Chen Kaige (b.1952)

Steps Toward a Personal Cinema

(taken from Kwok-kan Tam and Wimal Dissanayake, New Chinese Cinema, 1998, Chapter 2)

THE NAME of Chen Kaige is perhaps more closely associated with the new Chinese cinema than that of any other director. His Yellow Earth (Huang tudi), made in 1984, served to inaugurate a new phase of Chinese film. Many of the most discerning commentators on Chinese cinema are united in their opinion that this film constitutes the first major work of the Fifth Generation and that it had the effect of reformulating Chinese film language and aesthetics for the newer generations. It is hardly surprising that Chen's Yellow Earth has become a reference point in the discussion of contemporary Chinese cinema.

Chen Kaige was born Chen Aige in Beijing on 12 August 1952. His father, Chen Huai'ai, was a film director himself. At the age of fifteen, when the Cultural Revolution was in its initial stages, Chen was sent down to Yunnan province, where he was engaged in clearing the jungle for expansion of a rubber plantation. Three years later, he joined the People's Liberation Army and was stationed on the Yunnan border. In 1975, he resigned from the army and returned to Beijing, where he landed a job in the Beijing Film Processing Laboratory, the country's main film processing laboratory. In 1978, he gained admission to the Beijing Film Academy, from which he graduated four years later.

Chen made Farewell to Yesterday (Xiang zuotian gaobie) for Fujian Television in 1980, and he later worked as an assistant director for the children's film Brother Echo (Yingsheng a'ge) and for two other films, The Fragile Skiff (Yiye xiaozhou) and 26 Young Ladies (26 ge guniang). When Chen released Yellow Earth in 1984, he won for himself and for modern Chinese cinema great international acclaim. He has since completed five other films, The Big Parade (Da yuebing), King of the Children (Haizi wang), Life on a String (Eian zou bian chang), Farewell, My Concubine (Ba wang bie ji), and Temptress Moon (Feng yue). With these films Chen established himself as one of the most important modern film-makers in China and the world.

Yellow Earth recounts a fairly simple story. A soldier comes to a mountain village with the intention of collecting folk-songs. While in the village he lives in a house where a young woman is married to an older man to whom she was betrothed in infancy. The soldier explains to her how women are treated under the Communist regime in the capital, Yan'an. The young woman's mind is filled with hopes and expectations. She sets out in search of the city and is accidentally drowned. Chen presents this simple story movingly and persuasively on the screen, paying close attention to composition, exquisite visual images, and a careful use of sound and music. As a result, the film yields a complex sense of personal and social destiny. The cinematographer, Zhang Yimou, who later emerged as an outstanding film director in his own right, assisted greatly in this effort, presenting the landscape, as well as the relationship between people and nature, in a manner deeply reminiscent of classical Chinese paintings. This is a film full of symbolic and allegorical meaning, and the interplay between humans and nature, past and present, culture and politics, propaganda and reality is at the heart of the experience communicated by this work.

On 12 April 1985, Yellow Earth was shown at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and many who saw it realized that day that the new Chinese cinema had arrived. Quickly the word got around, and the film went on to win numerous awards at international festivals. Eschewing the dictates of socialist realism that had dominated Chinese cinema up until that time, Chen had made a film that focused on narration through images and communal self--reflexivity. Although Yellow Earth won great international acclaim, it did not do well at the box office domestically. What is more, the film-maker had to contend with the hostilities of the officialdom in Beijing, who saw it as an unfriendly film depicting Chinese backwardness.

Chen's next production, The Big Parade, was completed in 1986. In a sense this film, although perhaps artistically not as successful as Yellow Earth, extends the concerns of the earlier work while at the same time moving in a different direction from it. The Big Parade presents a psychological probing into the lives of soldiers in the People's Liberation Army. As in the plotting of Yellow Earth, here the director has chosen a specific situation in order to comment on the contours and life of the larger society. His focus on images and composition, clearly in evidence in the earlier film, finds ample artistic expression in this film as well, with sound playing an even more significant role. In some respects, The Big Parade is different from Yellow Earth. The former focuses on a contemporary subject and on male values, while the latter is set in the past and is more concerned with the situation of women.

The Big Parade deals with a group of army volunteers preparing themselves to take part in the National Day parade. Although the director focuses on six characters, ranging from a callow youth to a despairing intellectual, no one character emerges into a position of dominance. The accent is on the group mentality and the webs of inter-connections that make up the whole. At the centre of the film rests a strong impulse to question and challenge accepted beliefs and sanctioned discourses. Throughout the film, powerful and appealing visual images are contrasted with voices heard from off screen. As Tony Rayns (1989a: 31) points out, 'Visual certainties are undermined by aural uncertainties, and this disjunction helps to push the film into a symbolic register.'

