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Renewal of Song Dynasty Landscape Painting Aesthetics Combined with a Contemplative Modernism in the Early Work of Chen Kaige

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The Poetics of Chinese Cinema

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Abstract

Surprisingly, an interest in the glories of Chinese art history was virtually absent from mainland Chinese film in the past. The Shanghai filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s were involved in producing their own modern brand of cinema that necessarily had to appeal to local audiences through characterization and ideology—young people working together against oppression through a kind of natural socialism—while emulating the fast moving nature of Hollywood product. This model was followed in the 1950s and 1960s by that of state-supported Communism, where although the natural landscape would often appear, invariably it was used as a heroic backdrop to revolutionary characters, ala Soviet Realism. It wasn’t until after the Cultural Revolution that students of the state-run Beijing Film Academy (BFA) had access to the full history of film, including their own, as well as the great depth of China’s art history. Naturally enthused by films of the numerous international ‘new waves’ of the 1960s, and moved by the richness of their specifically Chinese culture, the filmmaking graduates were free for the very first time to regard the past while seriously thinking of the future. By focusing on two of the first three films directed by Chen Kaige—Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984), and King of the Children (Haizi wang, 1987)—I propose that Chen (and his cinematographers) incorporates a keen understanding of the aesthetics of Chinese landscape and narrative scroll painting combined with a need to produce original, at times reflexively ‘modernist’ work. Another interest here is that the ancient practice of Chinese painting was accompanied by theory, to the extent that some theoretical principles of media—ink, brush, silk, and paper—can be compared to aspects of twentieth century, medium specific, high modernist art, where, say the representational nature of painting, photography, and film becomes less important than the medium itself. In a sense, then, I argue that these film works are ‘experimental’ both narratively and visually, through both Western and Chinese interpretations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to Wu Hung (1997, p. 65), it is possible that a vertical handscroll in the collection of the Palace Museum, Taipei, entitled, Sailing Boats and a Riverside Mansion may be attributed to Li Ssu-hsün. Michael Sullivan (1980) is somewhat skeptical about the importance of Li father and son, but traces the development back much further and provides numerous examples of surviving seventh-century Sui Dynasty cave paintings including landscapes, at Tunhuang, especially pp. 111–112. The oldest surviving hanging scroll painting on silk dates from the Western Han Dynasty, about 180 B.C. (Sullivan 1973, pp. 45–6).

  2. 2.

    See The Pride of China (2007, p. 29, p. 83); Watson (2000, pp. 1−3).

  3. 3.

    See also Hsü (1999), and Watson (2000, pp. 11−12).

  4. 4.

    See Ch’en (2003, pp. 24–9); and Sickman and Soper (1961, pp. 203–14).

  5. 5.

    Sabine Hesemann discusses the horizontal scroll as it was developed earlier in the Southern style, exemplified by the work of Dong Yuan (e.g., The Xiao and the Xiang) who worked for the court of Nanjing (937–962), where the land was relatively flat. According to Hesemann, he was ‘a man of the south [and], created an effect of great scope in his landscape compositions,’ ‘China: The Song Period and the Aesthetics of Simplicity,’ (Hesemann 1999, p. 145).

  6. 6.

    See Hesemann (1999, pp. 155−6). See also Cahill (1997, p. 8).

  7. 7.

    See Treager (1997 [1980], p. 124); Cooper and Cooper (1997, p. 83); and Ch’en (2003, p. 35).

  8. 8.

    Soper’s translation of the other five principles is as follows: The second is ‘structural method in use of the brush.’ The third is ‘fidelity to the object in portraying forms.’ The fourth is ‘conformity to kind in applying colors.’ The fifth is ‘proper planning in placing (of elements).’ The sixth is ‘transmission (of the experience of the past) in making copies’ (Sickman and Soper 1961, p. 133).

  9. 9.

    See my essay, ‘The Presence (and Absence) of Landscape in Silent East Asian Films’ (Rist 2006a).

  10. 10.

    The original filmography was published as Volume One of Zongguo dianying fazhan shi (The History of the Development of Chinese Cinema) in 1963 and republished in 1980 after the Cultural Revolution.

  11. 11.

    For more on visual style in the Lianhua films, see my essay, ‘Visual Style in the Silent Films made by the Lianhua Film Company [United Photoplay Service] in Shanghai: 1931−35,’ (Rist 2006b).

  12. 12.

    The version of the US release that exists in China, and that was published by the China Film Archive, Beijing on VCD is only five reels of 35 mm in length, but a longer, seven reel version was discovered recently as a 16 mm print, with a musical soundtrack, and with a running time of approximately 67 min. Hopefully, an original Chinese release version will eventually be rediscovered.

  13. 13.

