THE REINCARNATION OF TIGER MOUNTAIN: POST-SOCIALIZING THE

MODEL OPERA FILM {YANGBANXI)

A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of /y ^ the requirements for the Degree

A o ll' r . ,, Master of Arts ' ' L" In • , ^ - Cinema Studies

by

Xiuhe Zhang

San Francisco, California

May 2017 Copyright by Xiuhe Zhang 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read The Reincarnation o f Tiger Mountain: Post-socializing the

Model Opera Film (Yangbanxi) by Xiuhe Zhang, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University.

FredertK Green » Professor of Chinese Language and Literature

Celine Parrenas f Ihimizu Professor of Cir*ina THE REINCARNATION OF TIGER MOUNTAIN: POST-SOCIALIZING THE

MODEL OPERA FILM (YANGBANXI)

Xiuhe Zhang San Francisco, California 2017

This thesis is not simply about the model opera film (yangbanxi), a genre that was favorably engineered by Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, in order to feed highly politicized lives of the Chinese masses, and scheme to continue igniting the revolutionary fervor among peasants, workers and soldiers. Instead, it opens up the discussion of reconsidering the politics of cultural production in contemporary China. By comparatively examining the narrative and film form in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (1970) and The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), this thesis seeks to unravel the three main forces that are conventionally intertwined and negotiate with one another - globalization, nationalization, and regionalization - so as to articulate an ambivalent correlation between political economy, authoritarian control of the Chinese Communist Party, creative autonomy of the artist, and phenomenological contingency of moving image in digital cinema. Thus, the thesis is not only evaluating the state of Chinese-language cinema, but also reinvestigating the stake of cultural production in contemporary China, arguing for highlighting the complexity and paradox that are largely overlooked and/or oversimplified by the existing scholarship.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My deepest gratitude goes to the collaborative energy behind this project. Especially, I would like to thank Randy R.L. Rutsky, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Aaron Kerner, and

Frederik Green, who have been persistently motivating, encouraging, and inspiring me since my very beginning of incubating and venturing into genre studies of Chinese- language opera film. Not only have you been the most rigorous and forgivable critics, but also you have shown me what the professional really is with your intelligence, patience, and generosity. Thank you. And last but not least, a special dedication to my parents and

my dearest hometown Harbin, China. Here is my token of love.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures...... vii

Introduction...... 1

Post-socialist Nostalgia...... 3

Narrative Schematization...... 8

Aesthetic Innovation...... 11

Conclusion...... 20

Bibliogtaphy...... 24 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. Post-socialist Nostalgic Gaze in The Taking of Tiger Mountain...... 26

2. Socialist Realist Gaze in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy...... 26

3. Sadistic Perversion in The Taking of Tiger Mountain...... 27

4. Voyeuristic Curiosity and Pleasure in The Taking of Tiger Mountain...... 27

5. Indigenous Folkloric Art of Northeast China in The Taking o f Tiger Mountain...... 28

6. Cross-dressing Convention of Folkloric Duet in The Taking of Tiger Mountain...... 28

7. Grotesque Realism in The Taking of Tiger Mountain...... 29

8. Carnivalesque in The Taking of Tiger Mountain...... 29 Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour of China in 1992 demonstrated the comprehensive implementation and determination of market reform policies, characterized as privatization and marketization, which signaled that China has entered a new era that seems at odds with the economic policies of a socialist state. Scholars have situated

China’s ongoing transition within the analytical framework of a post-socialist condition.

From an etymological perspective, Xudong Zhang contends “the post- in postsocialism indicates a new socioeconomic and cultural-political subjectivity which pre-figures the new but is embedded in an order of things that does not readily recognize the ideological claim, political legitimacy, and cultural validity of capitalist globalization for the totality of human history and its future horizon.”1 In Postsocialist Modernity, Jason McGrath asserts that postsocialism is a global, universally shared condition in which “the collapse of the ‘alternative modernity’ of communism, inexorably returns us to the ‘singular modernity’” - capitalism. The Chinese postsocialist condition therefore “is fraught with experiences of fragmentation and anxiety in addition to the awakening of new desires and identities.”2 In the same spirit, Sheldon Lu maintains that “postsocialism is a cultural logic in accordance with which artists, filmmakers, and writers negotiate the residual socialist past and the emergent capitalist present to concoct new imaginaries of a transitional society.”

To put it simply, what is at stake in China’s ongoing liminal state is the relentless, uneasy negotiation among socialist cultural memory and the political legacy of five

1 Xudong Zhang, Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 12. 2 Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 14. 3 Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007), 208. 2 decades of revolutionary zeal, the current consumerism-driven cultural logic and political economy, and the persistence (and in some way revival) of orthodox CCP (Chinese

Communist Party) ideology. As, however, the revolutionary repercussion and history of the Maoist period have become a commodified collective reminiscence, critics point to nostalgic yearnings for the devout, utopian, and egalitarian subjectivities that are now difficult to trace in postsocialist China.

