Global Chinese Cinema
The film Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou and released in 2002, is widely regarded as the first globally successful indigenous Chinese blockbuster. An expensive film with multiple stars, spectacular scenery and astonishing action sequences, it touched on key questions of Chinese culture, nation and politics, and was both a domestic sensation and an international hit. This book explores the complexities for the film’s popularity with its audiences, discussing the factors that so stimulated those who watched the film. It examines questions such as Chinese national unity, the search for cultural identity and role models from China’s illustrious pre-communist past, the portrayal of political and aesthetic values, and attitudes to gender, sex, love and violence, which are relatively new to China. The book demonstrates how the film, and China’s growing film industry more generally, have in fact very strong international connections, with Western as well as Chinese financing, stars recruited from the East Asian region more widely and extensive interactions between Hollywood and Asian artists and technicians. Overall, the book provides fascinating insights into recent developments in Chinese society, popular culture and cultural production. Gary D. Rawnsley is Professor of Asian International Communications and Director of the Institute of Communications Studies, , UK. Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley is Research Fellow at the Institute of Communications Studies, , UK. Their most recent jointly edited publications include Political Communications in Greater China: The Construction and Reflection of Identity (also published by Routledge) and Critical Security, Democratisation and Television in Taiwan.
Routledge Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia Series Editor: Stephanie Hemelryk Donald University of Sydney Editorial Board: Devleena Ghosh, University of Technology, Sydney; Yingjie Guo, University of Technology, Sydney; K.P. Jayasankar, Unit for Media and Communications, Tata Institute of Social; Sciences, Bombay; Vera Mackie, University of Melbourne; Anjali Monteiro, Unit for Media and Communications, Tata Institute of Social; Sciences, Bombay; Laikwan Pang, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Gary Rawnsley, ; Ming-Yeh Rawnsley, University of Leeds; Adrian Vickers, University of Sydney; Jing Wang, MIT. The aim of this series is to publish original, high-quality work by both new and established scholars in the West and the East, on all aspects of media, culture and social change in Asia. 1 Television Across Asia Television industries, programme formats and globalisation Edited by Albert Moran and Michael Keane
6 Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema No film is an island Edited by Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam
2 Journalism and Democracy in Asia Edited by Angela Romano and Michael Bromley
7 Media in Hong Kong Press freedom and political change 1967–2005 Carol P. Lai
3 Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia Copyright, piracy and cinema Laikwan Pang
8 Chinese Documentaries From dogma to polyphony Yingchi Chu
4 Conflict, Terrorism and the Media in Asia Edited by Benjamin Cole 5 Media and the Chinese Diaspora Community, communications and commerce Edited by Wanning Sun
9 Japanese Popular Music Culture, authenticity and power Carolyn S. Stevens 10 The Origins of the Modern Chinese Press The influence of the Protestant missionary press in late Qing China Xiantao Zhang
11 Created in China The great new leap forward Michael Keane 12 Political Regimes and the Media in Asia Edited by Krishna Sen and Terence Lee 13 Television in Post-Reform China Serial dramas, Confucian leadership and the global television market Ying Zhu 14 Tamil Cinema The cultural politics of India’s other film industry Edited by Selvaraj Velayutham 15 Popular Culture in Indonesia Fluid identities in postauthoritarian politics Edited by Ariel Heryanto
16 Television in India Satellites, politics and cultural change Edited by Nalin Mehta 17 Media and Cultural Transformation in China Haiqing Yu 18 Global Chinese Cinema The culture and politics of Hero Edited by Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley 19 Youth, Society and Mobile Media in Asia Edited by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Theresa Dirndorfer Anderson and Damien Spry
Global Chinese Cinema The culture and politics of Hero Edited by Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley
First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors their contribution All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hamanaka, Shintaro. Asian regionalism and Japan : the politics of membership in regional diplomatic, financial, and trade groups / Shintaro Hamanaka. p. cm. – (Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies / Routledge series) 1. Regionalism—Asia. 2. Regionalism (International organization)—Case studies. 3. Asian cooperation. 4. Japan—Relations—Asia. 5. Asia— Relations—Japan. I. Title. JZ5333.H36 2009 337.1’5—dc22 2009029326 ISBN 0-203-85911-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN13: 978–0-415–45315–8 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0-203-185911-7 (ebk) ISBN10: 0–415–45315–1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203-85911-1 (ebk)
Contents
List of figures List of contributors Editorial note About Hero Acknowledgements
x xi xv xvi xix
Foreword
xxi
CHRIS BERRY
Introduction
1
GARY D. RAWNSLEY AND MING-YEH T. RAWNSLEY
PART I
Changing discourses of national identities and heroism 1 The political narrative(s) of Hero
11 13
GARY D. RAWNSLEY
2 Recycled heroes, invented tradition and transformed identity
27
YINGJIE GUO
3 Ruthless tyrant or compassionate hero?: Chinese popular nationalism and the myth of state origins
43
YIYAN WANG
4 The king, the musician and the village idiot: images of manhood KAM LOUIE
53
viii Contents PART II
Transformations of cultural perception, genre and stardom 5 Twenty-first century women warriors: variations on a traditional theme
63
65
LOUISE EDWARDS
6 On tian xia (‘all under heaven’) in Zhang Yimou’s Hero
78
XIAOMING CHEN AND MING-YEH T. RAWNSLEY
7 Hero: rewriting the Chinese martial arts film genre
90
HAIZHOU WANG AND MING-YEH T. RAWNSLEY
8 “Would you rather spend more time making serious cinema?”: Hero and Tony Leung’s polysemic masculinity
106
MARK GALLAGHER
9 Fifteen minutes of fame: transient/transnational female stardom in Hero
121
OLIVIA KHOO
PART III
Local vs. global: deconstructing global Chinese blockbusters 10 Camp pleasure in an era of Chinese blockbusters: Internet reception of Hero in mainland China
133
135
SABRINA QIONG YU
11 North American reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero
152
WENDY LARSON
12 Heroic music: from Hunan to Hollywood and back
169
KATY GOW
13 Visual effects magic: Hero’s Sydney connection MARY FARQUHAR
184
Contents 14 Towards a global blockbuster: the political economy of Hero’s nationalism
ix 198
ANTHONY FUNG AND JOSEPH M. CHAN
Filmography Chinese Glossary: selected Chinese names and terms Chinese dynasties at a glance Index
212 217 222 223
Figures
1a 1b 2a 2b 3a 3b
Before – the sword in the library scene After – the sword piercing the white brush Before – green scene combat After – lakeside combat Before – wire-fu in the birch forest After – CG leaves swirl in the birch forest fight scene in Hero
189 189 190 190 192 192
Contributors
Chris Berry is Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research is focused on Chinese cinemas and other Chinese screen-based media. His publications include (ed.) Chinese Films in Focus II (2008), TV China (coedited with Ying Zhu 2008), China on Screen: Cinema and the Nation (with Mary Farquhar, 2006), Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (co-edited with Feii Lu, 2005), Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (2004), Mobile Cultures: New Media and Queer Asia (co-edited with Fran Martin and Audrey Yue, 2003) and (translator and editor) Ni Zhen, Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: The Origins of China’s Fifth Generation Filmmakers (2002). Joseph M. Chan is Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he served as a former director. His research interests lie in the intersection of international communication, political communication, as well as journalism studies. His publications have appeared in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, China Quarterly and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly among other journals and books. He is the chief editor of a Chinese journal Communication & Society. Xiaoming Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies, Beijing University. His research focuses on contemporary Chinese literature and post-Modern theories. He was a visiting scholar in the UK, Holland and Germany between 1995 and 1998. He has published more than ten books and more than 300 articles in Chinese and in English on Chinese contemporary literature, novel critique and structuralism and post-structuralism in China. He received the first Chinese-language Media Literature Award and Annual Critics Award in 2002. Louise Edwards is Professor of Modern China Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Her most recent books are Gender, Politics and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (2008) and an edited volume titled Celebrity in China (with Elaine Jeffreys, 2009). Other publications include Men and Women in Qing China (1994 and 2001), Censored by Confucius (with Kam Louie, 1996), three edited volumes with Mina Roces – The Politics of Dress in Asia and
xii Contributors the Americas (2007), Women’s Suffrage in Asia (2004) and Women in Asia: Tradition, Modernity and Globalization (2000). Mary Farquhar is Professor of Asian Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. She is a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts, a former President of the Chinese Studies Association of Australia and the founding director of the Australia-wide China Law Network. Her publications include the international award-winning book, Children’s Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (1999). Her recent work on Chinese cinema includes a book (with Chris Berry) China On Screen: Cinema and Nation (2006), joint editor of a special issue of The Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2008) and editor of forthcoming books Chinese Film Stars (with Yingjin Zhang) and Twenty-First Century China: Views from Australia. Anthony Fung is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include political economy of popular culture, gender and youth identity, cultural studies and new media technologies. Recently, he has been conducting research on transnational media corporations in China. His new books are Global Capital, Local Culture: Localization of Transnational Media Corporations in China (forthcoming) and New Television Globalization and East Asian Cultural Imaginations (co-authored with Keane and Moran, 2007). Mark Gallagher is Assistant Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. His research concerns transnational media discourses’ figurations of social class, race and gender. He works with US and East Asian film, television and emerging online media. He also interrogates contemporary configurations of media industries. He is the author of Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood (forthcoming) and Action Figures: Men, Action Films and Contemporary Adventure Narratives (2006) and the co-editor of Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies. Katy Gow developed her interest in East Asia during five years living and working in Japan and China. She studied music as a mature student and holds a BMus (Hons) from the University of Sheffield and an MA in Music from the University of Nottingham. During her studies she developed an interest in crosscultural interaction and Japanese film music. Her Masters dissertation was on the Western origins and influences on Japan’s national anthem Kimigayo. Katy lived and worked in China from 2004 to 2007 and was a part-time tutor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China and also an Associate Research Fellow at its Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies. She is now living in Shanghai. Yingjie Guo is Associate Professor in Chinese Studies at the Institute for International Studies, University of Technology, Sydney. His research is related to nationalism in contemporary China and domestic openness in local China under the impact of
Contributors
xiii
the WTO. He is the author of Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China: The Search for National Identity under Reform (2003) and co-author of Nationalism, National Identity and Democratization in China (2000). Olivia Khoo is Research Fellow in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University in Western Australia. She is the author of The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity (2007) and co-editor (with Sean Metzger) of Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (2009). Wendy Larson is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Film, East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon, and Vice Provost for the University of Oregon in Portland. Her research interests include theories of the mind in revolutionary China, gender and culture, and the performance of national culture on the global stage, which is the topic of her current research project. Her recent publications include From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China (2009) and Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (co-edited with Bryna Goodman, 2005). Kam Louie is Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Hong Kong. Before joining HKU, he was Chair Professor of Chinese Studies at Queensland University and Australian National University. He has published more than ten books on different aspects of Chinese culture, including Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (2002) and Inheriting Tradition: Critiques of the Classical Philosophers in Communist China 1949–1966 (1986). Gary D. Rawnsley is Professor of Asian International Communications and the Director of the Institute of Communications Studies, . Between August 2005 and February 2007 he was the University Dean and Professor of International Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. He has published extensively on international political communications and propaganda, and is particularly interested in political communications, public diplomacy and soft power in an Asian context. His recent publications include Political Communications and Democracy (2007). Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley is Research Fellow at the Institute of Communications Studies, , where she lectures and researches on Chinese-language films. Her current projects include Cross-Cultural Dialogue: Taiwanese Short Films and Documentary, as well as Making Science TV Programmes for the International Market. She publishes widely in both Chinese and English languages on media, culture and literature. She is presently working on a monograph, Culture and Social Change in Taiwan: Society, Cinema and Theatre (forthcoming). Haizhou Wang is Professor of Film Studies and the Associate Chair of the Film Studies Department, Beijing Film Academy. He specializes in Chinese-language cinema, as well as postmodernism and the contemporary Chinese film and TV
xiv
Contributors
culture. He is the editor of several film anthologies and the author of numerous articles and books on Chinese cinema including Chinese Cinema: Concept and its Trace (2003, in Chinese) and Image and Culture: Studies on Hong Kong and Taiwan Cinema (2002, in Chinese). Yiyan Wang is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney. Her primary research interests are modern and contemporary Chinese literature, comparative literature and Chinese diaspora studies. She has been working on nationalism, localism and gender representation in contemporary Chinese fiction. Her most recent publication is Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World (2006). Her current project is From Local Stories to National Identity: Competing National Myths in Chinese Nativist Fiction. Sabrina Qiong Yu is Lecturer in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University. She received her PhD in Film Studies from the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on stardom, gender and sexuality, audience/reception studies and transnational Chinese cinema. Her recent publications include ‘Jet Li (Li Lianjie): Star Construction and Fan Discourse in the Internet’, in Mary Farquhar and Yingjin Zhang (eds), Chinese Film Stars (forthcoming) and ‘Hero: How Chinese is it?’, in Paul Cooke (ed.), World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood (co-written with Julian Stringer, 2007).
Editorial note
This book follows the Chinese convention for Chinese names, that is, family names precede personal names (e.g. Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige). However there are two exceptions: first, the names of the contemporary Chinese authors of both English language and Chinese language sources follow the English convention of the personal name preceding the family name (e.g. Feii Lu, Jinhua Dai). Second, if a Chinese individual has adopted a particular English name that is well known in the field, the book will use the English formation (e.g. Ang Lee, Jackie Chan). The Chinese pinyin system is adopted for the Romanization of Chinese names (e.g. Chen Daoming, Hu Jintao) unless the individual has already obtained a particular English spelling of the name that is well known in the field (e.g. Chow Yun-Fat, Chiang Kai-Shek). The Chinese pronunciation of important Chinese phrases and terms that are directly relevant to the discussion of the book are given in pinyin after the English translation. For example, kung-fu movies (gongfu pian), killing within ten paces (shibu yisha). The editors also provide a Chinese Glossary at the end of the book that gives conventional English spelling, pinyin, Simplified Chinese characters (used in the PRC) and Complex Chinese characters (used in Taiwan) to minimize confusion. As China is not a Christian society, this book uses BCE (Before Christian Era) instead of BC in order to reflect Chinese history in a more appropriate way. The appendix of Chinese dynasties is designed to help readers easily see the timeline of China’s often complicated history, while details of the films referred to in individual chapters can be found in the Filmography.
About Hero
Film title:
Hero (Yingxiong) 英雄／英雄
Year of release:
2002 (China)
Director:
Zhang Yimou
Writing credits:
Li Feng, Wang Bin and Zhang Yimou
Cinematography:
Christopher Doyle
Original music:
Tan Dun
Main cast: Actor
Character
Jet Li
Nameless (Wu Ming)
Tony Leung Chiu-Wai
Broken Sword (Can Jian)
Maggie Cheung
Flying Snow (Fei Xue)
Zhang Ziyi
Moon (Ru Yue)
Chen Daoming
King of Qin (Qin wang, aka Ying Zheng)
Donnie Yen
Sky (Chang Kong)
Synopsis Set in the period known in Chinese history as the Warring States (c.475–221 BCE), Hero’s narrative is illustrated in a series of flashbacks representing multiple interpretations of the story by the main protagonists, the assassin Nameless and the King of Qin. Each version is filmed in a specific colour to symbolize mood and character, truth and falsehoods, different agendas and consequences. Slowly the stories unravel to reveal an unexpected reality and an ending that has, for China, timeless political effects. At a time when Qin is slowly destroying the six other states, Nameless is brought before the King to be rewarded for having killed three assassins. An important part of the narrative is the physical distance between Nameless and the King. Each time the King is convinced of Nameless’s victory, the assassin is allowed to get closer
About Hero
xvii
to the throne, and thus closer to killing him. On entering the palace Nameless must remain 100 paces from the King. After presenting to the King the weapon from the assassin known as Sky, Nameless is given the right to approach the throne within 20 paces and tells in the first set-piece flashback how he killed Sky. We are then introduced to two more assassins, Flying Snow (a female warrior) and Broken Sword, who almost killed the King inside his own palace three years earlier. Upon receiving the weapons which belonged to the two assassins, the King gives Nameless the right to approach him within ten paces. The story of how Nameless killed Flying Snow and Broken Sword is again told in flashback: at a calligraphy school Nameless asks Broken Sword to write a Chinese character, sword (jian), on a scroll for him. While Broken Sword writes, Qin archers attack the school, and Flying Snow and Nameless leap to its defence. As the army is defeated Nameless reveals he is a soldier of Qin and challenges Flying Snow and Broken Sword to a duel. That night, Broken Sword makes love to his servant and disciple Moon, knowing that Flying Snow is watching. The enraged Flying Snow kills Broken Sword by mistake. Moon tries to avenge her master but is also killed by Flying Snow. The next day Flying Snow fights with Nameless, but is defeated in part by the trauma of the previous night. The King of Qin doubts the authenticity of Nameless’s story because he does not believe that Broken Sword and Flying Snow are so driven by emotion. The King suspects that Nameless has been working with the assassins all along in order to allow Nameless to get close to his throne. Now the King considers Nameless the most dangerous assassin. The King constructs his own version of the truth in which Nameless demonstrates to Broken Sword and Flying Snow his ability to kill within ten paces. Using this technique he can kill the King of Qin only if he can claim to have killed Broken Sword and Flying Snow in front of witnesses, thus allowing him access to the palace and the King. First Flying Snow duels with Nameless at the Qin camp but loses her life. In one of the most spectacular and visually stunning scenes of the film he then fights Broken Sword on a lake, but the duel finishes when Broken Sword gives Nameless his blade. Nameless now has possession of the three weapons he needs to present to the King as proof of his victory. Back at the palace, Nameless, admitting the King is perceptive, begins to tell the truth. In the final flashback Nameless shows his technique of ‘killing within ten paces (shibu yisha)’ to Sky, Broken Sword and Flying Snow. Believing that Nameless can kill the King, Sky deliberately loses to Nameless, but the wound only appears fatal in front of the Qin royal guards. This means that neither Broken Sword nor Flying Snow will be killed by Nameless. Flying Snow agrees to cooperate in the illusion, but Broken Sword refuses because he does not want the King to die. Eventually Broken Sword gives Nameless his weapon, but begs him not to kill the King: the King must live, explains Broken Sword, by writing ‘tian xia’ (literally ‘all under heaven’) in the sand. The King of Qin is both shocked and moved by Nameless’s story. As his army gathers around them, the King rises and turns his back on Nameless saying that
xviii About Hero he can die happy knowing that Broken Sword understood his vision. Nameless employs his deadly technique and hits the King, but he leaves his target unharmed. As Nameless leaves the palace the Qin soldiers and bureaucrats surround him and beg the King of Qin to order the assassin’s execution. The King hesitates and then agrees. The army unleashes thousands of arrows and Nameless is killed. Outside the palace, Flying Snow learns that Nameless failed his mission, and accuses Broken Sword of ruining another assassination attempt. Broken Sword allows Flying Snow to kill him, and she then kills herself to be with her lover forever. Meanwhile, the King of Qin gives Nameless a royal funeral. Before the credits roll, a caption appears on the screen: The King of Qin united China and became the First Emperor.
Acknowledgements Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley
Well, we finally got there! As we put the finishing touches to the chapters and prepare the manuscript for submission, we heave a huge sigh of relief and hope that the book is as fascinating to read as it was to edit. We acknowledge not only the expertise and cooperation of all our contributors, but also their enduring patience. This volume of essays is based on an international symposium on Zhang Yimou’s 2002 blockbuster movie, Hero (Yingxiong), held at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China (UNNC) in early 2006. It took another three years for the editors to finish the manuscript and submit it for publication, far longer than we ever anticipated. So a big thank you to all involved for understanding and tolerating the sluggish pace at which this project proceeded. We hope the readers will appreciate and enjoy the final result and agree that the wait was worth it. Organized by Ming-Yeh Rawnsley at UNNC, the conference location was appropriate: as the first Sino-foreign venture university to create a campus in China, UNNC represented a unique opportunity to witness cultural interaction and global flows of information and culture. It personified the East-West transnational relations at the very heart of Hero. The editors spent 18 months at UNNC, Gary Rawnsley as University Dean and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley as Head of Chinese Studies and of the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Ningbo. Working there was both a privilege and an adventure in equal measure. We would like to thank all our colleagues and students who helped with the organization of the Hero conference and participated in its proceedings. We extend special thanks to Ian Gow, the former Provost of UNNC and still a much valued friend, for his continuous encouragement and support for this project and all our other endeavours to help create a vibrant research culture in the university. Moreover, we thank our many friends who travelled to Ningbo from the UK, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia and Beijing to take part in the conference and the associated film festival. You were all a joy to host. Gary Rawnsley would like to thank the editors of Media Asia for allowing him to guest edit soon after the conference a special issue of the journal (34:1) in 2007 in which four papers were published. He thanks the editors of Media Asia for allowing us to revise and publish three articles by Gary Rawnsley, Yingjie Guo and Yiyan Wang. We also thank Cambridge Scholarly Publishers for giving us permission to use an earlier version of Mary Farquhar’s chapter on Hero.1 In addition, Ming-Yeh
xx
Acknowledgements
Rawnsley would like to thank the director, Zhang Yimou, for writing a personal note of encouragement during her organization of the Hero conference in China. The joy of being inspired by academics and practitioners in the field has given her the strength to come through the darkest moments of the project. The editors naturally acknowledge the work and friendship of all the contributors. Reading the successive drafts of their work was always a pleasure and we enjoyed learning from them. Perhaps the most exciting part of this project was drawing on the multidisciplinary perspectives and approaches our contributors submitted. Thanks also to our good friend, Stephanie Donald, for commissioning the book in the first place and for always being a source of good advice. We used Stephi as a sounding board on many occasions when the editing of this book was far from smooth. We particularly thank her and her former colleagues at the University of Technology Sydney for inviting Gary Rawnsley to visit as Adjunct Professor in April and May 2008 and making both Rawnsleys feel very welcome. The time spent in Sydney was the perfect space to write and work on this project, and was most desirable prior to Gary becoming Director of the Institute of Communications Studies (ICS) at the on his return to the UK. On that note we thank all of our old and new friends at the ICS and in Leeds who helped us to settle in to our new home and help us adjust to life again ‘up north’. In addition, we would like to thank Professor Chris Berry for agreeing to read the manuscript and write a foreword. His contribution to the field of Chinese film studies has lent weight behind the project and we value his insights. Our final debt of gratitude must be reserved for our publisher at Routledge, Peter Sowden. This is our second book with Peter and we have always found him a most agreeable colleague – open to new ideas and unreservedly patient with our changing schedule. We would like to dedicate this book to the students in the Division of International Studies who graduated from UNNC in 2008. Teaching them International Relations in 2005–7 was a real pleasure and we are delighted that they all remain close friends. We wish them all the success they so richly deserve.
Notes 1 A later version of this paper will appear in Mary Farquhar (ed.) Twenty-First Century China: Views from Australia (forthcoming).
Foreword Chris Berry
Global Chinese Cinema: The Culture and Politics of Hero is, I believe, the first English-language anthology of essays to be devoted to an individual Chineselanguage film. It may be worth spending a little time pondering the significance of that. There have been both anthologies and monographs devoted to individual Chinese-language filmmakers for some time now. Zhang Yimou makes an early appearance in this category in Frances Gateward’s 2001 anthology, Zhang Yimou: Interviews. By comparison, Robert Elder’s book on John Woo in the same series only appeared in 2005. (However, it must be acknowledged that Kenneth E. Hall’s monograph on Woo had already appeared in 1999.) In 2005 John Anderson’s book on Edward Yang was published, whereas James Udden’s monograph on Hou Hsiao-Hsien has only just appeared in 2009. What does it mean now that an anthology not just on an individual Chinese filmmaker but also on an individual Chinese film has finally appeared? And what does it say that this film is Zhang Yimou’s Hero? The appearance of such a book certainly marks a new stage in the development of the field of Chinese film studies in English. That Hero merits such a treatment is, in my opinion, because it is a watershed film in so many different – and often contradictory – ways. My own strong desire to see more detailed analysis of individual films in Chinese film studies is one reason for me to welcome Global Chinese Cinema. Indeed, as I mention in the introduction to both editions of Chinese Films in Focus (2003: 1; 2008: 1), one of the triggers for that project was a perception that, although the field of Chinese film studies in English was growing rapidly, individual films were not getting as much attention as they deserved. Since then, Hong Kong University Press has launched a wonderful series of small monographs on individual Hong Kong films (modelled on the BFI’s very successful Film Classics series). However, an anthology on a single film brings different angles to bear in a way that a monograph cannot. The essays in the first section focus on its retelling of the well known national foundation story of the first Chinese emperor’s unification of the country, and Xiaoming Chen and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley’s essay in the second section looks at the deployment of the key concept of ‘all under heaven’ (tian xia). The second and third sections include essays on gender and role, such as Louise Edwards’s examination of the female warrior model, Olivia Khoo’s consideration of the film’s female stars and Mark Gallagher’s analysis of Tony Leung Chiu-Wai.
xxii C. Berry Hero’s contributions to the martial arts film genre are considered by Haizhou Wang and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley. Sabrina Yu and Wendy Larson look at the reception of the film, whereas Mary Farquhar examines visual effects, Katy Gow writes about the music, and Anthony Fung and Joseph Chan discuss the political economy of the film as it negotiated the tension between a patriotic narrative and global ambitions. This multidimensional approach to a single film promises rich detail and deeper understanding. Of course, I also appreciate the appearance of books that approach Chinese cinema by treating large bodies of films. And the more recent turn to the political economy of production represented in Michael Curtin’s Playing to the World’s Largest Audience (2007) and Darrell William Davies and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh’s East Asian Screen Industries (2008) is also an excellent new direction. However, in many countries where government plays a crucial role in funding research, an increased instrumentalism is pushing us to treat cinema primarily as a ‘creative industry’, rather than as an art form or as a socio-cultural discourse. In contrast, I believe the core of the field of film studies must remain the analysis of the films themselves, not only as economic and industrial products, but also as cultural and artistic texts. Even for those with a strong interest in industry and economics, it needs to be recognized that without individual films, in all the complexity examined through the diverse approaches taken here and more, there is no creative industry. The appearance of this anthology also suggests that the field has grown to a size and complexity where not only monographs on individual filmmakers or books on particular areas of Chinese filmmaking can find a readership, but also that it can sustain the intensive investigation of a single film from multiple perspectives. No doubt there are many reasons for the continued growth of the field. Chineselanguage cinema is the only non-Western cinema to have made and maintained a bridgehead into the multiplex-based mainstream exhibition circuit of the West (and most of the world), and it has done so with martial arts blockbusters like Hero. Furthermore, Chinese-language cinema is the only cinema able to compete globally with Hollywood, even though so far the martial arts blockbuster has been the only effective weapon in its arsenal. It would be a mistake to attribute the growth of the field to the successes of Chinese cinema alone. Other factors, such as the growth of Chinese Studies along with the growth of interest in China, and the less noble fact that students like movies and are more likely to take courses based on movies need to be acknowledged. A full analysis of this phenomenon is beyond this modest foreword. But I wonder if an English-language scholarship on any other non-Hollywood cinema could sustain an anthology on a single film at the moment? In the case of Chinese-language film studies, the appearance of this anthology is another sign that the frequent anxiety about China catching up is no longer necessary. Indeed, in some respects Chinese film studies is no longer catching up but setting the pace. However, why is Hero the first film to receive this treatment? Why not Chen Kaige’s Farewell to My Concubine (Bawang bie ji, 1993), Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000), a Bruce Lee film or Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (Sanxia haoren, 2006)? Any one of these films and many more deserves
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the same treatment, and I hope that they will get it. But one of the interesting things about Hero is that, despite its box-office success, it seems it is not an easy film to admire unequivocally. As Sabrina Qiong Yu and Wendy Larson relate in their essays here, the film provoked plenty of negative criticism. The Chinese intelligentsia angrily rejected it as a pretentious travesty of history and the key concept of tian xia or ‘all under heaven’ (translated in the subtitles as ‘our land’). Some critics writing in English either saw it as shallow formalism or, like Hong Kong and New York film director Evans Chan (2004), as fascistic. Even those who liked it were often defensive about its alleged lack of depth. And, as Yu explores in fascinating detail, many of the Chinese audiences who paid top renminbi to see it treated it a camp pleasure rather than the serious artwork that Zhang and his colleagues hoped it would be received as. Hero’s strange combination of an often negative reception with global box-office records is much like the American blockbuster whose Chinese box-office record it overtook, Titanic (1997). Titanic was one of those films everyone went to see at least once, but few people were prepared to admit – to themselves or to anyone else – that they liked. And maybe they really did not like the film, but went because it had become a media and cultural phenomenon: something you had to see because everyone else had seen it and was talking about it. Hero was deliberately designed to attract diverse audiences all over the world. Haizhou Wang and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley perceptively point out that an inevitable requirement of this strategy is that what might appeal to one audience might turn off another, and vice versa. In other words, global success requires making a film that is a bit of a parson’s egg, with audiences and critics disagreeing over which bit tastes good. In terms of the watershed quality of the film, this need to appeal in different ways to different audiences marks the point at which an older Zhang Yimou survival strategy goes global. In his Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy, Ni Zhen recounts how Zhang learned to be a survivor from an early age in what was an ideologically hostile environment because of his poor class background. When he went down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, he painted Mao portraits on the walls to impress the local leaders (Ni, 2002: 45). Perhaps this laid the foundation for what Rey Chow called the ‘force of surfaces’ in Zhang’s cinema (Chow, 1995: 142–172). This is his ability to deploy a glossy virtuosity with images in such as way as to repel demands for clear and anchored meanings, be they from the censors who always want to know what things mean or from the foreign art-house circuit with its demands for underground cinema ‘banned in Beijing’. With Hero, this certain slipperiness is harnessed to the blockbuster mode in China for the first time. Hero was a watershed film in many other ways, and this also helps it to stand out from the crowd. It marked a turnaround for Chinese cinema both at home and abroad. Feng Xiaogang’s New Year films (he sui pian) have been box-office hits in China, but never overseas. Other films might have done well abroad, but less well in China. Prior to Hero, the retreat of state funding and control from the film industry in the People’s Republic had coincided with a steep decline in the share of the domestic box-office held by Chinese films. After Hero, as Haozhou Wang
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and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley note here, that trajectory was reversed. Now, Chinese films have returned to take the major share of the box-office. It also marks the point at which the transformation of the local cinema industry into a commercial cinema is confirmed. Abroad, prior to Hero, films from the People’s Republic were only successful in film festivals and on the art-house circuit. Taking into account that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was at least partially an American film, Hero can be said to be the film that broke Chinese cinema through into the global mainstream. However, there is a curious sense of a price to be paid for success in both Hero’s international and domestic success. The film’s need to have something for everyone means it has difficulty appealing to anyone completely already implies a compromise in order to find success. In this case, the need to take on Hollywood also means surrendering to the Hollywood mode. I have discussed this in more detail elsewhere in a book co-authored with Mary Farquhar (Berry and Farquhar, 2006: 204–213). But I would like to close this foreword with a further consideration of the poignant quality that accompanies Hero’s triumph – and adds to its fascination. That poignancy is a major part of the film itself. Once Nameless decides to comply with rather than challenge the King of Qin in his imperial ambitions, he has to die after he reveals his abandoned plot. His loyalty leads to his own death. More poignant still, the King discovers that his position of power means he can only trust someone who is willing tell the King the ultimate bad news – that he came as an assassin. But then, having discovered someone he can trust, the King cannot draw him close but has to kill him. In keeping with Zhang Yimou’s slipperiness, for some viewers this makes the film an indictment of the authoritarian system it otherwise seems to laud. For others, it is full of heroic self-sacrifice. But I cannot help seeing parallels to Zhang Yimou’s own career, and a strange kind of price he has had to pay for his success. As Zhang’s films have racked up award after award around the world, they have become more and more ‘sensitive’ from the point of view of the Chinese state and the communist party. It is one of the ironies of the Chinese cultural system that you can be quite outspoken if no one is listening, reading what you write or watching your film. But once you start to attract attention, then the authorities start to care. That is why they worked so hard to get Zhang Yuan to come up from underground in the late 1990s, and Jia Zhangke a few years ago. In Zhang Yimou’s case, his series of successes beginning with Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, 1988) at the end of the 1980s seem to have made the government ever more eager to tame him. Although we know the authorities were angry in the mid-1990s about the screening of To Live (Huozhe, 1994) at Cannes without their permission, what happened behind the scenes at the Film Bureau after that can only be speculated about. But it is clear that, unlike many others, Zhang was not banned from making films for a period of time, nor did he stop making films. In fact, I doubt whether that would have been an acceptable choice for him or the authorities. Just as Nameless could not choose to simply retire from the fray and go home, Zhang had to find a way to go on. Whether this was because he is a workaholic totally devoted to film (which
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he is), because of demands from producers, because of demands from the authorities, or all three, is hard to judge. But, after a number of more modest films, Hero marks the point at which his career not only re-ignites but also moves on to a new level of local and global success unparalleled by any other Chinese filmmaker to date. Of course, unlike Nameless who goes to a certain death, Zhang Yimou has also reaped unparalleled rewards for finding a way to satisfy the domestic and international market as well as the Chinese authorities. (Some might say, on the basis of what followed, that Hero marked an artistic death, itself readable in the narratives of the films that have followed. But this might be too cruel an interpretation.) There is further irony. With Hero, Zhang comes more and more to resemble the filmmaker eclipsed by Zhang’s own debut along with the rest of the Fifth Generation – Xie Jin. Right up to and including Hibiscus Town (Furong zhen, 1986), Xie was far and away China’s most popular filmmaker, but also the one treated by the Film Bureau as the most dangerous. Like Zhang, his films were glossy, beautiful to look at and slippery to pin down in terms of meaning. He pushed the political envelope, but he was disciplined. And when he learnt where the limits were, he was rewarded with renewed success. Here, we have another contradictory quality of Hero. On the one hand, it takes Chinese cinema to places it has never been before. But, on the other hand, it demonstrates the persistence of certain established institutional, political and cultural patterns. No doubt, many other Chinese films might also be associated with one or other turning point similar to those mentioned here. Zhang Yimou is not the only difficult filmmaker to have been (more or less) tamed, as indicated by my mention of Zhang Yuan and Jia Zhangke. Hero is by no means the only Chinese film to feature a stellar cast and crew drawn from across different Chinese territories. Nor is it the only or even the first film to use world standard international visual effects. But it is the combination of all these and other ground-breaking qualities, together with its ability to provoke multiple and conflicting interpretations and judgments that makes it the right film for this equally ground-breaking anthology.
References Anderson, John (2005) Edward Yang, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Berry, Chris (ed.) (2003) Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes, London: BFI Publishing. —— (ed.) (2008) Chinese Films in Focus II, London: Palgrave MacMillan. Berry, Chris and Farquhar, Mary (2006) China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, New York and Hong Kong: Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press. Chan, Evans (2004) ‘Zhang Yimou’s Hero and the temptations of fascism’, Film International 2 (8): 14–23. Chow, Rey (1995) Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press. Curtin, Michael (2007) Playing to the World’s Largest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV, Berkeley: University of California Press. Davies, Darrell William and Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu (2008) East Asia Screen Industries, London: BFI Publishing. Elder, Robert (ed.) (2005) John Woo: Interviews, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
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Gateward, Frances (ed.) (2001) Zhang Yimou: Interviews, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Hall, Kenneth E. (1999) John Woo: The Films, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Ni, Zhen (2002) Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: The Genesis of China’s Fifth Generation, trans. Chris Berry. Durham: Duke University Press. Udden, James (2009) No Man an Island: Hou Hsiao-Hsien and the Aesthetics of Experience, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Introduction Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley
The story of China’s encounter with globalization is increasingly familiar: against the backdrop of comprehensive economic and social transformation, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is enjoying unprecedented rates of economic growth. This is due in part to a ‘reform and open door’ policy (gaike kaifang), introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, that has attracted to China extraordinary amounts of foreign investment. This has led some scholars to compare the ‘economic miracle’ taking place in China with that of the European industrial revolution of the nineteenth century (Leonard, 2008; Kynge, 2006; Naughton, 2006), though the transformation of Europe did not occur at the same speed. The GDP growth rate of almost 10 per cent over a 20-year period completely changed China, releasing millions from poverty and prompting the largest rural-urban migration in history. The consequences of globalization for China’s cultural industries, shaped in part by the reform and open door policies in the economy, are becoming equally well known. Global Chinese Cinema: The Culture and Politics of Hero assesses how China’s interaction with the forces of globalization has affected the production, content, distribution and reception (locally, regionally and internationally) of its communications, cultural and entertainment products. This collection of essays draws on multidisciplinary perspectives and approaches to analyze how the film industry in the PRC ‘globalized’ the production of Hero as a local response to international forces and pressures. Three questions have allowed reflection on these processes: why and how did Hero become the first global blockbuster produced in mainland China? How do the audiences in China and outside China react to and read the film? What does Hero tell us about the changes in the representation of Chinese culture, history and political philosophy? In the era of an increasingly Asianized Hollywood (Klein, 2004: 360–384) when Western cultural forms such as Kung Fu Panda (2008) playfully adapt Chinese cultural elements, the editors aim to tease out the ‘contradictory losses and opportunities’ (Ang, 1996: 148) brought about by cultural globalization in a Chinese context. Global Chinese Cinema demonstrates how the transnational flows of culture between ‘East’ and ‘West’ have given substance to ‘the ambiguous imaginary space’ of China (Iwabuchi, 2002: 6): how do consumers from diverse backgrounds try to understand transnational cultural flows and attempt to differentiate the ‘imaginary’ from ‘reality’?
