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NEW CHINESE CINEMA AND WESTERN FILM FESTIVALS
Introduction
Festival Circuits And The Selection Of Canonical Works
The Fifth Generation Cinema and Its Cross-Cultural Interpretation
The Sixth Generation Cinema: To Continue the Dialogue with the West
written by Ran Ma
Chinese national cinema has further consolidated its status in the map of world cinema especially since the Fifth Generation mainland Chinese filmmakers have drawn attention to their creativity and passion world-wide. As observed by Klaus Eden, a program organizer of the Munich International Film Festival, “New Chinese Cinema has dominated many international festivals, most recently Venice in 1992 (the Story of Qiu Ju), Berlin in 1993 (Women from the Lake of Scented Souls) and Cannes in 1993 (Farewell My Concubine). That is a surprising and admirable series of successes, which no other cinema has ever duplicated, at least not within the last two or three decades” (qtd in Zhang, 23).
Undoubtedly, festival circuit proves to be a crucial link in New Chinese Cinema’s path to the world arena. From the Fifth Generation’s Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Wu Ziniu, and Tian Zhuangzhuang to the Sixth Generation’s Jia Zhangke, Zhang Yuan, and Wang Xiaoshuai … many of the leading filmmakers have been identified as art film auteurists after they have garnered high-profile film festivals’ top prizes.
To take Zhang Yimou for instance, he has won his first crucial international film award at 1988’s Berlin International film festival with Red Sorghum (Hong Gaoliang, 1987). Since then he became one of the western film festivals’ favorites whose name has been closely associated with the dazzling Golden Lion, Palm and Bear despite his recent diving into genre films. A similar trajectory can also be found in Chen Kaige, whose award record reads no less impressive than Zhang’s.
However, while Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and their contemporaries have presented through their films “China” and “Chineseness” to the Western world, critics –especially native Chinese critics and audience–hold a mixed feeling towards their remarkable achievements at international film festivals. Referred to as “ethnographic film”, Zhang’s early works have reflected “the willful surrender of Third World cinema to the Orientalist gaze, as a classic case of the subjugation of Third World culture to Western hegemony” (Lu, 87). While it is too arbitrary to attach the label of “Oriental’s orientalism” or “Self-Orientalizing” to the Fifth Generation Cinema but fail to judge them from a wider spectrum of visions, the truth remains that numerous films deploying similar ethnographic formula, fashioned after Red Sorghum’s international success, have won awards and found distributions in the West. Ethnographic cinema became an entirely new genre in mainland China (Zhang, 208).
The disjuncture in the imaginary of “China” between the filmmakers, western audience and the Chinese spectators has foregrounded the western film festivals as a multi-layered cultural mechanism which functions in a complicated way both at the aesthetic and the commercial level.
Meanwhile, since the late 80s and early 90s, with the continuation of the Chinese government’s opening-up policy and the economic reform, the cultural scenario in post-Tiananmen China also underwent significant transitions. Profound changes also took place in the film industry. Firstly, with the socialist market-economy oriented reform and the subsequent erosion of studio system, young filmmakers have met with great challenges both from within and outside the system. As film academy graduates, few of them have had the chance to work in the state-owned film studios. The start of their career as independent filmmakers resembles that of their Western counterparts, which means that the festival circuit provides decisive channels for them to seek distribution and secure the investment for future projects.
Secondly, dubbed as the “Urban Generation”, they are dedicated to the every-day experience of urbanites, the influx of city life and a varied group of city dwellers, which separate them unequivocally from their predecessors. While the subjects of the Sixth Generation Cinema prove to be quite controversial, what is more provocative is the production mode of those films: independent and illegal. The distribution and circulation of the Chinese “underground” films in the West, owing to the festival circuit, contrasts sharply with their banning within mainland China. It exactly embodies the dilemma the Sixth Generation filmmakers are confronted with.
Just as international festival circuit has indeed established some of the Fifth Generation’s films as canonical works, an observable shift can be sensed when film festivals divert their interest to the new generation’s independent films. Acclaims from these festivals have shed light on the young filmmakers’ realistic spirit that they have claimed to commit to. It at the same time resonates with the increasing attention drawn to them from the academy. The Sixth Generation directors and their films have gradually become indispensable content in recent studies on New Chinese Cinema.
To examine two generations’ Chinese cinema through the platform of western film festivals is based on the intertwined relations between the inclusion/ exclusion of film canons and the selection process of film festivals. While film festivals are thriving not only in regions with established film tradition but also in territories with relatively underdeveloped film industry (like in the Africa), and despite the endeavor to diversify the film entries’ subjects and adjust evaluating standards, western film festivals still act as the leading tastemaker functioning within certain boundaries.
The selection criteria of film festivals, although not fixed, are intricately related to a comparatively stable framework permeated with the Western ideology and political vision. Therefore, the interpretation of both the Fifth and the Sixth Generations’ films can never escape the truth that China is unique country in that she has witnessed thousands’ years of historic vicissitudes and is now a socialist regime. Accordingly, the reading of Sixth Generation’s works evolves to a large degree from the supposition that these underground filmmakers, as potential dissidents, have taken the anti-system stance against the mainstream ideology. Therefore more elusive political messages should be explored within the cinematic texts and from their independent/ underground production practice.
I want to try to clarify the underlying mechanism for the interaction between the Western film festivals and Chinese films, especially the Sixth Generation’s works. The project aims to study which aspects the Fifth and Sixth Generation have exhibited and implicated appeal to the Western expectations and conventions and why. It also intends to make clear how the Western Taste, which figures predominantly in the evaluation and selection of non-western films at the Western film festivals, has intricately influenced these entries and presented them both with opportunities and challenges.
The new generation’s popularity among these film festivals has not altered the fact that both generations’ Chinese cinema has been interpreted by the West from limited perspectives that concentrate on the reality “beyond” rather than “within” those films. Consequently, the Sixth Generation directors not only have to counteract the homogenizing power from the official ideology and the mainstream narrative, but also have to resist being assimilated into the western anti-establishment discourse, which in turn may underestimates their aesthetic achievements.
Following the above argument, the thesis will unfold in several chapters. After the introduction, chapter one will examine the relationship between festival circuits—its programming and selection—and the inclusion of canonical films. Furthermore, it will explore the festival selection criteria with respect to world cinema and foreground the functioning mechanism correlating both art and commerce.
The second chapter will review the Fifth Generation’s rise at film festivals in order to address the crucial issue of “auto-ethnography” associated with their filmic narratives , which is considered to have lived up to western expectation and conventions and thus win their ticket to the West. Here the focus will be shifted from the “Oriental’s Orientalism” to the emergence of Chinese ethnographic cinema at the film festivals. The study of the festival-goers and the Western Taste will also illuminate the framework of the cross-cultural interpretation of New Chinese Cinema, where political vision has played a central role.
Chapter three will take a close look at the Sixth Generation filmmakers and the cultural scenery they have constituted. Their new production practice and the story behind banned films have sustained the Western curiosity about the “reality” of the socialist China. “Underground film” even became a marketable brand for young filmmakers’ works.
Finally, the concluding chapter will focus on the recent development of both generations’ filmmakers, especially the Fifth Generation’s commercial films and the legalization of underground films. It will examine in the era of global image consumption, what the film festival circuit has brought to New Chinese Cinema and how both generations cope with the changed cultural scenario.
24/08/2006
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