The state-censored and sponsored film The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014) ( ((

) - directed by Tsui Hark, one of the most significant auteurs who has been pioneering and redefining Hong Kong cinema since the 1979 New Wave - is a reincarnation of a famous Mao-era model opera film (yangbanxi, by the same

Chinese name, though known in English as Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (1970).

As such, it has been largely oversimplified by Western critics who labelled it as a propagandist piece infused with nationalistic and didactic flavor by Western critics. Such criticism, I argue, fails to take into full account the complexities of contemporary state- sponsored Chinese-language cinema. I read the film as a postsocialist cultural product that not only fulfills the historical necessity of the current socio-economic and cultural climates but also reflects the ongoing transformation of postsocialist China, typified by pluralization, individualization, differentiation, fragmentation and contradiction.4 While the model opera film is in itself an adaptation of an earlier novel titled Tracks in the

Snowy Forest ( (($$}!? HO) ), published in 1957, which was followed by several stage and screen adaptations, this paper will solely focus on the comparison of the 1970 adaptation and Tsui Hark’s remake.

4 McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 1-24. 3

By tracing the narrative and aesthetic paragons of model opera films alongside the corresponding innovation and experimentation of the remake through close textual analysis, this paper aims to accentuate the ambivalent negotiation of the political agenda, capitalist marketing of entertainment, and nostalgic symptoms that result from memories and imaginations of the Maoist era. In addition, the analysis attempts to elucidate narrative and aesthetic parameters for the production culture of postsocialist Chinese cinema as a way of thinking about the encounter between the economical neoliberalism and the ideological intervention of the state. In this sense, this paper also seeks to articulate the possibilities of the emerging new “model” film aesthetics and production code generated through the larger negotiation of cultural globalization, nationalization, and regionalism in terms of form, content, and further implications for postsocialist cinema, which may serve as a socio-political harbinger for the future of postsocialist

China that is yet equivocal.

Postsocialist Nostalgia

Nostalgia is “a symptom of our age, a historical emotion. It is not necessarily opposed to modernity and individual responsibility. Rather it is coeval with modernity itself.”5 In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym distinguishes two kinds of nostalgia, the restorative and the reflective, in order to delineate postcommunist Russian and

Eastern European local and global diasporic conditions.6 Unlike Boym’s classification, where the bygone homeland has both been physically and spiritually replaced and no

5 Svetlana Boym, The Future o f Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xvi. 6 Ibid., xviii. 4 longer exists, nostalgia in China involves a certain liminality that is repeatedly evoked and complicated by socialist remembrance and postsocialist reality and which therefore needs to be closely examined.

Scholars have interpreted nostalgia as a political and cultural tactic. Geremie

Barme contends that “in mainland China, nostalgia was institutionalized by the

Communist Party and its claims to legitimacy that emphasized its role as the inheritor and protector” in order to confront “social anomie and disjuncture.” 7 What Barme is suggesting is that nostalgic proclamation has become a way of asserting political continuity under the Chinese Communist Party. Reflecting upon fifth-generation director

Sun Zhou’s film The True-Hearted (Xin Xiang, (MV#)) ) and China’s production culture during the 1990s in general, Dai Jinhua argues the commodification of nostalgic traces serves social life in multiple ways: the “nostalgic atmosphere, in embellishing the vacuum of memory and in creating personal identities within the span of historical imagination, simultaneously accomplishes a representation of consumerism as well as a consumerism of representation.”8 Examining the many forms of nostalgia for the Maoist era, Jason McGrath argues that the representation of the nostalgic past mediated through postsocialist modernity conveys, on one hand, “a feeling of meaningfulness and utopian purpose,” and on the other hand, “the fondness with which revolutionary ideals are commemorated itself acts as an implicit rebuke to the much more individualized and commercialized values of the postsocialist era.” 9 In other words, the nostalgic

7 Geremie R. Barme, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 319. 8 Dai Jinhua, “Imagined Nostalgia” in Postmodernism and China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 211. 9 McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 216-217. 5 representation of the revolutionary past occupies the liminal lacuna between imagined ideal and sober reality.

When nostalgia becomes the recurrent symptom of social, economic, and cultural conditions in postsocialist China, how does The Taking o f Tiger Mountain, which was both sponsored and censored by the state, respond to such circumstances and exactly what kind of messages does it convey? I argue that nostalgia in the filmic text has been exploited and utilized as the emotional thread naturally suturing the idealistic and collective socialist past to the selectively and carefully chosen postsocialist present.

Beyond the simple reason of conveniently contextualizing the 1970 model opera film within contemporary culture, I argue that the discourse of nostalgia becomes an emotional vent for the repressed sentiment and resentment in postsocialist reality. On the other hand, the fictionalized fabrication of diasporic subjects bears nostalgic marks, textually reconstructing, legitimizing, and consolidating the CCP’s authority by channeling the (re)imagined past of the Mao era as a trans-temporal bridge over the troubled waters of contemporary society. The remake finds its preordained purpose.

