荒诞者共和

In 1982 around 100 students graduated from China's only film school, the Beijing Film Academy. This group of film graduates is widely known as the Fifth Generation as the Chinese like almost everything to have a number. Film historians have divided earlier film-makers into roughly four periods: 1905-32, 1932-49, 1950-1960 and 1960-1980 . The so- called Fifth Generation is sometimes used synonymously with "New Wave" - those whose clean break with socialist - realist cinema caused an excitement in the movie world in the mid - 1980s. Chinese Fifth Generation films won prizes all over the world: Red Sorghum of Zhang Yimou won at the Berlin Film Festival in 1988, Zhang's The Story of Qiu Ju in Venice in 1992 and Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine was successful in Cannes in 1993.

In 1982 when the film graduates left school the Chinese film industry was just recovering from the effects of the Cultural Revolution under Mao. During that period (1966 - 1976) art was a political instrument of propaganda. Films were tools of the communist party. Their leaders used film in order to influence, or as they called it, educate the masses. "Under the four decades of communist rule, Chinese cinema often seemed one long reel of propaganda" During the Cultural Revolution the ideological use of films were even stricter than in Stalin's Russia of the thirties and forties. Nearly all film activities and genres were suppressed, except for adaptations of the Peking Opera which were Jing Qing's (Mao's wife) favourite art form. The way in which the communist party used the Peking opera for their aims can be seen in Farewell My Concubine (1993) by one of the most famous film-makers of the Fifth Generation, Chen Kaige.

In the early eighties the film-makers of the Fourth Generation (as Huang Jianzhong, Wu Tianming or Yan Xueshu etc.) were able to make their first films. They had finished their degrees before the Cultural Revolution. Educated by Russian or by Chinese teachers educated by Russian teachers they followed the concept of social realism. For them film making means to tell realistic stories in a realistic manner. They were not able to get to know western films (as the Fifth Generation). Their stories follow conventional patterns. Nevertheless I think that they enriched the Chinese film scene with new stories and new topics.

However the Fourth Generation film-makers used the village as a central scene of their films (e.g. A Love- Forsaken Corner by Zhang Qi). In addition their films often show the damage and destruction caused by the old social traditions on women. A Good Woman of Huang Jianzhong starts by saying : In China Women are very respected people but their situation is especially bad. Huang represents women as strong individuals.

The tendency to see the village as a micro cosm of china and to represent women as strong and individualistic is still very strong in the films of the Fifth Generation. The Fifth Generation has been influenced by the early films of Fourth Generation film-makers such as Wu Tianming. This can be seen in all the films of Zhang Yimou, another one of the most famous film-makers of the Fifth Generation (Red Sorghum/Hong Gaoliang, 1987; Ju Dou, 1989; Raise the Red Lantern/Dahong Denglong Gaogao Gua, 1991; The Story of Qiu Ju/Qiu Ju De Gu Shi, 1992, To Live/ Huozhe, 1993).

Another element in the films of the Fifth Generation is their controversial relationship with the past. The Cultural Revolution and the way it shaped and influenced the lives of many Chinese is a common topic of their films. A lot of the Beijing Film Academy graduates had to leave school during the Cultural Revolution. They went to the army (Hu Mei, Li Shaohong) or to the countryside (Chen Kaige) to serve the communist idea. In this period of their life they found out about the contradictions between ideology and reality. In this period they lost their enthusiasm and ideals.

Two of the most acclaimed Fifth Generation film-makers are Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Chen Kaige was born in 1952 in Beijing as son of artistic parents. "His father was a well known film director[renowned director Chen Huaiai], his mother an actress and film editor." The family lived in an elegant mansion and Chen learned to recite classical poems and to speak in an elegant Beijing accent "sprinkled with well-chosen classical phrases." Zhang's personality and family background was very different from Chen's. "Zhang and Chen were the classic odd couple: yin and yang, whatever Chen was, Zhang was not."

Zhang was raised in a provincial town up in Shaanxi, in the North of China. He grew up "in the shadow of political stigma that surrounded his father" who was largely unemployed because of having been an major in the KMT Nationalist army with whom the Communists waged a protracted war. In a Guardian interview with Lynn Pan Zhang Yimou remembers that no matter how well-behaved he was at school, how excellent his grades (he came top in class every year), he could never join the Youth League, the stepping stone to the Communist Party. "I grew up introverted, withdrawn, reluctant to reveal my innermost thoughts."

