CHINESE CINEMA: THE FIRST GENERATION

This is the first in a series of six posts tracing the history of Chinese cinema. Each post will focus on one of the "six generations" which comprise the chronological basis for most histories of Chinese filmmaking.

EDISON'S ELECTRIC SHADOWS

The details about exactly how and when the first films were shown in China is unclear (many records of this embryonic phase have been lost or destroyed in the intervening years). But it could not have been later than August 11, 1896, when a set of short films were screened at the Xu Garden in Shanghai.

One theory is that the Lumiere Brothers brought film to China; another is that the experimental films of Thomas Edison were the first to be shown.

Perhaps Chinese spectators' first glimpse of the new medium was something like Edison's 1898 short below, of a parade by overseas Chinese in San Francisco.

As in the West, some early Chinese screenings got off to a less than auspicious start. According to the online journal The Chinese Mirror:

"In 1904, for a celebration of the Empress Dowager Ci Xi's 70th birthday, a British envoy in Beijing contributed a film projector and several films to be shown at the festivities.  Unfortunately, during the performance a generator supplying power to the equipment malfunctioned and exploded.  The superstitious Empress Dowager took this as an omen, and issued a decree that motion pictures should never again be allowed in the palace.  This decree was short-lived, however, as an advertisement in Shenbao two years later trumpeted the arrival of several new films for exhibition in the Summer Palace from "9 each evening till midnight, closed Sundays."  Even the Empress Dowager herself seems to have reconsidered, as records show that in 1906 she presented a local official she favored with a film projector and several films for his enjoyment."

But the first Chinese-made motion picture was not completed until 1905 - a recording of the popular Beijing opera The Battle of Dingjunshan. All recordings of it were lost in a fire, and the image below is the only still that remains.

The first Chinese feature-length (semi-) fiction movie was not made until 1921 - a docudrama entitled Yan Ruisheng, based on a real-life murder case that scandalised Shanghai's high society.

Besides technical constraints, one of the reasons for the initial slow start was political. In the years preceding the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the Empress Dowager belatedly accepted the need for certain limited reforms of education, the economy and governance, aimed at strengthening the imperial state against foreign "barbarians."

This required Western technology and practices, and also careful management of the process of opening by the state to preserve the "essence" of traditional Chinese culture. It meant that new technologies should be introduced gradually, and only once the rulers felt it was safe to do so.

In practice, the weakness of late imperial authorities was such that all they really did was slow down the penetration of particular technologies. But Chinese critics, artists and intellectuals still faced the challenge of persuading elites and masses alike that cinema was Western in "form" yet Chinese in "essence."

The film historian Jubin Hu has described the response in Projecting a Nation: Chinese National Cinema Before 1949. He notes the importance of the first Chinese term used to describe motion pictures - "Western shadowplay" (xiyang yingxie) or "electric shadows", which framed the new medium as nothing more than a slight modification of popular traditional Chinese shadow-play theatre (piyingxi). In this way, cinema was imagined as less a Western invention of a new art-form, but merely a Western technical adaptation of a longstanding Chinese art-form. Foreigners rented tea-houses to screen movies during variety shows.

Here is a clip from Zhang Yimou's To Live (1994) that features the protagonist acting out a shadow-play show at 04:25:

As a result of this sort of cultural positioning, the first Chinese movies were simply recordings of already-popular Chinese art-forms, like Beijing opera, and so movies appeared to be a curiosity (and cheaper than going to see a real opera), but not anything portending a step-change in "serious" art. Filmmaking suffered from a lack of investment, and it was held in low regard. Writes Jubin: "Film screenings were inserted between fireworks and conjuring, both traditionally seen as trivial, low culture entertainment... They saw film as a plaything."

That began to change when China became a republic.

THE PEOPLE VS. THE GENERALISSIMO

In the 1920s a new impetus was given to making "national cinema" (guopian), which now meant cinema that the Nationalist government of the Kuomintag considered conducive to the forging of a modern, strong and efficient nation-state.

