It's Complicated: The Story of Chinese Cinema

Chinese cinema has had a long and complicated struggle with finding a distinct national voice that exists in spite of foreign influence and strict censorship, yet somehow it has managed to develop a unique method of story telling that draws upon tradition and embraces it’s creative restraints.

In the beginning of Chinese cinema, audiences were exposed to “melodramatic and sentimental tales [that] dramatized the disjuncture and contradictions of life in the modern, western city. If they were tragedies, decline and misfortune were inexorable, but if they were comedies, the wondrous device of coincidence would intervene” (Barry 409). This makes since for the time, because cinema was still in its silent era, when melodrama flourished, and the west possessed the major influence over cinema. The Chinese, like everyone else, were exploring the abilities of the medium, and they were learning from the work of other countries so that they could begin to build their own conventions without having to start at the very beginning.

In this early cinema, there were often times where male cons gained obvious laughs from the audience (Barry 409), which again is expected in silent cinema. Audiences at the time were willing to laugh at the bad guy because he was not human, and they were rooting for the good guy. These cons had the perfect opportunities for slap stick comedy, and were often the source of laughs in Western silent films, like those of Charlie Chaplin, who in spite of turning the lovable tramp into a comedic entity, also made the villains the brute of many slap-stick jokes.

A theme that has been common throughout Chinese cinema seems to be that of financial strain providing motivation for the plot. Early on filmmakers put their own financial frustration on the screen through diluted story lines, and over time the financial problems created by the government has begun to provide an easy criticism for politically motivated filmmakers.

After the revolution, China began to re-direct its cinema. “From 1949 to 1966, a national film base financed by the state produced social realist ‘worker-peasant-soldier’ films, in an attempt to build an indigenous ‘revolutionary cinema’” (Yau 693). It was around this time the government realized the motivating and unifying power of film, and they therefore sought to use it to its full potential. They began to manipulate the subject matter to speak to a specific audience, a method often known and referred to as propaganda, which has become the source of government scrutiny and censorship ever since.

In the time from 1949 to 1950, the Northeastern Studio films “told moving stories of women as fighters, victims, and martyrs. In these films, elements as diverse as documentary footage, folklore, traditional music, and hagiography enhanced the popular appeal of female figures of liberation and struggle” (Yau 694). From this time on, women began playing vital, inspirational roles in Chinese cinema that can be followed right up to their present day films.

As China developed its voice, some filmmakers managed to incorporate an interesting dichotomy into their films. The films made between 1958 and 1959, “while focusing China’s modern history, all shared an appealing human focus” (Yau 696). This human focus has also become a stable part of China’s cinematic voice, because cinema has become so centered on the people. Government censorship has been wary of the humanity shown in films and censored them accordingly, while brave filmmakers in all generations have embraced the topic of humanity as a vehicle to express their frustration with the status quo.

The fifth Generation played a very influential part in the development of the modern Chinese cinema. In their films, “tragedy, absurdity, and ambiguity made their return” (Yau 700), and Zhang Yimou began to rise as a maverick of the extremist generation. Their era of filmmaking was influenced by the passing of the second “hundred flowers”, and the publication of director Zhang Nuanxin’s “The Modernization of Film Language,” which encouraged them to embrace technical aspects of storytelling as a method to improve the overall effect (Yau 699). It was this generation that brought China into its spot as an international contender in the film scene, with their limited yet still expanded freedom to express themselves, as well as their attention to technical detail. The fifth generation in China is a lot like the film school generation of the United States, except in China the generation was persecuted and in the United States they were embraced.

Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times, which was made in 2000, bears a striking number of similarities to a lot of previous generations of Chinese cinema from what I can tell. It’s story largely employs the obstacle of financial trouble, with the main character wanting desperately to help the young girl thrown into his care, and his obese lover always seeking more money from a partner instead of true love. It often times employs simple jokes to gain laughs, like when the first “client” for the young girl lays on the crudely constructed massage table and almost falls through the hole at the top, or when the main character ends up sleeping on the balcony after being trapped in the room with the young girl who does not know he is there.

