Three Times / Zuihaode shiguang

A Time for Love

France/Taiwan 2005

Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien

With Shu Qi, Chang Chen, Di Mei Certificate 12A 135 minutes.

In colour, aspect ratio 1.66:1. With English subtitles.

Screenplay: Chu Tien-wen, A Time to Love inspired by Tai Ai-jon, Ms Gin Oy. Director of Photography: Mark Lee Ping-bing. Supervising editor: Liao Ch’ing-song. Production designer: Hwarng wern-ying. Music: Lin Ciong, LiKuo-yuan, K-B-N.

The film features three stories, all starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen, and including Di Mei in supporting roles.

The first, A Time for Love, is set in 1966. Shu Qi plays May, a snooker-hall girl. Di Mei is her mother. And Chang Chen is Chen, a military conscript on leave.

The second, A Time for Freedom, is set in 1911. Taiwan, [then Formosa] was under Japanese control. In Mainland China, after a revolution, Sun Zhong Shan proclaimed the Republic of China. Shu Qi plays a courtesan, Di Mei is the ‘madame’ of the house, whilst Chang Chen [Mr Chang] is a republican.

The third, A Time for Youth, is a contemporary story set in the world of techno-rock and clubs. Shu Qi is singer Jing, who suffers from epilepsy and partial blindness. Di Mei plays her aunt and Chang Chen [Chen] is a motor-biking photographer. Jing also has a girlfriend, Blue (Chen Shih-shan).

Though Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film focuses on love stories, it also alludes to the political history of Taiwan. This is most overt in the second story, set in the tumultuous year of 1911. But there are also references in the other stories. Hsiao-hsien’s earlier films have also addressed Taiwan’s chequered history.  A City of Sadness (Beiqing Chengshi, 1989] dealt with events in the late 1940s, when following the Civil War the mainland Guomindang government evacuated to the island. The Time to Live and the Time to Die (Tongnian Wangshi, 1985) was set in the 1950s and followed the life of a mainland family who had emigrated to the island.

At various stages in it history the Island, formally known as Formosa, was occupied by the Portuguese, Dutch and then Chinese. China ceded it to Japan after the war of 1895. This meant the island people were excluded from the great democratic revolution in Mainland China of 1911. The Island remained under Japanese control during the 1920s and 1930s, when the Japanese invaded both China and Korea. And it remained occupied during the Pacific war from 1941 to 1945. It was recovered for Mainland China in 1945 by the Nationalist Guomindang Government. Conflict ensured and there was an island rebellion in 1947, which was brutally suppressed. When the Guomindang lost in the Civil War to the revolutionary Chinese Communist movement, it retreated to Taiwan. With US support they retained the title Republic of China, and benefited from US aid. Despite US propaganda about ‘democracy’ it was an authoritarian regime with little direct democracy. The détente between China and the USA in the 1970s undermined Taiwan. It lost its UN seat and later the US annulled the mutual security pact. The island’s political system gradually opened up though it was only in 1990 that mainland Guomindang members ceased to dominate the parliament. In 2001 the ban on trade and communication with Mainland China was partially lifted.

STYLE.

It is worth observing the mise en scène in the film: and Mark Lee Ping-bing’s lighting and photography are finely crafted. The selection and organisation of camera shots also show that Hsiao-hsien uses distinctive techniques. He particularly favours the long shot and the long take. The editing of the overall film [as opposed to shot-to-shot] is also distinctive. The arrangement of the stories is not chronological, and a parallel breach of chronology also occurs within the stories. Indeed each story has its own distinctive set of techniques and style.

The sound design produces an evocative track, and music plays a key part in this. Each story has a particular and appropriate song. And the music has both diegetic [part of the story] and non-diegetic [accompanying the story] functions.

The following contains plot information and comments on techniques. I should say that when I first saw the film, at the 2006 Göteborg Film Festival, I found an important part of the pleasure was the way the film surprises viewers.