"For all their differences in personality and family background, however, the two share something important: the Cultural Revolution." Chen was at a select boarding school at that time, studying with the children of high - ranking government officials but ineligible for the Party himself because Chen's father had joined the Kuomintang army in the Civil War. In an Observer interview Chen Kaige explained how the Cultural Revolution had shaped his life and why he denounced his father. "My best friends in the class, we played together, and then, the next day, they were totally different, they just ignored me. That's why I decided to denounce my father when my classmates asked me to. It was the turning point of my life. I wanted to show my loyalty... That's why I did not believe in the revolution." In a mass denunciation rally Chen shoved and yelled at his father. His Red Guard classmates were plundering his house and burnt the family books. "Chen's memoirs render both incidents in meticulous detail, and with a deep sense of guilt and sorrow."

Those personal experiences shaped the films of the Fifth Generation. Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine main theme is the betrayal. In his film The Big Parade Chen Kaige portrays the life of soldiers preparing for a parade in which he includes some of the incidents he experienced. After Zhang Yimou had to leave his studies during the Cultural Revolution he worked as a labourer in a spinning mill like the character in his film Ju Dou.

Zhang was finally admitted to the cinematography course at the Beijing Film Academy. Already an expert on photography, Zhang found cinematography easy. In an Guardian article Lynn Pan quotes Zhang: "I used my time to read books on directing. I kept it quiet, but directing was what I was already studying by myself."

At film school the students were able to watch western films unlike any other film generation before them. They were able to get to know western European art films such as Truffaut, Godard, Bergman, Bertolucci, Antonioni etc. "Chen has confessed that he didn't care much for Hollywood movies." Enjoying these Western films in film history Zhang was more surprised about the Shanghai movies of the pre-communist era such as Spring In A Small Town of Fei Mu. "These were as good in their time as any made in the West." Zhang continues saying "That the Western movies were way ahead and didn't shock us [film students of the Fifth Generation] so much as the discovery that China made better films 40 years ago than it does know." "The students promised themselves that they would reverse the trend. "

The film students did not want to learn the established rules of traditional Chinese social realistic art form. Moreover they wanted to invent and discover their own film grammar. Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth and Tian Zhuangzhuang's films about Tibet and Mongolia, Horse Thief and On The Hunting Ground, are examples of an experimental cinema. These films do not tell conventional stories but they integrate folklore elements producing wilful poetic statements of rural life. Tian Zhuangzhuang reduced the story to a minimum and created something like a poem on film. That used to be new and unexpected in Chinese cinema.

The first Fifth Generation film One And Eight by Zhang Junzhao with cameraman Zhang Yimou was produced 1993 under the framework of the studio in Guangxi on the Vietnamese border. A film against all idealistic patterns that used to devide the world into good and evil as it can be seen in the revolutionary war movies. This film showed that 'evil' people could do 'good' things: Criminals and 'even' KMT - officers, who were kept prisoners in 1941 by the communist army, fight together against Japan, meaning that patriotism counts more than their crime.

At first Chinese films could only be produced under the direction of studios. Only studios had the right to apply for release at the Chinese Film Bureau and the Minister of Broadcasting, Television and Film. In that way the authorities were able to censor films. Although Wu Tianming , another central figure of China's "Fifth Generation" film-makers, became head of Xi'an Studios in 1984 using his position to back two of the group's most prominent and impressive works; Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum (1987) and Chen Kaige's King of the Children (1988). These studios were not very interested in giving the film students space for doing their work. There was just one place available for them at China's biggest studio in Beijing. Moreover the young directors had to use studios far away from the capital.

In my opinion this shows firstly how desperate these young film-makers were to express themselves and secondly how china's authorities tried to suppress these expressions. On the other hand the young film-makers did not have to worry about money. As in earlier Russian films such as Battleship Potemkin (Russia, 1925) the studios provided the film-makers with big sets and technicians. While Hollywood Studios would have to spend large amounts of money for big sets (like in Bertolucci's Last Emperor) labour in China was very cheap and their films were "made with extravagant sets in often remote locations, were solidly backed by the official studios, however unsuccessful they were financially."

