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Lost in Time, Lost in Space:
Beijing Film Culture in 2004
by Shelly Kraicer
Imagine an entire culture in crisis, unable to
draw on the progressive foundations of its history, unable to conceive
of a livable or survivable future. It’s a crisis that the
world’s hyperpower, the United States, now seems to be driving
towards—even if this has only just been recognized by slightly
less than half of its electorate, who tried, and failed, to reject
the upcoming nightmare. American power, embracing crisis in order
to remake its country anew (and, what is cause for greater alarm,
remake a new world) has full control, and the country is deeply
divided.
Compare this to the People’s Republic of
China. The next great world power is currently in the throes of
an even more radical moral, historical, and existential crisis.
It is a society living asynchronously, without a vital link to its
past or a sense of its own future. The still unexamined raw wound
of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) irretrievably smashed the
country’s ties to its past. A 5,000 year-old cultural continuity
that anchored a society’s ethical underpinnings and sense
of identity was shattered in ten years of turmoil. What followed
was a hollow shell, a cultural space lacking culture. This enormous
vacuum soon inhaled, wholesale, the capitalist world’s methods
and values, practices and fetishes, which were hungrily adopted
and devoured far faster than they could be assimilated. Chinese
society is hurtling unseeing, at a blinding pace, towards an unknowable
future. With a political system that leaves little space for open
opposition, the arts are forced to bear a disproportionate, sometimes
crushing burden. Poets, novelists, musicians, filmmakers, artists
of all types have historically—this is a continuity persisting
through from pre-revolutionary China to the present day—felt
compelled to respond to national dilemmas, to engage in often coded
conflicts over the most profound dilemma: What is China and where
is it headed?
How does such a supercharged, over-determined cultural
context shape filmmaking in China? It puts enormous pressure on
the role of film as art, made by the intellectual class for the
intellectual class (a literati phenomenon, just as brush painting
was in pre-revolutionary China). And it warps cinema as entertainment,
which has the added burden of finding its way in a newly capitalizing
movie marketplace increasingly shaped by the exigencies of investment
and profit. Put simply, a culture adrift without history and without
identity, disoriented both chronologically and spatially, can do
several different kinds of cultural work at the same time: entertainment
for distraction or denial; art for criticism, guidance, reconstruction,
and/or consolation. Perhaps it is this sense of mission that has
induced a notable recent development in the Chinese film scene:
A significant number of the most prominent “underground”
directors (Jia Zhangke, Wang Chao, Liu Hao, Zhu Wen) have recently
sought to make new films within the system, and have received the
Film Bureau’s approval to exhibit their latest works in China.
Jia Zhangke’s new feature The
World has emerged
as the key text of China’s cinema of loss. China’s leading
cinematic poet and analyst is doing the work of a radical philosopher/sociologist,
systematically deconstructing his society’s dilemma in a clearly
structured way. His masterpiece Platform (2000) showed a China lost
in time. The World shows the same society lost in space. If contemporary
global culture has anything to offer, it’s a world in which
everything is connected, accessible, downloadable, transformable
across boundaries, cultures, languages, continents. But at what
cost? The World is set on the outskirts of Beijing, in a 114-acre
theme park, World Park (Shijie Gongyuan) which contains shrunken
monster-kitsch replicas of famous international tourist sites. Among
these mini-Eiffel Towers, Great Pyramids, and Taj Mahals, Jia takes
on the global metropolis as his subject; his poetical-analytic sensibility
proves just as suited for digital urban pop culture as rural post-industrial
torpor. The World seems to be the natural destination of his films’
progress from dusty small towns through to mid-sized industrial
cityscapes. Its excursions into futuristic nightclubs, onscreen
cell phone text-messaging, and even fantastical animated sequences
develop organically from Jia’s style and preoccupations.
At the centre of The World is Jia’s soulfully
elegant muse Zhao Tao, who plays the lead dancer in the theme park’s
multiethnic staged musical spectaculars, portions of which we glimpse
throughout the film. The narrative follows the intertwined lives
of her fellow performers and the park’s security guards, whose
various romantic entanglements play out against this surreal backdrop.
