An architect of modern Chinese cinema

Modern Chinese cinema had attracted worldwide attention thanks to the efforts of such filmmakers as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Jia Zhangke. In this column, I wish to focus on a Chinese filmmaker who has played a seminal role in the creation of what we generally refer to as modern Chinese cinema.

The name of the filmmaker is Chen Kaige ( I had the opportunity to meet him when he came to Hawaii some years ago to introduce his path-breaking film Yellow Earth).His name is perhaps more closely connected to the rise of the new Chinese cinema than that of any other filmmaker.

Fifth Generation

Chen Kaige belongs to the group of filmmakers generally identified as the Fifth Generation. It refers to the film directors who were trained at the Beijing film academy. They came into prominence after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.The two films One and Eight by Zhang Junzhao and Yellow Earth by Chen Kaige served to give a profile to the shapes of desires and lines of ambition of the Fifth Generation of filmmakers.

Clearly, in terms of theme, style and vision, they consciously chose to tread a path that was significantly different from the one that was endorsed by the officialdom.

Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth produced in 1984 was instrumental in ushering in the new phase of Chinese cinema. Many of the most perceptive commentators on the cinema of china are united in their conviction that this film can be regarded as the first major work by a film director belonging to what is popularly referred to as the Fifth Generation of filmmakers in China.

These new directors were able to change the focus of the cinematic discourse, bring about a re-formulation of the film language and syntax and underline a newer poetics of cinema. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that Chen’s Yellow Earth has attained the status of an inescapable reference point for explorations into modern Chinese cinema.

Chen Kaige was born Chen Aige in Beijing on August 12, 1952. His father was a well-known filmmaker himself. When Chen Kaige was 15 years old, the Cultural Revolution began to gather momentum. He was sent down to Yunnan province; where he was enlisted in the task of clearing the jungle for expansion of a rubber plantation.

Three years later, he enlisted in the peoples’ liberation army. He resigned from the army in 1975 and returned to Beijing. He secured a job in the Beijing film processing laboratory which was the central film processing institution in the country. In 1978 he was able to gain admission to the famed Beijing Film Academy and graduated, having distinguished himself there, four years later.

First film

Chen Kaige made his first film Farewell to Yesterday in 1980, and later worked in the capacity of an assistant director for the children’s film Brother’s Echo. In 1984 he made Yellow Earth which won for him as well as modern Chinese cinema great international acclaim.

He has since gone on to make such films as The Big Parade, King of the Children, Life on a String, Farewell to My Concubine, Temptress Moon, Sacrifice, and The Promise.

Yellow Earth, the film that made him internationally famous, deals with a simple story. A soldier arrives in a mountain village with the objective of gathering folk-songs. In the remote village, he lives in a small house where a young woman is married to an old man to whom she was betrothed in infancy.

The soldier tells her how women are given due recognition under the communist regime in the capital, Yan’an. The young woman looks towards a bright future full of hope. She sets out in search of the city, which sees as a place of promise, where women are accorded freedom and is accidentally drowned.

The director creates a moving cinematic experience out of this simple story, using his indubitable cinematic imagination to good effect. The way he pays close attention to framing, exquisite visual images, and imaginative use of sound and music so as to fashion a memorable filmic experience adds to the achieved effect..

What the film does is to produce a complex sense of personal and social identity. In this effort, it has to be noted, that the cameraman Zhang Yimou, who later gained international fame as a highly gifted director, made a distinctive contribution. He was able to present human beings against vast landscapes and rolling hills that were deeply reminiscent of traditional Chinese paintings.

Yellow Earth is a film replete with symbolic meaning and allegorical energy; the interaction between human beings and nature, past and present, culture and politics, masculine and feminine desires, propaganda and reality is at the centre of the experience reconfigured in this film.

Yellow Earth was shown at the Hong Kong international film festival, and many who saw the film were convinced that it signified the arrival of the new Chinese cinema. The word spread very rapidly and this film went on to garner critical accolades at film festivals in many parts of the world. Chen Kaige clearly jettisoned the imperatives of socialist realism that had influenced Chinese cinema in powerful ways up until then. It was his ambition to make a film that focused on narration through images and communal self-reflection.

Despite the fact that Yellow Earth had gained widespread fame as a work of cinematic art, it did not fare well at the domestic box-office. In addition, the filmmaker had to confront the hostilities unleashed by the officialdom in Beijing. Some of the members of the officialdom saw it as an unfaltering portrait of china that depicted its backwardness rather than growth.

In 1986, Chen made his next film that was titled The Big Parade. Although this film, in my judgement, was not artistically accomplished as his earlier work, it extended the preoccupations of Yellow earth while seeking to move in a direction different from the one charted buy it. The Big Parade can be regarded as a psychological examination of the soldiers in the peoples’ liberation army.

