Raise a Red Flag
David Ansen, Newsweek (October 9, 1995)
© Newsweek Inc. 1995
IN THE INTERNATIONAL FILM WORLD, few invitations are as
prestigious as being selected as the opening-night film of the
New York Film Festival. (Last year it was "Pulp Fiction.") When
Zhang Yimou learned that his "Shanghai Triad" was the first
Chinese movie ever picked for the opening slot, it was considered
the biggest honor of his career. Zhang was happy. The Chinese
government was happy. And the festival was happy that Zhang was
coming to the glittering first-night gala at Lincoln Center.
Unlike such earlier Zhang films as "Ju Dou," "Raise the Red
Lantern" and "To Live," all of which had been banned in China,
this intimate and ravishing gangster movie set in 1930s Shanghai
with superstar Gong Li as a heartless nightclub chanteuse passed
muster with the party bureaucrats. But a week before the opening,
Richard Pena, the chairman of the festival's selection committee,
received a call from the Chinese Consulate in New York. They were
not happy. They'd discovered that the festival was also showing
"The Gate of Heavenly Peace," a documentary examining the events
that led to the 1989 protest and crackdown at Tianamnen Square.
They told Pena the film was an insult to China, and unless it was
removed from the festival, they would be forced to withdraw
"Shanghai Triad." The festival had no intention of buckling under
to the Chinese request, nor could the Chinese back up their
threat to withhold "Shanghai," which is owned in the United
States by its distributor, Sony Classics.
Beijing's solution? Punish Zhang Yimou. The director was
"advised" not to come to the festival. He was not "forbidden,"
but to a man whose entire career has been a tightrope walk
between celebration and ostracism, there could be no difference.
Zhang sent a cautiously worded statement to be read on opening
night: "Unfortunately, I cannot be here with you. If I were, I
would stand on the podium and say the only two expressions I know
in English: `I love you all and thank you'." Within China, the
bureaucrats are denying everything. "Mr. Zhang's health isn't
good," a spokesman at the Shang" Film Studio told NEWSWEEK.
To say that the Chinese have not mastered the art of public
relations is an understatement. In an instant, they have turned
the documentary they want no one to see -- and which they, of
course, haven't seen either--into a cause celebre. And it
deserves to be: this extraordinary three-hour film, which will be
shown on PBS later this year, is a deep, powerful and rivetingly
complex study of Tiananmen--and, ironically, it's far more
evenhanded in its account of the massacre that killed more than a
thousand protesters than the Chinese government might suspect. (I
should disclose that I'm on the New York festival's selection
committee.)
The American filmmakers, Carma Hinton and her husband, Richard
Gordon, are particularly well informed. Hinton, who lived in
China until she was 21 (she's the daughter of William Hinton, the
author of "Fanshen" and "Shenfan," classic studies of a rural
peasant village under communism), spent five years shuttling
between China and her home in Boston researching the film. She's
devastated that Zhang, whom she's known for 10 years, is "getting
burned" for her movie. "It's really stupid, immature and
infantile. And they haven't even seen it! They can't even afford
to see it because of the stifling political process in China.
They have to make this weird pre-emptive strike to prove how
vigilant they are. And punish a filmmaker who's representative of
some of China's finest achievements."
"The Gate of Heavenly Peace" will prove controversial in the
West as well, for it shows that the student movement was divided
against itself, with some of its most influential leaders hoping
for carnage. The student leader Chai Ling, shortly before the
crackdown, announces in an interview that "only when the square is
awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes." The
film suggests that if the moderate elements had prevailed over
the extremists, and strategically abandoned the square, the
massacre might have been avoided. It shows as well how the more
radical students played into the hands of the government
hard-liners, who were then able to purge the reformers
sympathetic to the students. The film in no way excuses the
brutality of the Beijing regime, but it casts crucial new light
on this watershed event. "I'm not with people who want to see
things go really bad in China so that there'll be a revolution,"
Hinton says. "I see a potential for China to move to the
moderate. I'm hoping things will develop in a gradual way."
The politics of moviemaking in China are a confounding mixture
of progress and reaction. After decades of turgid propaganda
films, a new wave of filmmakers revitalized the moribund
industry, creating what many consider a golden age of Chinese
cinema. Zhang, Chen Kaige ("Farewell My Concubine") and Tian
Zhuangzhuang ("The Blue Kite") were the most famous members of
the group known as the Fifth Generation (the first class to
graduate from the Beijing Film Academy after the fallow years of
the Cultural Revolution). Their films, landed with festival
prizes and Oscar nominations, were produced in the wake of the
economic reforms instigated by Deng Xiaoping. The leader's famous
announcement that "to get rich is glorious" opened the way for a
huge wave of foreign investment and coproduction deals. But the
films the West hailed were precisely those the government clamped
down on.
