By Isabella Tianzi Cai
Say What? "Confucius" in Three-Way Tie for Worst Chinese Film of 2010
The winners of the 2nd Golden Broom Awards were announced in Beijing on February 22, 2011, Liu Wei from China Daily reports. The award ceremony is dedicated to the worst films made by Chinese directors. It may be considered the Chinese equivalent of the Golden Raspberry Awards (or “Razzies”) in America.
dGenerate Films President and Founder Karin Chien
Dan Edwards of The Beijinger profiles dGenerate Films’ President Karin Chien. The purpose of the company, as Edwards quotes Karin, was “to bring Chinese perspectives on the People’s Republic to US audiences.” There is a need for this due to language and cultural barriers between China and America. Most available films and television programs about China in the US and elsewhere tend to represent “an outsider’s view of China tailored to a western audience.” They are very different from the perspectives offered by native Chinese filmmakers.
We’re pleased to announce that The Black and White Milk Cow, the award-winning debut film by Yang Jin (Er Dong), is now available through our catalog. Description, awards and a trailer can be found below. Also be sure to read an exclusive interview with Yang Jin.
The Black and White Milk Cow
YANG Jin. China, 2004. Narrative, 93 min.
Shanxi dialect w/ English subtitles.
A young schoolteacher unknowingly enters a tangled web of politics in Yang Jin’s unsentimental dissection of the Chinese countryside.
When his father dies from AIDS following a botched blood transfer, Jinsheng must return to his home village to take care of his aging grandmother. Taking on the role of a schoolteacher in this barren village, Jinsheng is given a milk cow for his salary in place of money. On behalf of his students, the young man cunningly uses the cow to gain influence within this poor community dominated by stifling bureaucratic governance and backward feudal customs. Will Jinsheng’s unexpected rise to power be crushed within this oppressive environment, or will he find his way back out?
Shot on a micro-budget with remarkable black-and-white compositions, this debut film by Yang Jin (ER DONG, 2009 Rotterdam Film Festival), is a bold look at the starkly limited prospects for youth stranded in China’s poorest regions. The film depicts a rural landscape left behind by China’s urban growth, blighted by poverty and HIV, still a taboo topic in China. THE BLACK AND WHITE MILK COW offers one of the most thoughtful considerations of social commitment and individual responsibility in contemporary Chinese cinema.
Winter Vacation (dir. Li Hongqi)
Last year, dGenerate Films conducted the Best Chinese Films of the Decade poll, with the participation of 50 Chinese filmmakers and film experts. The poll results are the most popular feature on our website, recommending many exceptional films to people interested in Chinese cinema. This year, we invited colleagues to participate in the 2010 Chinese Cinema Yearbook, a collection of reflections, memories and favorite films related to Chinese-language cinema this year.
We thank all of our colleagues in the Chinese film community for their support throughout a busy and successful 2010 at dGenerate Films. We look forward to promoting more outstanding works by Chinese filmmakers in 2011.
Click through to access the 2010 Chinese Cinema Yearbook.
By Zhang Xianmin
Translated by Isabella Tianzi Cai
Zhang Xianmin
In this essay, Zhang Xianmin, Professor of Beijing Film Academy, film producer and critic, and organizer of the China Independent Film Festival, comments on the absurdity of China’s film culture and industry today. The essay is divided into four parts: the current cultural milieu, Chinese films’ box office, international film festivals, and the role of the Internet. He argues that first, vibrant film culture exists only in a few major Chinese cities while zero film culture exists in all other places; second, mainland Chinese cinema is not competitive in the global market because it is yet to develop any unique and cross-cultural popular genres; third, award-winning Chinese films at various international film festivals do not have much influence on Chinese cinema but are heavily oriented towards China’s social and political realities; and lastly, Chinese audience consume more foreign films than the other way around. To get his points across, he draws examples from his own experiences as a judge at several international film festivals. Though he can be extremely ironic at times, he shares his most honest thoughts about contemporary Chinese cinema with us in this essay.
I have tried to translate Zhang Xianmin’s essay as close to the original as possible; however, there were instances where I had to abandon the Chinese expressions in the essay for more appropriate English terms.
- Isabella Tianzi Cai
Daytime Booze, Nighttime Party: An Essay on the Lacklustre International Influences of Chinese Cinema in Recent Years
Zhang Xianmin
September 29, 2010
Our Current Cultural Milieu or the So-called Film Environment
Contemporary Chinese culture shows typical signs of a cultural backwater. The creation and recognition of new local cultures are heavily reliant on the existent fame and commercial power of more prosperous places. Cultural resources are clustered in big cities; the rest of China are cultural deserts. If we call this a transition period with Chinese characteristics, it might as well be unprecedented in human history. On the one hand, the cultural development of China lags behind its economic development because the former developed under various kinds of restraints and unhealthy favoritism (we developed but without making progress). On the other, Chinese culture does not have any real power in society; what it has are money-making industries (just like our real estate industry) and politically driven propaganda (in the name of spiritual development). The differences between China and other culturally more developed countries are both the lack of investment by big corporations and the lack of tax incentives for individual cultural workers.