As with Yellow Earth, The Big Parade addresses issues that are of great concern to Chinese society and culture. In this case, the focus is on notions of Chinese patriotism, nationhood, citizenship, and a selfless devotion to the betterment of the country. A certain tentativeness characterizes this film, as the director experiments with both theme and visual grammar in a search to find his cinematic signature. The ostensible subject of The Big Parade is the army, but the real subject is the Chinese nation state itself.

Chen's King of the Children was completed in 1987. This anguished work demonstrates how contemporary history can be explored allegorically with great artistic power. The 'king of the children', Lao Gan, is sent to a school in Yunnan province, where many of the students are poor and lead unhappy lives. He is a dedicated teacher who has come to realize the futility of learning by rote, and he is keen to stimulate the creative and critical faculties of his students. His teaching methods are unorthodox by approved standards, and since the local elite disapproves of his teaching style and philosophy, he is dismissed.

Chen successfully expands this story visually into a powerful and allegorical indictment of the Cultural Revolution that caused irreparable damage to Chinese society. The self-destructive education system portrayed in the film becomes a symbol for the Cultural Revolution in general. As Chen has remarked, he did not directly depict the violent social confrontation that took place during the Cultural Revolution. Instead, he chose the language and syntax of film to create the atmosphere of the era. The forest, the fog, and the sound of trees being chopped are all, according to him, 'reflections of China during that period of time'.

King of the Children is based on a novel of the same title by Ah Cheng, but the director has modified the story to enhance its visual power. The mute cowherd, for example, who helps in defining Lao Gan's character and interests, is not found in the original story. Chen's experiments with the visual language of film can be seen very clearly in this work. He invests the film with a certain mystic aura, through his deft use of sight and sound, to create a multifaceted experience which has a pointed relevance to the audience's perspective on the Cultural Revolution.

King of the Children was followed by Life on a String, Chen's most philosophical film to date. This work inhabits the region of the sublime and aesthetic wonder, in which the play of images and sound trembles on the verge of new insights. Made in 1991, Life on a String is a mesmerizing parable full of memorably vivid images. A blind boy is told that he will surely gain his sight if he devotes his life to the pursuit of music. Years pass, and the boy is now a blind old man, who regards music as the pathway to superior knowledge and wisdom. His disciple, however, regards music as a pleasurable sensual experience that serves to celebrate and define the present. Both are caught between the contradictory pulls of the desire for wisdom and the desire to see the world. The older musician has a deep faith in the ancient belief that his blindness could be cured by a prescription carefully kept in the Chinese harp. He will be allowed to try this prescription only if he wears out a thousand harp strings. After the thousandth string is broken, the musician removes from the harp a sheet of paper. Unfortunately, the paper turns out to be blank.

In Life on a String, Chen addresses questions of the redemptive power of art and the human need for spiritual values. Commenting on this work, Chen has remarked:

This film deals with human ideals and hopes. The old master lives with spiritual strength because of his objective in obtaining the secret cure to his blindness. Although he is briefly disappointed to find the prescription is nothing more than a blank sheet of paper, the old man realizes he has been able to grow spiritually strong simply because of that hope. Pursuit of an object enables the old man to live a better and higher life.

Despite the visual power of the film, it was both a critical and commercial failure, and in its wake Chen wanted to make a different kind of film. His next work, Farewell to My Concubine, represents the cinematic shape of this desire.

Farewell, My Concubine was both a critical and commercial success. It was the co-winner of the Palme d'Or, the top prize at the Cannes International Film Festival and received the International Film Critics' Prize for 'its incisive analysis of the political and cultural history of China and for its brilliant combination of the spectacular and the intimate'. It was a box-office hit in Hong Kong and did well internationally as well. Farewell, My Concubine, in many ways, represents a new departure for Chen in its attempt to combine the popular and the artistic. The success in this regard achieved by his friend and colleague Zhang Yimou may have impelled Chen to take this new path.

Farewell, My Concubine is based on a widely read novel that recounts the relationship between two Peking opera stars. The period of their friendship covers their boy-hoods, the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, and their old age. A three-hour epic, Farewell, My Concubine is visually stunning and dazzling in its exoticism. The relationship between the two opera stars is complex, taking place within the larger contexts of a boyhood friendship based on mutual suffering, as they learn the art of opera from cruel masters, unreciprocated love, opium addiction, the traumatic experiences of the Cultural Revolution, and encounters with bullying Red Guards. Chen's focus is on the complicated emotional relationship between the two actors, but some critics have maintained that he does not adequately probe this phenomenon. Chris Berry ( 1993: 22), for example, has maintained that the original story allowed Chen the opportunity to explore deeply his evident fascination with male-male relationships, but the director's homophobia undermined his ability to achieve that goal.

