Junting Zhang, 2015 HERO and the Chinese Cultured Blockbuster: Visual Style, Vernacular Tradition, and Commercial Strategies Thesis Utrecht University ISBN: 978-90-393-6365-2 Cover design by Zha Yiyun, Faculty of Art and Design, University of Lapland Layout by Junting Zhang 1 HERO and the Chinese Cultured Blockbuster: Visual Style, Vernacular Tradition, and Commercial Strategies HERO en de Chinese Blockbuster: visuele stijl, volkse tradities, en commerciële strategieën (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) 《英雄》和中国“文化”商业大片：视觉风格、中国文化和商业策略 （附中文简介） 2 Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof.dr. G. J. van der Zwaan, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 12 juni 2015 des middags te 4.15 uur door Junting Zhang geboren op 20 juni 1984 te Yantai, Provincie Shandong, China 3 Promotoren: Prof. dr. F. E. Kessler Prof. dr. A.S Lehmann This thesis was partly accomplished with financial support from the China Scholarship Council. 4 Content Introduction 1 I. Methodology: A Film Hisotry and Hisotrical Poetics 2 II. Theoretical Frameworks: Spectacle and Excess Moments 12 III. Outline of the Dissertation 23 Chapter 1: Cinema and Industry in Transition 26 I. Blockbuster: the Story Begins 28 II. Existing Discourse on HERO and on Chinse Blockbus 33 III. Contextualization 42 IV. The Constitution of Chinese Blockbuster Industry 50 V. The Presold Nostalgic China: Cultured Blockbuster 61 Chapter 2: Dancing to the Visual Rhythm 66 I. Historical Context of Martial Arts Films 68 II. The “Hollywood-ized” Martial Arts Genre 84 III. “Hollywood-ized” and “Hong Kong-ified”: Martial Arts Genre in Chinese Blockbuster Era 104 IV. Conclusion 111 Chapter 3: Contemplating the Female: Body and Costume 113 I. A Controversial Movies or a Dysfunctional Framework 115 II. The Visual Apparatus of Body 118 III. An Additional Cinematic Attraction: the Costume 128 IV. Facilitate the Reading in the Context 133 V. Discussion 140 Chapter 4: Shaping the Imaginary World 142 I. The Excess of the Establishing Shot 146 II. The Landscape: Cinematic Attraction and Tourism Attraction 159 III. Primitive China versus Mythological China: Painting and Other Visual Traditions 166 IV. Digital Compositing: Composing the Chinese Landscape 175 V. Digitalizing Traditional Aesthetics 181 VI. Conclusion 188 5 Chapter 5: Shaping the Imaginary World 190 I. Cinematic Landscape 192 II. Marketing Blockbusters by Marketing Tourism 200 III. Envelopment and Illusions of an Imaginary China 208 IV. Hengdian: Merchandising and Franchise 216 VI. Conclusion 231 Conclusion 233 Bibliography 239 Summery 281 6 Introduction The initial idea of the research project first came to me in China in 2006, when I was immersed in Zhang Yimou’s controversial movie CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. That day, two of my best friends and I were discussing about going out and doing some girls’ things together, until one of us suggested we could go to the movie CURSE. So we decided to go to the multiplex for the movie that was all over the Chinese media then. The movie was scheduled in the evening but we spent a whole day in the multiplex. We went shopping and enjoyed afternoon tea there. Then we bought the tickets, and entered with cola and popcorn, which came in containers adorned with the costumed figures from the film. After the movie we had manicures, inspired by the extravagant nail decorations Gong Li had in the film. This cinema experience was quite different from what I had experienced before. Until I went to high school, going to the cinema was part of the country’s patriotic education system, organized by elementary or middle schools. And sometimes my father, who worked for the government, got tickets. Back then there were no multiplexes. The cinema theatre in our neighborhood had only one screen and no shops. During the screenings there were only a handful of small traders selling drinks and snacks. Sitting in the comfortable chair and amazed by the spectacular scenes of lavish costumes, massive armies, blood, fighting, and sumptuous palaces, I realized that a significant transition had occurred in Chinese cinema. This transition had taken place on a large scale, involving almost every department related to Chinese cinema. It is reflected in more than the highly spectacular film images. For Chinese cinema, not only how it looks, but also the ways in which it is produced, distributed, consumed and even perceived are changing. It is not exaggerated to assert that even before the premiere of the film CURSE, Chinese cinema had evolved into a radically different object and that Chinese consumers, especially the young generation such as my friends and I, had acknowledged the transformation of Chinese cinema. Although I was also flooded with