Hibiscus Town (芙蓉镇 Furong zhen)

Director: Xie Jin

Screenplay: Ah Cheng, Xie Jin (adapted from Gu Hua's eponymous original story

Cinematographer: Lu Junfu

Art Director: Jin Qifen

Music: Ge Yan

Cast: Liu Xiaoqing, Jiang Wen, Zheng Zaishi, Xu Songzi

Studio: Shanghai Film Stduio, 1986

Description: color; sound; VHS format w/ English subtitles; about 164 minutes. Winner of the Best Feature Film Prize and other prizes at the Seventh Golden Rooster Awards in 1987 and the Grand Prix at the 26th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia.

Background information:

1957: The Anti-Rightist Campaign. Started as a reaction (known as 'correction') to the excesses that occurred during the preceding Hundred Flower period, when Party-initiated democracy generated criticism of the Party's bureaucratization and the suggestions that China should have a multi-party political system. Intellectuals on all levels were condemned, imprisoned, or sent away to do forced labor.

1963: A Campaign of Cleansing. Meant to 'cleanse' the corruption within the Party and the 'capitalist tendencies' in the Chinese economy.

1966: The Cultural Revolution. This political and ideological struggle within the Party took the form of a long period (officially a decade) of mass campaigns, conflicts, bloodshed, exiles, political extremism, ideologivcal terror, cultural deprivation, and economic chaos.

1979: Smashing the Gang of Four. The foremost figures (including Mao's widow) of ultra-leftist politcal control since the Cultural Revolution were put under house arrest. Deng Xiaoping started to emerge as the 'architect' of the reformist politics of post-Mao China.

Synopsis:

Hibiscus Town is a simple town surrounded by beautiful scenery. Hu Yuyin and her husband, Guigui, work hard and finally save enough money to build a new house. However, this new house brings them trouble. During the "four clean-ups" movement of 1964, they are classified as new rich peasants. Their house is confiscated, and Guigui is driven to suicide. Hu Yuyin is sentenced to sweep the streets every day together with the Rightist Qin Shutian. They eventually fall in love and marry, but their misfortunes continue...

About the director:

Xie Jin (1923-) is a native of Shangyu, Zhejiang Province. While young, he was educated in Chinese opera and classical literature and began his career as an actor in Shanghai in 1938. He later became a student of dramatists Cao Yu and Hong Shen in the State Theater Institute. There he was exposed to Western dramatic and cinematographic forms. He then studied Marxist theory at the Political Research Institute in the Northeastern Revolutionary University in 1950. He started out as an assistant director to the noted film personality Zhang Junxiang in 1948 and has been directing his own films in Shanghai since 1953. His directorial style mainly took shape in the 1950s and 1960s, when he wrote and directed many award-winning feature films, including Nülan 5 hao (No. 5 Woman Basketball Player, 1957), which won a silver medal at the 6th World Youth Festival, Hongse niangzi jun (Red Detachment of Women, 1960), which won best feature movie and best direction prizes at the 1st Hundred Flower Movie Festival, Wutai jiemei (Stage Sisters, 1965), which won the annual prize from the British Film Society at the 24th London International Movie Festival, among others. Many of his films focus on the lives of women, workers, artists, or students, and in a style that is ""an aesthetic crucible that ground together Hollywood classicism, Soviet socialist realism, Shanghai dramatic traditions, and indigenous Chinese folk opera forms" (Marchetti, 60). After making Stage Sisters, Xie Jin was denounced as a "bourgeois humanist." He was later imprisoned for several years during the first few years of the Cultural Revolution. He restarted directing in 1975 and made a few influential political melodramas in the 1980s, including Tianyunshan Chuanqi (Legend of Tianyun Mountain, 1980), which won the first national Golden Rooster Award in PRC and the Best Feature at the first Hong Kong Film Festival, Hibiscus Town (1986), which won out at the Seventh Golden Rooster Awards in 1987 and the Grand Prix at the 26th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia, and Yapian zhanzheng (The Opium War, 1997), which won the 17th Golden Rooster Award in China and an award at the Montreal International Film Festival.

