BREAKING BINARIES:

A CRITICAL APPROACH TO THE FIFTH

GENERATION CHINESE CINEMA

A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF
COMMUNICATION AND DESIGN
AND THE INSTITUTE OF ECONOMICS
AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
OF BİLKENT UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS

By
Chien Yang Erdem
May, 2008
I hereby declare that all information is this document has been obtained and
presented in accordance with academic rules and ethical conduct. I also
declare that, as required by these rules and conduct, I have fully cited and
referenced all material and results that are not original to this work.

Chien Yang Erdem

________________________

ii
I certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully adequate,
in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.

____________________________________________________

Assist. Prof. Dr. Mahmut Mutman (Principle Advisor)

I certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully adequate,
in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.

_____________________________________________________

Assist. Prof. Dr. Dilek Kaya Mutlu

I certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully adequate,
in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.

____________________________________________________

Assist. Prof. Andreas Treske (Chair)

Approved by the Institute of Fine Arts.

_________________________________________________________

Prof. Dr. Bülent Özgüç, Director of the institute of Fine Arts

iii
 ABSTRACT

BREAKING BINARIES: A CRITICAL APPROACH TO

THE FIFTH GENERATION CHINESE CINEMA

Chien Yang Erdem

MA in Media and Visual Studies
Supervisor: Assist. Prof. Dr. Mahmut Mutman
May, 2008.

How to interpret the self-Orientalized representations in the Fifth Generation

Chinese films remains an unresolved problem in cultural and film studies. This

thesis underlines some of the major theoretical problems which have produced

barriers for critical approaches to and understandings of the Fifth Generation

phenomenon in Chinese cinema. By reconsidering the notion of

power/knowledge in the Foucauldian sense, this work aims to challenge the

assumed ontological relation between China and the West in rigid terms of

binary oppositions and find an opening from this closure through which the

complex and discursive interactions between the two can be critically

examined. In this process of breaking the binaries, we are thus demanded to

question the categories of culture, such as high vs. popular culture, art film vs.

mass entertainment, etc., which take part in shaping our perceptual habits and

interpretive politics.

KEY WORDS: power/knowledge, cultural re-appropriation, national cinema,

the Fifth Generation Chinese cinema

iv
 ÖZET

ĠKĠLĠĞĠ KIRMAK:
BEġĠNCĠ KUġAK ÇĠN SĠNEMASINA ELEġTĠREL BĠR
YAKLAġIM

Chien Yang Erdem

Medya ve Görsel ÇalıĢmalar
Yüksek Lisans
Tez Yöneticisi: Yrd. Doç. Dr. Mahmut Mutman
Mayıs 2008

BeĢinci KuĢak Çin sinemasındaki Uzak Doğu betimlemelerinin nasıl

yorumlanacağı kültür ve film çalıĢmaları alanlarında çözülememiĢ bir sorun

olmaya devam etmektedir. Bu tez, Çin sinemasındaki BeĢinci KuĢak

olgusunun anlaĢılmasına ve bu olguya eleĢtirel yaklaĢımlarda bulunulmasına

engel teĢkil eden bazı ciddi kuramsal problemlere dikkat çekmektedir. Bu

çalıĢma, Foucault'nun bilgi/iktidar nosyonlarını yeniden ele alarak Çin ve Batı

dünyası arasındaki varsayılan ontolojik iliĢkiyi bu karĢıtlığın katı sınırları

dahilinde sorgulamayı ve karmaĢık ve düzensiz etkileĢimin eleĢtirel olarak

incelenebileceği bir açıklık bulmayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu ikiliği kırma

sürecinde yüksek kültür - popüler kültür, sanat filmleri - kitlesel eğlence gibi

algısal alıĢkanlıklarımızın ve yorumlama ilkelerimizin Ģekillenmesinde rolü

bulunan karĢıt kültür kategorilerini de sorgulamak gerekmektedir.

Anahtar sözcükler: bilgi/iktidar, kültürel yeniden-kullanım, ulusal sinema,

BeĢinci KuĢak Çin sineması

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for this academic opportunity that the Communication and

Design Department has given me. This program has not only enabled me to
continue my research interest in cultural and media studies but also provided
me the tools which I will need for further studies.

I would like to thank my advisor Assist. Prof. Dr. Mahmut Mutman for his
intellectual guidance and encouragement throughout my MA study. The
knowledge I acquired while working with him not only helped me to sharpen
my academic skills but also laid a solid foundation for more advanced work
which I plan in the near future.

I would also like to thank Assist. Prof. Andreas Treske, Assist. Prof. Dr.
Ahmet Gürata, Assist. Prof. Dr. Dilek Kaya Mutlu, and Dr. Mehmet ġiray for
their invaluable guidance. They followed closely every step of my thesis work
and offered their critical opinions which enabled me to integrate aspects of
philosophy, cultural and film studies into the inter-disciplinary framework of
this thesis.

All the jury members and my colleagues were a supportive force in this work.
Their participations, encouragement, and useful and at times provocative
feedbacks are truly appreciated.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE...................................................................................--
PLAGIARISM.................................................................................ii
APPROVAL PAGE........................................................................iii
ABSTRACT....................................................................................iv
ÖZET………………………………………………………….…...v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………..….vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………...vii

INTRODUCTION 1

1. REWRITING CHINA 13

1.1 A “new ethnography” as a narrative intervention: the

Fifth Generation‟s avant-gardism (mid-1980s to early
1990s)……………………………………………………...16

1.2 The landscape, the people, and the women in the “new
ethnography”………………………………………………20

2. THE PROBLEM IN READING THE FIFTH

GENERATION FILMS IN CROSS CULTURAL
CONTEXT 30

2.1 An overview of the Fifth Generation‟s transition in the

1990s ……………………………………………...………32

2.2 The Question of aesthetics and problem of cultural

categorization………………………….…………………..36

2.3 The limitation in Dai‟s psychoanalytical approach in

cross-cultural interpretation……………………...………..40

3. RETURNING TO ANCIENT CHINA: THE FIFTH

GENERATION‟S CULTURAL RE-APPROPRIATION IN
THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL MASS ENTERTAINMENT
47

vii
 3.1 Costume drama, preserving “Chineseness” and
rebuilding nation…………………………....……………..51

3.2 Cultural re-appropriation and the reemergence of wu-xia

genre……………..………………………………………...55

3.3 Modified wu-xia narrative as subversive discourse…...58

3.4 Subversion or allegiance? The ambiguity in Curse of the

Golden Flower...……………………………..……………67

CONCLUSION 75

FILMS CITED 80

REFERENCES 81

viii
 INTRODUCTION

My motivation of this research originates from Edward Said‟s Orientalism

(1994), a work that its theoretical problems will raise my major concerns

about the representations in the Fifth Generation Chinese cinema and the

power relations between the Chinese other and its Western spectators. In

Orientalism, Said‟s main criticism is that the tradition of the Orientalist

practice—exoticized, irrationalized, and romanticized depictions of the

Orient—have been constituted to produce knowledge of and about the Orient

and to justify the Western domination and intervention in the cultures,

economics, and politics of the East, namely, its colonial and imperial interests.

He suggests that the Orientalist discourse has dominated and homogenized the

world‟s perception and understanding about the East (particularly the Middle

East), established itself as the norm by subordinating the other cultures, and

created a phenomenon in the academia in the fields of cultural studies, Middle

East studies, etc. that even the scholarly works (done by both the Eastern and

Western scholars) considered as the most objective are permeated by the bias

of this discourse.

Undoubtedly, Said‟s work has raised the awareness on the issues of cultural

representation and stereotype in the related fields of studies. However, his

approach to this problem remains ambiguous and further leads to a general

assumption and homogenized critique of the Orientalist discourse/practice and

1
produces an academic trajectory, particularly in the Third-World studies. Dai

Jinhua‟s feminist Marxist criticism (discussed in Chapter 2) is one example of

this academic phenomenon since Orientalism’s first edition published in 1978

that the intellectual‟s persistent will to uncover the “truth” behind the

Orientalized depictions and narrations of the Orient reveals an assumption that

these images are fabricated to legitimize the West‟s dominating position over

the East. And it is believed that, in a “corrective approach”, the problem of

(mis)representations and stereotypes about the Orient can and ought to be

corrected by giving the Orient an agency to speak for themselves. Nonetheless,

the problems arise in such approach are that it not only inevitably replicates

the binary opposition which it criticizes but also produce another form of

stereotype by revaluing the “positive” characters of a particular culture.

Even with the best intention, in an attempt to empower the Orient by bringing

forth their true voice, such an approach to the problem of representation

unavoidably perpetuates, what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls, in Can the

subaltern speak? (1988), the “epistemic violence”, since the Orient is once

again doubly shadowed by the intellectual‟s (correct) representation (Spivak,

p. 271-313). Said, for instance, has taken the position of a “representative”—

an apparently legitimate position for him to fill with his Palestinian

background—and spoken in the voice of the Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims, or

even of the entire body of the marginalized minorities, that his act renders the

fact that the they have an agency, through his report, to speak for themselves.

Spivak argues that, however, the subaltern does not have an agency to speak

because the act of speaking belongs to the system of the dominant and the

2
privileged. She points out the problem of the double working of

representation—vertreten and darstellen—that the subaltern is always doubly

shadowed as both forms of representation merely “represent the non-

represented” (Spivak, 1988). Therefore, for Said‟s Orient, their agency has

been robbed the second time (the first time by the Orientalist discourse) by his

attempt to represent a correct image of the Orient.

The unresolved problem of representation in Said‟s work further reveals a

number of his assumptions and theoretical problems. Here, I will only discuss

the few criticisms that are relevant to the project which I pursue in the

following chapters. It is from this departure I intent to delve into the problem

of representation in the contemporary Chinese cinema in its postcolonial, post-

Cultural-Revolution context. By postulating the following criticisms on

Orientalism, in this research, I aim at exemplifying the complexity of the

constitution of the Orientalist subject, re-examining the power relation

between the East and West, and identifying signs of difference and resistance

within the Orient (in my case, the postcolonial China).

I shall point out three of the major assumptions in Said‟s book that have been

repeated in the academia as well as criticized by its critics: (1.) Orientalism as

a homogeneous practice of the West to further its colonial/imperial interest,

(2.) a complete success of colonialism/imperialism that its ideology has

permeated into every level of the social structure of the Orient, and (3.) an

ontological relation between the Orientalist discourse and the Orient.

3
First, the assumption of Orientalism as a homogeneous practice of the West

overlooks and oversimplifies the unstableness and discursiveness of its

discourse in the discontinuing historical and socio-political moments. Said‟s

critics such as Lisa Lowe in Critical Terrains (1991) strongly opposes this

homogenization and assumptions of Orientalism that it is a consistent,

univocal discourse or practice and that it oversimplifies, (re)produces, and

dominates cultural differences based solely on an attempt of establishing

hegemony. Lowe emphasizes a necessity to reconsider Orientalism by

examining its reconfigurations in specific cultural, socio-political, and

historical contexts in which they take place. I have found Lowe‟s main

argument, which is her emphasis on the heterogeneity of the Orientalist

practice by the West (mainly the French Orientalism in her book), useful

because it allows an opening through which we are able to recognize the

differences from within the West. Elaborating upon Lowe‟s argument, but

only to the extent that follows her main point, I will demonstrate, conversely

however, by offering my readings of a selection of the Fifth Generation

Chinese films, that Orientalism is not only a practice of the West, but it is also

rearticulated and reconfigured by the Orient (in my case the Chinese) to

further their cultural and political criticisms.

Second, a cultural critique such as Said‟s that tends to see the long history of

colonialism/imperialism, even in the postcolonial Third-World, as a complete

success of political rule and cultural intervention and distortion is to diminish

the possibility of resistance from within the Other. Michel de Certeau argues

in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) that it would be a mistake to consider

4
a European colonization over an indigenous culture as a mere success of

cultural imperialism even if the natives appear to have accepted their

subjection. The acceptance of the natives‟ subjection does not mean that they

willingly conform to the imposed laws, practices, or representations. On the

contrary, they are always on the watch for moments of “possibilities” when

they can utilize the dominant order and subvert from within a given set of

discipline at the same time without rejecting it. Therefore, their resistance may

seem silent or hidden. To be able to illustrate de Certeau‟s notions of “anti-

discipline” and “tactic” in my example of the practice of the Fifth Generation

Chinese cinema, we must first understand Foucault‟s concept of power, which

I will discuss shortly. My intention of following this Foucault/de Certeau

concept is to argue against a common, superficial reading of the Fifth

Generation films that their self-Orientalizing images are merely

(re)productions of cultural imperialism. I hope my analysis of the films will

offer a different understanding about this particular form of cultural and social

practice during the transitional period of the postcolonial China.

Third, the ontological relation between the Western Orientalist and their

Orientalized subjects described in Said‟s book creates an inescapable closure

in which the former and the latter are rigidly fixed in their oppositional sides

of the binary. This also implies that the Orientalist discourse has the absolute

determination over its subject and that “[because] of Orientalism the Orient

was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action” (Said, 1994, p.3).

Again, my method of interrupting this totality is to employ the Foucauldian

concept of power, which I think will allow me to identify signs of the Orient‟s

5
self-determination—meaning to be able to look into the West‟s Other that

their silent resistance is also a way of defining itself. And more importantly, I

hope by examining the different representations of “China” in the Fifth

Generation Chinese films from the 1980‟s to present, I will be able to

demonstrate the heterogeneity of the West‟s Other (at least the postcolonial

China).

Before approaching to the problem of the cinematic images in the Fifth

Generation Chinese films, I would also like to point out Said‟s

misemployment of Michel Foucault‟s philosophical concept of power as I

think that this particular theoretical mistake further leads to other problems,

which have been systematically ignored and overlooked in the fields of

cultural, feminist, and Third-World studies. The danger in this misuse and

misunderstanding of the Foucauldian terminology of power is that it

reproduces an oppressed other as it merely over-emphasizes the dominative

nature of the First-World/colonial/patriarchal domination and exploitation

while it claims to aim at seeking equality and making difference. Rey Chow

also suggests in Writing Diaspora (1993) that the repetitive pattern of falling

back to the drama, trauma, and tragedies caused by the Western domination in

writing (postcolonial and Third-World) cultural criticisms, in fact, is to fix the

otherness as the center identity of the Other (it be Said‟s Orient, or the Chinese

in my study) and to “perpetuate the political centrism which lies at the heart of

the violence that has surfaced time and again in the modern period” (Chow,

p.93). I do not intend to discuss in-depth about the problems in each of the

studies; rather, by indicating this banality in them, I want to refrain myself

6
from stepping into the pitfall of the mainstream postcolonial and Third-World

criticism.

