In the land of cinema, China is perhaps the only country that remains relatively uncharted, and it might have remained so if not for the Fifth Generation of filmmakers that emerged in the 1980s. But to arrive at the gates of it, China has struggled with decades of oppression which left lives shattered, and cinema hardly had the able lungs to breathe.
From the first showing of a Lumiere brothers film in Shanghai in 1896, to the indigenous production of The Battle of Dingjunshan, the first film in 1905, China has had a turbulent relationship with moving images. And being a filmmaker in China has always been a difficult proposition. Cinema’s inception and evolution in the past 100 years has also coincided with the country’s tempestuous idea of being a nation state: facing invasion and mass revolution, and continuously trying to assert its individuality in the last century.
The rise of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution that he set into motion led to a virtual standstill in every aspect of art. Cinema was no exception. Whatever remained was strictly aligned to the strict political ideology of the State, leaving cinema with no option than to become purely propagandistic.
In the reforms post-Mao China, the Beijing Film Academy -- China's national film school -- reopened for the first time in 1978. Four years later, 153 students – dubbed as the Fifth Generation – graduated, soaked in the teachings of rich cinema traditions. Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984) began a movement that got accelerated consequently by his comrades Zhang Yimou and Tian Zhuangzhuang. They made films that swept top prizes at coveted film festivals and the world became aware of the volcano that was dormant for decades. All of a sudden, China was everywhere.
All the films of this tradition are defined by symbolism, and a defiant attitude to have a dialogue with the country’s stormy past. In contrast to the heroic military deeds of cinema of the earlier generation, the Fifth Generation’s works celebrated the struggle of the common man in rich colours measured by long shots. Kaige’s 1993 film, Farewell My Concubine , one of the definitive works of this school, illustrates this break by following two friends for five decades.
We begin with a beautiful child being taken to an opera school by his prostitute mother. So desperate is she that when the school rejects him for possessing six fingers, she chops off the extra one without second thoughts. The opera school is tyrannical in its training, and merciless in its drive to turn innocent ducklings into swans of grand opera. In tears of cruelty, this boy, Dieyi, abandoned to his fate, finds a protective friend in a sturdy boy named Xiaolou.
But Dieyi’s modification is not only limited to bidding goodbye to his finger: he is soon made to train for female roles, but he fumbles in his lines, ‘I am by nature a girl, not a boy’, substituting ‘boy’ for ‘girl’. This invites pure wrath from the masters. Even Xiaolou, his dear friend, forces a pipe down his throat when this fumbling puts the troupe’s future in danger in front of a visiting patron. Blood dripping out of his mouth, Dieyi gets the line correct. With the passage of time, both friends become opera stars, and Dieyi plays the concubine dedicated to Xiaolou’s king, a reflection of their yin and yang dynamic offstage. Dieyi loves Xiaolou: he has for as long as he can remember. It’s only onstage that Dieyi can freely adore his object of desire. Offstage, he is unable to acknowledge this fact, forever burning in the pyre of unrequited love.
Xiaolou’s marriage to Juxian (the enchanting Gong Li), a prostitute, shatters Dieyi. Ensnared by jealousy, he embarks on an affair with the satrap of the ruling Japanese government. Blending the personal with the political, the film makes a historical sweep as we traverse through key periods of Chinese history ― the Warlord Era, Japanese invasion, the communist age and the Cultural Revolution. It’s the horror of the political upheaval that changes the equation of the characters as they grow in and out of each other, and betrayal becomes the only option for survival.
There is a very stark representation of feminine conflict in the film. Most Fifth Generation films empower women. These female characters display an unwillingness to submissively accept rigid social order of the Chinese society; predominantly defined by marriage. Gong Li who played many such emancipated characters in Zhang Yimou’s films plays an outcast in Farewell My Concubine , a woman who seeks acceptance in mainstream society through marriage.
On the other hand, Dieyi, despite being a man, is altered to play the role of the opposite gender, albeit metaphorically, even as he struggles with his love for another man. China’s terrible compromise of human dignity for political jingoism is trapped in this character of Dieyi, played with manic passion by Leslie Cheung, the iconic Hong Kong star. Dieyi is constantly asked to change to fit into a certain role, and is forced to go through physical and emotional changes without his consent. His finger gets chopped off, he suffers oppressive training shedding blood and tears, he gets pushed into female roles, he suffers rape, and also stumbles accidentally into motherhood when he adopts a baby. Dieyi becomes the personification of China; they both go through a ceaseless process of changing identity.
In totality, the film has a bewitching effect. Its admiration around the world made the Chinese authorities happy. That was until they became increasingly aware of the subversion in the politics of images, which became the hallmark of the cinema of Kaige and his classmates. Several of the class of 1982 suffered humiliations during the Cultural Revolution – Kaige was forced to denounce his own father. This anger led the filmmakers re-examine the Chinese heritage in their cinema, but they had to find a way to get past the censorship of the state – an act to both celebrate the national distinctiveness and yet condemn its horrors.
Kaige hails Chinese opera through Dieyi and Xiaolou’s ascent and descent. The film’s critical eye starting with the personal, gradually extends to the whole system, all captured in a visual sweep that is ambitious in scope, and intimate in detailing. Kaige uses allegory in every corner to mirror his implacable rage, to grasp the effects of the past on the future of China but refrains from offering any easy solution.
In the deep-sea of politics, it’s love that ultimately gets abandoned for the much easier option of hatred. But Dieyi for all his jealousies and insecurities, never forgets the ability to love, even if he is still searching for his true self within the web of befuddled gender. In our world of hate mongering and flag hoisting for the power of nation state, Dieyi is someone who can show us the way to love, so what if it is thwarted.
Top 5 of the Fifth Generation
Yellow Earth (1984)
Red Sorghum (1987)
Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
The Blue Kite (1993)
To Live (1994)
The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise; he tweets @RanjibMazumder
The article has been extensively edited to remove errors
