Screening Love: The Cinematic Representation of the Cultural

Revolution, 1980s to Early 1990s

Jingyi Lu

Faculty Advisor: Guo-juin Hong

Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

May 2017

This project was submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program in the Graduate School of Duke University.

Copyright by

Jingyi Lu

May 2016 LU III

Abstract

The ten-year Cultural Revolution exerts a tremendous influence on the domain of cultural production in contemporary China. After the Cultural Revolution, many filmmakers delved into the representation of this traumatic historical period and produced relevant films in the 1980s – 1990s. In these films, the motif of love is frequently employed to embody the impact of the Cultural Revolution on interpersonal relationships. What types of love relations do these films represent? How do the modes of love change over time? How do these films represent the Cultural Revolution and identify the root causes of this disastrous time? In this essay, to answer the above questions, I will explore the changing representation of love relations in the films about the Cultural Revolution: the scar films (also called post-socialist films) that prevailed in the 1980s feature romantic love, while The Blue Kite, Farewell, My Concubine and To Live directed by the fifth-generation filmmakers in the early 1990s mainly display family love. By looking into the cinematic interpretation of the Cultural Revolution, I will gain insight into the social and cultural environment in that two decades, and show that the films produced in these two different periods seek greater authenticity in representing that historical period and gradually break away from state ideology and propaganda.

Keywords The Cultural Revolution, Romantic Love, Family Love, Post-socialist, The Fifth Generation, Cinematic Representation, state ideology

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... III

List of Figures ...... V

Acknowledgement ...... VI

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Romantic Love in Scar Films of the 1980s ...... 16

Chapter 2: Family Love in the Fifth-Generation Films of the Early 1990s ...... 33

Conclusion ...... 51

Bibliography ...... 55

Filmography ...... 59

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List of Figures

Fig. 1 On a rainy day, Hu Yuyin and Qin Shutian are being sentenced; p. 24

Fig. 2 Geng Hua and Zhou Yun are dating on Lushan Mountain; p. 29

Fig. 3 The shadow puppets are played in the gambling house and in collective labor; Fugui put the new-born chickens in the box which was used to contain the shadow puppets; p. 46

Fig. 4 Tietou flies the blue kite with his family members and sees the broken kite at the end of the film; p. 48

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Acknowledgement

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my advisor Professor Guo-Juin Hong for his patient guidance in my completion of my master’s project. He provides me with great encouragement and valuable advice in the whole process. Without his generous help, this project would not have been completed. I am also indebted to other members of my master’s project committee, Professor Kent Wicker and Professor Donna Zapf, for their constructive suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for financially and emotionally supporting my studies and urging me to do my utmost in my academic development.

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Introduction

As history is frequently portrayed in both fictional and documentary films, many scholars begin to pay attention to the relation between cinema and history. Although cinema could not visualize the original historical scenes and moments, to some degree it allows written historical records to take on a concrete form. Through a set of arrangements, it entails expressivity in performance. As the French historian Marc Ferro considers, “film acts as a historical agent,” in that the invention of cinema came on the historical stage as a scientific breakthrough and cinema as an art could process and inculcate history (14). In reconstructing a certain historical period, historical films essentially aim to convey a certain ideology by mystifying the filmic images (Barthes 377–379). In addition, the historicity of historical films is not only embodied in their content but also in the particular time when they were produced. On this point, another scholar, Pierre Sorlin, thinks that, instead of merely representing the past, the historical films are intended to express certain ideas about the present when they process the past (71).

Therefore, to analyze historical films, plots, the time of the production of films, the modes and codes of filmic narratives, should all be taken into consideration.

Focusing on the relation between cinema and history, I aim to establish a connection between modern Chinese cinema and history in this project. I am particularly interested in the films which represent the Cultural Revolution, especially in the two decades after it (hereafter called Post-Cultural Revolution films). My interest in this field, first of all, arises from the

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specificity of the history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It is distinguished from any historical traumas before it because it represents a nationwide violence on both the bodies and minds of numerous people and the betrayal of Chinese traditions and ethnics (M. Berry 5).

The Cultural Revolution, an era characterized by collective hysteria, crazy worship of Chairman

Mao and blind negation of the “old,” is in nature a “cultural holocaust” (Lu 67). Moreover, social chaos, mass mortality, and economic loss during that period determine the significant role of the Cultural Revolution in modern Chinese history. This time connects the era of socialist and nationalist transformation and the era of economic construction and causes long-term sequela to China today. Therefore, a profound reflection on the Cultural Revolution is paramount to a thorough understanding of China today (L. Li 1).

When the Cultural Revolution came to an end, a profusion of artistic representations sprung up, and most of them are adapted from memoirs and historical data. These representations embody both the collective memory of the past and the collective mentality among Chinese people of rethinking that time (L. Li 2–3). Since the film industry revived in the early 1980s, numerous films have been produced to reflect on the Cultural Revolution and contribute greatly to shaping people’s understandings of this period. The production of these films over time indicates the huge and lasting impact of the Cultural Revolution on the contemporary Chinese society and culture and represents a significant part in the development of the Chinese cinema.

Substantial scholarship has been conducted on the history of the Chinese cinema after

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the Cultural Revolution from different perspectives. As for the films regarding the Cultural

Revolution, there is a distinction between the relevant films produced in the 1980s which are called “scar films” and the films produced by the fifth-generation filmmakers in the early 1990s.

The exemplary and most studied works in the 1980s are the trilogy directed by Xie Jin Legend of

Tianyun Mountain (1980), The Herdsman (1982) and Hibiscus Town (1986). Some scholars contend that Xie Jin’s films oppose the state ideology and expose the dark sides of the

Communist Party, but endorse traditional Chinese culture and Confucian thoughts, which the new generation film began to question from the mid-1980s (Semsel, Chen, and Xia 29–30).

However, Paul Clark points out from the perspective of the purpose of filmmaking that Xie Jin’s films, including his scar films, are always adapted to the changing political environment and respond to the advocacy of the Communist Party. Xie Jin’s melodramas in the 1980s about the

Cultural Revolution do not truly reflect on the trauma in the past decade, but engage the audience in moral and political indoctrination. Clark then observes a shift in Chinese cinema as the fifth-generation filmmakers rose in the mid-1980s and contends that their films no longer serve the ideological purposes and instead offer an allegorical interpretation of the reality (87–

98). Clark mainly centers on the accomplishments of the fifth-generation filmmakers in the

1980s, but he also admits that they did not stop making artistic advances in the 1990s even though the political events of 1989 thwarted film creation again (212). With China’s opening up, these filmmakers more boldly deal with the problems of the Communist party and use allegorical devices to represent the social or historical reality in an ambiguous way to eschew

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the censorship (Creekmur and Sidel 178).

The critic Wang Ban demonstrates the improvement in the narrative strategies of the cinematic representation of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1990s. He takes Xie Jin’s trilogy and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite as examples to account for the differences between scar films and the works by the fifth generation. According to him, Xie Jin’s films adopt the narrative mode of the conventional drama and force into the individual life the political elements which culminate in a single point. In this way, the films transform the historical trauma into interpersonal problems and undercut the intricacies of history by clearly separating the evil from the good. Unlike the mode of scar films, Blue Kite is not mainly intended to plot a dramatic story, but to interpret the historical trauma by creating continuous turning points. A series of disturbances are randomly and constantly inserted in individual life and are unfathomable to the characters. The haphazardness and destructiveness are exactly the features of the history of

Mao’s China and become most distinct during the Cultural Revolution. Accordingly, Blue Kite reaches the climax when the Cultural Revolution comes near the end of the film, which bespeaks the indeterminable destruction in the following years. As Wang Ban claims, the films which represent the Cultural Revolution in the early 1990s are “historically conscious.” In other words, they face up to the sufferings, instead of consoling the audience (142–162). As Jerome

Silbergeld indicates, the fifth-generation filmmakers have different conceptions of film from those held by their predecessors. They are unsatisfied with films as an excessive outlet for emotions and eclectic political standpoints which cater to the Chinese audience but incur

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criticism of critics (200–201).

The previous studies contribute to a broad understanding of post-Cultural Revolution films and lay a foundation for this study. The motif of love, as one of the common features of these films, has not been much studied before. Love in the films produced during Mao’s era refers only to sublime love for the Communist Party, for Chairman Mao, and for the cause of socialism, and is extraneous to human relations. Moreover, the characters are politicized and deprived of subjectivity, which is a key element in pursuing and maintaining love. However, as the philosopher Hegel maintains, love is a subjective experience of self and community

(Ormiston 5). In other words, love is not only an individual feeling, but is also a unifying human relationship which is essential to social cohesion (Due 44–68). The French philosopher Sartre defines that love bears the primitive connection between self and the Other, but love is also unstable because it would possibly be lost or withdrawn (224–230).

