荒诞者共和

It would take a Mainland Chinese person of Zhang's own age and background fully to understand the psychological and spiritual pressures of living and working in this situation. But Zhang has obliquely expressed some of his own feelings and experiences in his work: the portraits of capricious and cruel patriarchs in Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern offer us some inking of what it is like to live under authoritarian rule and be subject to arbitrary and unaccountable judgements and punishments. Given the 'invisibility' of the authorities - the 'faceless' bureaucrats and politicians who have so frequently banned Zhang's films and otherwise brought pressure on him - it's no surprise that the patriarch in Raise the Re Lantern remains largely off-screen. It's his iron rule that is seen and felt, not his physical presence.

More than once, Zhang has been forced into the position of abasing himself before this invisible but omnipotent authority. The most recent occasion was in September 1994, when he was forbidden to start shooting Shanghai Triad as a film for the French major UGC, ostensibly as a punishment for sanctioning the screening of To Live in competition in Cannes before it had been through Film Bureau censorship in Beijing. Zhang wrote a 'self-criticism' of the kind that was mandatory for many educated Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, concluding with a wish of even older vintage (it was routine in feudal China) - that the great and good would overlook the errors of a humble and insignificant individual like himself. This document was widely publicized in the overseas Chinese press but passed over in silence in Mainland China, where it would have been seen as an uncomfortable reminder of earlier bad times.

Zhang Yimou is not a coward. One the contrary, his record over the 13 years since he began making films in China proves that he is a courageous and resilient artist. But the fact that he is forced into these periodic acts of self-abasement underlines the existence of pressures which will weigh him down until China's system of government changes. The writer Lynn Pan, who visited Zhang on location in Shaanxi Province during the filming of The Story of Qiu Ju, recalls asking him if he was making the films as a gesture of appeasement to the authorities who had banned his two previous films Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern. By Pan's account, given in a BBC-TV documentary, Zhang said neither 'yes' nor 'no', but lifted his hands to his neck and mimed the act of strangulation. All he said was: 'Do you know how difficult things have been for me?'

2 (A question)

The story of Zhang Yimou's struggle to enter the Cinematography course of the Beijing Film Academy in 1978 has been told so often that it has become accepted as a cypher for his character. (In case you haven't heard, he was twice refused admission to the school because he exceeded the age-limit for the course; he sent an appeal to the Minister of Culture, pointing out that it wasn't his fault that the Cultural Revolution had robbed him of the opportunity to study at a younger age ƒ and was given a special dispensation to attend the Academy.) Most commentators take this anecdote as evidence of Zhang's resourcefulness and persistence. In fact, though, it looks more like an early example of Zhang's skill in dealing with an implacable system. He got ahead by presenting himself as a humble nobody and treating the minister a benevolent despot. In other words, he behaved as if China were still mired in feudal attitudes and hierarchies ƒ a presumption about China which some have also detected beneath the surface of his best films.

If china really is still organized and run on quasi-feudal lines, could or should Zhang Yimou conduct himself any differently from the way he does?

3 (A proposition)

Zhang Yimou could - and probably should - have been credited as co-director on the first film he photographed, The One and The Eight (1984, nominally directed by Zhang Junzhao). Aside from the children's film Red Elephant, with which Zhang Yimou also had some minor involvement, this was the first feature conceived and made by 1982 graduates from the Beijing Film Academy - the core of the group subsequently known as China's "fifth Generation' filmmakers.

There are strong 'auteurist' reasons for believing that Zhang Yimou had more than a hand in directing The One and the Eight. One is the fact that nothing Zhang Junzhao has signed since 1984 has come anywhere near to matching the qualities of the film. Another is the fact that the film's compositions and color tonalities directly anticipate Zhang Yimou's work with Chen Kaige on Yellow Earth (made immediately after The One and the Eight). Yet another is the underlying continuity between the testosterone-fuelled protagonists of The One and the Eight and the male protagonist of Red Sorghum, Zhang Yimou's official debut as director.

More intriguing, though, is the thought that the narrative of The One and the Eight sets an agenda which must have been close to Zhang Yimou's heart. The film (based on a long narrative poem by Guo Xiaochuan) is about an honorable Communist soldier who is unjustly accused and arrested and held with a group of eight hardened criminals. The Poem centers on the Communist's fight to prove his innocence: the film centers on the ultimate human worth and moral fiber of the convicts - showing them to be citizens as valuable to China as the wronged communist. Since we're in the area of speculative propositions, it seems legitimate to wonder with whom Zhang Yimou identified more closely, the wronged Communist or the renegade criminalsƒ

4 (A proposition)

Zhang Yimou is a well-established team player. He is known throughout Chinese film circles as 'the democratic director' because of his insistence on holding discussions with his leading cast and crew members at the close of each day's filming and his openness to ideas and suggestions from collaborators and others close to him. But Zhang is nowadays very much the team captain, a maverick talent who is universally accepted as the 'author' of the films he signs.