For Said, power, in the Orientalist discourse is strictly constituted in the form

of institutions (i.e. the colonial government) and legitimized by a superior

knowledge informed by the misrepresentation about the Orient. He recognizes

power as a structure of a top-down imposition—the Western domination over

the East:

Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate

institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by
making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing
it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism
as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over the Orient. (Said, 1994, p.3)

This cited statement demonstrates the contradicting point to the Foucaudian

concept of power/knowledge (pouvoir/savoir) as it is originally written in

Foucault‟s “Method” in The History of Sexuality (1980). Although Said has

claimed to follow the Foucaudian path, on the contrary, power in his book is

limited to the western European colonists‟ ability to dominate based on their

institutionalized knowledge informed by the misrepresentations about the

Orient.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her article More on Power collected in her

book Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993) points out a common

dogmatization, which we find in Said‟s work, of Foucault‟s philosophical

concept that “[„power‟] in the general sense is… a catachresis… the word is

7
„wrested from its proper meaning,‟ that it is being applied „to a thing which it

does not properly denote” (Spivak, p.29). To understand what Foucault means

by power/knowledge, we must know the original meanings in French as in

English there is no exact translation for these two words. Indeed

power/pouvoir means having the ability to do something, yet this ability-to-do

must not be reduced to institutionalized knowledge with the aim of domination

as overtly argued in Said‟s book. The “corporate institution”, according to

Said, makes up the condition that justifies its knowledge of and about the

Orient and permits the authoritative position of the Orientalist discourse.

However, in Foucault‟s sense power refers to the “multiplicity of force

relations… coded...” in a „complex strategical situation in a particular society‟

rather than being reduced to a particular institution or a structure” (Spivak,

1993. p.26). This also means that power (pouvoir) is, to use Michel de

Certeau‟s word, “tactical” as its coding is not isolated in a proper (prpore)

place (i.e. a colonial government) and one must constantly maneuver within

the given situation and produce “possibilities” for resistance by manipulating

events. The “complex strategical situation” is the condition where certain

knowledge (savoir) is developed and formulated during the on-going process

of maneuvering. And power (pouvoir) is dependent on this knowledge (savoir)

as “if the lines of making sense of something are laid down in a certain way,

then you are able to do only those things with that something which are

possible within and by the arrangement of those lines” (Spivak, 1993, p.34).

To understand Foucault‟s power/knowledge is not so much to know what

power is, but to know where to look. My purpose of referencing Spivak‟s

8
reading of Foucault‟s power/knowledge is to set the path for my later

argument that the Fifth Generation Chinese cinema is a product of

power/knowledge, and that its self-othering images should not be read on the

superficial level as it would assume a total domination of the Orientalist

discourse; instead, it must be understood as the Chinese filmmakers‟ “tactics”

of subverting from within the “complex strategical situation” determined by

the West. And it is inside the (Chinese) Other that I will investigate and try to

identify the complex, constant working of the Chinese resistance as

“resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (Foucault,

1980, p.93). Therefore, I propose a return to the Foucauldian concept of power

and an application of de Certeau‟s notion of “anti-discipline” (1984) as I think

this framework would allow an opening from the restricted economy that has

been created since Said‟s work.

The subject of my analysis will be a selection of the Fifth Generation Chinese

films from the 1980‟s to present made by the two most acclaimed and

criticized directors, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. The reason of choosing

their works is that I find in them a common pattern of representation that has

generated equal amount of laudation and criticism. However, I do not mean to

suggest that their works represent the entire body of the Fifth Generation or

the motivations of its filmmakers. My interest in the investment in Chen‟s and

Zhang‟s works is to examine the rise of the Fifth Generation, its becoming of a

distinctive genre (Chinese national cinema), which was brought under the

spotlight of the international film festivals, and more importantly, the politics

of its representation and the interpretive strategy reproduced by academic

9
discourses, which takes part in governing our perception and understanding of

this particular form of culture.

I shall clarify that the term of the Fifth Generation is only a way of describing

a new trend of filmmaking in terms of its novel style of narrative, technique,

visual representation, etc. It refers to a group of filmmakers who graduated

from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, the time when China began its

process of a drastic social transformation, and whose films have reflected this

new style and followed similar aspects of cultural and social criticisms. Their

films have attracted more noticeable attention abroad than at home because

audiences abroad are eager to see “China” whose culture that was/is so little

known as during its closure since Mao‟s rule in the 1950‟s, information about

China was very limited and almost inaccessible. China‟s economic and socio-

political transformations after the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

(1967-77) provided a condition in which the Fifth Generation filmmakers have

an opportunity to explore the once forbidden subjects. Their films have

become a distinguishable “genre” (known as world or the Chinese national

cinema) since their primary themes are based on cultural and social

reflections. They have also continually revised the image of “China” and

forwarded the questions of nation, which was dominated by the socialist

discourse for over three decades. Therefore, I will demonstrate in the

following chapters that this image of “China” in the Chinese national cinema

is not unchanging; it corresponds to China‟s place in the world as its economic

and socio-political transformations progress. This change is particularly

evident in the Fifth Generation‟s recent works of the 2000s. By studying the

10
different images of “China”, I want to understand the process of the

constitution of an ethnic and national identity and “China‟s” communication

with the West through cinematic images.

This research is organized into three parts which are arranged in a

chronological order beginning with the emergence of the Fifth Generation in

the mid-1980s, its first transition into the international domain during the

1990s, and its most recent development in the international mass

entertainment industry of the 2000s. By focusing on the notions of nation

(nationhood, national identity, national culture, and national cinema) and

cultural re-appropriation, I intend to exemplify that China, in the cinematic

space created by the Fifth Generation, does not represent an unchanging or

homogeneous collective of the Chinese nation, culture, or people. Instead, this

idea of a “collective” is constantly challenged by tactical narrative

interventions achieved through filming techniques, genre re-adaptations, etc.

In the first chapter, by looking at the films of the mid-/late-1980s, I will

discuss, in reference to Homi K. Bhabha‟s DissemiNation (1990), the event of

performativity of the Fifth Generation‟s ongoing and endless project of nation

building by constituting a new language, which Chow (1995) calls a “new

ethnography”. This examination is to demonstrate the subversiveness in the

act of self-Orientalization as the filmmakers‟ attempt to break with the

socialist discourse.

11
My intention in the second chapter, instead of “close readings” of the films of

the 1990s, is to contextualize the general question of culture and the problem

in cross-cultural interpretation by examining a Chinese feminist Marxist Dai

Jinhua‟s criticism of the Fifth Generation‟s shift toward a market-based mode

of production. I will indicate the limitations of this particular approach to the

Fifth Generation phenomenon that it tends to reduce the films as products of

cultural commodity and cultural imperialism. Such essentialist and reductive

approach not only limits the understandings of culture and the power relation

between China and the West, but also reproduces a restricted economy, which

I have mentioned in regards to the influence of Said‟s work, in which

difference and resistance tend to be overlooked.

To interrupt this ontological relation that has been taken for granted in the

academia, such as in the fields of cultural and feminist studies, and search for

an opening through which internal differences and signs of resistance can be

recognized are my major aims in the last chapter. By focusing on the Fifth

Generation‟s practice of cultural re-appropriation (genre re-adaptation) in the

2000s, I intend to demonstrate how subversive discourses are constructed in

the popular genre of costume drama. This chapter will challenge the binaries

produced in Dai‟s critical Marxist criticism discussed in Chapter 2 and

propose an alternative way of approaching the Fifth Generation films which

have become a part of the global mass entertainment industry.

12
 CHAPTER 1
REWRTING CHINA

We are demanded to reconsider the notion of modern nation when studying

the Fifth Generation Chinese cinema (or national cinemas in general) at this

point when its cross-cultural and transnational features have continually

exposed the difficulty, if not impossibility, and problems of enclosing its

narrations into a collective agency through which the interpellated subjects can

speak of the truth or reality of a nation. Indeed, the powerful immediacy

achieved through cinematic effects and narratives make possible the

visualization and render the concreteness of a present China. However, we

must not take this presence accountable as it is always a reconstruction in a

retrospective mode and in its form of representation it is never in its purity or

finality. The present has to be narrated retrospectively because the activity of

rewriting nation is always a practice that attempts to escape from or works

against the previously established nationalist discourse(s). Thus, writing nation

necessarily involves what Homi K. Bhabha calls in DissemiNation (1990) a

“double-split” movement between “nationalist pedagogy” and the narrative

strategy of performativity (Bhabha, p.293-297). Cinema as a project of nation

building follows precisely this mode of narration through which it produces a

“spatialization of historical time” (Bhabha, p.294). In this time-space, instead

of a fixed and finite form, the idea of nation is extracted from the modern state

discourse and re-articulated with an interventional performative narrative

strategy.

13
Around the time when the international film circles began to pay attention and

gave importance to national cinemas, the newly rising Fifth Generation in the

mid-1980‟s was brought under the spotlight with its avant-gardism, or a new

wave, which introduced a new China—one that broke away from the socialist

realism by producing another sense of realism through depictions of the

peripheral regions and people of China. The truthfulness of the Fifth

Generation films was achieved through their distinct, persistent aestheticism in

the form of primitivism, namely the nature, rural landscape, patriarchal feudal

society, oppressed women, or other signs associated with backwardness,

which Rey Chow (1995) calls the “primitive passions”. Chow characterizes

the early works (up to the early 1990‟s) of this generation as an ethnographic

self-display that their emphasis on self-exoticization through images of

primitivism produced ethnographic effects, which not only intensified the

immediacy of the films‟ visuality but also “turns everyone who watches into a

kind of migrant” (Chow, 145).

What the Fifth Generation had achieved in its beginning stage, and continues

to produce, was/is precisely the “time-space” that Bhabha describes when

discussing Bakhtin‟s reading of Goethe‟s realist writing in Italian Journey

(Bhabha, 1990, p.294-295). In this space, the filmmakers‟ collections of

national ornaments such as the bare mountains in Yellow Earth (1984), the

ceremony of worshiping ancestor of the brewery in Red Sorghum (1987), the

archetechtral details in Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and the Chinese opera

costumes in Farewell My Concubine (1992) compose the same kind of

14
narrative structure in Goethe‟s realist writing of an Italian day that depicts a

national time and space which tell the viewers that the Chinese people really

live(d) like that. However, if we follow Bhabha‟s explanation of the double

movement, or to use his words, the “temporality” between “cultural

formations and social processes without a „centered‟ causal logic” (Bhabha,

p.1990, 293) in rewriting nation, we begin to see that the Fifth Generation‟s

“China” is not quite in its fullness. The filmmakers‟ restoration of a past time

necessarily constitutes a secular space in which takes place the distortion of

the authenticity, continuity, and homogeneity represented by the modern state

discourse. Thus, what we find in this very time-space is rather an ambiguous

“China”—one that claims a transparency of national time such as a feudal

China, though falls short on representing it in its fullness.

Fullness is indeed not the Fifth Generation filmmakers‟ ultimate agenda;

instead, this time-space is kept open and must remain open because the project

of rewriting China will never come to an end. Chris Berry (1998) argues, by

drawing on Judith Butler‟s performative theory in Excitable Speech, that “the

making of „China‟ as national agency is an ongoing, dynamic, and contested

project” (my emphasis) (Berry, p.131). Berry claims that each re-articulation

of a national agency in Chinese cinema is necessarily a work of “citation” that

“is part of a chain that links different times and places, making it different

from the original it claims to repeat but simultaneously conditioned by that

original it requires for the work of citation. In other words, each citation is

necessarily a mutation” (Berry, 1998, p.145). Therefore, the method of

performativity, whether it is through Butler‟s concept of “citation” and

15
“iteribility” in performative speech or Bhabha‟s narrative strategy in the

practice of rewriting nation which consistently splits from the nationalist

pedagogy, provides a critical way of reading the Fifth Generation‟s texts that

each re-articulation renders ambivalent ideas of nation, which once again

disrupts the temporality produced by the nationalist discourse.

In this part, by following the aspect of the performative, I attempt to examine

the method by which the Fifth Generation filmmakers constructed an

interventional narrative not only as a means to break with socialist mode of

representation of China, but also to criticize its discourse on national unity

which is built upon the notions of the people and modernity. I argue that the

filmmakers tactically drew on these notions, extracted them from the context

of the socialist narration, and implemented them into a new context—a new

ethnographic narrative—in which they constituted a different signification of

“China” which was a disruptive and subversive force that reconfigured the

official narration.

1.1 A “new ethnography” as a narrative intervention: the Fifth

Generation’s avant-gardism (mid-1980s to early-1990s)

The first task that the Fifth Generation filmmakers undertook in their early

stage of nation writing was to develop a new set of language that signified a

different China, one that is free of the spectacle produced by the socialist

discourse. Chow recalls vividly the popular media memory of China in the

1960‟s that constituted and dominated the visual culture of the time. Her

16
recollection of the socialist image of China that is known around the world—

“hundreds of thousands of Chinese people, in particular youths, gathering at

Tiananmen and other public places, smiling, waving the „little red book‟...

shouting slogans in unison in adoration of Mao” (Chow, p.29)—was now

confronted by images of rural landscape and lives of peasants and women who

are equally oppressed within the patriarchal dominance. Chow calls this

process as “decentering the sign” China by „returning to nature‟—a

mechanism in which signs of resistance are coded (Chow, p.29-52). “Nature”

here is not in the sense of nature-loving, but as a signification contrasting with

the notion of modernity, which itself is also constantly reconfigured and

promoted in the narrations of the official discourse throughout the modern

history of China.

