A Cinema of Illumination

For the first time INTERFILM was present at the Mostra dell'arte cinematographica, the International Film Festival in Venice (August 27-September 6, 2008). During the festival INTERFILM organised a panel discussion on Chinese cinema of today, in cooperation with the Organisazione protestante del cinema Roberto Sbaffi and the Italian Catholic film organisation Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo. Karsten Visarius, Executive Director of INTERFILM, presented a keynote speech which is published below.

1. My starting point is a very simple statement. Chinese films interest us because China regained an important position in world politics, and because it plays an influential part in the globalization of the economy. Certainly you can discuss films also under these perspectives. But my perspective is different. Chinese films do interest us because of their artistic value and their aesthetic potential, and they do so for a much longer time than political and economic reasons can explain.

2. You can pretty precisely determine since when Chinese films won the attention of an international audience. 1985 Chen Kaige’s “Yellow Earth”, with Zhang Yimou as his cinematographer, won a Silver Leopard in Locarno and a Commendation by the Ecumenical Jury. In 1988 followed a Golden Bear for Zhang Yimous debut as director in Berlin, for “Red Sorghum”, and in the same year Tian Zhuangzhuang received an award for his “The Horse Thief” in Fribourg, once again in Switzerland. These three directors and their films form the centre of what later became famous as the “Fifth Generation” of Chinese cinema.

3. Although we are going to focus on the Chinese cinema of today, we need to recall the achievements of the 5th generation, if only in general, for they still form the basis for the work of younger directors.

The first and decisive achievement consists in reestablishing film as art instead of propaganda. This implies, second, to gain acceptance for the principle of authorship, that is to develop a personal concept or vision in order to organize the different elements and levels of a film. This principle as we know causes not only conflicts with political control and censorship but also with aims as gaining financial profits, pleasing the tastes of the audience and respecting the limits of conventional traditions. Third, the 5th generation has raised a sensibility for the fact that true art relies on knowing its own history. All these principles contrast directly to the Communist party’s ideology of the Cultural Revolution and the catastrophe it turned out to be for the Chinese society. The biographies of the 5th generation’s directors are all deeply affected by this experience.

4. The last principle, to be aware of the position of one’s own work in the course of film history, is especially important for the intercultural approach which we are interested in on this panel. For the directors of the 5th generation have developed their personal style in regard to films from the West, more precisely films from Western Europe. This remains true also for the next generation till today. At the beginning, Italian neorealism plays an important part, then the French Nouvelle Vague, as well as outstanding artists as Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni. Consequently, we don’t need to look for an abstract relation between European and Chinese films. This is not a question of influences and dependencies. Rather, I am talking about exchange, adaptation, and transformation, in short: about an international artistic communication. Using a formula, this means: the forms of expression in modern Chinese cinema rely on an intercultural matrix. We have to conceive Chinese films as a texture, with internal, national and external, international  elements permeating each other.

5. The last statement needs a footnote. The inherent international and intercultural nature of film contrasts to the search for a collective identity which in China refers to an imperial history of ages. The development of many 5th generation directors, first of all Zhang Yimou’s, but also Chen Kaige’s, can be told from protest and personal artistical self-assurance in the beginning to adapting to collective desires and needs later and ending in an imperial myth, although not necessarily excluding critical undertones. By this, they challenge the mythology of Hollywood cinema gaining also financial success.

6. Being a protestant raised film critic, I prefer other choices, and so do INTERFILM and the Ecumenical Juries – which are appointed at numerous international film festivals but not in Venice. It is not myth, not illusion, and not a common sensation of feelings, all of which are considered to be deeply connected with cinema. But there exists another side of cinema. It has to do with compassion, with empathy, with truth, with the dignity of the individual, with taking side for justice and protesting against suppresion and violence. I don’t need to explain why these values are so precious for an international church film organisation. But I am going to argue that these values and convictions are essential for film art as well. For the sake of our discussion I focus on the films of Jia Zhang-ke, for many observers the most important director of Chinese cinema today. His latest film will be screened during the Mostra, as well as his cinematographer, Yu Lik-way, has directed a film which made it into the competition section of this year’s festival.

7. “Xiao Wu”, in English “Pickpocket”, the first film of Jia Zhang-ke, tells the story of a little criminal in the provincial town of Fengyang, where the director himself has been raised. Fengyang is China, the director once said. Xiao Wu’s ex-companions have turned to be successful businessmen, the authorities which let him do in exchange for small services in previous times withdraw their protection. At the end he stands on the street in chains, painfully stared at by the crowd as if Kafka’s bug came into life. The plot itself is marginal. Important is the picture of a small town, the streets and alleys, the backyards and the shabby living rooms; important are the social positions and the net of social relations; important is Xiao Wu’s cigarette lighter which plays Beethoven’s “For Elise” and wins the heart of a prostitute for him.

Jia’s next film, “Platform”, is about a group of travelling theatre players, again from Fengyang, in the years between 1980 and 1989. On their route from one provincial stage to the other they experience the change from a state theatre group to a private enterprise. Personally, they start from a mood of youthful rebellion and end in the struggle for an indifferent audience’s attention. The film is a huge panorama of a decade in provincial China and could easily be entitled “Lost Illusions” like Balzac’s famous novel.

I am jumping to “Still Life” which won Jia Zhang-ke the Golden Lion in Venice 2006 as film surprise. The setting is the ghost-like town of Fengjie which is doomed to destruction and sinking in the waters of the Yang-tse by the Three-Gorges-Dam. The film tells the story of a former mine-worker in search of his wife who left him sixteen years ago, and a second story about a woman who lost her husband to a successful career in the construction business. The image on our invitation is drawn from this film. It shows a man walking on a tightrope in the background trying not to fall down – a symbol for the dangerous walk the characters have to cope with between a lost tradition and an uncertain future.

8. Everyday life in a rapidly transforming environment – that is Jia Zhang-ke’s central theme, as well as for many other directors of his generation. They tell us how the struggle to survive consumes the essence of life itself: happiness, satisfaction, hope, trust, solidarity, and self-esteem. Only an admirable pragmatism keeps people going. You can say that Jia Zhang-ke’s characters are threatened and damaged by the worthlessness of values. That is not an accusation, and not an affirmation. It is an observation, and a conclusion. To let us see, feel, and understand this drama is a great achievement of Jia’s film art. It relies on a camera work, a plot construction and a portrayal of characters which confides in reality nearly documentary-like, giving it a shape to grasp at the same time. This is not a cinema of effects but of truthfulness. It is not a cinema of illusion but of illumination. We know, that this kind of cinema in China suffers from a lack of any considerable distribution, of support and promotion, that it is often even forbidden and gets a circulation only by video piracy. Thus, these films get lost of their most important aim: to participate in the public communication about the problems, political decisions and perspectives of the Chinese society. Not only for this reason I plead to praise these artists, and to give them prizes: hoping that some day also Chinese audiences get curious to watch them with their own eyes.