Tragic and broken love could indicate the major negative impact of the Cultural

Revolution on interpersonal relationships. In Mao’s China, large masses were incited by some members of the Communist leadership to struggle against others, which turned the entire state into an ideological battleground. The disaster rose to crescendo in the Cultural Revolution when many people lost their lives when they struggled against each other, and many lost their trust even in their friends, lovers or family members or friends. Accordingly, interpersonal relationships became extremely fragile and unpredictable (Ye and Zhu 204–205). To indicate the

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disastrous effects of the Cultural Revolution in destroying human relationships, the post-Cultural

Revolution films often create tragic plots of love relations. As we shall see, in these films, love is no longer portrayed as the mere devotion to the Party or the socialism, but is represented in different manners in different cinematic contexts. The scar films produced in the 1980s mainly feature romance between two lovers, and the films directed by the fifth-generation filmmakers in the early 1990s feature familial love. The tragedies in the films are often embodied as the separation of lovers and family breakdown, and individuals became the carriers of trauma caused by the ongoing political events. The heartbroken plots could give the audience a sensational re-experience of the sufferings they might have in the past decade and lead them to ponder on the roots of the tragedies from different perspectives.

Therefore, in my study of the films about the Cultural Revolution, I will focus on the motif of love to explore the cinematic construction of the history of the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s and 1990s. By doing so, I attempt to answer the following questions: 1) how these films display the subjectivity of the characters in love relations; 2) what is the relation between love and ideology, i.e., whether the affection of the characters is influenced by their political stances; 3) what different reasons the films give for the destructiveness of the Cultural

Revolution through the tragic plots of love; 4) how and why does the representation of love changes over time?

After my exploration of these films, I find that the characters in the scar films of the

1980s are given incomplete individual subjectivity which are still governed by the state ideology.

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By contrast, the characters in the films of the early 1990s exhibit interpersonal subjectivity; that is to say, they care about each other and are no longer inextricably entangled with politics and ideology. Compared with the scar films, those directed by the fifth-generation filmmakers in the early 1990s do not attribute the tragedies which occur during the Cultural Revolution to the evilness of individuals, and instead, they emphasize the influence of the general political environment on individual life. Moreover, according to my own study, the transforming cinematic representation of love during the Cultural Revolution are closely related with the changes in social and political context in China as well as the revolution of the Chinese film industry from 1980s to the early 1990s.

After the foundation of People’s Republic of China and the establishment of the

Communist regime in 1949, the Chinese film industry completely came into the control of the state. Mao Zedong, the chairman of People’s Republic, repeatedly emphasized that arts should serve the political purpose, and thus in Mao’s era, Chinese cinema functioned as the Party’s tool of propaganda to propagate the Maoist socialist ideology. In 1976, the initiator of the Cultural

Revolution Mao Zedong passed away, and then the Gang of the Four fell from power. Two years later, in the Third Plenary Session of Eleventh Central Committee, the Cultural Revolution was officially denied and defined as an internal strife which was launched by Mao Zedong and maliciously exploited by the Gang of Four. This meeting marks the official end of the Cultural

Revolution and extreme left epoch (Holton 33–45). After that, the leaders of the Chinese

Communist Party attempted to make up the mistakes made during the past few decades and

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then made out plans to recover the country in multiple aspects. At this time, the strict control of art and literature was gradually loosened, and the promotion of greater diversity of artistic and literary creation was allowed.

Even so, the shadow of the Cultural Revolution still lingered on people’s life, especially for many intellectuals, literati, even ordinary people and government officials who were unreasonably persecuted and exiled to the countryside to gain ideological training. Their tragic experiences motivated some of them to write literary works that poured out their grievance immediately after the Cultural Revolution. These works are called scar literature. In 1978, the young writer Lu Xinhua’s work “Shanghen” [Scar] was published. It narrates a lamentable story of family tragedy during the Cultural Revolution and marks the beginning of the wave of scar literature. The term “scar” signals the painful memories in the past decade and evokes the public conscience. The scar literature influenced the mainstream films during the same period.

In the 1980s, many films that represent injustices during the Cultural Revolution were adapted from scar literary works and became known as scar films (Zhu and Rosen 95).

As the scar films gained popularity in the 1980s, the film industry was also undergoing a reform. Before the 1980s, Chinese cinema could not be considered as a kind of industry and the concept of box office did not truly exist. That is to say, it did not matter whether the production of films made a profit or loss. This situation was gradually changed after Deng Xiaoping called on the Party to shift the focus of their work from the class struggle to the economic construction in 1978. In the 1980s, when calling for constructing the Four Modernizations and

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promoting the market economy, the leadership of the CPC admitted that the Party should not excessively interfere in cinematic creation. Indeed, the Party did not insist that cinema should only remain in the field of propaganda (Xiaoming and Yanru 38). This is because as the country was undergoing economic and politic reforms and the market economy was coming into being, the commercial value of the film industry began to draw attention. A film scriptwriter Lin Shan wrote an article which was published in 1981 to show his concerns about the commercialization of the film industry and claim that filmmaking should not aim to appeal to audiences and achieve high box office (5). Even so, this article indirectly reflects that cinema was gradually becoming a part of the market economy.

In 1980, a series of seminars were held in Beijing to make out a plan to improve the management mechanism of the Chinese film industry. The participants included leaders in the

Film Bureau, the Propaganda Department, the Filmmaker Association, some film studios, and

China Film, the only company for distributing and exhibiting films. As a result, the China Film

General Corporation which later became the Ministry of Radio, Film and TV was founded to take charge of the distribution and the exhibition of films, and personnel appointment and removal, and meanwhile, to undertake the obligations to seek profits and pay taxes. Moreover, both the autonomy and responsibility of film studios were extended. On the one hand, they could profit more from the films they produced; on the other, they should be responsible for the quality of films (Wu 133–136).

Admittedly, the reform of the film industry was conducted on a rather limited scale. In

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the 1980s, most of the notable films were still produced in the film studios run by the state.

Therefore, few of them represent dissident voices. Although the state conducted reform and loosened control of the production of films, the film industry did not gain independence and autonomy. The film-related departments and publications were still under the strict supervision of the Communist Party. Film distribution almost only depended on China Film General

Corporation which actually was in the control of the Central Propaganda Department, and film studios were scarcely privatized. Although the Chinese cinema did not entirely get rid of the ideological control by the state and entirely entered a market-oriented system, the measures of the reform scheme and looser censorship of films to some degree boosted the development of

Chinese cinema since the film studios were motivated to produce better films (Chu 95–121).

As the reform was going on, the Chinese cinema was incorporated into the market economy and the role of film partly evolved from a propaganda tool to a commodity. Numerous cinemas were opened to the public and began to emphasize their box office revenue. To increase the box office, the public demand for films of higher aesthetic and entertainment value was addressed, and thus the production of films of higher aesthetic quality and the importation of foreign films were encouraged. More significantly, in a conference held in 1988, for the first time films were clearly defined as a kind of commodity. Around that time, the film industry leaders more strongly proposed to enhance the quality of films and raise the film industry revenue (Wu 137–163).

The commercialization of the mainland Chinese cinema concurred with the ascent of the

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Fifth Generation (Cornelius and Smith 35). To cultivate talents in producing high-quality films, the government also paid attention to film education. In 1978, the Beijing Film Academy reopened and set up majors in cinematography, art direction, photography, recording, directing and acting (Chen 57). The so-called Fifth Generation filmmakers were all admitted to the Beijing

Film Academy in this year and graduated in 1982. In the mid 1980s, after being exposed to foreign films and film theories, their works began to gain attention in the film circle and brought a revolution in cinematic content and aesthetics in mainland China. When they initially emerged in the eyes of the public, they were not known as the “Fifth Generation.” When finding that they graduated from the same school in the same year, people became more interested in these filmmakers. Later, the term “Fifth Generation,” following the previous film generations, was created to call them (Ni 1). Against the background of the reform of film industry, these filmmakers made significant efforts in combining the artistry and the commercial value of films.

They quickly responded to the needs of audiences and pursued artistic challenges. In the meantime, they edged themselves into the international film circle and built their fame using transnational resources, e.g., transnational distribution channels, foreign capital, and international audiences. Their creativity in cinematic language and their involvement in the global cinema market bespeak the modernization of the Chinese cinema (Rosen and Zhu 145–

146).

On June 4, 1989, the Tiananmen incident occurred and marked the watershed in the

Chinese cultural history after the Cultural Revolution. This incident hindered both cultural and

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intellectual progress and economic development. However, the Chinese film industry was still undergoing the impact of globalization. For one thing, the Soviet Union collapsed, which aroused fear among conservatives for the liberalization of China. The domestic and international upheavals led to a series of social changes in China, including shaken market, tightened ideological control and a crack-down on intellectual and cultural liberalization. For another, as China was integrated into the complex global society, liberal intellectuals were also being adapted to the ideological diversity. At the same time, the Chinese society was deviating from utopianism and collectivism and promoting socioeconomic well-being. The previous turbulent time drove people to seek for stability and normalcy and pushed them to think what life should be like. Accordingly, the literary and cinematic exploration of time, history and the nature of existence sought to be authentic. The reconstruction of the past addresses the delusion caused by the state ideology which exists in the collective memory (X. Zhang 270–273).

In the post-Tian’anmen period, the fifth-generation filmmakers identified themselves with the trend of rebuilding the traumatic national memories and reflecting on the atrocities in the recent trauma. Consequently, three relevant melodramas about the history of the Cultural

Revolution were produced by them in the early 1990s: Farewell, My Concubine directed by Chen

Kaige, The Blue Kite by Tian Zhuangzhuang and To Live by Zhang Yimou. These films stood out in the international film festivals, won a series of awards and were circulated worldwide (X. Zhang

625–638). They seem to question the scar films in the 1980s since they no longer stay on the level of storytelling. The films embody an advance in cinematic aesthetics and an intellectual

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break with socialist ideology. On the one hand, at this time, Chinese cinema not only was incorporated in the national market economy, but also entered the global film market.

