The contribution of Women Film-directors to Chinese cinema : a brief
summary
Before
everything else, I would like to tell you how excited I’m feeling today
… Twenty years ago, I arrived as a student at Fudan University in
Shanghai to continue my studies on Chinese cinema that I had started
three years earlier in Italy.
Some
months later, I wrote my first article for the journal Zhongwai Funü
(Chinese and Foreign Women): it described the role of women in
Chinese films. At the time, I was far from thinking that twenty years
later I would be taking part in such an important seminar! Therefore, it
has been quite natural to me to seize this opportunity to resume a
subject that in a way recalled my first article. That’s why I have
decided to bring up again the role of women in Chinese cinema… But this
time, I am not going to refer to the abstract role of women, but to
women that have truly existed, especially women film makers that by
their character, their intuition or simply by their talent have had a
considerable role during these 100 years of… electric shadows!
Much has
been written on this subject, this article does not claim to add
something new to a subject already superbly discussed by Dai Jinhua,
Chris Berry, Anne Kaplan and so on; I will highlight for each of the
persons I have selected, their genuine contribution to the cinema made
for women and by women.
I would
like to start by a very singular woman: Peng Jianping, mainly known
under the alias Wang Haolun. She does not need much introduction… Her
name is mostly connected to a film of Zhang Shichuan Gu er jiuzu ji
(The Orphan rescues Grandfather, 1923), the first authentic Chinese
feature film, at the time Wang Haolun was only twenty years old and was
in the leading role. What I would like to stress here is not her
performance as an actor, but her extremely independent character. As a
matter of fact, after the success of her first film, Wang Haolun chose
to break up with her family, which could not stand that she had sunk to
the level of a simple actor (xizi) and also divorced her husband.
What
today would be considered like a banal gossip, was at the time a real
act of revolution: in leaving her two families, Wang Haolun cast forth a
double challenge: break up with the ancestral tradition (what woman
would dare leave her family and her husband at that time?) to make a
name for herself as a woman in the frivolous and misogynous environment
of the cinema…
In spite
of all the success achieved in the subsequent years, during which she
starred in about ten films, Wang was not satisfied because she was
perfectly conscious that she was only playing insignificant cliché
roles. She was in fact nicknamed “The small widow” (because she
almost always played that role) or “The
fountain” due to her talent to cry whenever needed in the screenplay.
But how to change the rules in an environment where movies were only
made for commercial needs, to make money for the producers and left
almost nothing to artists and actors? It is there that Wang Haolun had
the idea to make a film mainly on her own, from A to Z. By the time, she
had enough money and connections in the environment of the cinema
to be able to create her own production company, The Hanlun Film
Company.
Then in
1926, she went ahead and purchased the rights to Bao Tianxiao’s script
Mangmu de aiqing (Blind Love) ; she produced the film,
played the leading role and asked the director Bu Wancang to direct the
film. Not being satisfied with the result, she bought her own movie
projector and edited the film all by herself during two months. Then,
she took the film on the road and showed it to audiences throughout
China and asked the public for their feedback.
Why do I
mention this film? Not because of the originality of the subject, since
it does not differ from the simple and over-melodramatic films she
always starred in. Nor for the artistic contribution of the
Hanlun company to other productions at that time, since Wang Haolun soon
shut down her company and became like other typical and short-lived
producers of that period.
Nonetheless, I believe that a woman who decided in the 1920s to chose
her own role in her private live as well as on the movie screen, shows a
good deal of originality and aspiration to freedom.
That’s
why, although I am somewhat perplexed about her artistic side, still I
want to mention Wang Haolun as the first Chinese woman film director who
“dared”.
In fact
Chinese women film makers have always dared to be innovative, they have
been able to look further than the screenplay, to offer a portrait of
women or simply of the individual closer to reality.
I think,
for example, of Zhang Nuanxin, one of the pioneers of modern Chinese
cinema. In the very well-known article “The Modernization of Cinema
Language”, written together with her husband, the writer and critic Li
Tuo, she examines the notion of cinema of author and documental realism.
Her first film Sha Ou (1981) as her second film Qingchun
ji (Sacrifice of the youth, 1985) represent the
most brilliant realization of her reflections on the subject. It
has been widely discussed, and quite rightly, how Zhang Nuanxin has
developed the feminine characters in a more subjective way than her
colleagues.
