China's Generation Gap

Catfights among Asian idols aren’t uncommon, if the usual tiffs over plagiarized hair bleaching patterns and paparazzi shots of hand-holding scandal are any indication. But China’s major movie-makers are usually above the fray, which is why a vicious spat between popular producer Zhang Weiping and upcoming director Jia Zhangke at last year’s Venice Film Festival was particularly telling.

The two filmmakers couldn’t be more different from one another. Zhang has worked on some of the most commercially successful Chinese films of recent years, specializing in visually exciting but intellectually moribund permutations of the “Hackneyed Story, Wooden Dialogue” formula (Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006), to name a few). By contrast, Jia Zhangke has come to be a mascot of China’s rising independent cinema movement, with his intelligent and understated features becoming international art-house favorites.

It was a bit of a surprise, then, when the big-time producer sent a flying dagger at 37-year-old Jia’s reputation, whose Still Life had just won the prestigious Golden Lion, alleging that the festival’s coordinator had been an investor in the film and had manipulated the final results. Zhang’s harsh accusation, published in China’s widely-read Chongqing Evening Post, was quickly responded to with an open letter from Jia threatening to sue for defamation. 

Was the low-blow in reaction to perceived celluloid threat? Probably not—blockbuster cranking Zhang’s bank account still has little to fear from the skillful yet commercially innocuous work of Jia. More likely, the lash was ideological. The rift between these film makers, after all, reflects some of the major fault lines in today’s Chinese film industry, indicative of the diverging directions of two generations of Chinese filmmakers.

China’s older and more powerful generation of producers and directors, including the aforementioned Zhang Weiping, seems to have turned its back on the possibility of socially subversive cinema. Though directors of this “Fifth Generation” once created films like Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell, My Concubine, which exposed cruel realities of country life and the Cultural Revolution, their biggest concern these days is box office numbers. And why not? Entrance into the World Trade Organization in 2001 forced Chinese filmmakers to face a hard fact: in an open market, imported Hollywood films trounce domestic cinema. If the Chinese film industry was going to stay healthy in this modern economy, it had to start thinking about selling tickets. This agenda was more than welcome by China’s now growth-focused central government.

On the other side of the game has been China’s industry underdogs; this “Sixth Generation” of directors, often working at odds against censors, have cultivated a pop aesthetic and depiction of quotidian ennui Martin Scorsese has hailed as “some of the finest, toughest, most vitally alive work in modern movie-making.” Against a state-run system aiming to reel in ticket sales, the Sixth Generation’s work has documented the socially marginalized in urban dystopias, calling attention to a China that the government would just as soon not acknowledge. The filmmakers often shoot without approval or permit (thus earning the nickname of “underground directors”), regularly braving passport revocation and darkroom raids. Zhang Yuan’s 1993 Beijing Bastard, Ning Ying’s 1995 On the Beat, and Lou Ye’s 2006 Summer Palace have all been exemplary works of the movement, though it is Jia Zhangke who has received the loudest acclaim, domestically and internationally.

As the dispute in Venice between Jia and Zhang may have already suggested, the ideological rifts between the two generations aren’t just commercial, nor even merely stylistic. Instead, the two modes represent competing visions of national representation. When Beijing picked Zhang Yimou (the director under which Zhang Weiping has most often worked) as a director of the opening program at the 2008 Olympic Games in the Chinese capital, it was acknowledging and encouraging the Fifth Generation’s vision of national history and aesthetics.

From Hero

Zhang Weiping and Zhang Yimou’s films are anything but subtle. The 2002 Hero, produced and directed by the two, sold big numbers in China and abroad and served as a commercial model for Chinese blockbusters. More importantly, Hero advanced a hegemonic vision of the nation very much in line with the Communist Party’s understanding of it.

The film’s story of an assassination attempt on the first Qin emperor—who is widely considered the creator of the geopolitical entity “China”—does everything it can to serve as a colorful and cohesive story of nation building. The state is unified under an emperor who, like all other cast members, speaks only the standard Mandarin dialect.  Different narrative threads coalesce into epiphany, and, as UC Davis’s Sheldon Lu points out, the Chinese language is, in the climactic moment, unified under a single system of signs.