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The research already published on the flows of Chinese cultural products and their interaction with processes of globalization provides the necessary frameworks for understanding the perspectives of the contributors to this volume. In Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience, Michael Curtin supplies a thorough empirical account of the development and globalization of the film and television industries in Greater China from the 1950s. His analysis of the transnationalization of Chinese-language film and television, mainly to culturally proximate countries but increasingly outside these areas, points to a cultural industry that is starting to explore the benefits of importing and exporting creative talent and their output. This is demonstrated in the PRC most clearly by Zhang Yimou’s Hero, and several of the contributors to Global Chinese Cinema analyze how the film represents the import and export of cultural influences, knowledge and practice. In this way, Hero reinforces Curtin’s challenge of the cultural imperialism orthodoxy and its emphasis on Western (or American) hegemony; despite the prevalence of, and easy access to foreign media products, audiences throughout the world prefer local and regional cultural output where high quality local products exist and can compete with foreign programming. This is a theme the editors of the present volume have explored in relation to Taiwan (see Rawnsley and Rawnsley, 2001: Chapter 5). Although Hollywood’s move into Asia and its production of Asian language films may be seen as a form of cultural imperialism – allowing already powerful transnational cultural corporations to extend their operations into new markets by producing Hollywood films with local flavour – it is far more accurate to describe the integration of local and global film industries. Asian film industries have benefited from this integration and believe they are now in a strong position to not only work alongside Hollywood, but also to compete with its output and reclaim its own domestic market. Michael Curtin’s most valuable contribution is his frustration with other accounts of globalization: What globalization theorists have failed to produce is a persuasive account of the most significant forces driving these processes and a clear explanation of why some places become centres of cultural production and therefore tend to be more influential in shaping the emerging global system. (Curtin, 2007: 9) He then lists a set of questions about location, which propel the discussion towards analyzing the international diffusion of cultural industries. “In essence”, he asks, “how might we begin to map the complicated contours and practices of global media?” (Ibid.) With reference to one Chinese blockbuster that attracted audiences around the world Global Chinese Cinema will reveal the complex ‘contours and practices’ in the Chinese film industry. One of the keys to understanding such contours and practices is the subject of creativity. As Curtin says, the “golden rule in the film business is that if you do not have creative talent to start with, then there is no business to talk about at all” (Curtin, 2007: 14). Curtin’s historical discussion of film studios in China and Hong
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Kong reveals how the victory of production over creativity and the constant quest for profitability damaged the Chinese film and television industries. This question of China’s creativity is a theme addressed by several contributors to a special issue of The China Quarterly edited by Michel Hockx and Julia Strauss in 2005 on ‘Culture in the Contemporary PRC’. The editors recognize that “globalization ... is a force to be reckoned with for cultural production” (Hockx and Strauss, 2005: 8) and identify instances of “glocalization” – “the combination of global trends with resolutely local contexts and meanings” (Ibid.), an idea that resonates with the main themes of Global Chinese Cinema. The essays included in Hockx and Strauss’s collection acknowledged the development of the cultural industries from multiple perspectives rarely described in the literature, and they demonstrated that the forces of globalization were only just beginning to pressure China’s cultural landscape at the time of their publication. Deborah Davis (2005: 170–187) analyzed the impact of the Swedish furniture chain Ikea, while Jeroen de Kloet (2005: 87–104) discussed the import of illegal and cut CDs from the West (so called dakou CDs) and how they inspired the evolution of Chinese rock. We are even informed that Uyghur popular music has maintained its cultural identity while being influenced and inspired by the Gipsy Kings (Harris, 2005: 105–121). At the heart of this collection of essays is the theme of creativity, and the general conclusion is that the creative industries have struggled in China to compete with more sophisticated and original non-Chinese products. This is most clearly articulated by Antonia Finnane (2005: 65–86) in her chapter on the Chinese fashion industry. Finnane proposes that even though textiles and the manufacture of fashion have helped China’s economic growth, it has not yet been possible to develop a local fashion design industry that can compete on global terms. Creativity is the core subject of a special issue of the Chinese Journal of Communication, edited by John Hartley and Lucy Montgomery in 2009. The contributors to this journal address a single hypothesis: that the internationalization of the creative industries would prove transformative in China, encouraging the growth of individual talent, ‘conten’ innovation, and a shift from centrally planned command-and-control industries to a complex dynamic system growing via the self-organized interactions of myriad creative industries. (Hartley and Montgomery, 2009: 10) The editors connect the changes in China’s cultural industries to the wider processes transforming the country, including globalization. This is most noticeable through reading of both Finnane in The China Quarterly (2005: 65–86) and the article by John Hartley and Lucy Montgomery on ‘Fashion as consumer entrepreneurship’ (2009: 61–76) in their special issue. Following Finnane, Hartley and Montgomery conclude that “only when ... a competitive creative-productive network is indigenized will there be a material basis for internally-driven innovation ... Until then the system is run on international borrowing” (Ibid.: 74). A close examination of Hero, Zhang Yimou’s first attempt to make a global film, which
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was released in China in 2002 and in America two years later, provides further insight of how a transnational creative-productive network was formed in the Chinese film industry. Although it is difficult to ascertain to what extent such a network has been ‘indigenized’, audiences around the world have since witnessed a series of Chinese blockbusters that followed a similar transnational mode of production as Hero: Zhang Yimou’s The House of Flying Daggers (Shimian maifu, 2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower (Mancheng jindai huangjin jia, 2006), Chen Kaige’s The Promise (Wu ji, 2005), Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet (Ye yan, 2006) and most recently John Woo’s The Battle of Red Cliff (Chi bi, 2008). We believe the Chinese film and fashion industries are very different: while the latter is an example of “consumer entrepreneurship” (Hartley and Montgomery, 2009: 62), the former still experiences government intervention despite recent reforms towards marketization (Curtin, 2007: 245–268). The film industry is characterized by what Curtin has called “institutional conservatism”, which is magnified by the “ideological caution” of the political leadership in Beijing which impedes creativity (Ibid.: 258). This means there are difficulties in forming an indigenous “competitive creative-productive network” that enjoys a free “material basis for internally-driven innovation” (Hartley and Montgomery, 2009: 74). Until these difficulties are overcome Chinese blockbusters may find it easier to focus on an imaginary ancient China instead of locating their stories in contemporary settings. It is also easier to borrow from international influences instead of cultivating local talent and nourishing innovating content. These strategies may partly explain the striking similarities in the textual qualities of the recent Chinese blockbusters to hit the international market. The contributors to Popular China (edited by Link et al., 2002) recognize that although the globalization of culture offers exciting and innovative new methods of communication and production, it also presents a number of additional challenges and even problems for those struggling to survive within its structures. These are “terrifying new pressures of a global market economy and the models of aspiration conveyed by a global popular culture” (Link et al., 2002: 3). Some will prosper; others, as Manuel Castells (2000) warned, will remain on the periphery, struggling to participate in the global information revolution. Contributors to Popular China demonstrate that large portions of Chinese remain on the periphery, or are encouraged by the depiction of popular culture to have aspirations they will have difficulty ever experiencing. Anita Chan’s chapter describes how globalization has trapped migrant factory workers in a “cage” in which they are forced to manufacture the products of globalization without ever experiencing them for themselves. The book reveals the complexity of globalization, the presence of ambiguity and the tensions generated by its encounter. The editors found the Chinese experience documented in their book does not represent a simple dichotomy of local or global. Instead, the Chinese “employ aspects of their local traditions to interpret that culture and to negotiate their way through it. They engage with globalization in a variety of distinctively Chinese styles” (Ibid.: 5). This gives rise to an “emergent or reemergent identity” that epitomizes a negotiation between the global and the local, and becomes a more powerful force of self-reflection when cultural flows
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are transnational and multidirectional. Chinese women may be reading Chinese versions of Western fashion magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, Elle and Vogue, but they are also reading locally produced magazines such as How (Hao), which imitate the styles, format and content of their Western counterparts. Similarly, Chinese audiences embrace the internationally produced Hero as a local product and engage with the film “in a variety of distinctively Chinese styles” (Ibid.). Both the magazine How and the film Hero are neither global nor local, but the creation of a hybrid product. While How has appropriated an international flavour for local tastes and local markets, Hero has appropriated the characteristics of local culture for international appeal and global markets (a process that should provide the foundations for success for global products in local markets as the fast-food chain McDonald’s has realized. (See Watson, 1997).
Themes in this book As Curtin (2007) and the myriad of other books available that analyze global Chinese movies demonstrate, the film industry is in a state of transition – from being (to use Hartley and Montgomery’s term) products of indigenous processes of creation, distribution and reception, to embracing transnational methods of production and market appeal. Chinese films are both inspiring and inspired by the Western movie industry to a point where non-Chinese are central to the production process and key parts of that process are undertaken outside China (see Farquhar in this volume). As the contributors to this volume testify, this transnational process certainly describes the production of Hero. Arguably, no other Chinese cultural product other than cuisine has travelled so far and as quickly as film. The movie industry reflects the intersection of global and local agendas, and the attempt by the Chinese to position their own identity and cultural formations within a distinctly capitalist global system. This links to Giddens’s definition of globalization as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link different localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events many miles away and vice versa” (Giddens, 1990). Through the prism of just one film, Hero, this book discusses the globalization of the world’s film industries and analyzes the strategies China uses to position itself within new global structures of film markets. Globalization has not heralded the decline or death of the nation-state as the primary unit of international organization (McGrew, 1992). Certainly in China the idea, if not the reality of ‘nation’ is growing stronger and more relevant. Since the late 1990s nationalism has surpassed communism as the foundation of mass mobilization and legitimacy: from NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 to the worldwide protests against so-called ‘anti-Chinese bias’ in the Western media in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games, Chinese communities in the PRC and around the world now congregate as a force of national pride, especially on the Internet and in the “blogosphere” (Gries, 2004). Meta-narratives of China recovering its rightful global position after two centuries of inferiority and “victimhood” (Renwick and Cao, 2003: 62–82; Jacques, 2009) are helping to shape the idea of a Chinese nation that is undergoing renewal and rejuvenation.
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Hero has reflected and strengthened these discourses: audiences and critics have detected in the film a distinctly nationalist message that has affirmed the centuriesold concept of tian xia, ‘all under heaven’. Given the political significance of this theme it is not surprising that tian xia and nationalism are the focus of several chapters in this volume (see, for example, the chapters by Rawnsley, Guo, Wang, and Chen and Rawnsley). The meta-narrative of China’s renaissance is visible in the cultural industries that are not only leading China’s global soft power offensive (Kurlantzick, 2007; Rawnsley, 2008; Cull, 2008) – shaping how the world sees China – but also helps to define how China sees itself. The film industry both constructs and reflects Chinese identity for local audiences, but as a major export movies also provide international audiences a gateway to understanding China. Hence the contributors to this volume are interested in what Hero, from its conception to audience reception, reveals about China as much as about the Chinese film industry. Both Wendy Larson, writing on reception in North America, and Sabrina Qiong Yu, who focuses on how mainland Chinese audiences reacted to the film, disclose a complex network of responses that are not determined by geographical or cultural proximity to the product. In both places the film provoked different reactions among audiences, and the authors detect substantial variation in the opinions of cultural elites and amateur online critics. Clearly the idea that Chinese audiences read and responded to Hero in ways that were completely opposite to audiences outside China is unfounded. Globalization has made it difficult to discuss the international film industry in terms of national frameworks (Lewis, 2001; Staiger, 2002), and Hero is a good example of a global and local hybrid. The chapters in this volume analyze how the film is recognizably ‘Chinese’ in terms of genre (Chapter 6), cast (Chapter 8 and 9), music (Chapter 12), story (Chapter 4 and 5) and especially its theme of tian xia; but Hero is also the product of an international collaborative effort that may mean it is tricky to pinpoint with any accuracy its place of origin (Chapter 13 and 14). Hero is the culmination of a process that started in the 1990s when, with Asian markets increasing in importance for American films, Hollywood began to assimilate Asian (and especially Hong Kong) film workers: directors such as John Woo and Tsui Hark, and actors such as Jet Li and Chow Yun-Fat became known to non-Chinese audiences. Michelle Yeoh enjoyed international success as a ‘Bond girl’ in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) in which she matched 007 in action scenes that challenged the stereotype submissive image of Asian girls seen in the earlier Bond movie, You Only Live Twice (1967); and Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan’s breakthrough success in American mainstream films was in Rush Hour in 1998 alongside American comedian Chris Rock. These directors, actors and action choreographers brought with them the talent to include in Hollywood movies the kind of action and spectacle that Asian audiences had enjoyed for decades. It is impossible, for example, to imagine The Matrix (1999) without the involvement of martial arts choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, just as it is difficult to imagine such films as In the Mood for Love (Huayang nianhua, 2000) and Hero without the work of the Australian cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. Thus we are witnesses to the process Christina Klein (2004: 360–384) has termed “the Asianization of
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Hollywood, and the Hollywoodization of Asia”. In short, the story of Hero – its production, distribution and reception – is one of transnationalization, and in particular informs the evolving relationship of Asian and global film industries (Balio, 1998; Miller et al., 2001).
Arrangement of Global Chinese Cinema The title of this book is chosen following careful consideration. We abandon the term ‘international’ because it suggests confinement “to the nation-state or to nationally institutionalized organizations” and that the “conception of culture” is “limited to a ‘national’ framework” (Iwabuchi, 2002: 16). Rather, we choose the word ‘global’ as an alternative because it articulates the interaction of globalization with the flow of popular culture within and beyond Asia. Hero is the first truly global Chinese blockbuster. Other Chinese productions were successful prior to Hero, for example Jackie Chan’s action movies in the 1980s and the early 1990s, however, their success was largely determined by geographical and cultural proximity to the centre of their production. Therefore this book adopts the term ‘global’ to reflect the scale and reach of Hero, which cannot be matched by any previous Chinese films except Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000). The first part of the book presents the political readings of Hero and considers how the film reflected multiple interpretations of Chinese history and formations of identity. At the heart of this discussion is the legacy of the First Emperor (Qin Shihuang, 259–210 BCE) whom history has both vilified and honoured as the visionary of a united China. The chapters speak to the ambiguity of the film: who is the intended Hero in the movie – the assassin who defeats all his adversaries only to fail his mission to kill the emperor because of the tian xia ideal, or the emperor who likewise vanquished his foes and created unity from chaos? Part II expands the discussion on ‘change’ from the political to the cultural realm and examines ‘Transformations of cultural perception, genre and stardom’. The chapters suggest that transformation is often the result of the attempt by political and cultural elites to reposition ‘China’, imagined or otherwise, on the world map. Hero’s production crew talked openly and candidly about how their concept for the film was influenced by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (Hero Defined, 2004). Although we cannot affirm that the production of Hero was a direct response to the so-called ‘war on terror’, we must concede that Chinese filmmakers pay close attention to international affairs, and that their engagement with the world has influenced and altered their interpretations of Chinese cultural traditions to embrace a new international dimension. The contributors in Part II address these changes through looking at sexuality, stardom and genre and by considering how the traditional methods of film production are no longer able to accommodate the remarkable transformations to Chinese society. Hero offers a new style of filmmaking that reflects not only the global influences on China and Chinese film, but also the changes taking place inside China. The final section of the book focuses on the transnationalism of Hero’s production
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and reception and reflects on its global success. The principal theme is the contrast between local and global and the variety that has helped to create an emerging popular film genre, namely global Chinese cinema. A close examination of audience reception and the technical elements of Hero’s production and distribution reveals how cultural globalization has created “a world where familiar difference and bizarre sameness are simultaneously articulated in multiple ways through the unpredictable dynamic of uneven global cultural encounters” (Iwabuchi, 2002: 15). The concluding chapter returns to the theme addressed in Part I, ‘nationalism’, and yet examines it from the perspective of film economy which reveals further how Hero begins from the ‘local’ and successfully reaches the ‘global’. The multiple flows of cultural influences offered by globalization suggest processes of appropriation, adaptation and negotiation. These processes are most keenly felt in film content and genres, but as these essays show we are also witnessing a remarkable transnationalization of film labour, capital and talent. At the same time, Hero demonstrates that the social, economic and political transformation of China has affected the local film industry and has fashioned new ways for movies to speak to Chinese audiences. In this way, Hero represents the convergence of the global and the local, and we hope this volume will provide new ways of understanding this process and China’s contribution and response to it.
References Ang, Ien (1996) Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, London and New York: Routledge. Balio, Tino (1998) ‘“A major presence in all of the world’s important market”: The globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s’, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, London: Routledge, pp. 58–73. Castells, Manuel (2000) End of Millennium,Oxford: Blackwells. Chan, Anita (2002) ‘The culture of survival: Lives of migrant workers through the prism of private letters’, in Perry Link, Richard P. Madsen and Paul G. Pickowicz (eds), Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 163–188. Cull, Nick (2008) ‘The public diplomacy of the modern Olympic Games and China’s soft power strategy’, in Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dayan (eds), Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 117–144. Curtin, Michael (2007) Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV, Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis, Deborah (2006) ‘Urban consumer culture’, in Michel Hockx and Julia Strauss (eds), Culture in the Contemporary PRC, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170–187. Finnane, Antonia (2005) ‘China on the catwalk: Between economic success and nationalist anxiety’, in Michel Hockx and Julia Strauss (eds), Culture in the Contemporary PRC, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 65–86. Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gries, Peter Hays (2004) China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics and Diplomacy, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Harris, Rachel (2005) ‘Reggae on the silk road: The globalization of Uyghur pop’, in Michel Hockx and Julia Strauss (eds), Culture in the Contemporary PRC, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 105–121. Hartley, John and Montgomery, Lucy (2009) ‘Fashion as consumer entrepreneurship: Emergent risk culture, social network markets, and the launch of Vogue in China’, Chinese Journal of Communication (Special Issue: Internationalizing the Creative Industries) 2 (1), pp. 61–76. Iwabuchi, Koichi (2002) Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Jacques, Martin (2009), When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World, London: Allen Lane. Klein, Christina (25 March 2003) ‘The Asia factor in global Hollywood: Breaking down the notion of a distinctly American cinema’, Yale Global, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. —— (2004) ‘Martial arts and the globalization of US and Asian film industries’, Comparative American Studies 2 (3), pp. 360–384. Kurlantzick, Joshua (2007) Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World, Yale: Yale University Press. Kynge, James (2006) China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Leonard, Mark (2008) What Does China Think?, London: Fourth Estate. Lewis, Jon (2001) ‘The end of cinema as we know it and I feel ...’, in Jon Lewis (ed.), The End of Cinema as We Know It, New York: New York University Press, pp. 1–10. Link, Perry, Madsen, Richard P. and Pickowicz, Paul G. (2002) Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. McGrew, Tony (1992) ‘A global society?’, in Stuart Hall and Tony McGrew and David Held (eds), Modernity and its Futures, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 61–117. Miller, Toby, Govil, Nitin, McMurria, John and Maxwell, Richard (2001) Global Hollywood, London: British Film Institute. Naughton, Barry (2006) The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Price, Monroe and Dayan, Daniel (2008) Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Rawnsley, Gary D. (2008) ‘China talks back: Public diplomacy and soft power for the Chinese century’, in Philip Taylor and Nancy Snow (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, London: Routledge, pp. 276–285. Rawnsley, Gary D. and Rawnsley, Ming-Yeh T. (2001) Critical Security, Democratisation and Television in Taiwan, London: Ashgate. Renwick, Nick and Cao, Qing (2003) ‘Modern political communication in China’, in Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T., Rawnsley (eds), Political Communications in Greater China: The Construction and Reflection of Identity, London: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 62–82. Staiger, Janet (2002) ‘A neo-Marxist approach: World film trade and global cultural flows’, in Alan Williams (ed.), Film and Nationalism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 230–248. Watson, James (ed.) (1997) Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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Recordings used Hero Defined (2004) DVD supplement (directed by Stanley J. Orzel), Hero Miramax Home Entertainment/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD.
Part I
Changing discourses of national identities and heroism
1
The political narrative(s) of Hero Gary D. Rawnsley
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the future controls the past.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Deliberately or not, Zhang Yimou layered his 2002 martial arts (wuxia) masterpiece, Hero, with multiple political discourses. The film addresses and interrogates themes that resonate with political meaning and imagery, and which are as relevant to an exploration of contemporary China as to any attempt to understand the ancient period of the Warring States (c.475–221 BCE) that forms the backdrop to the movie. The first discourse is the most transparent and the most intentional: nationalism, through the discourse of ‘our land’ (a term used in the English version of the movie) or tian xia (literally ‘all under heaven’), provides the film’s milieu and its satisfactory dénouement. This theme need not detain us here for nationalism is addressed in more depth by other contributors to this volume (for example, see Guo and Wang). However, from the perspective of political narrative we should note that Hero represents an implicit intervention in a post-communist discussion about the importance and role of ideology in modern China. The power and consequences of nationalist policy and discourse are subjects of concern to many observers of contemporary Chinese politics, most of whom refer to the ancient dream of national unification as an instrument of popular political mobilization and legitimation.1 Other discourses in Hero inform and are informed by this main theme of nationalism. The organization of political processes and institutions, for example, is framed through a study of Legalist approaches that promote narratives of stability over rebellion to serve the nationalist agenda; while I also suggest utilitarian discourses provide the means of interpreting the choices made by both Nameless the assassin and the King of Qin at the film’s conclusion.2 This chapter offers a brief analysis of the most significant political themes that are embedded within the film. It questions the relevance and utility of the historical narrative, and therefore raises the vital issue of the power of and over discourses in modern China. Moreover, I examine the underlying political philosophy of Hero that challenges accepted codes of Confucian morality and which gives the dominant nationalist narrative its strength.
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Narratives and their narrators At the core of Hero is a juxtaposition of narratives recounted by storytellers with varying degrees of knowledge and power. Audiences are gradually exposed to multiple versions of the same story, all weaving a complex plot of conspiracies, betrayal, sexual infidelity and ultimately, misinformation. In its structure the film therefore poses elementary political questions that are directly appropriate to modern China: who is allowed to tell the real story? Whose voice is heard? Whose version of history is legitimate and accepted as such? How do the powerful deal with narratives that challenge the official version of a story? Audiences with experience of living or working in China will find this theme familiar; mutiple narratives are carefully controlled and any attempt to offer a record of events that deviates from or challenges the official version soon faces the might of the Chinese censor. Under Hu Jintao (General Secretary of the Communist Party since 2002, President of China since 2003 and Chairman of the Central Military Commission since 2004), the government is extending its surveillance and management of the media, a situation I explore in depth elsewhere (Rawnsley, 2006). For example, preventing access to forbidden websites is common, while content on government approved websites can often present a sanitized version of Chinese history. A websearch for Tiananmen Square from within China, for example, will yield photographs of posing tourists, not the lone male facing down the PLA tanks in 1989. Yet despite the ever tightening political control of the media under Hu Jintao there are grounds for optimism. Chinese Internet users are both circumventing restrictions and forcing the government to follow discourses that are determined and shaped by popular opinion expressed online, thus conceiving new political narratives. This was demonstrated most noticeably in April 2001 when the Chinese airforce shot down an American spy plane over Hainan island (Gries, 2004: 120).3 Moreover, the death of Zhao Ziyang4 in January 2005 affirmed the Internet user’s ability to search for and discover forbidden information, and express grievances with government-controlled censorship: the Internet “has only endowed citizens with a heightened awareness of the amount of information that is being blocked” (Parker, 26 January 2005), while the growth of the blogger culture, in which ordinary Internet users can become simultaneously author, publisher and audience, encourages the creation of ‘bottom-up’ narratives: [T]oday […] my grandmother said, ‘Zhao Ziyang died, why isn’t the news or the papers reporting it?’ I was curious, so I went searching on the Internet, but I found I couldn’t open many Web sites, which made me think something was strange … This morning, I couldn’t connect to any overseas web sites, and I realized that something had happened … Putting aside Zhao’s merits and faults for the time being, we have already
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completely lost the right to speak, and to hear about him! What kind of world is this? (Ibid.) The dominant political and historical narratives are increasingly challenged by a progressively curious, vocal and Internet-friendly population that is able to harness the power of new technology to give form and voice to their questioning. This confronts the very basis of how the Communist Party retains control of information through centralization and vertical (top to bottom, i.e. a simple model of government to people) communication. The Internet, however, and the architecture of the World Wide Web facilitate decentralized dissemination based on horizontal communications (the most significant being person to person, nongovernmental communications). Increasingly we can observe how the Internet is a communications system that is incompatible with communist political and social organization. The connectivity associated with the Internet has the capacity to break down spatial and temporal relevance while undermining existing hierarchies (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2002; Norris, 2001; Stevens and O’Hara, 2006). Predictably, these tensions worry governments, such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that are determined to maintain a grip, however tenuous, on political narratives. These themes are represented in Hero in which the principal narrator is arguably the director himself. Audiences are familiar with political imagery in Zhang Yimou’s films, though in interviews the director has repeatedly denied deliberately following a political agenda or using overt political imagery. Interviewing Zhang, Tan (1999–2000: 10) noted: “Yellow Earth … and all other Fifth Generation films have been overly interpreted. Raise the Red Lantern, for instance, has been treated as an allegory of the Gang of Four.” Zhang replied: “Some people’s interpretations of our works overshadow the works themselves. It has been common for interpretations to impose themselves on art works.” Furthermore, film commentators and scholars have subscribed to the idea that the so-called Fifth Generation of directors, with Zhang arguably its most famous member, are less concerned with politics than their predecessors and are more interested in the ascetic and experimenting with the medium (Chen, Liu and Shi, 1997; Zhang, 2004). While one sympathizes with Zhang, his claim is defensive, if not a little disingenuous for it is impossible to watch his films, especially this author’s favourites, To Live (Huozhe, 1994) and The Story of Qiuju (Qiuju da guansi, 1992), without sensing their political undercurrents. Zhang’s movies, including Hero, provide a contested narrative, one version of Chinese history. The official response to Zhang’s films suggests that, intentionally political or not, the Chinese government perceives a direct challenge to their own narrative5; in other words that there is a competition between the state and artist for the authority and legitimacy to tell China’s story. One might propose that the Communist Party has politicized art through its own interpretation and, by challenging certain artists’ right to perform or compose, has drawn audience attention to the possibly subversive content in their output.
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The biographical focus of Hero, the King of Qin (259–210 BCE) has long been the subject of Chinese historiography, and the narrative of this history changes to suit the interests and prevailing political agendas of the time. Conventional accounts of Chinese history chronicle the contribution of the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE) to the formation of political society. According to these the First August Emperor, Shi huangdi (the assassins’ intended target in Hero), was responsible for introducing the characteristics of government, economics, commerce and culture that we today associate with modern China: a meritocratic bureaucracy; administrative efficiency; the centralization of state power; the standardization of language, currency, weights and measures. He is best remembered, however, as the first Chinese ruler to attempt the unification of China and for expanding its territory.6 The historian Rayne Kruger has recounted how under the First Emperor China extended for a thousand miles westward of the Pacific shore and from the deserts of the north to the lush lands south of the Yangtze. This was the core China which despite periodic fragmentation and with substantial accretions of territory has subsisted as a country and a nation these two and a quarter millennia – one of the major political entities on earth – while innumerable other imperial entities have risen and fallen … (Kruger, 2004: 90–91)
… in 210 BC he [the First Emperor] suddenly fell ill and died. He was fortynine, having reigned for thirty-seven years, of which only for the last twelve had he been Emperor. But the imprint of his rule remained on the Chinese state for two thousand years or more. (Ibid.: 96–97) Another historian, Partricia Buckley Ebrey (1996: 61), describes how later Chinese narratives “castigated” the First Emperor “as a cruel, arbitrary, impetuous, suspicious, and superstitious megalomaniac”. This is more consistent with the Confucian reaction to Qin rule, which is hardly surprising given that Qin Legalism (fajia) challenged the Confucian moral and political order. As early as 266 BCE Confucian scholars began to censure the Qin, alleging that the emperor was responsible for China’s first ‘Cultural Revolution’: in response to Confucian criticism of his style of government he is said to have ordered the burning of any classical texts and books about philosophy that did not serve a practical purpose.7 Anyone discussing or advocating these competing schools of thought were executed, as were their families. This ‘Cultural Revolution’ demonstrates that the Qin were not only concerned with controlling (or abolishing) competing schools of thought, but also with controlling narrative. One purpose of this wanton destruction was to abolish the tendency to disparage the present by praising the past, a method that successive Chinese governments have used (most recently during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1975). The Qin destroyed competing histories to prevent access to alternative versions (De Bary and Bloom, 2000: 141).
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The story of this ‘Cultural Revolution’ is a familiar theme in all the histories of the Qin and is entirely consistent with the dominant narrative of the dynasty’s brutality that began with the Confucians. Their Ten Crimes of Qin, for example, was an inventory of the emperor’s cruel actions and was followed by Jia Yi’s essay, The Faults of Qin (Guo qin lun).8 In all such critical accounts the fall of the dynasty was ascribed to the harsh nature of its rule and the challenge it presented to the Confucian code of virtuous conduct that an emperor should show towards his subjects. However, there is need for caution in accepting these narratives, for the historical accounts have a strong anti-Qin bias and must be used with great care. We cannot really know, for example, whether 460 scholars were buried alive by the Qin9, but this became part of the historical record accepted by Chinese scholars for over two millennia, consistent with the ruthless iconoclasm attributed to the Qin. (Schirokauer, 1999: 53) The West’s leading scholar on the Qin, Derek Bodde, has subjected these narratives to particularly close scrutiny. He concludes that: The unquestioning acceptance of this story [of scholars being buried alive] through the ages has contributed not a little to the horror with which the First Emperor has traditionally been regarded. Yet objective examination reveals good grounds for regarding it as more the stuff of fiction (and rather lurid fiction at that) than of history. In short, it seems a reasonable conclusion that the story […] did not appear in the original Ch’in record from which [Sima Qian] derived his sixth Chapter. (Bodde, 1986: 72, 95–96) So are the two narratives, one that recognizes the Qin’s accomplishments, the other that focus on his alleged brutality, necessarily mutually exclusive? Certainly the current dominant (state and non-state) Chinese narrative is a history of the Qin and the First Emperor that emphasizes his achievements and overlooks the less agreeable aspects of his reign. China is not unique here. History is decided by its interpreters, and although the narratives in Hero are not necessarily mutually exclusive, there is no doubt that political expediency at any particular moment can be an extremely powerful motivation for political actors to emphasize some parts of history while playing down others. It is noteworthy that Zhang Yimou also chooses to avoid making any judgement of the King of Qin and barely mentions in Hero the brutality for which he is remembered. The King, later emperor, is a useful reference point for modern Chinese propaganda that mobilizes audiences around a nationalist agenda. After all, history is a compelling propaganda device for it embraces and arouses powerful emotions associated with identity, common roots and a shared heritage. And when combined with the Chinese proclivity for alluding to history as a narrative of ‘victimhood’, the nationalist aspirations first linked with the Qin are still prevalent and influential.10 Yet the problem with linking
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an historical narrative to the movie is that informed audiences know from the outset how the film will end: the King of Qin must survive; the story is defined by the benefit of hindsight. We have ready access to descriptions of his achievements and failures, and we know how history has (rightly or wrongly) judged him. Moreover, we know that the Qin Dynasty collapsed soon after its creation in the throes of popular rebellions and court intrigue. This does not divert attention from the film, but it does inform the narrative and its reception, and is testament to the fact that Zhang Yimou is merely the latest in a long line of storytellers to revisit this ancient tale. Chen Kaige made his own version of the story about the King of Qin in 1988 called The Emperor and the Assassin (Jingke ci qinwang), as did Zhou Xiaowen in 1996 called The Emperor’s Shadow (Qin song). This theme of propaganda narrative and nationalism is most pronounced when one dissects the description of the emperor provided by Kruger above. It is possible to read Kruger as having accepted the official version of history, for the very idea that China has existed “as a country and a nation these two and a quarter millennia” is very problematic (Kruger, 2004: 90–91). Can we say that China as a country or nation, implying shared language, history and culture has existed for so long? This is not to dispute the idea that there has long been a geographic, demographic and cultural entity called China, only that a politically unified nation-state remained a distant aspiration certainly until the twentieth century. Even today the demographic diversity of China, thrown into sharp relief by the overwhelming inequality in resources (natural and otherwise), wealth and political privilege, makes homogeneity difficult to imagine, and is especially problematic if by China we refer to a Han-centric or Han-dominated nation-state: China’s minorities and the nonHan populations of contested areas of China (such as Xinjiang and Tibet) would take issue with the notion of homogeneity. Moreover, the complete unification of China remains unfulfilled, an ancient dream still unrealized for, following the (re)incorporation of Hong Kong (in 1997) and Macau (in 1999), Taiwan remains stubbornly separate from the People’s Republic. Instead, Hero asks audiences to reconsider the national memories, stories and myths that have been told and retold through generations manufacturing what Anthony Smith (1999: 9) has called “ethnosymbolism” that can create the sense of a unified nation.11 A more accurate examination is provided by Chris Berry and Mary Ann Farquhar: if a nation or community “appears fixed, unified and coherent”, they say, “then that is an effect produced by the suppression of internal differences and blurred boundaries … [P]roducing this effect … depends upon the establishment and recitation of stories and images – the nation exists to some extent because it is narrated [emphasis added].” (Berry and Farquhar, 2006: 6) It is not surprising that at the height of the China-as-victim narrative, between the end of the Opium Wars in 1860 through the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 (the start of the republican era) to the end of the Sino-Japanese war in 1945, historiography was more sympathetic to the Qin. As China grew weaker at the hands of foreign imperialists and a united China seemed as far away as ever, there surfaced a more positive reception for the First Emperor and his vision of tian xia. Feibai Ma in 1941 offered one of the more powerful revisionist histories of
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the emperor, Biography of the First Emperor (Qin shi huangdi zhuan) that was embedded in the political environment. Ma lauded the First Emperor as a hero of Chinese history, comparable to the Kuomintang leader and the Communist Party’s nemesis, Chiang Kai-Shek, who also attempted the unification of China (with the failed Northern Expedition in 1927). This was a narrative that resurfaced in the 1970s (minus the reference to Chiang Kai-Shek) when the emperor was used to analyze how the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution might be brought to an end and a unified China with a centralized state could finally be realized. The story and the emperor as its subject have been appropriated by different narrators at different times for different purposes. There appears, therefore, to be a correlation between the cultural portrait of the emperor and Chinese domestic or foreign policy. Tolerance and acceptance of the First Emperor and a more understanding judgement of his vision (if not his methods) may in fact reflect current anxieties – social, economic, political and national.