In the early Fifth Generation films, “nature”, which comprises elements of

ethnic essence, was the filmmakers‟ narrative intervention to displace China in

another time-space in which the symbolic order of the socialist discourse does

not exist. Chow characterizes this novel and subversive narration/visuality as a

“new kind of ethnography”, in which the Chinese cultural/ethnic significations

are collected, rearranged, and represented in a form of collage to signify

“China” (Chow, 1995, p.145). It is in this narrated filmic space that we see the

split between the Chinese people as the historical and social objects based on

whom the socialist discourse operates and the subjects that consistently

attempt to erase the identity that has been given to them by this discourse.

17
Chen Kaige‟s Yellow Earth (1984), the film that marked the beginning of the

Fifth Generation and its avant-garde movement which would soon end in the

late 1980‟s when a period of commercialization began, his next work King of

Children (1987), and Zhang Yimou‟s Red Sorghum (1987) best exemplify this

new form of “ethnography” as a way of intervention in this particular period.

Chen‟s and Zhang‟s new styles of filmmaking immediately distinguished their

works from the propagandist films produced under the supervision of the state

industry from the last three decades. As Deng Xiao-Ping‟s new leadership

after the Cultural Revolution (1967-77) launched radical reforms that led to

drastic transformations in China‟s social, political, and most significantly,

economic systems, the Fifth Generation quickly took up this opportunity and

used cinema as a means for historical reflection and cultural criticism by

exploring the forbidden subjects such as denouncing the political repression

under Mao‟s rule and female sexuality.

This modified ethnographic narrative necessarily involved a touristic writing.

For the Fifth Generation, who had lived through the Cultural Revolution, to

reconstruct a historical time-space also means a process of root-searching—a

desire or fantasy for a place that is before and outside the modern China. Such

a place is constructed through the gaze of a “foreigner”—someone looking

from the outside and obsessed with its primacy existing before/outside

modernity and its exotic presence signifying an “origin” which is lost in the

narrations of the modern nation. Chen‟s and Zhang‟s observations and

representations of the rural and feudal Chinese lives thus are not so different

from the Orientalist travelers‟ journals such as Bernardo Bertolucci‟s

18
recollections of his traveling experience in China when he made the film The

Last Emperor (1987). As Chow quotes Bertolucci‟s remark from a published

interview:

I went to China because I was looking for fresh air… For me it

was love at first sight. I loved it. I thought the Chinese were
fascinating. They have an innocence. They have a mixture of a
people before consumerism, before something that happened in
the West. Yet in the meantime they are incredibly sophisticated,
elegant and subtle, because they are 4,000 years old. For me the
mixture was irresistible. (As cited in Chow, 2006, p. 169)

Hence, the Fifth Generation‟s foreign gaze constituted themselves as the

objects of their own ethnographic narratives while at the same time they must

remain as subjects—observers from the outside. The filmmakers relied on the

Orientalist emphasis of representing the ethnic essence as a narrative strategy

as it is only in such a third place that the national subjects are divided and

through this opening space a Chinese cultural significance can be made.

I shall now turn to the discussion of “nature” which constitutes the Fifth

Generation‟s new ethnographic narrative as an intervention that disrupts the

continuity of the official narration of nation. Nature as a national time-space,

which had become a spectacle of “China” in the mid-1980s and early-1990s,

in Chen‟s and Zhang‟s films is constructed by a number of consistent

elements. In the following I will examine three major elements, the landscape

(nature), people‟s struggle, and oppressed women in Yellow Earth and Red

Sorghum and exemplify their function of re-articulating the Chinese nation.

1.2 The landscape, the people, and the women in the “new ethnography”

19
As mentioned earlier, the Fifth Generation‟s attempt in making a new

ethnography is to decenter the sign China by moving toward the margins of

the notion of nation. This is achieved through filming techniques (within the

condition of constraining censorship and lack of technology), a manipulation

of the state idea of “nation-people”, which was based on a subaltern

consciousness, and a re-appropriation of the element of “women‟s problems”

in conventional melodramas. The films‟ depictions of the remote areas and

those who live on the margins deconstructed (at least in the cinematic space)

the socialist narration of modernity and unity and projected an

exotic/exoticized image of “China”.

Undoubtedly, Yellow Earth is the best place to begin this discussion since it

had marked the beginning of the Fifth Generation. I will examine this film in

regards to the first two elements of the new ethnography, which are, the

landscape and people’s struggle. The story is set in an unliberated, remote

village in Shannxi province. Gu-Qin, a soldier of the Communist Eighth Route

Army is sent to this village to collect folk songs that would be used to

strengthen party and national solidarity as the Communist and Nationalist

Parties aligned in fighting against the Japanese invasion. Upon Gu-Qin‟s

arrival, a feudal wedding is taking place and he is invited to the communal

ceremony where he is struck by the young bride‟s unpleasant silence and

facial expression about her arranged marriage. He is hosted in the household

of a widower who has a young daughter and son, and he participates the

family‟s daily routine as he helps plowing in the field and fetching water from

20
miles away. Gu-Qin‟s encounter with the villagers and this family evokes a

tension between the state ideology and the village‟s feudal tradition. The

peasant‟s young daughter, Cui-Ciao, is fascinated by his stories of the urban

life and pleas him to help her leave the village and join the army as she is not

willing to accept her father‟s arrangement for her marriage. Gu-Qin turns her

request down as he claims that he must first consult with his superior. Cui-

Ciao then decides to leave on her own on a boat by crossing the Yellow River.

In the ending scene, upon Gu-Qin‟s next return to the village, he witnesses the

villagers performing a praying ritual for rain after suffering from a long period

of draught. The film then ends when Cui-Ciao‟s young brother shouts out Gu-

Qin‟s name and runs against the praying crowd trying to reach him who is

watching on the hill, but he fails to reach him before he has left as his voice is

overcome by the crowd‟s chanting.

First of all, the unfamiliar look of Shannxi‟s landscape in the film is a

signification of the reversal of modernity, that is, the opposite of the state‟s

vision of nation. The cinematographer Zhang Yimou begins with long shots of

vast, bare mountains for a silent moment; the landscape seems to expend

infinitely with the camera‟s horizontal movements. The exotic landscape

creates a sense of displacement; a place outside the modern China, yet at the

same time can not be correctly located in its history. Some scholars such as

Esther C. M. Yau have compared this style of cinematography with Chinese

scroll painting that the filmmakers consistently follow the tradition of Chinese

art, or to be precise, Taoism, that such aestheticism seeks to pursue an ultimate

21
state of what Bhabha would call “non-metaphysical” (Bhabha, 1990, p.299).

Yau explains this mode of aestheticism in his analysis:

“non-perspectival use of filmic space that aspires to a Taoist

thought: „Silent is the Roaring Sound, Formless is the Image
Grand‟…the „telling moments are often represented in extreme
long shots with little depth when sky and horizon are
proportioned to an extreme, leaving a lot of „emptyspaces‟
within the frame. The tyranny of (socialist) signifiers and their
signifieds is contested in this approach in which classical
Chinese painting‟s representation of nature deployed to create
an appearance of a ‘zero’ political coding”. (emphasis added)
(Yau, 2006, p.203)

Whether or not the filmmakers intended to pursue such aestheticism by

following classical Chinese art, it is clear that the “emptiness” creates a

“Chinese difference”. The spectacle of “zero political coding” has become a

trademark of the Fifth Generation‟s films, particularly those made during this

period of avant-gardism. Whether they are the mountains of Western China or

of the North East region, they have become a significant part of the narrative

that shifted the sign of China from its modern space into a primal scene where

traces of the socialist ideology are erased. Chen and Zhang‟s resistance in this

film is coded within this act of erasure—within the “emptiness” of the rural

landscape.

Therefore, unlike the aesthetic codes promoted in the Chinese socialist films,

in which the protagonist or the villain were required to be shot from certain

camera angles or placed at certain points within the frame, or the classical

Hollywood narrative structure, the Fifth Generation‟s new style of film

language, such as the unfocused framing, offered an unfamiliar visual pleasure

22
and distraction because the viewers‟ gaze could not locate a center point

within the space (frame) which lacks a symbolic order. Consequently, it

challenges the process of identification since “interpellation” is no longer the

filmmakers‟ goal.

Second, the element of people‟s struggle and the subaltern consciousness are

used here as a vehicle, not to form a collective of the nation-state/nation-

people which is propagated in socialist realism or in the Party‟s slogans, but to

denounce the incompetence of the Party. The aspect of peasants‟ struggles is

extracted from the Party‟s rhetoric and given a new meaning which questions

the process of modernization and liberation that the Party promised to deliver

to the marginalized peoples and remote regions. This element is another

trademark of the early Fifth Generation films which drew equal amounts of

acclaims from the European film festivals and sever criticisms particularly

from local critics and intellectuals for the films‟ misrepresentations of the

Chinese people.

For instance the folk songs, which comprise lyrics of the hardship of the

peasants‟ everyday lives, sang at the communal wedding and the performance

of a praying ritual for rain are exhibitions of the Chinese people‟s lives in the

remote areas that the Party had failed to liberate. In other words, it is a

mockery at the state‟s notion of modernization. Chen‟s intention, therefore, is

not simply to put the nation-people on display for visual pleasure or to

discover what has gone wrong with China, but to challenge the assumed

homogeneous collectivity (bounded by the idea of “people‟s struggle”) which

23
forms the artificial surface of the nation. Thus, the images of the villagers, as

well as the other elements in the new ethnography, demand an interpretation

of their second order of meanings that Roland Barthes argues in Mythologies

(1972). Like the Black soldier in French army uniform saluting at the French

flag that Barthes observes on a magazine cover that at first glance it appears to

portray an idea of nationalism. The images of the villagers‟ singing of

everyday miseries and their praying at the totem of the Dragon King for rain in

Yellow Earth may be read on the surface level that they make up the

nationalist ideology that the vast majority of the Chinese population in rural

places is still in desperate need for salvation. Nonetheless, on the connotative

level a counter discourse is at work. Barthes indicates the second order of

meaning of the picture that it may carry a critical connotation of the French

colonialism. The images of the peasants‟ struggle and their consciousness

about their suffrage imply Gu-Qin‟s (the Party‟s) failure of bringing answers

to people‟s needs and the empty form of the revolutionary rhetoric.

Third, although the early Fifth Generation films follow the conventional

melodramatic narrative that focuses on women‟s tragic lives in their feudal

marriages which eventually cause their death and madness such as Cui Ciao‟s

plight in Yellow Earth, the filmmakers‟ adaptation of such story line is not so

much that they want to show the “women‟s problems” in feudal China, rather,

women as an ideal agent for resistance. I shall discuss women‟s struggle as an

important element of the new ethnographic narrative by examining Zhang

Yimou‟s Red Soughum as his persistent investment in female body and

sexuality overtly demonstrates his historical reflections and social criticisms.

24
This story is also set in a remote village of feudal China around the 1930s

before the Japanese occupation; the unfamiliar look of the landscape of the

eastern province once again appears on the screen signifying a secular space

outside the socialist rule. The story is narrated in a third person‟s voice that

tells a past-down story about his grandparents. This oral history begins with

close shots of the narrator‟s grandmother Jiuer‟s face and hair as she his being

pampered for her wedding day. She is to be married off by her father‟s

arrangement to an older man with leprosy, who is the owner of a brewery. Her

husband dies mysteriously right after the wedding. Since the wedding, series

of flirtations have taken place between Jiuer and a worker of the brewery who

later becomes the narrator‟s grandfather. After her husband‟s death, Jiuer takes

over the brewery and with the same crew they run a successful business and

make a good reputation of their red sorghum liquor. Towards the end of the

story, the Japanese army occupies the village and forces the villagers to flatten

the sorghum fields by foot for the purpose of building railroads. The workers

of the brewery arrange an attack upon the Japanese troop‟s following arrival to

the village. During the confrontation the villagers are killed by the Japanese

machine guns including Jiuer who comes to deliver food to the ambushers

waiting to attack in the sorghum fields. The film ends tragically with only

Jiuer‟s lover and her son standing among dead bodies whose blood, the red

sorghum liquor, and the red eclipse merge together and fill the screen with red

color scheme.

The female figure, Jiuer, in this film is the site of the “double and split”

between the modern state (the pedagogy) and the nation-people (the

25
performative) that is narrated through the exhibition of women‟s struggle and

sexuality. Zhang repeatedly uses this tactical element throughout his films

such as Judou, Raise the Red Lantern, and the most recent work Curse of the

Golden Flower (2006). Bhabha (1990) in his reference to Levi-Strauss argues

that “[the] ethnographic demands that the observer himself is a part of his

observation and this requires that the field of knowledge—the total social

fact—must be appropriated from the outside like a thing… which comprises

within itself the subjective understanding of the indigenous. The transposition

of this process into the language of the outsider‟s grasp… then makes the

social fact „three dimensional‟” (Bhabha, p.301).

Jiuer is first a bearer of the sign of the pre-socialist China that articulates a

performative time-space external to the existing socialist order, that is, the first

split from the modern state discourse. Within the ethnographic narrative, a

second split takes place; she is both the object who is exploited by patriarchy

and filmic visuality and the subject inscribes within her a criticism of this very

exploitation. Therefore, Jiuer is the bearer of a “three dimensional” China that

she is a part of the narrative structure and the system of signification that re-

articulates a present China and she serves as an agent for cultural and social

reflections and for criticizing the Orientalist gaze which eagerly searches for

an exoticized Chinese female other.

Jiuer as a present China is achieved through the Freudian concept of

Oedipalization. Her husband‟s mysterious death suggests the killing of the

Father (the order of the state discourse); her affair with the brewery worker,

26
the narrator‟s grandfather, moralistically speaking, implies incest since he

occupies a lower social status (being an employee of Jiuer‟s deceased

husband). Therefore, in this process of Oedipalization, Zhang skillfully uses

woman as a narrative strategy that constructs a sense of presence, but a

presence in retrospective mode as the story is narrated by Jiuer‟s grandson.

And this presence is a site where traces of modern China are negotiated,

fragmented, and (partially) erased.