It is interesting to examine the films of the Fifth Generation considering as to what degree they are either art or commercial films. Taking David Bordwell's definition that "the art cinema motivates its narrative by two principles: realism and authorial expressivity" most of the Fifth Generation film-makers produced art-house films.

In my opinion the best example for this 'realism' is Zhang Yimou's The Story of Qiu Ju which further develops the "age-old challenge of constructing a realist aesthetic" (see Forth Generation film-makers) Zhang incorporated large numbers of local people in the action as bit players and extras who played together with a handful of professionals. Public Security Bureau officials, lawyers and letter writers play themselves and interact with the actors. This ensured "a certain level of authenticity in matters of regional dialect, dress and body language" . Furthermore the film tries to capture the reality of today's day-to-day life in contemporary China by shooting half of the film with hidden cameras, frequently hand-held, and long range radio mikes on "real locations" in the streets of the provincial towns and in a prosperous chilli-farming village in the mountains around Xi'an.

Bordwell adds that "part of this reality is sexual; the aesthetics and commerce of the art cinema often depend upon an eroticism." After working as a cameraman on Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth and The Big Parade (1985) Zhang made his debut as a director with Red Sorghum, a portrait of the earthy lusts and rhythms of 1920s and '30s Chinese rural life culminating in the Japanese invasion in 1937 staring Gong Li. She has starred in all his films bringing sensuality and eroticism to Chinese Cinema. In Red Sorghum it is implied that she had sex with a man she hardly knew although sex is always left off screen. "Her barely contained sexuality set her apart...Sex had come to 'serious' Chinese cinema."

Moreover Gong Li plays strong female individualistic roles or as Bordwell defines "art cinema uses realistic- that is - psychologically complex-characters." The complexity of her character makes it easy to identify with her. According to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey one of the most important pleasures of the classical narrative is identification where the spectator "narcissistically identifies with an idealised figure on screen, typically a male hero whose actions determine the narrative, in a process that recapitulates the discovery of the image of oneself in the mirror phase " I personally identified most with Gong Li or as Mulvey put it with the idealised figure, as I wanted her, or as Metz would put it, me, to go on with her life as she -in my opinion- represents the suppressed but strong individual. French film theorist Christian Metz argues in addition, but differing in certain important respects to Mulvey, that "the spectator identifies with himself, with himself as a pure act of perception."

The films of the Fifth Generation are mainly driven by showing "real problems" which Bordwell identifies as another device of art house films. Zhang Yimou's To Live and Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite show how ordinary families cope with the changes during the Cultural Revolution. Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine shows how the Cultural Revolution leads friends into betraying each other and the problems women experience in Chinese society are represented in the films of Zhang Yimou.

Authorial expressivity is another signifier of art films. In the central proposition of the auteur theory , as it can be read in the Baseline's Encyclopaedia of Film , the director (the "auteur," or author) is the dominant creative force in the making of a film. The corresponding critical methodology, auteur criticism, assumes the "continuity of one or more discernible personal features in the director's oeuvre" that comprise, in André Bazin's terms, "a standard of reference" .

Although I will argue that the Fifth Generation film-makers are not what the French would call 'auteurs' they certainly include authorial expressivity in their films. Zhang's "standard of reference", his personal features throughout his films for example are a strong female lead as his films always star Gong Li and bright colours or as Hong Kong journalist Lynn Pan puts it "a visual lushness" . Zhang especially uses reds in his films as in Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern and Jou Dou. Zhang explains: "While red is the colour of life, it is also the colour of death". Another of his personal features is his use of allegories as nasty men represent oppressive old order while women represent the downtrodden.

Chen Kaige's "standard of reference" are an epic scale tending towards the melodramatic. His Farewell My Concubine covers fifty years of Chinese history, including the Japanese invasion and the Cultural Revolution. Tian Zhuangzhuang's "standard of reference" is that he doesn't disguise his politics. Where Zhang uses allegories Tian Zhuangzhuang is the 'Ken Loach of the Fifth Generation.'