The philosophical narratives In addition to addressing the themes of nationalism and storytelling, the political narrative of Hero also refers to questions of rebellion versus stability. This is a rich discourse and one that is of major relevance to modern China in the throes of an extraordinary economic and social maelstrom. It is customary to use historical allegories to make reference to contemporary society, and the growing literature on Chinese movies all agree that films are an accessible gateway through which modern China can approach its problems and come to terms with itself. In other words, films both reflect and shape the times in which they are made. The conventions of the wuxia genre are used in an ultimately subversive way, undermining the traditional focus on Confucianism (rujia) upon which such films traditionally rest. The foundations of the conventional wuxia film are codes of loyalty (zhong), filial relationships (xiao), virtue (jie) and brotherhood (yi). Emperor, warrior, peasant and monk are all expected to uphold and defend these codes of Confucian morality. Classic examples of wuxia cinema include King Hu’s Come Drink with Me (Da zui xia, 1966), Zhang Che’s The One-Armed Swordsman (Du bi dao, 1967) and Raymond Lee’s New Dragon Inn (Xin longmen kezhan, 1992), and the conventions are explored in detail in the chapter by Wang and Rawnsley in this volume. However, starting with Ang Lee’s 2000 global blockbuster Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong) these codes are no longer taken for granted and in fact they are frequently interrogated. Yu Shulian, Michelle Yeoh’s character in Crouching Tiger, for example, accepts the codes: “Fighters have rules too,” she tells Zhang Ziyi’s character. “Friendship, trust, integrity … Without rules, we wouldn’t survive for long.” Yet when pressed further to discuss the ‘free and exciting’ life led by the swordsmen Zhang’s character has read about in story books, Shulian tells her “how it really is … No place to bathe for days, sleeping in fleainfested beds.” This more accurate narrative of the swordsman’s life is reinforced by Chow Yun-fat’s character who, despairing at the bloodshed associated with his warrior’s life, wishes to abandon his sword and therefore leave his life behind him.
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While undoubtedly part of the wuxia genre and heritage, such themes actually also subvert the genre in the same way that Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone subverted the Hollywood Western. More so than Crouching Tiger, Hero questions the relevance of traditional Chinese codes and chooses instead a Legalist narrative to judge the moral health of the nation. Legalism was the foundation of Qin rule. It offered a guide to political behaviour that challenged the social morality of Confucianism and hence the codes that had defined the conduct of warriors. Legalism advises that political power should be based on and exercised through a clear system of incentives and sanctions. There is no room for virtue, morality or wisdom. Legalism is “rational, cynical and totally amoral. What it teaches is totalitarian regimentation of society in the service of the state” (Hucker, 1975: 52).12 In fact, there is little that is legal about Legalism; it does not prescribe the rule of law, but rather a political and social system based on authoritarian rulers who are above the law exercising absolute power on behalf of the people. Hence Legalism, as understood and practiced by the Chinese, lies more in the realist rather than normative tradition: rulers were advised to deal with the world as it is (the realist approach), not as it should be (normative), though some scholars (such as Creel) deny such parallels between the two philosophies. The Qin, and especially the First August Emperor, were most influenced by Han Feizi (280–233 BCE) whom we might describe as the Chinese Machiavelli, for in his writings we find distinct echoes of The Prince (1532) which taught European rulers how to be strong and amoral. The teachings of both Han and Machiavelli shared many characteristics, including admonishing their audiences to trust no one; for as Han noted, “when the ruler trusts someone, he falls under the person’s control”. Blended with this is the core realist predisposition to observe self-interest as the driving force of human behaviour; and therefore rulers should beware those around him who would be his friend or subordinate, and should strive to manipulate competition between them (‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’): The empire can be ruled only by utilizing human nature. Men have likes and dislikes; thus they can be controlled by means of rewards and punishments. On this basis prohibitions and commands can be put in operation, and a complete system of government set up. The ruler need only hold these handles [rewards and punishments] firmly, in order to maintain his supremacy. […] These handles are the power of life and death. Force is the stuff that keeps the masses in subjection. (Creel, 1953: 149)13 These prescriptions, blended from realism and Legalism, are apparent in Hero. Although surrounded by subordinates, the King of Qin is alone and suspicious of all, suffocating in the protection of his court and trusting no one. All may be enemies; expect nothing except disloyalty; and depend on nobody for man is driven by self-interest. The loneliness of the King’s life contrasts sharply with the absolute power he wields – it is his ultimate sacrifice. There is no doubt that the assassins are (at least initially) intent on rebellion
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against the perceived tyranny of the King of Qin (of whom, incidentally, we know very little from this film), but the finale suggests that not dissenting from the Legalist codes serves the long term interests of ‘our land’. The rebellion is defeated not by the might of the King’s wisdom or his military machinery (i.e. not by the principles of Legalism), but by a complex intrigue among the assassins themselves. The question then becomes: who holds the power? Is it really the King or the assassin who lets him live? Is the fate of China decided by the assassin’s decision? And ultimately, who is the hero to which the film’s title alludes? “Nameless submits to the King, burying his ‘trivial’ loyalty to the doomed King of Zhao for the sake of a unified China, which brings peace to the people.” (Berry and Farquhar, 2006: 164) Such ambiguity is not surprising, for it appears to characterize the filmmaking of China’s so-called ‘Fifth Generation’ of directors. Audiences are denied easy answers, and there are no easy solutions to the paradoxes of modern government. Rather, it serves Zhang Yimou’s apolitical endeavours in Hero to maintain a sense of uncertainty so that the story and the aesthetic override ‘the message’. In the end, however, it is a Legalism tinged with utilitarian narrative that is most influential. As an audience we are witness to the moral anxiety of a leader faced with a critical decision: obeying his conscience (which is anathema to his philosophy’s Legalist foundations) or fulfilling the expectations of his office. Like the assassin before him, the King decides to make a sacrifice for the greater good and therefore orders the execution of Nameless. As Creel (1953: 154) writes of Legalism, “rewards and punishments are not concerned primarily with the individual to whom they are applied but are designed to have an exemplary effect upon the whole people [emphasis added]”. It is easy to read the film’s conclusion as a defence of authoritarianism; that stern political and social control is a necessary evil that can serve order, peace, stability and prosperity (or, in this case, the nationalist agenda). J. Hoberman (23 August 2004) among others has called Hero “a paen to authoritarianism” and a “glorification of ruthless leadership and self-sacrifice on the altar of national greatness”. This utilitarianism is, of course, an argument that is familiar to political scientists who study the so-called ‘Asian values’ thesis whereby the greater good becomes an easy justification for political repression. Creel (1953: 156) again alludes to this when he writes that when the King of Qin became the emperor: “All over China the people heaved a sigh of relief. It was centuries since a strong ruler had controlled all of China and enforced the peace.” The Asian values narrative is found, for example, in Hong Kong where we might argue that its power as a discourse has grown since the territory’s absorption into the People’s Republic in 1997. This is suggested by the following article published in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP): Chinese businessmen do not want to destabilize the status quo in Hong Kong for fear of upsetting Beijing and the economy. Provided people are rich and capitalism flourishes, why worry about politics? Business tycoons in Hong Kong […] lashed out at pro-democracy politicians, warning Beijing’s tolerance of their demands for universal suffrage in 2007 was wearing thin …
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G. D. Rawnsley … Ronnie Chan Chi-chung, chairman of Hang Lung Properties said … ‘Do you think if you are bringing more people on the street, [Beijing is] going to back off? No way. Hong Kong people will only limit our own sphere of possibility,’ he said … … Chang Wing-kee, Chairman of the Chinese Association of Manufacturers in Hong Kong, warned democrats not to ‘incite’ the public to ‘play with fire’. Lui Che-woo, chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Hotel Owners, said: ‘For over 100 years, Hong Kong was never involved in politics […] Why make political reform? (SCMP, 29 April 2004: 1)
These comments echoed those made by China’s Vice-President Zeng Qinghong: “For Hong Kong and Macau, the eternal theme is developing the economy and improving people’s livelihood” (SCMP, 27 April 2004: 1). Economics first; politics later. Again, this is a narrative that serves specific political interests; and it is a narrative that is vehemently contested in the public sphere. Recent studies testify that Hong Kong Chinese are far from being apathetic (apathy here referring to disengagement from politics rather than lack of interest or knowledge). History reveals that the people of Hong Kong have always been politically active, even under the British colonial administration. Most of this political activity has been necessarily channelled through non-governmental organizations because the ruling British authorities dominated the political structure. Resistance to hegemony provided the foundation for the emergence of a strong civil society that is too often neglected in studies of Hong Kong’s political development. Such grass-roots mobilization was often successful in changing government policy, including the introduction of public housing following the devastation of the Shek Kip Mei fire in 1955 and the student demonstrations of the 1970s (Butenhoff, 1999). We might also add the success of the 1 July 2003 protest march involving an unprecedented 500,000 people which overturned the local government’s commitment to introduce a socalled anti-subversion law. Moreover, the competition for control over the narrative continues as the protest organizers and the state routinely argue over the numbers of demonstrators who mobilized on the streets of Hong Kong, their support, and the long-term practicality of such actions. In Hero, the utilitarian narrative of acceptance contradicts that offered by the growing number of protests in Hong Kong. In the movie resistance fails; or it doesn’t fail as much as two of the assassins decide their resistance may damage the long-term interests of their fellow countrymen. Little wonder, then, that some critics have read Hero as a paean to authoritarianism.
Conclusions Zhang Yimou has been criticized (especially among audiences in Taiwan who shiver at the very thought of the implied nationalism and unification with China
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that is present in Hero) for “selling out”, for presenting a “sympathetic view” of China under the King of Qin, and thus embracing the need for authoritarian control for the greater good of the nationalist agenda (Chen, 2006: 324–327). This, say his critics, is a complete reversal of his position in his earlier films that were banned in China (Raise the Red Lantern and To Live, the latter a tragic and critical history of life under both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party). Typical is the following review by J. Hoberman (23 August 2004) who discusses the film’s “cartoon ideology”: There’s more than a bit of Leni Riefenstahl to Hero – and not just because of the implied ‘worship’ in the title […] Hero’s vast imperial sets and symmetrical tumult, its decorative dialectical montage and sanctimonious traditionalism, its glorification of ruthless leadership and self-sacrifice on the alter of national greatness, not to mention the sense that this might somehow stoke the engine of political regeneration, are all redolent of fascinatin’ fascism. However, this is too simple a reading of a film that has a complex and multilayered narrative that invites careful deconstruction. Rather than celebrating the authoritarianism of Qin, Hero is in many ways a depressing and desolate representation of society at that time. We know that the purpose of the King’s Legalism and both Broken Sword and Nameless’s decision not to kill him are based on ending war and bringing peace and stability to a finally unified China. Yet in the movie Zhang Yimou does not present any evidence to suggest that unification by the Qin will result in peaceful, just or benevolent rule. Rather the film concludes with a king surrounded by the drabness of his court (in stark contrast to the vibrancy of life outside) and hundreds of faceless bureaucrats who in unison remind the King of his duty in executing Nameless. Even though the King has absolute power in a Legalist sense, he is in fact powerless, for he is unable to make a decision on Nameless’s fate based on his own desires or opinions: Apart from the offensiveness of charging a filmmaker whose films have been banned by the Chinese government – and who has been prevented from traveling to collect the honors those films have garnered – of suddenly licking the government’s feet, the anti-‘Hero’ arguments don’t take into account that the film ends not in a surge of patriotic feeling but on a pronounced mournful note of contingency and skepticism. And they ignore how the movie forces the King to live up to the ideology he so glibly spouts about sacrificing the happiness of the individual for the good of all. In our final glimpse of the King, the man has been dwarfed by the trappings of his power. (Taylor, 27 August 2004) These ‘trappings of power’ are represented in the film’s opening scenes when Zhang offers an intriguing visualization of the structure and discourse of politics in Qin China. The first scenes provide a glimpse of how Zhang pictures the extraordinary rituals that might have defined the King of Qin’s world, in particular the
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power of the King’s mandarins who serve as gatekeepers to their monarch. Rather than enjoying the accoutrements of absolute power, by the end of the movie we realize the King is alone, deliberately isolated, paranoid and enveloped in a cache of protective rituals. He is also a prisoner of his mandarins and of the very philosophy that is the basis of his rule. Moreover, we should not lose sight of the implied criticisms embedded in Hero. The imposition of a homogenous culture, for example, is resisted by the Zhao calligraphy school. In this scene (one of the most powerful in the film) the master of the school insists his pupils continue to practice their art even when the school is under heavy bombardment from Qin army arrows: “Please remember,” he says, “their arrows might destroy our town and topple our kingdom, but they can never obliterate our culture.” Is this an indication that the cultural unification of China would never be realized? In many ways, therefore, it is possible to suggest that the way Hero has been read – as a sell-out in Taiwan and as a celebration of a distinctly nationalist (‘one China’) agenda in China – is misjudged. Rather, the very appropriation and interpretation of the movie, like its subject, represents a contested narrative of history, power and national interests. Audiences will see in Hero what they want to see or what they are told to see. But this chapter suggests that the complexity of the film is such that it is a mistake to assume a single easily identified narrative.
Notes 1 One of the best of the most recent publications on Chinese nationalism and its replacement of Communist ideology is Gries (2004). 2 I discuss both Legalism and utilitarianism in greater depth later in the chapter. Simply, Legalism is a form of political decision making that does not recognize the value of virtue, morality or wisdom. It provides a basis for authoritarian rule on behalf of the people. Utilitarianism involves determining how to benefit the greatest number. 3 “Following the 2001 plane collision … the People’s Daily sought to suppress extreme nationalist postings on its Strong Country Forum (qiangguo luntan) online chatroom. Many Chinese cybernationalists responded by moving to chatrooms at private sites like Sina.com, where they fervently decried the state’s suppression of their nationalist views.” Gries (2004: 120) “Criticism against feeble leadership reached a pinnacle shortly after the release of the American crew: ‘Why does our government have those leaders?’ asked another Netizen in frustration. ‘They didn’t take enough calcium tablets!?’” (Li, 2003) 4 Zhao Ziyang was Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party, 1987–1989. He was purged because of the sympathy he expressed for the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and spent the remaining years of his life under house arrest. 5 Three of Zhang’s best known films, Judou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and To Live (1994) were all banned in China. The Story of Qiuju (1992) was approved by the Communist Party. 6 The accomplishments of Qin, together with their system of law and punishments, were recorded in a collection of bamboo slips, unearthed in 1975 from the grave of a Qin official. See Li (1985: 429) and Turner (1990: 106–107). The achievements are also documented in Sima Qian’s Shiji or Historical Records, written during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220). 7 Eberhard (2005: 64) calls this destruction of Confucian writing in 213 BCE “the great holocaust”.
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8 Jia Yi (200–168 BCE) was a poet and statesman of the Han Dynasty and was an advocate of Confucian reforms. 9 This refers to a story that 460 scholars were buried alive after one complained about the emperor. However, it is important for the historical narrative to note that the first reference to this appears a century later than the events themselves were alleged to have taken place. See Neininger (1983: 121–136). 10 On the question of ‘victimhood’ in the construction and reflection of Chinese identity see Renwick and Cao (2003: 62–82). 11 “For ethno-symbolists, what gives nationalism its power are the myths, memories, traditions, and symbols of ethnic heritages and the ways in which a popular living past has been, and can be, rediscovered and reinterpreted by modern nationalist intelligentsias. It is from these elements of myth, memory, symbol, and tradition that modern national identities are reconstituted in each generation, as the nation becomes more inclusive and as its members cope with new challenges.” (Smith, 1999: 9) 12 Creel (1953) also equates Legalism with totalitarianism, calling Chapter 8 of his book ‘The Totalitarianism of the Legalists’. 13 Wang Hsien-Shen, Han Fei Tzu Chi Chieh (1896: 18.12b–13a), quoted in Creel (1953: 149).
References Berry, Chris and Farquhar, Mary (2006) China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, New York: Columbia University Press. Bodde, Derek (1986) ‘The state and empire of Ch’in’, in The Cambridge History of China Vol. I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 20–102. Butenhoff, Linda (1999) Social Movements and Political Reform in Hong Kong, Westport: Praeger. Castells, Manuel (1996, 1997, 1998) The Information Age: Economy, Culture and Society, 3 vols, London: Blackwell. —— (2002) The Internet Galaxy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chen, Mo (2006) The History of Chinese Martial Arts Films (Zhongguo wuxia dianying shi), Taipei: Fengyun shidai (in Chinese). Chen, Xiaoming; Liu, Kang and Shi, Anbin (1997) ‘The mysterious other: Postpolitics in Chinese film’, Boundary 2, 24 (3), pp. 123–141. Creel, Herrlee G. (1953) Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-Tung, Chicago: Chicago University Press. De Bary, T. and Bloom, I. (eds) (2000) Sources of Chinese Tradition I, New York: Columbia University Press. Eberhard, Wolfram (2005) A History of China, London: Routledge. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley (1996) The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gries, Peter Hays (2004) China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics and Diplomacy, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hoberman, J. (23 August 2004) ‘Review of Hero’, Village Voice. Available online at: www. villagevoice.com/issues/0434/hoberman2.php (accessed 28 September 2007) Hucker, Charles O. (1975) China’s Imperial Past, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kruger, Rayne (2004) All Under Heaven: A Complete History of China, London: John Wiley & Sons. Li, Xiguang (2003) ‘ICT and the demise of propaganda in China’, Global Media Journal 2 (3). Available online at: http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/fa03/gmj-fa03-xiguang. htm (accessed 31 October 2007).
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Li, Xueqin (1985) Eastern Zhou and Qin Civilizations, New Haven: Yale University Press. Ma, Feibai (1941, rpt 1985) Biography of the First Emperor (Qin shi huangdi zhuan), Nanjing: Jingsu guji chubanshe (in Chinese). Neininger, Ulrich (1983) ‘Burying the scholars alive: On the origins of a Confucian martyr’s legend’, in Wolfram Eberhard, Krysztof Gawlikowski and Carl-Albrecht Seyschats (eds), East Asian Civilizations: New Attempts at Understanding Traditions 2: Nation and Mythology, Munich: Simon & Magiera, pp. 121–136. Norris, Pippa (2001) Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, Emily (26 January 2005) ‘Cracks in the Chinese wall’, The Asian Wall Street Journal. Available online at: http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006212 (accessed 24 June 2007). Rawnsley, Gary D. (2006) ‘The media, the Internet and governance in China’, China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham. Available online at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ china-policy-institute/publications/documents/Discussion_Paper_12_China_Media.pdf (accessed 10 November 2007). Renwick, Neil and Cao, Qing (2003) ‘Modern political communication in China’, in Gary Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley (eds), Political Communications in Greater China, London: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 62–82. SCMP (27 April 2004), ‘Beijing’s last word on elections in 2007 and 2008’, South China Morning Post, p. 1. —— (29 April 2004), ‘Stop rocking the boat, say business leaders’, South China Morning Post, p. 1. Schirokauer, Conrad (1999) A Brief History of Chinese Civilization, London: Wadsworth. Smith, Anthony (1999) Myths and Memories of Nation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevens, David and O’Hara, Kieron (2006) Inequality.Com: Power, Poverty and the Digital Divide, London: Oneworld. Tan, Ye (1999–2000) ‘From the fifth to the sixth generation: An interview with Zhang Yimou’, Film Quarterly, 53 (2), pp. 2–13. Taylor, Charles (27 August 2004) ‘Hero’, Salon.com. Available online at: http://dir.salon. com/story/ent/movies/review/2004/08/27/hero/index_np.html (accessed 2 October 2007). Turner, Karen (1990) ‘Sage kings and laws in the Chinese and Greek traditions’, in Paul S. Ropp (ed.), Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 86–111. Zhang, Yingjin (2004) Chinese National Cinema, London: Routledge.
2
Recycled heroes, invented tradition and transformed identity1 Yingjie Guo
Introduction The recent resurgence of interest in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the story of the King of Qin, later the First Emperor (Qin Shihuang, 259–210 BCE) after China was united, is quite remarkable. In the last decade alone, he has been the subject of at least three films, two multi-episode TV dramas and a documentary film, in addition to numerous books and websites, which have involved large numbers of Qin Shihuang enthusiasts in the Chinese diaspora as well as some of China’s most prominent writers, filmmakers, directors and actors. Zhang Yimou’s Hero stands out from this genre not only because it was the most expensive Chinese blockbuster before Chen Kaige’s The Promize (Wu ji, 2005) and China’s No.1 boxoffice success, but also because it has been one of the most controversial films in recent years (Guo, 2003). This gives one good reason not to treat Hero as an isolated artistic work. In fact, one cannot take it out of the PRC’s cultural and political context or the centurieslong debate about Qin Shihuang’s role in history without losing sight of much of the artistic and political complexity of the film. Particularly pertinent to Hero is the on-going search for Chinese heroes as a response to a growing divergence of cultural values and a prevalent identity crisis accompanying the rapid transformation since the late 1970s. This is a time when old icons go out of fashion and established traditions are no longer able to offer valid answers to members of the national community (Zerubavel, 1996). This is also a time that stimulates the re-evaluation of existing cultural forms and conceptions of the collective self (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983; Zerubavel, 1996: 105–106). The reconstruction of national identity inevitably involves the production and reproduction of heroes who exemplify the true national spirit or embody the nation’s quest for meaning, identity, unity and collective vitality; and who, together with commonly accepted values, symbols, events and landscapes, constitute a distinctive repository of national culture to be drawn on by successive generations of the national community (Smith, 1993: 38). For that reason, the heroes of each nation are reliable indicators of its collective conception of itself: “Tell me who your hero is, and I’ll know who you are.” (Ruhlman, 1960: 150)
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Hero-making and the construction and reconstruction of national identity often involve the past partly because one of the most essential elements which make up the “soul and spiritual principle” of a nation is “the possession in common of a rich heritage of memories” (Renan, 1939: 203). As John Stuart Mill noted: The strongest cause for the feeling of nationality … is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and the subsequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past. (Mill, 1861 in Zimmern, 1939: 206) Because of these essential roles of history in national identity formation, contestation takes place as historical narratives are revised, reaffirmed, remade, blocked or created to validate or institutionalize certain identities at the expense of others. The nation is thus produced and reproduced in such a process of transformation and contestation. Additionally, the party-state’s monopoly of official hero-making has made it difficult for non-establishment artists and intellectuals to create heroes in the official media or contemporary heroes who fail to conform to official patterns. Hence, they have had to work on historical figures, relying on the less controlled artistic media, most notably TV and film, for input into China’s mixing pot of hero-making. In contrast to a prevalent anti-communist and anti-traditionalist thrust of heromaking in the 1980s, for example, all the recent TV and cinematic productions based on the story of Qin Shihuang and his assassin Jing Ke unanimously lean towards statism in their favourable treatment of unification. On the other hand, their consensus on unification goes against both the centuries-old cultural nationalist tradition which holds Qin Shihuang in contempt for his suppression of the Confucian orthodoxy and the iconoclastic tradition, which views ‘oriental despots’ like Qin Shihuang, together with Chinese culture, as antithetical to enlightenment and modernity. Hero, in particular, not only returns to tradition but seeks to rediscover a traditional martial warrior type of heroism. When viewed in the light of emergent social values, transformed identities, new socio-political goals and alternative visions of China’s future, the heroism of Hero and its unification theme have much to say about China’s cultural and political change as well as shifting heroic attributes.
The quest for heroes in post-Mao China Hero is related to the quest for true Chinese heroes in post-Mao China not least because the film is centrally concerned with heroism. The quest stems from a perceived lack of heroic spirit of the kind that Hero depicts. In the words of Wang Bin, who co-authored the screenplay of Hero with Zhang Yimou and Li Feng and worked closely with Zhang on the film for over five years, “all we want to explore in our film is ‘What makes a hero?’” (Xie and Wu, 22 November 2002: 3), as there is an urgent need for heroes today:
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This is an era when people are liable to yearn for heroes, as the passionate aspirations of some and their unwavering commitments to great causes are being overwhelmed in an uproar of materialism, as some have become slaves of fashion and material interest, and as some are concerned that life is now all about satisfying insatiable desires and taking advantage of others. If all cherished values are ruthlessly subverted, how do we maintain our sense of mission and spiritual wellbeing? Fortunately, history has created heroes […] heroes who were passionately devoted to great causes, lay down their lives for justice, fulfilled their mission regardless of personal suffering and humiliation, acted chivalrously and righteously, and were ready to die for their convictions, friendship and love. So great is their spirit that it is as though it has encapsulated the yang energy emanating from heaven and earth. They were not concerned about life and death; they were guided in their heart and soul by will and conviction. (Wang, 30 October 2002) The urgent need for heroes arose from what many commentators have described as a national identity crisis in post-Mao China. The crisis came about as what used to be considered ‘the physical and psychological definitions’ of China the nation is no longer acceptable or taken for granted.2 It started off as a loss of faith in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its ideology and worsened under increased media coverage of the outside world and open debates about China’s problems in reform under former leaders of the CCP, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe further deflated the myth of the superiority and invincibility of China’s socialist system. The crisis of faith in the CCP and Maoist ideology gradually escalated into a crisis of faith in the whole Chinese cultural heritage. Reflections on why disasters like the Cultural Revolution happened soon led to a deeper cultural examination, by an emerging Chinese avant garde, of causes for China’s reform and modernization. An iconoclastic ethos predominated in political and cultural discourse to such an extent in the 1980s that the received view in society held that nothing but wholesale Westernization could save China. Accordingly, national icons came under scathing attack, and the quintessential anti-imperialist national hero Lin Zexu was blamed for delaying China’s opening up to the outside world (Tu, 1994: 31). The tide changed in the wake of the crackdown on the students’ movement of 1989, as a more conservative CCP leadership replaced Zhao Ziyang’s pro-reform faction and subdued the Westernization discourse among Chinese intellectuals. To counteract ‘cultural nihilism’ or ‘national nihilism’, which was believed to have fermented the students’ movement, the new leadership made the promotion of national culture a key component of a series of ‘patriotic campaigns’, thus encouraging the revival of interest in traditional culture in Chinese society. Since the mid 1990s, national pride has been boosted to unprecedented heights by China’s ‘economic miracle’ as well as by speculations in Chinese and Western
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media that China will become a new superpower in the twenty-first century. Against this backdrop, soul-destroying self-examination for causes of national weakness, or “self loathing” (Barmé, 1996), has given way to more positive appraisal of native cultural heritage and calls to identify cultural sources of soft power, which can be tapped in the escalating global competition for economic benefit and political and cultural influence. In the new game of identity politics, while the commitment to a strong, unitary state and comprehensive national power remains strong, the keynote is no longer the liquidation of “backward traditional culture” and the “ugly national character”, but the “reconstruction of national culture” and the rediscovery of “national essence” (Guo, 2004).
The heroes in Hero: Champions of unification Who is the hero in Hero? Or rather, who are the heroes? Obviously the answer would vary depending on one’s values and perspectives. That is probably why nobody is actually referred to as a hero in the film; it is up to the audience to draw their own conclusions. And if survey research is anything to go by, most viewers believe that the leading characters, including the assassins and the King of Qin, are all heroes (Lu, n.d.).3 What makes them heroes is no doubt a range of outstanding qualities, as will be discussed in more detail later. What is more striking is that, with no exceptions, they either turn into champions of unification or give up assassination, thereby allowing unification to take place. In fact, the concept of unification is of central importance in the decisions that the characters make and the development of the plot. To be sure, determined assassins like Flying Snow and Sky are not champions of unification to start with, but they eventually contribute to unification nonetheless. Flying Snow does this quite symbolically, by taking her own life, so that she and Broken Sword, her dead lover, will be joined “only as a man and woman”, and they can “go home”, where “there’re no more swordsmen and no more swords”. And Sky finally “gives up swordsmanship for good in honour of his three friends” – Broken Sword, Flying Snow and Nameless. In the case of Broken Sword and Nameless, the conversion to the unification cause is much more thorough and explicit. Their dramatic change of mind results directly from their realization that only the King of Qin is able to bring peace to ‘all under heaven’ (tian xia) and from their inclination towards unification and peace. That dramatic change is illustrated more clearly in the story of Nameless, the deadliest assassin of all, who sees an opportunity in the King’s promise that whoever kills or fatally wounds Sky and either Broken Sword or Flying Snow will be rewarded handsomely and allowed a private audience sitting within only ten paces of the King. For ten years Nameless has been perfecting a unique sword skill called ‘killing within ten paces’ (shibu yisha), which enables him to ‘strike the target swiftly and with surgical precision’ or to enter at precise pressure points without causing any fatal injury, if necessary. What Nameless needs to do next, before he can claim the reward, is to form a pact with the other assassins and make believe that he has eliminated or wounded two of them.
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Nameless wins Sky over with surprising ease, when Sky figures out his plan on seeing ‘killing within ten paces’ in action in their encounter, which is witnessed by the Seven Masters of Qin. Sky is instantly convinced that Nameless has a better chance of killing the King. Hence he readily colludes with him without appearing to be doing so deliberately, allowing Nameless to defeat him and to break his legendary spear. Nameless secures Flying Snow’s support just as easily, and she agrees without the slightest hesitation to help him by feigning defeat the next day when they fight at the Qin camp nearby. To Nameless’s surprise, however, Broken Sword tries to dissuade him from going ahead with the assassination attempt. It turns out that Broken Sword has no intention of killing the King now. Actually, he had already come to the conclusion three years ago, when he and Flying Snow stormed the Qin palace, that “the King must not be killed”. What is more, he stopped short of slaying the King when he had the opportunity to do so. Despite Broken Sword’s attempt to stall the battle between Nameless and Flying Snow, it takes place as planned. Nameless successfully fools the Qin generals and soldiers by stabbing Flying Snow at precise pressure points without inflicting fatal injury on her. Finally, after ten years of painstaking effort, Nameless is in a position to take the King’s life. But he hesitates at this critical juncture, unsure whether he should kill the King. What has unsettled Nameless profoundly and shaken his resolution is Broken Sword’s argument for unification: BROKEN SWORD (‘S’ HEREAFTER): Please abandon the mission. NAMELESS (‘N’ HEREAFTER): You know I’m a man of Zhao. S: So am I. N: Doesn’t Qin want to conquer Zhao? S: Yes. N: Isn’t the King the enemy of Zhao? S: Yes. N: Who are you trying to defend? You call yourself a man of Zhao? S: … The King must not be killed… . Please abandon your plan. N: No. S: Was your sword forged in hatred? N: Yes. For ten years, it has never tired. I can’t stop now. S: How can I dissuade you? N: Only by killing me. S: Are you that determined? N: Yes. S: Allow me to convey my conviction in three words. These words N:
express my
mind. Please consider. …4
The three words that Broken Sword writes are ‘all under heaven’, or ‘tian xia’ in Chinese characters. His argument is that the unification of all under heaven is a greater cause than personal vengeance and the defence of one’s own country. In his own words, “One person’s suffering is nothing compared to the suffering of
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All under heaven. Zhao’s hatred of Qin is nothing from the perspective of all under heaven.”5 Only unification, he argues further, will bring an end to the current chaos and the suffering caused by years of warfare, and only the King of Qin is able to bring about unification. Nameless finds Broken Sword’s argument too powerful to ignore, even though he is not entirely convinced at this stage. Oddly enough, however, instead of questioning the logic of that argument, he counters Broken Sword by justifying his desire to continue his mission on the grounds of lasting hatred and obligation to Sky and Flying Snow. This suggests that he has no difficulty in accepting Broken Sword’s point about the desirability of unification, like all the leading protagonists in the film. What doubts he may have seem to concern the King’s indispensable role in the unification and the means by which it is to be accomplished. What finally dispels Nameless’ doubts is also an argument related to unification, this time from the King. In their improbable, long conversation, Nameless is visibly impressed with the King’s unwavering ambition to unify all the seven states and his grand vision of a huge empire stretching beyond the bounds of all the known states and the oceans to the east, even though he frowns upon the King’s plan to abolish all the writing systems other than that of Qin. Nameless is even more taken by the King’s exceptional insight into Broken Sword’s abstruse calligraphy and what he makes of it: that “the ultimate achievement of swordsmanship is the absence of the sword in both hand and heart”, that the ideal swordsman “vows not to kill and to bring peace to humankind”. The King’s interpretation of Broken Sword’s calligraphy agrees perfectly with what Broken Sword has said to Nameless about swordsmanship. His determination and enlightenment leave Nameless with no doubt at all that the King is up to the task of unifying China and that he is committed to peace. In his last words, “Your Majesty, your visions have convinced me that you are committed to the highest ideal of swordsmanship.” It is only logical then that he should spare the life of the great champion of unification irrespective of the consequences of his decision. The teary, hesitant King orders Nameless’s execution nonetheless at the demand of the Qin ministers, officials and guards, who remind him that the great cause of unification requires rule by law and the execution of the assassin according to the law. Restated differently, the assassin has refrained from killing the King for the sake of unification, but he must die all the same because the cause of unification demands it. In a scene that hardly inspires confidence in the King’s commitment to the ultimate ideal of swordsmanship, Nameless is pierced by thousands of arrows. And the film ends with a seemingly indisputable confirmation of the King’s historic achievement: In 221 BC, Qin Shihuang unified China and brought an end to wars. He had the Great Wall built to protect the country and the people from invasions. He became China’s First Emperor. In other words, the cherished ideal of Nameless and other champions of unification in the film has been realized, and their efforts and sacrifices have been worthwhile. On the basis of the preceding discussion, there can be little doubt about Hero’s
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confirmation of unification. Thus much of the criticism the film has attracted due to this is well justified. But Hero is certainly not alone in this regard, even though it differs vastly from the other productions. In Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin (Jingke ci qinwang, 1998), for example, a main conflict unfolds between the emperor and Lady Zhao, his confidant and lover, rather than between the emperor and the assassin, as the title of the film suggests. Lady Zhao’s love-hate relationship with the emperor has much to do with the fact that she is a native of Zhao; yet she has been a friend to the emperor since childhood, and admires his grand vision. Interestingly, when Lady Zhao asks permission from the emperor to return to Zhao, he does not dissuade her by stressing how much he loves her but by speaking about his determination to unify China and to end the centuries-long wars. The impact of his vision on her is such that she not only changes her mind but also offers the emperor advice as to how to attack her beloved Zhao, without showing the slightest qualm about the imminent annihilation of her motherland. It is only when the Qin army has slaughtered thousands of Zhao children for fear they will avenge their parents in the future that Lady Zhao becomes estranged from the emperor. Similarly, the focus of Zhou Xiaowen’s The Emperor’s Shadow (Qin song, 1996) is not on the emperor and the assassin either, but on the relationship between the emperor and Gao Jianli, a talented musician from Zhao. When the emperor has Gao kidnapped and brought to Qin to compose the Qin anthem, Gao goes on a hunger strike, although he soon starts to eat and drink as he falls in love with Princess Yueyang, the emperor’s favourite daughter. Still, he refuses to compose the Qin anthem, taking it as an act of treason to involve himself in Qin’s war effort. However, like Lady Zhao in The Emperor and the Assassin, Gao changes his mind completely when the emperor urges him to think of the greater good of ‘all under heaven’ rather than the interest of the Zhao people only, a unified China and the role of the anthem in fostering a bond and common identity amongst the unified Chinese. Moreover, he drops on his knees to kowtow to the emperor following the Qin custom and promises to meet every demand the emperor has made: he will take up the position of court composer, compose the Qin anthem and agree to his lover’s betrothal to General Wang Ben. In doing so, he sacrifices his honour and reputation and betrays his motherland and the love of his life (also see Wang and Louie in this volume). By comparison, Yan Jiangang’s 33-episode TV series The First Emperor (Qin Shihuang, 2002) covers much more ground than all the above films combined; it is also the most balanced account of the historical events of all the productions. It touches on the human cost of the unification as well as the suffering as a result of costly projects like the Great Wall and the emperor’s mausoleum. In addition, it is the only work that mentions the burning of books and burying of scholars. It must be added though that these historical events are only mentioned in passing, and the brief scene of burning books looks very much like a perfunctory touch of historical realism to be expected of a systematic account of the emperor’s life. And despite the occasional turning of some uncomplimentary light on the emperor’s life, the keynote of the series is his successful campaign against the competing states and his
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eventual unification of China. The invariably favourable treatment of unification in these productions should dispel any doubt about the consensus on the issue amongs some of China’s most eminent filmmakers, such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Zhou Xiaowen and their like-minded colleagues. The unquestioning confirmation of unification in these works says much about the ideological assumptions of their creators and the creators’ presumed audience expectations, as well as about their general themes and motifs. Much the same can be said about the heroism of Hero.