In this film, a in his earlier work, Chen has selected distinctive situation to make valid observations on the larger society which makes such situations feasible. He focuses on the propulsive power of images and framing to forward his narrative – a feature we discerned in yellow wart – with great deftness.

The sound plays even a more compelling role. Despite similarities yellow earth and the big parade differ in significant ways. The former is situated in the past and shines a light on women’s issues while the latter is concerned with contemporary society and male values.

The Big Parade focuses on a group of army volunteers who are making arrangements for the national day parade. Although the director concentrates on six characters ranging from a callow youth to a disillusioned intellectual, no single character emerges into a position of dominance. The stress is on group mentality and the nexus of relations that constitute the collectivity.

There is a strong impulse animating the film that seeks to interrogate accepted beliefs and privileged norms. Powerful and memorable images, throughout the film, are juxtaposed with off-screen voices. As the British critic Tony Rayns pointed out, visual certainties are undermined by aural uncertainties, and this disjunction helps to push the film into a symbolic register.’

As with Yellow earth, the big parade raises issues that are vitally connected to th forward movement of Chinese society. Here the focus is on ideas of Chinese nationhood, patriotism, citizenship and s unflinching commitment to the progress of society. There is tentativeness, a provisionality that marks the film as the filmmaker labours to establish his personal signature through experimentations in theme and visual syntax. The outward subject of the Big Parade is the army while the real subject can be described as the problem of the Chinese nation and its handing of conflicting demands.

In 1987 Chen Kaige released his next film king of the children. This is indeed a work pervaded by a sense of anguish which manifests the possibilities of examining history in allegorical registers. Lao Gan, the protagonist of the film, us sent to a school in Yunnan province where the students are extremely poor and lead miserable lives. He is a deeply committed teacher who regards the welfare of his students as his primary concern. He has understood the counter-productive implications of learning by rote, which was the current educational practice, and is bent on stimulating the creative and critical faculties of his students. Clearly, his methods of teaching are not the ones approved by the officialdom and consequently he is dismissed.

Indictment

Chen Kaige takes this simple story and expands into a visually moving and allegorical indictment of the Cultural Revolution. As the filmmaker himself has said he did not want to represent directly the violent social upheavals that occur during the Cultural Revolution.

Instead, he summoned the power of cinema to create the oppressive atmosphere prevalent at the time. According to him, the memorable images of the forest, the fog, and the sound of trees being felled are ‘reflections of China during that period of time. King of Children is based on a novel of the same title by Ah Cheng; however, the director has sought to re-interpret it visually so as to intensify its power. He has added new characters. For example, the mute cowherd who serves to define the character and concerns of Lao Gan is not found in the original novel. Chen Kaige, in king of the children, is able to envelope the filmic experience in a mystic aura through his innovative use of sight and sound to create a many-sided narrative that serves to allegorise the Cultural Revolution.

Life on a String made in 1991, Chen’s most philosophical film, followed King of the Children. This film occupies an artistic space in between aesthetic wonder and the sublime; the flow of mages and the soundtrack tremble on the edge of new insights. Life on a String can be characterised as a haunting parable animated by memorable images. A blind boy is told that he will almost certainly gain his eye sight if he dedicates his entire lie to the practice of music.

Years have gone by, and that boy is now a blind old man who s convinced that music opens a pathway to superior knowledge and wisdom. He has a disciple who however considers music to be a pleasurable experience that aids in savoring the present moment. They are caught in the contradictory pulls of the desire for wisdom and the impulse to enjoy the world.

The older musician, it is apparent, harbors an unshakable faith in the traditional belief that his blindness could be cured by means of a prescription secretly kept in the Chinese harp. He will be granted permission to try this prescription only if he wears out a thousand harp strings. After the one thousandth string is broken, the musician recovers from the harp a sheet of paper.

Unfortunately for him, this paper turns out to be blank. The experience contained in this film is very different from experiences communicated through other films. It focuses on the redemptive power of art and the unceasing human quest for spiritual values. Chen Kaige himself made the following observation about this film.

‘This film deals with human ideals and hopes. The old master lives with spiritual strength because of his objective in obtaining the secret cure to his blindness. Although he is briefly disappointed to find the prescription is nothing more than the blank sheet of paper, the old man has realised he has been able to grow spiritually strong simply because of that hope.’

Despite Chen’s best intentions, the film proved to be a failure both critically and commercially. There was considerable visual power pulsing through the film, but it was not enough to make the experience cogent and enticing.

