Published: December 14 2007 23:56 | Last updated: December 14 2007 23:56
There is a time-honoured fable in film festival folklore. A ghostly figure in a Chinese robe is said to go about, collecting all the satirical jokes and sayings about the Chinese film industry and putting them in a bag to wait upon the day when he or she can burn them. This bonfire of the aphorisms will mark the time when Chinese film has come of age and liberty, and state censorship no longer exists in the land of Kubla and Confucius.
We festivalgoers all know these gags. “The most successful Chinese director is the one who can’t get a job.” (Meaning, if you triumph at Cannes or Venice you’ll probably be banned in Beijing.) “The most crowded place in China is the wilderness.” “There is an old Chinese proverb...but it’s been banned by the censors.”
We know, too, the last group of victims: those directors of the so-called Fifth Generation – Zhang Red Sorghum Yimou, Chen Farewell, My Concubine Kaige, Tian Horse Thief Zhuangzhuang – who could never win a prize or Oscar nomination without their political masters screaming about the insult to China that their work represented.
When I met Tian in Venice in 2002 he had emerged from a period of disgrace following The Blue Kite, the prizewinning family drama inspired by his own life about the Cultural Revolution. He was rehabilitating himself with a small, beautiful period movie called Springtime in a Small Town.
“The Blue Kite is still banned in China,” he said. But he was optimistic about change. “The government is more flexible today. It allows us to talk about marriage, family, relationships and social themes, even if it is still defensive on subjects like the Cultural Revolution and political dissent.”
He envisaged a time when filmmakers no longer had to keep their heads down while dodging and scheming to please the politburo.
Now here we are with a Sixth Generation. (These numbers refer to succeeding waves of filmmakers after Mao’s coming to power.) Today China’s young directors live and work in a neo-capitalist country where artistic liberty has surely grown up with market freedom. Or has it?
The good news before the bad. I see some signs of hope in the freedom enjoyed by the once-banned director Jia Zhang-ke, now the Sixth Generation’s leading figure. He won last year’s Venice Golden Lion for Still Life and this year’s best documentary prize at the same festival for Wu Yong, his essay on culture and consumerism in the clothing industry.
In the old days both the subject and the success of Still Life, a drama about the depopulation of villages and disruption of lives around the Three Gorges dam, would have earned the movie a banning order and its maker an inactivity sentence. But, says Jia: “Still Life is being shown in Chinese cinemas. My first film Xiao Wu [about rootless youth and petty street crime] was forbidden. But ever since The World [a globalisation allegory set in a giant theme park] I have started to be distributed in China.
“The most important thing about the release of Still Life is that it has started to raise discussion about the kind of things cinema should deal with. People have been brought up in China to see cinema only as recreation or sometimes propaganda. Now they say: ‘This film is telling us something about our lives today. Our memories. Our communities. Should this be cinema’s proper role?’”
Still Life was independently funded, another new departure for the People’s Republic. “When the industry was state-run there were only 16 companies with permission to make movies,” Jia says. “But at the start of the 1990s directors began to find other ways. Today there are about the same number of independent films as those financed by the state.”
Jia sees the Tiananmen Square events as a turning point. “After that, just like after the Cultural Revolution, the position of intellectuals in China got lower. So a self-questioning began, an attempt to redress the balance and to tackle the social and political situation. What should filmmakers be doing? What is ‘independence in cinema’? Out of these questions began to come the answers.”
Jia has been lucky. As a director whose films are seen around the world he has become too conspicuous to persecute. The same thing happened earlier with Zhang Yimou, though his story carries a warning. Zhang’s rapprochement with the government seemed to work two ways. He was free to make films but he started making films that ceased to endanger that freedom. The maker of Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern – blazing critiques of political oppression, albeit camouflaged by period settings – was suddenly doing sword-and-swashbuckling romps such as Hero and House of Flying Daggers.
In Venice I catch the actor-filmmaker Jiang Wen. Before he became an acclaimed director with his powerful drama about the Sino-Japanese war, Devils on the Doorstep, which won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize in 2000, he starred in Red Sorghum, the film that made Zhang Yimou’s name.
“On one hand, yes, Red Sorghum shocked world cinema and China,” says the burly veteran. “On the other hand it hasn’t brought lasting change. Before Red Sorghum popular movie theatres were full of martial arts films. After it, they are still full of martial arts films. And Red Sorghum’s director is now making these films himself! So I am not sure who has changed what.”