The impact of films like these goes far beyond the theater itself. When Americans watch Jet Li’s swords or Chow-Yun Fat’s spears—dubious encounters with Asian masculinity, to be sure—they’re savoring the choicest weapons in China’s new soft power arsenal, its efforts to draw a monolithic and entertaining myth of a united China. Now that the films are big-budget enough to play abroad, the stakes are much higher than ever before—it’s no surprise that the propagandist Hero was largely funded by state-controlled enterprises, as were House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower. These lushly costumed but thinly plotted films all serve, through style and substance, to help create a shared myth of creation, helping to underpin the perceived legitimacy of China’s current national projects.

From House of Flying Daggers

If things go as planned, mainlanders born after the millennium will grow up in a world where the Chinese box-office is dominated by distinctly “Chinese” films and stories. Where then, can independent Chinese filmmakers find a place among these epics, their films having garnered critical acclaim abroad but tepid responses at home? Where is the independent Chinese filmmaker who can claim both “authenticity” and popularity?

After all, the Sixth Generation’s styles are often as subversive as their subjects, making the films tough sells at home. Unlike the top-tier blockbusters which place overwhelming emphasis on color, composition, and costuming, these films often demonstrate cultural discord with sound: uncommon dialects, indie soundtracks, and news reels played out of place or out of synch. These highly realistic, nearly documentarian films trace the coarse underbelly of China’s economic boom, the ravaging and dislocation of the nation’s internal and external landscape. Their unassuming narrative and cinemagraphic styles reveal, in contrast, just how romanticized much of the Fifth Generation’s work really was.

Jia has been acclaimed for his portrayal of “authentic” Chinese life.  Visitors to China will instantly recognize a world that seems to exist through his lens, which, in its distance, captures the chaotic disaffect of China’s cacophonous public spaces. More than any of his Sixth Generation peers, however, Jia has begun to directly confront the dichotomy of the Fifth Generation’s hegemonic spectacle and the “authentic” disorientation of the Sixth. Jia’s films reject both hyper-aestheticism and false grittiness, instead forging out a world where “pop”, “tradition”, and “authenticity” merge into a unique cinematic vision.

From Pickpocket

The effect is often playful. In his early Pickpocket, released in 1997, a portrait of Mao and the film’s protagonist, Xiao Wu, are presented side-by-side. In his 2000 film Platform, we watch as a song-and-dance group’s staid Maoist anthems slowly morph into an eighties electronic dance-rock hit. Jia captures the disorientation, as it were, perfectly, and as his camera pans slowly across landscapes to sonic dissonance, we find ourselves in a screen world that is, as the New York Time‘s A.O. Scott once suggested, “at once immediately recognizable and emphatically strange.”

But Jia’s project, unlike many of his peers’, isn’t merely one of capturing a sense of modern alienation; his dense and deliberate symbolism helps give meaning beyond the miasmatic mix of image and sound. In the Golden Palm-nominated Unknown Pleasures, released in 2002, we follow two heartbreakingly dead-beat youths through the wasteland of a recently industrialized Datong, a bleak city in the northern province of Shanxi. While the film is achingly realistic, Jia dots his scenes with subtle cinematic symbology. As a young couple on the verge of separation wander by, we hear the theme from Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. In other moments, we see references lifted from Pulp Fiction.  At first, the Uma Thurman wig and bank robbery scene are just more elements in the pop-culture melee; they later become central to the film’s narrative.