A Time for Love

The setting in various snooker halls crosses over with Edward Yang’s film A Brighter Summer Day (1991). However, those in this film are not especially seedy and are the locale for a romantic story. The film opens with a shot of May watching Chen play billiards, [the following scenes the game is snooker; the director in an interview refers to pool halls, but we never see that game]. Only later we realise that this shot is out of sequence. Chen only meets May during the course of the film. The mood of the story is partially set by two classic popular songs – Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Rain and Tears. The latter song actually has a diegetic function as Chen mentions listening to it in a letter to May. But, like the classic Platter’s track, it also provides a commentary on the developing relationship.

A Time for Freedom

A Time for Freedom is set in 1911 and presented in the silent film format of that period. The use of a dubbed soundtrack was due to technical limitations, but the style that the director has produced is the result of inspired choice. As with the original silent films, dialogue is imparted by title cards and there is accompanying music. In fact, in two scenes which more or less bookend the story, the accompanying music is a traditional song, which the courtesan is actually performing. But this is entirely appropriate, as alongside early experiments in sound there were also silent presentations where live music was synchronised to the cinematic image. The mise en scéne and the music become especially poignant as the courtesan’s situation mirrors that of Taiwan, left alone and outside the great democratic revolution that swept Mainland China.

A Time for Youth is the most ambiguous of the three stories and the trickiest to follow.

Jing is a singer with two relationships, one with Chen and one with Blue. A key scene shows Jing returning to her flat, where she left Blue earlier.  Blue has awakened and found Jing gone. She types a message on the computer:

I’m fed up hearing your lies, fed up waiting for you.

I love you more than you love me.

You’ll regret this. I’ll kill myself like your ex-girlfriend.

Jing returns. She lights a cigarette and looks round the flat. She read the message left by Blue. There is an off-screen sound and Jing goes and looks on the balcony.  She sits on the bed smoking. Her emotions are difficult to decipher. The viewer is given no further information. I wondered about this scene, and only when I saw the film again was I convinced that the sound we hear is Blue jumping from the balcony. Thus the sequence seems to use a comparatively rare technique, a plot point made by a sound cue.

A Time for Youth

I have now seen the film three times, appropriately. I still find it an exceptionally fine film, and well up to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s high standards. It also crosses over with the work of Edward Yang; several of the cast have also featured in his films. Yang’s films also make interesting use of sound tracks. This seems to be a particular skill among Taiwanese filmmakers.

The film is still available in 35mm in the UK. And has been released on DVD by Ocean-films.

Red Cliff (Ch/HK/Tw/Jap/Kor 2008)

Tony Leung (a little airbrushed?) as Zhou Yu

I thoroughly enjoyed Red Cliff. I’m a fan of wu xia, John Woo action choreography, Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro, so it couldn’t really fail.

If you don’t know the background to this, the most expensive Asian film so far, it is important to sort out a couple of points. In East Asia the film was released in two parts which together totalled over four hours. Part 1 was released in 2008 before the Beijing Olympics in China and a little later in other East Asian territories. Part 2 was released early in 2009. The ‘Western’ version is a single film (148 minutes in the UK). That’s the version I watched. It would appear that it cuts a great deal of the lead up to the ‘Battle of the Red Cliff’ and is therefore more action-orientated than the Asian Part 1. I thought it was quite coherent as a narrative and the only ‘wrong note’ in the whole film was a dreadful commentary in an American voice which attempted to explain the historical background over the opening credits. For a terrible moment I thought I was going to be presented with a film dubbed into American English. By contrast, in the Chinese version this history was put on screen as text in a scroll. God only knows why we couldn’t have had that in English. (I have no objection to American voices per se, but they aren’t appropriate in a film about 3rd Century China.)