The emphasis shifted in favour of more rapid importation of Western technologies and techniques. China's ability to develop a thriving national cinema industry became an important indicator of the nation's general fitness to catch-up to the West and reclaim its former standing in the world. Jubin has described how, for most of the 1920s, the government's goal was a Chinese-owned and Chinese-operated film industry making films that would contribute to a renewed sense of national identity, rather than explicitly pro-KMT film censorship that might alienate audiences and retard the industry's growth:

"The major concern of advocates of a Chinese national cinema was the Chinese nation, rather than Chinese cinema per se... The emphasis was therefore placed on the national ideology of this cinema, rather than on national culture as form."

The simple fact was that Chinese audiences loved watching foreign films (even, apparently, ones with blatantly racist overtones). If China was to develop an indigenous movie-making industry, it would need to make movies that could compete with foreign imports by catering to Chinese audiences' taste for Hollywood romances, dramas and comedies. This implied an overdue recognition of the newness of national cinema in China on the part of artists and critics - Jubin quotes Paul Clark:

"Film is the most foreign art form introduced into China in the Westernising cultural upsurge known as the May Fourth movement at the beginning of the twentieth-century. Film (along with modern-style spoken drama) was totally new, with no precursors in traditional Chinese literary and artistic activities."

Chinese cinema of this period was driven by commercial imperatives, and popular genres varied from adaptations of so-called "butterfly literature" (conservative, pro-family dramas) to more sensual and erotic pictures taking their cue from the Chinese writer Mao Dun's advocacy of "love for the sake of love." Melodramas with artificially-imposed happy endings (guangming de weiba) proved popular. There were also "ghost" thrillers, costume dramas, some slapstick comedies, and action films that were early incarnations of the martial arts for which Chinese cinema would become famous (many such films can be viewed here).

One of the earliest such films to use martial arts effects is Poor Daddy (1929) by the Kung Fu pioneer Ren Pengnian.

Here is a clip from the film - a fight when a man catches a burglar in his house.

The Orphan (1929)

Another early action film was The Orphan (1929), which you can view here. Films like The Orphan set the mould for "women warriors" (nuxia) like Pearl Chang in later Kung Fu movies. As the commentary on the Classical Iconoclast blog suggests, the film is also a historical curiosity, since many silent pictures of the time lack English subtitles:

"The English titles show that the film makers wanted to reach a wider audience, outside China itself. The "Orator" is John Chow who also "storied" the text. That's a historical archive, too, a very rare example of China Coast English, which was a curious hybrid of Victorian formality filtered through Missionary school, but "Chinese" too, because it follows Chinese grammar which doesn't use as many non essentials as English. When Chun Mei rues her fate, her words could come straight out of a Bible tract. People really did use to talk like that."

Even among the commercial fare it would be unfair to ignore the more idealistic filmmakers who used allegory and allusion to give voice to a social conscience. On the subject of national cinema, Yingjin Zhang writes:

"Not only can one locate in Zheng Zhengqiu's films of the 1920s an allegorical structure whereby family dramas were eventually made to play out on the overarching theme of "national salvation", but one can also discern in Zhang Shichuan's "escapist" films of romance (derogatorily referred to as "Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies") and swordsmanship (gongfu) in the same period a fundamental concern with the fate of the nation."

Zhang Shichuan

The partnership of Zheng Zhengqiu's determination to change society and Zhang Shichuan's ambition to make a lot of money is crucial in the story of early Chinese cinema.



Zheng Zhengqiu



Zhang, a hard-headed businessman, decided to invest in setting up a film production company after getting tired of waiting for his stock exchange trading license to be approved. Zheng was a filmmaker with an earnest view of his own profession's responsiblity toward society, closely modelled on the ideology of the founder of the republic, Dr. Sun Yat-sen: "To strive for the development of Chinese cinema, we must unite those film companies who cherish the same ideals and struggle together."

 

Thus, the commercial and the communal converged on the need for greater market concentration in what was an extremely fragmented industry composed of small "grab-and-run" one-production studios. One was motivated by profit, the other by national identity and prestige, but the end was the same.

Together, they co-founded the Minxing Film Company (Star Studios) in 1922. It was one of the first well-resourced, professional Chinese film outfits. Here is a picture of its first offices.