Tao and her colleagues seem so up-to-the-minute modern, so comfortably
wired into easy-access global culture, but Jia’s patient,
penetrating gaze slowly reveals that their inner lives are paralyzed,
haunted with a sense of dread, of gradually emptying hope.
The World is Jia’s first film to be approved
for exhibition in China by the Film Bureau (the mainland censors).
In going “above ground,” Jia has lost none of his critical
edge. Apparently, the officials responsible for Beijing’s
and Shenzhen’s World Parks are delighted with Jia’s
version. This would be another sad illustration of the film’s
thesis, if their cluelessness weren’t so absurdly funny. This
film is in fact his darkest critique yet of the futures available
to his compatriots in present-day urban China: dead ends and black
holes, as far as the eye can see. The film creates worlds within
worlds, wherein all things—architecture, costumes, emotions,
behaviours—are laboriously constructed fakes, painstakingly
crafted copies of imaginary originals who remain ever more out of
reach, the more obsessively their simulacra are fetishized.
With wit and humour, the film mercilessly interrogates
the environment in which its characters are trapped. In excavating
its deep structure, it exposes a tottering Escher-like nightmare
of infinite regress, where reality is cut off, hidden behind unending
iterations of fakes. But Jia gives us more than analysis. His film’s
pained, urgently anguished heart emerges right at the nexus of its
characters’ failure to integrate into such a world, as they
—tentatively hopeful, half-knowing, already preemptively defeated—flail
desperately against the prison walls of their simulated paradise.
The World deepens and broadens Jia’s main
preoccupations, while preserving the beauty of his magisterially
elegant long takes, his peerless exploitation of rich soundscapes,
his uncanny control of offscreen space, and his astonishing ability
to plumb his characters’ psyches while seeming to hold them
at an objective distance. While The World is grounded on a specifically
Chinese experience, ruthlessly dissecting contemporary urbanity
as it is incarnated in today’s Chinese metropolises, its title
signals a more expansive ambition. Several Western critics have
already picked up on the film’s general critique of globalization.
The film satirizes a post-Benjaminian culture where copies assume
primary validity, become even more “authentic” than
putative originals. And it locates something that I’d suggest
all of us have experienced, with a certain amount of apprehension
and confusion: that our hyper-developed technology of communications
masks an alarming void of content. The World may emerge out of China’s
own experience, but it speaks, directly, urgently, to all of us.
Jia Zhangke is not the only director exposing the
paradox of absent space in today’s China. Zhang Lu’s
bleakly humorous, ultra-minimalist underground drama Tang
Poetry is obsessed with domestic space as jail, as dead end, as nightmare.
It employs a rigidly fixed camera, two locations (a small apartment
and an adjoining hallway) and about 15 lines of dialogue to sketch
the bleak relationship between two petty thieves, once lovers, who
only share an inability to communicate. We’re given only the
vaguest hints of their relationship, and their backgrounds. Zhang
clinically isolates these two individuals, two atoms in a vacuum,
with the male partner locked in an anomie so extreme that he can
barely interact with his female roommate. Domesticity here is an
empty prison, both isolated and isolating, inhabited by people in
existential free fall. But the film is anything but dull. Not unlike
in Tsai Ming-liang’s minimalist farce-tragedies, the audience
is invited to hang onto every hint, every expressive gesture of
the superbly deadpan cast, and there are flashes of something like
delight. The film’s title comes from a TV program on Tang
dynasty poems (one of the peaks of world literary culture, from
eighth-century China) that the man watches, though the presence
of the texts (as onscreen intertitles) is cruelly ironic, underlining
how they can no longer communicate anything to someone like him.
Living in non-space, his connection to ancient culture is empty,
arbitrary, and impossible.