I suppose it is odd to watch a grand Chinese epic – based on the historical records about the Three Kingdoms – at a time when the contemporary Chinese leadership is being held to account for the troubles experienced by the Uighurs of Western China, who feel oppressed by the Han Chinese. The film’s narrative focuses on the Han people of the ‘Southlands’ (the Yangtse Valley) finding allies in the kingdom to the East and fighting off armies from the North under a ‘Prime Minister’ who has the Han Emperor under his control.  This sets up a complex play about loyalties and ethnicities/nationalities. The overwhelming numbers of the Northern Armies (bulked out by the ’surrendered armies’ of other warlords) are matched by the military cunning, education and all round genius of the men (and women) of the South. I guess there will be some comments about the ideological projects of these various narratives about the founding myths of China but this one seems to stress the friendships, loyalties and honour amongst the victors rather than the ‘rightness’ of their enterprise.

This is a ‘global film’ which includes sound crews from Australia and digital effects from America and India as well as a cast drawn from China, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. The crew are mainly Chinese but I’m sure there must be a few Koreans in there somewhere as well. The overall budget is listed as $80 million, which seems a bargain. For my money it’s easily as accomplished as Lord of the Rings or other Hollywood features.

I was a fan of John Woo’s work in Hong Kong but thought that is Hollywood output was generally poor. It was fun to see some of the old traits reappearing here with a warrior strapping a baby to his back in a rescue attempt a la the closing sequence of A Better Tomorrow and the use of caged birds and the inevitable dove/pigeon. Woo seems to have found his mojo in the fight sequences which were beautifully staged using wirework (I’m guessing) alongside CGI. (I’ve seen complaints that the fighting doesn’t look historically accurate, but this is a form of wu xia – martial chivalry – and flying through the air is conventional. (Don’t miss the final scenes.) But the biggest pleasure was just watching Takeshi Kaneshiro having a ball playing the strategist and playfully sparring with Tony Leung on top form. When Tony assumes his Zen-like calm and his firm-set jaw he has absolutely no rivals as the King of Cool. Perhaps I’ll buy the two parts from Hong Kong, it’s aggravating to think we are missing some parts of the film over here.

Jia Zhangke’s ‘Hometown’ trilogy

Director Jia Zhangke dropped beneath my radar, for some reason, until I saw Still Life (Sanxia Haoren, 2006); that presented me with the enticing prospect of ‘catching up’ on some terrific films. Xiao Wu (China-Hong Kong, 1997), his first feature, was heavily influenced by Italian neo realists and Bresson’s Pickpocket (France, 1959); his film was also known as Pickpocket in some countries. Xiao Wu features location shooting and non-actors in a tale of a petty thief who finds life in ‘new’ China is passing him by.

Trapped by the future

Xiao Wu became the first of the ‘hometown’ trilogy and it focuses on one character who’s failing to engage with the emerging capitalism. The second film, Platform (Zhantai, Hong Kong-China-Japan-France, 2000), is more ambitious in its scope as portrays the changes in a state-run theatre troupe from the late ‘70s to the late ‘80s of the Tiananmen Square massacre by which time it has been privatised. The third film, Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiao yao, S.Korea-Japan-France-China, 2002), portrays a whole ‘lost generation’; born post-Mao they don’t have any meaning in their lives other than the pursuit of money and women (the protagonists are a pair of male teenagers).

All the films shot are shot in and around Fenyang, a ‘middle of nowhere’ place, and one of the fascinating aspects of the trilogy is this rundown setting and the people (who are real and not extras) in it. ‘Middle of nowhere’ in the middle of China is a long way away from most places but children play skipping in alleys, just as the do everywhere else in the world.

Although not as surreal as the later Venice Golden Lion winner Still Life, the naturalism Xiao Wu’s visual style – much of it handheld camera – doesn’t mean the mise en scene isn’t expressive. Greens and reds are prominent sometimes submerging scenes in colour expressionately reflecting the protagonist’s stagnation. Whilst his boyhood companions make something of their lives, though their ’success’ is not something that Jia is necessarily celebrating, Xiao Wu drifts through petty theft unable to connect with women or his family: a character also common in all nations. The final shot of Xiao’s humiliation lingers long after the credits.