And here is the entrance to the Minxing studios.

One of their crucial insights was that Chinese cinema needed its own pool of talent to recruit from, independent of the stage and variety troupes that until then had supplied Chinese films with their casts. So Minxing opened its own film school to train new talent, and they encouraged continuity in allocating specific actors to specific directors, in order to build working relationships that would pay dividends in the finished product. They also set up their own magazine to promote awareness of their Chinese-made, internationally-competitive films, the "Morning Star." For their concerted effort to raise standards in the industry, the Minxing co-founders were known as the "tiger generals."

Warner Bros.-inspired logo of Shaw
Brothers Studio, estd. 1930

Two other significant film companies were established soon afterwards - Tianyi, founded by the Shaw Brothers in 1925, and Lianhua in 1929. But by the end of the decade, Chinese cinema was still overwhelmingly dominated by foreign imports. According to the Shanghai Historical Film Materials: 

"The film market in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s was monopolised by British and American films... The Americans and British had their distribution companies in all big cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, and Guangzhou... China produced 89 feature films in 1933, while the figure of imported films in that year reached 421. Among those imported films, 309 were American."

Chinese film companies had to compete with an integrated network of modern movie theatres such as Empire and Odeon. They responded by trying to modernise and consolidate - in 1927 there were around 180 Chinese-owned film production companies (150 of which were located in Shanghai, "China's Hollywood") and by 1930 this had been reduced to about a dozen significant companies. However, this restructuring was also the result of many smaller companies going bankrupt after the market bubble in martial-arts costume dramas burst in the late '20s. Film companies taking the long view established theatre chains across the South East Asian Chinese diaspora (foreign-owned theatres on the mainland showed foreign-made films).

But they were beset from all sides by social and political instability. In 1925-6 the film industry was temporarily throttled by a General Strike that reached into Shanghai and Hong Kong. Recovering from the instability was one of the reasons Chinese film still lagged behind the West technologically.


The Hero Gan Fengchi (1928)



For instance, in adopting sound some time after the first Western "talkies" appeared. The perceived financial risk was too great; Lianhua's star director Cai Shusheng was not alone in this: "I still don't trust sound machines. Therefore, I would rather make silent films (in peace) than take the risk of making sound films." When Minxing began making "talkies", the wax recording instruments they had to rely on were so poor that Zheng Shichuan started taking large doses of opium in between scenes calm his nerves.



If that wasn't bad enough, at the beginning of the 1930s China's film industry became a target of Chiang Kai-shek's "New Life Movement", aimed at purifying the nation with an ethos of military discipline. Essentially, the Generalissimo was against almost everything that Chinese moviegoers enjoyed going to watch. In his Brief History of Hong Kong Cinema, Paul Fonoroff writes: "In an effort to stamp out superstition and moral decadence, the KMT banned what had become the bread-and-butter of the Shanghai film industry: ghost stories and martial arts films."

More specifically, Yingjin tells us that the KMT set up a National Film Censorship Commitee in 1931:





"The Nationalist government sought to incorporate film-making in its nation-building project. Specifically, it promoted the following as crucial elements of a modern nation: Mandarin as a unified national language (it tried to curtail if not terminate the production of Cantonese-dialect films in southern China), a rational mind (it banned films with explicit religious and superstitious themes), a healthy body (it promoted the athletic look in a new generation of film stars), and Confucian ethics (it frequently ordered the pornographic and sexy sequences to be cut before the films could be released)."

In place of ghosts, swords and sex went a return to Chinese tradition - the KMT wanted more films based on Beijing operas in order to build a shared cultural identity around history. The focus of the Nationalists had thus shifted from technique to content.

Quite apart from the New Life Movement, dramatic events off-screen after 1932 would turn the 'second generation' of Chinese filmmakers away from melodramas and towards "national salvation" - though not of the sort the KMT wanted.

SIGHTINGS NO.1: ANTONIONI IN CHINA

'Sightings': the term used by Prof. Jonathan D. Spence to describe formative encounters of China by Westerners.