    In discussing Fei Mu’s films and writings at some length in a book on Chinese cinema before 1949, Jubin Hu stated that his ‘interpretation of Spring in a Small Town is that while Fei Mu accepted new ideas about culture and ethics he also wanted to preserve Chinese tradition to a certain degree’ (Hu 2003, p. 177). Elsewhere, Hu discusses Fei Mu’s writings on Chinese ‘national’ film style, where, as early as 1941, he had argued for such a style to, ideally, combine ‘tradition and modernity’ (p. 182).

  14. 14.

    For more on style in Tianlun, see, ‘The Presence (and Absence) of Landscape in Silent Chinese Films’ (Rist 2007).

  15. 15.

    During the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, from 1937 until the outbreak of the Pacific front of World War II in December 1941, it was possible to make films in the foreign concessions (the ‘orphan island’). On the occasion of the film’s restoration and public screening in Hong Kong, a little booklet was published that included a bilingual essay, ‘History and Aesthetics,’ written by archivist/historian Wong Ain-Ling (Wong 2009, pp. 4−9).

  16. 16.

    He also shows that with two other stylistic features considered by scholars to be typically ‘Chinese—medium shot scale and camera movement combined with flatness—the statistical evidence doesn’t support these claims’ (Udden 2012, pp. 269−72).

  17. 17.

    For example, in commenting on a neighboring cinema, David Bordwell said that ‘We are not in the habit of explaining contemporary Hollywood style by reference to Northern European Renaissance painting, so why should ancient aesthetic traditions be relevant to twentieth-century Japanese film?’ (Bordwell 2005, p. 98).

  18. 18.

    The Lumière Brothers introduced the cinema to China in 1896. See Robertson (1991 [1980], p. 3).

  19. 19.

    See also, Laikwan Pang, ‘Shanghai Films of the 1930s’ (Pang 2011, p. 58).

  20. 20.

    In the very first book written in English on the ‘Fifth Generation,’ and one that remains a first-rate introduction to the subject, Tony Rayns wrote, ‘No one seems fully clear how the nickname [Fifth Generation] was arrived at. Some take it to mean that the film-makers were the fifth distinct group to graduate from the Film Academy, which has a periodic rather than an annual intake. But simple mathematics makes that explanation unlikely: the Academy was founded in 1956, closed between 1966 and 1978, and offers its students four-year courses’ (Rayns 1989, p. 16). Rayns has recently provided a detailed discussion of the five generations (Rayns 2014, p. 16).

  21. 21.

    The narrative is driven by a comedy of errors, where the male visitor/hero Ah Peng finds the wrong Bai woman named Jinhua on four occasions before finally finding his loved one—hence the number ‘Five’ in the title. There is also an interesting reflexive dimension to Five Golden Flowers, where two artists working for the Changchun Film Studio have come to Yunnan to record folk songs, and paint landscapes and figures.

  22. 22.

    Another example is Third Sister Liu (Liu sanjie, dir. Su Li, 1960, b/w). Yingjin Zhang argues that this film ‘represents an attempt to approximate the viewing experience afforded by the traditional hand-scroll painting’ (Zhang 2004, note 4, p. 304).

  23. 23.

    See Ehrlich and Jin (2001, pp. 10−11).

  24. 24.

    See, for example, Shelly Kraicer, ‘Rediscovering the Fourth Generation’ (Kraicer 2008, p. 30). For the reception of Yellow Earth, see Rayns (1989), where he writes, ‘The screening was received with something like collective rapture, and the post-film discussion stretched long past its time limit’ (p. 1); and, ‘The torrid enthusiasm of the Hong Kong audience was repeated when Yellow Earth had its western première at the Edinburgh and Locarno festivals four months later’ (p. 2).

  25. 25.

    According to the English-language website of the BFA, the Directing department core includes, ‘Drama, Performing, Video and Audio language, Directing Art [Films?], Documentary Film Theory and Making,’ while the listing of 13 other ‘basic courses’ includes ‘Analysis of Art Works’ and ‘General Introduction of Art,’ which may or may not include Chinese classical landscape painting examples. http://www.bfa.edu.cn/eng/2012-12/17/content_57148.htm

  26. 26.

    See, for example, Silbergeld (1999a, pp. 43−7); Yau (1991, pp. 64−5).

  27. 27.

    This figure was submitted by Zhang Zizhao on 27 October 2010, the full breakdown of the advanced mode being available at http://www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=16882

  28. 28.

    My calculation uses 27.36 meters of 35 mm film being equal to one minute of running time taken from one of the very useful calculation tables presented in Cherchi Usai (2000, p. 174). McDougall counts the end titles as 11 shots, whereas I consider them as one shot only, although I maintained the count of the opening titles as six shots (Zhang 1991).

  29. 29.