The film was initially banned in China and lauded in the West; we like celebrating what others ban as it shows off our tolerance. In the west censorship is often economic: if it can’t make money we’re not going to show it. Clearly the censors noticed the lack of celebration of China’s growing economic prosperity. As in Still Life we see characters that are living lives in transition, looking for roots where they no longer exist.

A society in transition

Whilst Xiao Wu focused on one individual experiencing the transition to capitalism, Platform follows a theatrical troupe during the 1980s, a period of vast change as Deng Xiaoping instituted economic changes. Jia Zhangke’s second feature is stylistically very different from the handheld realism of Xiao Wu; often the motionless camera observes the action in long takes. Micheal Berry, in his excellent BFI Film Classic book on the trilogy, compares the style to Ozu; I was reminded of Miklos Jansco where action often wonders offscreen only to return.

Despite the stylisation the film still feels realist; location shooting and non-professional actors and the ordinary lives of the protagonists suggest we’re seeing an authentic vision of a Chinese backwater. Berry mentions that the DVD cut, Jia’s preferred version, is an hour shorter than the original and a lot of explicatory material has been excised. That might be one of the reasons I was occasionally confused as to what was going on. Similarly, I didn’t pick up on all the cultural references; however, that’s part of the point of watching ‘world’ cinema: to learn.

Although there are realist aspects, the film also has almost-surreal moments. For example when Zhong Ping goes to a meeting with a new perm, a signifier of modernity, she’s the butt of jokes; ‘you look like a flamenco dancer’. Cut to the same setting, a run-down hall, with Zhong dancing in a resplendent red flamenco dress. Similarly, another scene is interrupted by a ‘one child parade’; however that wasn’t contrived as these occurred during the late ’70s.

Jia also swamps the mise en scene in blue (all trucks in China seem to be blue!), red and green also predominate. This stylisation aesthetises the film suggesting the film is more than reflecting people’s lives but a statement about ’80s China.

The 'glamour' of the west

Unknown Pleasures is probably the grimmest of the three. If the eponymous character of Xiao Wu is one person being left behind by economic development in China, the teenage protagonists of Unknown Pleasures represent a whole generation whose lives are being destroyed by wholesale changes in society.

The title, as in Platform, is a reference to a Taiwanese pop song (and, also, tangentially, to Joy Division) and western, and westernised, popular culture infuses the film from the ‘bob’ wig worn by would-be singer Qiao Qiao to the attempted bank robbery – both inspired by Pulp Fiction (US, 1994). Qiao, though, is in the hands of local gangster and her performances are purely commercial; adverts for King Mongolian beer. It’s the logical progression from Platform, where the theatrical troupe start as state-run and end up as a business. In Unknown Pleasures selling is all that matters.

Jia portrays capitalism as soulless; or rather, it eats away at our souls as all we want is money. In China, of course, everything is magnified because of its size, so there are a lot of soulless people ‘growing up’ in China. Jia focuses on the losers, but no doubt the winners will also be spiritually empty.

Ji jie hao (Assembly, Hong Kong/China/South Korea 2007)

Zhang Hanyu as Gu Zidi

The range of Chinese films distributed in the West is increasing. This popular genre picture from 2007 has been distributed in UK cinemas and on DVD by Metrodome. The film is a biopic about a hero of the People’s Liberation Army who joined up in 1939 and was invalided out after an incident in the Korean War in 1951. Gu Zidi is first seen as the Captain of the 9th Company of a regiment fighting street battles with the Kuomintang Nationalist Forces in 1948. Reprimanded for his treatment of POWs, Gu is then required to base his depleted company on the rise formed around an old mine and to defend it until the last man is standing. He is instructed to retreat only if he hears the ‘Assembly’ call by the regimental bugler. The defence of the old mine is undoubtedly heroic but Gu loses all his men and is himself rendered unconscious. Apart from a later incident in the Korean campaign, most of the rest of the film is presented via flashbacks as Gu attempts to get the authorities to find the grave of his dead comrades who had all been taken into the mine. His story never waivers but he can’t be sure if the bugle call was ever played because he has lost much of his hearing. Did the Army abandon his company? Was the fault his?