Jiuer as the site of the second split into the ethnographic object and the

subjective self within this new ethnography that herself narrates perhaps can

be explained by Chow‟s notion of “double gaze” (which I will discuss more

deliberately in Chapter 3). Chow argues that Zhang‟s exhibitionism in the new

ethnographic narrative is a tactical means to redirect both the gaze of the

state‟s patriarchal domination and the West‟s Orientalist gaze. In the context

of Red Sorghum, by putting on display the ethnic/social practice of arranged

marriage approved by elderly male members against a young woman‟s will

“amounts to an exhibitionism that returns the gaze that is the Chinese family

and state‟s inhuman surveillance… [and] the gaze of the Orientalist

surveillance that demands of non-Western people‟s mythical pictures and

stories to which convenient labels of otherness such as „China‟ can be affixed”

(Chow, 1995, p.170). Thus, Zhang‟s investment in re-appropriating “women‟s

problems” from the conventional melodramas is to constitute the new

ethnography as a narrative intervention in which discloses a multi-layered

resistance in response to both the state discourse and the West‟s Orientalism.

27
I have discussed so far the beginning stage of the Fifth Generation and their

new ethnographic narrative, which amounted to an avant-garde movement or a

new wave in the Chinese cinema that their films constituted a critical

discourse and re-articulated the notion of the modern Chinese nation. This

split from the state discourse requires a tactical intervention of

performativity—a narrative structure that constitutes a pre-socialist China (a

national time-space) through the practice of what Chow calls “modernist

collecting” (Chow, 1995, p.145). The elements of “Chineseness”, namely the

exotic rural landscape, people‟s struggle, subaltern consciousness, and

oppressed women are extracted from their proper historical, social, and

political spaces and rearranged within the new ethnographic narrative

structure. The acts of “modernist collecting” and rearrangement are precisely

the “citation” and “mutation” that Berry (1998) discusses in his analyses on

the contemporary Chinese cinema. The filmmakers‟ performativity must be

understood not simply as an act of nation as narration, but also a persistent and

discursive way of resisting the dominative discourses which tend to

homogenize a collective national agency by producing a central image and

idea of “China”.

The self-exoticized images in the films thus must be translated as a dissent

voice from inside the seemingly uniform body of the nation. They are

significations of “China” as an internally heterogeneous nation/people who

refuse to be interpellated or reduced to a homogeneous group by the official

discourse. The three major elements of the Fifth Generation‟s new

ethnography that I have indicated shifted the notion of nation from the center

28
to the marginalized/margins and presented to us an alternative narration which

is constantly suppressed by the language of the hegemonic force.

As we will see, The Fifth Generation‟s narrative intervention will continue to

take on different forms, however, follow the same technique of the

performative in their cinematic project of nation building. The movement of

double/split may not always be so easily distinguished, in fact, they reveal a

rather unresolved dilemma with the official discourse that it claims to break

with. Thus, at this point I would question that, if the Fifth Generation‟s

intervention relies on and itself constitutes the chain work of “iteribility”, is a

state of “zero-political coding” possible since the narration strategy is

inevitably conditioned by that “original” it needs for citation? By raising this

question I want to point out that the process of distorting the authenticity,

continuity, and homogeneity represented by the modern state discourse may

not necessarily be a complete negation of “China”. This means that the Fifth

Generation films, while containing overtones of cultural and social criticisms,

may still linger traces of the ghostly images of the modern nation that they

attempt to erase. I will discuss more deliberately regarding this matter when I

examine the Fifth Generation‟s most recent works. Nevertheless, the process

of re-articulation “China” necessarily produces a movement of double/split in

which the acts of negotiation, subversion, and disruption take place.

29
 CHAPTER 2
THE PROBLEM IN READING THE FIFTH GENERATION
FILMS IN CROSS-CULTURAL CONTEXT

How to interpret the self-Orientalized representations in the Fifth Generation

films perhaps has been the most debated and still unresolved problem in film

and cultural studies. This problem remains because our perceptual habits and

aesthetic judgments often tend to be guided by a set of universal values by

which art and culture are categorized into a hierarchical order. The difficulty

in the tasks of aesthetic judgment and interpretation in cross-cultural context

further reveal a more complex issue regarding the text-reader relation, which

is my major concern in this subject matter. By text-reader relation, I do not

mean an audience or perception study; I specifically refer to the method(s) by

which critics and scholars examine the Fifth Generation texts and translate

them into an understanding of the China-West relation, which has become a

legitmized academic discourse.

My purpose of underscoring the problem in cross-cultural translation is

twofold. First, by raising a general question on aesthetics, I would like to

indicate that the universal aesthetic judgment (i.e. the Kantian aesthetic or

modernist aesthetic theory), although for some it may provide a convenient

guide for appreciation and evaluation, is in fact an obstacle which prevents

alternative and critical approaches to and understandings of various forms of

art and culture, in this particular case, the Fifth Generation films. Second, I

30
would like to further investigate the limitation of a universal language by

which critics and scholars tend to rely on when examining cross-cultural texts

and analyzing China‟s world position represented in films.

To discuss this subject in a more specific manner, I will take the Chinese

feminist Marxist cultural critic Dai Jinhua‟s approach to the Fifth Generation

films of the 1990s as a departure and to examine the difficulty in a cross-

cultural reading which is based on the critical Marxist theory (i.e. the

Frankfurt School of thought) and the language of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

My argument is that an understanding of culture in general and the

contemporary China-West relation in particular through these approaches and

methods is rather partial and limited. My intention is not to negate the

importance or validity of such approach; rather, I would like to point out the

danger of which that its dependence on the theories of mode of production and

ideology tends to reproduce a banal academic discourse, which overlooks and

oversimplifies the conditions in which a certain form of culture or artwork is

produced and diminishes the possibility for internal difference and resistance

within the Fifth Generation films made during this period.

Before moving on to the discussions on the question of aesthetics and the

problem in Dai‟s reading of Chen Kaige‟s Farewell My Concubine (1993) and

Zhang Yimou‟s Ju Dou (1991) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), I would

like to first briefly review the condition of the Chinese film industry at this

specific moment in which these works were conducted.

31
2.1 An overview of the Fifth Generation’s transition in the 1990s

The Chinese film industry had undergone a period of decline during the 1990s

as the country was adapting and adjusting to its economic reform policy

toward a capitalized system. The industry reached its high point in 1992 with a

production of 166 films (including co-productions with Hong Kong and

Taiwan), but started to go downward in the following years in production,

revenue, exhibition, and attendance. By the end of the decade, the production

quote decreased to a number of, according to the official statistics, 99 films,

however, some scholars indicated that only around 40 of the featured films

were exhibited. This status quo continued to remain even in the beginning

years of the new millennium; until 2002, the amount of annual production

stayed below 100 (Y. Zhang, 2004, p.281-284).

The considerable drops in each of the areas of the industry were accompanied

by a number of reasons. To name a few, the most significant factors perhaps,

were, first, the Party‟s pressure on the industry to make “leitmotif films” that

affirms the state reform policy and ideology. In the mid-1990s the Party

implemented the so-called „9550 project‟—a competition that intended to

encourage studios to make propaganda films—with an annual quota of ten

“exquisite films” (Y. Zhang, p.282) (also see Jihong and Kraus, 2002, p.430).

Those that were selected would be rewarded by government funding.

However, these films‟ failure at box offices proved the progress of social

change that neither the government could any longer have the complete

32
control over the industry, nor the filmmakers and the audience were content

with making and consuming such type of “entertainment”.

Second, around the same time, the import of Hollywood “mega films”—

namely high budget productions which target at making maximum amount of

profit—and the partnership of China Film Corporation with transnational film

companies based on revenue sharing system to distribute imported films

(including films from Hong Kong) affected the development of domestic

films. The official‟s intension of a more market-oriented industry reform

(though not openly spoken) and loosening its regulation by allowing

Hollywood‟s entry (up to ten films annually) was to re-establish the credibility

of cinema, attract movie attendance, and to stimulate domestic production to

make “exquisite films”, which were required to include educational,

artistically tasteful, and entertaining contents, that could compete with the

“mega films” (Jihong and Kraus, p.430). A note should be made here that the

Chinese officials initially referred to the “mega films” by their „aesthetic

value‟ and „technological achievement‟ rather than their market and profit

aims since such intention would not be considered legitimate according the

state ideology (Dai, 1999, p.398-400). Although Hollywood‟s entry did attract

movie attendance immediately, it also had an effect on the domestic films‟

performance at box offices since the Chinese audience now had a higher

expectation on films. Without being able to make enough sales, domestic

studios were facing serious financial difficulties that even the protection of

governmental regulation, which required two-thirds of the theater screening

33
time to be reserved for domestic films, could not save the falling industry (Y.

Zhang, p.284).

Third, the availability of other forms of popular entertainment such as the

increasing household ownership of television sets, internet, etc. changed

cinema‟s position that it was no longer the premier source of entertainment.

Piracy was also blamed for the depressing domestic film sales and decrease in

movie attendance. Since the government did not effectively control the

production and distribution of pirated films, not only people could easily

purchase them just about anywhere, the pirated copies had become more

favorable when being compared to expensive movie tickets and relatively low

quality domestic films (Y. Zhang, p.282) (also see Jihong and Kraus, p.421).

The future of the Chinese film industry seemed gloomy and survival was the

issue at stake that the Fifth Generation encountered at this stage. Unwilling to

submit to the official discourse by making “leitmotif films”, the Fifth

Generation looked for a way out of the Chinese film industry and found its

alternative support from foreign companies, among these included companies

and transnational corporations from Hong Kong, Japan, and Europe. For

instance, Zhang Yimou‟s Ju Dou was co-produced by China Film Co-

Production Corporation, China Film Release Import and Export Company,

Xian Film Studio, and the Japanese based entertainment publisher Tokuma

Shoten. The film also entered and received a number of awards and obtained

welcoming feedbacks at international film festivals, particularly in Europe.

Tian Zhuangzhuang‟s Blue Kite (1992), a critique of the Cultural Revolution

34
and also a co-production of Chinese and Hong Kong film companies, is

another good example that followed such path and attained controversial

attentions both from abroad and at home. Perhaps it was not so much the

director‟s critical tone that put this particular work under the spotlight; rather,

it was Tian‟s daring act of entering the Tokyo Film Festival and distribution

abroad without the approval of the Chinese officials. As a result, this film was

banned and himself was listed in the black list along with other “underground”

filmmakers who also were prohibited to make films in China (Y. Zhang,

p.284).

Despite the risks involved, the celebratory success of the Fifth Generation

films abroad have provided a model for the Chinese filmmakers to follow,

especially for the Sixth Generation and other independent filmmakers (or the

“underground” filmmakers) who were/are also working along the edges of the

strict governmental control and the declining industry. This venue enabled

them to smuggle out their artistic efforts and their critical views about the

Chinese history and politics which have not been appreciated by the officials.

Thus, the West, or I shall say the European art film market, has become the

Fifth Generation‟s “escape” in this crisis. However, Dai held rather negative

views toward this shift of commercialization and accuse the filmmakers for

pandering to the taste of the Western viewers by representing exoticized,

orientalized, and sexualized images of China. She sees the Fifth Generation‟s

escape as an “entrapment”, “a submission… to the subjected position through

the Western gaze” (hereafter, otherwise noted, my translations) (Dai, 1995,

p.74).

35
The Fifth Generation in the 1990s found their way out of the declining

Chinese film industry by focusing on making “festival films”, which not only

attracted international attentions but also funds in supporting productions of

national films. This was the Fifth Generation‟s first transition into an

international and market-based mode of production, which will be fastened as

China‟s social and economic transformations continued to progress in the

following years. This mode of production undoubtedly generated debates

among critics and scholars; the unsettling debates highlight the problem in

reading the Fifth Generation texts that I want to discuss in this chapter.

2.2 The question of aesthetics and problem of cultural categorization

A symptom of cultural crisis was evident in the Chinese intellectual and art

circles in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Just as everyone was still

trying to reconcile with the movement of modernization promoted by Mao‟s

government, Deng‟s reforms, which led China‟s step into global capitalism,

engendered another shock as no one seemed able to predict to what extent and

in what direction the Chinese culture would be impacted or restructured. In the

late-1980s and early-1990s, when making films in China was still very

difficult due to the lack of technology and the relatively tight restrictions and

ideological control of the government, some filmmakers managed to overcome

these obstacles and made their works known in other parts of the world. After

a long period of interruption of the Chinese film industry since the Second

36
World War, this was perhaps the first time that the world knew that China

could make films.

Zhang Yimou‟s Red Sorghum is the often spoken film which set the example

for the Fifth Generation‟s development during the transition into a

commercialization period since it brought home the Golden Bear Award in

1988. In the same year, Chen Kaige‟s King of Children encountered a rather

different feedback at Cannes Film Festival; it was selected by a group of

journalists that it was the longest and dullest film, and more ironically, it was

given a literacy prize by the UNESCO while the film‟s message was anti state

culture and education (Dai, 1995, p.72-73). This interesting scenario of Chen‟s

and Zhang‟s encounters in the European film festivals not only was a memo

for the Chinese filmmakers who were in search for a new direction, but also

for the cultural critics that this incident, which indicated capitalism and Europe

to be the future, implies a rather leery prospect of the Chinese culture in

general in the age of globalization that Eurocentrism seemed to be haunting at

the door.

Dai characterizes the beginning stage of the Fifth Generation as a “cultural

phenomenon” that it was a brief period of an “aesthetic revolution in the

Chinese film history” that can not be resumed after the interruption of global

capitalism (Dai, 1995, p.70) (also see Dai, 1999, p.247). The becoming more

market-oriented economy in the early-1990s had/has not only put an end to

this aesthetic revolution but also closed the door to the elite/high culture and

turned everything into mass produced products of capitalism/Eurocentrism. In

37
this mode of production, works of art no longer reflect truth but merely

represent the likeliness of truth which, according to the concept of Kantian

aesthetics, is the end of art: “ [commercial] art belongs to art only by

analogy”; like that of the animalistic mode of production, without reasoning or

the pleasure of free will (Derrida, 1981, p.5). Her readings of Ju Dou, Raise

the Red Lantern, Life on a String, and Farewell My Concubine, suggest that

the social reality of China represented through cinematic narratives is

precisely the product of this mode of production that its purpose is only for

commercial exchange, and, therefore, contains lower value.