    The Cinemetrics measurement of shot scale is based on Barry Salt’s system, illustrated at http://www.cinemetrics.lv/salt.php, where BCU (Big Close Up) frames the head only, CU frames the head and shoulders, MCU is from the waist up (although the image shows from the stomach or chest-up), MS, ‘includes from just below the hip to above the head of upright actors’ MLS, ‘shows the body from the knees-upwards,’ and, although not defined by Salt, FS shows the full body in the shot, LS, shows the body filling only half of the frame, while VLS (Very Long Shot) shows the actor small in the frame. For my own measurements of shot scale, I have tended to use the same scheme for closely framed shots (with ECU, instead of BCU), but I usually employ ‘MS’ more widely (to include Salt’s MS and MLS), while I reserve MLS for full body shots (FS). I use ELS (‘Extreme’) in place of VLS. McDougall uses ECU, CU, MC, MS, LS, and ELS, without defining any of the scales as Salt does. See Zhang (1991 p. 174)

  30. 30.

    See Cinemetrics http://www.cinemetrics.lv/satltdb.php

  31. 31.

    I am thinking here, especially of Fernand Léger’s (and Dudley Murphy’s) Ballet mécanique (France, 1924) that comically connects human behavior with machines and critiques the world of advertising, but also of celebrations of mechanization and the modernity of cinema such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin; Symphony of a Great City (Berlin; Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, Germany, 1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, USSR, 1929), and abstract animation, including Oscar Fischinger’s German cigarette commercials of the 1930s.

  32. 32.

    Tony Rayns provides an excellent overview of the connections between Mao’s zhiqing system of re-education and the Fifth Generation, especially, pp. 2−15 (Rayns 1989). The best account of Chen’s experiences in Yunnan is available in French, not English; see Chen (2001 [1989]).

  33. 33.

    The endnote 8 continues, ‘Most of these [landscape shots] are LS, although sometimes MLS, MS, or even close-ups are inserted. In all cases, the function of the natural background remains constant.’

  34. 34.

    I have found no specific reference to Chen Kaige being influenced by Renoir. Ni Zhen refers to the BFA students being shown ‘Chinese classical cinema, Hollywood film of the thirties and forties, and the Soviet classics’ (Ni 2002, p. 94). Later, he notes that Japanese films were imported into China in ‘the late seventies,’ and that ‘Filmmakers such as Bergman, Resnais, Godard, Truffaut, and Antonioni, and writers such as Kafka, Sartre, Camus, Wolfe, Garcia Marquez, Faulkner, Bellow, and Hemingway all became objects of intense fascination and half-comprehending worship’ (p. 98).

  35. 35.

    The only commercially available DVD of King of the Children is published by Guangzhou Beauty Culture Communication Co. Ltd. in China, #DE 1619-26, and it is a very poor quality version: poor resolution, with color shifts, bad subtitling, incorrect masking giving an aspect ratio of 2:1; and worst of all, reels seven to nine are inverted, complicating segmentation and close statistical analysis.

  36. 36.

    See, for example, ‘Comrades-in-arms’ (Zhanyou, 1977), ‘I contribute precious deposits to the mother country’ (Wo wei zuguo xian baozang, 1979), ‘Sternly attack criminal activities’ (Yanli daji xingshi fanzui buodong, 1983), and ‘Comrades Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao’ (Zhou Enlai he Deng Yingchao tongzhi, 1983), in Landsberger (2001 [1995], p. 40, p. 142, p. 160, p. 103). See also model paintings such as Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (Mao zhuxi qu Anyuan, 1967) by Liu Chunyua (born 1944), and especially, in contrast to figures in the landscape of Yellow Earth, Chen Yifei’s (1946−2005) Eulogy of the Yellow River (Huanghe, 1972), in Chiu and Zheng (2008, 121, pp. 36−7; detail, xii).

  37. 37.

    See, for example, the writing on the relationship between Mizoguchi Kenji’s long take and camera movement style of the 1930s and 1940s and e-makimono Japanese scroll painting (Sato 1994, pp. 170−1); (Burch 1979, pp. 228−34).

  38. 38.

    The quotations are taken from McDougall’s translations in Chen and Wan (1989, pp. 98−9).

  39. 39.

    See, for example, Taylor (2002, p. 38). See also, Bordwell (1993, p. 85): ‘The toys, cutlery, plates, glassware, and other luxury goods are evidently in the palace, but they are filmed in such intense close-ups or framed against such neutral backgrounds that they seem to hover in a purely symbolic space.’

  40. 40.

    ‘Le long de chemin, le paysage s’était profondément modifié. Les pentes, de part et d’autre de la route, était maintenant occupées par des plantations d’hévéas…. Mais la grande forêt primaire que j’avais connue, elle, a disparu à jamais’ (Chen 2001, p. 196).

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Rist, P. (2016). Renewal of Song Dynasty Landscape Painting Aesthetics Combined with a Contemplative Modernism in the Early Work of Chen Kaige. In: Bettinson, G., Udden, J. (eds) The Poetics of Chinese Cinema. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55309-6_4

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