The film has generated interest amongst Western fans of military action films (with their detailed interest in campaigns, weapons and strategies). Several commentators compare the film to Saving Private Ryan (a film that has undoubtedly been of great importance in influencing the representation of battles, but is possibly overpraised as a drama). A more helpful comparison would be the South Korean film Taegukgi (Brotherhood, SK 2004) and possibly Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). The Korean connection is strong in many ways (I’m sure I read somewhere that there was some contact between the two groups of filmmakers). Because the original incident is a Civil War battle, there is a strong sense of the ‘home front’ mixed with the military action and of the confusion over identities which also occurs in the Korean story. There is also a similar attitude towards the absolute horror of war and its representation via CGI. For me, Assembly was perhaps too gory – I’m happy to accept that “war is hell” and I don’t need to see so many dismembered bodies. It did seem at times that arms and legs were too easily severed by a single rifle shot. On the other hand, director Feng Xiaogang did choose to play all the battle scenes via a much reduced palette of blues, greys and reds that certainly didn’t glamourise the violence.

The problem for Western action fans is that the biopic spends plenty of time on the struggle to establish where the bodies are buried. The action is crammed into the first half only – apart from a few flashback scenes. The whole history of the long war – more than 20 years from the first Japanese incursions into Manchuria to the stalemate across the 38th parallel in Korea in 1953 – for what became the PLA is barely known about by audiences in the West and this history and how it is explored is what I found most interesting about Assembly. The film is propagandistic in some ways and also as sentimental as many Hollywood films, but overall it is quite a sober and moving account of an important period. I hope we get to see more Chinese films like this.

Sanxia haoren (Still Life, Hong Kong-China, 2006)

Life in a Ballardian landscape

A fascinating film set in town about to be submerged by China’s Three Gorges damn. It mixes the naturalism, common in Chinese cinema, of following ordinary people’s ordinary lives with the utterly surreal landscape of a city being destroyed. Zhang Ke Jia has an astonishing eye for composition so a shot of men sledgehammering a building has stunning beauty.

A man seeks his mail order bride (who left him 16 years earlier) and a woman seeks a two-year missing husband to seek a divorce against a gorgeous natural landscape and bonkers moments (the tall building is about to be blown up in the still above). There is also an appearance of a UFO and one building takes off like a spaceship: audacious filmmaking.

Small details resonate too: characters compare how their home towns are represented on banknotes, a marvellous metaphor for capitalist China. Incidentally, the ‘Ballardian’ in the caption refers to British SF writer JG Ballard who specialised in decaying urban landscapes – this film realises his vision.

Farewell China (Hong Kong 1990)

Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Ka-Fai in Farewell China

This is an extraordinary film with a shocking ending. In some ways it plays as a darker version of the later Comrades, Almost A Love Story. The premise is straightforward with Tony Leung Ka-Fai and Maggie Cheung as a young couple in rural China. They met during the Cultural Revolution, married and have their allowed one child. Their aim is to emigrate to America and eventually, after countless attempts, Hung (Maggie Cheung) is successful in getting a visa to study and sets off promising to send for Zhou and their son as soon as possible. When his letters are returned ‘undelivered’, Zhou decides to travel himself, leaving his son with the grandparents and by a circuitous route via Panama, he makes it to New York. Without English, how is he going to find Hung?

Directed by Clara Law, who made several features around this time, the film begins in a recognisable social realist style, but in New York, many of the scenes are set at night in different ‘Chinatowns’ in Brooklyn and the Bronx and also in Harlem. One IMDB user remarks that the film shows areas of New York that don’t usually appear in feature films. For me, the nighttime scenes were reminiscent of films like Scorsese’s After Hours, with the dark streets as very menacing.