The heroism of Hero, or the spirit of xiayi Wang Bin’s comments, quoted earlier, have already made it clear that the type of heroism that the film is concerned with is none other than the ‘spirit of the righteous and chivalrous hero’ (xiayi jingshen). This is corroborated in Zhang Yimou’s revelation that for him Hero is a dream come true, as he has been a fan of martial heroes since a boy and the film has enabled him to reproduce the ‘spirit of the righteous and chivalrous hero’ to which he has been attracted (Xie and Wu, 22 November 2002: 3; Yang, n.d.). That spirit is reproduced by various means in Hero but most notably by rewriting history and fictionalizing historical events and figures. Although the tension between historiography and fiction is detrimental to the plausibility of the story at times, the film stands to gain significantly from both its fictional and historicist dimensions. The former gives the filmmakers a free hand in tailoring the characters to suit the moral lesson of the film without having to worry about fidelity to history, while the latter adds nuance and dimension to it by situating it in China’s history of empire-building and long tradition of heroic swordsmanship, which can be traced back to the Warring States period (c.475–221 BCE), a golden age which abounds in legendary martial heroes, philosophers and statesmen. The partially fictional and partially real-life King of Qin, for example, certainly does not come across as an despicable chief of “barbarian tribes” who has “the heart of a tiger or a wolf” and who is “avaricious, perverse, eager for profit, and without sincerity”, as portrayed by Confucian philosopher Xunzi (c.300–230 BCE). Nor does the King’s image in Hero match his portrayal in Shiji (Historical Records) written by Han historian Sima Qian (c.145–86 BCE), whose Confucian influence is evidenced by approving reference to the Confucian poet and statesman Jia Yi (Sima, 1959: 276, 292–293). While Sima acknowledges the King as a shrewd politician and an outstanding military strategist, he also describes him as a brutal tyrant who is obsessed with immortality and troubled by assassination paranoia and who has killed many people and caused suffering to even more. By contrast, the King’s image in the film is that of an exceptionally visionary and perceptive statesman as well as a magnanimous and fearless hero. Nameless, as another example, is not a real-life figure, and yet there is no doubt his prototype is the historical figure Jing Ke. Broken Sword, too, is connected to the ancient tradition of swordsmanship. As is made clear in the screenplay of Hero (Li, Zhang and Wang, n.d.), the character is inspired by an influential treatise, On All under Heaven (Lun tian xia), which he has inherited from a legendary swordsman
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of the Warring States period by the name of Hou Ying, while the original owner of his broken sword is another famous swordsman of the same period, Zhu Hai. In fact, all the four fictional assassins in the film bear striking resemblance to the typical ‘chivalrous and righteous hero’ (xiake) of the warring states. As characterized by Sima Qian, heroes of this kind are “honest in words, effective in action, faithful in keeping promises and fearless in offering his life to free the righteous from bondage” (Sima, 1959: 3181). Overall, they are also similar to traditional martial (wu) heroes with the seven wu virtues, or the qualities that “suppressed violence, gathered in arms, protected what was great, established merit, gave peace to people, harmonized the masses and propagated wealth” (Pulleyblank, 1976: 33). It is not surprising, therefore, that the assassins in the film remind one of numerous Chinese martial heroes in literature and TV and cinematic drama. Still, Hero reconstructs a quite different kind of heroism despite the fact that it is steeped in age-old traditions. In significant ways, it even subverts traditional versions of heroism without rejecting commonly accepted heroic virtues. In the case of real-life figures such as Jing Ke, Zhu Hai and Hou Ying, for instance, heroism was demonstrated in courageous attempts on the life of the King of Qin or in exceptional endeavour to prevent the Qin from conquering the other states, or both. By contrast, Nameless and Broken Sword find it righteous to spare the King and devote themselves to the greater good of all. Underlying this difference are clearly competing conceptions of country and ‘all under heaven’ as well as contrasting objectives and ideals. The ideals of Hero’s unique version of swordsmanship, or heroism, are placed on three levels of achievement. As the King of Qin notes in his observation about Broken Sword’s scroll: Swordsmanship’s first achievement is the unity of man and sword. Once this unity is attained, even a blade of grass can be a weapon. The second achievement is when the sword exists in one’s heart, when absent from one’s hand. One can strike an enemy at 100 paces, even with bare hands. Swordsmanship’s ultimate achievement is the absence of the sword in both hand and heart. The swordsman is at peace with the rest of the world. He vows not to kill and to bring peace to humankind.6 Additionally, the screenplay of Hero makes a distinction between three types of martial heroes: ‘assassins’ (cike), ‘swordsmen’ (jianke), and ‘chivalrous and righteous heroes’ (xiake). Of these, the last category is by far the most superior, while the most outstanding in this group are the ‘committed idealists’ (sishi). These are consummate heroes not because they excel in courage and swordplay – although this is important – but because they readily give their all to their country, to ‘all under heaven’ and to justice – justice unrestricted by state boundaries; they are prepared to sacrifice their own lives in the interest of their ‘kindred spirits’ (zhiji); and they live and die for their ideals. Combining these criteria with other established heroic qualities, Hero creates a new kind of heroism that looks beyond the self, family and motherland and which
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forsakes violence to embrace the highest ideal of swordsmanship. Those who are not committed to that ideal might still qualify as heroes, but they do not become ‘true heroes’ until they are, or at least until they are reconciled to it. Indeed, the three stories – Nameless’s fabricated story, the King’s slightly distorted romantic story and Nameless’s ‘true story’, which respectively unfold in the red, blue and white sequences – are not just a narrative device for revealing the truth dramatically to the audience, but also an accumulative and corrective illustration of the ways in which true heroism takes shape and is manifested while overcoming daunting obstacles. Specifically Sky, Broken Sword, Flying Snow and Nameless start off in the film as assassins rather than true heroes. This, of course, is not to disregard their heroic qualities. Like the typical traditional martial hero, they each possess an admirable professionalism towards swordplay. At the highest level, their professionalism is exemplified by insistence on personal integrity and strict adherence to moral principles. Not only are they upright and above board, they also refuse to use underhand means even if the end is justified and even if what is considered appropriate means proves to be much more costly and less effective. When Broken Sword has failed to stop Nameless from proceeding with the assassination, for example, nothing would be easier for him to do than to alert the Qin forces to Nameless’ plan. But it would not befit a true hero like him to do so, and it is hard to imagine that many viewers would forgive him for doing that. Their professionalism can also be seen from simple, inconspicuous acts like bowing to their opponents before and after a fight, their refusal to use force unnecessarily and a unique style of fighting that contrasts with comic show of some kind. This obviously agrees with Zhang Yimou’s conception of elegant martial arts and his vision of martial arts film (Yang, n.d.). From the perspective of intellectual discourse, however, it is worth noting that Zhang’s stress on elegant professionalism in Hero parallels the rejection by leading Chinese intellectuals of the Cultural Revolution-style politics and their call for civilized behaviour and respect for the opponents in political debates and power struggles. Even if this parallel is accidental, there can be no doubt that unrelenting ‘revolutionary violence’ has no place in the film. A second outstanding heroic virtue that Sky, Broken Sword, Flying Snow and Nameless have in common is a single-minded devotion to their mission. In each case, the attempt to assassinate the King has lasted about a decade, and years of practice have led to the unity of man/woman and sword. Apart from the time and energy they have spent on the mission, they have made enormous sacrifices of one kind or another. For Nameless, nothing but his mission matters: he has chosen not to get married, to have children, to make friends or to seek promotion. What is more, he refuses to have a name, because, as he says at the beginning of movie, “when one is without a name, one can practise martial arts without extraneous distractions”. Flying Snow, as another example, would rather sever her intimate relationship with Broken Sword, or kill him if she has to, than refrain from assassinating the King. Even more impressive is the uncanny mutual understanding and absolute trust
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between the heroes who consider themselves ‘kindred spirits’. As noted earlier, Sky figures out the plan Nameless has in mind without any explanation from the latter. Moreover, he leaves his life in Nameless’s hands and allows him to strike him down without worrying for a moment about the potential risk or about his reputation as a legendary warrior. In the screenplay, Sky makes still greater sacrifice by losing his right arm and therefore any hope of remaining a warrior. Similarly, Flying Snow entrusts her life to Nameless in their battle at the Qin camp, when, though she is assured about her safety, the slightest mishap can be fatal. Surprisingly, the most uncanny mutual understanding exists between apparent enemies, Broken Sword and the King. Of all the people in the film, including the King’s numerous trusted ministers, officials and advisers, Broken Sword is the first and for a long time the only person to be convinced that only the King is able to unify China and to bring peace. The King is moved to tears when he hears about Broken Sword’s faith in him and repeats the age-old Chinese adage that anyone with a kindred spirit like this can die happily. And he understands Broken Sword equally well. That is why he alone is able to decipher what Broken Sword’s calligraphy, ‘Sword’, means. That is also why he can see through Nameless’s fabricated story. Even though he has met Broken Sword and Flying Snow only once and only briefly, he has no doubt at all that they are devoted lovers and that “they are not petty”. Therefore, he does not find it plausible that Broken Sword will provoke Flying Snow by sleeping with Moon, or that Broken Sword and Flying Snow will come to grips with each other out of jealousy. That said, it should be pointed out from the perspective of Hero, that true heroism seems to be better exemplified by Broken Sword and Nameless than by Sky and Flying Snow. The reason for this is not just that Sky is cast in a minor role or Flying Snow is of less significance in the story than Broken Sword and Nameless. More importantly, both Sky and Flying Snow are consistently motivated by what is regarded as less than noble sentiments in the film, namely hatred of Qin and love of Zhao. It is impossible to tell whether either of them eventually achieves the ‘highest ideal of swordsmanship’, although it is clear in the last moments of the film they have at least resigned themselves to the inevitable prospect of unification. In contrast, Broken Sword and Nameless, who also fail to look beyond self, family and motherland at the beginning, finally realize that ‘all under heaven’ should come before the motherland, and the motherland before family and self. Hence, they both abandon assassination, thereby achieving the ‘highest ideal of swordsmanship’. For Nameless, this means that he cannot honour his obligation to Sky and Flying Snow, who have placed their trust in him. But his dilemma is easily resolved by the filmmakers: Nameless lunges towards the King withholding the sword in his hand and fulfils his obligation, as it were, by metaphorically killing the King who has not yet fully embraced the highest ideal of swordsmanship. By comparison, Broken Sword’s dilemma is much harder to deal with, since it is simply impossible for him to be faithful to his ideal and love at the same time. He became estranged from Flying Snow three years earlier when he stopped short of slaying the King when he had the opportunity to do so. Since then, he has been a ‘love-sick’ hero, and so long as he is in love, his heroism is always likely to be
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compromised as “love is the most dangerous enemy” to chivalrous and righteous heroes (Li, Zhang and Wang, n.d.). Still, he remains true to his conviction, refusing to allow his love for Flying Snow to influence his course of action. But if he betrays love, he is not likely to appear as a true hero in the eyes of the audience. Hence, having proved true to his ideal, he finally proves he is also true to love by allowing Flying Snow’s sword to penetrate his heart. In this case, true heroism can only be reconciled with true love in death – a white world of purity, innocence and peace. In the end, all the heroes in the film die or fade away. What remains is their heroic spirit to be passed on to posterity. As the film’s theme song recapitulates, “people sing their praises” and “drawing their inspiration from the heroes, thousands and thousands of late comers succeed in accomplishing their own goals”.
Conclusion In terms of the film the heroic spirit is both unique and familiar. What makes it unique, as has been noted already, is its single-minded orientation towards unification and peace for ‘all under heaven’. In the case of Broken Sword and Nameless, heroism contrasts with what Han historian Sima Qian valued in the legendary personages of the Warring States period, upon whom the assassins in the film are based. A still sharper contrast exists between Hero’s heroic King and Xunzi’s barbarian King as well as Sima’s outstanding statesman and brutal tyrant. Without a doubt, Xunzi’s contemptuous allusion to the King and Sima’s favourable portrayal of the assassins and his somewhat uncomplimentary portrayal of the King are influenced to varying degrees by a Confucian bias, which is related to the orthodox Confucian assumption that the fault of the King is his ruthless pursuit of power against the Confucian teaching that a government derives its strength from the support of the people and virtuous conduct of the ruler.7 This bias is challenged in Hero not just by the King’s positive image and the assassins’ conversion to the cause of unification, but also by its recurring motif, as is made apparent by the foregrounding of rule by law in the state of Qin and the meticulous organization of its formidable armies, that it is Legalism that has given Qin superior strength. Moreover, the King and the state of Qin stand for the establishment in the film, and both are made into the heroic by virtue of a concerted quest for unification. Whether Hero’s creators like it or not, their gravitation towards unification converges with, and reinforces, the current party-state’s preoccupation with state unity and the identification of state with party and China. This development seems to be symptomatic of waning artistic dissent in China today or deliberate lack of friction between artists and the state post-1989. In part it may be attributable to tighter political control of intellectual discussion and artistic expression under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, by comparison with the ‘bourgeois liberalization’ under Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. It may also be related to the emergence in post-Tiananmen China of an unprecedented cultural-political synthesis at a time of growing national confidence. This is not to say, though, that Hero’s endorsement of Qin’s quest for unification and centralized power through rule by law amounts to a total rejection of
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Confucianism. For the film leaves no doubt that while the King has acquired enormous power for Qin by means of Legalist measures, he has also won people’s support because he is perceived to be a virtuous king who is capable of bringing peace to ‘all under heaven’ and committed to that great cause. In addition, what is regarded as the ‘the highest ideal of swordsmanship’ in the film is not just shared by Chinese martial heroes, past and present, but by Confucians as well. In fact, ‘bringing peace to all under heaven’ (ping tian xia) is considered the ultimate achievement of the Confucian ‘gentleman’ (junzi), preceding ‘governing the country’ (zhiguo), ‘harmonizing the family’ (qijia), and ‘cultivating the self’ (xiushen). Similarly, all the heroes in the film are prepared to sacrifice their lives for benevolence and righteousness (sheshen quyi, shashen chengren). Needless to say, the phrase comes straight out of the Confucian classic The Analects (Leys, 1997, chap. 15: 75). Although not always understood in the same way, it has been a clarion call for Chinese heroes of all sorts of persuasions since ancient times. At the same time, in spite of the unique heroic spirit of the film, viewers may be reminded of countless other martial heroes and historical personages who have emerged in recent literature and film and TV productions. After all, the ‘spirit of the righteous and chivalrous swordsman’ has been of enormous attraction to no small number of hero worshippers and nation builders in China who believe China’s weakness and backwardness had much to do with a general failure in society to set great store by martial qualities. Today, many continue to argue that the ‘spirit of the martial hero’ is valuable source of national strength (Fang, Wang, Song, et al, 1999). These writers give the ‘spirit of the martial hero’ the same social role as the ‘chivalrous and righteous spirit of the swordsman’ in Hero. In sum, Hero seeks to rediscover an authentic tradition in a golden age of Chinese history, the Warring States period. This quest can be seen as a continuation of the search for national essence since the late 1980s, and as is testified by scriptwriter Wang Bin’s comments, it is driven by the conviction that the nation opens itself to decay and chaos as a result of inner degeneration resulting from commercialization; that in cultural traditions lies ‘the creative life-principle of the nation’, which should be rediscovered (Hutchinson, 1987: 122–123). Those convictions stand out in relief against the iconoclasm of the 1980s and the New Culture Movement of the early twentieth century, which held that Chinese cultural traditions must be rejected completely as a precondition for China’s modernization. Of course, authentic traditions or creative life principles are not just there ready to be rediscovered; returning to the spirit of the past means an historic perspective that reads the appropriate trends into events, accompanied by a revaluation of historical figures to identify instruments of national destiny or obstacles to it (Breuilly, 1994: 109). Hence the challenge to traditional heroes in the film: although the rejection of traditional heroes is tantamount to the rejection of the values and beliefs they personify, the remaking of heroes can also be seen as an attempt to establish alternative values and beliefs in accordance with new visions of the collective self. Underlying the remade King of Qin, for instance, is a negative evaluation of two Chinese traditions at once, i.e. the centuries-old cultural nationalist tradition that holds him in contempt for his suppression of the Confucian orthodoxy in favour
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of Legalism and the anti-traditionalist position, which views ‘oriental despots’ like the King, together with Chinese tradition, as antithetical to liberty and modernity. At the same time, the King’s image in Hero is identified with both Legalism’s inclination towards authoritarian rule by law, centralized power and state unity, and the Confucian emphasis on government whose strength comes from the support of the people and righteous and benevolent conduct. To this extent, it may be said that Hero has arrived at a compromise between Legalism and Confucianism (also see Gary Rawnsley in this volume). Similarly, Hero’s refusal to identify with historical figures such as Jing Ke, Hou Ying and Zhu Hai implies a rejection of a type of heroism exemplified predominantly in loyalty to the native place, whereas the heroic image of the assassins in the film, particularly Broken Sword and Nameless, is a ringing endorsement of unreserved readiness to give precedence to national unification and the greater good of all, over motherland, family and self. It is not hard to see parallels between this position and that of age-old Chinese teachings that urge self-sacrifice in the interest of all sorts of collectivities or the CCP’s similar version of patriotism. Moreover, the film contradicts the traditional view of Legalists and Confucians that swordsmen and martial arts heroes were mostly anti-establishment rebels or dangerous outlaws, even though some fought against injustice within the establishment.
Notes 1 An early draft of the paper was presented at the annual workshop of the Institute for International Studies, University of Technology Sydney in December 2003. A revised version was presented at the International Film Workshop on HERO: Anatomy of a Chinese Blockbuster, held 13–15 April 2006 at the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. The author wishes to thank David S. G. Goodman, Elaine Jeffreys, Yiyan Wang and Kate Barclay, who read the paper carefully and made invaluable comments. Thanks also to Margaret Tam and Heleanor Feltham for editorial assistance. 2 According to Lucian Pye, “In the process of political development a national identity crisis occurs when a community finds that what it had once unquestionably accepted as the physical and psychological definitions of its collective self are no longer acceptable under new historic conditions.” (Pye, 1971: 110–111) Yet, he states elsewhere that the Chinese have been spared an identity crisis (Pye, 1968: 5). It can be argued, however, that even if one follows Pye’s definition of ‘identity crisis’, one can still reach the conclusion that there is currently an identity crisis in China. 3 Tianming Lu is a researcher from the Chongqing Branch of the Chinese Institute for Social Research (Zhongguo shehui diaocha yanjiusuo). His survey of 366 viewers in Chongqing found that 42.4 per cent and 42.2 per cent respectively viewed Broken Sword and Flying Snow as heroes, while 26.1 per cent and 21.8 per cent said the King of Qin and Nameless were heroes. 4 English subtitles by the SBS English Language Services, Australia. Except where indicated otherwise, all English subtitles cited in this chapter are from the SBS English Language Services. 5 In the English subtitles by the SBS English Language Services, the two original sentences have been translated into ‘One person’s suffering is nothing compared to the suffering of many. The rivalry of Zhao and Qin is trivial compared to the greater cause.’ Not convinced of the wisdom of freely translating ‘all under heaven’ into ‘many’ and
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‘greater cause’, the author has translated the sentences more literally. 6 English subtitles by SBS Language Services. It should be pointed out that it is problematic to translate ‘xia’ ‘xiake’ or ‘jianke’ into ‘swordsman’ for the simple reason that the original Chinese words are not gendered. For the same reason, it is equally inappropriate to use the personal pronoun ‘he’ for ‘xia’, ‘xiake’ or ‘jianke’. Words like ‘swordsman’, ‘swordsmen’ and ‘swordsmanship’ are not entirely appropriate either. These are retained in the text simply because alternatives such as ‘swordswoman’, ‘swordswomen’ and ‘swordswomanship’ might not be widely accepted. 7 This is the view of famous Han poet and statesman Jia Yi (c.200–168 BCE). See his The Faults of Qin (Guo qin lun). Jia’s comments are quoted approvingly by Sima Qian in Shiji.
References Barmé, Geremie (1996) ‘To screw foreigners is patriotic: China’s avant-garde nationalists’, in Jonathan Unger (ed.), Chinese Nationalism, New York: M.E. Sharpe. Breuilly, John (1994) Nationalism and the State (2nd ed.), Manchester: Manchester University Press. Creel, Herrlee Glessner (1970) The Origins of Statecraft in China, vol. I: The Western Zhou Empire, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Fang, Ning; Wang, Xiaodong; Song, Qiang et al (1999) China’s Road under the Shadow of Globalization (Quanqiuhua yinying xia de Zhongguo zhi lu), Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe (in Chinese). Guo, Yingjie (Spring/Summer 1998) ‘Patriotic villains and patriotic heroes: Chinese literary nationalism in the 1990s’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 4 (182), pp. 163–188. —— (2003) ‘Making and unmaking national heroes: Artists and nationalism in the People’s Republic of China’, paper presented at the annual workshop of the Institute for International Studies, University of Technology Sydney, 5–7 December. —— (2004) Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China: The Search for National Identity under Reform, London: RoutlegeCurzon. Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchinson, John (1987) The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, London: Allen & Unwin. Leys, Simon (trans.) (1997) The Analects (Lunyu), New York: Perre Ryckmans. Li, Bin (24 November 2004) ‘Contemporary Chinese lack the spirit of xiayi: An interview with writer Jin Yong’ (Dangdai guoren quefa xiayi jingshen: Fang Jin Yong), Beijing yule xinbao, p. 2 (in Chinese). Li, Feng; Zhang, Yingmou and Wang, Bin (n.d.) Hero: Screenplay (Yingxiong juben). Available online at: http://read.anhuinews.com/system/2003/03/18/000277290.shtml (accessed 15 October 2003, in Chinese). Lu, Tianming (n.d.) ‘What do the audience really think of Hero?’ (Yingxiong daodi zenmeyang?), Social Survey Institute of China. Available online at: http://www.chinasurvey. com.cn (accessed 8 February 2006, in Chinese). Mill, John Stuart (1861) Representative Government, reprinted in part in A. Zimmern (1939) Modern Political Doctrines, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (1976) ‘The An Lu-shan rebellion and the origins chronic militarism in the late T’ang China’, in John Curtis Terry and Bardwell L. Smith (eds), Essays on T’ang Society, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Pye, Lucian (1968) The Spirit of Chinese Politics, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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—— (1971) ‘Identity and political culture’, in Leonard Binder et al. (eds), Crisis and Sequences in Political Development, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Renan, Ernest (1939) ‘What is a nation?’, in Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, Modern Political Doctrines, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruhlman, Robert (1960) ‘Traditional heroes in Chinese popular fiction’, in Arthur Wright (ed.), The Confucian Persuasion, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sima, Qian (1959, rpt) Historical Records (Shiji), Beijing: Zhonghua shuju (in Chinese). Smith, Anthony (1993) National Identity, Nevada: Nevada University Press. Tu, Wei-ming (1994) The Living Tree, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wang, Bin (30 October 2002) ‘How many heroes are there under heaven?’ (Shiwen tian xia you duoshao yingxion), Beijing qingnian bao. Available online from Dayang wang: http:// et.21cn.com/movie/xinwen/huayu/2002–10–30/814589.html (accessed 22 February 2006, in Chinese). Wang, Guisheng (1990) ‘Thoughts on the problems of the declining effect of the Lei Feng model’ (Guanyu Lei Feng de dianxing ruohua wenti de sikao), Youth Studies (Qingnian yanjiu), (3), pp. 42–45 (in Chinese). Xie, Xiao and Wu, Jiemin (22 November 2002) ‘Hero’s screenplay “heroes”’ (Zhang Yimou Yingxiong de wenzi ‘yingxiong’), Nanfang dushi bao, p. 3 (in Chinese). Yang, Binbin (n.d.) ‘Zhang Yimou: One shot missing from Hero’ (Zhang Yimou: Yingxiong shaopai le yige jingtou), China Academic Forum (Zhongguo xueshu luntan). Available online at: http://www.frchina.net/data/detail.php?id=7044 (accessed 14 February 2006, in Chinese). Zerubavel, Yael (1996) ‘The historic, the legendary, and the incredible: Invented tradition and collective memory in Israel’, in John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
3
Ruthless tyrant or compassionate hero? Chinese popular nationalism and the myth of state origins Yiyan Wang
Introduction The First Emperor (Qin Shihuang, 259–210 BCE, aka, Ying Zheng) and his pursuit of unification of the warring states around the mid-third century BCE has been the subject of dozens of scholarly studies and popular history books published in China. There is a 30-episode television series produced by China’s Central Television in 2002 entitled Qin shihuang. The First Emperor has also been the subject of three major films produced by China’s most prominent film directors, namely: The Emperor’s Shadow (Qin song, 1996) directed by Zhou Xiaowen, The Emperor and the Assassin (Jingke ci Qinwang, 1998) directed by Chen Kaige and Hero directed by Zhang Yimou in 2002. There is no sign of interest waning as the Metropolitan Opera in New York performed First Emperor in 2006. The opera is directed by Zhang Yimou with the New York-based, internationally acclaimed Tan Dun as the music composer, and its premier run was completely sold out.1 What emerges from this constant focus on China’s First Emperor is his changing image from tyrant to hero, running parallel to changes in the sentiments and practices of contemporary nationalism in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This chapter explores the changes in Chinese assessments of the historical figure the First Emperor, and the discourse of popular nationalism through the two films by Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, chosen for their impact within China and their international reputation. Both films have been distributed internationally and have casts of superstars. Gong Li plays the lover of Ying Zheng in The Emperor and the Assassin and Zhang Yimou brings together a cast of Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Jet Li, Tony Leung, Chen Daoming (famous in the Chinese-speaking world for having played the role of emperor successfully in several extremely popular television series in the PRC). According to the Beijing University professor and film critic Jinhua Dai, the domestic release of both films were dramatically orchestrated with their premieres in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, staging ceremonies that match state-run events of national significance. Zhang Yimou dressed 200 tall, young, elite athletes as guards of the Qin in black garments with spears and shields, greeting the guests in Shaanxi accent (Dai, 2006: 160).2 Chen Kaige intended to release The Emperor and the Assassin with an open-air screening in Tiananmen Square, but changed the venue at the request of the authorities. Both films attracted a
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great deal of negative criticism from Chinese critics, but the intense media attention and debates among audiences had very different effects. Chen Kaige had to recut his film but still attracted only a small audience, whereas Zhang Yimou’s Hero went on to break all box-office records for a Chinese film despite sharp criticism on the Internet (Dai, 2006: 159–193). It seems that Chinese audience went to see Hero to make disparaging comments about it, and they demonstrated more interest in the subject of Chinese history and the image of the First Emperor than the film itself. At the centre of all these dramas is the image of the First Emperor and his achievement of national unification. Before he enthroned himself as the First Emperor, Ying Zheng was the King of the state called Qin, and Chinese popular history described him as a violent and abusive tyrant. History records that he was the target of several assassination attempts because of his determination to conquer the other six states which had been at war with each other on and off for hundreds of years (the Warring States period, c.475–221 BCE). Both movies use plots that centre on his assassination to present the myth of China’s unification. Historical records, popular beliefs, fact and fiction are mixed and manipulated, and the films produced very different images of the King of Qin. However, despite the enormous differences in their characterization of the King of Qin, his historical mission to unite China remains the ultimate core of the filmic narratives. Zhang Yimou’s Hero miraculously transformed the image of the tyrannical King of Qin in Chen Kaige’s representation into a courageous, wise and intelligent national hero.
The hero versus the villain The Emperor and the Assassin begins with the following statements: In 221 BC, following years of civil war among hundreds of Kingdoms, seven states emerged as the dominant powers in China [emphasis added]. The most ambitious of these states was the Qin, which was ruled by King Ying Zheng. Following a mandate dictated by his ancestors, King Ying Zheng made the unification of China a personal crusade.3 These statements send two important messages that are essential in understanding the film. First, the film assumes the existence of China prior to the establishment of the central state by calling the wars between the states a ‘civil war’. This justifies one state conquering the others to bring the wars to and end. Second, the unification of China is a mandate dictated by the ancestors of Qin and hence the King must fulfil a historical mission. To reinforce these messages, the very first scene portrays a very violent and bloody battle from which the King of Qin emerges as the bravest fighter. He is next seen standing in the Qin ancestral hall where he is reminded of his ancestral mission to unify the states. He then leaves the ancestral hall to discuss with his
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ministers strategies of waging war against the other states. The portrayal of court politics soon reveals that the war for unification faces resistance on many fronts, including from his own mother, the empress, whose lover is conspiring against the Qin army advancing into Zhao, her native state. Within only a few minutes of the film, it becomes clear that to achieve his goal of unifying ‘China’, the King of Qin has to be single-minded. The Emperor and the Assassin presents a grand and ambitious narrative of China’s founding mythology. As much as possible it follows various historical records of the period and the associated events, and creates emotional tangles only to enrich the character of the King of Qin as a full-blooded person. The film addresses him personally by his name, Ying Zheng, and places him in a web of complex political, personal and family relationships with an adulterous mother, ambiguous paternity, the betrayal of his most loyal general and the desertion of his lover. It highlights both his absolute power as the commander of the strongest army in the region and his tyrannical personality which the film suggests comes with such absolute power. His subsequent alienation from the entire world is pronounced again and again to illustrate the high personal price he pays for his historical mission. Of all the historical accounts of the plots to assassinate the King of Qin, the attempt by Jing Ke is covered in most detail and has become a popular legend, perhaps because it took place in the imperial court and almost succeeded. The story was also a favourite subject matter of stone engravings often found in the burial sites or clan halls during the Han Dynasty (Zhu, 1996: 30–31). According to Historical Records (Shiji) written by Han historian Sima Qian (145–c.85 BCE), the professional assassin Jing Ke was a learned man of courage and wisdom, highly respected by scholars and politicians of his time. He also won praise for his bravery in undertaking the dangerous task of killing the villain tyrant, the King of Qin (Sima, 1959 rpt: 2526–2538). The film characterizes Jing Ke not only with all these positive qualities, but also adds compassion and emotional depth to his character. He is therefore able to win over Madam Zhao, Ying Zheng’s lover since childhood. The Emperor and the Assassin offers a panoramic picture of the historical process of unification. It strives for authenticity in its reconstruction of battle scenes and weaponry, the city walls, markets, restaurants, country houses, the grandeur and beauty of the imperial court and its elaborate architecture, and much more. The strength of the Qin state is shown through its material wealth and advanced technology with its ambition to conquer the other states evidently reinforced by military and economic might. The film repeatedly stresses the difficulty and complexity of the great cause of unification, although the King of Qin does not emerge as a hero. He has no grand vision of unification, being instead a mere instrument of his ancestors’ historical mission.
The Chinese national heroes in Hero Like The Emperor and the Assassin, the Chinese version of the film Hero also begins with written statements which describe the state of Qin’s ambition to conquer the other six states as a matter of ‘objective’ history:
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While these descriptions open the story and lead the audience back into history, they serve several narrative purposes. They succinctly accentuate the Chinese popular belief that China predates the unification of the warring states and that the division of the country is against heaven’s wish. These descriptions also simplify the film’s relationship with history by presenting the centuries of wars through such brief statements of ‘facts’, thereby saving time and space for its primary focus – the King of Qin and the overwhelming enormity of his vision and will to unify the warring states at all costs. Unlike The Emperor and the Assassin, Hero is not interested at all in presenting a grand and comprehensive or accurate historiography. Rather, it remains a film in the tradition of martial arts narratives (film or literature), where the primary intention is the invention of legendary stories loosely connected with history. These legends, however, often have high moral grounds for which their heroic protagonists strive. It is therefore no surprise that Hero demonstrates a total disregard for the historical record and tells a succession of assassination stories to elaborate its use of martial arts. The idea of a unified China and the image of a national hero are by-products of this first Chinese commercial blockbuster. Furthermore, the film’s core idea of the Chinese national hero and China’s unification are all the more powerful and influential precisely because of its commercial nature and success. The King of Qin is the focus of the film and remains in the gaze of both his assassins and the audience. He is in possession of cultural attainment, skilled in martial arts, and having the strategic vision and courage to face both physical threats and emotional isolation. The King’s image in Hero challenges the depiction of him in The Emperor and the Assassin as a rough and violent tyrant of unpredictable temperament. In Hero he possesses both wen (cultural attainment and strategic vision) and wu, meaning courage and martial arts skills (also see Louie in this volume). During his long conversation with the assassin Nameless, the King of Qin gradually evolves from being the victim of his ambition to being revered as a ruler with a grand vision for ‘all under heaven’ (tian xia).5 At the beginning of the film, the audience first sees the massed Qin army outside
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the majestic palace. Nameless ascends the staircase to meet the King of Qin who sits on his throne in isolation at the far end of a dark and empty imperial court. This arrangement is a result of a previous assassination attempt when two killers, Flying Snow and Broken Sword, overwhelmed hundreds of imperial guards and almost succeeded in taking the King’s life. Thereafter, the court room is stripped of its curtains and decorations so nobody can hide from the King. He has also ruled that anyone who wants to talk to him must sit a hundred paces from him. Only the most deserving can be as close as ten paces to him. In fear for his life, he is enclosed, insecure and trusting no one. However, as the film continues, this figure of vulnerability fades away and in his place emerges a man of great courage and immense intellectual ability. He listens quietly as Nameless recounts how he defeated three of the most deadly assassins. His stories are fascinating and intriguing and Nameless provides hard evidence for their validity, but the King eventually sees through the layers of his constructed narrative and fathoms the truth. It turns out that Nameless is the most dangerous of all and has managed to deceive many on his way to come so close to the King. Nameless has perfected a way to kill within ten paces so the King’s life is now at his disposal. However, at the moment of life and death, the King of Qin is not only calm and composed but also able to win over the deadly enemy, as his vision of unification enlightens the assassin. The King of Qin rises, standing tall in front of the calligraphic image of the Chinese character for ‘sword’, and speaks about his vision for peace that benefits ‘all under heaven’. In this way the supposed martial-arts action film depends on the construction and deconstruction of narratives for its plot development. Communications between the King of Qin and Nameless thereby becomes a process of transformation and enlightenment, unfolding the great vision of unification. Although the emperor’s wisdom and persuasive rhetoric are most impressive, his life is ultimately saved by convincing Nameless of tian xia. In accepting this vision, Nameless also accepts his own death, thus transforming himself into the most courageous hero, who bravely ‘faces his death as his ultimate fate’ (shisi rugui), one of the highest regarded heroic virtues for Chinese. With tears in his eyes, the now compassionate King of Qin orders Nameless to be executed according to the law of Qin, but he stages a state funeral to honour Nameless as a national hero. At the same time, it also becomes clear in the course of their conversation that another assassin, Broken Sword, shares the vision to unify tian xia, which stopped him killing the King. Consequently, Broken Sword subjected himself to rejection by his lover, Flying Snow. Empathy from his would-be assassin touches the King of Qin, and his admiration for his deadly foe transforms Broken Sword into another hero in the great cause of China’s unification. From the beginning to the end of the film, the notion of tian xia serves as the central axis around which all the events revolve. At the centre of the power politics, the notion of ‘all under heaven’ erases all the violence and suffering the King of Qin inflicts upon people of his own and other states. Twice his would-be assassins are converted to his vision when in close contact with him, allowing the King of Qin to survive and achieve unification. To reinforce image of heroic grandeur, the
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Chinese version of the film ends with the following written description set against the background of the Great Wall: In the year of 221 BCE, after the King of Qin unified China, he ceased the war, built the Great Wall, and took good care of the country and the people. He became the first emperor in Chinese history, known in history as Qin Shihuang, the Qin’s First Emperor.6 It is very clear that the film’s intention is to establish the King of Qin as the perfect emperor with immense political wisdom, courage and benevolence. In sharp contrast to Chinese popular memory of Ying Zheng as the abusive tyrant, the film Hero transforms him into a compassionate national hero.