Accordingly, the aesthetic qualities of these films are enhanced to appeal to the global spectatorship. On the other, the fifth-generation filmmakers managed to establish cooperation with foreign filmmaking companies. With the support of foreign funding, these filmmakers touched the sensitive history of the Cultural Revolution which had a huge negative impact on their own lives. The political elements of the stories actually reflect moral concerns in the past collective experiences. In this sense, a global ideology and universal values are assimilated in the represented memory in these films. In turn, the visualization of the past trauma also attracts global audiences and caters to their imagination of the mysterious Mao’s China (X.

Zhang 273–275).

The cinematic exhibition of love in the films about the Cultural Revolution has been changing, especially in the 1980s and the 1990s. In the first chapter, I will explore the representation of love in scar films. The theme of romantic love that was previously suppressed began to spring out in post-Cultural Revolution cinema. However, the mode of love in these films is relatively simplified in that the relation between two protagonists is not necessarily concerned with other minor characters in the same film. The main content of the films is the separateness and togetherness between two lovers, and the separateness mainly results from the obstruction by a villain. However, most of these films are equipped with a happy ending.

Despite the fact that the protagonists are wrongly denounced during the Cultural Revolution,

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their fame is always rehabilitated in the end under the new leadership of the Communist Party.

As we will see, the films in the style of romanticism still do not get rid of sublimation. Although the emotions of the characters are intensified, their decisions of choosing and abandoning love are partly connected with the national ideology. In this sense, the characters in scar films are not given complete individual subjectivity in romantic relationships.

The representation of love shifts from romantic relationships to kinship in Farewell, My

Concubine, The Blue Kite and To Live directed by the Fifth Generation in the early 1990s. These films no longer develop sublime nationalist themes and instead focus on mundane family life.

The grand narrative mode is converted into personal or interpersonal narrative (Zeng 47). Slavoj

Žižek’s theory about totalitarianism might account for the standpoint from which these films represent the Cultural Revolution and other political movements in Mao’s era: “what mattered was not inner belief in the proposition of the ruling ideology, but following the external rituals and practices in which this ideology acquired material existence…” (90). Žižek points out that ordinary people do not care about the official political ideology, but about their loved ones and everyday life.

Therefore, in the second chapter, I will show that through the motif of family love the three films attempt to separate common people’s affective and emotional life from state ideology. All of them portray an unattainable family love which reflects the shared traumatic experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Compared with scar films, they make great advances in creating a sense of authenticity and exhibiting a wider range of broken relationships

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in which the sufferings are shared between characters. As we can see, the incomplete individual subjectivity in scar films is transformed into interpersonal subjectivity. In this way, these films intensify the disastrous effects of the Cultural Revolution and easily arouse the compassion of audience.

When comparing the motif of love in scar films of the 1980s with those in the following decades, we need to take into consideration not only the cinematic plots and techniques, but also the background against which the films were produced. By doing so, we could better understand the development of Chinese cinema, the different social attitudes towards the traumatic past of the Cultural Revolution over time, as well as the mixed feelings about the present and the future of China in the 1980s and the 1990s.

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Chapter 1: Romantic Love in Scar Films of the 1980s

Scar films originated in the late 1970s after the Cultural Revolution and gained popularity in the

1980s. Around that time, with the nationwide redress of unjustly handled cases in the previous movements, many films were adapted from relevant literary works and produced to represent individual tragedies in the Anti-Rightist Movement, Four Clean-ups Movement and the Cultural

Revolution from 1949 to 1976. These films are also called “post-socialist cinema” in foreign scholarship to mark China’s social, cultural and economic transformations which mix the

Chinese aspiration of modernization and the legacy of Maoist socialism (Y. Zhang 57–74).

The films produced in Maoist era are characterized by didacticism and rigid modes. Such features are more evident in the films adapted from model operas produced during late period of the Cultural Revolution from 1970 to 1976. These films take the class struggle as the theme, trumpet proletarian heroism and assail capitalism. It is notable that Chinese cinema from 1949 to 1976 reflects an absence of romantic love, partly because it was considered as westernized or capitalized during Mao’s era (Berry 27–32). The characters in most of the films are politicized, dehumanized, and ascetic, so they don’t have individualized affections. Their emotions are entirely directed towards the Party, Chairman Mao, and the socialism.

In contrast, the device of love began to erupt in the scar films which flourished in the

1980s, such as Romance on Lushan Mountain (1980), Corner Left Unnoticed by Love (1981), and the trilogy directed by Xie Jin Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1980), The Herdsman (1982) and

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Hibiscus Town (1986). Some of the romance scar films even contain implicit references to erotic love, mostly presented as latent sexual desire for the opposite sex, female sexual appeal, and physical intimacy. Love in these films has two functions. For one thing, the sensational love stories could produce dramatic effects and arouse the compassion of the audience. For another, love enters the political discourse and thus becomes politically meaningful in these cinematic representations.

The appearance of these new themes in films produced in the 1980s is praised as a breakthrough in Chinese film history mostly because they begin to express dissident voices on state politics (Shao 149–178). Among these films, the most representative might be the trilogy of films directed by Xie Jin which are widely received in academic and non-academic circles. As

Chinese critic Shao Mujun put it, films like The Legend of Tianyun Mountain “bravely touched the contradictions that exist in real life, its dramaturgy not only didn’t seem false; on the contrary, it reinforced the sense of reality” (162). The advances of these films in artistic devices and in content also gained recognition from some scholars. Wang Ban speaks highly of these retrospective films because they successfully reveal the darkness of the extreme left history through the enunciation of personal tragedies and amplification of the characters’ emotions.

The affecting individual experiences could well resonate with the audience and provoke them to think deeply about the past history (150). The effect in eliciting reflective thoughts that the trilogy and other scar films achieve through various expressive techniques has been noticed in previous scholarship. For example, according to Brittany Wellner, Xie Jin’s films incorporate

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theatricality into films to engage a Chinese audience and remind them to keep their memories, rethink on the past and contemplate the uncertain future (358–365).

This point is explicitly expressed by Xie Jin himself in an interview about why he had a particular inclination for shooting films of tragedies in the Cultural Revolution:

I predict that such masterpieces will come from our reflection on the Cultural Revolution. Human nature

was destroyed; friends and families betrayed one another; that entire era was a tragedy, and all Chinese

were victims. Nothing like it had ever happened before; that’s why people often refer to the Cultural

Revolution as the “unprecedented”—it had never happened that Chairman Mao made serious mistakes

as well. Therefore, I say masterpieces will come out of it.

(M. Berry, “Xie Jin: Six Decades of Cinematic Innovation” 37)

From this, we can know that Xie Jin highlights the functions of reflection on the historical tragedies during Mao’s era and the contributions of the depth of thought to the high quality of cinematic works. But, considering his other statements, there is no reason to believe that the films he directed convey the thoughts of suspecting or replacing socialist ideas as some critics suggest (Farquhar 81–116). In his comments on making the film Legend of Tianyun Mountain, he says he wants to extol the heroes who love socialism, love the Party, and love the people but were mistakenly classified as rightists (Xie 77). We can see from it a bottom line in his reflection on the past, i.e., no criticism of the socialist system and the supreme leaders. This bottom line is

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embodied not only in the melodramas Xie Jin directed but also in other scar films. Although many scar films depict love in order to humanize characters, they fall into a monotonous narrative pattern. It remains unchanged that the evil characters are punished and the injustice to the virtuous is redressed. It seems that such a pattern in these films reflects more the moral issues involved than the fundamental reasons for the sufferings of the characters, which unavoidably renders the reflection on the Cultural Revolution superficial.

Given these considerations, in this chapter, I am going to further evaluate the effect in the reflection on the past by some of the scar films produced in the 1980s, using Xie Jin’s trilogy,

Romance on Lushan Mountain, directed by Huang Zumo, and Corner Left Unnoticed by Love, directed by Zhang Qi and Li Yalin, as examples. To achieve the goal, I will discuss how love and in some cases sexuality are represented and entangled with the political background of the

Cultural Revolution. More specifically, I will analyze the pattern of love relations, i.e., how lovers fall in love, are separated or are reunited in the aspects of discursive features, the values of characters, mise-en-scène and narrative structure in the films. By doing so, I will argue that, compared with Chinese films produced during the Cultural Revolution, these scar films make advances in humanizing the characters, criticizing the erroneous political line and enriching narrative structures. However, many of them, if not all, do not transcend the ideological boundary and make a profound reflection on the roots of the historical trauma, but carry on an ideological propaganda of patriotism and post-socialism.

In approaching the films, it should be clarified why love is one of the frequently

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employed motifs to represent suffering in the Cultural Revolution. First of all, unlike other forms of love, the occurrence of romantic love is a kind of emotional experience and unconstrained by objective shackles. Therefore, romantic love can be regarded as a symbol of autonomy or subjectivity. But subjectivity should be eliminated in the ultra-leftist era when collectivism was overemphasized (Z. Li 146); thus, romantic love, though a common human feeling, was particularly repressed due to the attribute of subjectivity.