In his next film, Farewell to My Concubine, Chen Kaige sought to present a different kind of cinematic experience. It is a masterful representation in cinematic form of the shapes of human desire. It won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes film festival and received the international film critics prize for ‘its incisive analysis of the political and cultural history of china and for its brilliant combination of the spectacular and the initial,’ farewell to my concubine was both a box office hit and critical success. This film, in many ways, represents Chen’s desire to strike out in new directions. He sought to combine, with a large measure of success, the essence of artistic and popular traditions of Chinese filmmaking. He may have been helped in this effort by the work of his former colleague Zhang Yimou who had already displayed the viability of this cinematic blending.

This film is based on a highly popular novel that narrates the relationship between two Peking opera stars. It is a friendship charted over an extended period of time – their boyhood, the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, and their olden years. Farewell to My Concubine is a three-hour epic that is visually brilliant and carries the audiences on a wave of exuberant exoticism.

The relationship between the two opera stars is complex and multi-faceted and it is depicted against a backdrop of changing personal and social fortunes. As I stated earlier, Farewell to My Concubine was both a critical and commercial success; however, there were certain commentators who felt that Chen had given up on done of his early refreshing idealism and heading down a wrong path in terms of art. They contend that this is a highly conventional film with a clear eye towards commercial acceptability. It displays very little of the stylistic audacity that marked his earlier work.

Chris Berry, a friend of mine and a perceptive critic of Chinese made the following observation on this film. ’Although farewell to my concubine may resuscitate Chen’s career and make him a bankable director, it indicates dangerous thematic and stylistic self-limitation. Since leaving China for New York some years ago, his work has tended towards increasingly abstract re-workings of well-known themes.

The perils of blind faith, historical repetition from one Chinese generation to another, and bad faith among men as symbols of china’s cultural condition with the Cultural Revolution as dominant trope have been reworked in one Chen Kaige film after another. Distant from contemporary china and showing absolutely no sign of making any connection with the culture of his adopted home, he is in danger of being as condemned to repetition and historical abstraction as he believes china to be. Is this price worth paying’ many critics, who once admired Chen’s films, seem to endorse this assessment.

The next film by Chen Kaige was called Temptress moon, and was in spirit closer to farewell my concubine than to his earlier films. It is an elegantly visual film and the camerawork is memorable; however, the plot line is convoluted and the narrative energy falters. The narrative discourse is constructed around the character of Zhongliang played by the late Hong Kong actor Leslie Cheung. Who in spent his childhood in a country estate of the decadent pang family.

His playmate at the estate was Ruyi; she is played by the celebrated Chinese actress Gong Li. These two characters are surrounded by many others who represent the progressive decadence, the seductive power of opium and the hunger for power, all leading to the inevitable erasure of human values. It is indeed true that Temptress Moon draws on some of Chen’s clearly established strengths and virtues as a film director; however, this film does not represent an advance on his earlier work as a creation of cinematic art.

At this pint, many discerning film critics who were following Chen Kaige’s career with great interest were asking the question whether he would prefer to continue with the line of innovative work manifested in his earlier work, or whether he would decode to explore the kinds of themes and styles found in works such as the farewell to my concubine no one, to be sure, doubted that Chen had already contributed significantly to the rise and growth of modern Chinese cinema.

Driven by a powerful moral imagination and visual interest, Chen Kaige proposed new standards of filmmaking in china. the setting of his f early film yellow earth bears ample testimony to his indubitable skill as a filmmaker.

It is important to bear in mind the fact that the yellow earth and the yellow river basin were the heartland of both the Chinese revolution and the Chinese civilisation itself. Interestingly, Chen Kaige’s decision to select a setting rooted in that earth and in the vicinity of Yan’an, the headquarters of the Chinese communist party during the Chinese civil war and the war of resistance to Japan allows him the opportunity t highlight the role of the communist party while establishing important links to the distant and rich past of China.

In 1999, Chen Kaige made an epic historical film titled The Emperor and the Assassin. It centers on the life and times of the legendary king of Qin and the reluctant assassin who is given the task of killing him. The director in this film has sought to recreate the past in vivid colors and transport the viewer to a strange, but in a curious way, familiar world.

This film, in my judgement, failed to live up to expectations as Chen Kaige was attempting to move simultaneously in different directions. His flair for visual communication is undoubtedly evident in the Emperor and the Assassin, but the different parts of the film do not coalesce to form a cogent unity and construct a thoughtful filmic experience.

Three years later Chen Kaige made a film in English called Killing Me softly. It was both a commercial and critical failure. The film deals with the unfortunate consequences that follow when a young woman decides to abandon her loving relationship with her boy friend and pursue a life of sexual adventure with a mysterious celebrity mountaineer. Killing Me softly, in some ways, is reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Suspicion in which a wife wonders whether her husband is a murderer. This film was a failure partly because there was a mis-match between Chen Kaige’s interests and talents and the intent of the narrative pursued in it.