The First Emperor and the myths of the Chinese state origin The storylines of the two films develop from the assumption that China existed before the unification by the King of Qin in 221 BCE and that he had the mandate to unite tian xia. Regardless whether one likes the films or not, so far these two basic assumptions in Chinese popular history have not been challenged. The debates in China over these two films are mostly about their historical accuracy, or their images of the First Emperor, but are not about their conceptualization of China or unification. As both films demonstrate, the notion of tian xia plays a key role in the imaginary of the Chinese state. The earliest entries of tian xia can be traced back to the Confucian Analects (Lunyu) and one of the Daoist (daojia) volumes, Zhuangzi. The Emperor’s ambition to unify tian xia, and his strategy for doing so, are recorded in the ‘Biography of the Emperor of Qin’ (Qin Shihuang benji), a chapter in Shiji. As a result of Qin’s victory in 221 BCE, a centralized Chinese state was established and an empire evolved afterwards. Prior to that point in history, there were central plains (zhongyuan) and several central states (zhongguo), but there was no China (Zhongguo), the central state in a singular form. ‘The central states’ and ‘the central plains’ were geographical references to the area known to the people of the time as the civilized world.7 This world perspective would in time become significant in Chinese political thinking and fundamental to the gradual development of the myths regarding the origin of the Chinese state. Zhongguo, originally referring to all the states in the central plains, would in time be adapted to mean ‘China’ as it is understood today. But this transformation of meaning did not happen until late in the nineteenth century when modern state-building was triggered by its encounter with colonial powers from the West and Japan. Between 221 BCE and 1911 when the Republic of China was established, states in the area now known as China used dynastical titles, such as the Tang, the Han or the Qing. At the time of the Warring States, the term ‘tongyi tian xia’ meant ‘unifying all the states under heaven’, i.e. all the central states and the central plains, but this term has come to mean ‘unifying China’, for the states had all become part of what is now ‘China’. This subtle and yet vital change in the meaning of tian xia led to the misconception that ‘China’
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had always been there since before the King of Qin conquered all other states. Hence the First Emperor’s accomplished mission in unifying ‘tian xia’ becomes the achievement of unifying ‘China’. Furthermore, China, as conceptualized in the Chinese popular imaginary had therefore already existed. Although this is a retrospective belief, the claim that China existed before a central state was established is not problematic for the Chinese. The acceptance of centrality may also have been strengthened by Qin’s effective state-building. The King of Qin assumed a newly invented title, ‘august sovereign’ (huangdi) and crowned himself the First Emperor, symbolically rising above all the kings, dukes and other heads of states. The central state also administered the unification of administration via the national standardization of the written language, measurements, transportation and codes of conduct. Although the centralized Qin state only lasted about 15 years after the First Emperor took the throne, the central administration of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220) continued its political ideal of ‘all under heaven’. In the Chinese popular understanding the unification of China was a great achievement. Yet paradoxically its major advocate, Qin Shihuang, has not been remembered favourably. Typically he is portrayed as a ruthless tyrant, single-mindedly pursuing his political agenda without consideration for the lives of others, as seen in The Emperor and the Assassin. History records how he killed many scholars and burnt books, and is known to have demanded high taxes from his people to construct the Great Wall and his own palaces and tombs. His extravagance is so legendary that his palace, Efanggong, remains a metaphor for the grandest style and luxury.
Ramifications of the Chinese unification complex Whether one considers the King of Qin a hero or villain, both films take ‘China’ as a given and the notion of its unification a noble cause. If it is reasonable to assume that the two directors and their films reflect, to certain extent, the current understanding of Chinese ‘national’ history within the PRC, it may also be assumed that for most Chinese people and many Chinese historians, China has been China since before 221 BCE. This understanding shows an enormous discrepancy with scholarships on Chinese nationalism in the English-language literature. Scholars in the West tend to question the nature of ‘China’ and consider it a highly arguable notion. Questions have been raised as to whether China was and is a nation. Is it a state? A nation-state? A multi-nation state? Or a nationless state? Many hold the view that China was a civilization and an empire. It acquired a national consciousness in the nineteenth century after contact with Europe and only became a nation-state after the nationalist revolution in 1911.8 Others insist China has been a nationless state since around 221 BCE, for the state remains essentially the same throughout history, whereas there has been fluidity in the constituency of the people. Hence there has been the Chinese state but not a Chinese nation (Fitzgerald, 1996: 56–85). Still some say that “China is a multicultural and ethnically diverse nation-state, with tremendous cultural, geographic, and linguistic heterogeneity among its dispersed population” (Gladney, 2004: 6) and suggest
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that the Han Chinese nationality is a twentieth century construction of nationalist discourse (Ibid.: xii). Prasenjit Duara (1995) calls for “questioning narratives of modern China” in order to “rescue history from the nation”. Nation or no nation, to look at China through the lens of nationalism can only have distorted views of the political and cultural space called China. What is the dominant view on the ‘nature’ of China within the PRC? The books, films and television series about the First Emperor of Qin all seem to concur that China as one political entity – a country, a nation or a state – existed at the point of Qin’s unification of tian xia, if not before. For many academics in the PRC, problematizing ‘China’ is Eurocentric, if not evidence of a conspiracy against China. Why should nations elsewhere have to fit into a European definition of nation? Why should other nation-states come into being only after the founding of nationstates in Europe? These are the kinds of questions Chinese historians ask, and, one of the most articulate, Professor Zhaoguang Ge at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, argues that to frame China in the nation-state paradigm developed on the basis of the emergence of nation-states in Europe necessarily projects an abnormality to China (Ge, 2005: 90–103). Ge asserts that China is and has been a nation-state (guojia) with a clear centre but ambiguous periphery. He rejects the applicability of Hobsbawm’s thesis, which insists that nation is a recent phenomenon in human history (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). Ge gives three reasons for his belief that China has long been a nation-state: first, the ‘human history’ in Hobsbawm’s thesis refers only to European history, whereas China has had a continuous history. Second, ‘China’ (Zhongguo), the Central Kingdom (or the Middle Nation/State/Country, depending on one’s understanding of the two Chinese characters and their historical meanings), has long been identified by the Chinese people. Third, the difference in size between the Chinese national centre and periphery, and between the Han Chinese and the minorities (the current ratio is 91 per cent to 9 per cent) means China is essentially a nation of Han nationality. There have only been brief political, cultural and traditional discontinuities in Chinese history and China has had no need to rebuild a ‘nation-state’. In Ge’s view, the historical divide from the empire to the nation state only applies to European cases. He further argues that China is a concrete, not an imagined, community, for China has been a ‘community’ with the same written language, administration and a Confucian ideology since at least the Song Dynasty (960–1276) (Ge, 2005: 100–101). The differences in defining the ‘nature’ of China reflect a profound rift between Western views of China and China’s nationalisms. For Chinese nationals the debate about the origin of China is as much political as it is academic. In this sense, it is doubtful that all Chinese academics will simply accept the application to China of Western theories of nation-states. The immediate question, however, is not whether the Chinese should or should not imagine their ‘national’ history more objectively and scientifically. Rather, it is a matter that Chinese national imagining and representation be accessible and understood. Ge’s argument that the Chinese nation-state has existed for centuries before the modern nation-state era in Europe echoes Chinese popular beliefs as voiced by the two films discussed here. The
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recent cultural phenomenon of the First Emperor fetish and the Chinese unification story demonstrate that the Chinese populace in the PRC has had a ‘unification complex’ for a long time. The changes in the image of the First Emperor from a ruthless tyrant to a compassionate hero reflect the changes in Chinese popular sentiment on China’s unification.
Notes 1 The relevance of the First Emperor to current political life in China can be easily discovered on Chinese and English language websites. For the opera by Zhang Yimou and Tan Dun, see http://www.chinanews.com.cn/tp/ylfs/news/2006/12–09/834896.shtml or http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/production.aspx?id=9495, both accessed on 12 April 2009. 2 Shaanxi is the original home of the Qin. 3 The credits at the end of the film state: English translation by Carma Hinton. 4 The author’s own translation based on the Chinese version of the film. 5 Kam Louie has persuasively demonstrated that in the discourse of Chinese masculinity, wen (cultural attainment) and wu (martial arts skills) are both valued. Cultural attainment is not only considered masculine but also a higher form of masculinity than skills in martial arts. The Chinese ideal of masculinity comes with the combination of the two, which is usually found in the images of wise and benevolent emperors (Louie, 2002: 8–9). 6 The author’s own translation. 7 For the meanings of the words ‘zhongguo’, ‘zhonghua’ and ‘zhongyuan’, see Shangwu yinshuguan bianshenbu (1958: 44). For further discussion about the meaning of ‘tian xia’, see Chen and Rawnsley in this volume. 8 See the various chapters in Jonathan Unger (1996), in particular the chapter by Presenjit Duara.
References Chatterjee, Partha (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dai, Jinhua (2006) Gendering China (Xingbie Zhongguo), Taipei: Maitian (in Chinese). Duara, Presenjit (1995) Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— (1996) ‘De-constructing the Chinese nation’, in Jonathan Unger (ed.), Chinese Nationalism, New York: M. E. Sharpe, pp. 31–55. Ebery, Patricia Buckley (1996) The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, John (1996) ‘The nationless state: The search for a nation in modern Chinese nationalism’, in Jonathan Unger (ed.), Chinese Nationalism, New York: M. E. Sharpe, pp. 56–85. Ge, Zhaoguang (2005) ‘Reconstructing the historiography of “China”’(Chongjian “Zhongguo” de lishi lunshu), 21st Century, 90 (August), pp. 90–103 (in Chinese). Gernet, Jacques (1996) A History of Chinese Civilization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gladney, Dru. C. (2004) Dislocating China: Reflections on Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects, London: Hurst & Company.
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Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, Philip A. (2002) Origins of the Modern Chinese State, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Louie, Kam (2002) Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shangwu yinshuguan bianshenbu (ed.) (1958) The Origin of Phrases (Ciyuan zhengxubian hedingben), Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan (in Chinese). Sima, Qian (1959, rpt.) Historical Record (Shiji), 10 vols, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju (in Chinese). Unger, Jonathan (ed.) (1996) Chinese Nationalism, New York: M. E. Sharp. Yang, Lan, 1998, Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong: Hong University Press. Zhu, Xilu (ed.) (1996) Stories in the Han-Dynasty Stone Engravings in the Clan Hall of Wu (Wushici Han huaxiangshi zhong de gushi), Jinan: Shandong meishu chubanshe (in Chinese).
4
The king, the musician and the village idiot Images of manhood Kam Louie
Zhang Yimou’s Hero is a rare specimen in the history of Chinese cinema. As well as achieving blockbuster status in the West that few Chinese movies have managed, it was also extremely successful in China. The plot of the film is based loosely on stories of assassination attempts on the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE) in Historical Records (Shiji) by Sima Qian (145–c.85 BCE). Reworkings of the assassin story abound throughout Chinese history. Hero is one such reworking, but a very unusual one. Other chapters in this book examine some of the reasons for the film’s commercial success and the critical attention it received, together with the major historical and political issues that provoked the events depicted. In this chapter, I examine how the First Emperor and the assassin are interpreted in the film, and contrast this with another big-budget movie made at around the same time by another high-profile director: Zhou Xiaowen’s The Emperor’s Shadow (Qin song, 1996, hereafter Shadow). Through this comparison I aim to illustrate the main features in the composition of an ideal hero in the contemporary Chinese consciousness. Hero and Shadow provide contrasting but pertinent illustrations of the Chinese construction of a hero because both present an epic narrative and draw on archetypal images of heroes from Shiji. In their negotiation with Shiji both films also present decidedly contemporary revisions of heroism. They are thus ideal vehicles for examining the elements that constitute the notion of a hero for the filmmakers and their audiences. Another film in the same style, Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin (Jingke ci qinwang, 1998, hereafter Assassin), will also be referred to briefly, but will not be the main focus of attention since Yiyan Wang has already compared it with Hero in the preceding chapter. These three films are known for being sumptuous and extravagant productions. For example, Zhou’s Shadow has been compared to Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) and David Lean’s 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia (Sena, 2000). By contrasting these earlier efforts with Zhang Yimou’s film, I will argue that Zhang’s success is not just a result of his film being more visually appealing (though that is clearly important), but also because the movie harks back to orthodox and legendary conceptions of heroism that appeal to Chinese audiences. The contrasting popular success of Hero and Shadow, which led critics like Holly E. Ordway (2002) to assert that “Hero soars while The Emperor’s Shadow plods”, is the result of more than simply cinematic technique. Zhang’s depiction of ‘heroes’ is more effective
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than that of Zhou or Chen. Even though Zhou Xiaowen and Chen Kaige have attempted to give their own unique, modern twist to the depiction of the First Emperor by adding psychological dimensions – for example, Chen’s inference that he suffered from an Oedipus complex, or Zhou’s portrayal of the assassin as a musician whose art translates into an extremely potent sexuality – these modern renditions of such a deep-rooted legend serve only to give an impression of superficiality and opacity. For example, in comparing Hero and Shadow, critics such as Ordway (2002) claim that Shadow lacks a coherent narrative, which means that the audience cannot develop any sense of anticipation nor can they identify with the protagonists. This problem is exacerbated in Assassin, which is extremely difficult to follow unless the audience has a detailed knowledge of the history or stories of the period, leading critics to describe it as “a strangely soulless grandeur and mechanical mise-en-scene” (Garrett, 1999). Since the plots of both Hero and Assassin are provided in detail elsewhere in this volume, I will not recount them here. I should, however, very briefly recap Shadow to make the discussion easier to follow. Shadow begins with Ying Zheng (played by Jiang Wen), the future First Emperor of Qin (aka Qin Shihuang, 259–210 BCE), as a child hostage in the state of Yan. He grows up there with Gao Jianli (played by Ge You), a child of the same age whose music gives him the courage to face potential execution. Ying Zheng returns to Qin and becomes the King of Qin (Qin wang), while Gao becomes a famous musician back in Yan. The King of Qin conquers all the states, including Yan, and tries in vain to get Gao to compose an anthem that will win over the hearts of the people with music. Instead, his crippled but beautiful daughter Princess Yueyang (played by Xu Qing) succeeds in securing Gao’s cooperation to compose that music when Gao rapes her while she is taking music lessons from him. The two fall in love and she miraculously walks again, but she is already betrothed to a powerful general, who cruelly murders her on their wedding day. At the ceremony to enthrone the King as the First Emperor, Gao, who has been blinded by the King for his transgressions, attempts to kill the latter with his zither, but fails and then poisons himself. The King ascends the coronation altar alone and finally sheds some tears. Even such a short synopsis of the film reveals that Shadow is a movie that aspires to be epic in scope but frequently descends into melodrama. As in Hero, the audience is led to believe in one storyline only to find that the plot suddenly takes off in another direction. But where Hero deliberately orchestrates the different strands of the assassins’ stories into a tragic climax, Shadow’s plot involves many baffling twists and irritating turns before reaching its conclusion. This has led critics such as G. Allen Johnson (1998) to comment that Shadow “embodies the very best and the very worst of Chinese cinema” and that what could have been a great film “gets bogged down in the soap opera-like plot twists and clunky formalism”. Despite these problems, Shadow shares one important innovation with Hero that makes both films excellent vehicles for examining Chinese ideas of masculinity and leadership qualities: their revisionist reassessment of the First Emperor. As well as proclaiming loudly the message that ‘it’s lonely at the top’, both movies depict the First Emperor as a decent, upright ruler whose main reason for
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conquering the states to establish an empire was to bring peace and order to tian xia (‘all under heaven’). In fact, Zhou claims that “the King of Qin in Shadow is an enlightened ruler. There is not a hint of impropriety in him”(Li, 2000: 380). Such an evaluation is diametrically opposed to conventional understandings of him as a ruthless and immoral dictator. This sympathetic portrayal of the First Emperor is very different, for example, from Chen Kaige’s version in Assassin, which paints an unlikable picture of the King as a tyrant even while seeking to explain the psychology behind the man. Chen suggests the Oedipal impulses behind the ambitious King as well as his willingness to sacrifice all, including his mother and half brothers, to attain supreme power. Zhou Xiaowen also brings much psychological detail to Shadow’s characterization of the King by tracing the origins of his awareness of the power of music to his childhood with Gao Jianli. The emotional conflicts brought about by his attachments to Gao and Princess Yueyang are also given an airing. By contrast, Zhang Yimou’s presentation of his characters does not depend on psychological profundity. Nonetheless, as I have shown elsewhere (Louie, 2008), Zhang Yimou’s success is linked to his ability to imbue his characters with the ideal traits of ‘hero’ in Chinese tradition, i.e. an ideal, superior Chinese manhood in which heroes embody the twin attributes of literary (wen) and martial (wu) prowess, encapsulated in the wen-wu dyad (see the next section for further discussion). Because wen-wu predates empire and attains mythical significance in terms of the Chinese audience’s appreciation of the heroes in the movie, Zhang Yimou has managed to upset the traditional interpretations of the First Emperor as an autocrat and presents him as an all-round hero. This ability to read against the grain of traditional conceptions of the First Emperor and go deeper into mythic constructions of wen-wu manhood may explain why, despite its purported political incorrectness in portraying a tyrant as a deep thinker, the film was a phenomenally successful Chinese blockbuster, and audiences continue to enjoy it as a feast for the senses.
Wen-wu in Shadow and Hero I should briefly describe the characteristics of the wen-wu dyad since it is the key theoretical construct that underlies the analysis in this chapter.1 Literally, wen-wu translates as literary-martial, and refers to the dichotomy between the mental and the physical. It has represented a masculine ideal throughout Chinese history, from the first mythical sage kings to the present day. Those, and only those, who have mastered both wen and wu attributes are considered fit to rule. Thus, in all three films under consideration, the First Emperor is seen wielding both brush and sword. And in the imperial court of Shadow in particular, the officials are portrayed seated or standing in two rows, one on either side of the emperor: one row is the wen officials and the other the wu. The ways in which this dyad operates in Chinese ideology bring out many interesting formations relating to power and gender. Wen has always been perceived as superior to wu, and women have not been able to attain true wen-wu. Supreme leaders and real heroes are men who excel in both wen and wu, and this principle has been upheld in Chinese tradition for millennia
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(Louie, 2002: 15–17). The success of Hero ultimately rests on this formulation. Using this theoretical frame, I hope to shed new light on how these films depict the main characters, and in doing so show how they have buttressed traditional conventions of being a real man. While they are keen to provide some psychological depth and character development, what emerges in Assassin and Shadow in particular continues the conventional depiction of a ruthless First Emperor who is completely driven by ambition. Thus, the emphasis on military might, with soldiers, chariots and arms evident in most scenes, stands out in both films, and both have ‘heroes’ who are truly macho men without wen refinements. In Assassin, the only person who is not depicted in this way is the fake eunuch Lao Ai (played by Wang Zhiwen), who is feminine in his manners and the only male who spends most of his time dealing with women, using his brain rather than his physical strength in attempting to gain power. But his machinations backfire, and he dies an inglorious death. Zhou Xiaowen’s Shadow is more subtle than Assassin in its depiction of men of valour. Its use of wen-wu is also more manifest, allowing for clearer comparisons with Zhang Yimou’s Hero. The King of Qin is depicted by Zhou as a tyrant, but he is also shown to have some appreciation of music. In this way, he is portrayed as having the essential qualities for true leadership (mastering both wen and wu). However, the problem with Shadow is that the power of music is exaggerated, reaching into the sexual realm in a manner that gives wen refinements a supernatural quality that is beyond body and mind. Thus, the musician can, through sex, make the crippled princess walk again. This is nothing to do with Chinese ideal of heroes. The relationship between the musician and the princess in Shadow will be examined more closely later to illustrate the different ways in which femininity has been represented in China. However, although the way it is depicted here is conventional, it is not in the sense that the portrayal of women in Zhang Yimou’s woman warriors in Hero is conventional (see Louise Edwards in this volume). The princess in Shadow is literally a cripple, though she is wilful and spoilt. But in the end she is a toy, one that can be used and disposed of by her father, husband and lover. It is curious that Assassin and Shadow are more masculine than Hero in style, however, neither Chen Kaige nor Zhou Xiaowen set out to make a wuxia (‘swordplay’ or ‘martial arts’) film, the epitome of the Chinese action movie. Yet their films (especially Assassin) reveal much more of a wu attitude than Hero. This demonstrates that in Chinese consciousness, wu is not just the physical strength of kicking and punching. While it is primarily about physical force and power, as a ‘manly’ attribute, it is about controlling others by physical force. But brute force only superficially determines whether a man has truly mastered the essence of wu. Masters of kung-fu may not be brutally strong, but their skill in using their bodies and movements shows their wu accomplishments. Thus, the macho behaviour of the men in Assassin in particular does not mean that they have wu. The King of Qin in Zhang’s Hero does not shout or swagger. In fact, he calmly sits and talks throughout most of the film. Yet he is the one with definite martial arts skills, as the fighting scene between himself and Broken Sword illustrates, whereas the King in Chen’s and Zhou’s movies does not engage in individual combat at all, but barks orders and leads troops into battle wielding swords.
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Most importantly, a mastery of wen-wu means mastery of one’s feelings. This translates as decisiveness, a trait common in many cultures as a marker of masculine power. The King of Qin in Hero is nimble with his brain and can reach decisions quickly. His only lapse in this regard is when it is time for him to give the order for Nameless to be executed. But this indecisiveness is only momentary, whereas the King in Shadow displays a lack of strength of character throughout. In Hero the King engages in a rational contest with Nameless, each trying to outwit the other; the King in Shadow is hopelessly entangled in an emotional tug of war with the musician Gao Jianli. So the heroic nature of the central character in Shadow is lost. In direct contradiction to traditional renditions, Shadow’s King of Qin is portrayed as a leader almost without fault in his public persona; yet in his personal life, his indecisiveness makes him appear foolish. His inability to be tough with his family and friends apparently even tested the patience of the actor who played the King: Jiang Wen reportedly nearly walked off the set because he could not see how he could act heroically while having to display such unforgiving and unmanly behaviour. Being decisive is part of the self-control that is central to being a leader. Shadow’s King is lacking in this respect because the director chooses to show the King’s humanity. In his direction Zhou Xiaowen is adamant that it is important to stress feelings above all. Therefore, Shadow is about how the King of Qin attempts to win the affection and allegiance of Gao Jianli. The King is aware of the true wen-wu path because he emphatically reasons that he needs Gao Jianli’s assistance to win the hearts and minds of the people to govern well. He already has the military might, which is wu. What he seeks to further obtain in order to guarantee supremacy is spiritual power, which is wen, represented in the movie as the power of music. Moreover, throughout Shadow, the King is portrayed reading his bamboo scrolls, a sign of learning and homage to the written word. In the traditional Chinese caizi jiaren (literally ‘scholars and beauties’) romances, the young scholar is only learning to be a hero. So he is allowed the indulgence of being swayed by his emotions and not acting decisively. Once he has learnt to control his emotions and act decisively, he can become a real man. Likewise in Shadow, the King of Qin is not capable of making the decision to kill Gao Jianli because he is still learning how to be a ruler. This contrasts with the King of Qin in Hero, who makes the decision to eliminate Nameless within seconds. In fact, Gao Jianli’s death liberates the King in Shadow from his attachment to sentimentalism and enables him to ascend the altar to be a real leader of man. Hero begins where Shadow ends. As Shiji has stated, the emperor thought so highly of Gao Jianli’s music that instead of killing Gao, the emperor gouged out Gao’s eyes and made him perform his music at court. Because the emperor enjoyed Gao’s music so much, he allowed the blind man to approach him gradually. Gao weighted his guitar with lead and when he was close enough, he raised it to strike. But he missed his enemy. He was immediately put to death, and never again did the emperor allow others to approach him (Yang and Yang, 979: 401). This event sets the scene for the movie Hero, in which the King of Qin has devised strict rules about who can approach him and how close they may come.
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The contest for dominance between the King of Qin and Gao Jianli is explicitly about winning the hearts and obedience of the people. In Shadow, this contest is shown most vividly in the shifting allegiance of the central woman character Princess Yueyang. There is nothing in any of the historical records that brings women into this story. Women in general should have no part in heroic roles, except in fantasy fiction such as those works about female avengers who are better fighters than men. But in Shadow, the woman is not a fighter. Princess Yueyang is introduced in the script purely for romantic interest, and presumably for the box-office. Apart from being able to run again as a result of having sex with Gao Jianli after years of being crippled, her role in the film seems to parallel those played by women in tales of heroic exploits in traditional Chinese fiction: women are objects of desire that threaten to distract men from their true purpose, weaken their judgment and bring down kingdoms. Men must resist or conquer them to achieve wen-wu. Women’s weak moral and emotional strength mean they can be naive and innocent one minute, and corrupt and depraved the next. That is, they are either saints or whores. Thus when Gao Jianli first encounters Princess Yueyang he calls her a whore. It is after many trials and tribulations (and when it is too late) that he finally falls in love with her. In the depiction of the relationship between Gao Jianli and Princess Yueyang, Zhou Xiaowen portrays feelings and emotions that involve hostility, lust, infatuation and love. But ultimately, Princess Yueyang is a pawn in the emotional and political game played by the two male protagonists. In Shadow, there are two threads tying the movie together. The first is the spiritual (emotional) contest between Gao Jianli and the King of Qin, and the second is the contest between Gao Jianli and Princess Yueyang. Director Zhou Xiaowen claims that there is no such thing as love. His notion of love is that it is conquest. “Homosexual love is the mutual conquest between two people of the same sex; heterosexual love is the mutual conquest between a man and a woman.” (Li, 2000: 374–375) In the movie, the two male protagonists try to conquer each other. Princess Yueyang is initially used by the King of Qin to try and break down Gao Jianli’s resistance, and then by Gao to provoke and humiliate the King. The emotional attachment between the King of Qin and his assassin Gao Jianli is developed into melodrama, which is very different from the depiction of the relationship between the heroic men in Hero. Director Zhang Yimou never loses his focus while describing the intellectual and martial contest between the heroes concerned: Hero is mainly about ‘manly feelings’, not sentimentality.
The musician and the village idiot As previously discussed, an idealized Chinese manhood must cultivate both wen and wu. While in Hero wen is represented by calligraphy, in Shadow it is represented by music. But what kind of music is it? Confucius (c.551–479 BCE), whose teachings are considered by the Chinese the orthodoxy of wen, was emphatic about the importance of listening to only the ‘right’ kind of music. He states that Shao music, the music of the legendary sage-king Shang, has both beauty and goodness (‘mei’ and ‘shan’). But he thinks that the music of King Wu, who used military
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might to rule, has beauty but not goodness. Thus, in stating the function of music, Confucius spells out its wen-wu aspects, in effect saying that virtue comes from wen music, and that the more military wu music may be beautiful but has no moral function. For a Confucian gentleman goodness and virtue is the ultimate goal. Listening to the right kind of music helps the search for self-cultivation. Confucius claims that a gentleman “emerges from the book of poetry, is established using rites, and is completed with music” (Jin, 1995: 85). The King of Qin in Shadow almost follows this dictate by wanting to rule the empire with music. Calligraphy is another important virtue of wen. Both Hero and Shadow depict a King of Qin who appreciates good Confucian wen qualities such as calligraphy and music, and it is possible for us to argue that the King in these two films is in fact more a Confucianist than a Legalist, a label most associated with him because he is famous for using brute force and engaging in Machiavellian intrigue (see Gary Rawnsley in this volume). However, Confucius and the Legalists believed that goodness, such as that found in music, helped govern the people. Legalists believed things were good if they could help maintain political power. In other words, there is a utilitarian dimension in both Confucianism and Legalism. Nevertheless, while the King in Shadow tries to use music (i.e. wen in this context) to govern his people, Hero suggests that achieving wen-wu is above utility and beyond rational comprehension. Thus the King in Hero is able to suddenly become enlightened by simply staring at calligraphy with the symbol ‘jian’ (sword) written on it. In this way, the movie incorporates some Daoist/Buddhist ideas of enlightenment being innate rather than nurtured, as Confucians seem to preach. In Hero this elevation of the sudden enlightened understanding of the unity of the brush and the sword (wen and wu) as a mythical and spiritual path that is beyond words is phrased in such a way that Nylan (June 2005: 770) calls it “a bit of hokey dialogue”. Be that as it may, such ideas of the mythic nature of the wen-wu cultural norms give the movie its popularity, and many Chinese viewers seem to accept these interpretations, judging by the popularity of the movie. When interviewed about Shadow, Zhou Xiaowen said that he was making a movie about China’s 5,000-year-old culture and that he wanted to reveal Chinese humanistic and cultural values (Li, 2000: 374–375). He repeatedly iterated that the audience needed to be educated to a better cultural level (Ibid.; and Palma, n.d.). The movie, The Emperor’s Shadow (1996), is purportedly designed to civilize the masses and to raise the cultural level of the general public. However, when Shadow premiered in Beijing in 1996, Zhou said “Chinese rulers have always wanted to control our spirit. But they cannot succeed in doing so.” (Baranovitch, 2003: 194) This clearly contradicts his own wish to raise the cultural level of the audience. On the one hand, he does not want the political leadership to control his mind, but on the other he wants to manipulate the minds of others. The director’s contradictory views make Shadow somewhat self-contradictory as well. As ‘Xun Huan’ (1998) questions, what is the point of claiming you have spiritual or moral superiority when you and everyone else connected to you are dead? What is the meaning of victory if the dictator is the only one left standing and claims it is lonely at the top? This is a pertinent observation in the context of Zhou Xiaowen’s continued
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insistence that his aim was to show that dictators cannot control people’s minds. Yet why is the dictator the only man standing at the end? Xun Huan believes it is because the filmmaker is behaving like Ah Q, a character from a novella written by China’s revered author Lu Xun (1881–1936). Ah Q is the archetypal village idiot who has no spiritual life whatsoever, but he lives within his mind. He is a total loser. Yet every time he is beaten or humiliated he says he has won simply by claiming a moral victory of sorts (Lu, 2002 rpt). This begs the question: when is wen merely escapism? Self-deception is a characteristic Ah Q trait. But do the intellectuals who live in their minds vis-à-vis Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi possess wen or simply a degraded mental reframing represented by the Ah Q spirit? There seems to be some confusion about spiritual life (of the mind) and self-deception. In Shadow, although Gao Jianli is an idealistic musician and his rape of Princess Yueyang results in the miracle of the Princess being whole again, how does this tally with Gao’s talk of observing ethical codes? Under any other circumstances, Gao would be sentenced to death, but the film has him conquering not only the Princess’s body, but her mind as well. This is only possible in the realm beyond humanistic wen level and is much closer to the Ah Q fantasy world. This is where the difference between Hero and Shadow lies. In interviews, Zhang Yimou makes it quite plain that his greatest concern was the box-office, how he would make a profit for the producers and keep the audiences happy.2 For whatever reason, there is a respect for audiences having a choice in the matter. By contrast, Zhou claims in his interviews that he wants to please the audience, but then immediately contradicts himself by insisting that he wants to raise the cultural level of the audience. In other words, Zhou seems to think that he knows what ‘correct’ culture is and how the audience should be raised to that level. The paradox of saying one respects freedom and individual spirit while at the same time believing one should have a role in raising another’s cultural level is evident. In the end it is a contradiction that cannot be easily resolved. It is a paradox that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also finds difficult to resolve. The Party’s standard exhortations about using art for raising the political consciousness of the masses, while at the same time believing there is a vanguard that leads, inevitably results in an absurdity. Similarly, while filmmakers resent the Party telling them what constitutes good art or the purpose of life, they themselves have an idea of what that good art should be, and tell audiences how to lead their lives. Ironically, the levelling effects of the box-office seem to have achieved the results that Mao Zedong famously advocated in his Yan’an Talks: that is, the audience is the master and should teach the artist a thing or two, not the other way around. By contrast, Hero seems less concerned about raising cultural levels, and is therefore more popular. There are many reasons why Zhang Yimou’s Hero was successful. He might have deliberately catered to mass tastes, or have followed CCP policies bending to powerful men, or have manipulated the box-office by vigilantly restricting piracy. Whatever reason is advanced to explain the popularity of the film, one thing is certain: Zhang Yimou is concerned about making a profit and having strong ticket sales. At least explicitly he is not so concerned with a mission to teach the masses about the spiritual and culture. These are days when
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materialism reigns and money speaks. Paradoxically, these may also be the days when Mao’s wish for an audience-centred rather than an artist-centred approach to art is easier to achieve than it was when socialism was at its height.
Notes 1 For a more detailed exposition, see Louie (2002). 2 See for example the interview in ‘About Hero’ (2002).
References ‘About Hero’ (2002) Monkeypeaches. Available online at: http://www.monkeypeaches. com/hero/interviews01.html (accessed 22 December 2006). Baranovitch, Nimrod (2003) China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, California: University of California Press. Garrett, Stephen (1999) ‘Cannes ’99 review: Chen Kaige’s opulent “emperor” lacks human resonance’, indieWIRE: on The Scene. Available online at: http://www.indiewire.com/ onthescene/fes_99Cannes_990516_2A$C0.html (accessed 28 March 2007). Jin, Liangnian (ed.) (1995) The Analects Translated and Annotated (Lunyu yizhu), Shanghai: Guji chubanshe (in Chinese). Johnson, G. Allen (1998) ‘Chinese drama omits subtlety’, Title of Discussion List. Available online at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/e/a/1998/06/26/WEEKEND3932. dtl (accessed 29 April 2007). Li, Erwei (2000) ‘Talking about The Emperor’s Shadow with Zhou Xiaowen’ (yu Zhou Xiaowen tan Qin song), in Yuanying Yang et al. (eds), The 5th Generation of Chinese Filmmakers in the 1990s (Jiushi niandai de di wudai), Beijing: Beijing guangbo xueyuan chubanshe, pp. 373–394 (in Chinese). Louie, Kam (2002) Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2008) ‘Hero: The return of a traditional masculine ideal in China’, in Chris Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus II, London: BFI Publishers, pp. 137–143. Lu, Xun (2002, rpt) The True Story of Ah Q (Ah Q Zhengzhuan), Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press (in Chinese and English). Nylan, Michael (June 2005) ‘Hero’, American Historical Review, 110 (3), p. 770. Ordway, Holly E. (2002) ‘The Emperor’s Shadow’, DVD Talk. Available online at: http:// www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?id=9510 (accessed 28 March 2007). Palmer, Augusta (n.d.) ‘Zhou Xiaowen on The Emperor’s Shadow’, indieWIRE: People. Available online at: http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Zhou_Ziaowen_981217.html (accessed 29 March 2007). Sena, Pedro (2000) ‘The Emperor and the Assassin review’, KillerMovies: Movies that Matter. Available online at: http://www.killermovies.com/e/theemperorandthe assassin/ reviews/d6k.html (assessed 29 March 2007). ‘Xun Huan’ (1998) ‘The reappearance of the spiritual victory method’ (Youjian jingshen shengli fa), CivilWind. Available online at: http://www.civilwind.com/big5/guest/liqh18. htm (accessed 29 April 2007, in Chinese). Yang, Hsien-Yi and Yang, Gladys (trans.) (1979) Selections from Records of the Historian, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.
Part II
Transformations of cultural perception, genre and stardom
5
Twenty-first century women warriors Variations on a traditional theme Louise Edwards
Women warriors have featured in wuxia (martial arts) films since the inception of filmmaking.1 Hero’s female fighters, Flying Snow and Moon, follow in the footsteps of an impressive tradition of previous sister soldiers. In the early decades of the twentieth century, women with fighting skills simply stepped from the stage to the screen as technologies of capturing image on film evolved. Similarly, in the late twentieth century as computer and console games emerged hungry for narrative, so too did women warriors appear on these new platforms. Moreover, China’s lengthy historical and literary records are dotted with tales of women in martial roles. Over the course of at least 1,500 years martial women have entertained Chinese audiences. Hua Mulan, Qin Liangyu, Liang Hongyu, Shisan Mei (Thirteenth Sister), and the Yangjia nüjiang (Yang family female generals) are the most famous of a very long list of remarkable women.2 In Europe women warriors have also appeared, for example, Bodiccea, Jean D’Arc and the ancient Greek Amazons. But on balance China’s interest in battle-ready women appears to have more deeply penetrated the popular imagination. Certainly, as Kwai-Cheung Lo has noted, in the world of film production, “Eastern cinema has featured an extraordinary number of women warriors compared to Hollywood” (Lo, 2005: 142). The twenty-first century movies, Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000, hereafter Crouching Tiger), are simply two of the more internationally successful texts to provide new renditions of an immensely resilient trope. Such a familiar image as the woman warrior necessarily comes to the screen bearing an extensive historical legacy – audiences expect certain behaviours from women warriors and they interpret actions by these female fighters with wellformed preconceptions. Deviation from these patterns has the potential to provoke surprise, awe and entertainment. But, conformity to the women warrior norms is no less engaging. This chapter contends that a central part of Hero’s success rests in the dexterous manner in which it moves between depictions of women warriors that both conform to historical expectations and break from these norms. Accordingly, an analysis of Hero in the context of the long line of other cultural products that depict women warriors provides scope for understanding the extent of the evolution of the women warrior image in the twenty-first century. This evolution is more than a mere technological shift from page or stage to screen or cartridge. Changes in gender ideology are also apparent. The mammoth
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social change wrought by the impact of feminist politics in China over the course of the last century (Gilmartin, 1995; Wang, 1999; Edwards, 2008) and the revolution in attitudes to acceptable sexuality (Evans, 1997; Hershatter, 1999; Jeffreys, 2004) have both produced scope for an evolution in the characterization of women warriors. Yet, what aspects of the women warriors in Hero provide evidence of the impact of these changed politics in the popular imaginary? In which respects has the woman warrior remained the same? In exploring these twin aspects of continuity and change, the chapter provides insights into the manner in which gender ideologies contributed to Hero’s success both with Chinese and non-Chinese audiences.
