Many of the filmmakers who created the unique, visually enchanting and often troubling movies in recent decades are still around.
But increasingly tight censorship combined with corporate opportunism driven by Hollywood and China Inc have changed the landscape: auteurs are restricted to tiny budget films screened to audiences of friends or they shoot action-saturated co-produced blockbusters with uplifting themes of triumph over aliens or barbarians.
Chinese property developers — led by the country’s wealthiest person, Wang Jianlin, owner of the Wanda conglomerate — have built waves of multi-screen cinemas to lure customers to their ritzy new malls, from which customers have been draining away as e-commerce replaces regular retail.
The need to fill these 12,000 mostly new screens — driving China’s box office towards overtaking the US’s — together with a turn towards stronger centralised political control of culture have caused a makeover in the film industry. There were fewer than 5000 screens seven years ago.
The answer to both trends has been blockbusters, ideally set in fantasy worlds, in which right triumphs over wrong.
In this area, East conveniently meets West.
Hollywood has decided to court the Chinese market as well as Chinese investment and even ownership of studios. And the way Hollywood approaches its domestic market — including storylines — fits these Chinese commercial settings nicely.
Wang is discussing with Viacom the purchase of 49 per cent of Paramount Pictures. He already owns US cinema chain AMC Entertainment and the Legendary Entertainment studio that made The Dark Knight.
The format is working, to an extent. Last year the Chinese box office soared 50 per cent, but on the back of extensive discounting of tickets.
In the first half of this year, as discounts fell away, receipts rose by a calmer 20 per cent compared with the first half of last year to $4.9 billion, compared with about $7bn in US receipts for the same six months.
Zhou Shixing, the chief content officer of Hunan TV & Broadcast — China’s second largest television network, owned by Hunan provincial government, which has co-invested in a series of films with US company Lions Gate Entertainment — has told The Wall Street Journal: “Because of the special situation in China’s market, we prefer to choose films with positive energy. When we invest in a film, our priority is to assess the film’s political and policy risks, and then its commercial prospects.”
This makes commercial sense. China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), which is responsible for licensing and censoring on behalf of the ruling Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department, can and does veto the showing of many films within China.
It also has the final say on which films can be imported. The present quota is 34 products from around the world in any calendar year. In the first half of this year, 47 per cent of box office was for imported films. Warcraft was by far the biggest.
New legislation for the industry is about to be approved by the National People’s Congress.
This requires higher ethical standards for actors and directors, imposes stricter protocols for censorship, and requires cinemas to fill at least two-thirds of annual screen time with domestic films, according to Beijing analysts China Policy.
A Hollywood company in a joint venture with a Chinese partner, though, can bypass the SARFT quota and be assured of distribution (providing censorship requirements are met). Sometimes the removal of scenes — or even of whole characters, such as that played by Chow Yun-fat in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End— can persuade SARFT to give a film the tick.
A classic example of this new China-US movie production chain is The Great Wall. At $177 million, it’s the most expensive film so far shot in China — specifically, in Qingdao — and is due for release in December.
The Great Wall stars an eclectic cast including Matt Damon, Willem Dafoe and Andy Lau. It brands itself as a “3-D epic science-fantasy monster-adventure action” film, the central trope of which is the great nationalist symbol of the wall whose core role is to keep out barbarians — or, in this version, monsters.
Its director is Zhang Yimou, who for the first half of his career made personal and challenging films such as Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern and To Live. He has since turned to epics such as Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower, winning him strong support in the party elite. He was chosen to choreograph the heroic-scale opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games.
He says The Great Wall’s opulent budget and ambition of taking a patriotic theme to a global market sets “a trend that should be embraced by our industry”.
Hao Jian has a different perspective. A leading scriptwriter, he is now a professor at Beijing Film Academy, whose own retail outlet sells almost solely franchised goods from Star Wars, Frozen, Transformers and other US blockbusters. Graduates of the academy include most of the giants of
Chinese cinema including Zhang, Chen Kaige and Jia Zhangke.
Jia, who won the 2006 Venice film festival Golden Lion for Still Life as well as other international awards, is unable to gain licences to have his films screened in China, where he still lives and continues to make films on tiny budgets.
Hao tells The Australian it is understandable that films seeking young audiences happen to be bright and easy to follow, as in the US or Europe.
When more challenging films win Oscars, they don’t always secure a local release: “I assume that they will be shown here, but often that’s not the case. With The Lives of Others” — a 2006 film about the Stasi in East Germany — “I knew that could never happen of course.”
The Chinese government adheres to a “mainstream aesthetic”, he says, that does not tolerate film noir, rejects “unhappy” endings, shuns ambiguity and requires “positive energy”. Sometimes more complex films from overseas make the quota, such as Atonement and The King’s Speech.