Jiang is less optimistic than Jia Zhang-ke about the new liberalism. Devils on the Doorstep was banned in China: its director waited seven years before daring to make another feature, a delicate fantasy called The Sun Also Rises, shown at Venice this year. “I prefer not to speak about that [the banning of Devils]. I hope not to have the same problem with this new film.”
Is it true, I ask, that the Chinese authorities were angry at Jiang for taking Devils on the Doorstep to Cannes without permission?
“Yes, it was like that.” And the allusions to the Cultural Revolution in his new film, in the shape of a youth brigade mysteriously weaving through the story, is that a comment on the continuity of Mao’s legacy?
“In China today nobody speaks any more of the Cultural Revolution. But its evils and influence are everywhere even so. In life and on the streets. Historically it is over and obviously no one praises it. But its effects live on.” So, he says, does politically motivated film censorship. “If you want to shoot a commercial action adventure film, no problem. If you want to shoot something that has to do with ideology, that is still hard.”
Another Chinese director, Li Yang, realised how hard when he made Blind Shaft, a film that won international attention for its dramatisation of a murder-and-corruption case in the Chinese mining industry. The story of a boy slain by workers scheming to make a fraudulent claim on his accident insurance had a basis in truth – but that won no favours from the Film Bureau.
“Blind Shaft was never allowed to be shown in China,” Li tells me in Cannes, where he has brought his new film Blind Mountain, another controversy-stirrer about a girl kidnapped and taken to a remote village for an arranged marriage. “I was forbidden to make a film for three years, until this one.”
He had sinned in innocence. “I had been living in Germany and had just come back to China. I didn’t understand all the requirements for making films, so I just went ahead. When the film was completed I was told what I had done was illegal.”
Li thinks there are glimmers of hope even so. “It is now possible to have a dialogue with the people at the Film Bureau. They can say: ‘Oh you must cut out this part’ and you can argue.
“The problem is the long tradition of making propaganda films in China. Many people in the Film Bureau have the view that if a film is political it must be political in the propagandist sense. It must present a good image of China.”
Blind Mountain has had an easier passage than Blind Shaft, though the all-seeing eyes of the Bureau seem to have missed two moments that will startle westerners. We learn – almost as asides – that free healthcare and education have been abandoned in modern China. In the race towards capitalism the country now requires people to pay for schooling and hospital treatment.
The corrupting hand of materialism is seen, by Jia Zhang-ke, as the new totalitarianism. That is the theme of his prizewinning documentary Wu Yong, whose literal English title Useless comments ironically on the now-prevalent Chinese attitude to anything that doesn’t have a value tag on it. (Wu Yong is the name of the line launched by Ma Ke, the avant-garde designer portrayed in Jia’s film. Her clothes are a meld of the historical, the surreal and the peasant-traditional, intended to build layers of cultural memory and social meaning into single garments.)
“The faster China develops economically, the more people are concerned about the monetary value of things,” Jia says. “If it isn’t valuable, it is useless. This applies not just to goods but to feelings, ideas and art. Ma Ke goes against this. Her clothes are not made for fashion or profit but as artworks, to tell a story and create a conception for the future.”
Another filmmaker concerned by the new materialism is Li Yu, whose film Lost in Beijing narrowly missed winning last year’s Berlin Golden Bear. Li’s battles with the censors took place during the festival, by long-distance phone. The Film Bureau wanted scenes cut that related to the film’s critique of consumerism. Lost in Beijing is about a man’s attempt to buy a baby from a married employee he has all but raped.
“Society and people’s relationships are changing so fast in China because of economic growth,” Li says. “They are changing so quickly that people don’t realise it is happening. Marriage, love and family life are becoming part of this.”
The state censors hated the unblinking realism of her portrait of China. “They don’t want people to see dirty streets or prostitution or corrupt healthcare officials. They want to show only an ideal China. They are lying to themselves and to other people.”
But Jia Zhang-ke thinks the Film Bureau’s control-freak tendencies are in retreat. One cause is China’s new access to the freedoms of world cinema: people can see what they are missing.
“Pirate DVDs are a big development. Chinese people are not restricted to the films the state chooses for them or allows them to see.”
For Jia and his contemporaries the call is to follow this freedom, or to build and sustain it in the homegrown cinema. “If there is such a thing as the Sixth Generation, it is the generation that is willing to look in the face of society as it exists in China today.”
That willingness, once established, is hard to intimidate. As Li Yang says, reflecting on the ban imposed on him after Blind Shaft, “They can forbid me to work for three years. But they cannot forbid me to think.”