As is noted, personal subjectivity rises to prominence in post-socialist cinema, which signals a stronger emphasis on human rights than on civic obligations (Browne 40–56). It is true that the scar films attempt to make a distinction from red classic films by returning subjectivity to the characters. One of the typical examples is the film Legend of Tianyun Mountain in which three women, Zhou Yuzhen, Song Wei and Feng Qinglan, are the viewing subjects who alternately narrate their contact with Luo Qun. Their narrations move back and forth between memory and the present to offer different perspectives to view this same character. In this way, the film seems to create a feeling of intimacy for the audience and give them a sense of historical authenticity. Likewise, in The Herdsman, the male protagonist as the narrator in the whole movie shares his experiences and exposes his mental activities to get closer to the audience and arouse their sympathy. However, as Chris Berry observes, “this turn to subjectivity does not usually equate to a turn away from the communalist ideology underlying the classic cinema and towards individualism”(93). In fact, the viewing subjects are developing understandings for the sufferers during the Cultural Revolution and establishing a common

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ground with people who are loyal to the Party but are calumniated, so their thoughts, as well as their compassion and love for the sufferers represent the Party’s advocacy in the early 1980s of political redress of the extreme left political line and partly function as the Party’s mouthpiece to propagate the idea of a bright future of new socialism under the enlightened leadership.

The free will in finding someone beloved is the point the scars films want to represent.

Take the film Legend of Tianyun Mountain as an example. When the male protagonist Luo Qun is categorized as rightist, Song Wei’s friend Feng Qinglan still falls in love with Luo Qun and decides to stay with him. The female character Li Xiuzhi in The Herdsman is similar to Feng

Qinglan in that she also stayed with Xu Lingjun who was exiled during the Cultural Revolution.

By examining the victims’ and their partners’ perceptions of their own identity, we can find that there is actually a precondition of their love. In the eyes of Feng Qinglan and Li Xiuzhi, the men they love are not real rightists but are wronged. In the letter to Song Wei, Feng Qinglan writes that Luo Qun has a great devotion to the people, to the Party and to socialism, and it is precisely his devotion that deeply strikes her and appeals to her. This indicates that Feng Qinglan’s love for Luo Qun is not irrelevant to his political identity. When Li Xiuzhi talks about her marriage with Xu Lingjun, she says that since the day she married him, she has already rehabilitated him.

That is to say, she does not recognize him as a rightist when she decides to marry this man.

Moreover, unlike “the sense of reality” that Shao Mujun thinks these films create (162), both

Luo Qun and Xu Lingjun are similar to the empty iconic figures in red classic films and characterized by unexplainable persistence, patriotism, and somewhat revolutionary heroism.

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The major difference is that they are misclassified as rightists, but none of the characters have a clear understanding of what is rightist and for them whether someone is rightist or not is usually evaluated by the loyalty to the people, to China and even to the Party. On a subconscious level of these characters, only those who are wronged as rightists are eligible for justice, and real rightists are not a legitimate political identity.

Self-identity also affects the subjectivity of the characters in love. In The Herdsman, before Xu Lingjun accepts Li Xiuzhi as his wife, due to his identity as a rightist, he considers himself a fallible person who is disqualified from marrying someone. In Romance on Lushan

Mountain, when the female protagonist Zhou Yun knows that her beloved Geng Hua is undergoing political examination because of hanging out with her, she suddenly felt very guilty, even ashamed, of her identity as the daughter of a KMT general living abroad. Although her political identity does not keep Geng Hua from falling in love with her, of special note is that when the characters get acquainted with each other, Zhou Yun introduces herself as a patriot who is always looking forward to coming back to China and making contributions to the construction of China’s socialist modernization and Geng Hua strongly endorses her aspiration.

In this case, her identity as a patriot actually goes beyond that as the daughter of a KMT general. The portrayal by scar films of the way the characters fall in love does not acknowledge that love is a genuine and passionate human affection in which politics should not interfere, but instead, it seems to propose an ideology that love often happens to those who have equal political status and becomes the embodiment of that person’s political or ideological values. On

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this level, the subjectivity in pursuing love is largely weakened, and love is politicized.

Besides the attribute of subjectivity, love is also characterized as the philosopher Hegel maintains: love is not only personal feelings, but also a unifying human relationship which is essential to social cohesion (Due 44–68). This affinity enables conflicts between oneself and the beloved as the other to be reconciled. The other will never be viewed as evil, and instead as a human being whose values can be integrated into oneself (Houlgate and Baur 389–394).

Romantic relationship presents a sharp contrast with the interpersonal relationship molded in the Cultural Revolution, because during that time people had to vilify, antagonize and dehumanize others for protecting themselves. Hence, love, especially tragic love, is one of the best motifs to reflect the big picture of the Cultural Revolution on both individual and social levels.

The occurrence of tragic love in the scar films presents a fixed mode. Against the particular background of the Cultural Revolution, negative political identities are imposed on individuals, and interpersonal interactions are under close surveillance. The personal identity influences the interpersonal relationship because the characters who are wronged are forced to be separated from their lovers for political reasons. For example, in Romance on Lushan

Mountain, due to Geng Hua’s engagement with Zhou Yun, the daughter of a KMT military officer, he is accused and required to do self-criticism. In order not to get Geng Hua in trouble,

Zhou Yun decides to leave him. On a dark rainy night, Geng Hua comes to Zhou Yun’s house, looking up at her window and being drenched by the rain. The high-angle shot and low-angle

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shot of their bodies and faces in close-up are alternated to engage the audience in the characters’ grievance.

The tragic love is always represented in a sentimental way. When the lovers, confronted with the upcoming separation, are exhibiting great sorrows, the scenes feature strikingly heavy rain, and are always shot in desaturated colors and low-key lighting to create a melancholy atmosphere. The meaning of rain in Hibiscus Town is slightly different. It is on a rainy day that the verdict is delivered against Hu Yuyin and Qin Shutian. They, as two “criminals,” are put in a higher position than the surrounding onlookers while wearing a look of despair rather than sorrow. With the heavy rain, this scene of pronouncing the verdict is fraught with

Fig. 1 The Scene where Hu Yuyin and Qin Shutian are on their verdict. Source: Hibiscus Town (1986). gloom and repression. The intensified grievance and misery of these characters in the films in some sense could remind the audience of the disastrous impact of the Cultural Revolution on

Chinese people’s life, and in this way advocates humanism.

As we can see, the scar films fit in the typical mode of melodrama. They share the

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affective effects in common and magnify the emotions of the characters to engage the audience. In the words of Christine Gledhill, “As a modality, melodrama organizes the disparate sensory phenomena, experiences, and contradictions of a newly emerging secular and atomizing society in visceral, affective and morally explanatory terms” (Williams 10). This mode revolves around the articulation of a particular ideology and the extolment of virtue. The stories exhibit an excess of pains and sufferings of the victimized protagonists. Such touching and exciting plots glamorize the virtuous and heroic victims and arouse the sympathy of the audience for these characters. Moreover, the mode plays an edifying role in fostering certain moral values (Williams 11–44).

More often than not, in the standardized narrative structure of these films, policies and ideological trends during the Cultural Revolution and the Anti-Rightist Movement are turned into a tool used by the villains to persecute others or separate lovers for their own benefit. To illustrate this point, Legend of Tianyun Mountain offers a typical example. Luo Qun and Song fell in love with each other at their young age, but their love incurs the jealousy of Wu Yao who had a crush on Song Wei. To separate Song Wei from Luo Qun, Wu Yao took advantage of Cultural

Revolution and the Anti-Rightist Movement to frame Luo Qun and brainwashed Song Wei to break up with Luo Qun. Many years later, Wu Yao even deliberately declines Luo Qun’s application for redress to conceal his persecution of Luo Qun and prevent his wife from thinking of Luo Qun. In this case, the decisive factor in breaking up Suo Wei and Luo Qun turns out to be

Wu Yao’s villainy, and the part the Cultural Revolution plays in their romantic relationship

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becomes less significant. By the same token, in the film Hibiscus Town, the reason why Hu Yuyin is labeled as a rich peasant is that the county cadre Li Guoxiang is jealousy of her beauty and popularity among the neighborhood. This led to Hu Yuyin’s first experience of tragic love: when she was persecuted, her husband was sentenced to death as a result of attempting to kill the cadre. Admittedly, it is more likely that an unwarranted charge against others is made during a totalitarian era, but the persecution seems mainly dependent on wicked individuals. The negative, the neutral and the positive characters in the films are easily differentiated. The persecuted people symbolize the good, and the persecutors the evil. Those who are unjustly treated must have gained support from a majority of kind and righteous people, and eventually, with justice done, the persecutors always have received the punishment.