Jia has convincingly shattered the illusion that
it is possible to continue to maintain a construction of “space”
that is stable and coherent in social conditions characterized by
loss. Some of the most interesting filmmakers of his generation
in China are looking along the other axis of experience that Jia
explored in Platform: time. Their conclusions may not be as bleak
as Jia’s, and their films tentatively offer positive critiques,
or even the possibility of consolation. Gu Changwei is best known
as the cinematographer of many of the founding masterworks of the
Chinese fifth generation of filmmakers: Chen Kaige’s King
of the Children (1987) and Farewell My
Concubine (1993), and Zhang
Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) and Ju
Dou (1989). Peacock, due
to premiere internationally at the next Berlinale, is his first
film as director. It is a large-scale period piece, a look back
at China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps a bit too
narratively complex for its own good, the film tells three consecutive
stories, each from the point of view of one of three siblings who
grew up in a very troubled family. The sister (a great performance
that should make a star of newcomer Zhang Jingchu) is a dreamy misfit
imprisoned in a drab life ruled by uncomprehending, soul-crushing
parents. Her compensatory fantasies of rhapsodic escape and her
desperate struggle for some kind of spiritual survival give the
film an emotional, passionate heart. The stories of her two brothers,
one mentally handicapped and the other emotionally unstable, pale
a bit in comparison. But the whole is knit together by Gu’s
eye for formally astonishing framings and perfectly beautiful images.
This is not a nostalgia piece for an unrecoverable
imaginary past (Jiang Wen’s 1994 masterpiece In
the Heat of the Sun, also photographed by Gu Changwei, addresses and critiques
that genre). Rather it’s rather deeply committed to catching
a moment of disappearance, when China, emerging from the collectivized
chaos of the Cultural Revolution, seems to offer opportunities to
create private identities, recover private spaces, and construct
individual worlds. The film balances a devotion to the deeply weird
beauty of these newly possible private spaces, while at the same
time acknowledging the desperate sadness of their fragility and
evanescence.
Consolation, however, is on offer in Zhu Wen’s
splendid South of the Clouds. Far more mature than his debut underground
shocker Seafood (2001), the new film is an “above ground”
elegy for the generation that came of age during the 60s and 70s.
Retiree Xu Daqin (played by the fine veteran actor Li Xuejian) determines
to travel to the southwest Yunnan province, a place that functions
as a semi-remote tropical paradise in the imagination of many northern
Chinese. As a young man in the 60s, he had a chance to relocate
there, but the consequences of a love affair forced him to abandon
his Yunnan dream. Trapped afterwards in a life of routine and waste,
he never resigned himself to accepting this loss. But the trip he
finally takes as an old man turns from fantasy wish fulfillment
to absurdist farce as he becomes entangled in a cheap erotic blackmail
scheme. Esteemed fifth-generation film director Tian Zhuangzhuang
has a wonderful cameo here as a sympathetic local police chief,
reminding us of his Springtime in a Small
Town (2002), a film that
tried to assume the burden of showing how contemporary Chinese artists
might somehow begin the process of reforging sustaining links to
their own buried cultural history.
Though authorized for screening in China, Zhu’s
film is definitely a social critique. It relentlessly contrasts
barren contemporary life with an imagined lost past. But it is sharp
enough to acknowledge that this idealized past is a dream, a necessary
but imaginary mental construct. It’s an anti-nostalgia piece
that precisely captures the emotional state of a generation severed
from the past that they thought they deserved. Zhu manages to mix
a wise, inexhaustible compassion with satirical wit, all held together
in a package that skirts the border of art film and commercial entertainment
with rare savvy.
Engaging critically with the past is also on the
agenda of director/writer/actor/producer Xu Jinglei. This 30-year-old
Chinese media idol and star (whose first film, Me
and Dad (2002),
met with some success inside and outside China) is fast becoming
one of her country’s most interesting young filmmakers. Her
second film, Letter from an Unknown Woman, adapts Stephan Zweig’s
1922 Viennese novella—not necessarily Max Ophuls’ 1948
film of the same name—to 30s and 40s Beijing, and won her
the award for best director at the San Sebastian Film Festival this
year. Xu proposes an incisive feminist revision of the original,
in which an adolescent girl’s love for a famous writer blossoms
into an intense, all-consuming obsession. Zweig’s work proposes
a female identity completely under the sway of the male writer’s
gaze. The female protagonist believes that she exists only insofar
as he recognizes her. But her beloved constantly fails to so, even
though, during the course of 15 years, he occasionally sleeps with
her, taking her for a new sexual conquest each time. Xu’s
film subtly turns the tables on this schema, proposing an active
woman who chooses and controls each step of the seduction.