Each viewing of a Jia film, then, lends itself to very different levels of engagement. A first-time viewer can stop at the immediate sensation of a viewing experience, feeling profound disorientation. But an informed viewer becomes increasingly aware of the deliberately constructed environments, and the works, then, stand apart from the “documentarian” films of the other Sixth Generation directors. The careful construction and reflexivity exposes the troublesome nature of the very idea of a “realist” film—Jia, like the New Wave auteurs of the ‘60s, is hyper-aware of the dangers of a cinema which creates its own world. Though Jia’s films do offer a stunning portrait of contemporary urban China, which seems to be its overwhelming value to those abroad, his films are intensely crafted, subtle and referential—subjective cinema masquerading, or masqueraded, as the objective.

From The World

Jia’s 2004 film The World, a tightly-crafted tale of an epynomous Beijing park populated by unnerving simulacra of major world landmarks and its workers, was his first release to receive any funding from the State filmmaking bodies. Accordingly, the film represented the director’s first efforts to move “above-ground,” and to address the questions of representation and objectivity for a much larger audience. The World, then, was a film caught between two drastically different audiences - the international art community, with their demands of allusiveness and “authenticity”, and the domestic viewer, for whom the dystopia could be a shocking or, as some domestic critics have claimed, offensive portrayal of blue-collar culture.

Responding to the challenges of directing for two audiences, The World seems to represent an effort to lower the level of interpretive difficulty. The most critical shift was an adjusted level of interpretive difficulty. Consider the dramatic juxtapositions in the opening shots: a young woman blasts through a dingy basement hall screaming for bandages in a heavy Shanxi accent and sporting a gaudy sari. In the next shot, she is monumentalized dancing to hyponotic electronica on stage. The camera moves out over a monorail, and a homeless man wanders before the park’s skyline.

As the title scrolls, the significance of the central symbol—the crude substitution of the global provided in a constructed amusement park—is already clear.  The presentation of the film’s central metaphors (as a New York Times critic basically cried “The park is a metaphor, I get it!”) is a departure from Jia’s earlier films, and the transition to a certain bluntness is evident in other ways too: the insertion of section headers to indicate changes in the narrative arc, the flash animation of text messages which show the stunted inner states of characters, the floating catalogue of debts after the death of a character, and even his mode of allusion border on the spectacular.

The alarming bifurcation of contemporary Chinese film suggests that “pop” art and “socially conscious art” are somehow oppositional. As Jia begins to look to two audiences—the art-house community abroad and the billion-strong market at home—he is wrestling with the major questions of Chinese cinema today. How much must a director acquiesce to a “pop” presentation to reach a larger audience? Can a director create a cinema that encourages its viewers to question representation, rather than passively accept it? Directors like Jia, whose work flies in the face of the conventional oppositions in Chinese filmmaking—romantic versus realistic, subjective versus objective, domestic versus foreign—are more critical now than ever before, as they seek to provide a third path between two very narrow routes.

The implications for China go beyond the silver screen. There are deep ideological and cultural debates being played out in Chinese cinema today. Will the Chinese public make room for new voices like that of Jia, as he begins to work towards an audience at home? Or will the logic of Communist Party-style capitalism relegate directors like Jia to the discerning, but politically innocuous eyes of foreign art-film critics?

Jia has commented the Golden-Lion winning film Still Life, following a coalminer and nurse as they return to a town decimated by the Three Gorges Dam project should be received well in China, given its “real and direct portrayal of ordinary people”. Such a comment though, is misleading, and belies the immense complexity of Jia’s concerns. Directors like Jia can be considered the alternative to the mythologizing vision of Chinese national cinema, but not because they offer a “real” or “direct” account of a mythless Chinese reality. Jia’s realism is in itself no claim to authenticity—precisely the converse, it is, as he himself claims, an “ideology”.

In this ideology, mediated experience like globalism, capitalism, and “pop” and the false images they produce are of ultimate concern.  It is this “ideology” that informs his themes, as well as his style. The World, accordingly, ends with a highly Buddhist interpretation of the whole sensory world as illusion. In darkness, in the absence of prejudicing images, the disembodied voices of two lovers, whose very status as living beings is questionable, declare a new beginning. Jia, having emerged from the underground, must now begin to find a new cinematic language if he is to meet the charge that the contemporary Chinese audience calls for.

From Still Life