By Kevin B. Lee
Let it be known that 2010 was an exceptional year for Chinese independent cinema.
Most media attention on Chinese cinema in 2010 was directed at its record-breaking domestic box-office receipts, led by blockbusters such as Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock and If You Are the One 2. What hasn’t been reported enough is the abundance of excellent Chinese films to be found outside the mainstream cineplexes. Accessing these films is a challenge, to be sure; most have only been screened one or two times at small-scale independent film festivals in China. A lucky few have made it to international festivals; some have even won awards. Scattered over last year’s festival calendar, their appearances made resounding but isolated impressions – but taking them in all at once, the diversity and quality of these independent visions is staggering.
I originally wanted to write an article spotlighting my favorite Chinese independent films of 2010, but looking at the year’s bounty, it seems that the real story is in how richly differentiated Chinese independent cinema is becoming. Even a lesser film by objective standards of quality may offer an exciting new approach in subject or form. Such efforts to innovate may prove to be more vital to the development of cinema than the so-called masterpieces. In his provocative articles for dGenerate and elsewhere, Shelly Kraicer has repeatedly asked, “What Is Chinese Cinema?” He’s raised this question to challenge both international audiences and Chinese filmmakers on their assumptions and expectations on what Chinese films should be. No more succinctly does he make the point than in an essay from three years ago:
By Shelly Kraicer
This is the conclusion of Shelly Kraicer’s essay “The Use and Abuse of Chinese Cinema (in the West).” Click here for the introduction and first half of the essay.
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Oxhide 2 (dir. Liu Jiayin)
4. Exemplary Asian independent art cinema. This misreading has something in common with Number 1 (“Exotic, colorful diversion”) , but in a more rarified, sophisticated form. It also contradicts (but exists in a weird sort of symbiosis with) Number 5 below. There is supposed to be something essentially “Asian” (meaning usually East Asian) about the predominant mode of contemporary art cinema now celebrated in festivals worldwide. Films that convey China’s backwardness (see Number 6 below) often employ a Andre Bazin-influenced mise en scène that is post-realist in its effect. Long takes, a demandingly slow pace, opaque storytelling, a distant motionless camera, inexpressive, non-professional actors, lots and lots of visual and narrative blankness, emptiness, stillness. Examples abound, the best recent exponents being Yang Heng (Betelnut, Sun Spots), Yang Rui (Crossing the Mountain), and in her own inimitable way, Liu Jiayin (Oxhide and Oxhide 2).
This analysis reduces an often surprising diversity of film styles into something that is assumed to spring, essentially and almost automatically, from a specific historical and cultural background, with local visual and pictorial traditions transmuted directly into their filmic correlatives. This in a sense over-simplifies and over-particularizes Chinese filmmakers who are utterly fluent (more than most of us) in the world-cinema image market (you can easily find films from everywhere, from every era, in China’s wonderfully eclectic bootleg DVD shops). By insisting on the “Chinese-ness” of these films, a special understanding, a privileged access to the films’ “essences,” may reserved for Sinological experts.
5. International art cinema master(s’) works. On the other hand, it’s just as easy to abuse Chinese cinema as some sort of proof that master directors work in a universal style recognizalbe to experts, critics, professionals, and well-trained festival audiences. In absolute contradistinction to Number 4 above, this attitude says “you don’t need to know anything about China and its specific cultural history to appreciate these films. They are great cinema, full stop”. This can be a branding exercise, like Number 2 (“Commercial entertainment”), but one for a more discriminating audience who needs to be reassured that she or he will be able to enjoy the latest Chinese masterpiece without unduly stressing over its foreignness. This is global art, i.e. It belongs to “Us,” not to its incidentally “Other” creators. Hegemony reasserts itself as art / film criticism, denaturing a film for our appropriation and viewing pleasure (with emphasis on the pleasure). This tendency can be seen in the flattering (for a forty-year-old director) inclusion of the latest Jia Zhangke film I Wish I Knew in the “Masters” section of the Toronto International Film Festival programme.
Opening Ceremony of the 7th China Independent Film Festival in Nanjing (photo courtesy of CIFF)
By Shelly Kraicer
While attending the China Independent Film Festival last month in Nanjing (October 2010), I was invited to give a talk the next morning at the International Youth Art Film Summit Forum, a symposium for young directors organized by the Festival and Nanjing University. I couldn’t really decline, especially since I was benefiting from the CIFF’s generous hospitality and its wonderful programming. The problem: “forums” like these in the Chinese film festival context are rather more like formal ceremonies, featuring a series of presiding officials who drone out banal speeches welcoming the scholars and celebrating young Chinese directors’ unbridled creativity.