Woman warrior orthodoxy and Hero Apart from their remarkable skill with the sword, both Flying Snow and Moon conform to a long-standing ideological norm for women warriors, i.e. prime loyalty to one’s family and specifically the paternal line.3 Women join the army to avenge father’s deaths, or to replace fathers in battle or to save their family from losing sons that will carry on the paternal line. The woman warrior’s prime motivation and drive emerges from her concern for her family. Joining the military effort is the best way to achieve protection of her family, and the patriarchal social order this relied upon, in times of crisis. I have demonstrated elsewhere (Edwards, 2005) the large extent to which the woman warriors of the Chinese tradition have been an integral support to the patriarchal order. They perform an important female role within the Chinese patriarchy, which I have termed ‘crisis femininity’ – women temporarily depart from norms of female behaviour in order to support the existing social order in times of crisis. As exemplars of ‘crisis femininity’, the woman warrior is not at all, as Siu Leung Li describes, “one of the most threatening unconventional female figures to the patriarchal imagination” (Li, 2003: 83); quite to the contrary, pre-modern era woman warriors are remarkable for their defence of the patriarchal family order. The most famous example of this phenomenon is Hua Mulan, the semi-historical daughter who dresses as a man to replace her father in the conscripted imperial armies. Her father is too old and her brother too young for successful military service, so she steps into their shoes and ensures simultaneously her father’s continued life and the maintenance of the family line through her brother. But importantly, once this filial duty is performed she modestly refrains from undertaking any further adventures – to do so would be excessive and self-indulgent – instead she returns to the family home. In the original Ballad of Mulan (Mulan ci) written in the Northern Wei Dynasty (386–534), when Mulan’s 12 years in the army are complete, he/she is asked to remain in court to serve the emperor as a minister as reward for outstanding service. Mulan demurs and requests only a camel by which he/she can return home to his/her family. Once at home she resumes her life as a dutiful daughter.4 The women warriors in Li Ruzhen’s Flowers in the Mirror (Jinghua yuan) published in 1828, are similarly motivated by desire for vengeance at the loss of fathers and family members or serving as replacements for them (Li, 1828). The
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hunter, Ziying is replacing her ailing brother and now-deceased father in performing their task of hunting wild animals to protect local villagers. The archer, Hongqu, developed expert skills with the bow and arrow as a result of her desire to avenge her mother’s death (Edwards, 1995: 240). The 12 women comprising the Yang family generals from the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127), made famous in numerous plays and poems in subsequent centuries, assume their military roles after their husbands have all been killed in battle. Mu Guiying, the most famous of the Yang generals, had fought alongside her husband until his death, after which tragedy she continues to fight and achieves a glorious victory as a general in her own right. The women warrior of the past is not a feminist fighting against patriarchal norms, but rather an exceptional woman making a remarkable sacrifice in order to protect the status quo either in terms of family structures or the imperial order. However, the woman warrior’s devotion to her family often prevents her from recognizing broader political goals or the larger benefits likely to accrue to the nation or empire. In Hero, we see a perfect twenty-first century extension of the woman warrior’s narrow family vision in Maggie Cheung’s character, Flying Snow. She is a remarkable and daring warrior with courage and prowess with the sword that exceeds the skills of thousands of Qin guards and warriors. But, in the ‘real’ narrative as revealed to the King by Nameless (Jet Li’s character), Flying Snow dies unable to grasp the broader importance of the overarching unity of the concept tian xia (‘all under heaven’). Right up to the point of her death she remains dominated by her desire to avenge her father’s murder and to ‘return home’. She is incapable of embracing the broader political picture. Tony Leung’s character, Broken Sword, and Nameless, both comprehend the broader vision of a united and peaceful nation before they die. Indeed, in terms of the various characters’ motivations for their dream to assassinate the King, Nameless is in exactly a parallel position to Flying Snow – both were driven to his mission through a desire for vengeance at the murder of his family members. Male warriors perceive the broader ‘national’ interest either by fighting the King of Qin, as did Broken Sword, or by speaking with him, as did Nameless. Flying Snow had the opportunity to understand the King’s big picture politics from Broken Sword’s insights, but she remains steadfast in her loyalty to her father and proceeds to her death firm in her ‘narrow’ family dominated vision. Like women warriors for generations before her, she undertakes all her remarkable deeds to avenge her father’s death. For these women warriors, only the personal is political. Ultimately, this preoccupation with personal vengeance prevents her from seeing the ‘bigger and broader’ political vision that her male comrades come to appreciate. Blinded by a noble, yet narrow-minded loyalty to her father she is at once adored for her filial piety and disdained for her lack of deeper philosophical understanding. Such steadfast adherence to the paternal memory is entirely in keeping with the many woman warriors of the Chinese past. Flying Snow’s lack of clarity both in personal and political terms contrasts starkly with Broken Sword’s. He sees that she is totally preoccupied with seeking revenge for her father and will only rest once that is achieved. However, Broken
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Sword can see that to achieve their idealized life of peace and harmony as husband and wife (where ‘there is only a man and a woman’) they must go with the broader political vision of complete unity with Qin. Although he yearned for the quiet retreat to their homeland, he saw that this was a selfish and narrow goal compared to unifying the nation and ending all battles. In his willingness to die he shows he can put aside the personal for the broader political game. So, even in terms of achieving the goal of returning home to kith and kin, Broken Sword sees more clearly the most effective path for achieving this – for all warriors and not just for themselves. As they fight in their last duel, he predicts her actions and instead of blocking her sword, Broken Sword chooses to die by it. She is bewildered by his choice of death at her hands and cries, “Why didn’t you block my sword?” The other woman warrior in the movie, Zhang Ziyi’s character, Moon, does not understand the concept of tian xia either but in delivering Broken Sword’s sword to Nameless she declares both her loyalty to her master and her ignorance of the broader political agenda saying that Broken Sword is “always right”. She recommends to Nameless that he would do well to take Broken Sword’s advice. Her support of the broader principle derives from that other feminine virtue – obedience to men – rather than an independent comprehension of the deeper philosophical significance of her master’s words. Moon simply follows Broken Sword but her political and philosophical awareness makes no advance to a higher realm. Loyalty to the men, primarily men within your natal family, but in Moon’s case, her martial arts family, is a key attribute of historical vision of women warriors. In Flying Snow’s case her choice of family loyalty over the empire’s interest emerges from the narrative as morally ambiguous: it is both a virtue and evidence of stubborn, narrow mindedness. In this regard, Flying Snow reinforces a long-standing expectation of the moral code of the woman warrior, that is, she remains loyal to the family because her vision remains blinkered by personal concerns. In this regard, my views contrast with those of Kwai-Cheong Lo who writes of Flying Snow that: She is more devoted to her love and passion (she is not afraid of killing her lover), and does not buy into the political idea that the unification of China by Qin will bring peace to the war-torn country (whereas the men are fooled by the unification ideology to the extent that they would stupidly believe that sacrificing their life for this cause was worthwhile). It is only the female assassin who acts ethically by challenging the myth of unification and who does not give up on her desire for revenge (since the cruel King of Qin has slaughtered her father). (Lo, 2007: 132) On the contrary, I contend that Flying Snow conforms to the traditional model of a woman warrior who remains blinkered to the big picture by single-minded and unthinking loyalty to the paternal domestic world represented by her family. Her overarching passion emerges from her desire to avenge her father and the core of her ethical value is filial piety. Flying Snow, far from seeing through the unification ideology, like many women warriors in China’s past, simply fails to understand it.
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The very model of a ‘modern’ women warrior The orthodoxy of the loyalty to the family and the failure to grasp the broader political vision reflected in the women warriors in Hero is important in making these twenty-first century amazons recognizable in the lengthy women warrior tradition of China’s past. Yet, Hero provides audiences with new aspects to this traditional figure. Both Flying Snow and Moon bring thoroughly modern aspects to their sister soldiers of the past. These aspects serve to maintain the freshness of the image to a contemporary audience in China and also engage an international audience unfamiliar with the expectations of appropriate women warrior behaviours. These changes reflect the broader social changes in the status and symbolic roles of women through the twentieth century. The most apparent difference between the amazons of Hero and those of the dynastic past is that neither Moon nor Flying Snow disguises themselves as men to achieve their military achievements. Nor does the King or any of their partner assassins ever mistake these characters for anything other than women. Lengthy traditions of women warriors often required cross-dressing to occur before their remarkable deeds can be performed. China’s women warriors from Hua Mulan through to Thirteenth Sister and the many women warriors of the Flowers in the Mirror become men through donning men’s clothing (Edwards, 1995). In Hero the audience is reminded of the feminine beauty of Flying Snow and Moon through their sartorial difference from men. The flowing gowns, cosmetics and decorated hair of Hero’s women warriors are distinctly un-manly. These are ‘women being warriors’ rather than women transformed temporarily into men for warrior purposes. Contemporary audiences no longer require a masculine form to produce a credible warrior image – pretty girls can be killers too. However, in contrast to the media product (film, console and computer games) featuring fighting women emanating from the US and Japan, Hero’s Flying Snow and Moon are modest. International versions of women warriors often exude a sexualized hyper-femininity with extended bust-lines, suggested or visible cleavage as they perform their martial deeds in body-hugging clothing, with narrowed waist and exaggerated long limbs. Lara Croft is a classic, prominent example of this trend, but there are myriad other possible examples. Chinese women warriors even in the twenty-first century remain modestly, albeit femininely, clad. Hero’s women warriors are now distinctly female, but they are not explicitly displaying or reminding audiences of their sexuality through sartorial markers.5 This does not mean, however, that sexuality is not an important part of the twenty-first century woman warrior. Indeed, another significant and dramatic break with the past traditions of women warrior narratives is precisely the sexualization of the Hero warriors. Jinhua Dai (2005: 88) noted of the majority of women warriors that “she [the woman warrior] is rarely an object of desire for the male protagonist” and Lo (2005: 153) points out that the martial arts tradition hailed celibacy as a key tenet to all training. Both men and woman warriors learnt to resist the lures of sexual desire and gained audience respect on this basis for centuries. All of the eulogized women warriors of the past remain chaste daughters – returning home
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unsullied to their paternal moral space. Aided by their disguise in men’s clothing the orthodox woman warrior returns to the domestic fold, chastity intact and ready to assume life as a virtuous woman, just as they had served as a virtuous ‘son’. This is not to say that the earlier women warriors did not appeal to audiences on the level of sexual attraction. Chang-Tai Hung has clearly demonstrated that the “ambiguous sexual identity” (derived from cross-dressing, but also from the use of female impersonators in the women warrior roles) “titillates the audience” (Hung, April 1989: 172). The viewers and readers of the traditional stories of crossdressing women are engaged by the potential discovery and/or downfall of the noble young woman, but comforted in the knowledge that she will remain unsullied and will return home as a filial and chaste daughter. The traditional woman warrior goes to great lengths to mask her sex and is never presented as sexualized desiring a sex-partner from among her fellow soldiers. Hero breaks new ground in this respect by depicting women warriors as fired by desire and actively seeking sexual liaisons. But, importantly, the most transgressive of these sexual acts (specifically, Flying Snow’s ‘one night stand’ with Sky and Moon’s with Broken Sword) only occur in the ‘unreal’ narratives. Thus, audiences can taste the danger of the sullied woman warrior only to be reassured in the ‘real’ version that such ‘perverse deeds’ did not occur. Nonetheless, in Hero Flying Snow and Moon are both, within the various versions of ‘reality’ depicted as active sexual beings – desiring and desired – and this is a substantial break with the lengthy traditions of women warriors in China’s past. One of the untrue narratives presented to the King by Nameless includes a range of illicit sexual liaisons. These include: the audience’s and Flying Snow’s voyeuristic secret peeping at the ‘sex under a sheet’ between disciple, Moon, and master, Broken Sword; references to the sexual liaison between Flying Snow and Sky; and tensions generated by jealousy and the denial of sex in the now-defunct sexual relationship between Flying Snow and Broken Sword. In the case of the sex between Moon and her master Broken Sword, his rough and callous disregard of her immediately after they have had sex presents to the audience the spectre of the degraded woman and a classic reassertion of masculine sexual power over women.6 The strategic humiliation of Moon presents a passive female sexuality that is roughly and carelessly taken by Broken Sword. The other illicit sexual act, Flying Snow’s affair with Sky, is presented as off-screen action but remains nonetheless part of the driving force behind the untrue narrative. Most importantly, the inclusion of each of these sex acts is a transgression against the martial arts genre: sex between master and disciple would never be acceptable, between fellow swordspersons rare and a triangular love relationship would render Flying Snow morally bankrupt in the eyes of the dynastic and even twentieth century Chinese audiences. While none of the traditional woman warriors ever has such taints associated with her name, the twenty-first century audience is less modest in its views and revels in the explicit sexual content and the dangerous transgression to the woman warrior orthodoxy inferred therein. But, the fact that these transgressions occur in the untrue versions of the narrative reassures the audience that the chastity and filial piety of the ‘good’ woman
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warrior is intact. The audience appreciates this ‘rehabilitation’ of the chaste woman warrior through the eyes of the King. When Flying Snow and Broken Sword storm the palace the King personally engages Broken Sword in battle and witnesses the spirit of Flying Snow’s sword skills. From this encounter he determines that neither of these figures would be so emotionally unstable as to let sex and sexual jealousy destroy them. He has felt their ‘honour’ and at that moment realizes that Nameless’s intriguing and titillating narratives are a nonsensical tale designed only to fool him. Through the technique of multiple narratives, Hero has ensured that aficionados of the martial arts genre are reassured by the ‘real’ upholding of strict moral codes of the noble warrior they have grown to expect while still providing entertainment for twenty-first century audiences thrilled by tales of jealousy and sex, safe in the knowledge that these risqué versions of the story are fabrications. Without this rehabilitation, Flying Snow and Moon would have been transformed into that category of evil women who use sex to trick, trap or distract men. Crouching Tiger provides just such a ‘fallen’ woman warrior in the character of Jade Fox when she tries to seduce the master, Southern Crane, in order to gain access to his martial arts secrets. As explicit sex has never been part of the women warrior trope, romantic love is also a relatively new phenomenon. In the women warrior tradition, fighting female figures were either already married or returned home to marry a person of their parent’s choosing. Only in the twentieth century do we see versions of the Mulan story including narrative lines where Mulan falls in love with her fellow warrior during her time as a soldier (see, for example, Bu Wancang’s 1939 film, Mulan Joins the Army [Mulan congjun]). Chang-Tai Hung has noted the trend towards eulogizing romantic love within spoken drama through the first half of the twentieth century and this is reflected in the evolution of the women warrior narratives. The right to love and the importance of romantic love to individual happiness, Hung shows, was a significant new theme in twentieth century storytelling (Hung, April 1989: 151–155). Hero’s women warriors develop further the twentieth century typology of a ‘romancing’ woman warrior. In the ‘true’ narrative, the love between Flying Snow and Broken Sword is irreproachably pure and noble. Also, the King assumes the love between Flying Snow and Broken Sword is so strong that Flying Snow deliberately injures the latter in order to sacrifice herself in the fight with Nameless. His life would continue with Moon at his side, facilitated by Flying Snow’s love and sacrifice in death. Similarly, in Crouching Tiger the romantic tension between Li Mubai and Yu Shulian is amplified by their restraint. Their love is so deep, and their devotion to their profession so strong, that they resist the temptation to retire into conjugal romantic bliss. The tragedy of the narrative in Crouching Tiger revolves in large part around the tension built by this unfulfilled romance. Hero presents no such restraint in the relationship between Flying Snow and Broken Sword. In both the fabricated and true versions of the narrative they are romantically, physically and emotionally intertwined. Most importantl, the audience and the characters in the movie express implicit approval of this romance and the power of ‘true love’. Where earlier versions would see such emotional ties as hindering or endangering the martial skill of the warrior, twenty-first century audiences and characters see romantic love as a powerful and positive force.
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But even so, the audience is reminded of the vulnerability presented by warriors in love, especially for male warriors. This is made apparent in the mountain-top murder-suicide scene at the closing stages of the film. So great is Broken Sword’s love that he chooses to die at Flying Snow’s hands. On news of the failed foray into the palace she then also joins him in death hoping to ‘go home together’. She takes a sword and impales herself and Broken Sword – like a human shishkebab – penetrating through the two bodies with the one thrust. The act becomes a reversal of sex roles with Flying Snow, a woman penetrating her partner with her pseudo-phallus, the sword. His very name, Broken Sword, standing as a signifier of an imperfect phallus, suggests his vulnerability to just such an eventuality. However, even though Flying Snow penetrates him, she ultimately cannot control his life and death. He maintained control to the end by knowingly refusing to block her sword. Her failure to see the broader political vision ultimately prevents her achieving her goal of ‘returning home’ to live in domestic bliss with Broken Sword. As I argued above, for centuries women warrior narratives have described how women return home and are re-absorbed into the domestic realm on the completion of their tasks. Here, Flying Snow’s failure to grasp the broader political vision leads to her failure on both counts. Her father’s death is not avenged and neither does she return home to domestic bliss. She was being asked to choose between loyalty to her partner (Broken Sword) and his vision of the world and loyalty to her father through avenging his death. Her own suicide is the only noble option once she has failed both men. Similarly, Zhang Ziyi’s character, Jen, leaps from the cliff at the close of Crouching Tiger in an act of repentant suicide, according to Rong Cai. The suicide is a masochistic act of repentance. The female body is punished for initiating and harbouring the unauthorized desire that causes the demise of the male hero. Its voluntary destruction offers the female body a chance at redemption and sublimation. (Cai, Fall 2005: 456) Indeed, the movie presents its women warriors as weaker in their martial skills than men warriors. They never achieve that pinnacle of warrior mind-body-spirit unity by ‘fighting in their minds’ as do Broken Sword, Sky and Nameless. Sky and Nameless perform the dramatic battle to the sound of zither and dripping water while Broken Sword and Namless fight in tribute to the passive corpse of Flying Snow lying in ‘state’ on a lakeside pavilion. Moreover, unlike the men both Moon and Flying Snow are presented as fighting in unstable emotional states in the untrue narrative. Moon in her fight with Flying Snow to avenge Broken Sword’s death and Flying Snow in her fight with Nameless in front of the circle of Qin soldiers. Moon and Flying Snow are good, but they are not as perfect in their sword skills as the men since they fail to go beyond mere technical expertise to achieve that spiritual and mental peak required of the great heroes.
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Pollution of the warrior woman with the victim script The orthodox woman warrior of China’s past was an unsullied hero. Just as she never indulged in lustful desires, neither was she sullied by illicit male attentions or sexual violence. Yet, over the course of the twentieth century and certainly by the time audiences are introduced to Hero and Crouching Tiger, China’s amazons are depicted as vulnerable and prone to victimization on the basis of their sex. Wendy Larson and others have demonstrated that during the first half of the twentieth century the oppressed and degraded status of women emerged as a symbol of China’s national humiliation (Chan, 1988; Harris, April 1995; Larson, 1999). Plays, movies, novels and short stories alike reproduced the woman-as-victim narrative in multiple visions. It became common for popular entertainment to include the suicide, murder or other degradation of the female lead. The common view is that China’s humiliation at the hands of Western imperialists was metaphorically reflected in the tragedy of the humiliation of innocent woman. Over the course of the century even the woman warrior did not escape her duty to perform as victim. Chang-tai Hung describes numerous examples of drama written to inspire patriotic action against the Japanese during the second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) in which the heroic women warrior appears noting that women resistance fighters appear in large numbers of the 600 plays published in this period (Hung, April 1989: 169). Sexualized victimization of the woman warrior appears in these tales where it had previously not featured strongly. For example, in Ouyang Yuqian’s 1939 play Sorrow for the Fall of the Ming (Mingmo yihen) the protagonist Ge Nenniang is executed, but not before she has defended herself against sexual advances from a Manchu commander (Hung, April 1989: 162). Both Hero and Crouching Tiger present to audiences images of women warriors that are sexually vulnerable to men. Moon’s degrading sexual congress with Broken Sword and Jen’s ambiguously consensual liaison with Dark Cloud in his mountain cave (where ‘no’ does not mean ‘no’) remind readers of woman’s vulnerability to men’s sexual violence. In none of the Mulan story cycles, nor the myriad warriors depicted in Flowers in the Mirror, are readers or audiences told so resolutely that women inevitably fall victim to men. Prior to the twentieth century, Chinese audiences revelled in the stories of unbeatable women soldiers; women whose victories exceeded those of men and whose leadership of men brought new glories to their troops. Hua Mulan ended her military career as a general – not as a degraded, misled or dead woman. These orthodox women warriors were far from victims and inspired awe for their martial skills, not anticipation of their impending sexualized victimization. Neither Hero nor Crouching Tiger was created in times of national humiliation. In fact, China’s global political and economic rise in the late twentieth century accounts in part for the international popularity of the two movies. So how do we understand the continued strength of the woman-as-victim motif in the twenty-first century and, more specifically, the pollution of the woman warrior with this victim role? Kwai-cheung Lo’s analysis is instructive in this regard:
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L. Edwards The physique of onscreen women warriors not only demonstrates their ability to beat up and kill enemies of either sex, they are also there to reaffirm the traditional, pre-modern notion of femininity that requires them to be sexually desirable and to exhibit a certain emotional vulnerability in order to mask the emptiness/void of the postmodern subject. (Lo, 2007: 136)
Lo’s insightful point also helps explain the reason modern women warriors no longer disguise themselves as men. Their feminine sex appeal is in fact part of their success and is also integral to the shift in the symbolic function they perform within a newly defensive patriarchal social order. The rise of social power by real women in the real world produces resistance from remnants of patriarchy with tales that remind viewers the female sex’s essential weakness and vulnerability to attack by men. The twenty-first century women warrior’s new vulnerability – in physical, moral and sexual terms – serves to contain the threat she poses to the existing gender hierarchy. Lo concludes his chapter with the grim reminder: “Perhaps the woman warrior film is not about the concealment of (sexual) exploitation and struggle, but about their inevitability in the capitalist world.” (Lo, 2007: 136) Rong Cai makes a similar observation about the destruction of Zhang Ziyi’s character, Jen, in Crouching Tiger: “Recouping male authority by containing runaway female desire thus functions as a narrative/ideological axis around which the film constructs a cautionary tale against gender transgression and border crossing.” (Cai, Fall 2005: 457) The anxiety of the patriarchal social order to the reconfiguration of the power balance between the sexes with reminders that women are constantly anticipating sexualized attack was evident in the New Culture Movement (1915–1925) as well. During these years of dramatic social and political change, both radical activists and reformist intellectuals challenged age-old Confucian hierarchies, such as those that placed age over youth and men above women. Yet, Lu Xun’s famous essay ‘What happens to Nora after she leaves home?’ reminded readers that a woman who breaks with tradition is likely to end up in poverty and degradation. This point suggests perhaps the explanation of women’s suffering in literature and film in the first half of the twentieth century as symbolizing national suffering may not be entirely accurate. It is possible that tales of women’s suffering were reminders of women’s essential weakness and ever present vulnerability and that these reminders emanated from general social anxiety about women’s newfound power. Amy Dooling supports this point in her study of fiction in the early twentieth century. Where it is commonplace to read narratives of the hardship of women’s lives as synecdoches for the misery of China, she argues that such stories should be read simply as powerful tales of women’s suffering (Dooling, 2005). Dooling makes her argument in order to reclaim these stories for a feminist politics that pressed for radical social change to eradicate this sex-specific suffering. Such stories stand as reminders of the broad social anxiety produced by challenges to the patriarchal gender order, but they also provide evidence of how threats of sexualized violence against women are invoked to limit these challenges.
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Conclusion The dramatic social changes that occurred in gender roles and gender hierarchies over the twentieth century necessarily altered the role of the woman warrior within the world of representations and fantasy. As women changed their reality so the imaginary and symbolic roles they perform must necessarily also change. The women warriors produced in a prominent twenty-first century cultural product, Hero, demonstrate the changes explicitly when considered in relation to the many earlier women warrior narratives. Yet, the success of this movie, a global Chinese blockbuster, is in part a result of the fact that the scriptwriters, actors, producers and directors have presented a composite of the traditional and the hyper-modern in their women warrior figures. In so doing they provide an engaging insight into shifting gender ideologies in a rapidly globalizing Chinese culture.
Notes 1 For excellent comprehensive studies of early Chinese cinema see Berry and Farquhar (2005), Fu (2003) and Hu (2003). 2 Hua Mulan and Yang family female generals will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter. Thirteenth Sister is the protagonist in Wen Kang’s mid-Qing novel Heroic sons and daughters (Ernü yingxiong zhuan) and performs Robin Hood-esque acts of rescuing the innocent and redistributing ill-gotten gains. Qin Liangyu (1574–1648) became a general in the Ming forces after the death of her husband, General Ma Qiancheng. Liang Hongyu (c.1130) was a courtesan and then wife to Song General Han Shizhong. Her battle strategies using drum signals were instrumental in vanquishing the enemy. 3 Confucian ethical principles underpinning Chinese culture uphold filial piety as a key personal virtue. Throughout one’s life, an individual is exhorted to respect his or her parents and willingly make any necessary sacrifices. As the family in Han China was figured along paternal lines for ritual and economic purposes, performance of filial piety primarily meant loyalty to one’s father’s line. 4 The original poem The Ballard of Mulan (Mulan ci) is 62 lines and 332 characters. All later versions of her story draw from this original source. It is unclear whether or not she was an historical figure or merely a literary creation, but the sustained interest in her tale stands as evidence of the continuing relevance of her story for over 1,500 years since the appearance of the poem. 5 See Kwai-cheung Lo’s comment on the exaggeration of sexual characteristics in female heroines in Hollywood warrior films (Lo, 2005: 152). 6 In conversation with me, Guo Yingjie noted that he is of the opinion that the sex act between Moon and Broken Sword did not actually take place. He points out that the film script does not actually describe the physical act of sex. Everything is hidden under a sheet and simply performed for Flying Snow’s eyes. Regardless of one’s position on the completion or otherwise of sexual intercourse, the script is clear in its instructions to create an erotic atmosphere – the scene is described as ‘extremely erotic’ (hen seqing).
References Berry, Chris and Farquhar, Mary (2006) China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, New York: Columbia University Press.
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Cai, Rong (Fall 2005) ‘Gender imaginations in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the wuxia world’, Positions, l3 (2), pp. 441–471. Chan, Stephen Ching-Kiu (1988) ‘The language of despair: Ideological representations of the new woman by May Fourth writers’, Modern Chinese Literature, vol. 4, pp. 19–38. Dai, Jinhua (2005) ‘Order/anti-order: Representation of identity in Hong Kong’, in Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu (eds), Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 81–94. Dooling, Amy D. (2005) Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Edwards, Louise (1995) ‘Women warriors and amazons of the mid Qing texts Jinghua yuan and Honglou meng’, Modern Asian Studies, 29 (2), pp. 225–255. —— (2005) ‘The impact of war on women’s suffrage in China: The problem of “crisis femininity”’ (Zhanzheng dui xiandai Zhongguo funü canzheng yundong de yinxiang: “weiji nüxing” de wenti), in Wang Zheng and Chen Yan (eds), Research in 100 Years of Chinese Feminist Thought (Bainian Zhongguo nüquan sichao yanjiu), Shanghai: Fudan University, pp. 220–226 (in Chinese). —— (2008) Gender, Politics and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Evans, Harriet (1997) Women and Sexuality in China: Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949, Cambridge: Polity Press. Fu, Poshek (2003) Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gilmartin, Christina (1995) Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics and Mass Movements in the 1920s, Berkeley: University of California Press. Harris, Kristine (April 1995) ‘The new woman: Image, subject and dissent in 1930s Shanghai film culture’, Republican China, 20 (2), pp. 55–79. Hershatter, Gail (1999) Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in TwentiethCentury Shanghai, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hu, Jubin (2003) Projecting a Nation: Chinese National Cinema before 1949, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Hung, Chang-tai (April 1989) ‘Female symbols of resistance in Chinese wartime spoken drama’, Modern China, 15 (2), pp. 149–177. Jeffreys, Elaine (2004) China, Sex and Prostitution, London: RoutledgeCurzon. Larson, Wendy (1999) Women and Writing in Modern China, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Li, Feng (2003) Hero: Screenplay (Yingxiong juben). Available online at: http://read.anhuinews.com/system/2003/03/18/000277290.shtml (accessed 23 March 2007, in Chinese). Li, Ruizhen (1828, rpt. 1985) Flowers in the Mirror (Jinghua yuan), Taipei: Xuehai chubanshe (in Chinese). Li, Siu Leung (2003, rpt. 2006) Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Lo, Kwai-cheung (2005) ‘Fighting female masculinity: Women warriors and their foreignness in Hong Kong action cinema of the 1980s’, in Laikwan Pang and Day Wong (eds), Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 137–154. —— (2007) ‘Copies of copies in Hollywood and Hong Kong cinemas: Rethinking the women warrior figures’, in Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam (eds), Hong Kong Film,
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Hollywood and the New Global Cinema: No film is an Island, London: Routledge, pp. 126–136. Wang, Zheng (1999) Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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On tian xia (‘all under heaven’) in Zhang Yimou’s Hero Xiaoming Chen and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley
Introduction If there is a message in Zhang Yimou’s Hero, it is certainly tian xia (‘all under heaven’). The phrase appears numerous times throughout the film. The conflict between Nameless, Broken Sword and the King of Qin, later the First Emperor when China was united, is diminished because of their vision of tian xia. The hidden logic of tian xia in the film is: on the one hand, terrorism and violence must be abandoned if peace (heping) within tian xia is to be restored; on the other hand, it is necessary to tolerate, and even support, unification of nations by force in order to pursue universal peace. The logic seems self-contradictory. Yet it is this logic of peace that unites the assassins and the King of Qin in the film. Nameless and Broken Sword give up their secret missions and support the conqueror for the sake of eternal peace, while the King believes that he enjoys the Mandate of Heaven (tian ming) because he has the power and the will to bring peace to all. Peace becomes the ultimate justification that resolves all violence in the world of Hero. Although the 9/11 terrorist attack occurred just one month after Hero began shooting1, it is hard to argue that the film is Zhang Yimou’s direct response to the event. However, as regional conflicts and threats of terrorism have since dominated news agendas all over the world, it is also difficult to imagine that Zhang was not at all influenced by such an international atmosphere when he was working on a film aimed at a global audience. Moreover, the film directs attention towards the creation of a new world order, albeit a seemingly very different world from today. Why did Zhang Yimou make tian xia such a prominent theme for Hero? What does tian xia really mean in the film? Further, how did he represent tian xia aesthetically and philosophically? These are the questions we intend to address in this chapter.
Tian xia: a new national and international dimension The English version of the film translated tian xia as ‘our land’, which is misleading. The exact meaning of tian xia is in fact fluid. In Chinese classics, tian xia mainly refers to all the territory within the central plains (zhongyuan) and the central states (zhongguo), a geographical area of which in time became known as ‘China’, but the term tian xia can also mean the entire world that goes beyond
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Chinese land (Sea of Phrases, 2003: 1069).2 As mentioned earlier in this chapter and throughout the volume, the literal translation of tian xia is ‘all under heaven’. To put it more clearly, tian xia is a noun that refers to population, creatures, natural resources and everything under the sky. Therefore the term is sometimes seen as an ambiguous concept. Nevertheless, tian xia has been a phrase frequently mentioned by Chinese politicians and intellectuals throughout history, even though their meaning of tian xia may differ depending on context. For example, Fan Zhongyan (989–1052), an important political thinker, prominent mandarin and respected writer in the Song Dynasty (907–1276), said that one must “foresee the worries before tian xia (the population) starts to worry and only feel content after tian xia is content”.3 Fan’s tian xia here is interpreted as all the people within the country. Because of the compassion to every ordinary man and woman revealed in this sentence, Fan’s saying has become one of the most famous mottos that generations of Chinese elites dutifully recite. The founding father of modern China, Dr Sun Yat-Sen (1866–1925), also championed the ideal that “tian xia belongs to the public”.4 Dr Sun’s tian xia here embodies many layers of meanings – it can stand for the Chinese government, the whole of China, to all governments and all of the world – depending on how one chooses to decipher it. Dr Sun was heavily influenced by Western political thought on democracy and did not believe in dynastic Chinese views that tian xia (the whole of China) should belong to just one person (i.e. an emperor). As he repeatedly promoted uprisings to overturn the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) and eventually succeeded in 1911 on the eleventh attempt (Kruger, 2004: 379–394), his views on tian xia have added another commonly repeated slogan into the Chinese consciousness and called for the establishment of a republic modern China. If we subscribe to Benedict Anderson’s theory that language lays the bases for national consciousness and the formation of an “imagined community” (Anderson, 2000), tian xia is certainly an important notion that forms an imagined Chinese universe in the mind of the Chinese population. In the 1980s when Zhang Yimou became a professional filmmaker, Chinese youths and intellectuals were taught to be patriotic and to “take tian xia as their responsibility”5, namely to make themselves the driving force to strengthen China as a modern state and to raise China’s international status after the political, social and economic chaos created by the Culture Revolution. It is difficult to imagine that Zhang Yimou, a leading artist and cultural elite in China, will not be familiar with the Chinese notion of tian xia and share a strong sense of responsibility towards it. His passionate patriotism was shown in his directorial debut, Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, 1988), which was hailed a glorious achievement both in China and in the international arena.6 Both the content and the international reception of the film captured a mainstream desire among the mainland Chinese at the time to survive, thrive and to re-enter the world stage. However, Zhang’s personal artistic interest has taken him down a more marginalized path since the success of Red Sorghum. For example, Judou (Judou, 1990) tells a story of extreme sexual repression and despair in rural southern China. Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong denglong gaogao gua, 1991) depicts the helplessness
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and exploitation of Chinese women in a traditional patriarchal society in the early twentieth century. The subjects of these films were not only marginal in the West, but also in China itself. As Sheldon Lu (2005: 121) has pointed out: The 1990s were a time of consumerism, commercialization, depoliticization, and deideologization. It was an age without heroes and gods. […] Film as an effective form of mass media has had to carry out an ideological mission in postsocialist China. A category of film that the government heavily invests in both ideologically and financially is the so-called mainstream film (zhuxuan lü). A major purpose of zhuxuan lü was to create role models and rebuild an ethical foundation at a time when people had lost faith in grand ideologies. Under such circumstances, there is no wonder that although the artistic merit of both Judou and Raise the Red Lantern won Zhang acclaim as a filmmaker at various international film festivals7, they ignited at the same time a fierce debate at home and abroad that Zhang’s work reinforced the prejudice of Orientalism by showcasing tragedies of anti-heroes in a dysfunctional Chinese society.8 The Story of Qiuju (Qiuju da guansi, 1992) and Not One Less (Yige dou buneng shao, 1999) were both well received in China and were particularly welcomed by the Chinese government.9 The main character of the former, Qiuju (played by Gong Li), is a middle-aged woman from a poor Shannxi village and the heroine of the latter is Wei Minzhi (played by Wei Minzhi), a teenage girl from another deprived area in the North. Because Qiuju’s husband was physically bullied by the village chief, she jumps over numerous hurdles of bureaucracy in the legal system to fight for justice for her family. Wei Minzhi is a short-term substitute teacher. One of her students ran away, and so she goes to an unfamiliar big city miles away from home to look for the missing boy. Like Qiuju in her story, Wei also encounters the challenges of bureaucracy but finally receives help from the media and achieves her goal. Both films adopted techniques of documentary that enhanced a sense of authenticity to the story. Some critics (Lu, 2005: 127–128) find similarities between both films and the Chinese fable, The Old Fool Moves the Mountain (Yugong yi shan). The stubbornness of the female characters, their “silly, single-minded, ‘foolish’ determination is what moves the audience in the theatre, the authorities in the films, and the ‘mountains’ in China’s social landscape” (Ibid.: 128). Nevertheless, it does not change the fact that in reality, people like Qiuju and Wei Minzhi will be minor, fringe characters in the modern Chinese political and economic system. Neither of them will be treated as real role models for Chinese citizens by normal standards. They are simply ordinary peasants, uneducated (or with very limited education) and powerless. In other words, for a long time since Red Sorghum, although Zhang Yimou has been accustomed to portraying the weak, disadvantaged and neglected individuals in the Chinese society, none of his film characters prior to Hero is capable of speaking on behalf of the whole China or participating in mainstream dialogue with national or international elites. For this reason, Hero is a breakthrough in Zhang’s film career. Tian xia has given him a central and elitist stand point that has been denied by his previous
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masterpieces. Hero is a ‘big’ film, not only in terms of production scale and financial investment, but also in terms of its ideology. What Zhang wanted to convey in this film has finally matched the contemporary mainstream thinking of the Chinese government and society in the new millennium as he once did in the late 1980s with Red Sorghum. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, China has finally become an undeniable political and economic power. Moreover, the significance of China’s international status has been growing10, and the Chinese government and its social elites are highly aware of the rise of their country. Many leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) including Zeng Qinghong11, Hu Jintao12, Cao Gangchuan13 and Wen Jiabao14 have been focussing on ‘peaceful rise’ (heping jueqi), ‘peace as priority’ (yi he wei gui) and ‘peaceful development’ (heping fazhan) in prescribing strategies for China’s foreign policies during their talks for both the domestic and international audiences (China Net, 2004). This discourse of peace has provided Zhang Yimou with a new national and international dimension for elaborating his argument of tian xia in Hero.