The narrative offers a wealth of sociological detail about the different migrant groups. The ‘mainlanders’ occupy the lowest level of rented housing, whereas the Hong Kong and Taiwanese communities have been able to move out. I don’t want to spoil any narrative expectations, but there is an interesting use of an American-Chinese character. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are excellent and I don’t really understand why films like this don’t get picked up for UK distribution. It would be great to screen this next to Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts or Michael Winterbottom’s In This World – as well as Comrades, Almost A Love Story. (Available on an All Region DVD from Fortune Star, Hong Kong.)

Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei) (China 1964)

The two women at the end of the film.

Stage Sisters is a well made and enjoyable film that also has great significance in the history of Chinese Cinema. Director Xie Jin was one of the few figures to have continued working in China since the 1950s, making his first feature in 1957 at the age of 34 and his sixteenth in 1997 (The Opium War).

Plot outline:  Chunhua and Yuehong are the ’stage sisters’ of the title. They meet in the late 1930s when Yuehong’s father’s popular opera troupe visits a town where Chunhua is all too willing to join the troupe. Eventually, they land up in Shanghai under Japanese occupation with Chunhua now a skilled performer. But the two young women gradually move apart before the plot brings them together again and the film ends with the triumph of the of the People’s Liberation Army.  

The timing of the film’s production is one reason for its importance. Although it was completed well before the usually accepted date for the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Kwok and Quiquemelle (1987) have argued that the beginnings of the clampdown were in 1963 and that Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong and a former Shanghai actress, was instrumental in the ban received by Stage Sisters. She saw both cinema and theatre in the early 1960s as failing to adhere to policies designed to promote the conception of the People’s Republic of China as a revolutionary society. (There is also the suggestion that she was settling old scores in Shanghai.) In the first instance pressure was put on Xie Jin during production to change the latter part of his film. Then before its release in 1965 a campaign was mounted against the film – because it did not paint a sufficiently negative view of the ‘bad’ characters. During the Cultural Revolution, filmmaking was first suspended altogether and then allowed only in the form of austere revolutionary model operas. With the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s, films like Stage Sisters emerged from their cocoons to charm and please audiences.

What is surprising about the ban for audiences in the West is that the vision of a Marxist future appears so palatable in the film. Two young women are shown taking different decisions about their future and it is clear which is the ‘correct’ decision. This comes across in a satisfying story that has plenty of human interest and moral ambiguity.

Traditions and metaphors
For a film like Stage Sisters to work with a mass Chinese audience, it must draw upon traditional storytelling with familiar characters and settings. This the film does by basing its story on the meeting of two young women from different backgrounds who then work together in a Shaoxing folk opera troupe.
The best known form of Chinese opera in the West is Beijing opera – the metropolitan opera with elegant choreography and movement. But there are regional ‘typical’ opera forms across the country. Shaoxing is a rural district south of Shanghai. It is famous for producing opera singers – singers in a more populist mode than in Beijing opera – and for an opera style with more dialogue and audience engagement. Touring troupes from Shaoxing would perform in the market place of towns and villages. Eventually these performances moved into the larger towns and cities, occupying permanent theatres. The tradition includes women playing men’s parts in traditional stories. Although the elaborate costumes, complex plots and sophisticated performance styles might seem to suggest an elite activity, Shaoxing opera was largely performed by actors of peasant stock for audiences of mainly poor people. Xie Jin was also from the Shaoxing region and he draws on his own background in the film.

The story begins in the mid 1930s when the Nationalists (KMT) were attempting to subdue local warlords and to suppress the growth of the Communists. When the Japanese invaded in 1937, a temporary truce between Nationalists and Communists lasted only a few years before a three-cornered struggle ensued. After 1945 the Communists began to win the war against the Nationalists and the film ends in 1949 when the victorious Communists enter Shanghai and the PRC (People’s Republic of China) is established. In between, the struggles of the opera troupe to find ways to struggle through the war act as a metaphor for Chinese society as a whole.

