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At 100, China's cinema faces life-and-death struggle
2005-12-20
When Wang Zhanyou accepted the job as manager of Beijing's Daguanlou movie theater two years ago, he knew he was taking on an extraordinary task. Not only has Daguanlou been open for business for all of the 100 years Chinese cinema has been in existence, the cinema's founder was also the nation's first filmmaker. "We have a responsibility to keep the theater alive for 10 years or 20 years or 50 years or perhaps another hundred years," says Wang. "It's a responsibility to history." Wang, 45, is the 12th manager of the Daguanlou counting from Ren Qingtai, its legendary founder who shot China's first movie, "Dingjunshan", an adaptation of a famous Beijing Opera play. The contrast with the latest film by renowned Chinese director Chen Kaige -- a 42-million-dollar Kung Fu blockbuster with thousands of extras and jaw-dropping special effects -- could not be greater. "He shot, directed, edited, and showed the movie himself," says Wang. "It's hard to find this kind of versatility anywhere else." The film was lost in a fire, so historians today know virtually nothing about it apart from what they can guess by looking at the small number of surviving stills. They do not know the exact plot. They do not know how many minutes it was. They are not even sure exactly when in 1905 it was shown for an audience for the first time. That is a point of minor concern in Beijing 100 years later, as the centenary of Chinese cinema has been officially set for December, with a volley of commemorative events including seminars, news reports and TV broadcasts. Most spectacularly, the China Film Museum, allegedly the biggest in the world and reputedly the brainchild of former president Jiang Zemin, is opening on the outskirts of Beijing. But amid the festivities, some scholars warn that Chinese cinema is at a crossroads and finds itself squeezed in between the twin dangers of growing foreign competition and increasing commercialization. "Chinese cinema is standing at a crucial point," says Chen Shan, a film historian at the Beijing Film Academy, the alma mater of not only Chen Kaige, but also Zhang Yimou. "It's a life-or-death situation. Chinese cinema has to find a way to survive and evolve," he says. The biggest challenge is posed by China's membership of the World Trade Organization, which had opened the nation's cultural market and radically increased the pressure on local filmmakers to create profitable art. "Hollywood movies will keep coming in, and they will fight with Chinese movies for market shares. That's the most urgent issue at the moment," Chen says with a frown. For three decades after the Communist Revolution in 1949, independent-minded filmmakers had mostly to worry about dodging government attempts to control their work. But times change, and today the market forces form a challenge as formidable as any censor with a pair of scissors and a sharp eye for bourgeois decadent art. "These days, it's no longer a question of artistic freedom, but of the movie business' ability to respond to changes in the international market," says Chen. To be sure, Chinese movies had the upper hand in 2004 for the first time in several years, generating 55 percent of the 1.5 billion yuan (185 million dollars) of box office revenue. But that may have been a one-off, caused by a series of very successful releases, including action comedy "Kung Fu Hustle" and "House of Flying Daggers", a martial art epic. In 2005, foreign blockbusters again enjoyed huge popularity, and Chinese movies' brief dominance could be at an end. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" is set to be China's biggest box office hit this year after reaping more than 80 million yuan (9.8 million dollars) since its release in November, state-run Xinhua news agency said. For all its proud traditions, the Daguanlou theater also has never existed in a time capsule, but has followed the tastes of local audiences. After all, "Titanic" was the biggest selling film in the movie theater's history, Wang says. But although the rivalry for the Chinese moviegoers' money is more intense than ever, China's cinema has a definite chance, according to foreign observers. "I'm personally pretty optimistic," says Yomi Braester, an expert on post-1949 Chinese cinema based at the University of Washington. "The reason is that there is a good, a healthy number of filmmakers who understand what it takes to make a movie that would be financially viable." Embracing the world is the road forward for China's movie industry as it enters it second century, according to Chen, the film historian. "China has a splendid tradition and a brilliant popular culture. If this can be combined with the mainstream of global culture, Chinese cinema will be in a strong position," he says. "Like Japanese and Korean movies, it can make an invaluable contribution to world cinema with its special aesthetic sense." The "Matrix" series showed how a distinctly Chinese style had gained a foothold in western film making, and the East may yet influence the West in unknown ways in the future. Ironically, at the very time when Chinese cinema may be assuming its proper place in a global context, national distinctions are gradually disappearing. Most films are multinational endeavors, employing creative people from a range of different countries and cultural backgrounds. An example is the recently released "Memoirs of a Geisha," which has a Japanese subject matter, an American director, as well as one Malaysian and two Chinese leading ladies. "What film is Chinese now, or French or German now? They are often transnational cooperative efforts," says Braester. "And when it comes to riding on that pattern of transnational cooperation, Chinese film is doing well." AFP
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