Here is a real gem. At the start of the 1970s, China was tentatively opening itself up to the rest of the world (with the exception of the Soviet Union). Mao and his inner circle recognised that they needed to try and carefully manage the process of opening in order the shore-up the legitimacy of the Communist Party.

Alongside openness would be an effort to control which of its many faces China presented to the world - and in 1972, the Party invited the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni to visit China and assist with the construction of cultural "soft" power in a new phase of triangular diplomacy.

"IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL"

Antonioni was a distinguished art house director, famous for works such as L'avventura (1960) and Blowup (1966), and as a leading light in the development of neo-realist film-making earlier in his career. But in a China still reeling from the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution - in which being "red" was more important than being an "expert" for a person's career prospects - it was Antonioni's left-leaning politics that made him the candidate of choice.

Here is Antonioni:

Maoism had been an influential force amongst the radical left in the student movements in the late 1960s, across Western Europe and North America. This was especially so at the time of the Cultural Revolution, which seemed to be in sync with the same frustrations of the younger generation - and the subsequent 'counter-culture' movements - against the bureaucratic restrictions of the elders of the First World.

In his book, 'The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s', Richard Wolin gives a fascinating account of how the various Maoist sects and factions across Europe wielded a degree of power and influence in public life that vastly outweighed their actual numbers.

Initially, the Maoists in Western Europe were dogmatic 'true-believers' who saw in Communist China what they wanted to see. As Wolin puts it:

"Cultural Revolutionary China became a projection screen, a Rorschach test, for their innermost radical political hopes and fantasies...China became the embodiment of a "radiant utopian future." By "becoming Chinese"...they would rid themselves of their guilt both as the progeny of colonialists and, more generally, as bourgeois."

These 'Maoists' tended to be de facto disillusioned Stalinists who found abandoning their belief in "actually existing socialism" too painful to bear. Wolin describes this mindset: "the "successes" of Chinese communism - or its imagined successes - would magically compensate for the abysmal failures of the Communist experience elsewhere."


But this all changed when the Maoists found themselves utterly sidelined in the dramatic revolts of May 1968. They found themselves forced by the libertarian spirit and 'new issues' agenda of the moment to broaden their appeal, or sink into irrelevance. As usual, they split into two such camps, with one group continuing to centre their political platform around venerating whatever Mao was doing at that moment, and the other group embracing the more open-minded, grassroots spirit of the times.

"The idea of 'cultural revolution' was thereby wholly transformed. It ceased to be an exclusively Chinese point of reference. Instead it came to stand for an entirely new approach to thinking about politics: an approach that abandoned the goal of seizing political power and instead sought to initiate a democratic revolution in mores, habits, sexuality, gender roles, and human sociability."

Here are Black Panther supporters brandishing Mao's 'Little Red Book' in Oakland, 1969:

It is hard to miss the irony of using the rhetoric of the Red Guard movement to promote this new 'post-power' politics, when the Cultural Revolution inaugurated by Mao was precisely concerned with restoring his power inside the Party machine - the "rebellion" against established authority that he encouraged amongst the young was a means to the end of strengthening, not transcending, the power of the Party.


Here is a clip from a documentary about the period, which gives some idea of what it was really about:

The key moment for these neo-Maoists in the West came in the aftermath of 1968. Wolin presents a crucial argument that one of the legacies of the upheavals of 1968 was that it instilled a deep sense of humility in Western European public intellectuals, particularly in France and Italy. This was in part because some intellectuals had failed to predict the momentous events using their elaborate theories (Lucien Goldmann aptly observed that "structures don't go out into the streets to make a revolution"), but also because the bottom-up, anti-paternalistic ethic was so integral to the movements themselves.

And writers, artists and intellectuals had a new sense of themselves as being somehow "above" the masses, telling them what they ought to read, look at, and think - which was something they had a duty to resist.