It’s an implicit radicalism, though: Xu is
determined to rework the story from the inside, by inflection, suggestion,
and emphasis. The surface attributes of a romantic period piece
are all there: Letter is visually sumptuous, graced with the exquisitely
observant, softly gliding, and richly luminescent camera-eye of
master cinematographer Mark Lee. The film’s amber-hued shots
of detailed, perfectly placed everyday objects succeed each other
in a rhythmic flow carrying the viewer through spaces lit with virtually
tangible atmosphere that gives them a palpable intimate domesticity.
All this gorgeous atmosphere celebrates lost time (the Proustian
kind), and sets the domestic gaze, gendered female, against the
traditionally male narrative gaze. While acknowledging an irretrievable
loss, Xu’s film demands a regendered reappraisal of that era,
just before the Chinese Communist revolution in 1949 that seemed
to hold the most promise for its future. Rather than nostalgia,
Letter demands an active reconstruction of a not-so-distant past,
as a prerequisite, perhaps, for any possible future.
Sometimes one can see Beijing filmmakers struggling
not to be overwhelmed by the complex burden that their cultural
environment imposes on them. Both Liu Fendou and Pan Jianlin, for
example, have recently made films that have attracted international
attention yet betray signs of incompletely assimilating the contradictions
that they are steeped in. Liu’s 35mm underground feature Green
Hat—which won the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival’s best
narrative feature and best new narrative director awards—is
split down the middle. A blackly humorous story about a heist gone
wrong (one of the bank robbers melts down when he discovers that
his girlfriend in America has ditched him) is spliced to an intimate
domestic drama between the cop who broke up the heist, his wife,
and her studly lover. The film seems to self-consciously enact the
paralyzing fear of an artist’s impotence in the face of a
social crisis that one can’t assimilate. The result, though
technically sharp, has an inescapable structural incoherence that
weakens an otherwise fascinating and provocative work.
Pan Jianlin’s Good
Morning Beijing attempts
to juxtapose two possibly related stories about Beijing’s
lurid night life: a man drives around the city with a couple of
private investigators trying to deliver ransom to the people who
kidnapped his wife; while, in an abandoned apartment, several women,
possibly sex-trade slaves, give erotic massages to a succession
of creepy johns. Shot in murky Digibeta with very little craft or
finesse, the film never coheres: its general impression of night-drenched
anxiety (mitigated by a droll underbeat of black humour) is far
more cogent than its structure or story. But these two directors’
works, no matter how deformed by the pressure cooker of contemporary
Beijing’s cultural contradictions, retain an urgent sense
of purpose that is unmistakable.
I’ve been discussing cinema as a symptom
of a crisis; films as alarm bells, summoning us to rethink the way
we live. Chinese cinema has urgent work to do: things need to be
said; wounds need to be exposed. There’s a palpable sense
of frustration, at least in the Beijing film community, that with
a society in such evident crisis, the country’s filmmakers
haven’t yet produced a response equal to the challenge. Keep
an eye, for example, on independent directors like Wang Bing (Believe
in the Future, 2005), Li Shaohong (Baober
in Love, 2004), Wang Chao
(Day and Night, 2004), He Jianjun (Pirated
Copy, 2004), Li Yu (Dam
Street, 2005), Zhang Yuan (Beautiful, 2004) Xie Dong (Summer, 2004),
Cui Zi’en (The Narrow Path, 2004), Gan Xiao'er (Raised
From Dust, 2005), and Li Yang (Red Passion, 2005), all of whom have either
recently completed or are working on new features. If China’s
current cultural upheaval hasn’t yet produced the kind of
masterpieces that its prodigiously talented filmmakers are capable
of, it is nonetheless producing a body of work that is vibrantly
engaged and aesthetically challenging. China’s cinema of loss
will continue to confront a profoundly disoriented audience, struggle
to make sense of a void, and offer to console a society lost in
time and lost in space.
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The World
Articles in this
Section
Lost in Time, Lost in Space: Beijing Film Culture
in 2004
by shelly kraicer
Identity Politics: Issues in the Films of Claire
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