Session 73: Formal Contents: High Cultural Borrowings in and of Popular Chinese Cinemas

Organizer: Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota

Chair: Xiaobing Tang, University of Chicago

Discussant: Carlos Rojas, University of Florida

Keywords: film, modernism, popular culture, globalization.

This panel explores the crossing of boundaries between popular Chinese cinemas and high art forms in cinematic practice and the implications such appropriations have for both Chinese and cross-cultural politics. Several recent Chinese films, for example, borrow in various ways from elite or avant-garde culture in terms of form (the use of experimental or modernist stylistic techniques) or content (the injection of serious cultural introspection into audience-pleasing entertainment cinema) to create postmodern hybrids of elite and popular cultures. The result is a middle-brow aesthetics in which popular culture obtains a measure of artistic legitimacy while more serious artists gain the opportunity to broadcast their ideas to a broader audience. In an opposite movement, mainstream culture and media can be subverted through ironic quotation in an avant-garde aesthetic and political discourse. In many cases, the mixing of high and low is accompanied by a process of cross-cultural translation. Thus a low-brow Hong Kong martial-arts film is transformed into elite cultural irony and political commentary in Europe; or, in the case of recent Chinese cinema, cinematic formalism is borrowed from abroad and sprinkled into popular domestic films. The results offer rich suggestions regarding cultural geopolitics and shifting distributions of cultural capital and discursive power from periods of political radicalism in China and the West to the current age of global capitalist hegemony. The panel presents a series of unique configurations of the variables elite/popular, form/content, and foreign/domestic, not erasing but rather problematizing those distinctions and exploring their tensions.

Pop Art Conscience? Middle-Brow Aesthetics in the Film/Novel Cell Phone

Robin Visser, University of North Carolina

Whether met with apologia or stigmatization, the escalating integration of aesthetic production with commodity production in the PRC is consistent with postmodern cultural trends elsewhere. China’s most successful commercial director, Feng Yiaogang, satirizes this phenomenon in films such as Big Shot’s Funeral (2001) even while capitalizing on heavy corporate sponsorship. While his 1990s collaborations with popular writer Wang Shuo seemed natural—the irreverent parodies of both artists aimed categorically at profit—in Cell Phone (2003) Feng partners with Liu Zhenyun to create a middle-brow work that, not unlike 1920s Butterfly Literature, injects ethical and social consciousness into entertainment art. Unlike many acclaimed authors from the 1980s, Liu Zhenyun had remained aloof from commercial collaborations until his recent entree into television drama with the adaptation of his novella Chicken Feather’s Everywhere. For Cell Phone, at Feng’s insistence Liu took the unprecedented step of adapting his screenplay into a novel, the latter published in December of 2003 to correspond with the film’s release. Feng’s marketing strategy provided Liu with one of his best-selling works, allowing his philosophical reflections on the relationship of modernity to truthful discourse to reach a broader audience. Conversely, Liu’s previous work, an esoteric four-volume novel eight years in the making, is "respected for his professional piety but rarely read." In turn, Liu’s screenplay for Cell Phone introduced sensitive social issues into Feng’s repertoire, inducing unprecedented introspection and heated debate among his film audiences. In this paper I examine the critical possibilities and impasses of such middle-brow aesthetics.

The New Formalism: Mainland Chinese Cinema at the Turn of the Century

Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota

With the turn of the century a new wave of mainland Chinese cinema has appeared, telling unpredictable and often playful stories in a formally experimental style, with frequent use of techniques such as fast- and slow-motion, changes in lens length, special effects, and puzzling narrative flashbacks and flash-forwards. These films blur the boundary between popular and art-house cinemas, and their extent of formalist play, often lacking in obvious plot motivation, is unprecedented in the history of popular cinema in the People’s Republic. The new trend is no doubt in part a reaction against the somber historical allegories of the Fifth Generation as well as the ascetic realism of the independent films of the 1990s. However, these films also reveal a new level of transnational and transregional stylistic borrowing in Chinese cinema in the age of a globalized cultural economy. With such obvious touchstones as Wong Kar-wai’s jazzy, aestheticized depictions of contemporary urban life in Hong Kong as well as certain middle-brow European art films such as Wings of Desire and Amelie, the new formalism in Chinese cinema indicates a new level of style-as-detachable-commodity, in which forms with origins in modernist or art-house practice become decontextualized and transferable as stylistic quotations to give at least a superficial hipness and vitality to films that might otherwise be banal and unoriginal. Given such a mass-cultural commodification of modernist form, the new formalism arguably represents the first large-scale appearance of postmodernist filmmaking by mainland Chinese studios.

Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

Robert Chi, SUNY at Stony Brook

We usually understand the cross-cultural life of recent Chinese cinema in terms of how films are made or how films are viewed by others once they are made. But what happens when reception turns into production, that is, when an already made Chinese film is renewed in the manner of the ready-made? This is the question posed by the film "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?" (Rene Vienet, France, 1973). The film is one of the few known and still extant examples of the Situationist proposal of "detournement," the subversion of mainstream culture and media. Following Guy Debord’s suggestion, this film replaces the original dialogue soundtrack of the kung fu film "The Crush" (Tu Guangqi, Hong Kong, 1972) with a French dialogue soundtrack. It thereby rewrites the original story of a lone Chinese kung fu hero who saves a school of Koreans under Japanese colonial oppression into a satirical demonstration of class struggle, cultural revolution, and post-May 1968 intellectual politics. In this way "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?" bridges several sets of issues. First, the film translates two different problematics into each other: on the one hand, mass culture, media, and ideology; and on the other hand, colonialism and regionalism. Second, that translation takes place in terms of formal features such as genre conventions, language, and sound-image interactions. Third, if the result is irony, and if irony is the simultaneous and conscious coexistence of contradictory positions, then the coexistence that the film depends on is a specifically cross-cultural one.