The Maoist sects played an important role in this, largely because they were merely in the right place at the right time, armed with the right (and suitably ambiguous) slogans. The police in Paris chose to target the Maoist groups, and their publishing outlets, to send a signal to other radicals, because they were small enough to be manageable. But heavy-handed intervention only made a public martyr of them and rallied intellectuals to their cause, most notably Sartre and Foucault. Wolin describes how all these processes interacted to undermine an older model of the engaged French public intellectual as a member of an elite 'vanguard' class:

"They ceased behaving like mandarins and internalised the virtues of democratic humility...insight into the debilities of political vanguardism impelled French writers and thinkers to reevaluate the Dreyfusard legacy of the universal intellectual: the intellectual who shames the holders of power by flaunting timeless moral truths."

 

THE RED DESERT



Maoism in the West had helped to destroy the belief that an artist has a right to decide what an audience should be exposed to, and what meanings they ought to take away. Maoism in China had instituted extremely restrictive censorship across all arts and entertainment. Here were two superficially similar political discourses with a great deal getting lost in translation.

Ever since Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China Western leftists had visited the People's Republic and painted it in a positive light. The Party had the same expectation of Antonioni, who had a reputation for using his films to criticise the exploitation he saw in his own society. Like many of his generation, he was haunted by the living memory of fascism under Mussolini. Like the radical left in post-war West Germany, he felt burdened by a sense of duty to guard against the ever-present danger that fascism might resurface in a disguised form.

His earliest feature films addressed the social alienation that afflicted the working- and middle-classes alike under capitalism. The alienating effects of modernity was a theme that ran through his career - at their best, his films force his audience to honestly confront the restlessness and anomie of modern life, and to abandon the self-deception of thinking that there exists a 'strong man' ruler who could restore a long-lost semblance of permanence, order and meaning.

In 1997 the BBC dedicated an edition of Arena to Antonioni. Here is the start - it is worth watching in its entirety to get a feel for the man less as an individual and more as a representative of a restless post-war generation. (Further down the page I have included the section that deals directly with Chung Kuo.)

During the programme, he describes how his philosophy of being an artist changed over time. His comments from the 1960s foreshadow the difficulty the Chinese government would have in trying to use him as their mouthpiece several years later. He describes losing confidence in his judgment about which features of the world around him are worth observing, which aspects of daily life carry some greater significance.

It is not something that ought to be overly rational - you should freely range the camera over anything and everything that might be of interest.

THE ADVENTURE

In 1972 Antonioni was invited to China to record a documentary of everyday life. His visit lasted five weeks, and the result was Chung Kuo China, a three-part film that was subsequently shown on Italian TV. The first part was filmed in Beijing, the second in rural Linxian and the southern cities of Suzhou and Nanjing, and the final part focuses on Shanghai. Below are some screen-shots from the film.

Here is Part 1 of the first episode (the entire film can be found on there):

It is a strangely hypnotic film, meditative and never intimate yet offering a glimpse of a China that has since disappeared. Everyone is wearing drab 'Mao suits', there are no tourists, and the old parts of cities like Beijing are untouched by high-rise urbanisation - in the third episode there is a shot of the Pudong area of Shanghai consisting of a shipyard, an oil refinery and expansive fields.

This is what the Pudong financial district looks like today:

From the outset, Antonioni as the narrator declares that he is "not pretending to understand China", but is merely providing an objective portrait - though the narration is not always consistent in its value-neutrality. He is frank about the restrictions placed on him by his political supervisors during filming, such as when he describes being instructed not to film the entrance to Mao's residence - but films it anyway.

Other politically-sensitive sections were filmed in secret using hidden cameras, including what he describes as "free markets", which were officially prohibited. Even more galling for the authorities, he speculates that it is these "gaps" in the collectivist economy that are responsible for diminishing "the tragedy of Asian malnutrition." There is an interesting parallel between the Party's boasts that it has opened up previously hidden areas of the Forbidden Palace to commoners, whilst it has erected new barriers of secrecy around the most routine features of daily life.

I think a very interesting section of the film is the recording of a discussion amongst factory workers in the first episode. Antonioni tells us the workers have met after work to discuss a new art exhibition, under the supervision of a Party cadre. But, he says, "there are no real debates" in the group - each takes their turn to recite monotonous slogans. One worker proclaims their need to spin enough cotton for the coming World Revolution. When the sole purpose of art is to glorify the workers, that becomes the sole criterion for evaluating art, and even the discussion of art becomes a dull and dry task - which in turn makes the real-life workers seem ever-more distant from these heroic figures...it is a kind of vicious cycle. The clip comes early on in the segment below.