Tian xia: artistic and spiritual expression Tian xia is an abstract term, but Zhang Yimou gave it an important physical presence in the film. It appears in Hero for the first time when Broken Sword tries to persuade Nameless not to assassinate the King of Qin. The scene is set in a sandy wilderness. Broken Sword is unable to defeat Nameless. Nameless tells Broken Sword: “Your energy is weakening. You won’t be able to stop me.” As Nameless is about to leave, Broken Sword seems particularly saddened but he does not look at Nameless. Broken Sword says: “This sword is passed down by a xiake (literally ‘chivalrous knightly figure’). If I have failed this sword, I’ll no longer be a xiake myself. At last, allow me to give you advice in two words.”15 Subsequently Broken Sword uses his sword carefully to write down tian xia in Chinese characters on the yellow sand surrounding them. Nameless stares at what has been written. He looks impressed and thoughtful. Wind then blows over and wipes out the calligraphies in the sand. Thus tian xia has enjoyed a significant and lengthy introduction to the heroes in the film, as well as to the viewers. Zhang Yimou did not make the characters in his film debate the concept of tian xia. Its meanings are often communicated through atmospheric methods and the film is filled with moments of Zen when the insights of tian xia suddenly dawns on the heroes. For example, when Nameless wants to meet with Broken Sword and Flying Snow, his pretext is that he would like to ask for one word written by Broken Sword as he a famous calligrapher. The word Nameless asks for is ‘sword’ (jian). As it happens, Broken Sword has not only perfected his swordsmanship by his writing of ‘jian’, but has also discovered profound philosophy from it. And the philosophy Broken Sword has learned is that ‘the King of Qin must not be killed’ (Qinwang buneng sha). Broken Sword later tells Nameless he was at first shocked and tormented by his own awakening. But he finally understood and accepted that although a swordsman cannot unite tian xia (i.e. all nations) by using his sword, it
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is important for him to try and help the best way he can. He believes the ultimate mission of xiake is to help tian xia (all people) by bringing peace to all. It seems that the definitions of tian xia referred to by Broken Sword here switch between ‘all nations’ and ‘all people’ from time to time. Broken Sword’s (i.e. Zhang Yimou’s) argument to link ‘sword’ with tian xia is a fascinating train of thought: a sword is a weapon. It kills people and hence symbolizes violence. The original motivation for Broken Sword to practice calligraphy and swordsmanship was to assassinate the King of Qin in order to avenge Qin’s invasion of Zhao, Broken Sword’s own country. Yet as Broken Sword’s skills of swordsmanship become more polished, the more anti-sword and thus anti-violence he becomes as he appreciates the true meanings of tian xia. Broken Sword explains his theory of tian xia to Nameless: tian xia (i.e. the Chinese universe) was originally a united one. People were happy to live in peace. But tian xia was gradually divided into many small nations. These nations fought with each other for 700 years, and so the general public suffered seven centuries of nightmares. If one wants to end these nightmares, one must end wars. But if tian xia (China) is not united, wars will never come to an end. Who can stop wars? No swordsman can stop wars however strong and skilful he may be because swordsman can only kill individuals. The only person who can stop wars is the King of Qin as he has the ability to unite the other six nations. It will no doubt be a very painful process especially for the nations that are to be conquered by Qin. But once the process is over, the pain will eventually stop and people will not have to suffer any longer. In Broken Sword’s eyes, the sacrifice of individuals cannot compare with the suffering of the entire population; it is better to bear pain in the short term than to endure endless suffering. Although it is not specified, the meaning of tian xia in the above dialogue between Broken Sword and Nameless seems to alter again from ‘all nations’ and ‘all people’ to be transformed to ‘China’. In this way, Zhang Yimou artfully interweaves his adaptable interpretation of tian xia with a mysterious philosophy of swordsmanship and thus blends the tolerance of violence into a grand vision of peace. This logic of peace is not necessarily rational. But it appears to be poetic, spiritual and fits in with what has been generally perceived as the wisdom of the Orient (Said, 1978). Moreover, Broken Sword’s logic of sacrifice also reveals a seemingly noble agenda: sacrificing the lives of individuals for the greater good. Yet upon closer examination, the lives that Broken Sword proposes to sacrifice are not just that of his own, but also of the innocent citizens of non-Qin nations who stand in the way of Qin’s path to establish an ambitious empire. In other words, the sacrificial dimensions of the film are much closer to despotism than humanitarian. However, as Zhang Yimou’s portrayal of Broken Sword is a tormented hero who seeks to end all wars, his views on sacrifice, just as the vague and inconsistent interpretations of tian xia in the film, are elaborately packaged and sold to the audience as necessary means for ultimate peace. The assessment of the First Emperor’s legacy has been a contentious issue. Instead of being celebrated as one of the greatest conquerors of all time, the First Emperor was often castigated by the Chinese as “a cruel, arbitrary, impetuous, suspicious, and superstitious megalomaniac” (Ebrey, 2004: 61). Moreover, he
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collected and burned all writings other than useful manuals on topics like agriculture, medicine, or divination … Recalcitrant scholars were also suppressed – tradition holds that 460 were buried alive in a common grave as a warning against defiance of the emperor’s orders. (Ibid.: 63) ‘Burning books’ (fenshu) and ‘burying scholars alive’ (kengru) have traditionally been seen by historians as two of the utmost crimes committed by the First Emperor since Sima Qian (145–c.85 BCE) wrote Historical Records (Shiji).16 Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that the First Emperor united China as a single state. Further, he imposed uniformity on it. This has been seen as a particularly glorious achievement by the Chinese government since the 1950s. Zhang Yimou avoided dealing with debates over the legacy of the Fist Emperor in Hero but simply focussed on his grand vision of tian xia instead. However, although Zhang, through Broken Sword and Nameless, equates tian xia with the pursuit of universal peace in the film, the First Emperor’s interpretation of tian xia should be and would be very different indeed. For political and military conquerors in dynastic China, tian xia was more likely to symbolize ‘power’ rather than ‘peace’. The ambition of a conqueror was to rule the world and war was a means to realize this ambition. Once he achieved his dream, war might stop if this was to his interest to hold onto power, but it might not if the ruler wished to expand the empire or to suppress rebellions. Peace would only be a by-product if it fitted in with an emperor’s agenda of power and control. In other words, a Chinese emperor was extremely unlikely to share the same definition of tian xia with his assassins. In the film Hero, the characters do not qualify their interpretation of tian xia, but simply rely on mutual trust and unsaid agreement between them. Hence the viewers are made to witness a spiritual link between the King of Qin and Broken Sword. The King asks Nameless: “What is the advice Broken Sword gave you?” Nameless gazes at the King and answers slowly as if he could feel the weight of the words: “tian xia.” The King seems slightly surprised and says: “I see … tian xia.” Nameless continues: Broken Sword told me, seven nations in the world have never stopped fighting each other. People have suffered a great deal. You are the only person who can stop the chaos of wars. He wanted me to give up my mission for the sake of tian xia (all people). He wanted me to understand that one person’s own suffering means nothing once it is compared with the suffering of tian xia. The hatred between Zhao and Qin is meaningless if we place it within the context of tian xia. Tears are welling up in the King’s eyes at this point as he is obviously moved. The King then says:
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The King then stands in front of Broken Sword’s calligraphy, a large Chinese character of ‘sword’ written in bright red ink. He tells Nameless: Since I have found a soul mate in Broken Sword, I’ll have no regret even if I died today. You must decide what action to take for the sake of tian xia (all people). I will be like Broken Sword and let you make up your own mind whether or not you are going to kill me. He throws a sword to Nameless and turns his back. Just as Nameless is going to raise his sword, something dawns on the King suddenly: “I’ve got it!” He acclaims: There is no wonder you didn’t understand! This character that Broken Sword wrote has nothing to do with his swordsmanship. He wrote it with his heart! I am not as good as Broken Sword, and neither are you! Broken Sword has foreseen the trend and the future. He is telling you, by advising you to think of tian xia (all people), that it is destined for Qin to conquer the other six nations. Life or death of any individuals will never change the course of history. So it is up to you if you want to kill me. But whether or not you do, the fate of tian xia (the world) will not be altered because tian xia (the public) will get what it wants and deserves once the trend of history has been determined. Through this conversation, the King of Qin has been depicted as a wise and thoughtful politician who understands tian xia and cares for peace. Therefore Nameless does not kill the King in the end. He only asks the King to bear tian xia in mind as he walks out of the palace. Yet as discussed earlier in this chapter, while the tian xia Nameless wants the King to remember here should mean ‘all people’, the tian xia the King of Qin actually thinks of at this point will most likely be ‘the entire territory in the Chinese land’. Zhang Yimou has invented several heroic figures including Sky, Broken Sword and Nameless in the film. All of them are assassins who have decided to abandon violence for the sake of peace and tian xia. The friendship between them is also elevated to a higher spiritual level due to their common belief and altruism for the benefit of tian xia. Hero could have been a movie about friendship and trust between swordsmen. Yet as the director gave tian xia such a major presence, the focus of the story has turned to the pursuit of peace and thus the King of Qin must become the ultimate hero by the logic of the narratives. The discrepancy in the initial captions of the Chinese version and the English version of the movie is
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very telling. While the Chinese version simply states the historical background of Hero17, the caption in the English version reads: People give their lives for many reasons. For friendship, for love, for an ideal. And people kill for the same reasons. Before China was one great country, it was divided into seven warring states. In the kingdom of Qin was a ruthless ruler. He had a vision – to unite the land, to put an end once and for all to war. It was an idea soaked in the blood of his enemy. In any war there are heroes on both sides.18 When Broken Sword and Nameless decide to spare the King of Qin of his life for the sake of tian xia, none of the characters nor the viewers can be confident of the final outcome of this decision. If the King did not unite all nations and bring peace to the world as the assassins had wished, will their sacrifice by giving up their missions not be seen as utterly meaningless and even stupid? Therefore not only the personality of the King but also his historical achievement needs to be artistically (re)interpreted in the film. Again, the difference in the ending captions between the Chinese version and the English version of the movie has revealed the filmmaker’s motivation. While the Chinese version avoids mentioning the tyranny of the First Emperor the Chinese viewers are familiar with, it also plays down his military victory by simply stating the fact that the First Emperor united China and built the Great Wall to protect the country from foreign invasion.19 But the English version romanticized the First Emperor further by saying: The nameless warrior was executed as an assassin but buried as a hero. The King of Qin went on to conquer all of the six kingdoms and united the country. As China’s first emperor, he completed the Great Wall to protect his subjects. This was more than two thousand years ago. But even today, when the Chinese speak of their country, they call it ‘our land’.20 The final action of the First Emperor, namely unification of China under single rule, validates Sky, Broken Sword and Nameless as heroes.
Aesthetic representation of tian xia As far as Zhang Yimou is concerned as a filmmaker, tian xia is a much needed catch-all term that combines traditional Chinese philosophy with contemporary relevance. It is a broad concept without concrete essence. As explained earlier in this chapter, once each character has clarified what he actually meant by tian xia in the film, it will be impossible for Nameless and the King of Qin to establish their consensus. Hence on the one hand, Zhang Yimou deliberately kept the definition of tian xia vague and intangible, but on the other hand he needed to emphasize the significance of tian xia in the mind of the heroes in order to make it a convincing driving force for the film narratives. The dual representation of tian xia allows Zhang Yimou to make himself a
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cultural and aesthetic hero: ideologically, it gives Zhang a platform to elaborate his theories on violence, sacrifice, the world and the pursuit of long-lasting peace to a global audience; artistically, it grants the director aesthetic freedom to experiment with the metamorphosis of the concept in colours, lines, camera movements, composition of each frame, etc. To Zhang Yimou, Hero not only provides him with the platform to be ‘grand’ in the ideology it represents, but also in the filmic language it employs. As Zhang admitted in the documentary made by the Hero production team, he would like the audience to remember certain colours and mise-en-scène in the film when they forget the plots of the movie years later.21 Most scenes in Hero are shot in wide camera angles: bold background colour, masses of soldiers, skyful of arrows, gigantic buildings, enormous battle fields … Sky, Broken Sword, Nameless, Flying Snow and Moon all fight, dance, move around and act within this highly stylized vast stage. Although Zhang Yimou leaves a lot of space in each framing, the mise-en-scène does not seem empty or weightless but often fills with a sense of anxiety. It can be argued that, based on the logic of the film narratives, this sense of anxiety and repression comes from the heavy presence of tian xia. In other words, although tian xia is an ambiguous notion, it enjoys a haunting presence that is constantly read, written, talked about and as if can be felt and touched by the characters throughout the film. Further, the concern for tian xia provides the filmmaker with justification to explore more ways of portraying violence that may be perceived as a newer, more stimulating and ‘Oriental’ style than previous globally successful Chinese martial arts productions, most notably Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000). The aesthetic expression of the film Hero derives from the violent actions of the assassins, and each fighting sequence is meticulously designed to fulfil specific aesthetic requirements. For example, when Nameless first encounters Sky, there is a blind musician playing a conventional Chinese instrument in the scene. The duel between Sky and Nameless is accompanied by the woeful sound of Oriental music performed by this aging musician in the background (see Gow in this volume). It is aesthetics of violence expressed in front of ‘Chinese culture’. When Nameless fights with Broken Sword in an ancient library, the stage is ‘wisdom’ and ‘civilization’. The two swordsmen communicate their knowledge and understanding of humanity through traditional Chinese books and deadly weapons. The swordplay between Flying Snow and Moon takes place under red cherry blossoms. The falling petals and the whirling costumes of the two heroines make violence and death seem glorious, beautiful and almost alluring. The large Chinese calligraphy, ‘sword’, written in bright red ink, which establishes spiritual links between Broken Sword, Nameless and the King of Qin, appears in the movie several times. As discussed above ‘sword’ is a symbol of violence, but it is also interpreted by the characters in the film as anti-violence and a way of pursuing peace. In other words, the filmmaker uses ‘sword’ as a metaphor to unite violence and aesthetics on the basis of tian xia. As if as long as the heroes embrace the notion of tian xia, there will be ground for the filmmaker to display violent actions through the use of sword with deep philosophical meanings and full of aesthetic values. Nevertheless, the highly formulated representation can be too
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pretentious to be believable at times. For example, when Broken Sword suddenly realizes the true meaning of tian xia by practicing his calligraphy, his enlightenment does not seem to the viewers a coincidental awakening but an artificially predetermined plot by the filmmaker. Similarly when the King of Qin turns round and says to Nameless: “I’ve got it (the connection between ‘sword’ and ‘tian xia’)”, the moment of Zen seems too convenient and too false to be convincing.
Conclusion The production of Hero reveals Zhang Yimou’s intention to fulfil his aesthetics inspiration as a filmmaker, as well as his ambition to make an intelligent comment on international politics in general as a member of the Chinese cultural elite. However, from the analysis above, we can see that although the theme of tian xia may have helped to realize his former goal, it lacks real substance to support the latter. On the surface, the film seems to be full of Oriental wisdom that may be applied to current situations, including the pursuit of ultimate peace and the readiness to sacrifice individuals for the greater goal and the bigger picture. But in reality, the logics of tian xia communicated in the film are often inconsistent and irrational. Similarly even if the heroes’ self-sacrifice may be a noble action, the rationale behind it is questionable. As a result, Hero is more an aesthetic achievement than a cultural or a philosophical commentary on either national or international affairs. Tian xia in Hero is simply a pretext for the filmmaker to maximize his artistic expression rather than a real statement rooted in Chinese political thought.
Notes 1 Cause: The Birth of Hero (Yuanqi) (2002) special feature included in the Hero DVD available in the Chinese market, directed by Gan Lu, produced by Beijing Xuanliu Documentary Studio (Beijing xuanliu jilupian gongzuoshi), in Chinese. 2 For example, both The Book of History (Shu Jing) and The Analects (Lunyu) mentioned tian xia. The Book of History records events in China between 7000–2000 BCE. The Analects records the teachings of Confucius (c.551–479 BCE) and the discussions between him and his disciples. For the meanings of zhongyuan and zhongguo, also see Wang in this volume 3 The actual saying is ‘xian tian xia zhi you er you, hou tian xia zhi le er le’. It came from the article ‘Yueyanglou ji’ that Fan Zhongyan wrote to commemorate the refurbishment of the building Yueyanglou. The Chinese text can be found online: http://www. chinapage.com/big5/prose/tower.htm (accessed 8 September 2008). 4 The actual saying is ‘tian xia wei gong’. The phrase originally came from one of the Confucian classics, Book of Rites (Li ji), chapter ‘Li yun’. Because Dr Sun Yat-Sen championed the notion of ‘tian xia wei gong’ throughout his life, it became closely associated with Dr Sun for the Chinese people today. The text of the chapter ‘Li yun’ was carved in a tablet placed at Dr Sun’s tomb and it can be found online: http:// www2.bbsland.com/cgi-bin/gb_big5.cgi?src=/child/messages/62042.html (accessed 8 September 2008). 5 The actual saying is ‘yi tian xia wei ji ren’. It is one of the most common Chinese idioms. 6 Red Sorghum won the Golden Bear Award at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival and four Golden Rooster Awards in China, including Best Film.
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7 Ju Dou was nominated in 1990 for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards and the Golden Palm Award at Cannes, and it won the 1991 Amanda Awards in Norway and the 1990 Golden Spike Award in Spain. Raise the Red Lantern won ten international awards in 1991 including a BAFTA Film Award and the Silver Lion at Venice Film Festival. 8 For discussion about the ‘myth of Zhang Yimou’ (Zhang Yimou shenhua), see Haizhou Wang and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley in this volume. 9 The Story of Qiuju won Best Film at both the Golden Rooster Awards and the Hundred Flowers Awards in China in 1992. Not One Less won Best Director at the Golden Rooster Awards in 1999. Moreover, companies and factories were encouraged to buy tickets for their employees to view Not One Less in the theatres (Lu, 2005: 126–131). 10 For example, after the events of 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush was photographed alongside President Jiang Zemin wearing traditional Chinese costume. The message behind this photograph was that the Bush administration felt that they had to turn their policy from ‘strategic competition’ to ‘strategic cooperation’ with Beijing in order to secure full support from the Chinese government in the war against terrorism (Rawnsley, 2006: 81–87). Although China has been a benign superpower in international politics, when the threat of North Korea’s nuclear test alarmed the world in 2006, Beijing took a crucial role in leading the six-party talks to defuse the crisis (Guardian Unlimited, 2007a). Similarly when the Burmese troops bloodily suppressed pro-democracy demonstrations staged by Buddhist monks in late September 2007, China was also expected by the international community to assume greater responsibility in calming the situation (Guardian Unlimited, 2007b). 11 Zeng Qinghong was the Vice President of the PRC, 2003–2008. 12 Hu Jintao has been the General Secretary of the CCP since 2002, President of the PRC since 2003 and Chairman of the Central Military Commission since 2004. 13 Cao Gangchuan is the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and former Minister of National Defence of the PRC. 14 Wen Jiabao became the Premier of the PRC in 2003. 15 The authors’ own translation based on the Chinese version of the movie. Except where indicated otherwise, all English subtitles cited in this chapter are the authors’ translation. 16 Sima Qian is a historian of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220), which was established after the collapse of the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE). His lifetime achievement, Historical Records (Shiji), has profoundly shaped the way ‘the Chinese have conceived of their past – and thus of themselves” (Ebrey, 2004: 67). 17 The initial caption of the Chinese version states: Over two thousands years ago, it was the Warring States Period. China was divided into seven states – Qin, Zhao, Han, Wei, Yan, Qi, Chu. These seven states were at war with each other constantly to fight for the ultimate power. People suffered a great deal. Among the seven states, Qin was the strongest. The King of Qin, Ying Zheng, wanted to conquer the other six states to unify tian xia. He saw the six states his biggest enemy. From the ancient time to the modern day, there have been many stories about assassinating the King of Qin in the Chinese history. 18 English subtitles by the SBS English Language Services, Australia. 19 The Chinese version of the closing caption reads: The King of Qin ordered an honourable burial of Nameless. Sky decided to give up his martial arts in order to commemorate the three dead friends. The King of Qin unified China in 221 BCE. He ended the war, built the Great Wall to protect the country and the people, and became the first emperor in the Chinese history. He is called Qin Shihuang. 20 English subtitles by the SBS English Language Services, Australia. 21 Hero Defined (2004) DVD supplement (directed by Stanley J. Orzel), Hero Miramax Home Entertainment/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD.
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References Anderson, Benedict (2000) Imagined Communities, New York: Verso. China Net (2004) ‘China’s Road of Peaceful Rise’ (Zhongguo de heping jueqi zhi lu). Available online at: http://www.china.com.cn/zhuanti2005/node_550363.htm (accessed 7 November 2007, in Chinese). Ebrey, Patricia Buckley (2004) The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fan, Zhongyan (n.d.) ‘Commemorating Yueyang tower’ (Yueyanglou ji). Available online at: http://www.chinapage.com/big5/prose/tower.htm (accessed 8 September 2008, in Chinese). Guardian Unlimited (2007a), ‘Timeline: North Korea and nuclear weapon, 1991–2007’, The Guardian. Available online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/korea/subsectionmenu/0,,854619,00.html (accessed 5 November 2007). —— (2007b), ‘Special report: Burma’, The Guardian. Available online at: http://www. guardian.co.uk/burma/0,,970917,00.html (accessed 6 November 2007). Kruger, Rayne (2004) All Under Heaven: A Complete History of China, Sussex: John Wiley & Sons. Lu, Sheldon H. (2005) ‘Chinese film culture at the end of the twentieth century’, in Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh (eds), Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 120–137. Rawnsley, Gary (2006) ‘May You live in interesting times: China, Japan and peacekeeping’, in Rachel E. Utley (ed.), Major Powers and Peacekeeping: Perspectives, Priorities and the Challenges of Military Intervention, London: Ashgate, pp. 81–98. Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism, New York: Pantheon. Sea of Phrases (Ci hai) (2003) Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe (in Chinese).
Recordings used Cause: The Birth of Hero (Yuanqi) (2002) special feature included in the Hero DVD available in the Chinese market, directed by Gan Lu, produced by Beijing Xuanliu Documentary Studio (Beijing xuanliu jilupian gongzuoshi), in Chinese. Hero Defined (2004) DVD supplement (directed by Stanley J. Orzel), Hero Miramax Home Entertainment/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD.
7
Hero: rewriting the Chinese martial arts film genre Haizhou Wang and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley
In this chapter, we intend to investigate why and how Zhang Yimou’s Hero has rewritten the Chinese martial arts film genre. We believe that the development of Zhang’s cinematic career led the director along a particular path when he embarked on the project of Hero. This helps to explain why Hero takes on the format of the martial arts film instead of any other genre. We then trace the history of the traditional martial arts film genre in order to summarize its key characteristics. This allows us to compare the differences in traditional Chinese martial arts films and Hero. We also try to identify possible motivations for why Zhang Yimou rewrites the genre in Hero.
Zhang Yimou and contemporary Chinese cinema There is little doubt that Zhang Yimou has made a significant contribution to contemporary Chinese cinema. His accomplishment was realized when China opened to the West in the 1980s. When his directorial debut, Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, 1988), won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, Zhang became the first filmmaker from the Chinese-speaking world to receive the highest recognition at a major international film festival in the West. This has marked the beginning of a trend where contemporary Chinese cinema constantly makes a noticeable impact at important international film festivals.1 In the meantime, Zhang’s success in subsequent film festivals granted him increasing resources, as well as a domestic and international reputation. He gained tremendous confidence in his own artistic judgment and for a relatively long period since 1988, Zhang Yimou was seen at overseas film festivals as a Chinese director who specialized in producing awardwinning masterpieces. As his achievement has raised the artistic perception of Chinese cinema in the West, Zhang has been perceived by a considerable number of Chinese critics as a legendary figure that is widely accepted by the West, but at the same time is moulded and even marred by Western values.2 Nevertheless, it is worth noting that Zhang Yimou has always insisted on making movies about China, in China, through legal channels. He once admitted that when I receive a film script, the first thing I think about is not whether there
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will be an investor for the film, but how I can make the kind of film that I want with the approval of the authorities. (Zeng, 17 December 1999: 6) He did not change his ways of filmmaking when the Chinese ‘underground cinema’ captured Western imagination and became fashionable in the West in the 1990s (Cui, 2005: 96).3 Even when To Live (Huozhe, 1994) was banned from being screened in China, Zhang did not move abroad but remained on the mainland to make films in a similar manner to his previous productions. Towards the end of the twentieth century, Zhang Yimou completed Not One Less (Yige dou buneng shao, 1999), a film about school children in a poor northern Chinese village, which received huge acclaim in China. It was initially predicted by Zhang himself that Not One Less would win major film awards in Europe although he was unsure if the American market would welcome it because he felt less attuned to the US taste (Shi, 1999: 63). However, the director of the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, Gilles Jacob, accused Not One Less of government propaganda perhaps because the film portrayed a “strong residual moral seriousness in the Chinese popular consciousness”, which is opposite to the Chinese mentality thought to be prevalent in the 1990s, i.e. “commercialization, consumerism, money-worship, utilitarianism, and pseudomodernization” (Lu, 2005: 125). Jacob’s comment angered Zhang and prompted him to withdraw from the festival (Zhang originally planned to submit both Not One Less and The Road Home [Wode fuqin muqin, 2000] to Cannes). As Sheldon Lu (2005: 126) has recorded: In his letter to Jacob, Zhang criticized what he regarded as a naïve and lopsided understanding of Chinese films among many Western viewers. For them, Chinese films must fall under two categories: they are either government propaganda or antigovernment. By this logic, whatever films the Chinese government approves must be bad, and whatever films are banned in China must be good and worth seeing. We can hypothesize from such evidence that although Zhang Yimou does not necessarily change his directions simply because certain ways of filmmaking are popular in China and/or in the West, Zhang has become increasingly receptive about Chinese and Western tastes through his constant negotiation between the two cultures in the past two decades. Zhang Yimou worked at a cotton factory in rural Shaanxi Province in the 1970s. His hobby was photography and his portfolio of photographs helped him win recommendation by the Cultural Ministry to attend the Beijing Film Academy. When Zhang registered as a cinematography student in 1978 he was already 27 years old, several years above the age limit specified by the academy’s admission policies (Farquhar, May 2002). When One and Eight (Yige he bage, 1983) and Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984) caught the attention of international festivals, Zhang Yimou was the cinematographer for both films. Zhang then acted in Old Well (Lao jing, 1986), which won him the Best Actor at the 1987 Tokyo International Film
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Festival. When he received the Golden Bear Award with Red Sorghum, his reputation as a movie director finally surpassed his achievement as a photographer and an actor. Nevertheless, the ways Zhang approached his earlier works were similar; he tried to capture and represent the grassroots China that he knows by heart with passion and aesthetic energy. As Jinhua Dai (1999: 229) has observed: Although Zhang Yimou’s films only occupied a small corner of Chinese cinema in the 1990s in terms of both quantity and quality, his films have been quickly identified as a symbol representing ‘Chinese cinema’ as a whole in the Western cultural realm. The West has become used to recognize the particular China, Chinese culture, Chinese history and reality, as well as Chinese cinema, through Zhang Yimou and his films. This may explain why although Zhang was highly regarded at overseas festivals, his films did not enter mainstream markets in the West. They were seen exclusively ‘foreign’ by Western standards. In addition, Zhang’s films did not usually command large audiences in China because of their very strong art-house tendency. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Zhang Yimou has recognized that market value is the most important element for the movie industry. It is as true in the capitalist West as in communist China since the Chinese government has declared ‘market is politics’ as one of its policies guiding cultural industries.4 Hence Zhang Yimou has decided to reinvent himself in the new millennium in order to continue being the leading director pushing modern Chinese cinema into the international arena – not only by artistic values, but also in commercial terms. Hero became the most influential turning point in Zhang’s career. It revealed his ambition as the most successful director in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as well as his acute understanding of how to operate in a globalized movie world. Despite the varied views on its artistic merit, Hero’s success in the global market has guaranteed its historical status in Chinese cinema as the first movie from the mainland to become a global sensation.
Why Hero? Because of Zhang Yimou’s success abroad, his films have often been criticized in China as being ‘Orientalist’ and catering only to Western audience. Zhang’s opponents have argued that the ‘myth of Zhang Yimou (Zhang Yimou shenhua)’ is simply to showcase primitive qualities of the Chinese people and a backward and dysfunctional Chinese society to the outside world (Wang, 1996). The authors of this chapter believe that such criticism is not justified. After all, several of Zhang’s films were very well received by the general Chinese public, for example, Red Sorghum, The Story of Qiuju (Qiuju da guansi, 1992) and Not One Less. Thus it seems an equally “naïve and lopsided understanding of Chinese films”, quoting Zhang’s letter of 1999 to Gilles Jacob (Lu, 2005: 126), if one is to brand Zhang’s films as catering only to Western audience simply because they won international awards. However, we think it is important to recognize that the production of all Zhang’s
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masterpieces, including Hero, have indeed to varied degrees taken into account their Western reception. In fact, it is almost impossible not to consider the West if films are to be sold abroad or to compete in European or American film festivals. This does not necessarily equate a filmmaker to being an appeaser of the West, nor does it mean a film panders only to Western values. Once we have abandoned the judgemental attitude in dissecting the ‘international’ or ‘Western’ dimension in Zhang’s movies, especially in Hero, we begin to understand how a film produced locally can achieve a global appeal and how the cultural distinctions between China and the West, or domestic and international, become increasingly blurred. Why does a Chinese movie need to consider ticket sales in the West? Why are international markets (and thus Western elements) unavoidable? According to Yu Yuxi, Director-General of Beijing New Pictures Studio (Beijing xinhuamian yingye gongsi) and the partner in the Hero production team, the total investment in Hero amounted to £19.29 million (US$30.86 million). As the Chinese movie industry dictates that revenue must be divided equally among producers, distributors and movie houses, even though Hero has achieved an unprecedented box-office of £17.86 million (US$28.57 million) in China, the producers made no more than £6.43 million (US$10.29 million) in return. The extra revenue created by the sales of the copyright of DVD, VCD and CD products has reached £1.21 million (US$1.94 million). This means the overall revenue of Hero in China still amounts to less than half of the capital invested by the producers (Yu, 2003: 27).5 In other words, however well Hero may do in China commercially, the producers will suffer from a serious deficit if the movie can only rely on the domestic market. Therefore the overseas market becomes a necessity to render viable any big-budget Chinese movies. As a result, if a filmmaker wishes to produce a professional, high-tech and big-budget Chinese blockbuster, s/he must take the West into account at the very beginning of production, perhaps even before the content of the film is conceived. There are many reasons why Zhang Yimou has chosen the martial arts genre for Hero even though it is an unfamiliar territory for the director. First, it is one of the two most popular and well-developed genres in the history of Chinese cinema. The other genre is the drama of family ethics (jiating lunli pian) which, in our view, may suit Zhang’s directorial style better as the majority of his work has revolved around private emotions and personal relationships. Yet family drama is laden with specific traditional values that may prove difficult to transcend cultural barriers whereas martial arts movies rely heavily on body language that breaks national boundaries. Second, martial arts films have been established in the West for several decades by mega Chinese stars such as Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and influential Chinese directors such as King Hu (wuxia) and John Woo (action films), as well as Hollywood media hybrids such as The Matrix series (1999, 2003) and the work by Quentin Tarantino as a popular format. Furthermore, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000, hereafter Crouching Tiger) has proved a worldwide success both commercially and artistically by breaking many box-office records and winning four Academy Awards including the Best Foreign Language Film. This proves that the martial arts genre is not necessarily seen as second class in the industry any longer or that they must
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compromise the filmmakers’ artistic integrity. As Klein (2004: 360–361) has pointed out, “Hollywood today is fascinated with martial arts … Martial arts fight scenes have become a ubiquitous feature in action films across the genre map”. While some films “use martial arts to generate knowing laughs”, others “use them for existential musing”. In other words, martial arts films seem to have become an effective vehicle that can blend both Chinese and Western elements and produce a cinematic spectacle enjoyed by moviegoers all over the world. One of the risks Zhang Yimou faced in making a martial arts movie after Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger was to be accused of being a mere follower. Thus Zhang claimed on several occasions that he has long been a fan of martial arts culture. He said he began preparing his own martial arts production in 1998 before Crouching Tiger was released. The special feature included in the Hero DVD available in the English market, Hero Defined (2004), reveals when and how the script of Hero was developed in order to emphasize that Hero is not an opportune decision trying to cash in on the success of Crouching Tiger, but follows Zhang’s own carefully thought out plan. However, the production team of Hero did learn from the experiences of Crouching Tiger especially on the issues of audience reception and tried to make necessary adjustments in order to ensure the broad appeal of the film. As Yu Yuxi of Beijing New Pictures Studio has said: We had done a lot of homework for Hero by the year 2000, including deciding on the major crew members, securing bank loans, selecting film locations, etc. The global acceptance of other Chinese martial arts films at that time boosted our confidence, but it also gave us increasing pressure. We did not worry whether Hero would be inferior to other films of the same genre; we were anxious whether our commercial strategies and market operations would be able to match our ambition and created a truly unprecedented production in the history of Chinese cinema (Yu, 2003: 28). It is apparent that the choice of the martial arts genre as the format for Hero is a conscious decision as the genre embodies international market potential. If we examine the content of Hero closely, we will similarly discover international dimensions even though the story is full of distinctive Chinese cultural characteristics on the surface. The major characters in the film – Nameless, Broken Sword, Flying Snow and Sky – are all fictional figures. So why does the filmmaker place them in the Qin Dynasty instead of a fictional period or other dynasties that enjoyed longer time spans in the Chinese history? Why do the characters try to assassinate the King of Qin who later called himself the First Emperor, but not Tang Emperor Xuan Zong (685–762) or Qing Emperor Yong Zheng (1678–1735), both of whom inspired rich Chinese folklores as most-wanted targets by numerous assassins? It is generally believed in China that the discovery of the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an has made the Qin the most fascinating dynasty and consequently the First Emperor the most famous ancient Chinese ruler in the world. This impression has been enhanced
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time and time again, if not proved, by anecdotal facts such as a grand exhibition at the British Museum from September 2007 to April 2008, The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army. The exhibition attracted substantial press interest and public attention in the UK and around the globe (Snow, September 2007). Under the impression that the First Emperor has become known worldwide, the choice of the Qin Dynasty as the backdrop of Hero seems highly rational. This may explain why there were two other big-budget Chinese films with international flavour around the same time, The Emperor’s Shadow (Qin song, 1996) by Zhou Xiaowen and The Emperor and the Assassin (Jingke ci qinwang, 1998) by Chen Kaige, both of which also choose to tell the stories of the First Emperor. Although the images of the Qin Emperor in Zhou, Chen and Zhang’s work differ, the intention of the filmmakers is the same – to reach an international audience by using a historical figure with highest worldwide appeal. Now that we understand what external factors may have determined why Hero is a martial arts movie about assassination attempts on the life of the King of Qin before he united China, the next questions the authors would like to explore are: how does Zhang Yimou tell the story of Hero? What are the differences between the traditional Chinese martial arts films and Zhang’s Hero and why?