Although Dai makes no reference to any aesthetic theory, nor does she offer

an explanation on her method of measuring the value of the examined films, it

is clear that the point of departure in her criticism bases on a universal

aesthetic theory, which legitimizes her argument of the Fifth Generation‟s

entry into the market as the end of an aesthetic revolution and the beginning of

a cultural decline. The “value” that she attributes to the films, to my

understanding, is determined by two things: their ability to allow the reality of

the Chinese society or the idea of the artist to reflect itself through its form and

their ability to constitute a language that critically reflects and responses to the

language of the dominant. I will discuss the latter when examining her method

of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

To understand the former aspect, I would like to briefly turn to Michele

Barrett‟s discussion in The Place of Aesthetics in Marxist Criticism (1988) on

the art critic Max Raphael‟s view on aesthetics and his distinction between

38
effective and inferior art in his studies of Cezanne‟s and Picasso‟s works.

Raphael‟s “[artistic] excellence is characterized, on the one hand, by an

engagement of the senses and the intellect and, on the other, by a fusion of

materials and imagination” (Barrett, 1988, p.703). Based on technical

observation in his evaluation of the paintings, Raphael characterizes

Cezanne‟s Mont Sainte-Victoire as a more effective and meaningful work of

art than Picasso‟s Guernica because Cezanne, without focusing on any

particular viewpoint and by using certain aspects of natural appearance, he is

able to express feelings/sensations that are constituted by the surroundings of

Aix-en-Provence into the figurations in his painting, and through this medium

the intensity of these sensations unfolds before the viewer. Whereas Picasso,

by using black and white to produce the effect of shock, while it delivers

powerfully a sense of „destructiveness of a disintegrating society‟, he could

only express personal feelings through such extreme figurations and colors,

which do not reflect the real world that is composed by nature, society, etc.

(Barrett, p.707).

Barrett‟s examination on Raphael‟s critique puts forward the question of

aesthetic that the theory of sensibility—art as reflections of empirical

experiences—tends to undermine the meanings of the artworks. The

relationship between sensibility and meaning remains unresolved as the latter

is often ignored in the aesthetic theory. Based on the former, Dai denounces

the Fifth Generation‟s commercial films for falsely representing China in self-

Orientalized images and degrading its early aesthetic achievement that had

distinguished this Generation from any other period of the Chinese film

39
history. The aspect that I want to call to the attention here is her categorization

of art and culture. Her heavy concentration on the emphasis of value, at the

expense of understanding why certain properties of an art work is accounted

for its assigned value as well as how and why certain perceptions may be

formed, reproduces a hegemonic discourse that governs our perceptions and

overlooks the social conditions that also take part in shaping them in

discursive ways. This is one of the major problems in the critical Marxist

theory that it tends to mystify the so-called high art or revolutionary art and

underestimate the possibility of resistance in commercial cliché. Dai‟s

categorization based on the films‟ sensibility not only inevitably overlooks the

more important questions of aesthetic but also perpetuates the cultural

hierarchy informed by Eurocentrism that she overtly criticizes.

2.3 The limitation in Dai’s psychoanalytical approach in cross-cultural

interpretation

Dai‟s critical Marxist and Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches to the Fifth

Generation films made during its first transition into the commercialization

period reveal two anxieties shared among the Chinese intellectuals and those

in diaspora of the time. One is a reaction toward the uncertainties in terms of

cultural and social changes caused by the force of global capitalism, which,

according to Arif Dirlik (1994), enables the circulations of Western

(Eurocentric) ideas in the “Third-Worlds”. Dai‟s essays, The Multiple

Recognitions in the Chinese Art Films after 1989 (1995) and Son of History:

Rereading the Fifth Generation (1999) are a part of the “academic

40
phenomenon” which Dirlik discusses in The Post Colonial Aura that since the

mid-1980s, intellectuals of the “Third-World” origin in the “First World”

began to reconsider the new world situation of the postcolonial and conduct

criticisms to respond to Eurocentric ideas. Their attempt was to relocate the

once marginalized narratives as the center. Like most of those critics, Dai uses

the language (Lacanian psychoanalysis) that is familiar to the “First World” in

order to attain legitimacy in the “First World” academic circles. Nonetheless,

such criticisms often tend to return to the same state of essentialism and

universalistic narratives, I would also add, the binary structure of the “First”

vs. the “Third-Worlds”, which they claim to break away from (Dirlik, 1994,

p.341-342).

The second anxiety, which comes from the reactionary response toward the

postcolonial condition, is a rejection of the “Third-World” identity, and the

Fifth Generation‟s self-Orientalized portrayal of China becomes the perfect

target through which the critics and intellectuals identify the West as a source

of cultural contamination and blame it for its cause of China‟s “cultural

decline”. This is the truth that Dai so persistently try to uncover in her

analyses. Nonetheless, Rey Chow (1995) questions this “deep habit of

ideology criticism” in cultural, visual, and films studies that while it may

provide a convenient means for deciphering the images, it at the same time

limits our understanding of their meanings or significations which are

constantly in flux and unstable. Unquestionably, in cultural and film studies,

as Chow suggests, we are often told to be cautious about the illusions which

are produced to deceive. Therefore, we tend to assume that there is something

41
called “truth” lying under the mask of illusion and feel obliged to undertake

the task of unveiling it by looking under the surface of this illusion (Chow,

1995, 163-172). However, the act of uncovering the truth, in the particular

case of reading the Fifth Generation texts in cross-cultural context, tends to

reduce its meaning to essentialized and oppositional terms as we shall see

shortly (and in Chapter 3 I have a more deliberate discussion on this subject).

Now, I shall turn to Dai‟s discussions of the Fifth Generation‟s “festival films”

of the 1990s and point out the limitation in her psychoanalytical approach. She

argues that the China-West postcolonial relation is reflected in the process of

cross-cultural “misinterpretation”; the films‟ self-Orientalized images, which

are produced to attain recognition from European film festivals, are

misinterpreted as a series of significations of a “Fatherless”, “feminized”, and

“castrated” China. In this misrecognition of China through the Western gaze,

the filmic images reaffirm the postcolonial world order in which Europe (the

West) maintains its domination over China (the East). Therefore, in her view,

the films project the Fifth Generation‟s submission and acceptance of the

assigned “Third-World” identity and position and revaluation of Eurocentrism

(Dai, 1995 and 1999).

For instance, a Fatherless China in Zhang‟s Ju Dou, as Dai explains, is

produced in the process of misreading which reestablish the subordinated

position of China. Through the repeated scenarios and scenes of father-son

relations (i.e. the old master Qin-Shan and his nephew Tian-Qing, who has

incestuous relation with his uncle‟s wife; Tian-Qing and his illegitimate son

42
Tian-Bai, who kills both the old master and his biological father), allegorizes

the repetitive pattern of the unchangeable social order of the patriarchal

society in which the law of tradition always prevails. This allegory is

accomplished in the killing of the son. When the youngster Tian-Bai who

inherits the spirit of the deceased old master—the law of the patriarchal

tradition—kills the disobedient son Tian-Qing, in the Chinese reading, this

narrative insinuates the winning of the established law of patriarchy. She

further suggests that Zhang uses this scene and translates the Chinese idea of

killing of the son into killing of the Father. Thus, in the Western perception,

this is a familiar scene of the Oedipus complex—a signification through which

this story of a cultural and social criticism—a “national allegory”—receives its

misrecognition in the event of cross-cultural reading (Dai, 1995, p.76-79).

In addition, Dai further discusses the events of mistranslation and

misrecognition in Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine that the

classical Chinese melodramatic narratives of the jealous wives and concubines

of Chen‟s resident in the former film and the image of a „pure Oriental

woman‟ represented by the character Dieyi, a male Chinese opera actor trained

to play female roles, in the latter constitute a “spectacle of the East” which

invites a Western male subject position. In Raise the Red Lantern, the women

of Chen‟s residence become the central focus in the absence of the husband,

whose face is never clearly shown in the frame. When the objective view of

the camera shifts its focus onto the victimization among the women

themselves, the view of the master—the Western patriarchal gaze—comes to

occupy the voyeur‟s position. Dai argues that in this process of identification,

43
the film language reinforces the secondary/subordinated status of the female

gender (China in the “Third-World” position) and constitutes a signification of

submission to the patriarchal order (Eurocentrism) (Dai, 1995, p.80-81).

Moreover, a similar process of identification also takes place in Farewell My

Concubine. A feminized China is signified through the castrated character

Dieyi when he is acting on stage in the costumes of female characters. The

story covers three major periods of the Chinese modern history, the

Kuomintang regime, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Cultural

Revolution. According to Dai, Dieyi‟s role in the film—a castrated man—

signifies a victimized Chinese identity that in each historical event it once

again bears the wound of oppression. This signification is constituted in

several scenes throughout the film; when Dieyi is raped by the imperial

eunuch Zhang Gongon, performing for the Japanese troops, later for the

Kuomintang‟s troops, and in the meetings of Chinese opera reforms during the

Cultural Revolution, he is always in the female figure either in the full

costume or with the operatic makeup on (Dai, 1999, p.266-267). In the cross-

cultural reading, the story is not simply about an opera actor obessed with

drama and his role, beneth the veil of this mythical China it lies a signification

of the Chinese identity based on which the misrecognition is accomplished.

When Dieyi appears on stage/screen, he/she is the sign of a “pure Oriental

woman”—a spectacle of the East—which, according to Dai, fulfills the visual

pleasure of the Western patriarchal gaze, thus, once again, a reinforcement of

the China-West postcolonial relation through the misinterpretation between

cultures (Dai, 1995, p.85).

44
As mentioned, Dai‟s attempt in her analyses is to uncover the truth behind

“the-East-as-spetacle” that it is not just an exotic depiction of the victimized

Oriental women or the oppressive feudal China, but its meaning is to be

understood in relation to Eurocentrism that China‟s “Third-World” identity

and position are affixed and further reinforce by this film language. However,

the problem with her persistent will in ideological critique tends to reduce this

form of culture to nothing but sheer illusion. Her method of psychoanalysis,

although enables her to find the connections that bridge the events of cross-

cultural reading, can only provide partial understanding of the films‟

meanings. It is not that I reject the validity or the idea of using the Western

theory of psychoanalysis in understanding the Chinese texts, but that this

method is inadequate to explain the complex relations of China and the West,

text and reader, or the gaze and the spectacle only in terms of the phallus and

the lack. Perhaps this is one reason that Dai‟s critique repeatedly falls into the

pitfall of a restricted economy composed by a series of binaries within which

it does not allow internal difference and resistance.

Her approach to culture in general and the Fifth Generation‟s cultural

practice/conduct in particular by following a universal set of aesthetic

judgment and emphasis on the theory of mode of production exemplifies that

the critical Marxist critique is outdated in the case of cross-cultural reading of

the contemporary China-West relation. It also indicates an academic

phenomenon in which a hierarchical discourse on culture tends to be

reproduced. How to avoid this academic banality and find a critical way of

45
interpretation without reproducing essentialist or reductive theories remains an

unresolved problem in the studies of the contemporary Chinese films. Perhaps

Chow‟s suggestion of abandoning some of the interpretive habits and

prejudices, which I have discussed so far, may enable us to find an alternative

approach and understanding of the Fifth Generation texts. By following this

aspect, I think we are able to examine the event of self-Orientalization not in

rigid and limited sense of the success of Eurocentrism over the East, but as a

tactical means of representation which challenges our perceptual habits and

demands us to understand the projected images/ideas beyond the terms of the

phallus and the lack.

46
 Chapter 3
RETURNING TO ANCIENT CHINA:
THE FIFTH GENERATION‟S CULTURAL
RE-APPROPRIATION IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL MASS
ENTERTAINMENT

China‟s transformation into a capitalist system, from its long process of

implementing reform policies to finally joining the World Trade Organization

(WTO) in 2001, and the entry of Hollywood into its film industry since the

mid-1990s have generated both positive and skeptical responses among the

intellectuals and filmmakers. The tension between the conflicting responses

and the various approaches that have been taken on this subject matter in

cultural and film studies underscores the questions of how we should look at

these culturally specific Chinese films that are becoming a part of the global

mass entertainment and how we could analyze China‟s relation with the West

in the postcolonial situation without oversimplifying and reducing these texts

to mere products of reification or seeing them as complete success of

capitalism and Eurocentrism over China as we see in Dai‟s feminist Marxist

criticism. Indeed, there is no single straightforward answer that could fully

explain such a complex issue. In order to more adequately understand the Fifth

Generation phenomenon on the path of global capitalism, and later into the

transnational, it requires examinations from various aspects.

As I have discussed in Chapter 1 that the event of the filmmakers‟

performativity by using inventory narrative interventions in rearticulating a

47
“Chinese” story inscribes subversive discourses that resist both the

language/law of the Chinese authority and the Western Orientalist gaze. This

subversiveness is often overlooked because of the tendency of understanding

of power as an imposition of a superstructure and that a resisting force should

come from an exterior oppositional position. Nevertheless, we are demanded

to reconsider this discourse of power that has been banally repeated in (cross-

)cultural studies, in this case particularly in the studies of the postcolonial

China and the films produced within this context. In the introduction, I

proposed a return to M. Foucault‟s concept of pouvoir and savoir that the Fifth

Generation‟s narrative interventions such as the ethnographic style of filming

in its early stage should be considered as the filmmakers‟ ability to express

their aesthetic pursuits and social criticisms within the given constraining

socio-political situation (completely closed film industry monopolized by the

state government at the time) in which they acquired certain knowledge to

produce certain forms of discourse that could enable their works pass the

Chinese censorship by choosing safe subjects and stories and deliver

subversive messages to their audience in allegorical forms.