news 1 covering Chinese films going international and Oscar nominations, I hadn’t made connections between these phenomena. At that time my curiosity was about what was going on in Chinese cinema and what had caused the transformation. This has motivated my interest in Film Studies and my PhD project. This research is an investigation into these two issues, and is thus an attempt to record a Chinese film history from 2002 to 2012. I. Methodology: A Film History and Historical Poetics Writing THE history of Chinese cinema, even for just a certain period of time, is from my point of view an impossible mission. As asserted by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell in their introductory work of film history, there is no “essential” film history, “grand narrative” or “Big Story” that “puts all the facts into place” nor “accounts for all events, causes, and consequences.”1 They argue that the variety of film theories and methods lead to diverse and dissenting conclusions and perspectives.2 Writing film history is considered a big tent housing people who work from various perspectives and with different interests and purposes.”3 In recent years, a variety of recognized schools in Film Studies have all devoted efforts to write THE film history from their own point of view, resulting in a variety of film histories from many perspectives, including phenomenological, feminist, Marxist, political-economic and psychoanalytic. Chinese cinema historiography is dominated by histories taking political-economic, psychoanalytic and post-colonial perspectives. This dissertation takes the perspective of Bordwell and his methodological framework of “Historical Poetics” to attempt to record the history of the Chinese blockbuster between 2002 to 2012 in the context of Chinese cinema’s industrialization and globalization. As we have discussed, this perspective is relatively new in the discussion of the Chinese blockbuster, and even more so the Historical Poetics evoked by David Bordwell as “a response to the 1 Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 2. 2 Ibid. 3 Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, 3rd ed., international ed. (Boston [etc.]: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2010), XIV. 2 overdetermination of what he refers to as the ‘Grand Theory’ of the 1960s and 1970s,”4 to which schools subscribing to such frameworks as psychoanalysis and post-colonialism pertain to. According to Bordwell: In the academic setting of the 1970s, and with the crucial influence of French Structuralism and Poststructuralism, film theory became Theory. Here was a comprehensive account of representation in which film took its place as one signifying system among many. Unlike classical film theory, Grand Theory constituted a large-scale account of how signifying systems constructed subjectivity within society.5 Bordwell repeatedly and clearly indicates that his framework of Historical Poetics is not a method. He defines “methods” as attempts to understand texts by “applying a variety of doctrines”, such as those “a phenomenologist or a Lacanian, a follower of deconstruction or poststructuralism or cultural studies” subscribes to.6 With regard to Grand Theory, Bordwell has been suspicious of its wide-range applicability: If I am bent on substantiating the belief that every film constructs an ongoing process of “subject positioning” for the spectator, nothing I find in a film will disconfirm it. Given the roomy interpretive procedures of film criticism, I can treat every cut or camera movement, every line of dialogue or piece of character behavior, as a reinforcement of subject positioning. The theory thus becomes vacuous, since any theory that explains every phenomenon by the same mechanism explains nothing.7 Answering these concerns, Bordwell establishes his own framework of Historical Poetics for approaching film history. It is outlined in a number of his works, including “Historical Poetics of Cinema”, Making Meaning, Poetics of Cinema and 4 Felicia Chan, “In Search of a Comparative Poetics: Cultural Translatability in Transnational Chinese Cinemas” (PhD, University of Nottingham, 2007), 40, http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/386/. 5 David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Harvard University Press, 1997), 140. 6 David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 11. 7 David Bordwell, “Historical Poetics of Cinema,” in The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, ed. R. Barton Palmer (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 380. 3 put into practice in Film History, Film Art, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, and The Classical Hollywood Cinema.8 Bordwell describes the framework of Historical Poetics