Also, when it comes to how the grievances are redressed, the final justice always relies on the judgment of the conscientious leaders of higher rank. At the end of Legend of Tianyun

Mountain, owing to Wu Yao’s thwarting, Song Wei is unable to redress the wrongs done to Luo

Qun. After she resorts to the local senior secretary, the redress is immediately approved. In this sense, the films confirm the positive role of the power of authority within the Party plays in upholding justice, as well as the bureaucracy hierarchy in socialist China. Some of the top Party leaders who are the initiators of the Cultural Revolution are never criticized or even represented; instead, this huge political blunder and a series of social and individual tragedies are simply attributed to the Gang of Four and a few morally corrupt local officials who maliciously impose the titles of rightist, capitalist, counter-revolutionary or landlord on others.

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According to this narrative mode, such tragedies are likely to happen in any period, and the historical specificity of the Cultural Revolution is missing.

Rather than representing the grim past, the love relationship developed during the

Cultural Revolution in these films more or less reflects the virtue of ordinary people. Luo Qun and Feng Qinglan of Legend of Tianyun Mountain, Xu Lingjun and Li Xiuzhi of The Herdsman both become couples, share joys and sorrows and then become increasingly intimate with each other in difficult times. They live in a poor condition, but they do not lose hope and always believe a better time will come, showing that the spiritual life of the persecuted is not impaired by poor material life. Also, when the characters are persecuted and expelled, they often gain sympathy and support from irrelevant ordinary people. For instance, in The Herdsman, the neighbors of Xu Lingjun know that he is exiled, while they still show kindness to him and even introduce to him a girl as his wife. As they say, no matter he is rightist or not, he still has the right to marry someone. Similarly, the righteous administrator of the grain supply station in

Hibiscus Town also gives a hand to Hu Yuyin when she gets married and gives birth to a child.

When seeing Hu Yuyin’s misfortune, some other people even feel resentment against the social trend of koumaozi. Here, the motif of love serves as the incarnation of public conscience through the depiction of the public reaction to the victims. It appears that the films view the afflicted people in the Cultural Revolution from an ex post facto perspective by defining them as revolutionary optimists.

Many years later, when the Cultural Revolution has ended, their life totally returns to

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normal and their love is strengthened. Those who suffered from these movements, without a trace of dissatisfaction, start to cherish the hope of the upcoming socialist new China and the realization of the four modernizations. The films foreground the spirit of solidarity and understate the aftermath of the erroneous policies, political persecution, and social deformation. Therefore, it is problematic whether the films would convey to the audience a fetish for the time during the Cultural Revolution. In nature, these films do not break away from the sublime political ideology that originated from the May Fourth Movement for arousing the nationalistic aspirations and which prevailed in Mao’s reign. However, this sublimation undermines the spirits of self-reflection and self-criticism, and curbs the development of cultural diversity. According to Wang Ban, “The historical vicissitudes of the sublime should be kept in mind if we are not to read its de-sublimation as the blind and irrational rage of a few nihilistic-minded individuals” (267).

Furthermore, in Xie Jin’s trilogy, the romantic aspects of the love relationship are absent.

As early as the 1980s, it caused a sensation that Zhu Dake criticized the narrative mode of the films directed by Xie Jin as lacking in modernity. He pointed out the defects in molding the obedient female characters and turning them into the belongings of men, the expected outcome in a patriarchal society (144–146). There is an element of truth in this criticism.

Although women are not portrayed in a derogatory way, they often play the supporting role in men’s life. Their love thus is partly transformed into traditional family affection and partly into comradely love featuring encouragement, sympathy and shared ideal. In comparison, Romance

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on Lushan Mountain depicts more romantic scenes. After hanging out together many times, the

love between Geng Hua and Zhou Yun derives from mutual admiration and unfolds in the

beautiful scenery of Lushan. However, through dressing Zhou Yun in a variable and fashionable

way, the film gives a plentiful visual display of Zhou Yun’s upbringing in America and creates an

image of a fashionable lady from a bourgeois family. Her love with Geng Hua then needs to be

romanticized as an imagined Western-style love (Berry 104). In the meantime, their love also

proceeds along with nurturing Zhou Yun’s determination of coming back to contribute to China’s

socialist modernization together with Geng Hua, which makes their love also politicized.

In most scar films, not only the romantic elements, but also the erotic elements, are

scarce. Of course, these films are still influenced by the inhibition of sexual desire during the

Cultural Revolution. In the socialist revolutionary culture, any individual conduct should be

socialized, and private self should be transformed into public self. Hence, rejection of desire and

the trumpet of self-sacrifice reached a fever pitch (Min’an and Xie 4). Human bodies and

Fig. 2 The scene where Geng Hua and Zhou Yun are dating on Lushan Mountain. Source: Romance on Lushan Mountain (1980).

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emotions are under the surveillance of the government during that highly repressive era, and people lost their rights to use their own bodies. Any officially unapproved love, not to mention sexual activity, is illegitimate. Gradually, the opposite gender was estranged, and sexuality was viewed as filthy and disgusting. The public perception of gender and sexuality was deformed by obsessive regulation.

Among the very few films containing the element of sexuality, the film Corner Left

Unnoticed by Love touches upon the problem of sexual repression. With the title straightforwardly bringing out the theme of love, this film interlaces the life experiences of three women, the female protagonist Huangmei, Huangmei’s sister Cunni and their mother,

Linghua. In Cunni’s youth, she and a young man of her village Xiaobaozi fell in love. Driven by an inherent sexual desire, they had some intimacy. Their close premarital relationship was discovered by other villagers and was strongly denounced. Out of shame, Cunni threw herself in a river to commit suicide. The death of Cunni casts a shadow over Huangmei and distorts her perception of males and of love. From then, she becomes unsociable and eccentric, and particularly unwilling to talk with men.

The film does not directly depict scenes of sexual activity, but the conception of sexuality exists from the beginning to the end. Huangmei’s fear of males and resistance to love, and her ambiguous feelings which mix sympathy for her sister Cunni with hatred for Xiaobaozi signal her deformed sexual conception and the social repudiation of sexual desire. However, this film still does not cross the ideological boundary. Ultimately, inspired by the new state policy to rid the

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rural area of poverty, Huangmei gained the courage to pursue her love, which bespeaks a bright future under the new leadership. This film outstrips many other scar films featuring love in that it breaks the model that a few villains direct the tragedies. Instead, it gives prominence to the political environment and its impact on social morality and individual life, and then makes a tragedy out of the public hatred and twisted morality.

Another exemplary film is the last one of Xie Jin’s trilogy Hibiscus Town released in the late 1980s and recognized as the best among the three. In this film, though Qin Shutian and Hu

Yuyin also fall in love when going through difficulties together, their love is not purely platonic.

In the enclosed domestic sphere, they kiss each other passionately, but meanwhile, they also keep wary of the surroundings in case their intimacy is spotted. This detail implies that people, especially “enemies of the people,” were deprived of the right of privacy and freedom under the despotic system. When they have emotional and bodily intimacy, they actually pose a challenge to heavy-handed political tactics on regulating bodies. They are thus sentenced for their marriage, and this punishment demonstrates the authority of the government of controlling human bodies and emotions (Yuan 231–245). Despite sticking to the previous narrative pattern, by politicizing bodies, Hibiscus Town is endued with richer and deeper connotations and lays a foundation for later retrospective cinema.

Taken as a whole, although love stories in some scar films produced in the 1980s partly are intended to criticize the devastating impact of the Cultural Revolution and showcase the glory of humanity, they still have many limitations. For one thing, the subjectivity assigned to

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characters is manipulated to articulate a certain political stance. Political stances and individual personalities are abruptly attached to characters without a developing process. For another, the role of a small number of individuals in obstructing love relations is foregrounded. As a result, the social and political facets are downplayed. Besides, the narrative features which echo the didactic paradigm of the red classic cinema reduce the aesthetic values. With the repeated ending of the prospect for bright future, the films turn the reflection on the Cultural Revolution into more propaganda which eulogizes the new authority and promulgates a new socialist China and the four modernizations. Considering the social environment of filmmaking in the 1980s, these limitations are understandable. While in 1981 the Cultural Revolution was officially denounced and reflections were allowed, insistence on the Communist Party’s legitimacy is still the bottom line in artworks, and the reputation of the Party cannot be damaged. Therefore, reflective films could not touch the root causes of those tragedies. Even so, these films are very meaningful. As Chris Berry says, seeking truth relies on the right way of interpreting. By interpreting these films, we are also approaching the reality of the decade of the 1980s.

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Chapter 2: Family Love in the Fifth-Generation Films of the Early 1990s

The decades of the 1980s witnessed not only the popularity of scar films, but also the rise of the fifth generation. The themes of the films directed by the fifth generation cover a variety of themes. The early works of the fifth generation which became very popular in the mid-1980s feature Chinese culture and folk customs and investigate the root causes of root problems in

Chinese traditional culture. The fifth-generation directors were unsatisfied with the artistic style and the emptiness of the films directed by the directors of the previous generations, and thus they strived to make innovations in cinematic language, avoid dogmatism and break through the limitations of the previous films. With such efforts, some films produced by them and their team received prizes in both domestic and international film festivals, which enabled them to build an international reputation.

However, in the late 1980s, dramatic social, political and economic changes influenced the filmmaking enterprise of the fifth generation. The Tian’an men Incident on June 4th, 1989 again tightened the CPC’s grip over the media and artistic production. The disputable works produced in the late 1980s were prohibited from being distributed, and the foreign or capitalist cultural products were denigrated. Meanwhile, the film studios were demanded to produce a batch of films which acclaim the socialism and the feats of the Party and denigrate the dissidents, and the filmmakers were faced with the dilemma of making films as required

(Pickowicz 310–315).