As China‟s transformation has been fastened by its preparation for and entry

into the WTO, the Fifth Generation faced an urgent need to adapt new

strategies in all production phases from constructing narrative structures and

styles to marketing in both domestic and foreign markets. The already

declining Chinese film industry has become a highly competitive environment

with the increase of Hollywood imports and takeovers of the market (from

initially allowing ten films each year to be imported and screened based on

48
profit-share basis in the mid-1990s to fifty films by 1999 and opening up to

forty percent of cinema investments to foreign investors) (Lau, 2007, p.3). The

task the filmmakers undertake now was to make films that would meet both

the Chinese and Western audiences‟ expectations. Although the Fifth

Generation‟s “new ethnography” had served as a tactical narrative intervention

to break away from the socialist image of China and attracted considerable

attentions from the international film circles, those works, such as Chen

Kaige‟s Yellow Earth and Temptress Moon and Zhang Yimou‟s Red Sorghum

and Raise the Red Lantern, were either banned in China or could only reach

the small circles of “high art” at the American and European art houses. Such

“reputation” of the filmmakers‟ “high aesthetic achievements” has in fact

become the box office poison and could not attract the mass audiences abroad

and other Chinese-speaking regions. Under this circumstance of global

capitalism and Hollywood‟s take over, the Fifth Generation was forced, once

again, to develop a new film language.

Coincidentally, or not, the reemergence of costume drama has become the

predominant narrative of the Fifth Generation‟s blockbusters in the late-1990s

and 2000s. The filmmakers readapt this popular genre as an effective vehicle

to construct an innovative narrative, which serves to disrupt the pedagogical

norm and ultimately challenges a series of binarism, namely, high vs. popular

culture, avant-gardism vs. mass entertainment, the West/Self vs. the

Chinese/Other, etc. (I will come to this point when discussing the films). The

most acclaimed and criticized works are Chen Kaige‟s The Emperor and the

Assassin (1999) and The Promise (2005) and Zhang Yimou‟s Hero (2002),

49
House of Flying Daggers (2004), and Curse of Golden Flower (2006). The

responses toward these films circulating among critics and intellectuals are

rather polemic than neutral; the negative reactions often target at the films‟

misrepresentations of the Chinese culture and history for reproducing

Orientlized images of China and pandering to the taste of the Western mass

audience.

Departing from this accusation, I would like to suggest a reconsideration of

these popular texts that in their superficialities, namely the spectacularity and

self-Orientalized images, lie the codes of multi-layered (silent) resistance.

These codes are the tactical elements, which are added to and modified from

the conventional genre to rewrite the pedagogical discourse(s), be it a

discourse of the Chinese authority or one that is informed by a foreign

influence. Therefore, in the following, I will first briefly discuss the return of

costume drama and its role in the commercialization periods of the Chinese

film industry that this genre has been readapted to respond to the impacts of

Europeanization, Japanese Occupation, Hollywood entries, and global

capitalism, which play(ed) roles in China‟s socio-political transformations.

Second, I will exemplify how and what critical discourses are constituted

through re-appropriations of this genre and one of its sub-genres, wu-xia,

which is loosely know as martial arts, by a formal and narrative analysis on

two of the biggest blockbusters of the Chinese film history, Hero and Curse of

the Golden Flower.

50
3.1 Costume drama, preserving “Chineseness” and rebuilding nation

To clarify the term costume drama that I use throughout this part, I shall note

that I refer to this genre in a restricted sense of historical costume drama,

which is also known as period piece. It covers a range of other genres, which

embody features of each other‟s; for instance, Chinese opera movies, martial

arts, and period films taking place in ancient feudal and imperial settings.

They are mostly based on official and unofficial historical texts such as

classical novels, legends, etc. (Y. Zhang, p.38). Historical accuracy is usually

not the primary concern in these fictional films; however, misrepresentations

of the historical figures and periods often generate criticisms among critics

and especially historians. The stories mainly follow the conventional plots of

social turmoil during the falls and raises of a dynasties and power struggles

among imperial members and different states.

This genre has become a preference for the filmmakers for a few major

reasons. First, it is a convenient framework to deal with subjects concerning

social issues, which can easily be coded in the characters and the chosen plot.

As Zhang Yimou states:

[Some] Chinese directors resort to this method when they have

a story to tell. They simply trace the time backwards and place
the story in a safe time period when it would be easier to make
the film and would not cause them any trouble. So we have
seen that this is our creation and it is not necessarily that we
have special sentiments about a certain time period. Sometimes
we pick a certain time period solely for the purpose of
implementing a plan. (As cited in Asia Source, 2004)

51
In other words, a period piece functions as an allegory projecting

contemporary social issues and avoidance from censorship. The second reason

is that it guarantees an audience and even a box office success since the

majority viewers, particularly from Chinese-speaking regions, is already

familiar with the genre and its narrative in other forms such as literature,

theater performances, and television episodes. Last, but not least, the

concentration on (reconstructing) the essence of “Chinese identity” in this

genre enables the re-articulation of “China” at the times when national culture

is challenged or “contaminated” by social transformations accompanied by

foreign influences.

The above reasons, I think, legitimately, though not fully, explain the re-

appearances and increased popularity of costume drama during the three

commercialization periods of the film industry and major socio-political

transitions of the Chinese modern history—post First World War

commercialized and modernized China in the May Fourth Movement, pre

Pacific War during the Japanese Occupation, and the post Cultural Revolution

restructured system toward global capitalism. As documented in Y. Zhang‟s

Chinese National Cinema (2004), each of these transitions and their

aftermaths were/are forces that engender(ed) the developments of such a

“national genre”. An interesting pattern which I found in his

historical/institutional analysis is that this genre has been used as a means to

re-articulate traditional values/norms and national unity that were shaken by

socio-political factors.

52
For instance, the first wave of commercialization began around the early-

1920s when cinema was first established as an institutionalized, legitimate art

form that gradually replaced the traditional popular entertainment of theater

performances and functioned as an educational venue. The still immature

“industry” controlled by the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) heavily

relied on technical supports from abroad. Under the influence of the May

Fourth Movement in 1919, which eventually led to the founding of the

Chinese Communist Party in 1921, the producers often chose subjects that

could maintain films‟ function of civilizing and elevating the nation. Foreign

and Chinese stories that promoted good deeds were preferred rather than those

exposing darkness and shortcomings of the human nature and society (Y.

Zhang, 2004, p.28-31). A number of genres were experimented throughout

this period; toward the mid and late-1920s, popular Western comedies, such as

Charlie Chaplin, provided sources of inspiration and model for the comedy

genre. This wave of Europeanization and the pressure of May Fourth

Movement eventually lead to a “return of „Chineseness‟” (Y. Zhang, p37-38).

Costume drama and its sub-genre of martial arts in which traditional ethics and

teachings are highlighted during the end of this decade were a response to the

changing social values under the influences of Europeanization and

modernization promoted by the May Fourth movement.

In addition, the costume drama genre made another return in the late-1930s

and early-1940s during the film industry‟s second wave of commercialization.

Confucius ideas were the major feature during this time of Japanese

Occupation and Hollywood domination of the industry (Y. Zhang, p.85-88).

53
The attempt of the return of this genre and emphasis on traditional values at

this pre-war period was mainly to propagate patriotism and preserve national

culture in resistance to the Occupation and Hollywood.

Furthermore, the latest return of costume drama is brought to its height on a

global scale by the Fifth Generation‟s blockbusters in the late-1990s and

2000s. Despite the accusations directed at these high profiled films, I think one

can draw parallels between the previous two instances and the current

situation of the Chinese society and film industry in the age of global

capitalism. This latest „return of Chineseness‟ in the mentioned films, as well

as other directors‟ works such as Feng Xiaogan‟s The Banquet (2006) and

primetime television series, serves similar functions of re-articulating the

Chinese nation/national culture and responding to different forms of socio-

political impacts, be it the notion of modernity promoted by the Party,

Hollywood‟ domination, Eurocentrism, Westernization, or the so-called

neocolonialism.

The filmmakers transform this genre by adding innovative and tactical

elements and modifying its conventional narrative with technological

enhancements to project contemporary issues and construct critical discourses,

which reflect social discontentment. I will now demonstrate how and in what

condition the critical discourses are encoded in the process of re-appropriating

the all-time popular genre of costume drama.

54
3.2 Cultural re-appropriation and the re-emergence of the wu-xia genre

Wu-xia, or loosely known as martial arts as a sub-genre of the Chinese

costume drama, had been a popular literary genre throughout the twentieth

century, particularly before the age of global capitalism when other forms of

entertainment were still unavailable. However, this genre was banned in China

by the Communist Party until after the Cultural Revolution around the early-

1980s because it was considered as a source of social and moral corruption

and obstacle for the nation‟s modernization. Numbers of wu-xia novels were

later adapted into television series and films. This genre reached its prime time

between the 1960s and the 1980s both in print and on screen. The stories are

usually narrated in plots of historical periods of social turmoil. The figure of

xia, literarily means a hero/heroine or a knight-errant, who practices and

masters in wu, namely martial arts that focuses on traditional Chinese

teachings of medicine and philosophy such as Buddhism and Daoism, travels

around the country (often in exile by political or personal causes) and fights

against injustice carried out by the strong and saves the weak. The act of

fighting is not to justify the use of killing against wrong doings, on the

contrary, it is considered as a form of art that requires sophisticated studies

and a long process of self enhancement and meditation in order to achieve the

highest state of wu. Therefore, one can say that this popular genre, which is in

some ways similar to the Western genre, serves to project social problems of

the time and the desires and fantasies for social justice.

55
After the 1980s, the wu-xia genre was no longer a preference of both the

young movie-goers particularly because of its emphasis on the essentially

Chinese ideas and the filmmakers since the markets were taken over by

Hollywood‟s high budget films. However, with the Taiwanese director Ang

Lee‟s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000, this genre made its return

(modified by technological enhancement and adaptation of a melodramatic

narrative) to the popular entertainment of the Chinese-speaking regions and

successfully entered the Western markets. It was a small budget production of

fifteen million U.S. dollars, but grossed one hundred and twenty-eight U.S.

dollars in the United States alone and won the Academy Award for Best

Foreign Language Film (see detailed data on [Link]). Yet, despite

Lee‟s success overseas, his film was rather greeted by unwelcoming responses

from Chinese-speaking audiences. One reason could be that the audiences who

expected to see an authentic wu-xia movie were dissatisfied by this modified

and romanticized wu-xia genre. Nonetheless, as the Fifth Generation was

searching for a new direction of filmmaking that would enable them to attract

interests from both domestic and foreign viewers, this film‟s box office

success in Hollywood indicated the potential of this new genre—melodramatic

wu-xia—that was yet to be experimented.

Later, Zhang Yimou‟s Hero (2002) also made its move into the Hollywood,

but unlike Lee‟s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Zhang‟s film was able to

make a domestic box office hit. It broke the record in the Chinese film

industry for having the highest production cost of thirty million U.S. dollars

for a single film, which was topped over by his latest film Curse of the Golden

56
Flower (2006) with a budget of forty-five million U.S. dollars. Zhang made it

clear that this was a commercial film; its cast and crew consisted of the most

popular actors and actresses of China and Hong Kong and the well-known

Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle and the same chorographer and

music composer from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In 2004, it was

finally released in the U.S. presented by Quentin Tarantino, the producer of

Pulp Fiction (1992) and Kill Bill (Vol. 1 2003, Vol. 2 2004). The high profile

and marketing strategies enabled Zhang‟s accomplishment in achieving his

goal of making a Chinese film that could attain recognitions by both the

Chinese and the Western mass audiences instead of a small circle of the high

art (Lau, 2007, p. 4-5).

Zhang‟s adaptation of the Hollywood production strategies and re-

appropriation of the wu-xia genre into a new form/style should not be

dismissed or reduced to mere cultural commodity that his film‟s cultural and

aesthetic values are compensated solely for commercial exchange or that its

ideological function operates with the single aim of the culture industry. On

the contrary, this is the “guerrilla tactic” which Michelle de Certeau (1984)

describes that by using the tools of the strategical domain with additional

implementations of tactical elements (i.e. genre re-adaptation, CGI images, or

color symbolism as we shall see shortly), Zhang‟s work manipulates certain

ideas of the conventional narrative and adds to it a critical overtone which

negotiates with and subverts the dominant discourse. Thus, I argue that

Zhang‟s move into the global mass entertainment could be considered not

simply as a response to Hollywood culture, but also as an act of resisting to be

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marginalized in the categories of “high art” and “Chinese cinema” that both

terms carry a connotation of a “Third-World” production made for the West‟s

consumption in which its recognition relies on its very “Chineseness” that

constructs the Western subject.

3.3 Modified wu-xia narrative as a subversive discourse

Hero, unlike the conventional wu-xia genre which mainly focuses on its visual

style on the aestheticization of physical movements and the skills of fighting,

puts more emphasis on the ethical and spiritual aspects of this particular form

of art. By shifting the film‟s aspect, Zhang not only maintains a Chinese

essence of the film in terms of traditional values but also tactically uses this

essence to create a film discourse that reflects the contemporary issues

concerning both the Chinese and global audiences and their societies. The

tactical elements that Zhang implements to formulate the film‟s discourse are

a re-articulation of the Chinese ancient history and color schemes that play the

role of an agent in narrating a lesson of the traditional Chinese teaching.

The film has been criticized for its historical inaccuracy and misrepresentation

of the Qin Emperor as a wise, moderate man, who is actually known as the

most ruthless dictator in the Chinese history. However, as I argued in chapter

one that (historical) accuracy is not the aim in the event of the cinematic

nation building, and that each re-articulation of the so-called nation is to be

seen as a revision of or break with a previously established discourse.

Therefore, what the film achieves is what Bhabha calls the “split between the

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continuist, accumulative, temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious,

recursive strategy of the perfomative” (Bhabha, 1990, p.297). History is an

institutionalized knowledge/discourse that informs us of the world view,

which is controlled and maintained into a certain format and represented to us

as it is the unshakable fact. Yet, this knowledge/discourse is repeatedly

challenged by the performativity of other (institutionalized) discourses, for

instance, the ongoing, discursive cinematic project of nation building.