Surprisingly, as soon as we enter the diegetic world at the beginning of the film, the first thing comes into our vision is the title “New York 2015,” accompanied by two aerial shots of cosmopolitan nightfall in New York City and one low-angle establishing shot of Chinatown illuminated by vibrant neon lights. Following the protagonist Jimmy and his suitcase as the camera enters an interior karaoke space, we later find out Jimmy will be relocating to Silicon Valley for his new IT job and his friends are throwing a farewell party on Christmas Eve. The oscillating use of both Mandarin and English in the conversations, tinged with the Americanized bodily gestures of the group of friends, 6 suggests an aura of unsettling, ambiguous and fluid identities that intensifies the nostalgic atmosphere. As one of the friends is ready to take the microphone to sing, we see the karaoke screen unexpectedly interrupted by the opening scene of “Kill the Tiger in the

Mountain” from the original 1970 revolutionary model opera film, in which Yang Zirong

disguised in a bandit costume, strikes poses and rides a horse on the opera stage before the encounter with the tiger. It is not until this point that the real storyline of

Tsui’s film appears on the screen, bringing a realization of what the film is really about.

The fragment of from the 1970 model opera film, positioned as an anachronistic intruder, soon after is cut and superseded by the Western hard-rock music, in contrast to Jimmy’s silent and nostalgic gaze that is still fixated on the karaoke screen (Figure 1).

In Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China, Stephanie Donald characterizes the socialist-realist gaze as “quintessentially anti-individual” and argues that “it belongs to great leaders, and to representatives of collective action. As a trope of narration, it favors the romance of revolution and a heroic future over the intimacy of personal psychology.” 10 Directed to the mythological off-screen space, the socialist realist gaze has been prevalently used in Chinese revolutionary cinema and model opera films as “an ultimately empty signifier that nonetheless seems to anchor the entire symbolic field” in the unrepresentable “sublime Other of ideology.”11 In contrast to the

“socialist realist gaze” in the 1970 model opera film in the socialist era (Figure 2), I argue that “the postsocialist nostalgic gaze” is intrinsically individualized, privatized and even regionalized. In the context of the film, the silent gaze between diasporic subject and

10 Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 62. 11 McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 10-12. Cf. Slavoj Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso Books, 1989). 7 socialist object charged with regional marks is deeply personal and complex, in a way that defies easy verbal articulation. However, being infused and mobilized implicitly with the grand narrative of nation building, the nostalgic gaze also has been strategically exploited and transformed into the reassertion of geographic, psychological and cultural centralities of the Chinese motherland within overseas diasporic communities.

While stuck in traffic on the street in New York City, Jimmy in the following sequence sits in the back of the cab and starts playing the “Kill the Tiger in the

Mountain” scene through the screen on his phone, and then redirects the silent nostalgic gaze from the screen to the window, looking far away. As we are hearing Yang Zirong’s aria “Crossing Sea of Forest, Striding Snowfield” from the 1970 version, the film cuts to the aerial shots of the snow-covered forest in northeastern China with its monochromic white as we enter another diegetic world in 1946 during the Chinese Civil War. It is interesting to note here that the model opera film played on the cell phone screen is presented through Youku, one of the biggest online video sharing and streaming platforms in China. As the personal-grand nostalgic narrative keeps building, the presentation of Youku at this point reflects the state’s ambition to propagate the full- fledged new digital capital as global self-representation that is generative and imaginative, and to offer a digitized sheltering space for nostalgic subjects to immerse themselves in.

Towards the end of the film, Jimmy finally gets back to his hometown and visits his grandmother on Chinese New Year eve. Instead of constructing home as an urbanized residence featuring glass, steel, and concrete as is common in the People’s Republic of

China, the materiality of the represented home is cautiously and selectively comprised of 8 bucolic elements, such as brick, dark-colored wooden furniture and warm glowing lamps, tinged with a nostalgic melancholy and sensibility. Facing the numerous well-prepared traditional home-cooked dishes, Jimmy wonders about the rest of the guests. As the grandmother explains that the guests are family members who visit every year for the

New Year family dinner, we start seeing soldiers of People’s Liberation Army from the diegetic world of 1946 begin to come back, bathed in a luminously white aura and joining

Jimmy and his grandma around the dining table.