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Even so, it should be noted that the intensified political pressure did not bring the end to the filmmaking by the fifth generation. In the early 1990s, as these filmmakers were becoming renowned in international film circles, they managed to establish cooperation with foreign investors and received foreign funding for their film production. In this fashion, they relieved from both political and commercial dilemmas and were able to boldly represent the sensitive topics in mainland China (Clark 203–212). Funded by the foreign capital, their works were targeted more at the international audiences than the domestic audience, and satisfied the foreign interests in experiencing the Chinese world through films, though the screening of such films was restricted in China. Moreover, they at times got into conflicts with the Chinese authorities and were considered as rebellious filmmakers in the international film world

(Pickowicz 317–318). During that period, Farewell, My Concubine (1992) directed by Chen Kaige,

The Blue Kite (1993) by Tian Zhuangzhuang and To Live (1994) by Zhang Yimou are all co- produced with foreign companies. As we can see, these epic melodramas explicitly deal with a few decades in the history of Mao’s China and represent the life of ordinary people as they were subjected to a series of political campaigns.

The fifth-generation filmmakers share similar life experiences during the period of the

Cultural Revolution. As an educated youth, they were sent to the countryside to work as labor, and many of their parents suffered from severe criticism or even persecution owing to the education they received. What they saw and heard in their youth had a profound impact on their mind and impelled them to think critically of Chinese politics and society. Paul Clark in his

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study of the biographical sketches of the fifth-generation directors found out that many of them enjoyed a privileged life and were exposed to foreign works in their childhood, while in the

Cultural Revolution their previous life was shattered and their life in exile filled their hearts with anxiety and fear. Their experience proved decisive for their future preference in their directing careers for the cinematic representation of the life of people at the bottom of society and of their own memories during the Cultural Revolution (Clark 1–36).

Farewell, My Concubine (1992) is an exemplary film which recalls shameful memories of

Chen Kaige in Mao’s China. As Yomi Braester observes, the film is set in the spaces of Beijing where he grew up, and the episode of Xiaosi’er and Cheng Dieyi suggests his own relation with his father during the Cultural Revolution. The character Xiaosi’er appears as the Cheng Kaige at his young age, and Xiaosi’er’s betrayal of Dieyi represent Chen’s struggle against his father (89–

96). Given this, Farewell, My Concubine is often regarded as a film about love and betrayal, faith and reality (Silbergeld 108). This is also true with the triangle love relationship between Dieyi,

Xiaolou, and Juxian. Dieyi’s homosexual affection for Xiaolou and the marital relation between

Xiaolou and Juxian remain in conflict. The conflict reaches the climax in the Cultural Revolution when the three characters were dragged to the street to confess or disclose others’ past by the fire. At first, Xiaolou was forced to disclose Dieyi’s disgraceful past, which ignited Dieyi’s hatred for Juxian and compelled him to attack Juxian. The next second when Juxian’s former identity as a prostitute was exposed by Dieyi, Xiaolou was obliged to deny his love for Juxian and reject his relation with her. At that moment, the accumulated conflicts between them broke out. Xiaolou

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abandoned his conscience and became an utter egoist, while Dieyi and Juxian were driven to despair.

The scene of the struggle session is replete with metaphors, especially the dress of the characters. In the public struggle meeting, behind the burning flame, Dieyi was fully dressed up in a Peking opera costume, Xiaolou was wearing an incomplete makeup, and Juxian was wearing a housewife’s plain clothes. The Peking Opera costume represents Xiaolou’s career as a Peking

Opera artist and also his faith and spiritual life, and the civilian clothes represent the peaceful family life. When being interrogated, Xiaolou betrayed both Dieyi and Juxian and threw his costume into the fire, which means that he discarded his faith and lost his earthly happiness.

The fire, as a trope for the destructive revolutionary fervor, blurs the faces of the three characters and ruins the costumes. This metaphorically means that the revolutionary fervor stirred up during the Cultural Revolution can wreak havoc on both people’s spiritual and secular life. The role of the struggle meeting that plays in their relationships is to magnify the tensions between them and destroy both Juxian’s delusion of a quiet family life and Dieyi’s attachment to

Xiaolou. As we can see, in the cinematic representation of the Cultural Revolution by these films, families, instead of bodies, bear testimony to the historical traumas. Although the films do not depict much about physical abuse, the changing family patterns and the different family members’ attitudes towards the Cultural Revolution fully embody the social disasters which befell the masses.

When interpreting this film, critics often ascribe rich political and historical meanings to

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them and associate the features of these films with the miserable life experiences of the filmmakers during the Cultural Revolution. The openness and ambiguity of the cinematic representation of China in the past decades, on the one hand reflects an indefinable and changing image of China over time, and on the other signals an uncertain and vague sense of nationalism and a crisis of faith among the Chinese public as well as the filmmakers themselves which derives from the past sufferings (Cornelius and Smith 34–52). From the perspective of the process of film production, Jenny Kwok Wah Lau takes a negative attitude towards the film

Farewell, My Concubine by Chen Kaige. After comparing the ending of the film and that of the novel by Lilian Lee, she claims that the ending of the film tends to embody the important status of the Mainland and marginalize Hong Kong (16–27). They to some degree might express their attitudes towards contemporary China and thus detach the contents of films from their historical background.

Not only Farewell, My Concubine, but also To Live and The Blue Kite are substantially discussed in both domestic and foreign scholarship and receive a diversity of interpretations.

Zhang Xudong puts forward that the films about the Cultural Revolution directed by the fifth- generation auteurs do not intend to gain insight into the capricious social and political environment in Mao’s China, but are centered on human nature and art itself. He lays greater emphasis on the emotion that the characters might evoke and analyzes the collective mindset of the audiences when watching such films. By doing so, he considers that the realization of the absence in the national history and the distress at the past aberrant years entails the

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recuperation and critique of traumatic memories (623–638).

This type of the view on the representation of the Cultural Revolution by the fifth- generation filmmakers in some sense is in agreement with the thoughts of the filmmakers which can be known from an interview with Zhang Yimou:

I’d love to really delve into the Cultural Revolution and make not just one film, but ten. Amid that great

tragedy, human nature was nakedly exposed—and all of the weakness of human nature came out. The

way that people were tortured, twisted, and bent is unbelievable. What happened to people during that

decade was fascinating.

(M. Berry 128)

From the above, we can see that the filmmaker focuses on the changes of people’s mentality in the early PRC history, and this is often achieved through the representation of family life. For instance, Zhang Yimou’s work To Live narrates the attitudes held by the members of a family towards a series of political movements. According to Zhang Xudong, the state political events synchronize with the family vicissitudes, and their constant destructive impact on the family life forces the characters to keep that memory and get accustomed to sufferings.

Family and individual traumas are regarded as the locus of the national history. In this way,

Zhang claims that the cinematic representation of family everyday life is intended to disintegrate the history constructed by the official discourse; however, he considers the

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individual desires, pursuits, and experiences as ephemeral and unimportant (623–638).

The relation between history and cinema are substantially discussed in other studies. For instance, Ming-May Jessie Chen regards Farewell, My Concubine, To Live and The Blue Kite as authentic representations of that historical period which the filmmakers went through and says that the audience can comprehend the history of the Cultural Revolution when watching these films (177). In this study, she compares some moments in the films with the historical records, but she does not specifically analyze the fictional narratives which also carry significant messages about the historical reality. In a study of the relations between truth, reality and cinema, Peter Wollen concludes that: “The cinema cannot show the truth, or reveal it, because the truth is not out there in the real world, and meanings can only be plotted, not in relation to some abstract yardstick or criterion of truth, but in relation to other meanings” (Braudy and

Cohen 507). Therefore, to evaluate the representation of the Cultural Revolution, cinematic strategies and plots are worth considering.

Love, as a fictional element, is still frequently employed to advances plots and represent human nature, but scholars think little of this aspect because in the three films it is family love that is dominant rather than romance. As is always represented in a realistic manner, families, as basic social groups, are disintegrated during the Cultural Revolution, and family members easily lose their lives. Consequently, normal family ties are hardly maintained and tragedies become unavoidable in that specific social context (Tweedie 239–251). The touching family love presents a stark contrast with the cruel historical reality.

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Therefore, in this chapter, I will mainly focus on The Blue Kite and To Live and analyze how family love relations go through the Cultural Revolution, as well as the Great Leap Forwards and the Anti-rightist Movement in these two films. I would like to compare the tragedies represented in these films with those in many scar films. By doing so, I will show that the films directed by the fifth generation use family love to represent the destructive forces of the

Cultural Revolution and other movements in the early PRC history on the micro level. Through featuring family love, the films not merely depict how human nature was constrained and twisted during the Cultural Revolution as Zhang Yimou claims, but also reflect how tragedies happened when human nature remained unchanged. I am going to argue that these two films highlight people’s desire for survival and pursuit of happiness and disengage the common people from the state ideology.

