Updated 14 November 2006
English 212, Section 3: World Cinema
Week 11: 6 November 2006
Professor: Don Larsson
6:00-6:15 Quiz 6 (Indian film)
6:15-6:20 Review Quiz 6
6:20-6:45 Chinese filmmaking and the 5th Generation
6:45-8:50 View To Live/Huozhe
8:50-9:00 Break
9:00-9:30 Discuss To Live
Twentieth Century Chinese History: A Brief Overview
1911:
§ Emperor Puyi is overthrown by the Nationalist Kuomindang Party, ending the Qing/Ching Dynasty and establishing China as a republic
§ Much of China remains in hands of local warlords
1920:
§ Chinese Communist Party founded
1925:
§ Sun Yat-Sen, founder of Kuomindang, dies; Chiang Kai-Shek becomes new Nationalist leader
1930s:
§ Japan invades Manchuria, establishes puppet government
§ Civil War erupts between Kuomindang and Communists
§ 1934-1935: Mao Zedong leads Communist army on Long March in retreat from Chiang’s forces, cements Mao’s power as Party Chairman
§ 1937: Japan invades Republic of China
§ Mao and Chiang form alliance against Japanese
§ 1945: World War II ends with Japanese defeat, civil war begins again
People’s Republic of China
§ 1949: Mao and Communists seize control of country, declare Communist People’s Republic of China
§ Chiang and Nationalists flee to island of Taiwan, still recognized by U.S. as Republic of China
§ 1956: the “Hundred Flowers” policy relaxes government censorship for a while
§ 1958-1962: Mao announces radical program of industrialization and modernization known as the Great Leap Forward, ends in economic and social disaster
§ 1966: Mao announces Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
o “Old” and Western ways denounced
o Mao’s “little red book” of quotations becomes key text
o Enforced by youth militias known as the Red Guard
o Professionals, intellectuals, artists denounced, jailed, exiled to hard labor or executed
o “Incorrect” documents and artifacts destroyed
§ 1969: Mao dissolves Red Guard but Cultural Revolution policies remain until after Mao’s death
§ 1971: United States begins to reestablish diplomatic and trade ties with PRC
§ 1976: Mao dies; “Gang of Four” (Party leaders, including Mao’s wife, Jian Qing) arrested and tried for treason
§ 1980: Deng Xiopeng emerges as most powerful Party leader, launches China on new movement toward part-capitalist economy
§ 1984: China takes control of Hong Kong from British
§ 1989: Deng and government brutally suppress Democracy Movement in Beijing’s Tienanmen Square
§ 1997: Deng dies
§ 2003: Hu Jintao becomes President of PRC and General Secretary of Communist Party
Film History in China:
§ Early films shown in China in 1890s
§ Much of domestic film production based in Shanghai
§ Chinese filmmakers divided into “generations” by Chinese film historians:
o First Generation: 1905-1932 (native production does not really begin until 1916)
o Second Generation: 1932-1949
o Third Generation: 1949-1960 (Socialist Realist aesthetics dominate)
o Fourth Generation: 1960-1980 (Cultural Revolution period, only a few films produced, under control of Jian Qing)
o Fifth Generation: 1980-1990s (first filmmakers to graduate from newly-reopened film schools)
o Sixth Generation: 1990s-present (anti-romantic in temperament)
The Fifth Generation
§ Different styles, themes and narrative concerns
§ United by rejection of Socialist Realist legacy of Third and Fourth Generations
§ Films sometimes banned or modified by government censors
§ Directors sometimes exert own control through foreign financing
Major Directors and Films of the Fifth Generation:
Chen Kaige (born 1952)
§ Yellow Earth (1984), one of first Chinese films to gain attention and praise in West, photographed by Zhang Yimou
§ The Big Parade (1986)
§ King of the Children (1987)
§ Life on a String (1991)
§ Farewell, My Concubine (1983), sweeping tale of three people involved in the Beijing Opera from the Japanese invasions through the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath
§ Temptress Moon (1996)
§ The Emperor and the Assassin (1999)
§ Killing Me Softly (2002)
§ Together (2002)
§ The Promise (2005)
Zhang Yimou (born 1951)
Began film career as cinematographer, then feature film director
§ Red Sorghum (1987)
§ Ju Dou (1990)
§ Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
§ The Story of Qiu Ju (1992)
§ To Live (1994)
§ Shanghai Triad (1995)
§ Not One Less (1999)
§ Happy Times (2000)
§ Hero (2002)
§ House of Flying Daggers (2004)
§ Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (2005)
Major Themes and Motifs:
§ Role of the individual in relation to the group or state
§ Women asserting their independence in male-dominated culture
§ Striking uses of color, often with symbolic importance
§ Careful attention to sound effects
§ Actress Gong Li has starred in most of Zhang’s films
To Live (China, 1994)
Director: Zhang Yimou; Script: Lu Wei and Yu Hua, from their novel; Cinematography: Lu Yuwe; Editing: Du Yuan; Music: Zhao Jiping
Cast: Ge You (Fugui Xu, a landlord’s son); Gong Li (Jiazhen Xu, his wife); Ben Niu (town chief); Guo Tao (Chungshen, Fugui’s assistant in the puppet show and later friend in the army); Tianxi Liu (Fengxia Xu, Fugui’s daughter); Jiang Wu (Erxi Wan, Fengxia’s husband);Fei Deng (Youqing, Fugui’s son)
Synopsis:
Xu Fugui is the son of a prosperous landlord in 1930s China, who has been gambling away his family’s finances. Finally, he is reduced to owning nothing but a set of shadow puppets. On a trip putting on shows to earn money, he and a friend wind up having to put on shows for both the Nationalist and Communist forces who are fighting each other in the civil war. In the meantime, Xu’s wife Jiazhen has to take whatever work she can find to support the family. After the Revolution, the family lives in a neighborhood collective, and they find their lives buffeted by the forces of history and Mao’s politics through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Discussion Questions:
1. What is Xu like when we first meet him? How does he change? In what ways are those changes caused by the historical forces that intersect his own life?