When discussing the portrayal of the reemergence of the repressed historical unconscious as specter-like images in Jia Zhangke’s films, Yomi Braester claims that “as the cinematic image returns to reassert itself, it takes spectral forms—ruins, mirrored reflections, and ghostly phantoms. These haunted images convey the resurfacing of repressed collective memory.”12 In the end of The Taking of Tiger Mountain, the ghost, as the actualization of personal and national histories, becomes real. The incarnated socialist apparitions and postsocialist living humans eventually meet and celebrate the transnational and trans-temporal solidarities of the new age, as if they have tacitly achieved a mutual recognition that not only have their disparate social realities been fused and codified into one nationalistic entity, but it also seems that the socialist legacy and generational memories would not easily be exorcised, much like the group of innocuous comrades who keep haunting the present, privatized but nostalgic world of the living in the People’s Republic.

Narrative Schematization

12 Yomi Braester, “The Spectral Return of Cinema: Globalization and Cinephilia in Contemporary Chinese Film,” Cinema Journal. 55, no.l (Fall 2015): 47. 9

Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (1970) is one of the eight so-called “model opera films” (yangbanxi), officially introduced and propagated at the nascence of the

Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76) for the purpose of cultural dictatorship.

Mapping out the quintessential motifs of the model opera films, the recurrent themes include the glorification of the harmonious communal relationship between the People’s

Liberation Army (PLA) and the masses, the Chinese people’s “determined struggle” against the foreign and domestic enemies, as well as the emphasis on Mao Zedong’s decisive leadership and promising blueprint for the ultimate victory of socialism in 1 ^ China. The emphasis on class struggle is prioritized on the opera stage so as to concretize Mao’s theory of “continuing revolution under the proletarian dictatorship.”14

In this spirit, the original model opera film portrays a group of geographically marginalized villagers in northeastern China who have been chronically oppressed and besieged by the bandits based on Tiger Mountain. The villagers are mobilized and unified by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and eventually subdue the gangs and warlords during the Chinese civil war in 1946. Yang Zirong, the main heroic protagonist, who is based on a real-life figure, disguises himself, impersonates a bandit, successfully infiltrates the gang’s hideout and eradicates them in conjunction with the combined forces of the villagers and PLA. The narrative emphasis on the effective mobilization of the masses in the village, as well as the resourcefulness of tactical infiltration in the film,

13 Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense o f Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 36. 14 Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), 220. 10 justifiably reflects and exemplifies the strategic essence of Mao’s own political agenda.

As Nicole Huang claims:

The gist of Mao’s strategy was to shift the Revolution away from urban centers, to infiltrate the vast rural areas of China, to mobilize the impoverished villagers, to generate organized troops from rural uprisings, and to eventually surround the urban areas with the goal of reclaiming them. A peasant uprising led by a proletarian leader was, then, crucial to the success of the Revolution.15

Compared to the standardized characterizations that are borrowed and rendered from

Peking Opera, along with the formulaic aria and narration in the 1970 model opera film, how does the remake reconstruct this narrative differently and what is the significance to it?

Setting the millennial thread of the transnational and nostalgic homecoming trip aside, the reinvention of the opera stage in the postsocialist film, with its computer­ generated imagery (CGI) world, is humanized, individualized, intellectualized, and fetishized in ways that defy either socialist or postsocialist ideologies. The narrative structure and the relationship between characters are complex, interwoven, and yet identifiably archetypal. Instead of showing us the enduring, idealized, and unified relationship between the desperate masses and savior PLA, in the remake, the villagers cast doubt on the capability of PLA as an emancipator in the first place, and not only refuse to partake in the battle with bandits, but prefer a peaceful although subservient relationship with the bandits. As a downright departure from the idolization of communality, reliability, and self-sacrifice in the Mao era, the villagers’ resistance to the war demonstrates an autonomous recognition and adaptability of the circumstantial

15 Nicole Huang, “Azalea Mountain and Late Mao Culture,” The Opera Quarterly. 26, no. 2 (2010): 404. 11 power dynamics infused with the new social and intellectual identity in the postsocialist era.

As such, the introduction of new characters and their intersecting relations further destabilize and invigorate the dynamics of the originally rigid and homogenized opera stage. The narrative foundation of unifying the PLA and villagers in the public sphere is derived from a socialist normalizing structure while the humanized characters charged with personal aspiration and desires constantly test the delimitation of socialist norms in the diegetic world. For instance, the veiled socialist norm becomes quite tangible when the emerging mutual attraction between rescue team nurse Lil’ Dove and the PLA troop captain is sublimated into prosaically attentive care between comrades. On the other hand, the narrative of bandit gangs and Lord Hawk is placed in a semi-private space that is constructed as the inverted counterpart of socialist relations. Here, repressed sexual desires and consuming pleasure are played out. Impersonated by Yu Nan with her striking performance, the character Ma Qinglian was abducted by the bandits and forced to separate from her son who is now under the protection of PLA and villagers. As the only female who resides on Tiger Mountain, Ma Qinglian’s body becomes Lord Hawk’s exclusive property, exploited for his sadistic and sexual pleasure (Figure 3) and is also being fetishized for the subordinate bandits’ voyeuristic pleasure (Figure 4). Her limited mobility is granted through her sexual agency to conduct a fatal seduction on the newcomer to the gang, not only to satisfy Lord Hawk’s sadistic skepticism but also for her own purposes.