One of the many striking features of Yellow Earth was the way the main credits appeared on screen. The three key people - director Chen Kaige, cinematographer Zhang Yimou and designer He Qun, the three of them friends and contemporaries from the Academy - were credited together, in a single caption. The unmistakable inference was that we (the viewers) should take them as co-creators of the film. The decision to arrange these credits in this way was probably Chen Kaige's but it was doubtless born of the solidarity between these classmates in their determination to pull Chinese cinema into the modern world. But this spirit was not carried over into Chen's next significant collaboration with Zhang Yimou, The Big Parade, where the arrangement of the credits reflects the usual hierarchy of responsibility. (I haven't been able to see Forced Take-Off, the TV film which Chen and Zhang made together after Yellow Earth, and so I don't know how they credited themselves on that.)

Zhang's personal trajectory in the mid-1980s was a struggle to win the status of director which his friend Chen Kaige already enjoyed. In the event, it wasn't much of a struggle. When Wu Tianming, then the head of Xi'an Film Studio, invited Zhang to photograph Old Well for him, Zhang's condition for accepting was the Wu should afterwards give him the chance to direct. What happened, of course, was that Zhang ended up not only supervising the cinematography of Old Well but also playing the film's central character and - those who visited the shoot attest - giving Wu Tianming copious advice about the way it should be directed and structured. For Zhang the step from working on Old Well to directing Red Sorghum was clearly a short one.

Zhang now has the status that a director traditionally enjoys in China, but he doesn't use it autocratically. His 'democratic' working methods look back to the camaraderie he once enjoyed with the Film Academy classmates. Perhaps we should interpret the way he exercises his directorial authority as another of Zhang's oblique criticisms of Chinese tradition ƒ as another of his acts of quiet rebellion.

5 (A proposition)

In Red Sorghum, the man played by Jiang Wen represented the man that Zhang Yimou himself would like to be. Or rather, the man he wanted to be when he made the film in 1987.

The single most important characteristic of Red Sorghum is not its florid visual style, its folk-ballad approach to storytelling or even its daring mixture of drama, song, horror and black comedy. It's the fact that it's a wish-fulfillment film. Ted Sorghum has larger-than-life characters who live by their instincts and desires in a way that bears little relation to the realities of Shandong village life in the 1930s. The emphasis on their unfettered sexuality represents Zhang Yimou's rebellion against year of state-sanctioned inhibition and repression. And the emphasis (in the closing scenes) on patriotic self-sacrifice represents Zhang Yimou's cunning strategy for getting the sexual material in the earlier part of the film past the ever-puritanical Film Bureau.

6 (Two questions)

Red Sorghum marked not only the start of Zhang's official career as a director but also the start of his extended collaboration with gong Li. When it first appeared, Red Sorghum was criticized in some non-Chinese circles 9absurdly, in my view, but the criticism stung Zhang Yimou) for evidencing male chauvinist attitudes. Which of these two factors was more important in pushing Zhang towards the female-centered films Ju Dou and raise the Red Lantern?

Both Ju Dou and raise the Red Lantern are 'cruel patriarch' films, and it seems to me that both represent Zhang's rueful recognition that the wish-fulfillment of Red Sorghum are unsustainable in present-day China. Ju Dou is fairly explicitly the flip-side of the Red Sorghum coin: a film about the power of the patriarch (for all that he is crippled, impotent and perverse) and about the cruel punishment of authentic desire. Raise the Red Lantern offers a broader view of the way the Chinese society functions, using the enclosed spaces of one large household as an obvious metaphor for larger, off-screen realities. Both film move inexorable to tragic endings. I once asked Zhang Yimou about the high incidence of tragic endings in his films. His reply was wimple: "Maybe we Chinese have too much tragedy in our lives."

However, the decision to center both films on women was very clearly related to Zhang's ongoing desire to work with Gong Li. If he hadn't 'discovered' gong Li for Red sorghum, fallen in love with her and turned her into an international star, would he have made the films he did?

7 (A proposition)

The Story of Qiu Ju was consciously conceived by Zhang and his Hong Kong-based producer Ma Fung-Kwok as a film to rehabilitate Zhang's name at home. At the time it was made, both Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern were banned in China, it was essential that Zhang make a film which would be welcomed by the authorities and released. Qiu Ju thus offers a tendentiously benign view of the functioning of china's local bureaucracy and nascent legal system: it features a succession of uncorrupt and considerate officials and shows that an uneducated peasant woman has as much right to legal redress as anyone else in China. The suddenly melodramatic ending, in which Qiu Ju has second thoughts about her hounding of the proud and stubborn village chief, questions not the justice or efficacy of the judgement against him but rather the problematic relationship between traditional community notions of justice and the country's new legal code, drafted and generally implemented in China's cities.