Various foreign guests are typically invited to give what (is hoped) are equally generic talks outlining their respective institutions and their wholesome and uncomplicated eagerness to cooperate with China, Chinese directors, and Chinese cinema institutions. I was advised to do likewise. I came up with something that I hoped might interest or at least not bore some of these young filmmakers who were supposed to be in the audience. My talk was called “The Use and Abuse of Chinese Cinema (in the West)”. Since it was to be an eight minute speech (including translation, I think I went a bit over), I boiled it down to a list of seven abuses.
What follows below is a recreation from memory of the speech I gave, somewhat expanded from the original version. I’ve also added various clarifications (and complications), and the examples not included in the speech itself (as I was advised not to name specific films in front of officials). I’ve set off these extra sections by italicizing them, so what I hope results is something like a text that alternates between more formal discourse and a parallel informal stream of commentary that supplements, qualifies and even challenges my main argument.
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I start with a question: why do western film festivals need Chinese cinema? Films from the People’s Republic of China are eagerly sought after by festivals around the world, enjoy a generous portion of festivals’ programming slots, and receive a substantial share of prestigious competition prizes. This doesn’t happen by accident. The international festival system does not privilege films on the basis of “excellence” alone. Complex questions of power, commercial viability, and national self-representation come into play. So, phrased another way, the question becomes: What functions — political, commercial, and cultural — does Chinese cinema serve in the western festival and distribution system? How are these films used, what interests does programming them serve?
Zhao Tao in I Wish I Knew (dir. Jia Zhangke)
Published as part of Dong Week at dGenerate Films, a series of articles on Jia Zhangke and the art world in China.
At RealTime Arts, Dan Edwards reviews Jia Zhangke’s new film I Wish I Knew. Some highlights:
There is a spectre haunting Jia Zhangke’s recent work: the spectre of time, of memories being displaced and history erased… But whereas Still Life and 24 City implicitly asked where a nation’s emotional, ethical and philosophical centre lies when so much of its heritage has been destroyed, Jia’s new documentary I Wish I Knew attempts to answer this question by reclaiming history from the ground up…
The contested nature of Shanghai’s past is highlighted not only through personal remembrances from various political and historical perspectives, but also through the filmmaker’s reflection on the ways in which the city’s life has been represented on screen. Shanghai has long been the centre of China’s film industry, and even when Hong Kong dominated Asian cinema, its industry was nurtured by Shanghai refugees who had fled the mainland in the wake of the Communist takeover…
I Wish I Knew resists simply positing an alternative narrative to what appears in mainland Chinese history books, or validating the version of Shanghai’s past told in Taiwan. Instead, the film redefines the very notion of history in China by refusing all singular, linear accounts of Shanghai’s development. For millennia succeeding dynasties rewrote or simply wiped clean what went before in China in order to shore up their own power, a tradition the Communists have pursued with violent determination. In contrast, Jia’s film gives voice to the vanquished as well as the victors, marking out history as an ever-evolving, always disputed discourse comprising a multitude of competing voices.
Read the full review. Dan Edwards’ personal blog devoted to Chinese cinema is Screening China.
There are many other reviews and resources related to I Wish I Knew and Jia Zhangke online. Here are just a few:
Film director Jia Zhangke
Published as part of Dong Week at dGenerate Films, a series of articles on Jia Zhangke and the art world in China.
Back in August, we published a summary and partial translation of Jia Zhangke’s essay reflecting on the Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, ”I Don’t Believe That You Can Predict Our Ending (Wo bu xiang xin ni neng cai dao wo men jie ju).” We have now translated the entire article, which can be found below. Thanks to Jia Zhangke and Zhu Wen for providing us with the full text. English translation by Isabella Tianzi Cai.
Jia first delivered the essay on July 25 at the Beijing premiere of Sixth Generation director Wang Xiaoshuai’s new feature Chongqing Blues. An unsubtitled video of Jia’s address can be found on Youku.com. An abridged version of his remarks, titled ”I Don’t Believe That You Can Predict Our Ending (Wo bu xiang xin ni neng cai dao wo men jie ju)” had been published a week earlier in the Chinese newspaper The Southern Weekly.
Speaking of “the Sixth Generation”: I Don’t Believe That You Can Predict Our Ending
By Jia Zhangke
I am not sure how one would define “the Sixth Generation.” In terms of age, I am seven years younger than Zhang Yuan, who directed Mama, and I am half a year older than Lu Chuan, who is believed to belong to “the Seventh Generation.” I made Xiao Wu when I was 28. From 1998 onwards people have thought of me as from “the Sixth Generation.”
All along I have believed that there is no difference between desperately asserting oneself as belonging to a generation and desperately denying that fact. The reason that a film director does not want to categorize him or herself is either because that he or she wants to emphasize his or her uniqueness or that he or she wants to avoid having anything to do with the negative impressions of his or her generation. For example, whenever we speak of “the Sixth Generation,” one of the first things that come to our mind is that they have notoriously bad box office returns. For me, this is fine. If people want to think of me as such, then so be it.