Nevertheless the directors of the Fifth Generation are by far not the only people that influence 'their' films. Almost all Fifth Generation films are adaptations of published novels as there are no script writers in China. Furthermore Gong Li's contribution to Farewell and Zhang's films made her a big star while other actors contributed towards the director's fame. Jiang Weng starred in Red Sorghum and Leslie Cheung starred in Farewell my Concubine. Another big influence on Chinese films are the censors who have the power to make life difficult for critical directors. Sight and Sound quotes the China Daily, a Beijing-based English language newspaper, "that Chen had cut out from the novel the hints of homosexuality and stressed the descriptions of human feelings and frailties."

On the other hand there are "interesting areas of overlap" between art house and commercial films as there were also commerce authors such as Hitchcock and Hawks. I would argue that films such as Farewell my Concubine and Zhang Yimou's films show that the borderline between commercial cinema and cinema as art can be very narrow. Chen Kaige made his studio-shot film with a, in Chinese terms, big budget of 20 million Hong Kong Dollars (about 3 million pounds) involving a Hong Kong production company and the Beijing film studios. Zhang financed his films with co- productions from Hong Kong and Europe. Chen had told Farewell "in a manner that would engage a larger audience." which signifies commercial films. In a Sight and Sound article Chen admits: "It's just a commercial film."

It is interesting that Chen Kaige always had his roots in art films . It had been part of the Fifth Generation's ethos to "insist on picking actors from an unknown unspoiled talent pool and letting them blossom together with a young film-maker." Zhang was the first to break this rule with Red Sorghum starring Jiang Weng "the most famous male actor in China" and continued to feature Gong Li in all his films. For Chen, who adhered to the Fifth Generation's anticelebrety ethos for so long using the established female star Gong Li, had gone against his former principle.

The history of Chinese Fifth Generation film-makers has always been a history of censorship. The first Fifth Generation film One And Eight shares the same fate as most of the Fifth Generation films: The authorities allowed the film only after censoring and re- editing. Zhang Yimou's first films Red Sorghum, Jou Dou and Raise the Red Lantern were firstly forbidden partly because they contained sex which had not been seen before in Chinese cinema and because they dealt with China's problematic past. "He [Zhang Yimou] can be accused of moral, as well as political, decadence."

His earlier films were only allowed after Zhang Yimou's Venice Golden Lion winner, The Story Of Qiu Ju won the authorities approval. It is not astonishing that the Chinese authorities like the film,since it is, substantially, a mildly placatory work, suggesting that, if anyone fought hard and long enough, the justice they sought could prevail.

In an interview with Derek Malcolm Zhang Yimou repeats what sort of films the government would like him to do. "What the government says is this: Why keep on making films about the problems of the past? Why repeat all that stuff about our mistakes, which we now admit? Why not produce more optimistic films about the better times of the present?" Chen's Farewell My Concubine was shown in China without the authorities' express permission. The film exhibitors simply ignored it. Zhang's next co-produced and financed film To Live, was shown at Cannes without the authorities permission and pre-sold before it could be censored. The Blue Kite had also looked at the Cultural Revolution "from ground level and got into serious trouble with the authorities for doing so." These incidents must have make the government think that new regulations should be put in place which would prevent them losing face.

From now on the authorities demand that any co-production will have to deposit a print of the film until the film gets itsnal approval. At present China's film-makers deal with the situation by pao ren shi - the Chinese phrase for talking with all related persons such as officials and producers.

In conclusion it can be said that political and historical factors such as the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1976) shaped the productions of the Fifth Generation Chinese film-makers. Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, two of the most famous graduates of the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, included their personal experiences in studio productions such as The Big Parade and Jou Dou. Clean breaking with socialist - realist cinema they created a "New Wave" that "motivated its narrative by two principles: realism and authorial expressivity".

Moreover their films can be seen as "interesting areas of overlap" between art and commercial films. Farewell My Concubine and the films of Zhang Yimou show that the borderline between commercial cinema and cinema as art can be very narrow. Finally I show that the history of Chinese Fifth Generation film-makers has always been a history of censorship as the Chinese authorities do not approve of films which constantly and critically examine China's recent past.