The diversified and hierarchized categories of the characters on Tiger Mountain are not only established as the transgressive narrative counterpart distinguished from the 12 socialist normative conditions of the PLA and villagers’ world, the imagined and invented sexual desire, pleasure and practice in the private space also reflects the social relevance of the postsocialist condition where “the domestic and individual pleasures of personal life have at long last returned to mainland Chinese cultural representation with a vengeance... a new psychology of autonomy in which visions of desire and fulfillment have become highly individualized.” 16 In other words, the embrace of intellectual liberation and sexual fantasies as postsocialist indicators find their way into the narrative schema of the remake. Especially through the comparison of characters’ desires, hopes, and the ways in which they communicate and connect with others, the narrative foundation of the PLA and villagers textually and contextually reflects the Zeitgeist of socialism. On the other hand, the gang of bandits responds to the emergence of new social subjects of postsocialist China. In contrast, the narrative of the remake imbricates socialist and postsocialist conditions, and leaves the task of disentangling the heterogeneous and contestable ideological elements for the spectators themselves.

Aesthetic Innovation

Ever since the first Chinese film, The Battle of Dingjunshan (Dingjun Shan,

1905), which features the performance of Peking Opera, the film camera has consistently endowed new forms of life to the Chinese traditional operatic repertoire. The mobilizations of cinematic lenses “contribute to a process of recording, dissemination, and, to a certain extent, standardization” effect, and in return the opera stage offers to

16 McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 216-217. 13

“open up a space of experimentation” 17 for filmic practice which is imbued with traditional artistic quintessence and experience. However, the negotiation between the intrinsically mimetic faculty of film camera, and the theatricality and symbolic expressiveness of operatic stage has never been effortless. As both state officials and artists become acutely aware of new possibilities and manipulative power created through filmic remediation of the Chinese opera stage, numerous reforms have been implemented alongside aesthetic debates and challenges faced by the state, filmmakers, dramatists, performers and stage designers for decades. As Judith Zeitlin notes, the practical

“propensity to repress the local and create a single national standard was taken to the extreme and triumphed during the Cultural Revolution with the creation of the model operas.”18 Meanwhile, most regional operas with heterogeneous forms were repressed and instead the reinvented performance and music styles from archetypal Peking operas were appropriated in order to create the model opera film as the centralized new national

“model”.

Operated and mediated between cinematic and operatic aesthetics, on one hand, the model opera film strategically utilizes the sentimental and familiar aspects of Peking opera tradition to accommodate and educate people since the opera traditionally was a medium that “even the deaf could watch and the blind could listen to.”19 On the other hand, the intrinsic verisimilitude of the cinematic apparatus technologically and aesthetically modernized, standardized, and homogenized the opera stage in a way that

17 Paola Iovene, “Chinese Operas on Stage and Screen: A Short Introduction,” The Opera Quarterly. 26, no. 2 (2010): 190. 18 Judith T. Zeitlin, “Operatic Ghosts on Screen: The Case of A Test of Love,” The Opera Quarterly. 26, no. 2 (2010): 247. 19 Chen Duxiu, Chen Duxiu zhuzuo xuan (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1993), 1:86-90. 14 manipulatively cemented and unified political regimentation. The model opera film “was ultimately one of the genres through which the Communist Party mobilized ‘tradition’ to forge a ‘new humanity.’”20 Not only has a regional art practice (Peking Opera) been integrated and institutionalized in the creative process of the formation of model opera film, the hybridization of consciously incorporated and remodeled foreign musical styles has also partaken in this synthetic creation. Both Elizabeth Wichmann and Barbara

Mittler have pointed out the assimilation of Western musical conventions and theatrical elements in the reification of model opera film. Deconstructing the aria, orchestra, instrument, and musical composition from the 1970 Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy as textual evidence, Barbara Mittler contends that foreign compositional methods and musical conventions, such as European romanticism, have been transplanted in the model opera film practices. She concludes that the Cultural Revolution, “a period in Chinese history that set out to condemn the art and culture of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, actually perpetuated, in the form of model works for the masses, the very musical style that could ironically be called the most apt expression of the ‘bourgeois cult of individualism’ and of the ‘triumph of capitalism.’”21 Coincidently, it is striking to see that the film production schema of the Cultural Revolution era has been appropriated in recent film production for the purpose of not only modernizing, hybridizing and enriching the postsocialist screen of China but also constructing a docile and fluid humanity which serves the manifold and paradoxical postsocialist agendas of the state.