In the same year, Chen Kaige made a film titled Together. It is a film that explores the intimate relationship between a violinist and his father. Xiaochun started playing the violin from the day he could hold it. Now at the age of thirteen he has emerged as a child prodigy.

His father, who earns his living as a chef, has high hopes for his son. The father and son move to Beijing to further his musical abilities, and what happens to him there forms the core of the narrative discourse. This is, to be sure, not one of Chen’s strongest films; however, it displays some of his characteristic strengths.

In 2006 Chen made a film called The Promise. It tells a story of love and passion against a backdrop of war and social turbulence. The film narrates the story of a beautiful and mysterious princess who becomes the object of desire of three men – a powerful duke, a brave general and a lowly slave.

There is an element of fantasy that marks this film. Chen Kaige has always been torn between the demands of commercial imperatives and artistic desires, and this film, in many ways, signals his increasing embrace o commercial values. This is, in my judgement, not one of his most memorable films. It seems to me that he has made too many compromises with the demands of the box-office.

In 2010 Chen Kaige directed a film titled Sacrifice which succeeding in generating a great deal of interest among movie-goers. It is a re-creation of a well-known play called The Orphan of Zhao. The film was a commercial success, and some film commentators contended that it signified the return of Chen to his true strengths.

It tells the story of a doctor who in order to save the only child of the Zhao family whose entire membership had been massacred by a minister sacrifices his own son and seeks vengeance on the minister. It is the way in which the director has been able to convert this into a visually interesting experience that generated so much interest among audiences both inside and outside China.

To be sure, Chen Kaige’s career as a filmmaker has had its ups and downs. However, as a student of Asian cinema, it is his early phase as a filmmaker that I find more compelling because it is so vitally connected to the birth of modern Chinese cinema.

It is indubitably true that Chen Kaige, along with other film directors associated with the so-called fifth generation ushered in the new wave in Chinese cinema. It needs to be remembered that a decisive emphasis on the visual image as a facilitator of narrative, the use of unconventional camera movements, the avoidance of melodrama. jettisoning didacticism, minimalist acting, the studied contrast between light and shade, turning his back excessive theatricalisation, all contributed significantly to the rise of a new style of filmmaking in China and the forging of a new syntax for Chinese cinema.

It has to be conceded that not all critics of Chinese cinema were equally enthusiastic about these new innovations that Chen Kaige and others like him had introduced to Chinese film culture. It is evident that the officialdom in china viewed Chen’s work with an unconcealed anxiety and cynicism. Some of his films went through the troubling process of being repeatedly banned and unbanned.

Others were the object of fierce criticism and censorious repudiation in the state-run media. Clearly, his relationship with the czars of Chinese cinema was fraught and full of disabling tension and antagonism.

Chen Kaige’s films, predictably enough, have cleared space for informed discussions on modern Chinese cinema. He desire to inaugurate a cinema that departs appreciably from the customary theatrical and overtly socialist realistic works that dominated the Chinese screen has been rightly highlighted. His stress on vivid images, careful compositions, deft use of the soundtrack, the imaginative intersections of personal biography and social history, and his move to fashion cinema into an integral part of the Chinese public sphere have also been topics for elaborate discussions.

Criticisms

Similarly, his propensity ti draw on classical Chinese aesthetics, his direct and oblique criticisms of the excesses of the cultural revolution, his excursions into metaphysical themes, as well as his inclination to call attention to the plight of others – social outcasts, failures, mute children, unsophisticated peasants – have received extensive scholarly exegesis.

Chen Kaige is a dedicated, innovative and resolute filmmaker who displays a fine visual sense supported by a speculative mind. It can be said that reflexivity is the ruling virtue and cherished value in his films; for him, cinema is a site which allows us to reflect on the contradictions and uncertainties of life.

Unlike in the work of most other Chinese film directors, in Chen’s films, abstract speculation and human specificity come together in vivid images. At times, one might be left with the uneasy feeling that he projects a pessimism; this is, to my mind, not an accurate reading of his intentions.

This feeling of pessimism is perceived by some because he is concerned about a society divided against itself and turning its back on its deepest and most nurturing strengths and resources.

Yet, beneath it all, one perceives a sense of wonder at being alive in the world, a celebration of freedom in the flow of images, an invigorating undercurrent of hope and social renewal a human solidarity.

The yearning for human freedom and justice is a guiding passion. It is important to bear in mind the fact that the society he most values is the society we have as yet failed to bring into life, but one which he feels is within our grasp.

Chen Kaige, as a filmmaker, like most other film directors, has had his ups and downs; but no one would want to deny the act that he is a filmmaker who merits serious study. When we examine the rise of modern Chinese cinema, the early works of Chen are highly significant. That is why we can justifiably describe as a architect of modern Chinese cinema.