About the stars:

Liu Xiaoqing (1951-) was born in Peiling, Sichuan and was educated at Sichuan Music Institute. She was a stage actress before she turned to films in 1975, when she played Tiannu in Nanhai changcheng (The Great Wall on the South China Sea). Since then, she has played the female lead in more than 20 films. She won the Best Supporting Actress Prize at the 3rd Hundred Flower Awards for portraying Zhang Lan in Qiao zhe yijiazi (What A Family!, 1979). She received the Best Actress Prize at the 10th Hundred Flower Awards for playing Hu Yuyin in Hibiscus Town. She also won the Best Actress Prizes at the 11th and 12th Hundred Flower Awards for her portrayal of Jinzi in Yuanye (Savage land, 1981) and Chuntao in Chuntao (1988), thus becoming the only actress in China to have received three Best Actress prizes consecutively at the Hundred Flower Awards. Liu also made impressive portrayals of Empress Dowager Cixi in Huo shao Yuanmingyuan (The Burning of Imperial Palace, 1983), Chuilian tingzheng (The Reign Behind the Curtain, 1983), and Da taijian Li Lianying (Li Lianying: The Imperial Eunuch, 1990), which won the Special Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Since the 1990s, she got more involved in TV productions and other businesses, and remained in the center of publicity for her troubled personal life and economic activities. She produced Jiang Wen's directorial debut In the Heat of the Sun (1994). She was arrested on tax fraud in 2002, released on bail a year later, and appeared in some TV series and a new film Plastic Flowers, which participated in the 2005 Berlin Film Festival.

Jiang Wen (1963-) is one of the most exciting and important figures in Chinese film today, both as an actor - he is the dominant male performer of his generation on the mainland - and as a director. His second directorial effort, Devils on the Doorstep, in which he also stars, took the Grand Prix at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. As an actor, Jiang Wen is perhaps best known to international audiences for his starring role opposite Gong Li in director Zhang Yimou's breakthrough film Red Sorghum (1987).

Born into an army family in Tangshan, Hebei province on Jan. 5, 1963, Jiang Wen moved to Beijing at age 6 and showed an interest in acting at an early age. He entered China's foremost acting school, the Central Academy of Drama, in 1980. After graduating in 1984 he was assigned to the China Youth Theater, and gave many stage performances with the troupe. He began acting in films the following year. His performances have won him numerous awards at home and abroad, but for Chinese audiences it was his starring role in the 1992 Chinese TV series "A Beijinger in New York" which made him one of the best-loved actors of his generation. He also starred in such other well-known Chinese films as Hibiscus Town, from director Xie Jin, Black Snow, from director Xie Fei, and The Emperor's Shadow, directed by Zhou Xiaowen. His second collaboration with Zhang Yimou came on that director's 1997 film Keep Cool.

Jiang wrote and directed his own first film in 1994. In the Heat of the Sun, adapted from a novel by Wang Shuo, which won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival for its young lead Xia Yu and numerous other prizes, including Best Feature at the Singapore Film Festival and six Golden Horse awards in Taiwan. It was cited by Richard Corliss in Time as the best film of 1995.

Since 1996, Jiang Wen has been a professor and researcher at his own alma mater, the Central Academy of Drama. In 2003, he was also seen on the screen in director Zhang Yuan's Green Tea. (This biography of Jiang Wen is provided by Filmbug.com.)

Questions to ponder: These are a few questions suggested for you to think about while reading the assigned articles and watching the film. Please jot down ideas and notes on details or scenes you think are relevant for class discussion. 1. Nick Browne points out, Hibiscus Town "addresses the emotional complexity of the central ideological question of the post-Cultural Revolution era--the place accorded to individual entrepreneurship within the socialist order." How does this post-CR mentality play a part in the film's narrative? How does the film articulate its ideology? Is it politically critical or supportive to the CR experience? Are there any contradictions or ambiguities? 2. Identify the major dramatic conflicts in the film. Think about how the political, moral, and sexual relations interplay in the film and try to contextualize them in the specific historical moment during and after Cultural Revolution. 3. How is the gender space constructed in the film? What kind of moral messages does the contrast of two women--Hu Yuyin and Li Guoxiang--deliver in terms of women's economic, political, and sexual power?

Relevant readings:

Hayford, Charles W. "Hibiscus Town: Revolution, Love and Bean Curd." In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 120-27.

Kipnis, Andrew. "Anti-Maoist Gender: Hibiscus Town's Naturalization of a Dengist Sex/Gender/Kinship System." Asian Cinema 8, 2 (Winter 1996-97): 66-75.

Browne, Nick. "Society and Subjectivity: On the Political Economy of Chinese Melodrama," in New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics. Cambridge: CUP, 1994, 57-87.