We can see that the appropriation and transformation of traditional Peking Opera and foreign musical conventions become integral constituents of its invention. What,

20 Iovene, “Chinese Operas on Stage and Screen,” 193. 21 Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, 96. 15 then, are the aesthetic characteristics of model opera film? Jason McGrath points out that the film aesthetic has been undergoing irreversible transformations, moving from the critical realism of the left-wing cinema movement during the Republican era (1912-1949) to the socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism of the “seventeen years” period

(1949-66) of the People’s Republic. He uses the term “formalist drift” to trace and dissect the closely synchronized imbrication of ideology and film aesthetics. In this regard, the model opera film (yangbanxi) “represented the final extreme of the formalist drift in

Chinese revolutionary cinema,” 22 not only because of its high stylization of make-up and costume, with the artists “routinely blamed if they tried to use realistic makeup, costumes and props,”23 but also because of the excessive formalization of performance as the manifestation of the “formalization of ideological rhetoric.”24 Although the model opera films attempt to “imbue spectators with a powerful sense of being in the presence of an absolute and sublime ideological Truth,”25 their extreme aesthetic formalization tends to detach them from an identifiable reality or ideological message. Ironically, it is when the

“political determination of artistic form appears to be at its height” that ideology falls

“victim to form itself,” and McGrath therefore suggests that the Cultural Revolution itself

“may have sown the seeds of its own ideological collapse.”26 In the same vein, Paul Clark argues that the culmination of formalism has rendered the model opera film into a superficial ornament with little ideological content: “(style) took over from content, as the banality of much of this cultural production became obvious after years of unrelenting

22 Jason McGrath, “Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema,” The Opera Quarterly. 26, no. 2 (2010): 360. 23 Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 220. 24 McGrath, “Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films”, 372. 25 Ibid., 369. 26 Ibid., 344. 16 posturing... The images became empty of real substance and merely served as a kind of switch to turn on appropriate associations of idealistic sacrifice and heroism.”27

As I too briefly historicize the aesthetic innovation and configuration of early film, opera, and then model opera film, the main purpose is not simply to illustrate the negotiation of aesthetics of the model opera film among cultural regionalism (Peking

Opera), nationalization (ideological formalization), and globalization (appropriation of

Western musical conventions) in the socialist era, but more importantly, to point out that the film practice in The Taking of Tiger Mountain in the postsocialist era might be potentially operating in a comparably schematic way. Unlike the dominant force of aesthetic nationalization in model opera film, Tsui Hark’s remake undoes the homogenized ideological determination of “formalist drift,” recuperates the long- suppressed lives of regional speech and art forms, and self-reflexively balances and negotiates the application of computer-generated imagery (CGI) resulting in the paradox of a consumer-driven spectacle that also draws attention to questions of ideological identification and historical factuality.

In contrast to the eclipse of regionalism in the original model opera film, the foregrounded Northeastern regionality, such as the vernacular dialect and the indigenous folk art song-and-dance duet (er ren zhuan, — A $ f) are restored and also mediated through Tsui Hark’s aesthetic idiosyncrasies in the 2014 remake. Tracing back to as early as the 1980s, Tsui Hark had already practiced his cinematic style and innovation with traditional Peking Opera repertoire in Peking Opera Blues (1986). As an action thriller and a comedy imbued with exuberant visual texture, the film explores the aesthetic

27 Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 257. 17 articulation of the cross-dressing tradition in Peking Opera where males impersonate female roles, along with the creative notion of gender mixing, with female characters cross-dressing as males to then play females onstage.28 The subversion of gender norms through on and off opera stage roles not only elicits transgressive laughter, but also blurs the boundary of reality and the fantastic.

In the case of The Taking of Tiger Mountain, Tsui Hark continues his subversive creation. Elements of Northeastern regionality, including the conventional cross-dressing practice of the Northeastern folkloric song-and-dance duet (er ren zhuan) (Figure 5, 6) as well as the raw, uninhibited, and coarse Northeastern vernacular dialects, are appropriated as the creative foundation for aesthetic regionalization and constructing the carnivalesque world of Tiger Mountain through what Bakhtin calls fantastic/grotesque realism. In the film, the grotesque representation of defecation, attempted copulation, animalization of human body, and the extravagant banquets of lavish food and drinking

(Figure 7, 8) not only “glorify the excessive body that outstrips its own limits and transgresses the norm of decency,” but also “demonstrate the whole remarkable complexity and depth of the human body and its life.”29 Meanwhile, most of the dialogue we hear from the bandits is infused with profanity and obscenity, and is a deliberate exaggeration and vulgarization of Northeastern dialects. The aesthetic regionalization rendered through the carnivalesque form not only elicits transgressive laughter and subversive pleasure, this exaggeration also foregrounds the long-repressed regionalism in cultural discourse. Robert Stam has noted that carnivalesque modes generally involve a

28 Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, “Peking Opera Blues (1986), Tsui Hark,”in Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 791-806. 29 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 167-171. 18 return of the repressed: “In carnival, all that is marginalized and excluded - the mad, the scandalous, the aleatory - take over the center in a liberating explosion of otherness. The principle of material body - hunger, thirst, defecation, copulation - becomes a positively corrosive force.” 30 Arguably, the renewed attention given to Northeastern regional differences in Hark Tsui Hark’s film serves at once to undermine homogeneous notions of nationalism and to allow new, more carnivalesque affective possibilities for audiences, both at home and abroad.