The personal dramas of the stage sisters parallel the fictional worlds of the plays they perform, which in turn, parallel the political changes occurring in Chinese society. (Marchetti 1989: 100)

Gina Marchetti suggests that Chunhua is a modern recreation of a female warrior character from traditional opera – aggressive, physically powerful, morally upright and inevitably victorious. This use of traditional types is common to many of the films of the PRC and works for both the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ characters, so that ‘counter-revolutionary’ figures may embody characteristics of wicked demons or monks or rogue generals.

But there are also parallels with more contemporary figures. Marchetti points to the character of Jiang Bo in Stage Sisters. She is the representative of the progressive forces in Shanghai and she acts as a major influence on Chunhua. In particular, she takes her to an exhibition in 1946 commemorating the death of Lu Xun, a literary and theatrical figure associated with the ‘May the Fourth’ Movement (the May protests of 1919 against the Versailles settlement), also known as the ‘New Cultural Movement’.

Lu Xun was another Shaoxing native who championed the rights of women, especially those of the poor and Chunhua goes on to perform in an opera based on Lu Xun’s novella, The New Year’s Sacrifice. Here the narrative of Stage Sisters points to the struggle for a socially committed theatre. It is significant that it is the Shanghai theatre world in which these events unfold. Shanghai was the Chinese city most open to the West and outside influences – both the revolutionary politics which informed the Communists and the entrepreneurial drive of capitalism.

In the final part of the Stage Sisters narrative, Chunhua is back on tour, this time performing in an opera version of The White-Haired Girl, a revolutionary play written in Yenan in 1943 at the time of Mao’s lectures on Art and Literature in which he laid out the importance of a ‘cultural army’ to fight the Chinese people’s enemies at home and abroad. Stage Sisters cleverly combines the references to traditional, ‘socially committed’ and ‘revolutionary’ operas in the performances of Chunhua. But this also requires a very careful approach to cinema aesthetics.

Combining cinema aesthetics
Xie Jin constructs the film’s narrative using three different, but interconnected approaches. First he draws on traditional Chinese literary sources (and to a certain extent, earlier forms of Chinese cinema such as the Shanghai melodramas of the 1930s). He was himself strongly influenced by Hollywood films from the 1940s studio period, especially what he termed the ‘literary’ or ‘lyric’ films such as Grapes of Wrath (John Ford 1940), Waterloo Bridge (Mervyn LeRoy 1940), Casablanca (Michael Curtiz 1942) or the 1930s Warner Brothers’ bio-pics of figures such as Emile Zola or Marie Curie.

These two sources are referenced alongside Soviet Cinema, which was perhaps the dominant cinematic mode in China in the 1950s and early 1960s. Soviet Cinema since the early 1930s had been forced by Stalin to develop what became known as ‘socialist realism‘.

Not to be confused with ‘social realism’ (a term used generally to describe films that attempt to create an authentic environment of social reality and to engage with ‘real social issues’), the Soviet variant dates from Stalin’s attempts in the early 1930s to purge Soviet cinema of its experimental and authorial features, especially those of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko. Stalin decreed that cinema must be ‘accessible’ to the masses. Accessibility did not allow for ‘art’. The socialist realist model drew on Hollywood methods to present the worker as hero in romanticised scenarios with simple linear narratives. The heroic figures were privileged in the frame through the use of lighting, camera angles and composition.

In many ways ‘Hollywood realism’ and ‘socialist realism’ used a similar aesthetic and offered audiences an easily digestible form of entertainment with the ideological work of the film disguised by ‘invisible editing’ and clear identification with characters and narrative coherence. They differed of course in terms of the individualist v. collectivist ethos of American and Soviet culture.