“But generally,” Hao says, “the track is popular and safe, meaning of course politically safe.”
Films made in Hong Kong don’t come within the quota but “distribution companies buy them and quite often change them” to fit perceived SARFT preferences.
Besides cutting famous sex scenes, censors reworked Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s 2007 masterpiece Lust, Caution by editing out the crucial warning of the young lover “Kuai, zou!” (“Quick, go!”) — around which the film’s drama and emotional realism hinge — to create instead a narrative whose main thread is more consistently patriotic.
“It’s the turning point in the story,” Hao says. “And it’s changed. In the original, she decides with her heart to save her lover whom she knows is in a trap.
“In the mainland Chinese version, she says instead “Zou ba” (“Let’s go home”). The removed sex scenes are also important for the narrative: they show us she is choosing her body for herself, not for her country, her identity awakens when she makes love.”
The most recent Chinese-made film to feature a dark side, and which has received warm reviews from foreign writers, is Mr Six, a gang-crime drama directed by Guan Hu and starring a mesmerising tough guy with a heart of gold played by Feng Xiaogang, himself a director.
But even Mr Six came under fire from some Chinese critics, who complained about the lack of realism in the resolution of the conflict that built through the movie. In the film, Feng’s character reports the bad guys to the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection, the Communist Party’s much-feared anti-corruption agency. This odd script deviation was almost certainly crucial in ensuring widespread distribution.
“But it didn’t seem consistent with the character,” says Hao.
He says the current generation of students at the film academy “are naturally very aware of the situation of the industry, one which they can’t change”.
“So for many of them, it’s natural to gravitate towards commercial opportunity, to focus on computer-generated imagery, on superheroes” — and on stars who may have emerged from social media, chiefly because of their looks.
The statist ideology and the aesthetic starting to dominate, Hao says, have its origins in German photographer and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose Triumph of the Will celebrated Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy. “The Olympic Games opening ceremony in Beijing carried resonances from Riefenstahl.”
He says film theatre managers had told him during the past few years that comedy “mostly makes for disastrous box office”.
There remain exceptions, such as director Xu Zheng, best known for two hits in which he also acted, Lost in Thailand and Lost in Hong Kong. “To become a successful filmmaker in China today,” Hao says, “you must be an astute analyst of censorship. Better still, internalise the censorship norms.”
Hao himself recently began researching a script that would seek “to locate the dark part in our heart”
— as, he says, William Golding had done in Lord of the Flies.
But a producer friend warned him that this would be “too difficult” to get made or receive censorship approval. That is why production and distribution companies usually today work together to fund and make films in China.
The acclaimed early films of Zhang, he says, would not have been made or distributed today. The country lacks art-house type cinemas that might, if the films receive permission, provide alternative, more nuanced viewing.
“But a film that is not strikingly clear is perceived as dangerous,” says Hao.
Art-house fame would be too low-key for another group of ambitious students at the academy, he says — those for whom celebrity is an end in itself.
But Hao says: “Hollywood films can still change Chinese society. Through some of them, we can meet people who seem very real, whose stories are very human. Even totally commercially driven films have their compensations. Their messages often come from inside the characters, not from without.”
Working outside the system in China means making a film for about $5000. The films are shown in cafes, people’s apartments or film schools
Previously, they could get screenings at independent film festivals. But such festivals steadily are being closed down by authorities, as happened two years ago to the annual Beijing festival that had enabled independent directors to show their works.
And it is now much harder to show such products on university campuses, where Jia used to screen his classic works, carrying the equipment from city to city.
Nor is the internet the answer. That is policed even more tightly than physical venues.
“In the West, independent means the filmmaker is independent of wealthy investors,” Hao says. “In China, it only means not wanting to take part in the game of censorship.”
Success in that game is signified by the SARFT seal of approval, which features a flying dragon, a requirement for foreign and domestic films.
A director who sends an independently made product to an international film festival will be banned from shooting a film in China for three to five years — as happened to Zhang after entering To Live at Cannes, for which actress Gong Li also was banned. Chen’s Farewell My Concubine, the only Chinese film to win the Cannes Palme d’Or, was banned too.
Americans, Hao says, reassessed themselves in part through their Vietnam war films. The same is happening in Hong Kong with its surprise smash, the cheaply and independently made dystopian film Ten Years.
But in mainland China, there’s an even more fundamental challenge: “We can’t tell a good story today because we don’t know who we are. Our identity is confused.”
And the most obvious way of re-establishing it, through re-examining history, is barred by an especially well-bolted door, Hao says.
Source: The Australian by Rowan Callick