How, then, does globalization negotiate its way in The Taking o f Tiger

Mountain's in 3D screening format? The appropriation and exploitation of Hollywood- based technologies such as CGI, 3D, and IMAX can be dated back to the 1990s when

Hollywood began its reentry into the Chinese market. The immense anxiety and pressure invoked by the box office domination of Titanic (1997) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) resulted in incessant emulation of, and competition with, Hollywood’s technological advancements and spectacular practices. Braester notes that when China “undergoes rapid economic development and social changes, film too is increasingly defined through a discourse of urgency. Policy makers are calling for rapid integration with the global film market. Chinese cinema, much like an Olympic sport, is expected to perform faster, higher, stronger.”31

Produced in different historical times and under different socio-economic conditions, both the model opera film and the remake avail themselves of the discrepant aspirations that the Western world could offer so as to modernize and popularize for their

30 Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 86. 31 Braester, “The Spectral Return of Cinema,” 33. 19 own purposes. Unlike the sublime ideology (nationalization) that pulls aesthetic stylization towards extreme formalism in model opera film, the omnipresent computer­ generated imagery (CGI) representations in postsocialist film practice seem to produce a discordant force similar to “formalist drift,” which disturbs nation-building tendencies.

Vivian Sobchack has contended that the experience of digital special effects contributes to a phenomenological disintegration so that “(living) in such a formally schematized and intertextual metaworld unprecedented in its degree of remove from the materiality of the real world has a significant tendency to liberate the engaged spectator/user from the pull of what might be termed moral and physical gravity.”

In other words, the otherworldly quality of CGI practice potentially results in a disjunction between material reality and formalized fantasy. The CGI’s intrinsic non­ material, formalist, and unidentifiable qualities, I argue, destabilize ideological imposition and delegitimize ideological credibility and identifiability. Moreover, CGI may itself be seen as a cinematic form of the carnivalesque, liberating and emancipating spectators from the physical world of material/referential limitation and socially normative constraints to produce an indeterminate and queer space. To demonstrate this argument, I would point to the two separate narrative endings of The Taking of Tiger

Mountain. The first ending, which employs the simplistic action formula through verisimilitude filter to depict Yang Zirong shooting and killing Hawk, takes about one minute, after which he reunites with the PLA, joyfully celebrating the victory in the dawn. But there is also a second ending that is brought up at the very end of the film and retold through Jimmy’s imagination, where, thanks to the computer-generated imagery,

32 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 154. 20

Hawk and Yang Zirong begin their spectacular four-minute fight on a moving jet and end it when Hawk falls from the cliff and is engulfed in the jet explosion. The first ending, portrayed through the realistic cinematic devices without any CGI rendition, consciously avoids the delegitimizing force of CGI effects by suturing the decisive action sequence with the final victorious celebration and unification with Mao’s surrogate - the People's

Liberation Army (PLA). On the other hand, the unruly and somehow whimsical application of CGI effects of the second ending creates an indeterminate and fantastic space which is in alignment with a market and consumer-driven logic that has been deeply planted in Chinese postsocialist cultural production since Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour of China in 1992. In other words, while the persistent integrating of CGI in postsocialist cinematic practice has, on one hand, served to reinforce the state’s support of market capitalist tendencies, including global image consumption, it has also, on the other hand, tended to undermine the historical legitimacy and ideological operations of the state. Braester has in fact suggested that the dominant blockbuster CGI model violates the actuality of historical consciousness, collective remembrance and self-reflection of mass spectators, observing that:

The Hollywood blockbuster is menacing the film industry and injecting it with an urgency to catch up with global trends. Meanwhile, the figure of history also stalks the cinematic imagination. Many filmmakers feel haunted by past events and images and in response foreground the historical dimension of cinema. Yet the dialectic between future globalization and a suppressed past, between urgency and historicity, between digital special effects and an aesthetics of austerity, springs from a common recognition of a deep-rooted crisis. Given the inevitable indexical failure of the digital image, the act of facing film as a form of historical witnessing is a moral burden and an ethical choice.33

33 Braester, “The Spectral Return of Cinema,” 51. 21

Yet, the implementation of all-encompassing computer-generated imagery (CGI), conniving with the global capitalism, haunts and endangers not only the traditional viewing experience of historical discourse, but also the ideological legitimacy of the

Chinese Communist Party. Here, the allure of cinematic attraction not only seduces spectators, but the state as well. Indeed, Tsui Hark’s remake suggests that the fantastic spaces produced by CGI also have the potential to function as transgressive “queer attractions,” opening the possibility that spectactular image consumption can enable new, more indeterminate affective experiences that are not simply controlled by the state.