The goal of this fictional story, which loosely adapts the legend of Jing Ke‟s

assassination of the Qin Emperor, is to interrupt the continuity of our world

view. But if Zhang‟s intention is to rewrite or change the taken-for-granted

historical fact and to convey a dissident message to those who maintain this

fact, why is the Emperor not killed while his assassins, Nameless and Broken

Sword, on two occasions have the perfect opportunities to kill him? Instead,

they attempt to reconcile with the Emperor and to convince him that it is up to

his decision that the wars can be stopped, hatred among people can be

vanished, and peace can be brought to the world. Nameless and Broken Sword

have not failed their mission of killing the Emperor as Jing Ke does in the

legend story; rather, they abandon their missions because they have learned

the ultimate state of human spirit—peace—that disarmament and forgiveness

(the emphasis of wu/swordsmanship) are the keys to resolving conflicts.

Nameless‟s last words to the Emperor are, “[think of] those who die/died

and… remember the highest state [of swordsmanship]”. Thus, Zhang‟s

rearticulation of this historical story and re-adaptation of the wu-xia genre, not

only offers us a world vision—harmony and peace—that is different than the

59
one we live in, but also stresses and applies this very idea onto a larger scale

of contemporary reality.

The political meaning of using the Qin Dynasty as the story background has

been debated among critics even though Zhang claims “[the] objective of any

art is not political. I had no political intentions” (Guardian, 2004). Zhang may

not have intended a political message; however, he did reveal in an interview

that he hoped to make this film meaningful and relevant to the current reality

(Golden Dragon Pictures, 2007). He expressed his concern about the aftermath

of the Septemter 11 incident, which just happened the year before the film was

first release in China, and the countless conflicts throughout human history,

particularly the ongoing wars that were happening in the Middle East. He said

that the central idea of the film in the Chinese phrase “all under heaven” and

the message of peace refer to a vision of peace for the world (Golden Dragon

Pictures, 2007). In relevance to the incident and aftermath of the September

11, which has become a global concern when the U.S. declared war on terror,

some have interpreted the film and its central idea on a global level.

Conversely, some perceive the fictional story of Qin as an allegory of the

current Chinese situation that militaristic and hegemonic suppressions are

justified in the name of (re)unification and the state‟s stability. While the

Taiwan, Tibet, and Xingjian issues were/are under the watch of international

pressures, such reading of the film is natural and expected.

Given the historical and social contexts in which the film is made and

perceived, both readings are equally valid. They also indicate the polysemic

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nature of the film‟s meaning that can not be reduced to a single “truth” which

tends to be believed as being masked beneath the technologically reproduced

“illusion”. Thus, it further explains the film‟s domestic and foreign box office

successes as it allows various interpretations according to the contexts in

which it is consumed.

Another tactical element in Zhang‟s re-appropriation of the wu-xia genre in

Hero is his use of color symbolism that besides enhances the film‟s visual

quality, organizes the film‟s discourse. In other words, the color schemes are

the segments of the story in which a message is encoded. The red, blue, green,

and white sequences of flashbacks narrate the different states of the spirit of

wu or swordsmanship, and all together, they constitute a counter-discourse by

a traditional teaching. First, the color red, as that we see in Zhang‟s previous

films, Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, and Raise the Red Lantern, symbolizes an

intense passion and love, however, in a negative sense, as it involves jealousy

and determination for revenge. In this sequence, the Emperor finds Nameless‟s

initial story unsound and does not take it accountable as he believes that the

two “supreme warriors”, Broken Sword and Flying Snow, who are lovers, are

not narrow-minded people and would not be easily affected or separated by

their emotions caused by simple matters of love and jealousy. The Emperor

further indicates the fact that Sky, a proud master of swordsmanship,

purposely looses the fight to Nameless so that Nameless could receive the

imperial award to come face to face with the Emperor within ten steps

distance out of the reach of the imperial guards and carry out the assassination.

What this sequence insinuates and denounces is the conventional narrative of

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the popular wu-xia genre that the majority works of which often base on

stories of revenge caused by emotional or political unsettlements and justifies

the event of violence and killing. Later in the story, this conventional narrative

is re-written by an entirely opposite set of values that underscores bravery and

personal integrity.

Second, Zhang designates the color blue to denote bravery, self-integrity, trust,

and willingness of self-sacrifice for the good. In this sequence, the Emperor,

once again, finds Nameless‟s story deceptive and comes to realize that Sky‟s

and Flying Snow‟s self-sacrifices by trusting Nameless‟s skill of handling the

sword that would only harm but without killing them in order to convince the

imperial guards that he had terminated the most wanted assassins for the

Emperor. This color sequence highlights and affirms the mentioned symbolic

values, which are the fundamental state of spirit emphasized in the wu-xia

genre. Yet, the determination for revenge (killing the Emperor) in this part of

narrative is rather ambivalent.

In spite that the intelligent Emperor had recognized the purpose of the

collaborations between Nameless, Sky, and Flying Snow, what he had not

learned at this point is the highest state of the swordsmanship/wu—harmony.

In the third color sequence of white, Broken Sword urges Nameless to

abandon his mission of assassinating the Emperor for the good of tian-xia,

literarily means “all under heaven”, a Chinese phrase of saying “the world”,

and aspires him to consider the true meaning of this phrase that violence

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caused by hatred is intolerable. Therefore, white indicates the truth of

harmony, the path that masters of swordsmanship must follow.

Finally, Broken Sword has given up his determination to kill the Emperor and

eventually convinced Nameless to also abandon his mission since they both

have learned to be able to achieve the highest state of living in peace by

forgiving from the practice of calligraphy in which Broken Sword initially

seeks to apprehend the perfect skills of swordsmanship. This ultimate state—

peace—the central idea of the film is illustrated in different layers of green

such as the green mountains and the still reflection of their profiles on the lake

that merge into one picture of paradise where swordsmanship and violence do

not exist as everything is in its simplest and most truthful form.

The last two color sequences are the turning point that subverts the wu-xia

genre and accomplishes the film‟s discourse. Consider in a Western film, the

cowboy does not draw his gun when he comes face to face with the enemy;

instead, he forgives and reconciles with him to live in peace. When an

“original” type of film is re-adapted into a new form (e.g. melodramatic wu-

xia), viewers, especially fans, may not always appreciate such creativity, in

fact, may be annoyed by it when they do not find the expected, familiar

narratives that they have in mind about a particular genre. Lau (2007) suggests

in his analysis that the tension between „wen‟, literarily means words, literacy,

and culture, and „wu‟ in this film is the cause of criticism among most East

Asian audience. In the conventional wu-xia narrative, the figure of xia does

not always follow the teaching of „wen‟, which is considered as a form of

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social norm (Confucianism), yet it is justice, rather than peace, has the highest

value in this genre. However, Hero’s shift of emphasis on „wen‟ seems to

imply a call for restoring social norm as the ultimate means for conflict

resolution.

Hero’s narrative discourse goes beyond subverting the conventional wu-xia

genre. Its assertion of a traditional (Confucius) teaching and moral value not

only serves to highlight and maintain the “Chineseness” of the film in

resistance to be assimilated as a “Hollywood commodity” but also to redirect,

what Chow (1995) calls, the “double gaze”. Firstly, as mentioned, the Chinese

film industry had been experiencing a major decline since the entry of

Hollywood; Zhang‟s intention in directing Hero under such circumstance is to

make a Chinese film that would attract Chinese-speaking and foreign

audiences and make box office hits both in local and global markets. One way

to explain Zhang‟s re-adaptation of the once popular wu-xia genre and

emphasis on the essence of traditional Chinese teaching (inscribed in the white

and green sequences) is that he seeks to challenge the stereotype of the wu-xia

(or the so-called martial art) genre, which is generally known as action films

without much depth and meaning, and make a distinction that this modified

genre, unlike the majority of Hollywood action films which is mainly based on

technologically produced visual effects, can be on the contrary artistically

tasteful and meaningful. Another promising explanation could be that he

attempts to change the impression of “Chinese films” as “art films” (e.g. Red

Sorghum and Chen Kaige‟s Temptress Moon) that are difficult to understand

by general audiences and are usually excluded from popular culture. Thus, I

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argue that Hero is Zhang‟s response to the apparatus of the industry of mass

entertainment that, on the one hand, marginalizes Chinese films into a small

group of the so-called “high art”, and, on the other, commodifies them into the

loosely known martial arts or action films. What Zhang ultimately

accomplishes is to deconstruct a set of binarism in which a cultural hierarchy

is maintained.

Secondly, the film further functions as a response to the higher level of

structure that governs the activity of the cultural/social practice of the Chinese

cinema, that is, the Chinese political authoritarianism and the West‟s

Orientalism. Chow, in her analyses of Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou,

suggests that Zhang‟s display of “China” is a self-conscious exposure which is

a play with the idea of exhibitionism in which he tactically uses the means of

popular narratives; for example, the abused female body and oppressed female

sexuality under patriarchy, to redirect the “machine of surveillance” of the

“double gaze of the Chinese security state and the world’s, especially the

West’s orientalism” (Chow, 1995, p.170).

Following Chow‟s argument, Zhang‟s exhibition of an ancient totalitarian

China in his commercial film Hero, thus, ultimately, redirects this double gaze

and exposes the brutality of it by means of displaying “China” that is ethnic

and culturally different. On the one hand, we see the Chinese government‟s

hegemonic force over its people in an allegorical form such as the smallness

and insignificance of the individuals in contrast with the gigantic architecture

of the imperial palace, the superior, unreachable status of the Emperor, and the

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massive number of the imperial army and servants chanting and moving in

uniformed actions. What this exhibitionism denounces is the cruelty of the

surveillance of the Chinese authoritarian rule. For many Chinese people, I

believe, the scenes of the palace and the army bring back the memories of

historical moments, for instance, the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989. On

the other hand, this exhibitionism redirects the Orientalist gaze that eagerly

searches and marks the very otherness of “China” to assure its own position.

Zhang‟s self exposure by using the commercial clichés, which serve as

convenient signs with which the West can identify “China”, tactically

manipulates the idea of being gazed. His conscious self exposure in Hero is

thus a way of making a political stance that he rejects to accept or internalize

this gaze. Therefore, what Zhang achieves in the act of returning the double

gaze is to create a cinematic space for dialogue and negotiation and to subvert

from within the apparatus of the surveillance machine.

Indeed, one can argue that Hero is a work of the Fifth Generation‟s and the

Chinese film industry‟s response to Hollywood‟s domination of the global

market. Yet, the previous examples show that this “return to Chineseness” is

not only a contemporary phenomenon, but a site to which the filmmakers of

different historical and socio-political situations tend to revisit. In each of

these returns (of the costume drama/wu-xia), it is not necessarily that they

attempt to reconstruct a past that can no longer be, rather it is more of a

wishful thinking of what could have been. Therefore, what we see is not the

same form of the genre or the “China” that is being represented; instead, it is

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always, to use Chris Berry‟s (1998) words, a “citation” and “mutation” of a

previously articulated version.

A legitimate question at this point is that in the event of performativity, is the

process of re-articulation always necessarily a subversive action? Or can it

entirely transgress the pedagogical narration? When the film exposes the

brutality of the double gaze, is it possible that it also reserves certain attitude

toward what it criticizes? This means that in between the official discourse

(pedagogy) and the film‟s critical discourse (performative) there is a state of

ambiguity, what H. Bhabha calls an “in-between-ness”, which belongs to

neither side of the narrations. Thus it raises the question of what possibly may

be the unresolved dilemma that Zhang confronts in his cultural and social

criticisms. I seek to answer these questions by a reading of his most recent

film, Curse of the Golden Flower (Curse hereafter) as I think in this film‟s

visuality and narrative explicitly unfolds a duality of the contemporary

Chinese social dimensions.

3.4 Subversion or allegiance? The ambiguity in Curse of the Golden

Flower

In Curse, Zhang continues the Fifth Generation‟s primary theme of cultural

and social criticism by readapting the genre of historical costume drama. A

critical discourse and unresolved dilemma are simultaneously at work in the

film‟s narrative and visuality of excess and lavishness, which is a style found

in the new “Chinese mega aesthetics”. Anyone who has seen the film would

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have noticed the extravagance of its spectacularity in terms of its uses of color

in architectural and costume design, computer generated images, etc. This

extravagance unmistakably, on the one hand redirects the overwhelmingly

demanding double gaze, yet on the other, holds back its criticism towards the

rigidity and severity of the Chinese authoritarian patriarchal rule. By

foregrounding the film‟s central idea, gueju, which means rule, order, or

discipline, Zhang invites his audience to reconsider this fundamental principle

of the Chinese culture and politics, yet leaves unresolved the question of its

validity. In other words, Zhang does not provide a resolution that the viewers

habitually look for when consuming a product of popular entertainment. Thus,

similar to the Hero situation, they tend to feel dissatisfied by the film‟s

unconventional narrative and ambiguous message. The film has also received

polemic reactions. Again, its inaccurate historicity and overly exaggerated

scenes are the targets of the negative responses mainly from the perspectives

of the modernist critiques. However, what is yet more interesting is the in-

between response which neither fully appreciates nor dismisses Zhang‟s

method of creating such a Chinese mega. I think this undecided response

further discloses the Chinese people‟s attitude toward the central idea of gueju.

In the following I will examine some of the most discernible elements in the

film‟s excessive visuality that narrates the problems of national unity and the

central idea of gueju. What Zhang wants us to see in these elements, I think, is

the conflicting sides of the notion of national unity—the surface of narration

that defines nation vs. the strategic means it undertakes to build up such a

surface.

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First, Zhang‟s color symbolism is once again at play in constituting the film‟s

critical discourse. The primary color scheme of gold, such as the imperial

attire, architecture, jewelry, army‟s armor, chrysanthemum being displayed in

the palace square, and so on, is a signification that demands multiple ways of

reading from aspects of different social dimensions. On one level, it signifies

the prosperity and national strength of the Later Tang Dynasty (928 A.D.). On

the other, it implies a centralized and corrupted system in which the

distribution of wealth and social resources are concentrated in the few hands

of the powerful. Therefore, if we apply this (allegorical) narrative to the

modern day China, these significations seem to project the contemporary

Chinese society which is undergoing a process of rapid economic development

and to underscore the problematic idea of national unity in the capitalist

system that is built upon an unequal distribution of wealth and power.