Despite the fact that Farewell to My Concubine was both an indubitable critical and commercial success, there are many commentators on Chinese cinema who feel that this movie indicates that Chen is heading down the wrong path artistically. They argue that this is a highly conventional film, with an obvious eye to commercial acceptability and displaying little of the stylistic innovation that characterized his earlier films. At the time of the film's release, Chris Berry (1993: 22) wrote:

Although Farewell, My Concubine may resuscitate Chen's career and make him a bankable director, it indicates dangerous thematic and stylistic self-limitation. Since leaving China for New York some years ago, his work has tended toward increasingly abstract reworking of well-known themes. The perils of blind faith, historical repetition from one Chinese generation to another, and bad faith among men as symbols of China's cultural condition with the Cultural Revolution as dominant trope have been reworked in one Chen Kaige film after another. Distant from contemporary China and showing absolutely no sign of making any connection with the culture of his adopted home, he is in danger of being as condemned to repetition and historical abstraction as he believes China to be. Is this price worth paying?

This is indeed a sentiment shared by many of Chen's admirers.

Chen's latest film, Temptress Moon, is in many ways closer to Farewell, My Concubine than to his earlier films. It is an elegantly shot work but the story is clumsily told, with many unnecessary convolutions. The film centres on the character of Zhongliang, played by Leslie Cheung, who as a child grew up at the country estate of the decadent Pang family. His playmate at the estate was Ruyi, played as an adult by Gong Li . Around these two characters are many others caught up in the decadence, the temptations of opium and lust for power, and the progressive erosion of human values. Temptress Moon, while drawing on some of Chen's established strengths as a film-maker, such as his persuasive visual rhetoric, does not in any way represent an advance over his earlier work.

At the time of this writing, Chen is at an interesting crossroads in his career. Will he continue with the line of innovative work established in his earlier films? Or will he delve more deeply into the kinds of themes and treatments exemplified by Farewell, My Concubine? Only time will tell. There is no doubt, however, that Chen has already contributed significantly to the growth of the new Chinese cinema.

Multifaceted and driven by a strong moral vision, Chen's films established a new standard for film-making in China. The setting of the film Yellow Earth clearly demonstrates the director's subtlety and skill. The heartland of both the Communist revolution and Chinese civilization itself, the yellow earth and the Yellow River basin that contains it nurtured the ancient Chinese people. Chen's selection of a setting rooted in that earth and close to Yan'an, the head-quarters of the CCP during the Chinese civil war and the war of resistance to Japan, allows him to explore the role of the Communist Party while making significant connections to China's distant past.

Chen, along with the other film-makers associated with the Fifth Generation, ushered in the new wave in Chinese cinema. A clear emphasis on the visual image in constructing a narrative, use of unconventional camera movements, an absence of melodrama, minimalist acting, a careful contrast of light and dark, and a move away from theatricality all contributed to the emergence of a new form of film-making in China and a new language for Chinese cinema. Not all critics of the cinema were equally enthusiastic about these innovations. Certainly, the officialdom in Beijing has viewed Chen's work with a great degree of cynicism and anxiety. Some of his films have been repeatedly banned and unbanned. Others have been subject to severe criticism in the official media. Clearly, his relationship with the czars of cinema in China has been full of tension, even antagonism.

Chen's work, understandably enough, has generated much discussion among film commentators. His attempt to create a cinema that departs radically from the theatrical and socialist realist works that continue to dominate the film scene in China has been justly commented on. His focus on vivid images and composition, a clever use of sound, an imaginative intertwining of personal biography and social history, and his attempt to make cinema a vital part of the public sphere have also been discussed at length. Similarly, his attempts to draw on Chinese aesthetics, his direct and indirect critiques of the Cultural Revolution, his interest in a variety of metaphysical outlooks, as well as the presentation in his films of a subversive 'other', as represented by the use of an unfamiliar landscape, mute children, social failures and outcasts, and simple peasants, have received extensive scholarly attention.

Chen Kaige is an absorbing, resolute, and innovative film-maker with a fine visual sense supported by a speculative mind. Reflexivity is the ruling virtue in his work: for him films are a way to think about the world and its unpredictabilities. Abstract speculation and human specificity meet in his memorable images. He may present a certain pessimism, a personal testament of a society divided against itself and moving away from its deepest and most nurturing strengths. Yet, beneath it all, there is a sense of wonder and a celebration of freedom in the flow of his images, an undercurrent of hope for social renewal and human solidarity. The society he admires most is the society we have as yet failed to create, but one which he feels is within the human grasp.

Selected Filmography

Farewell to Yesterday (Xiang zuotian gaobie, 1980)

Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984)

The Big Parade (Da yuebing, 1986)

King of the Children (Haizi wang, 1987)

Life on a String (Bian zou bian chang, 1991 )

Farewell to My Concubine (Ba wang bie ji, 1992)

Temptress Moon (Feng yue, 1996)

The Emperor and the Assassin (Jing ke ci Qin wang , 1999)

Killing Me Softly (2002)