Liu, Xiao. "From the Glaring Sun to Flying Bullets: Aesthetics And
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Liu, Xiao. "From the Glaring Sun to Flying Bullets: Aesthetics and Memory in the ‘Post-’ Era Chinese Cinema." China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu and Luke Vulpiani. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 321–336. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501300103.ch-017>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 13:31 UTC. Copyright © Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, Luke Vulpiani and Contributors 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 17 From the Glaring Sun to Flying Bullets: Aesthetics and Memory in the ‘Post-’ Era Chinese Cinema Xiao Liu How do we remember the past in a post-medium era in which our memories of a previous era are increasingly reliant upon, and thus continually revised by, the ubiquitous presence of media networks? Writing about the weakening historicity under late capitalism, Fredric Jameson sharply points out that the past has been reduced to ‘a multitudinous photographic simulacrum,’ ‘a set of dusty spectacles.’1 Following Guy Debord’s critique of the spectacle as ‘the final form of commodity reification’ in a society ‘where exchange value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced,’ Jameson reveals the ways in which the past appropriated by what he calls ‘nostalgia films’ is ‘now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation’ for omnivorous consumption that is an outcome of neoliberalism and its cultural motor – post- modernism. Implicit in Jameson’s argument is how the crisis of historicity is tied to the commercialization of media and the repetitious production of media simulacra. Jameson’s argument generally follows the line of the critique of the mass media as laid out of the Frankfurt School critics, focusing on the ideological function of the cultural industry. How has the post-medium, networked society of control changed this milieu diagnosed by Jameson? I use ‘post-medium’ on the one hand to refer to the state of media saturation in our current moment, and on the other hand, to illustrate the conditions of media convergence that challenge the modernist notion of media specificity.2 First raised by art critic Rosalind Krauss (2000) to address the increasing threat to the notion of media specificity by the pervasive power of electronic and digital media, the term ‘post-medium’ has become part of a contentious discourse for rethinking the relationship between cinema and other forms of media, as well as the socio-economic and political powers that shape and are in turn reshaped by a network society. Pertinent here is Friedrich Kittler’s observation of the convergence of media in the form of digital coding and computer processing. Henry Jenkins furthers Kittler’s 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 321 14/04/2014 09:13 322 China’s iGeneration notion of ‘convergence culture,’ and adds to the technical definition with ‘the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted.’3 While convergence culture involves a technological process of ‘bringing together multiple media functions within the same gadgets and devices,’ this hybrid media experience, above all else, also represents a shift in the cultural logic ‘as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections between dispersed media content.’ While affirming the increasing role of consumers, Jenkins also points out that this convergence culture is ‘shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple media platforms.’ Here Jenkins’s elaboration of convergence culture raises several pertinent issues. First, cultural production has shifted from a producer-controlled mode of mass culture to a more distributed mode of networks. Consumers are no longer just at the end of the commodity chain, waiting to consume the products provided to them by an industry, but are also today increasingly incorporated into the very production of these commodities. Second, while the emergence of ‘prosumers’ becomes a crucial issue among current network theories, in this chapter I ask what pressures are placed on ‘auteurs’ to replicate and be reflexive to new media platforms and distributed ‘prosumers’? What are the aesthetic choices of ‘auteurs’ in this networked society? Finally, I relate this former question to the eclipse of historicity raised by Jameson: has the increasing participation of the audience in media culture broken down the repeti- tious spectacularization of historical memories, as Jameson suggests? An examination of the media repercussions of Jiang Wen’s 2010 film Rang zidan fei (Let the Bullets Fly) may address this question in the context of contemporary Chinese cinema. Loosely set in the 1920s (a time of ‘revolutions’ against warlords and imperi- alism) and with references to real historical figures, the film seems uninterested in providing a serious historical backdrop for narration: its characters mouth buzzwords from current social media, pulling the audience out of the film’s constructed past; any references to historical facts in the film are seemingly ridiculed and dismissed by its characters as insignificant, as Let the Bullets Fly comes to construct a past which is reduced to filmic bricolage. Despite the commercial success of the film with its domestic box office take of 700 million RMB, Let the Bullets Fly also generated heated discussion in Chinese tabloids and on online social media sites. Instead of reading the film as a historical account, its audience read each segment of the film’s various media incidents in relation to their own postsocialist experiences. This anachronistic juxtaposition of the past and the present compels a critical reflection on the intertwined relationship between cinematic representation of history and social media networks. Most online discussion centred upon the notion of ‘revolution,’ as the protagonist of the film, Zhang Muzhi (Jiang Wen), is simultaneously a bandit who fights for the poor against the warlords and a cynical revolutionist who belittles the masses as self-interested and politically apathetic. The online debate around ‘revolution’ also has to do with the ambiguity of the overloaded word in postsocialist memories of twentieth-century China. 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 322 14/04/2014 09:13 From the Glaring Sun to Flying Bullets 323 With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the Mao era, official historical narra- tives of Chinese Revolutions gradually lost their ideological coherence and credibility under the drastic process of marketization led by the CCP. Though the memories associated with ‘revolution’ are repeatedly remediated in literature and cinema, the ideology and sentiments behind these narratives and representations are often fuzzy and self-contradictory. Without serious historical reflections, these narratives often slip into commercialization of the past. Thus any film that evokes the ‘revolutionary past’ has to address the existing media stereotypes and the danger of reducing history for nostalgic consumption. In the latter part of this chapter I will examine the ways in which the intermedia flows between cinema and the internet have transformed the textuality of Let the Bullets Fly, placing the film amid the economy of exchanges of social media and creating an experience of temporality that is aligned with what Jameson describes as the eclipse of historicity. I use ‘economy’ here because accompanied with flows of media contents is the flow of money, and the box office of the film affirms again that the production of cinema today still follows the rule of commodity production. Yet before that, I will draw attention to Jiang Wen’s previous film made in 2007 – Taiyang zhaochang shengqi (The Sun Also Rises). Aesthetically distinct from Let the Bullets Fly, The Sun Also Rises shows Jiang Wen’s almost modernist efforts to construct a self-enclosed cinematic world, and his self-conscious interrogation on the narrative possibilities of the revolu- tionary past in a postsocialist and post-medium era. To read the two films in tandem promises to reveal not only the pressure of social media networks on the autonomy of cinema, but also their shared social conditions of production behind their disparate aesthetics. Starting with a close reading on The Sun Also Rises, I will elucidate the multiple temporalities implicit in the elliptical narrative of the film, which I regard as Jiang Wen’s reflections on the representability of the past: how to tell the stories of the past when the existing narratives are either hollow official ideology or commodification of reified nostalgia? Jiang, in his efforts to eschew media stereotypes, created exquisite sensuous images to evoke historical memories. Though my analysis of this film does not directly involve its reception on social media, I argue that the narrative and aesthetic of the film self-consciously address the issue of media and representability in a media-saturated society. The relation of cinematic images to existing media stereo- types is implicit in Jiang’s choice of aesthetic. I will then come back to Let the Bullets Fly, examining its audience reception and the role of social media in that reception, and conclude with a parallel reading of the two films in terms of their shared dilemma of representing the past. In other words, I read both films symptomatically as revealing the crisis of historicity and represent- ability in a post-medium, postsocialist era. The seemingly self-enclosed aesthetic of The Sun Also Rises displays Jiang’s arduous effort to preserve the autonomous space of an ‘auteur’ film amid constant flows of media, and to bring attention to the entangled relations between media and historicity.