For
example, in the film Ode to the Youth, she describes with great
sensibility the desires and the feelings of the main character with the
help of the narrative voice that strengthens the subjective side. But
personally, in this same film, I prefer to stress the tenderness and the
respect Zhang Nuanxin put in filming the comparison between the two
different cultures, the Han and the Dai, in breaking once and for all
with the widespread discrimination that had, up to then, marked the
films on ethnic minorities.
Keeping
her own Chinese cultural identity, the young Han girl is captured by the
culture of the ethnic minority Dai that Zhang Nuanxin highlights without
the use of exoticism.
Far from
seeing in foreign cultures a threat to Chinese culture,
Zhang Nuanxin points out the contrary, the wealth of mutual
exchange that can come out of such comparison : this is an example of
tolerance and openness of mind well ahead of its time, that the film
director left as an inheritance to future generations.
Another striking aspect to be noted with
Zhang Nuanxin and other Chinese women directors is that their reflection
on feminism is quite different than their European colleague in the same
period. In particular, the film director Huang Shuqin, in a
interview published in “The journal of Beijing Academy”,
declared that in 1978 she had the intention to make a film on Yang
Kaihui and the couple Xiang Zhangyu and Cai Hesun
issued from the 1919 May 4th Movement. But she
changed her mind because, as she said, I quote : “(…) The
history, the society is not as simple as we imagine.
(…) I interviewed many people at that
time. At that moment, I felt they were so great, in the old system, that
society, that corrupt society, it was difficult for them to survive.
They were animated by such a strong fighting spirit! They were the first
new woman generation. Only with a problem: how will you do after having
a baby? Who will be responsible for the child? This situation is quite
different from the ideas of the first revolutionary generation. All of
these problems were different from what I had imagined before I set off.
So at that moment I felt it was difficult for me to deal with….”
At a
time, when films in the West were giving more power to feminist
subjects, Huang Shuqin, without playing down the important
feminist movements in China or in other parts of the world, seemed as
she was already asking herself questions on their too monolithic aspect.
Her attitude suggests the idea that equality is far from being achieved,
men have less duties than women, but one should maybe begin to admit
these differences to be able to progress, because the equality of
everybody resides in the respect of the differences of each and every
person. In other words, woman cannot evolve unless man evolves too; in
order to achieve true emancipation, the stereotypes man-woman must be
abandoned in equal measure, otherwise all tentatives will be bound to
fail.
In this
perspective, the choice of Huang Shuqin and the other Chinese women
directors of not really dissociating the revendication of women from
those of men and rather talking simply in terms of evolution of the
individual, could be interpreted as some sort of renewed feminism that
still does not arrive at imposing itself completely in the Western
world, where due to the fraying of the links between “social” and
“political”, the renewal of feminist critical theories, in real life as
well as in the cinema, is late to arrive.
It is hard, however, to be certain about
such a reading that relies perhaps on an unique and special way to see
their films but it could open up some more perspectives in this field.
In any
case, that does not prevent Chinese female directors to deal with
subjects in their films more closely linked to the feminist cause. Like
the director Li Shaohong, for example, that in her film Xue se
qingchen (Bloody morning,1990) denounced the rules of
traditional Chinese marriage according to which the family of the boy
put forth a sum of money as a dote to acquire his future wife, which
equals to a contemptuous form of buying a woman. Or also the
rehabilitation of prostitutes in Hong fen (Blush, 1994). In her
second last film, Lian ai zhong de bao ber (Baober in love,
2004), Li Shaohong opens another debate on the feminin question : how to
keep a feminine identity in the new millennium face to economic
developments that, in China (like elsewhere, indeed…) make a pressure on
souls. Baober (played by Zhou Xun) is depicted as a young and romantic
girl, fearful of living in a rapidly changing society and tortured in
her heart by the traumas of change, while yearning at the same time for
passionate love. This very original fairy tale on contemporary anxiety
is based also on the technical and imaginative virtuosity of Li Shaohong
and confirms the fact that in China the revival of cinema, including the
technique and contents, passes often and easily through Women directors.
Today,
Woman directors of the new generation use their female sensibility to
investigate on the extremely complex connections that are characteristic
of very intimate relations, like the one between parents and their
children, for example father and daughter in the film Wo he baba
(Me and dad, 2003) of Xu Jinlei, or mother and daughter in
Shijie shang zui feng de na ge ren qu le (Gone is the one who held me
dearest in the world, 2002) of Ma Xiaoying.
It is
still too early to be able to judge the contribution that this new
generation of women directors will bring to Chinese cinema, but from the
first results attained, it is not premature to affirm that in China the
cinema of… “the other half of heaven “has not finished yet to take us by
surprise…
Luisa
PRUDENTINO, December 2005