2. What is the relationship between Xu and Jiazhen like? How does their marriage manage to hold together despite all the hardships that they go through?
3. What attitudes does the film express toward China’s recent history? How are such social experiments as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution presented in terms of their actual outcomes?
4. What is the significance of the shadow puppets that Xu works with for a while?
DISCUSSION SUMMARY:
To Live presents the lives and fortunes of one man and his family through the turmoil and changes of the last half-century of Chinese history. When we first meet Fugui, he is a representative of a decaying upper class. His father is a wealthy landlord and Fugui himself is married, but he spends all of his time at the local gambling hall, but he loses his house to an ambitious patron of the gambling hall and has no way to make a living. His father dies in a fit of rage and his wife and child leave him. Desperately, he turns to his debtor who gives him a box of shadow puppets with which he can try to earn a living by putting on shows. Those puppets come to be representative and perhaps symbolic of the lives of ordinary Chinese people like Fugui throughout the film.
Surprisingly, Fugui turns out to be a good showman, but his skills are not enough when he and a friend are captured by Chinese Nationalist forces fighting in the civil war against Mao’s Communist army. Soon, Fugui and his friend are taken by the Communists, and when Mao declares the victory of the Communist People’s Republic of China, Fugui returns to his home town as a supporter of the revolution. He is soon reunited with his wife Jiazhen, who has been making a living selling water, but he discovers that his daughter has become mute from illness. He is grateful now, though, for the family that he nearly threw away when he was prosperous.
Over the years following, Fugui and Jiazhen have to cope with Mao’s policies of collectivization and the overturning of traditional class rule. Fugui’s bad fortune has now turned good, since if he was still known as the son of a landlord, he would be subject to imprisonment or even death, as happens to Long’er, the man who won Fugui’s house. But the family has more ordeals to live through. Their son is killed in an accident during the Great Leap Forward, partly a matter of chance but partly because the boy was tired from overwork.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution wreaks even greater havoc when Fugui is forced to burn his shadow puppets, which represent the “old” China that the Cultural Revolution seeks to destroy. His daughter marries a Red Guard commander, but one who actually turns out to be a very decent and humane individual. However, she dies in childbirth because the Cultural Revolution had driven the best doctors from the hospitals. In the end, Fugui, Jianzhen, their son-in-law and grandson gather at the grave of their two children, sacrifices to Mao’s ambitions, still relying on family as the only sure place of refuge in the storm of history.
To Live presents an image of China that fits with the new society that has been emerging after Mao’s death. The criticisms of Mao’s policies and the fact that this story does not glorify the state would have made this film impossible (and very dangerous!) just a few years earlier. The predominant message of the film is that life continues, despite all of its dangers and setbacks. At the very end of the film, Fugui looks for a place to house some chicks that he had bought for his grandson. He drags out the old chest where he had once stored his shadow puppets. Now the chicks have room to move about (and, it is implied, so do Fugui and his family). When his grandson asks what will happen to the chicks, he replies that they will grow and change into other animals, echoing a statement he had made to his own son earlier in the film. That time, he promised his son that the end result would be Communism, the “worker’s paradise” predicted by Karl Marx. Now, though, the end result is simply “family.”
To Live does not challenge the new government and economic policies created by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiopeng, but it does strongly suggest themes that resonate through Chinese history and philosophy—the need to adapt to change; the central role of the family; and especially the need for balance between opposing forces, whether in government, nature, or personal lives. In that way, the film is more optimistic than Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, which ends on the note that the changes of the “new” China after Mao still leave individual human lives as wreckage in their wake.
The ending of To Live is also consistent with Zhang’s more recent film Hero, starring Hong Kong action star Jet Li as an assassin sent to kill Qin Shi Huangdi, China’s first Emperor. As a historical figure, Qin has always had a mixed reception. The film portrays him as a warlike figure capable of great cruelty but also recognizes his role in establishing the Chinese system of writing as a center of national identity. The film was seen by many Western critics as Zhang “giving in” to the demands of the current Communist rulers of China, but from the perspective of Chinese history, it is a different representation of the need for order and balance that is also present in To Live.