Second, Women in Zhang‟s films are a site of struggle and negotiation. In his

previous films, such as Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou, the abused female

body and suppressed female sexuality not only signify women as the ultimate

bearer of the oppressive social order, but also actively seek to return the

voyeuristic gaze and reveal the cruelty of the patriarchal traditions through a

self-exhibitionism of the troubled femininity. In Curse, Zhang continues using

this element of oppressed women to expose the inhumane gigantic system of

surveillance by an over-exposure of their femininity. The Empress and the

female imperial servants in the film, like Song-Liang and Ju Dou in the

mentioned texts, function as an embodiment of the entire Chinese nation-

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people whose actions are disciplined by this supreme system. However, in the

film Zhang remains ambivalent on this subject matter as this element is given

a doubled signification that its meaning, instead of being fixed, is constantly

shifting in between the pedagogy and the critical discourse.

For instance, the overstated femininity, namely the spectacle of the cleavages

in the opening scene, is a site of the unresolved dilemma toward the

suppressive imperial rule, which projects the social discipline of the

contemporary China. When the female servants are awaken and instructed to

wash, dress, and apply make-up in rows by following the percussion sound of

woodblocks, several shots focusing on their upper bodies present a spectacle

of uniformity not only in terms of their appearances and rhythmic movements,

but the unnatural looking cleavages forced by their corsets occupying the

screen. This exaggeration of female essence in conformity, which I think

resembles a militaristic performance, is a doubled signification that both

denounces and extols the oppressive social discipline and dictatorial rule.

Following Chow‟s argument of the double gaze, this aesthetic of excess/over-

exposure unquestionably redirects the idea of being gazed by the Chinese

authoritarianism and the Orientalists‟ search for images of the Chinese

despot’s ‘harem’. Yet, in this act of subversion, it also seems to reserve certain

attitude toward the brutality of the double gaze by pushing it toward another

direction of the extreme, that is, in agreement with totalitarianism that only by

which such uniformity is possible.

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Moreover, the Empress‟s poisoned body and suppressed sexuality, which

eventually leads to her insanity, is another site of negotiation of the

justification of the film‟s central idea gueju. Since the Emperor is aware of

Empress‟s incestuous relationship with his eldest son by the former Empress

who he claims has deceased, he secretly assigns the imperial doctor to put

poisonous ingredient into her daily herbal drink to slowing kill her. The

Empress being fatally punished for her individual (sexual) desire, again, opens

up the debate about the inhumane authoritarian rule. Morally speaking, her

intimate relation with her step-son is condemned by social norm; however, her

character in the film tends to acquire the viewers‟ identification and sympathy

because of her plight under the dictatorial control and her determination,

despite self-sacrifice, of overthrowing the ruthless Emperor. According to

Zhang‟s tactical narrative intervention with the element of oppressed women,

the Empress‟s sexuality unmistakably resembles the idea of individualism; her

punishment is thus a form of suppression of her individuality for the sake of

maintaining social order. This seems to imply Zhang‟s hesitation in judging

too quickly this social norm/order sustained by harsh rule.

The third major element that constitutes the film‟s ambivalence is a

combination of the excessive scenes of the human casualties caused by

military clashes, the speedily recovered imperial court after the bloodshed, and

the celebratory event of the Chrysanthemum Festival all in the same eve. In

the end of the confrontation between the royal guard and the rebellious troop

led by the second Prince, Jai, the palace court is quickly repaired and

rearranged for the Chrysanthemum celebration by a mass of the imperial

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servants. Tens and hundreds of corpses and blood in the square are removed,

washed off, and replaced by a carpet of golden chrysanthemum. As the

eunuchs announce the beginning of the festival, all the imperial members and

servants orderly march into the square and uniformly worship the Emperor.

Despite the family and national tragedy in which the Emperor‟s first wife,

oldest, and youngest sons are killed, he remains calm and insensitive as he sits

on the platform restating the rule to the Empress and the second Prince who

collaborated to overthrow him. This extreme insensitivity toward human lives

and capacity of restoring (social) order in a considerably short time also

require a doubled interpretation. On the one hand, the film‟s critical overtone

is explicit in the conscious self- and over-exposure of the Chinese

totalitarianism. Once again, this is a tactical manipulation with the idea of

exhibitionism through which it responses to the Chinese system of

surveillance and the label (the Chinese other) given by the West. One may

argue on the contrary that the last scenes reflect a discourse that is pro-state or

even pro-totalitarian. This argument suggests an allegiance between the film‟s

discourse and the idea of gueju that a nation needs a commanding ruler who

has the capability of committing to order and discipline even at times it

requires sacrifices of individual freedom or lives. Both interpretations are

indeed valid; however, I think, this excessive exhibitionism further unfolds the

unresolved dilemma which is neither a fully subversion of nor in allegiance

with the official discourse. It is rather a (visual) space that is open to debate

and negotiation in regards to the issue of national unity and its fundamental

principle of gueju.

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Such political dilemma is indeed inevitable in the Fifth Generation‟s

commercial/popular films while the filmmakers are demanded to take into

considerations of the local and global market factors, the official censorship,

and so on. The Chinese film industry of the 2000s has become a much more

complex habitat, in which constant re-adaptations to new trends are required in

order to survive in the competitions with Hollywood. Nonetheless, the

subversive intention and potential of these commercial films must not be

undermined or overlooked with any set of judgment informed by a cultural

hierarchy (i.e. Dai‟s feminist Marxist criticism discussed in Chapter 2). This is

not to suggest a celebration of the Fifth Generation films being a part of the

popular culture; rather, it is to underscore the problems of the ways in which

we approach to these cultural texts and the complex issues that are being dealt

with, and, more importantly, to understand the interactive relation between

China and the West which can not be oversimplified or reduced into sets of

binarism.

The return of Chineseness in the Chinese mega films is thus a tactical

narrative intervention that ultimately deconstructs a series of binaries, namely

high vs. popular culture, China vs. the West, etc. It is always a distortion and

reorganization of the structure that regulates our perception. To achieve this,

the most effective method is perhaps by means of popular culture. Yet, this

assimilation into the realm of the popular must not be reduced to mere

commodity or sheer manipulation. As we see in Hero and Curse, the re-

appropriations of the popular genre of historical costume drama is a novel

trend of narration in which contemporary social issues and desires are

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inscribed. As a final remark on the Fifth Generation‟s latest development in

regards to Dai‟s criticism, their commercial films indeed reflect China‟s place

in the postcolonial condition; however, in this condition, China‟s relation with

the rest of the world, particularly the West, is in a continuous fluctuation that

no binary opposition can be affixed. Whether the texts inscribe an overt

subversive discourse or an unresolved dilemma, they are products of a certain

knowledge acquired within the changing conditions in which the filmmakers

are enabled to construct narrations in connection to the contemporary society.

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 Conclusion

Initially, when I began to conduct this research, instead of a “film study”, I

was mainly interested in the politics of representation in the Fifth Generation

Chinese cinema. Born and raised in Taiwan, but having ancestral connection

with the mainland, the Fifth Generation films (particularly those made during

the 1980s and 1990s), at least for me, no doubt served an “ethnographic”

function which further provoked my interest and concern about what it means

to be Chinese, a name that is problematically labeled by academic and

political discourses. Therefore, I chose the Fifth Generation Chinese cinema as

a medium to pursue a critical understanding of the constructs of national

culture and national identity that are relentlessly contested in the narrations of

the Chinese pedagogy, the Fifth Generation‟s performativity, and the Western

Orientalism.

Throughout my discussions, I highlighted the general questions and issues

concerning the notion of nation (in Chapter 1, Bhabha‟s DissemiNation),

approach to (popular) culture (in Chapter 2, Dia‟s feminist Marxist criticism),

and concept of power/knowledge (in Chapter 3, the Fifth Generation‟s cultural

re-appropriation) in the context of the postcolonial China. My purpose in

doing so was to expose some of the blind spots in cultural studies which tend

to be ignored and overlooked by some of the most prominent academic ideas,

namely, the study of national cinema, feminist and critical Marxist theories,

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etc. Also, I intended to exemplify the possibility for a critical approach to the

mentioned subjects by following M. Foucault‟s pouvoir/savoir. By no means I

attempted to produce reversal views or to negate the already established

academic discourses, rather, I wanted to propose a supplement by which I

think we can break through the binaries reproduced by those discourses and

create an opening to allow critical examinations.

Nonetheless, this research also has its limitations and demands supplements

from other aspects and fields of studies. I shall clarify a few of which I may

have left unanswered and ambiguous. First, I have discussed in Chapter 1 the

Fifth Generation‟s performativity that by constructing a “new ethnography” it

functions to break with the socialist narration of nation of the time in the post-

Cultural-Revolution period. I should stress that the Chinese cinema or the idea

of the Chinese nation must not be reduced to an oppositional relation between

the socialist realism and the Fifth Generation as during the same time there

were other types of films being produced, such as the Fourth Generation

which had influenced the constitution and later development of the Fifth

Generation. Due to the difficulty of obtaining materials produced before the

Fifth Generation, I decided to narrow down my focus to examining the notion

of nation, by following the concept of performativity, in regards to the

emergence of the Fifth Generation‟s inventory narrative intervention during

the crucial period in China‟s socio-political transformation in the 1980s. To

find more information about the interplays between the narrations of the

socialist realism and other performative practices, one shall turn to Yingjin

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Zhang‟s Chinese National Cinema (2004) in which he provides detailed

documentation with a historical/institutional approach.

In addition, as I have mentioned in the introduction that the terminology of the

so-called “Generation” is only a description of a particular group of

filmmakers (including script writers and actors/actresses) who share common

features in terms of filming techniques, film narratives, themes/genres, and so

on, and constituted a distinguishable and recognizable style amongst

themselves in a specific period. However, such way of description and

categorization leaves many gray areas unmarked, such as the way we describe

the French New Wave or the Italian Neo-Realism, and sometimes tends to

render a homogeneous body in which the internal differences are essentialized

and reduced to one particular character. In my discussions, although I have

only focused on Chen Kaige‟s and particular Zhang Yimou‟s works to

demonstrate the ideas of performativity and cultural re-appropriation, neither

did I mean to imply that they or their films represent the entire body of the

Fifth Generation nor only their works are worth examining. There were two

practical reasons that I chose their works as my study subjects. First, my

purpose in underlining the commonalities between the two was to concentrate

my thesis in a more specific manner when discussing the issues of nation

building in filmic narration and cultural re-appropriation. Therefore, I took up

the shared elements in their self-Orientalized representations to evoke

questions and debates on the critics‟ and scholars‟ accusations, which have

reduced Chen‟s and Zhang‟s works to mere products of culture industry or

cultural imperialism. Second, although the Fifth Generation consisted of more

77
members, such as Tian Zhuangzhuang, one of whom also conducted

controversial works in the 1990s and was prohibited from filmmaking in

China for exhibiting Blue Kite (1992) in international film festivals without

attaining official permission, Chen and Zhang are perhaps the only survivors

from the declining Chinese film industry since the early/mid-1990s and

competition with Hollywood. Thus, this also reflects the instability of the Fifth

Generation phenomenon which requires an understanding of the broader

context of the Chinese film industry and the economic, social, and political

factors which take parts in determining the transformations (i.e. the three

stages I have discussed) of the Fifth Generation.

Moreover, in the discussions of the films Hero and Curse of the Golden

Flower in Chapter 3, my focus on the Fifth Generation‟s re-adaptation and re-

appropriation of the costume drama genre was to demonstrate in a broad sense

the function of this particular genre in the Chinese popular culture and in the

global mass entertainment industry as a means to reflect contemporary social

problems/desires and to create a cinematic space for dialogue and negotiation

with the Chinese officials and the Western Orientalist gaze. However, this

readapted genre must not be generalized as serving the single function of

social criticism or national allegory. Various film narratives (discourses) are

constructed by using common elements of self-Orientalized representations

(i.e. inaccurate/unofficial historicity, excessive and lavishing spectacularity,

etc.) which must be examined individually in relation to the historical and

socio-political conditions in which they are articulated. For instance, Chen‟s

fantasy story The Promise (2005), which combines modified elements of

78
action (martial arts), romance, and costume drama, explores the theme of

human nature which differs from Zhang‟s persistent pursuit of social criticism

in Hero and Curse.

Overall, by moving between concepts and theories in literature, philosophy,

and cultural and film studies, I, like the filmmakers, also aimed at finding a

tactical intervention which would allow a critical aspect in studying this

subject. As a final remark, the more complex issues deriving from the study of

the contemporary Chinese cinema such as the (re)constructions of Chinese

culture/identity and the China-West relation require examinations which are

not refrained by timeless or universalistic theories. In some cases, the most

prominent academic narratives may in fact produce barriers which prevent our

critical judgments and comprehensions of cultural phenomena.

79
 FILMS CITED

Chiu, Fu-Sheng. (Producer), & Zhang Yimou. (Director). (1991). Raise the red
lantern [Motion picture]. China: Century Communications.

Gong, William., Zhang, Weiping., Zhang, Yimou. (Producers), & Zhang Yimou.
(Director). (2006). Curse of the golden flower [Motion picture]. China: Beijing
New Picture Film Co.

Guo, Keqi. (Producer). & Chen, Kaige. (Director). (1984). Yellow earth [Motion
picture]. China: Guangxi Film Studio.

Hsu, Feng. (Producer). & Chen, Kaige. (Director). (1993). Farewell my concubine
[Motion picture]. China: Beijing Film Studio.

Hu, Jian., Tokuma, Yasuhoshi., and Zhang, Wenze. (Producers), & Zhang Yimou.
(Director). (1990). Ju dou [Motion picture]. China: China Film Co-Production
Corporation.

Kong, Bill. (Producer), & Zhang Yimou. (Director). (2002). Hero [Motion
picture]. China: Beijing New Picture Film Co. and Elite Group Enterprises.

Li, Changquing. (Producer), & Zhang Yimou. (Director). (1987). Red sorghum
[Motion picture]. China: Xian Film Studio.

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