Compared with the characters in scar films, one of the major differences in the characters of the three films is that they were given subjectivity in family and marital love relations. The returned subjectivity does not mean the freedom to choose lovers, since the films do not focus on how the couples fell in love. The subjectivity is reflected in the conflicts between family love and political impact. In the marital relations, no matter how one spouse was politically labeled, the other one still simply regarded him or her as the husband or the wife. This point was best illustrated in The Blue Kite. After the female protagonist Chen Shujuan married her first husband Lin Shaolong, they enjoyed a happy and harmonious marriage. When

Shaolong was persecuted as a rightist and sent to a very remote place, the first thing that

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concerns Shujuan was the separation from her husband, instead of the label “rightist.” In her view, the reason why Shaolong was defined as rightist is that he went to the bathroom in the middle of the “rightist selection meeting,” which reflects that she subconsciously thought that the Anti-Rightist Movement was meaningless. Shaolong, as a victimized character, is unlike the

Luo Qun of Legend of Tianyun Mountain and Xu Lingjun of The Herdsman. He is disinterested in politics, in the lofty communist cause or in serving the Party, and instead, he places family above the political life. Before Shaolong was sent away left, he was attentively preparing the coal for the family to use during the winter. This scene shows his strong attachment to his family. Although it does not represent his agony, his silence and concentration on the work at hand are very touching and oppressive. In contrast to the falseness of the characters in some scar films, the subjectivity of the characters shown in family love and their mentality in the face of the persecution contribute to the sense of authenticity so that the film can evoke the empathy of the audience.

The subjectivity of characters not only responds to the social and political reality, but also disengages them from the state ideology. The films seem to speak highly of the spirit of perseverance and tolerance among common people when they were faced with the political intrusion into private life in Mao’s China. In The Blue Kite, when Shujuan’s second husband Li

Guodong confessed to her that Shaolong’s death had something to do with his letter of accusation, she did not show any hatred for Li Guodong, and instead, she understood that he did not have many choices under that circumstances. Their love was on the basis of Li

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Guodong’s remorse and Shujuan’s forgiveness, and build a connection between their past and future. Their marriage actually witnesses the inherent goodness of the characters which grew out of the darkness of Mao’s era. Another case in point is that Shujuan’s third husband Wu

Leisheng was denounced as a counter-revolutionary during the Cultural Revolution, and he decided to divorce Shujuan for the fear that he would get her into trouble. However, when

Shujuan came back to visit Wu and found him suffering a heart attack and being severely assaulted, she struggled to save Wu Leisheng from the plight and criticized the violence of the

Red Guards. At that moment, she is represented as a great woman whose virtue forms a sharp contrast with the evils exposed by the Red Guards. In the film, the representation of how the individual conscience was not devoid under the burden of the state politics outweighs the cruelty and brutality imposed in Mao’s China.

The love of the protagonists for their family members disengages them from the political ideology, even though their lives are permeated by ideological propagandas. The three films recreate very well the political intrusion into family life during that time. At the beginning of The Blue Kite, the very presence of totalitarianism in family life is embodied in the Tietou’s self-narrative, in that the wedding of his father and mother was postponed due to the death of

Stalin, a foreign political figure entirely irrelevant to their life. Moreover, the two weddings of

Shujuan in The Blue Kite and the wedding of Xu Fengxia and Wang Erxi in To Live are all characterized by “Red” and represented as ritualistic performances of the Maoist ideology. The wedding ceremonies were decorated with political slogans and posters, and the participants in

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the wedding sang songs eulogizing socialism and Mao Zedong in place of the traditional prothalamion. The unusual special wedding customs announce the abandonment of the

Chinese traditions and the absolute authority of the Party to dominate people’s life. In addition, a scene in common during the Cultural Revolution in the three films is of the radio broadcasting political propaganda, the dissemination of the class struggles in the domestic space and the posters with the portrait of Mao appeared on the walls inside the house. All these details turn the collective behaviors into a political performance with the masses as its actors. However, it seems that the inner self of the characters in the films is not transformed by the mechanically repeated political rituals, and the disseminated values of the masses stays on the materialistic level. For example, in To Live, when Erxi was introduced to Fugui and Jiazhen as the prospective spouse of their daughter, he gave away several brassards with Mao’s head portrait and a bundle of Selected Works of Mao Zedong. These gifts do not represent his faith in Mao or any thorough understandings of socialism, but indicate the worth of these tangible objects which are used for socialization.

The superficial understanding by ordinary people of the Maoist ideology are also represented when Fengxia was giving birth. The young doctors and nurses did not allow the experienced doctor, who was denounced as an old academic authority, to deliver the child, while Erxi, Fugui and Jiazhen still doubted the ability of those young doctors due to their lack of experience. As a result, Erxi brought an old doctor from the cowshed and pretended to humiliate him so that the doctor could stay in the hospital in case any accidents happened. Erxi

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was actually kind to the doctor, and Fugui and Jiazhen took pity on him. This indicates that the characters subconsciously negate the Cultural Revolution, especially when witnessing its brutality. According to Žižek, the common people are indifferent to the state ideology but only mechanically turn ideology into specific behaviors. In this way, people want to acquire a legitimate identity in their society (90–91).

In light of Žižek’s theory, in the films, the characters are passively involved in political rituals and try to incorporate their words and deeds into the political ideology for the purpose of survival. Even so, they are still unable to evade various disasters and then family breakdown.

The specificity of the political context determines that people are deprived of human rights and incapable of controlling their own fates. One aspect of the specificity that the films represent is that individual identity depends on the definition of the socio-political class, and thus the social power of individuals is not stable. To Live offers many examples to illustrate this point. The identity of Fugui was closely connected with his shadow puppets. In the Republican time when wealth was worshiped, the protagonist Fugui was a prodigal son of a landlord’s family and lived in clover. Due to his indulgence in gambling, he squandered the family fortune and descended to the status of a pauper who survived by performing with shadow puppets. His identity thus was transformed into that of a lower-class person. In the civil war, Fugui was seized by the press gang of Kuomintang, and later was held captive by the Communist army. His shadow puppets were found by a communist soldier and marked his identity as working class. His shadow puppet performances for the communist army endues him with another identity as a

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“revolutionary.” This identity, as well as his poverty, enables himself to tide over the following years, during which he also tries to assimilate himself into the Maoist society. For example, in the Great Leap Forward Movement, he actively joins the collective labor and even forces his son to do so; in the Cultural Revolution, he burns his cherished shadow puppets which carry the stigma of the “Four Olds.” However, his deeds do not mean that he was truly brainwashed by the political propaganda. Also, his identities vary with the changing social institutions and bear no relation to his own ideological position. Instead, what Fugui cares about is family stability and well-being.

To illustrate this point further, let us consider the cinematic trope of puppets that recurs throughout the whole film. On the one hand, it stands for the capricious fate of Fugui, since puppets are always manipulated behind the scene. In a broad sense, the puppets symbolize people at the bottom of society who are unable to control their own fates, and the manipulator might represent the orthodox political powers. On the other hand, the shadow play bears witness to the vicissitudes of Fugui’s family. At first, the shadow puppets play appears in the gambling house and represents the decadent life of the aristocratic class. As Fugui’s family declines, the shadow puppets are his livelihood and give hope to his family. During the Great

Forward Movement, when Fugui plays shadow puppets for the steelmaking workers, his son plays a trick on him by giving him water with vinegar. Here the shadow play represents family affection. With the outburst of the Cultural Revolution, the shadow puppets are burned into ashes, which means the elimination of family memory. However, at the end of the film, Fugui let

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his grandson put the newborn chickens in the box which was used to contain the puppets before, and looks into the future with his grandson. This scene implies the basic need for survival by ordinary people and their constant outlook on a bright future regardless of how many sufferings were inflicted on them.

Fig. 3 The scenes of the shadow puppets play in the gambling house and in collective labor and the scene of containing chickens in the box. Source: To Live (1994).

According to these films, the Cultural Revolution causes not only the individual sufferings, but also dysfunctional interpersonal relationships. This is because the political oppression on some characters cast a shadow over those closest to them, especially family members. The representation of traumas which a family experienced is more affective than that of the individual sufferings and better embodies the devastating effects of the Cultural

Revolution. Therefore, the films produced in the early 1990s tend to feature the vicissitudes in

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familial or marital relations over time which are often expressed in an allegorical approach. For instance, in The Blue Kite, the kite which Tietou’s biological father Shaolong made for him functions as a metaphor for familial love. For Tietou, the last memory of Shaolong is quite unpleasant because when Shaolong was unjustly wronged as a rightist, he unconsciously vented his anger at his son, and soon after he left his family forever. Even so, flying the kite remains one of the few happy moments with his biological father in his childhood, so he kept the kite for many years from childhood to youth. When Tietou lived with his stepfather, he hung the kite on the wall which represents his nostalgia for the parental love of his childhood and his strong dissatisfaction with the new family where he thought of his mother as a servant. His discontent was fully mitigated when the granddaughter of his stepfather Niuniu begged him to fly the kite with her. The moment of Tietou’s flying the kite with Niuniu signals his acceptance of the friendship with her and the familial happiness in his new family. However, later when Niuniu flew the kite, the string was broken, and the kite was accidentally hooked in the tree. After that, the disaster of the Cultural Revolution befell on this family, as the stepfather Wu Leisheng was denounced as anti-revolutionary. Wu Leisheng had to divorce from Shujuan to avoid getting her and her son in trouble, and then this new family broke down again. From here we can see that blue kite in the tree bespeaks an unachievable happy familial life and the inability to defend the family. In the final scene, when Leisheng and Shujuan were both being attacked by the Red

Guards and Tietou was beaten down, Tietou was lying on the floor and again desperately saw the blue kite which was tattered in the tree. Here, the broken kite signals the dashed hope for

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happiness and an intact family. By assigning the allegorical significance to such objects, the films strengthen the disastrous effects of the political movements on human rights, individual happiness and family well-being.

