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From Yu Hua's to Zhang Yimou's to Live

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From Yu Hua's to Zhang Yimou's to Live Jia Guo Adaptation as Creation: From Yu Hua’s to Zhang Yimou’s To Live I once heard an American folk song entitled “Old Black Joe.” The song was about an elderly black slave who experienced a life’s worth of hardships, including the passing of his entire family – yet he still looked upon the world with eyes of kindness, offering not the slightest complaint. After being so deeply moved by this song I decided to write my next novel – that novel was To Live. (Yu 2003, 249) Abstract: There is one point on which viewers and critics usually agree: that film adaptations of works of literature cannot reflect the full connotations of the orig- inal written work. To Live, written by Yu Hua, one of the most important con- temporary Chinese writers, was first published in the Chinese literary magazine Shouhuo in 1992 with a length of 7,000 Chinese characters, and then was extended to 12,000 Chinese characters for cinematographic adaptation. Zhang Yimou, one of the leading Chinese directors of his time, adapted the novel as a film in 1994. Zhang is fully aware of the significance of the practice of film adaptations of liter- ary works. Of his eighteen films, thirteen are adaptations of literary works, which has earned him the title of “the director inseparable from literature.” Both the novel and the film versions of To Live have gained great renown. By analysing the variations and distinctions between novel and film, this article will offer some interpretations of Zhang Yimou’s creative process in adapting literature. Keywords: adaptation, film, literature, To Live, Yu Hua, Zhang Yimou To Live, both novel and film, can be considered a dual success.1 The novel was named one of the ten most influential books of the 1990s in mainland China and awarded the 1998 Grinzane Cavour literary prize as the best foreign fiction in Italy, receiving good reviews worldwide. Zhang Yimou’s film adaptation was well received, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival in 1994, and was nominated as best foreign-language film in 1995 at both the British Academy Film Awards and the Golden Globe Awards. In an interview, the filmmaker revealed 1 I would like to thank Prof. Bernard Franco, Prof. Haun Saussy, and the ICLA’s anonymous reviewers for their acute comments on an early draft of this article. Thanks also go to Christopher Lawson, who proofread the article, and to Prof. Brigitte Lejuez. Open Access. © 2021 Jia Guo, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110642056-032 412 Jia Guo that he made the decision to adapt the novel To Live immediately after reading a draft of the novel, before To Live had even been published (Niogret 2001, 57). The novel has been reprinted since it was first published, whereas the film has never been publicly screened in mainland China, which adds an element of mystery to the relationship between novel and film, and makes it attractive for researchers to compare them. While literary critics consistently state that To Live is one of Yu Hua’s best works, the critical reactions to Zhang Yimou’s film adaptation of the novel fall into two opposing camps. According to one critic, the film represents the summit of Zhang Yimou’s film career (Z. Zhang 2014, 2). Other people, who do not share this view, complain that Zhang Yimou’s adaptation departs too radically from the novel, saying for example that the film “misunderstood the main point of Yu Hua conveyed in the novel, and some modifications the director conducted have politicized it” (Huang 2008, 47; my translation). Rather than taking issue with these early reviews, this article will offer a comparative analysis of the two versions of To Live, an analysis that, in the context of adaptation theory, explores more generally the concern animating those reviews: the creative side of adaptation. 1 To Live: The context Since the first Chinese adapted film, Ten Sisters, based on a French detective story (B. Zhang 2007, 17) was made in 1921, there have been two main highpoints in Chinese film adaptation history: the 1920s to the 1930s,2 and, after a period of stagnation during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the 1980s to 1990s, when Zhang Yimou’s To Live was produced. As Zhang Yimou, one of the most famous Chinese directors of the Fifth Generation, states: “By speaking of the materials and trend of Fifth Generation film, I insist that it is literary works that make our careers. […] We must start with studying contemporary Chinese literature to study contemporary Chinese film” (quoted in Li 1998, 10; my translation).3 From 1987 to 1994, five of the six films directed by Zhang Yimou were adapted from contempo- rary Chinese literature. 2 From 1921 to 1931, there were 650 films made by all Chinese film companies, and writers from the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School (a modern Chinese literary school originated in Shanghai in 1920s) took part in the production of most of these films. They are based on some of these works of this literature. 3 The cinema of mainland China has gone through seven generations of filmmakers so far. The rise of the Fifth Generation began in the mid-1980s. Most of the film-makers graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982; they include Zhang Junzhao, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhang Yimou, and others. Adaptation as Creation 413 From 1984 to 1987, a group of Chinese writers, including Mo Yan, Su Tong, Yu Hua, Ge Fei, and Bei Cun, began attracting attention by developing unique writing techniques and language; they were labelled as “avant-garde writers.” Among them, Yu Hua has distinguished himself in various literary genres: he is the author of novels like To Live, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and Brothers, the short-story collection Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China, and the collection of essays China in Ten Words. To Live’s positive reception both in print and in film has accelerated the dissemination of Yu Hua’s works in foreign countries, and several of Yu Hua’s books have been translated into a total of more than twenty foreign languages. Inspired by an American folk song, “Old Black Joe,” Yu Hua made an autofic- tion out of an ordinary person’s life. The protagonist of the story, Xu Fugui, is born into a rich landlord’s family. After squandering the family’s fortune in gambling dens and brothels, he has to start living a peasant’s life. Subsequently, his family is hit by wave after wave of political turmoil, including China’s Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. Xu Fugui is conscripted into the army during the Civil War, and his family loses all their wealth and land during the Great Leap Forward. Fengxia, Fugui’s daughter, becomes deaf and mute from a childhood illness, and then marries a man called Erxi. Youqing, another child of Fugui, dies while donating blood. Later on, Fengxia dies due to haemorrhag- ing during childbirth. Fugui also loses his wife to disease. Erxi is killed in a fatal construction accident. Kugen, Fengxia and Erxi’s son, dies by choking on beans. With every member of his family having passed away, Fugui is left with just an ox as his companion. Not involving any bloody violence, this tragic story is told by a neutral bystander. By revealing to us the life of a common peasant, the novel shows us how ordinary Chinese people survived during these decades. Chinese traditional values are well conveyed in the book. In the preface to the Chinese version, Yu Hua makes the point that the whole story is about the endurance of suffering and optimism towards the world, and he believes that people live for life’s sake, not for anything beyond life itself. 2 From page to screen A close relationship has existed between literature and film since film was invented. In 1895, the Lumière brothers tried to show people’s daily life on film. A few years later, the French film director Georges Méliès made the film A Trip to the Moon in 1902, based on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. Méliès filmed stage plays with a motionless camera, as 414 Jia Guo film at that time was still the repetition of stage plays. Film did not find its own narrative techniques until montage was born. In his book Novels into Film, George Bluestone points out the close relation- ship between narrative fiction and cinema: “the reciprocity is clear from almost any point of view: the number of films based on novels; the search for filmic equiv- alents of literature; the effect of adaptations on reading; box-office receipts for filmed novels; merit awards by and for the Hollywood community” (1968, 2). In the same book, Bluestone emphasizes differences between literature and film on the grounds that they are different media, maintaining that novels and their film versions are both organic, and that they consequently have different formal and thematic conventions, differences inseparable from differences in their respective media. Bluestone characterizes the “fitful relationship” between the two genres as “overtly compatible, secretly hostile” (1968, 2). By “secretly hostile,” Bluestone means in an extreme sense that novels and films are comprehensible to different publics: the small middle-class reading public and the mass public, which make the two forms of art turn in opposite directions.
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