Happy Times simultaneously inverts the traditional view of women and upholds it with the two main female characters. The main character’s lover in the film becomes the con, as opposed to early Chinese cinema when cons were men. On the other hand, her stepdaughter portrays a journey from victim to fighter, roles that were given to women by the Northeastern studio fifty years before. Yimou, whether he meant to or not, seems to make the statement here that women are neither pure nor evil, but like men must be regarded with caution.

With the characters of Happy Times being so interdependent, the film eventually embraces the human focus developed in the late 1950s. The main character, despite being a bum and a con artist maintains a complicated moral code and unexpectedly deep compassion. When he refuses to allow a couple to have sex in the bus that he painted, we see for the first time that this man is not strictly a con, but a man of morals. In his desperate attempts to keep his lovers ‘stepdaughter believing that she is working and making money, he makes self-sacrifices thinking of her, and again shows the audience that he may not be societies most valued member, but he is far from their most despicable. The young blind girl who holds out an unbelievable amount of hope under crushing circumstances is also a key focus of the film. The audience is never quiet sure what she knows and what she does not, and they are therefore trying to read her throughout the entire film, which raises the level of interest dramatically. As she grows throughout the film, she becomes less of a helpless child and more of an woman empowered by her past moving forward.

Yimou’s fifth generation influence is also clear in this film with its absurdity and ambiguity, which were markers of films from the generation. The entire plot is absurd in its circumstances, yet the audience forgives this shortcoming because of the lovable characters. The films end embraces ambiguity to the point of sacrificing a conclusion. In the end, the audience does not know what happens to the main character, and they are left to create a future for the young heroin as she walks a lone down a crowded seat.

One last, small thing that I noticed about the film was it's reference to America. In the cafe, when the girl begin to dream about getting her eyes fixed, she talks about how her father will take her to America is they cannot fix them in China, and as her dream gets bigger and glorifies America, her surrogate father's friend cuts her off saying something along the lines of "You don't need America, we can do it in China". This conversation, to me, referrenced a distinct Chinese voice in cinema, claiming their superiority to America, the West, and Capitalism. It also reminded me that in China there is censorship, and filmmakers must be cautious of what they put on screen to make sure China is glorified and not put down.

Word Study:

On page 700, Yau brings up the term “the fifth generation” and points out the word generation “acknowledges previous generations contributions”. I decided to look up the word generation. According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Fourth Edition, it means:

1. All of the offspring that are at the same stage of descent from a common ancestor: Mother and daughters represent two generations.

2. Biology A form or stage in the life cycle of an organism: asexual generation of a fern.

3. The average interval of time between the birth of parents and the birth of their offspring.

4.

a. A group of individuals born and living about the same time.

b. A group of generally contemporaneous individuals regarded as having common cultural or social characteristics and attitudes: "They're the television generation" (Roger Enrico).

c. A stage or period of sequential technological development and innovation.

d. A class of objects derived from a preceding class: a new generation of computers.

5. The formation of a line or geometric figure by the movement of a point or line.

6. The act or process of generating; origination, production, or procreation.

Of these, the definitions 4b, 4c and 4d, as well as 5 all seem to fit. The fifth generation was characterized by their style of film, which was standardized in many ways due to higher education and a common disgust for the current government. The “generation” also fit into a sequence of development, with each generation encouraging the next to be more radical in their story telling while embracing the technology used to create film. Under this same idea, the generation fits definition 4d if the word objects is substituted with people. It did draw many things from the previous generation, but also made those concepts more radical in their own work.

Finally, the generation has become a point on the timeline of Chinese Cinema, and therefore fits into the idea of being a “point on a line” in definition 5.

Works Cited:

Barry, Chris. “China Before 1949”. The Oxford History of world Cinema: The Definitive History of Cinema Worldwide. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 267-275. Print.

Yau, Esther. “China After the Revolution”. The Oxford History of World Cinema: The Definitive History of Cinema Worldwide. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 267-275. Print.