As well as Chinese, American and Soviet aesthetics, Xie Jin in the early 1960s was influenced by a further realist aesthetic, this time from European and World Cinema. Xie Jin himself has referred to Italian neorealism and it is likely that he was also familiar with the work of other filmmakers who were influenced by neorealism, including Satyajit Ray in Bengal (e.g. in The Apu Trilogy 1955-9). The dominant form of World Cinema in the 1950s was referred to as a ‘humanist cinema’ (a term applied to both Ray and Kurosawa Akira  at the time). The reference to humanism is generally taken to mean a text which deals with human interests rather than religious themes or the supernatural. In such films, the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in ‘ordinary situations’ are the focus. The neorealist influence meant that such stories would be filmed with less stylisation than the manufactured realism of what Jean-Luc Godard would later describe as ‘Hollywood-Mosfilm’.

Stage Sisters has many influences and it is held together by Xie Jin’s feeling for the human characters.

. . . the delicacy and skill with which Xie Jin has so often juxtaposed official messages approved by the political hierarchy of the time, with other more subversive scenes and comments. His films are often laced with scenes of sheer human pleasure in everyday social banalities, delight in which quietly melts the edges of hard Party truths and relentless social critiques. Not that Xie Jin is a ‘schizophrenic’ director: rather he has an overwhelming sense for the full texture of social interaction. (John Downing, responding to Timothy Tung, 1987: 207)

(The film is in Technicolor despite the still above.)

References
Kwok and M. C. Quiquemelle (1982 and 1987) ‘Chinese Cinema and Realism’ in John Downing (ed.) Film and Politics in the Third World, New York: Autonomedia
Gina Marchetti (1989) ‘Two Stage Sisters: The blossoming of a revolutionary aesthetic’ in Jump Cut No 34.
Timothy Tung (1987) ‘The Work of Xie Jin: A Personal Letter to the Editor’ in Downing (ed.) op cit.

(Many of Xie Jin’s films were seen in America in the mid-1980s and Jump Cut 34 has a major section on Xie Jin and Chinese Cinema. Gina Marchetti’s article has formed the basis for these notes.
In 1988, following the successful release of Yellow Earth, a new Xie Jin film, Hibiscus Town was released in the UK. Xie Jin was a prolific filmmaker throughout his career (except for the period of the Cultural Revolution) but only two of his films have been widely seen in the UK.

Questions for discussion

1. Do we think that Stage Sisters manages to deliver a coherent story in a consistent style, given the many influences and pressures on its director?

2. What reading do we make of the resolution of the film’s narrative and in particular what happened to the ‘stage sisters’?

3. If the film’s narrative is indeed a metaphor for the social and political history of China in the period 1935-50, what do we understand about that history and what might we expect to see in later films?

Roy Stafford (based on notes compiled in 2003/4 for evening classes on Chinese Cinema)

Xie Jin (1923-2008)

 

Xie Jin addressing the Special Olympics Global Policy Summit. (He had two sons with learning disabilities.)

Xie Jin, who died on 18 October, was perhaps the most distinguished and best-loved film director in China. He was not well-known outside China for the simple reason that most of his films were not widely exported during the 1950s and 1960s. In the UK, it was not until the 1980s, after the Cultural Revolution, that his best known film Two Stage Sisters (1964) was distributed by the BFI in the UK and this was followed by a release for one of his later melodramas, Hibiscus Town (1987) through ICA Projects. These two films did allow UK film scholars to recognise Xie Jin’s ability to work with the conventions of Chinese socialist realism and to adapt and subvert them. Nevertheless, like the Fifth Generation directors who followed him, he struggled to make the films as he would have wanted without the pressures from authorities. 

Xie Jin was one of the leading directors in global film during the second half of the 20th century. Because of the disruption to production during the Cultural Revolution, he was unable to work intensively during what should have been the prime period of his career. As a consequence he completed only 19 features according to IMDB. However, some of these would have been seen by very large audiences. Notes on Two Stage Sisters follow this entry.