Conclusion

Sitting in the movie theatre with my parents and listening to their excited whispers at sharing the history of real-life figure Yang Zirong and to anecdotes of attending screening and film viewing experience of their days, I realize it is the most apt, if not sentimental, time and space for them to access and share the part of their memories of the socialist past that barely leaves any trace on our daily lives. Looking at the model opera film sequence on screen for the very first time not only gave me the opportunity to visit the vision of their youth but also precipitated a tacit understanding and ineffable connection with them, and to that tumultuous and creative passage of time I have not personally experienced.

During an interview, director Tsui Hark talks about his creative intention in remaking the film, noting that he aspired to excavate the eternality of the story from a contemporary perspective. Not only should the political didacticism and slogans be 22 completely removed from the remake, he says, but the reconstruction of characters should also allow intellectual and emotional complexities to concordantly engage, excite, and touch contemporary spectators and filmmakers themselves. Tsui Hark’s creative intention reflects a sheer contrast not only with Western critics’ stated viewing experiences, but also is inconsistent with the diasporic narrative constructed as nationalized nostalgia, which together add to the multifarious interpretive nature of the cinematic text. In alignment with Western critics, one could argue that it is a calculated propaganda film combining a nationalistic message and consumer-driven CGI war epic spectacles in order to attract and accommodate the masses for both patriotic inculcation and profits, which conveniently fall under the existing category of Leitmotif cinema (zhuxuanlii dianying, i W % ff£), “aimed at repackaging (or fetishizing) the founding myth of the

Communist Party and the socialist legacy.” 34 Or, is it a cinematic invitation for sharing a sense of historical sensibility and a calling for resistance and providing a cinematic cure to the postmodern historical amnesia that is especially contagious in younger generations? Or is it a critical reflection on those vivid, universally translatable characters who still firmly hold on to their unyielding courage, tenacity, and perseverance while facing precarious and life-threatening situations, in contrast to the fragile, alienated, fetishized, and materialistic proclivities of modern human beings?

Through the textual and contextual comparisons of narrative schematization and aesthetic innovation between the 1970 model opera film and Tsui Hark’s remake, I have analyzed and contended that the cinematic practice of postsocialist cultural production

34 Zhen Zhang, “Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of ‘Transformation’ (Zhuanxing),” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 23 has undergone a negotiation between regionalism, nationalization, and globalization. As the “Great Northern Wilderness” (Bei da huang, is represented through the primitive sea of forests and pristine snowscapes on screen, it seems that not only does it offer a certain kind of ethnographic attraction for the spectators at home and abroad, but also a degree of narrative and aesthetic regionalization mediated through carnivalesque form that recovers and reinvigorates Northeastern Chinese regional subjectivities. As such, the representation compensates for the region’s marginalized realities, its developmental unevenness and socio-economic inequality, and affords a cinematic consolation for the empty promise of all-encompassing prosperity in postsocialist China.

In addition, I have argued that the continuing exploitation and creative application of

CGI, 3D, and IMAX on contemporary postsocialist Chinese screens projects an implicit ventriloquism of global capitalist commercial viability and visual addiction. This produces indeterminate and queer characteristics that can emancipate spectators from ideological and social constraints, and at the same time, as I indicated above, the intrinsically carnivalesque nature of cinematic CGI operation defies effortless reconciliation with the practices of govemmentality for the purposes of the state. In this sense, the cinematic crisis of historical factuality and authenticity remains unresolved, and would be constantly reactivated, and still contested, in postsocialist cultural production and consumption. 24

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Zhang, Zhen. "Introduction: Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of “Transformation” (Zhuanxing)." In The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, 1-45. Edited by Zhen Zhang. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Figure 1. Jimmy’s nostalgic gaze induced by watching the sequence of model opera film on screen in The Taking o f Tiger Mountain (Bona Film Group, 2014).

Figure 2. The “socialist realist gaze” in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Beijing Film Studio, 1970). Figure 3. Ma Qinglian is being punished for the sake of Lord Hawk’s sadistic pleasure in The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Bona Film Group, 2014).

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Figure 4. One of Lord Hawk’s subordinates enjoys voyeuristic pleasure in The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Bona Film Group, 2014). 28

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Figure 5. The cross-dressing practice of the Northeastern folkloric song-and-dance duet (er ren zhuan) tinged with grotesque realism in The Taking o f Tiger Mountain (Bona Film Group, 2014).

Figure 6. The cross-dressing practice of the Northeastern folkloric song-and-dance duet (er ren zhuan) tinged with grotesque realism in The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Bona Film Group, 2014). 29

Figure 7. The eamivalization of the banquet in The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Bona Film Group, 2014).

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Figure 8. The extravaganza of drinking scene in The Taking o f Tiger Mountain (Bona Film Group, 2014).