520 Featured Reviews humanism and reflection on war, the repression and exclusion of Chinese people inherent in the Japanese soldier’s viewpoint, and the fragmented expression of image and space, are all in some way the result of this compression of historical space. At the same time, taken together, they also form a concrete symbol of this film’s aesthetic landscape. It is not only Lu Chuan’s thirst for “transcendence” and “restoration” that lies, unfulfilled, behind these “compressions” and “symbols”—it is easy to believe that they are also carefully concealing a superficial and defective view of history. The most direct reflection of the latter in City of Life and Death is its rough handling of its chosen historical era. To quote from Mao Jian’s evaluation: Lu Chuan still “thinks that history means specifying the year 1937 and reading two paragraphs of John Rabe’s diary.”9 Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, audiences once again saw this naïveté from Lu Chuan in his new historical drama, The Last Supper. In this sense, transforming a historical era into space, which is in turn expressed as a kind of aesthetic landscape, is perhaps the greatest crisis to strike Chinese screens in the last ten years. Zhang Yimo’s Hero and The Flowers of War, Chen Kaige’s The Promise and Forever Enthralled—even The Founding of a Republic and Beginning of the Great Revival, which narrate the history of modern China—all these films can be seen as further evidence of this crisis. The flaws apparent in the films of Lu Chuan’s generation make it clear that at least some of their number are still moving very much within the orbit of these fifth generation Chinese directors—and that furthermore, on that wide road, they have not yet made it very far.

Bo Cai East China Normal University E-mail: [email protected]

The Film Back to 1942 —From Investigative Reporting to the Absurd10 DOI 10.3868/s010-002-013-0032-6

Back to 1942, directed by Feng Xiaogang and scripted by Liu Zhenyun, has been a box-office success and drawn rave reviews from the media. On December 9, 2012, a forum on the film was organized at the Institute of Film, Television and Theatre of Peking University where it won enthusiastic plaudits from the experts.

9 Mao Jian, “San shi ba sui de Zhongguo nanren,” 2009. 10 Translated by Shi Xiaojing. Featured Reviews 521

This seems to show that the film has been both a commercial and critical success. So what kind of a film is it? The movie is an adaptation of the 1993 novel Remembering 1942, written by Liu Zhenyun. In the year of 1942, a huge famine ravaged the province of Henan, causing three million people to starve to death. The novel takes the form of an investigation into the disaster to reconstitute the history of those terrible times. The text is a combination of interviews with survivors, excerpts from historical records and a narrator commentary, hence its classification as “investigative literature” and not fiction. The author’s intention is to get closer to the historical truth by supplementing “official reports” with the “oral recollections” of ordinary survivors. The narrator commentary tries to reveal the historical reality of public apathy towards the disaster that has been “forgotten,” as well as the fact that the refugees and their plight weighed very little in the political considerations of Chiang Kai-shek at the time. However, in spite of this combined structure, the narrator neither highlights the role of the people to eventually “control their fate,” nor does he criticize the reactionary government’s total disregard for the suffering of the victims. On the contrary, it is these very concepts that become the objects of his irony. This attitude towards the past is linked to the rejection in the 1990s of how revolutionary history has been reported. In other words, the narrator has cast aside a revolutionary historical outlook, but has yet to form a clear one of his own. The result is a messy patchwork of pieces from the past, all treated with the narrator’s “black humor.” In this way, the suffering of the refugees becomes utterly meaningless, and the novel shifts from investigative reporting into the absurd. The film too has pretty much followed this same logic and view of history. In the process of turning the novel’s written representations into visual ones, the film has first eliminated the narrator with his inquiries and interviews. Excerpts from them and the historical record have been adapted and rearranged into the scenario, and a great deal of dramatic plot twists, details, and scenes have been added. However, this has not done away with the original fragmented narration. Five main storylines can be identified: the exodus of refugees as personified in the family of Old Master and his tenant farmers Shuanzhu and Xialu; Chiang Kai-shek’s attitude towards the famine; the American reporter Theodore Harold White interviews and news reports; the attitude of foreign missionaries and Chinese converts, and the hypocrisy and ineffectiveness of the church; the ferocious bombing of the refugees by the Japanese invaders and their deceitful famine relief. These five storylines alternate back and forth in vivid visual fragments, pieced together in long or short sequences, but without ever becoming a complete structured historical account. This distinctive form of narration is based on two features. First, it adopts the tactic of all “catastrophe movies” of creating sensational and shocking effects,