The generally balanced and open-minded tone of the film was anathema to the Party authorities who insisted that the primary purpose of the arts was to promote the Party line. In the seminal 'Yenan Talks', Mao expressed this bluntly:

"Writers and artists who cling to their individualist petty-bourgeois standpoint cannot truly serve the revolutionary mass of workers, peasants and soldiers."

This policy towards the arts was known as the "Two Servings" - serving the people and serving socialism.

Another slogan was "from the masses, to the masses." This slogan is perhaps the most useful in understanding how Antonioni and the Chinese government came to misunderstand eachother so completely. At the doctrinal level, Maoist theory rejected what might be called 'naive realism' - the notion that unmediated, universal "truth" exists in a directly-accessible form out there in the world - in the same way that the Italian neo-realists rejected it as a basis for making films.

But the crucial difference was that Mao believed that a 'vanguard' party could restore order and meaning in the world if it kept in touch with the masses, listened to their views, and then used the tools of philosophy and Marxism-Leninism to fashion a kind of rational, unified whole out of the assembled fragments of opinions and interpretations. The job of the Party was then to transmit this coherent construct back to the masses, and if necessary to impose it by force - the masses would recognise their thoughts and feelings as expressed in the Party policy, in a higher, more refined form.

It was not a cultural policy that allowed for ambiguity - a piece of work was either pro-China or anti-China. Chung Kuo China was condemned as the latter in a series of critiques in the Peking Review.

The most prominent criticism was that the film did not give sufficient coverage of the achievements of 'New China'. In an extreme instance, the soldiers guarding Tienanmen Square are reported as complaining that Antonioni distorted the sunlight over Beijing:

"When one looks up at Tienanmen Gate, one sees a portrait of Chairman Mao radiant with a kind and warm expression and the state emblem of the People’s Republic of China shining bright. But in Antonioni’s film neither the panorama of the Square nor the magnificence of Tienanmen Gate is seen. The film was taken on a bright sunny day in May. Nevertheless, the Square is shown in dim and dreary colours. The grand Square is presented in a disorderly fashion as if it were a market place of noisy confusion. Is this a result of Antonioni’s neglect or unique interest? Of course not. It is the result of a despicable technique with vicious intention."

Yet in the same newspaper, the film is also attacked by an official from Linxian for supposedly depicting the Chinese as glorying in their exceptionalism and self-importance (a sensitive topic at a time when Mao was trying to present China as a more co-operative player in the international system):

"This out-and-out anti-China imperialist agent Antonioni says that "for the Chinese, this great silent space is the centre of the world" and "China is the country at the centre." This is a vicious slander, intended to drive a wedge between the Chinese and other peoples. The Chinese people have all along adhered to Chairman Mao’s teachings that we Chinese people should "get rid of great-power chauvinism resolutely, thoroughly, wholly and completely". We never regard China as "the centre of the world." In imposing this allegation on the Chinese people, Antonioni’s criminal purpose is to create doubt and distrust between the Chinese and other peoples and undermine their solidarity and friendship."

Mao hated the film and it was not screened inside China until 2004.

But from another point of view, Antonioni achieved a more immediate victory - as the producer in the Arena programme says, Chung Kuo showcases the deep similarities between Antonioni's style and traditional bedrock themes in Chinese art - panoramic landscapes, the emptiness of the void, non-linear storytelling. The first wave of filmmakers to emerge after Mao died in 1976 - the so-called "Fourth Generation" - sparked a short-lived renaissance in Chinese cinema by fusing the arthouse stylings of Italian neo-realism with the more populist themes of conventional Chinese movies. And nothing quite like that brief burst of creativity has been seen since (but that is a subject for a future post).

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Sighting No. 2 is in the works. Here is a clue as to who the subject will be - like China, this visitor is also famous for a teapot, but one rather far-removed...