Fig. 4 The scenes where the blue kite appears. Source: The Blue Kite (1993).

The cinematic representation of the traumas that occur to families in Mao’s China is also characterized by unexpected death. The death of family members is surely a heavy blow to the entire family, but in these films, the political persecution is not a direct factor in the death. Take the deaths in To Live as an example. In Mao’s era, Fugui’s family was not attacked, but the son

Youqing and the daughter Fengxia both died. Youqing, an elementary student, was forced to make steel during school hours. Though his mother Jiazhen opposed his going to school because he was overtired, Fugui thought that they should not lag behind in the cause of steel-making and thus carried Youqing to school. However, when Youqing was resting by the wall, he died from a car accident, and the driver who caused this accident happened to be Chunsheng, the district mayor and also Fugui’s comrade in arms. The identity of Chunsheng as Fugui’s friend aggravated the hatred by Fugui and Jiazhen. However, as for the death of Youqing, none of the

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characters is entirely responsible but none is innocent, and even the driver Chunsheng’s act was unintentional, and he felt rather guilty. On this point, the death of Fengxian is similar. When

Fengxia encountered postpartum bleeding, none of the young student doctors in the hospital were able to help her, and those experienced doctors who were denounced as reactionary academic authorities were driven to the cowshed. In order that Fengxia could deliver successfully, Erxi brought to the hospital an old doctor who was starving to death. However, the doctor ironically died there from overeating the steamed bread which the couple of Fugui gave him out of sympathy. Without any professional medical solution, Fengxia bled to death. As a result, the resistance to death, in turn, results in death. It seems that the multiple coincidences cause the death, but the deaths of the characters are all unnatural. These coincidences are in some sense associated with the specificity of the social and political context, and in these films, the enforced devotion to the empty cause of socialism and the dysfunctional social division are especially represented. Without anyone to blame, the losses of beloved family members constantly lower the expectation of the characters for a living and strengthen their patience of enduring sufferings. The film To Live represents how life becomes unvalued outside the family and vulnerable in a society disordered by political campaigns. As the shadow puppets which

Fugui once used to make a living imply, life is just like a play.

To conclude this chapter, the three films produced in the early 1990s and directed by the fifth-generation filmmakers share the many similarities in their representation of the Cultural

Revolution. On the one hand, the vicissitudes of a family as the major theme in these films are

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intended to reflect the social unrest in Mao’s China. Various factors, such as death, separation, enforced betrayal, etc., lead to the losses of loved ones and then the family breakdown. As a step forward to realism, the films give an authentic depiction of people’s poor and dangerous living condition during that historical period and the absence of faith and hope. On the other, the films indicate that even though people were unconcerned about the state ideology, they were too powerless to escape the disasters caused by the political campaigns. The cinematic representation of traumas in Mao’s era might allude to the situation of post-Tian’anmen China if we think about the time when these films were produced. As Chow indicates in her analysis of

To Live, directed by Zhang Yimou, the traumatic stories in the film might imply the ideological situation of China in the post-1989 era (119). Perhaps, witnessing the recent trauma in 1989 reminded the filmmakers of their own experience during the Cultural Revolution and provokes their thoughts on common people’s life under the political impact.

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Conclusion

As we can see in this study, the cinematic representation of the motif of love in the films about the Cultural Revolution undergoes a notable change from the 1980s to the early 1990s. The differences are reflected in the types of love, the portrayal of characters, the cinematic settings and the narrative modes.

In the scar films that prevailed in the 1980s, love is always represented as romance, and it is seemingly intended to mark a difference from asceticism of the model operas produced during Mao’s reign. The romantic love often occurs between two virtuous, innocent and victimized characters. This is especially evident in Xie Jin’s trilogy in which the cinematic narration of love stories falls into a rigid mode of union, separation and reunion. The tragic part is the forced separation between two lovers for political reasons, which is characterized by strong sensational effects. For example, in a love relationship, one character is often framed by a villain and labeled as anti-revolutionary, rightist, or landlord; then he or she has to be sent away or imprisoned. This mode is always equipped with a happy ending in which the grievances of victims are redressed and lovers get reunited. However, this fixed mode could not fully reflect the specificity of the Cultural Revolution. For one thing, the occurrence of love is often based on a common political ideal, and thus the subjectivity of characters in love relations is still dominated by state ideology. For another, the happy endings are intended to promote the

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ideology of the construction of the socialist cause and the Four Modernizations, and rebuild positive images of the Communist Party.

In contrast, the three films directed by the fifth-generation filmmakers in the early

1990s, The Blue Kite (1993), Farewell, My Concubine (1993) and To Live (1994), show significant changes in the representation of love during the Cultural Revolution. First of all, these films mainly represent unswerving family love in difficult times. Through this type of love, family members form a small social group and become more closely interrelated. In this fashion, the sufferings inflicted on the persecuted characters are contagious, and the negative impact of the

Cultural Revolution on human relationships is magnified. Secondly, family love in the three films is separated from state ideology and propaganda. Under the devastating impact of the political movements, the primary concern of family members is not to pursue political correctness, but to maintain an intact family and keep the beloved safe. The films do not create sensational dialogues and actions to arouse the sympathy of the audience for the sufferer; instead, they display the sympathy of characters. They vividly depict the subjective experience by some characters of the sufferings and pains of their beloved. Thirdly, these films witness the process for de-sublimation. They display the daily life over time in Mao’s China and produce a sense of historical authenticity. Regarded as melodramatic epic, they break off from enclosed narrative structure and often create an open ending. Given all these differences, these historical epic

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films make substantial progress in cinematic aesthetics, narrative mode, and profundity of the reflection on the Cultural Revolution.

This dynamics of the cinematic representation of love during the Cultural Revolution indicates the changing attitudes towards the traumatic past. According to scar films, the root cause of the tragedies is the evil deeds and thoughts of individuals, and the ending of the

Cultural Revolution means the conclusion of all the disasters and traumas in the past. The films always offer a vision for the bright future under the leadership of the Communist Party, and thus serve the purposes of propaganda. In contrast, the films The Blue Kite (1993), Farewell, My

Concubine (1993) and To Live (1994) boldly investigate the destructive influences of the erroneous political action on the social institution and people’s life from the perspective of interpersonal relationships. In other words, the fifth-generation filmmakers to some degree overcome the ideological shackles in their pursuit of artistic creation. This is partly because, against the background of globalization, the Chinese cinema entered the international film market. These filmmakers managed to gain financial support from foreign companies and thus became less constrained by domestic censorship. Moreover, considering the time when these films were produced, the recent trauma of the Tian’anmen Square Incident on June Fourth,

1989 also urged these filmmakers to associate their sufferings during the Cultural Revolution with their reflexive thoughts on the Chinese social and political conditions after 1989.

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The cinematic representation of the Cultural Revolution never ceases, and signifies

China’s transition from post-socialism to post-modernism. In the 2000s, a series of films were continuously produced on this theme, such as Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (2000) directed by

Chen Joan, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2002) directed by Dai sijie, and The Sun

Also Rises (2007) directed by Jiang Wen. With the increasingly more open sexual culture in

China, the motif of love in these films shifts from pure romantic and warm family love to erotic love. The sexual psychology and behaviors described in the films function as the metaphors for the real world. For example, Jiang Wen’s The Sun Also Rises which is replete with sexual metaphors represents the Cultural Revolution in a surrealistic way. Several characters indulge in sexual fantasies to satisfy themselves, which in turn embodies sexual repression in their era.

Sexual repression, in essence, carries the implication of the repressive nature of the Maoist politics. According to Jiang Wen, sexual desires and revolution are satirically intertwined, and the erotic power is inherent in political revolution. By means of the motif of erotic love, such films transform the concrete representation of the Cultural Revolution into an abstract one.

They no longer aim to recreate authentic historical moments, but explore the possibility of reconstructing the elusive past (Johnson et al. 324–326). The representation of erotic love in the films about the Cultural Revolution of the 2000s is not studied in this essay but remains to be explored in the future.

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Filmography

Huang, Zumo. Romance on Lushan Mountain. N.p., 1980. Film.

Li, Yalin, and Qi Zhang. Corner Left Unnoticed by Love. N.p., 1981. Film.

Xie, Jin. Hibiscus Town. N.p., 1986. Film.

---. Legend of Tianyun Mountain. N.p., 1980. Film.

Xie, Jin, and Shuqin Huang. The Herdsman. N.p., 1982. Film.

Chen, Kaige. Farewell My Concubine. N.p., 1993. Film.

Tian, Zhuangzhuang. The Blue Kite. N.p., 1994. Film.

Zhang, Yimou. To Live. N.p., 1994. Film.