As if unconfident that the films' 'message' alone would meet official approval Zhang shot the film in a way that the most unreconstructed Maoist member of the Politburo could only applaud. Making Qiu Ju entailed spending many moths living with peasants in Shaanxi village - precisely Mao's prescription for Chinese intellectuals. At the same time, the working methods were Zhang's means of preserving some artistic integrity while delivering a politically compromised film: shooting often with hidden cameras and microphones and integrating countless 'real people' into the action of the film were aesthetic strategies never before attempted in China, and they made Qiu Ju the fist 'social-realist' film of its kind in the whole of Chinese cinema. It was doubtless the film's success in carrying off its observational approach which won it the Golden Lion in Venice; but it was doubtless the flattering picture of Chinese society which earned Zhang and Gong their celebratory dinner in the Great Hall of the People.

8 (A proposition)

Zhang Yimou's career to date has encompassed a number of fairly blatant attempts to turn a quick buck. The first was his second feature as director, operation Cougar, a would-be thriller about China-Taiwan cooperation to foil an aircraft hijack. The second was his involvement (as executive producer and lead actor, costarring with Gong Li) in the Hong Kong action-comedy A Terracotta Warrior, directed by Ching Siu-Tung. He has since lent his name as executive producer to a couple of other Gong Li vehicles, most notable Huang Shuqin's Pan Yuliang, A woman Painter. Some would add his latest film Shanghai Triad to the list.

Aside from endorsing the old Hollywood maxim 'Even a director has to eat,' these ventures are all evidence of Zhang's need to free himself from despondency on the 'generosity' of the Beijing authorities and the state film industry. At the time he made Operation Cougar, Zhang was simply one of 1,200 contract staff at Xi'an film Studio, paid a monthly salary of less that US$100. He rushed Cougar into production in an attempt to boost his meagre income, just as he and Chen Kaige had made their TV film Forced Take-Off after making Yellow Earth for Guangxi Film Studio to earn some extra money. The first time he received a director's fee commensurate with international norms was when he made Ju Dou for the Japanese company Tokuma. Since then, all of his films until Shanghai Triad have been made for non-Mainland producers, with budgets and salaries at a decent level.

Shanghai Triad, of course, was intended as a French production until the film Bureau intervened to stop it. Two months later, when the Film Bureau allowed the rewritten Shanghai Triad to go ahead as a Shanghai Film Studio production, it became clear that the nebulous political scandal surrounding To Live had been manufactured by the authorities solely as a means of putting pressure on Zhang Yimou. The film Bureau had belatedly realized that the only way to save china's bankrupt film industry was to get China's internationally successful directors back to work for it, and Zhang Yimou was the guinea pig. Zhang now blames himself for rushing into Shanghai Triad too quickly, and attributes the film's shortcomings to his haste, but it seems equally likely that the film's lack of depth and resonance reflects Zhang's need to buy himself breathing space by making another completely uncontroversial film - another film guaranteed to meet with official approval in Beijing.

9 (More questions)

Where does Zhang Yimou go from here? Shanghai Triad returns to the artifice and visual flamboyance of the early films after the low-key naturalistic interludes of Qiu Ju and To Live, it also returns to the theme of pitiless patriarchal authority. Parts of the film are very obviously conceived to showcase Gong Li, but neither the character she plays nor the way Zhang treats the character seems rooted in any particular need, artistic or otherwise. Shanghai Triad, in fact, is the first Zhang Yimou film since Operation Cougar which doesn't seem to reflect its director's inner life or political situation at any level. And so it's legitimate to ask how easy it will be for Zhang to get back to highly motivated filmmaking, especially now that he has been temporarily cut off from the foreign producers who are clamoring to finance this work.

The question is complicated further by the break with Gong Li. Zhang has at least one script in hand (Empress Wu, commissioned by the French company CB200) which was written expressly for Gong Li, and both he and she have voiced the hope that they will one day film it together. But it seems clear that Zhang's projects in the immediate future will have to be made without the woman who has dominated his work to date.

Will he find a way to function within the new constraints the authorities are imposing on him, while continuing to address issues that matter to him?

10 (Closing propositions)

Zhang Yimou's primary instincts are rebellious. Condemned to second- or third-class status by the accident of birth, he has spent his life fighting to succeed on his own terms. Those terms include the right to describe china as he has experienced it 0 not necessarily in images likely to please the 'system' which blighted his adolescence by denying him a formal education, forcing him to labor in a cotton mill and driving him to sell his blood to get the money to buy his first camera. When Zhang disavows any political intent behind his work, he's not being cagey or coy. His visions of china as a country doomed to tragedy or as a feudal household in the process of destroying itself are not 'political' in the sense understood by China's Communists but simply accurate reflections of the 'system' he knows, loves and hates.

Whenever his visions have given offence to some faceless authority figure, he has retreated with practiced ease into a project designed to buy himself some time or space, and then launched anther 'quiet' rebellion as soon as circumstances have permitted. He is not the first Chinese artist to adopt such a strategy. Sadly, he will not be the last either. It is the strategy of a man who stands outside the 'system' but refuses to bang his head against its walls in a futile gesture of self-destruction. ItÍs the strategy of a seasoned survivor. The fact that he is also an extremely talented filmmaker will guarantee that he prevails.