physical and psychological traits. Essentially, The Formation of Chinese Art Cinema is an account of coming of age for Chinese art cinema, or Zhangda chengren, as Lu Xuechang’s 1997 Sixth Generation film is aptly entitled. The period of focus, from the release of the first Sixth Generation film Mama in 1990 to 2003 , the year in which the Film Bureau officially recognized a group of key “underground” filmmakers through a formal meeting,⁵ is referred as “the 1990s” in this study. By exploring the social and industrial mechanisms that were conducive to the emergence of the 1990s art wave and its representative styles, The Formation of Chinese Art Cinema demonstrates why the second art wave holds the key to understanding Chinese art cinema.

The study of Chinese art cinema will never just concern the pursuit of aestheticism by several auteurs, because the ascendance of art cinema was accompanied by the formation of a new categorization method for all Chinese films, of which art film is one integral part. Under the Socialist mass-line cultural policies, all Chinese films performed political functions and served the “masses.” The films were classified by the class elements of protagonists and the primary setting of the film (e.g. films about workers and films about the countryside, etc.). In less than 20 years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the three all-encompassing film categories became widely accepted: leitmotif (propaganda) film, entertainment (commercial) film, and art film by the start of the 1990s.⁶ This purpose-driven classification differs significantly from the standards used in the Socialist system. More importantly, films with explicit political missions (i.e. leitmotif films) have been relegated to but one of the three categories , while they were once the main substance of Socialist cinema. Seen in this light, the emergence of Chinese art cinema was necessarily enabled by the overall restructuring of Chinese film production and consumption and simultaneous formation of other film categories . The discussion of art film thus entails the explication of power relations among individuals, film studios, and the government. In other words, the history of Chinese art cinema could not be written without carefully examining the evolving dynamics of the entire Chinese film system.

Furthermore, such an account of the industry transformation will to a great extent illustrate the social dynamics of the Post-Socialist Chinese society as a whole. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Institutions
• Part II. Aesthetics
• Back Matter