Blacklisted: The official policies change from year to year, and
sometimes day to day, leaving these filmmakers buffeting in the
wind. Consider the case of Tian Zhuangzhuang. His 1993 "The Blue
Kite" was a startlingly frank depiction of the Cultural
Revolution's tragic impact on one family. The film he made was
significantly different from the script he'd submitted for
approval--a common subterfuge among filmmakers. When the film won
first prize at the Tokyo Film Festival, the Beijing delegation
stormed out, and Tian became the bad boy of Chinese cinema. He
was lambasted in the press, ostracized by producers and had to
resign from the studio where he'd worked for 10 years. In an
April 1994 crackdown, Tian was blacklisted with six young
filmmakers (the so-called Sixth Generation, whose funkier,
low-budget movies qualified them as the Chinese underground). All
were forbidden to work in China.
Yet a year later, Tian was ensconced at the Beijing Film
Studios, overseeing production of 30 to 35 new movies a year, and
assigned to bring in those once reviled Sixth Generation
filmmakers. What had changed? "The studios responded to the
market," Tian explained in March. "They knew they couldn't turn
out the same drivel they'd been making for 4o years." Tian first
had to resolve "The Blue Kite" episode with some ceremonial
kowtowing. "I admitted I was wrong in not following censorship
laws and promised to abide by them."
Profits, not politics, are driving these latest twists of fate.
In the past, the big studios in Beijing and Shanghai sold their
films to the state for a flat fee. Now the studios are free to
negotiate directly with the theaters, enabling them to reap
greater profits. That is, if they can provide movies the Chinese
public wants to see.
What the Chinese want to see, however, is "The Lion King" and
"True Lies," or Harrison Ford in "The Fugitive." These Hollywood
heavyweights are three of 10 imports recently released in a
profit-sharing agreement with the U.S. studios. So far, the only
flop has been "Forrest Gump apparently the plot confused Chinese
audiences, who found the nitwit Gump an uninspiring hero.
This taste for Hollywood (supplemented by a thriving black
market in videotapes and laserdiscs) is dousing the appetite for
homegrown product: ticket sales for Chinese films have been
slumping, driving theater owners to open sideline businesses such
as karaoke lounges. The challenge facing the Chinese studios is
how to make films that will lure the home audience back without
offending the authorities.
Communists, like Hollywood capitalists and American politicians,
prefer happy endings and family values. Zhang's "Ju Dou" and
"Raise the Red Lantern"--which were eventually unbanned--were
apparently deemed too dark and tragic. Chen's "Farewell My
Concubine" was objectionable not just for its harsh look at the
Cultural Revolution but because it depicted homosexuality, which
isn't supposed to exist in a socialist paradise.
In 1994 Zhang had to apologize for sending "To Live," a
less-than-rosy-Red view of Mao's China, to the Cannes festival.
As punishment, he was prohibited from making movies with foreign
money for two years--which threw a wrench into "Shanghai Triad."
He had to drop his French backers and take on the Shanghai Film
Studios as producers. On the set, he said, "I feel I'm being
watched all the time."
Then, in the midst of filming, he and Gong Li--his creative and
romantic partner through seven films--split up. In one version of
events, she dumped him to take up with a rich Chinese Singaporean
businessman. In another, he left her because because she wanted
to have children (he has a daughter with his first wife).
"Shanghai Triad" may be their swan song as the Von Stemberg and
Dietrich of China--and the movie itself, in which she dons a
Marlene Dietrich-like tuxedo to sing in a smoky nightclub, can be
read as a veiled parable of their relationship. Its also
possible, with some effort, to read a political subtext into this
tale of warring gangster clans, but the true pleasures of this
sumptuous movie are on its dazzlingly stylish surface. It's the
sort of deeply felt genre movie Hollywood would love to make
itself (it's like a much improved version of "Billy
Bathgate")--just what China is hoping can hold back the Hollywood
tide.
Zhang has long since discovered that nothing is quite what it
seems in the Chinese movie world. There are rules for everything,
but enforcement is another matter. Not long ago, Zhang returned
to the city of Xian, where he began his career. Though "To Live"
was banned throughout China, videotapes had been circulating
freely, and there were even posters in theaters that had shown
the movie. To his amazement, he discovered everyone there had
seen it.