Traditional martial arts genre Strictly speaking, martial arts films contain two sub-genres: films of swordplay (wuxia pian) in which characters dress in ancient Chinese costumes, as well as kung- fu movies (gongfu pian) in which characters are much closer to modern times. The focus of this chapter is mainly on the former type of martial arts films, but we generalize the term, wuxia pian, to refer to the entire martial arts genre. Martial arts films emerged in the 1920s in Shanghai and have been developed by several generations of filmmakers in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan (Mo Chen, 2006: 7–46). The genre has gradually established a substantial following in the Chinese-speaking communities and has formulated specific styles. For example, the use of kung-fu in martial arts films is an important element of entertainment. The major essence of these films is to reiterate traditional Chinese ethics and social values. The fighting between characters usually emphasizes the principles of ‘good versus evil’ and ‘loyalty versus betrayal’. The narratives often build up to a climatic fighting sequence in the end as the protagonist of the film seeks revenge with violent actions. Hence the Chinese martial arts genre used to be defined as “films that glorify justice by Chinese kung-fu in order to dramatize, to entertain, to educate and to maximize popularity” (Chen, 1988: 170). However, the development of the genre was not always smooth. In the late 1920s in Shanghai, movie studios used camera movements and cinematic gimmicks to create images of people with supernatural ability and magic power in order to tell Chinese legends and mythical stories on the silver screen. The audience reception was such a phenomenon that numerous commodities in similar format were produced quickly and cheaply. The term used to categorize these films at the time “is a compound phrase – wuxia shenguai pian, or the ‘martial arts-magic spirit’ film”
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(Zhen, 2005: 53). The genre reached its peak between 1928 and 1932. The total output during the four years was estimated at 241 (Ibid.: 54). However, it received heavy criticism “by the cultural elite, as well as official censors, for serving as a vehicle for entrenched ‘feudal superstitions’ that hindered the progression of nation building and modernization” (Ibid.: 53). It was subsequently banned by the government in the early 1930s. Although there were still a small number of martial arts productions between 1938 and 1949, the genre disappeared altogether on the Chinese mainland for three decades when the communist government came to power. Martial arts cinema as we know it today was reinvented in the 1960s in Hong Kong and Taiwan (Mo Chen, 2006: 83–120; Teo, 1997: 87–134; Lu, 1998: 137). The critical acclaim of Come Drink with Me (Da zui xia, 1966) by King Hu and The One-Armed Swordsman (Du bi dao, 1967) by Zhang Che signalled a renaissance of martial arts films as they re-energized aesthetic representations of the genre. These productions impressed Tsui Hark who grew up during the 1960s and prompted him to choose the same genre for his directorial debut, The Butterfly Murders (Die bian, 1979). Tsui Hark’s contributions are on two levels: first, he subverted the rules and transformed the format of the genre. The Butterfly Murders is a hybrid between martial arts, detective, mystery, horror, myth and science fiction. Moreover, elements of different cultures, time and space were jumbled up in the film with modern weaponry, Japanese ninja and Western gunfighters appearing alongside ancient Chinese swordsmen. This unprecedented experiment has exercised profound influence on Hong Kong cinema until today (Lee, 1991: 52–72). Second, he brought modern techniques of special effects to the Chinese film industry. Although the reviews of The Butterfly Murders were mixed, critics generally agreed that the visual effects were stunning (Mo Chen, 2006: 268–270). When he directed Zu Warriors (Xin shushan jianxia, 1983), Tsui Hark went one step further by bringing special effects experts from abroad into the production team. Consequently ‘Tsui Hark’ has become a label representing hi-tech special effects for Chinese cinema, especially martial arts films. He then enjoyed a series of very popular productions including Swordsman (Xiao ao jiang hu, 1990), codirected with an old martial arts film master, King Hu, and Once upon a Time in China (aka Wong Fei-Hung, 1991), starring the then emerging martial artist, Jet Li. The success of these films has not only strengthened the status of Tsui Hark in the industry, but has also validated new styles of the genre such as highquality special effects and certain degrees of cultural appropriation and media hybridization. Nevertheless, this does not mean that narrative has become insignificant for the genre. Traditional martial arts films have always relied on dramatic stories, plots and narrative structures to justify exaggerated violence and martial arts skills. The harder the hero/heroine is pushed by villains or the more difficult the challenges the protagonist must overcome, the more the audience anticipates the battles in the end. Without the suspense, the fighting sequences of martial arts films will not be as exciting and satisfying as they are to viewers. Therefore the dynamics between characters are crucial for martial arts films. The establishment of distinctive role functions and binary oppositions create essential motivations for the ultimate
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confrontation between good and evil. The motives of the protagonist are generally quite simple – to avenge, to perfect one’s martial arts ability and achieve honour, or to recover lost treasure (usually secret weapons or scripts of some supreme kung-fu style). Whatever motives the protagonist may have, traditional martial arts films conventionally favour three-act narratives to develop the story. The first act concentrates on building up the images of the protagonist and making the viewers identify with the hero/heroine in order to establish an emotional link between the viewers and the character. The middle act develops the conflicts, struggles and hatreds between the protagonist and the villains. It is common practice to create a larger-than-life, extremely powerful antagonist who also possesses unthinkable martial arts ability. The chief antagonist does not appear in the film frequently, but he does exercise a constant presence in all evil deeds, which creates increasing tension and pressure on the protagonist. The final act is the climax, represented by the ultimate kung-fu fighting between the protagonist and the antagonist. The better developed the middle act is, the more unavoidable, some may say the more destined, the terrible and bloody fight is expected by the viewers. New Dragon Inn (Xin longmen kezhan, 19926) is an excellent example of this: the protagonist of the film is a swordsman, Zhou Huaian, who wants to protect the orphans of a respected mandarin who was wrongly killed by the government. The antagonist is the eunuch leader of East Chamber, Cao Shaoqin, who only appears once at the beginning, introduced by a low-angle close-up shot, and is followed by hundreds and thousands of beautifully dressed soldiers. The various horrendous crimes the viewers witness are mainly committed by two of Cao’s trusted henchmen, who also engage Zhou in several fighting scenes in the middle act. As Zhou and Cao do not get to face each other until the end of the film, the final battle in the desert is full of drama, anticipation and excitement. The filmmakers reward the audience with a colourful, intricately designed and choreographed combat sequences. If the audience’s anticipation cannot be satisfied by the life-and-death confrontation between Zhou and Cao in the end, they will be disappointed by the film no matter how well acted or developed the story is. Similarly if the narratives of the film do not build up the atmosphere, elaborate the motivation for the deadly conflict and make the audience lend full support to the protagonist, the battle in the desert will be less pressing and the movie will lose its charm despite being extremely well made technically.
Why and how does Hero rewrite the genre? Zhang Yimou likes to be seen as a ‘leader’ not a ‘follower’ as a filmmaker. When he decided to make Hero a martial arts movie, he did not want to be viewed as a mere genre practitioner but as an artist making original contributions. One of the major differences between Zhang’s Hero and traditional martial arts films lies in the construction of narratives. We have summarized how the conventional martial arts genre builds up its stories to reach the climatic act where good defeats evil in a decisive final battle. If
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the model of such narrative structure can be described as ‘progressive’ because it increases the tension of the film and the anticipation of the viewers, the narrative model which Hero adopts may then be described as ‘regressive’ since it reduces the zest of the swordsmen’s motivations to assassinate the King of Qin. In other words, the viewers are made to fully anticipate a climatic act in the end, i.e. assassination of the King, from the beginning of the film. But as the narratives progresses, the anticipation decreases when the swordsmen realize that “the King of Qin must not be killed (Qinwang buneng sha)”. Thus Nameless only uses the handle of his sword to lightly touch the King as a symbolic gesture of fulfilling his mission at the end of the film. This reversed narrative structure seriously challenges the anticipation of general martial arts movie fans in the Chinese-speaking world. A significant number of viewers in the Chinese markets find it hard to accept Hero because the film fails to satisfy their expectations in many aspects.7 First, role functions in the film are ambiguous. There are no clear distinctions between the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’, the ‘hero’ and the ‘villain’ as traditional martial arts film should, which makes it difficult for the Chinese audience to identify with any characters and thus feel detached from the film. Second, there is no build-up of conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist. The King of Qin proves to be a ‘fake antagonist’ as the story develops. Real conflicts do not exist between the assassins and their target, but between the swordsmen themselves. Various fighting sequences in the film happen between these heroes and heroines. Yet as they share similar goals and moral standards, their fights lack pressing motivations such as ‘life versus death’ or ‘good versus evil’. Consequently the characters seem without genuine passion when they duel. The ultimate confrontation between Nameless and the King becomes an anticlimax as Nameless agrees with Broken Sword that the King must not be killed. This may explain why many Chinese viewers feel dissatisfied at the end of Hero: their anticipation is deflated step by step throughout the film (Xu, 2004: 110–111). Moreover, Zhang Yimou rewrites the essence of traditional Chinese ‘hero’ in martial arts films, that is, xia, xiake or xiashi (‘chivalrous knightly figure’). The concept of xia is a cultural imagining of ancient China and xia as individuals are thought not to be confined by any institutions. Xia exist in jianghu (literally ‘rivers and lakes’), an abstract construct that is opposite and outside of governmental system in dynastic China. Jianghu is a half-imaginary and half-real, chaotic and violent world where the views on right and wrong are so black and white that most people can be wrongdoers under different circumstances.8 For example, killing is wrong, but if one kills in order to avenge the injustice imposed on him, the killing is justified. Yet the descendants of the person(s) being killed will have the right to seek revenge too. Jianghu is therefore a vicious circle. Xia is an idealistic and idolized hero in jianghu, whose mission is to protect the weak and the innocent and to uphold the moral standards of jianghu. The most important standard of all in jianghu is justice. Xia do not obey the laws of government but follow tian dao (the principles of Heaven) to right the wrongs and restore all kinds of individual and social justice (ti tian xing dao). As professor of Chinese literature, Pingyuan Chen, has explained, jianghu and xia belong to each other. One can only become
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a xia and freely expresses his martial arts talents and sense of justice in jianghu. Once a xia enters the official system, he is no longer a xia as he has left jianghu to operate within a legal framework that is approved by the government (Pingyuan Chen, 1995). In Hero, Broken Sword and Nameless embrace the vision of the King of Qin, i.e. the ambition to create a vast empire, as they gradually identify with the values of a united kingdom. It is a story about how xia become institutionalized in their spirit and defend the establishment instead of combating the injustice and misery that ordinary people suffer because of the King. It is anti-xia from the perspective of Chinese wuxia traditions. Further, the morality pursued by the assassins in Hero is also distant from the conventional xia. One of the most basic and highest praised qualities of xia to the Chinese is that xia must be always true to their words. Numerous martial arts literature, folklore and films are full of heroic and tragic stories of how genuine xia would rather sacrifice their lives than break their promises. Thus neither Broken Sword nor Nameless can be easily identified as xia if they are to be measured against traditional standards. Hero’s scriptwriters invented another level of moral high ground in order to justify the assassins’ behaviour by linking the King’s military victory with tian xia (‘all under heaven’). But even so, when Nameless relinquishes his mission at the end of the film, many Chinese spectators still mourn for the shattered image of xia that has been treasured as part of Chinese iconography. This may explain why 42.4 per cent of the audience in mainland China identified with Flying Snow, but only 21.8 per cent believed Nameless to be a hero (Lu, 31 December 2002).9 As mentioned earlier, the defence that Hero creates against the above challenges from the Chinese viewers on the moralities of its characters is in fact the central theme the film chooses to represent – a peaceful tian xia. It is the ultimate peace (heping) that Broken Sword and Nameless have been pursuing and thus they have to abandon xia’s lower-level code of conduct in order to achieve a greater good. It is also the grand vision that Zhang Yimou has intended to communicate through his epic production. Therefore when the higher-level principle conflicts with the internal logic of characters in martial arts film, the latter is compromised in order to ensure the viewers, both Chinese and international, hear the bigger message. As a leading filmmaker in China, Zhang Yimou has always wanted to entertain and to educate the public at the same time. The logic of Hero’s central theme goes like this: For the sake of tian xia, peace must be pursued at any cost; as long as there are different nations fighting for power, there will never be peace and people will always suffer; the King of Qin is the only ruler who has the ability to bring all different nations under control and to end wars eventually; and so the King of Qin must not be killed for the sake of world peace. This is a simplistic logic and worldview. But as a global Chinese film, Hero aims to speak both to domestic and international viewers and thus it adopts a simplified theme that can drive a narrative accepted by a global audience. Under this logic, Zhang Yimou chooses not to deal with the harsh reality of the Qin history as it will over complicate the story. For example, the well recorded cruelties the First Emperor committed prior to and after his victory are overlooked as this will make
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the argument of ‘all under heaven’ difficult to justify. The fact that the Qin was one of the shortest-lived dynasties in the Chinese history is also neglected because this makes the peace Broken Sword and Nameless pursue look short-sighted. Moreover, the King of Qin is portrayed as a tormented and misunderstood political leader instead of the tyrant known by the Chinese because otherwise it will be impossible to form a synergy between Broken Sword, Nameless and the King of Qin, as well as to make the audience sympathize with the characters. As the Qin history mentioned above is common knowledge for Chinese, why did Zhang Yimou decide to champion the notion of world peace by rewriting the martial arts genre, distorting Qin history and reinventing the First Emperor? We would like to argue that the reasons are twofold. First, because the Chinese audience comprises only 50 per cent of the market Hero targets, the filmmakers are less pressed to formulate a narrative that satisfies Chinese understanding of their history. Second, the discussion about the central theme of Hero may be formed through, or at least informed by, the influence of the 9/11 terrorist attack. As Zhang Yimou has revealed in the promotional film of Hero, Cause: The Birth of Hero (Yuanqi, 2002), the terrorist attack made him reflect on his epic a great deal. The 9/11 incident happened one month after Hero began shooting, and the documentary recorded Zhang Yimou’s reflections soon after. He said: I feel the world today is full of threat of wars. As we are making a film right now, 9/11 makes us think about the hostility between people. I want to destroy you; you want to destroy me. No one knows when it will end. We [the production team] discussed the concept of Chinese martial arts and wondered if the most important matter for a xiake is his martial arts ability. We hope our film can communicate some meanings stemmed from reality. Although it is a beautiful costume drama with a lot of fighting sequences, we hope it will make the audience think when it ends. Perhaps they will realize that the film has another level of meaning which is relevant to the world today. Zhang Yimou did not seem to feel that he expressed himself fully in this part of the interview. Thus he returned to the same subject in a later segment of the documentary and stressed: Over thousands of years, there have been numerous wars. Nobody knows why. After 9/11 […] I have been thinking that the Chinese martial arts film is beautiful, but it seems so irrelevant nowadays. I am dissatisfied. I want the movies I make to have some meaning, a meaning that can be accepted by everyone. So the ‘tian xia’ and ‘heping’ we refer to in the film is about the whole world. Although it is impossible for the authors to prove the causal effect or to know exactly what the filmmakers intended when Hero was made, Zhang’s comments above have demonstrated the fact that 9/11 is relevant to Hero at least in terms of how and why this film has been positioned in the marketplace. By linking the central theme of Hero to world peace either as the original intention of the
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production or as its marketing strategy, Hero has become more than a commercial film but a cultural platform that Zhang Yimou can use to comment on a world event.
Conclusion The pursuit of ultimate peace in the film turns the narrative of Hero into a conclusion that contradicts the accepted wisdom of Chinese history and challenges the Chinese viewers’ expectations of the genre. The mixed evaluation and contentious feedback on Hero in the Chinese communities is therefore an outcome hard to avoid (Hao, January–March 2003: 115–117). As local companies de-localize in order to promote local products in the global market and then re-localize in order to promote global products in local markets (Lee, 2003), a media hybrid inevitably loses the authenticity of its cultural origin. Hero attracts controversy from within the Chinese communities when it enjoys worldwide popularity because Hero is in fact not a ‘Chinese’ film but a global hybrid that is only in part for the Chinese and in part also for the rest of the world. The blurred cultural boundary is the key to the commercial success of Hero, which aims at a global market but very cleverly makes the local Chinese audience feel that they have a stake in, and a claim on it at the same time. The phenomenon created by Hero as a global Chinese film fits in with what Ien Ang (1996: 148) has termed the “contradictory losses and opportunities” that are brought by the globalization of the media industry. The analysis of how the makers of Hero appropriate local cultures and the martial arts genre in order to claim prominence on the world stage helps us understand the strategic manoeuvring that Chinese cultural elites employ. It is important to pay attention to “such local responses and negotiations” (Klein, 2004: 362) because they give us valuable insight on the complexity of ‘global culture’ in the twenty-first century.
Notes 1 For example, Zhang Yimou’s Judou was nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1990 and for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards in 1991; Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong denglong gaogao gua, 1991) won 11 international awards; The Story of Qiuju (Qiuju da guansi, 1992) won the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival; Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bie ji, 1993) received two nominations for Oscars and won 13 international film awards; and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite (Lan fengzheng, 1993) won the Grand Prix at the Tokyo International Film Festival and Best Film at the Hawaii International Film Festival in 1993. If we include films produced in Taiwan as part of this trend, then Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, 1989) and Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive L’Amour (Aiqing wansui, 1994) won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1989 and 1994 respectively. Ang Lee’s Wedding Banquet (Xi yan, 1993) also won a Golden Bear at the 1993 Berlin Film Festival and received a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1994 Academy Awards. These have all enhanced the impression of the rising importance of Chinese-language cinema in the international arena. 2 For instance, some said Zhang relied on international investment to produce films and
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H. Wang & M.-Y. T. Rawnsley thus he inevitably had to follow the trend and demand of the international market. In the eyes of these critics Zhang intentionally “internationalized post-colonial culture” (Huang, June 2003: 98–99). Others criticized Zhang for (1) focusing on market success instead of artistic exploration, (2) pursuing Western skills of filmmaking which do not necessarily suit Chinese themes (for example, Shanghai Triad [Yao a yao, yaodao waipo qiao, 1995]) and (3) avoiding in-depth self-reflection but simply exploiting the fringed social issues in China to satisfy the curiosity of international spectators (Mo Chen, 1995: 274–279). According to Shuqin Cui, a number of young Chinese filmmakers in the early 1990s committed themselves to independent filmmaking in order to break the hegemonic mode of film production and distribution in China. These independent films were not made through the traditional channel and were thus not tolerated by the official system. Consequently these emerging young filmmakers were compelled to seek recognition on the international film circuit in order to survive. Western festival programmers and arthouse distributors welcomed Chinese independent films as they were seen as subverting mainstream production and official censorship. Hence the Chinese ‘independent films’ are also termed by Western observers “underground cinema”, “outlawed cinema” or “countercinema” (Cui, 2005: 96–97). In contrast, Zhang Yimou has always made his films in China through official means. Although the themes of his work (for example, sexual repression in Judou and suppression of women in Raise the Red Lantern) and his approach to topics (for example, the way modern Chinese politics was portrayed in To Live [Huozhe, 1994]) do not always meet the approval of Chinese censors, Zhang’s filmmaking is essentially very different from the Chinese underground cinema of the 1990s in terms of both how and why the films are made. It is commonly believed that a government official made a remark, “market is politics”, in an important meeting soon after the Chinese entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the end of 2001. Numerous commentaries in support of this idea have spread across media in China since then, but this has at the same time made it extremely difficult to trace the original source of the comment. However, it seems a consensus shared by the Chinese government and academics in the new millennium that the bigger audience a cultural product can reach the more influence it will exercise. Therefore cultural elites in China are encouraged by the government to consider market values and the size of box-office. Since Yu was involved in the film’s production, readers should bear in mind the possibility that these figures might not be absolutely accurate as there might be publicity or administration considerations from the producer’s perspectives. However, it is also worth noting that these figures largely correspond to other sources used by academics in the field, for example, Fung and Chan of this volume and Stringer and Yu (2007: 238–254). New Dragon Inn is directed by Raymond Lee and produced by Tsui Hark. As it is full of the trademarks of ‘Tsui Hark’ production described in this chapter, the film is usually branded in the Chinese market a ‘Tsui Hark movie’. The views on Hero in the Chinese market are polarized. If one types ‘Hero’ in Chinese characters in Google, many websites with viewers’ comments will demonstrate this fact. For example, one of the most popular Chinese search engines is Sina (xinlangwang). Its entertainment website, Sina Entertainment (Xinlang yingyin yule), has a webpage dedicated to Hero (http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/f/yingx/index.shtml#2, accessed 27 September 2007) where general public are invited to comment on the film. Out of the 98 articles published between 19 December 2002 and 5 May 2005 when we accessed the website, 40 of them are extremely positive and 34 very negative. Twenty-four of the articles are reportages and news-oriented commentaries that do not reveal the true feelings of the writers about the film. But many of these reports remark on the controversy caused by Hero among Chinese viewers. For the Chinese reception of Hero, also see Yu of this volume. It is difficult to define jianghu. It is an abstract concept rooted in the real world. In
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other words, it is an imagined world of real people, people of working class and grassroots society. It exists in the cultural imagination of ancient Chinese. But the Chinese people today often refer to the criminal world or networks of gangsters as jianghu as well. For example, a hit Hong Kong film about triads in 2004 entitles Jiang Hu. One of the Chinese translations for the popular American TV series The Sopranos is ‘Ren zai jianghu’, literally ‘Living in jianghu’. Hence the authors of this chapter describe jianghu as “a half-imaginary and half-real, chaotic and violent world”. Other writers also point out that “according to folklore, jianghu exists but it is an abstract world” (Wu, 1993: 114), or “within the real society there is an abstract, dangerous and conflicting world named jianghu” (Cai, 1983: 77). 9 The statistics come from an audience research conducted in 2002 by the Chongquing branch of Chinese Social Survey Bureau (Zhongguo shehui diaochasuo Chongqing fensuo) quoted in Lu (31 December 2002).
References Ang, Ien (1996) Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, London and New York: Routledge. British Museum (September 2007) ‘The First Emperor: China’s terracotta army’, British Museum. Available online at: http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/whats_on/future_exhibitions/first_emperor.aspx (accessed 27 September 2007). Cai, Guorong (1983) ‘Dreamed hero’s yesterday, today and tomorrow: Transitions of wuxia films (Menghuan yingxiong de zuori, jinri yu mingri: wuxia pian de liubian)’, Literary Monthly (wenyi yuekan), (163), pp. 68–77 (in Chinese). Chen, Feibao (1988) The History of Taiwan Cinema (Taiwan dianying shihua), Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe (in Chinese). Chen, Mo (1995) On Zhang Yimou Movies (Zhang Yimou dianying lun), Beijing: Dalu dianying chubanshe (in Chinese). —— (2006) The History of Chinese Martial Arts Films (Zhongguo wuxia dianying shi), Taipei: Fengyun shidai (in Chinese). Chen, Pingyuan (1995) Literary Dreams of Xia: Study of Wuxia Genre (Qiangu wenren xiake meng: Wuxia xiaoshuo leixing yanjiu), Taipei: Maitian (in Chinese). Cui, Shuqin (2005) ‘Working from the margins: Urban cinema and independent directors in contemporary China’, in Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh (eds), ChineseLanguage Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 96–119. Dai, Jinhua (1999) Foggy Scenery: Chinese Film Culture, 1978–1998 (Wuzhong fengjing: Zhongguo dianying wenhua, 1978–1998), Beijing: Beijing University Press (in Chinese). Farquhar, Mary (May 2002) ‘Zhang Yimou’, Senses of Cinema. Available online at: http:// www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/zhang.html (accessed 17 July 2008). Hao, Jian (January–March 2003) ‘Heroes live on, but people die (Yingxiong huozhe, ren sile)’, Film Appreciation Journal (Dianying xinshang), 21 (2), pp. 115–117 (in Chinese). Huang, Weiwei (June 2003) ‘The dramas in Zhang Yimou’s cinema’ (Zhang yimou dianying zhong de xiju shijie), Masters dissertation (unpublished), Chinese Culture University, Taipei (in Chinese). Klein, Christina (2004) ‘Martial arts and the globalization of US and Asian film industries’, Comparative American Studies, 2 (3), pp. 360–384. Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah (ed.) (2003) Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
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Lee, Chin-Chuan (2003) ‘A connectivity view on media management strategies in media globalization’, Mass Communication Research, (75), pp. 1–23. Lee, Paul (1991) ‘The absorption and indigenization of foreign media cultures: A study of a cultural meeting point of the east and west: Hong Kong’, Asian Journal of Communication, 1 (2), pp. 52–72. Lu, Feii (1998) Taiwan Cinema: Politics, Economics and Aesthetics (Taiwan dianying: Zhengzhi, jingji, meixue), Taipei: Yuanliu (in Chinese). Lu, Sheldon H. (2005) ‘Chinese film culture at the end of the twentieth century’, in Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh (eds), Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 120–137. Lu, Tianming (31 December 2002) ‘What is Hero like in the end? Social survey analyzes opinions of the audience’ (‘Yingxiong’ daodi zenmeyang? Shehui diaocha jiexi guanzhong yijian), Sina Entertainment. Available online at: http://ent.sina.com. cn/r/m/2002–12–31/1119122996.html (accessed 27 September 2007, in Chinese). Sai, Lulu (February 2003) ‘Zhang Yimou bows to the mainstream cinema (Zhang Yimou xiang zhuliu dianying zheyao)’, China Financial Monthly (Zhongguo caijing yuekan), (104), pp. 30–32 (in Chinese). Shi, Xiangsheng (1999) Not One Less: Script (Yige dou buneng shao juben), Beijing: Zongguo dianying chubanshe (in Chinese). Sina Entertainment (Xinlang yingyin yule) (2002–) ‘Hero’. Available online at: http://ent. sina.com.cn/m/c/f/yingx/index.shtml#2 (accessed 27 September 2007, in Chinese). Snow, Dan (September 2007) ‘History: Terracotta army’, BBC – The One Show. Available online at: http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/whats_on/future_exhibitions/first_ emperor.aspx (accessed 27 September 2007). Stringer, Julian and Yu, Qiong (2007) ‘Hero: How Chinese is it?’, in Paul Cooke (ed.), World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 238–254. Teo, Stephen (1997) Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions, London: British Film Institute. Wang, Yichuan (1996) ‘Who has directed the myth of Zhang Yimou (Shei daoyianle Zhang Yimou shenhua)’, in Tian-Duo Li (ed.), Discussing Contemporary Chinese-Language Cinema (Dangdai huayu dianying lunshu), Taipei: Shibao chubanshe, pp. 323–331 (in Chinese). Wu, Hao (1993) Folklore of Hong Kong Cinema (Xiangkang dianying minsuxue), Hong Kong: Subculture (in Chinese). Xu, Jingwen (2004) ‘The transition of Chinese-language martial arts films under the trend of globalization (Quanqiuhua xia huayu wuxia dianying de zhuanbian)’, Masters dissertation, Department of Mass Communications, Tamkang University, Taiwan (in Chinese). Yu, Yuxi (2003) ‘The commercial success of Hero and its effective market planning (Yingxiong de shangye chenggong yu youxiao de shichang cehua)’, Film Art (Dianying yishu), (2), pp. 27–28 (in Chinese). Zeng, Guang (17 December 1999) ‘Zhang Yimou prefers tragic work (Zhang Yimou duzhong beiju zuopin)’, World Journal (Shijie ribao), p. 6 (in Chinese). Zhang, Jing-Bei (2002) A Cinema Dream of Ten Years: Biography of Ang Lee (Shinian yijiao dianying meng), Taipei: Shibao chubanshe (in Chinese). Zhen, Zhang (2005) ‘Bodies in the air: The magic of science and the fate of the early “martial arts” film in China’, in Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh (eds), ChineseLanguage Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 52–75.
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Recordings used Cause: The Birth of Hero (Yuanqi) (2002) special feature included in the Hero DVD available in the Chinese market, directed by Gan Lu, produced by Beijing Xuanliu Documentary Studio (Beijing xuanliu jilupian gongzuoshi, in Chinese). Hero Defined (2004) DVD supplement (directed by Stanley J. Orzel), Hero Miramax Home Entertainment/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD.
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‘Would you rather spend more time making serious cinema?’ Hero and Tony Leung’s polysemic masculinity1 Mark Gallagher
Film stars, as spokespeople for the films in which they appear, provide tangible links between film texts and extra-textual discourses and thus play key roles in enabling or discounting particular cultural readings of films. As an illustration of this relationship and the political ramifications of contemporary Chinese cinema, consider an extra-textual event surrounding the historical martial arts film Hero. In an interview published before the film’s release, Hero co-star Tony Leung Chiu-Wai alluded to the film’s “message of peace and human kindness”, then expressed support for the contemporary Chinese government’s 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square demonstrators, claiming that “what the Chinese government did was right – to maintain stability, which was good for everybody”. Hong Kong human rights activists subsequently criticised Leung, and in a later interview the night of Hero’s Hong Kong premiere, he tried to contextualize his remarks: I’m just an actor. My interest is in making movies, not politics. When I was doing the interview, I was trying to talk from the perspective of [Hero character] Broken Sword. It was not my personal viewpoint. (‘Tony Leung Chiu-Wai claims he was misquoted regarding Tiananmen’, 19 December 2002) Leung’s explanation encouraged an understanding of the acting profession as fundamentally apolitical, yet left open the possibility that film narratives do carry political valences. In its denouement, Hero’s narrative straightforwardly praises Chinese military imperialism, and thus raises questions about its producers’ political sensibilities. Consequently, Leung’s ambiguously attributed statement in favour of Chinese ‘stability’ demonstrates how political debates can be waged, and taken seriously, through entertainment channels. Whether or not they publicly articulate political viewpoints, stars serve as ambassadors or vanguard troops in the operations of transnational cinema, paving the way for films’ recognition and possible success in disparate regional markets. Justin Wyatt identifies stars’ privileged position in cinema’s global economy, arguing that “[p]erhaps the most significant pre-sold property from a commercial standpoint is the human capital, the star, which is attached to a project” (Wyatt, 1994: 31). Stars carry cultural as well as economic significance, creating essential recognition and
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differentiation for audiences confronted with myriad viewing choices; and too, film stars provide points of entry not only for audiences, but also for analysts of global media production, circulation and reception. Film criticism tends to locate stars within particular national cinemas.2 To understand stars’ contributions to the promotional apparatus and reception climate for cinema in transnational circulation, this chapter examines the Hong Kong-born, internationally recognized actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai through his role in Hero and his related efforts in other East Asian productions.3 Distinct from but related to Hero’s textual strategies, Leung’s inter- and extra-textual star persona contributes in multiple ways to struggles over textual meaning. Beginning work in Hong Kong television dramas and in regionally distributed films in the early 1980s, Leung’s international reputation derives from his leading roles in a diverse corpus of films. Key early films starring Leung to receive international distribution include the martial arts fantasy A Chinese Ghost Story 3 (Qiannü youhun III: Dao dao dao, 1991), the ultraviolent action film Hard Boiled (Lashou shentan, 1992), and the pop-art romance Chungking Express (Chongqing senlin, 1994). As the 1990s continued, Leung continued to perform in a range of genres and modes in films that circulated principally within East Asia, as well as some receiving wide international distribution and acclaim. Yet even among Western4 viewerships that might recognize his face or name, Leung’s international reputation has been complicated by the fact he is one of two successful, transnational Hong Kong stars known globally as Tony Leung. The other one – Tony Leung Ka-Fai – acts in a similar range of local and transnational productions, including the transnational art film The Lover (1992), the crime film A Better Tomorrow III (Yingxiong bense III: Xiyang zhi ge, 1989), works of Hong Kong New Wave directors such as Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage (Ruan lingyu,1992), and also like Leung Chiu-Wai, in numerous martial arts films (wuxia pian) and comedies. Both Tony Leungs appeared in 1994’s Ashes of Time (Dongxie xidu), perhaps eliciting confusion among Western audiences who saw the film in its limited international release and who might have hoped to identify its male stars.5 Leung Chiu-Wai’s international profile arguably was cemented in 2000, when he won the Best Actor prize at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival for his role in In the Mood for Love (Huayang nianhua, 2000). Western cinephiles’ confusion over the identities of Asian actors represents one minor symptom of the condition of film stars in transnational circulation. While it is pleasurable to trace the many intersections of Leung Chiu-Wai and Leung Ka-Fai, a more fruitful mode of enquiry will be to assess the multifarious nature of Leung Chiu-Wai’s (hereafter Leung’s) stardom and to examine the ways the film Hero deploys facets of his complex star persona. Of the films in which Leung has appeared, Hero is to date the most commercially successful worldwide, so it provides an ideal case through which to consider how film stars’ personas circulate among, and generate meanings for, disparate audiences worldwide. Key to Leung’s persona as it circulates beyond Asia are attributes of racialized masculinity, attributes both immutable and performed, and engaging a multitude of reading strategies. Through a range of production determinants and textual features, films
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in particular genres and modes shape these and other attributes into coherent constellations for reception. Particularly in Western critical discourses, Leung’s Chinese ethnicity is a key marker of his distinct star persona. Articles about Leung in English-language entertainment publications inevitably define him analogously to classical or contemporary US stars: he becomes “the Asian Clark Gable”, “the Humphrey Bogart of Chinese cinema” or “Hong Kong’s answer to Johnny Depp” (Internet Movie Database, 2007a; Oon, 22 January 2003; Rose, 23 February 2004). Such analogies interpolate Leung into the constellation of global film stars while explicitly marking his difference from white, American stars past and present. Coupled with his good looks and lean physique, Leung’s Asian heritage facilitates his circulation among Western film viewerships as an unthreatening other and object of fantasy. As the analogies demonstrate, Leung’s mild exoticism is easily recuperable within the Hollywood-derived frameworks of star appeal: his choice of roles and romantic chemistry with female co-stars liken him to Depp and Gable, although his Chineseness locates him in a fundamentally separate category. Substantial portions of Leung’s viewing communities of course do not recognize him in terms of otherness, and may not resort to analogies to understand him. For East Asian viewers, Tony Leung may simply be Tony Leung, or Leung Chiu-Wai (though the ‘Chinese Bogart’ reference comes courtesy of Singapore’s Straits Times, aimed at a polyglot readership). Nonetheless, his particular attributes, and the apparent willingness of English-language journalists to imagine him as a racially transfigured version of a white Hollywood star, contribute to his successful international critical reception. Leung’s Best Actor award at Cannes attests to the translatability (not to say universality) of his performance style and its constituent features.
Performance and translocation Leung’s performance style lends itself well to transnational circulation. Many of his roles call for limited dialogue, and in many films – including In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, Cyclo (1995) and 2046 (Er ling si liu, 2004) – he delivers monologues in voice-over, freeing him on screen to act exclusively through facial expressions and body language. Though his 1980s television work locates him in broad comedies and in martial arts roles, in the 1990s and more recent films released to international critical acclaim he performs in a restrained, highly cinematic manner, relying on a slack posture and in particular his expressive (if often downcast) eyes to convey emotion. Leung’s performance style, whether in films such as Hero, In the Mood for Love, Cyclo or others, exemplifies screen cosmopolitanism. One might envision the cinematic cosmopolitan as a gregarious urbanite, preternaturally curious and generically attractive, a figure legible across cultures and discourses. Leung enacts a reticent cosmopolitanism, his characters’ motivations and emotions equally internalized whether they operate in contemporary or historical worlds, urban or rural ones, in steel and glass metropoles or decrepit Third World backwaters. In not presenting a tabula rasa onto which audiences can project ideas and impressions,
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Leung’s unobtrusive presence leaves space in films for viewers’ exercise of imagination. Such restraint promotes some degree of legibility across communities and thus facilitates the international circulation of his star persona. In Hero’s global circulation, the legibility of Leung’s performance style helps anchor his character, Broken Sword. Given the protagonists’ shifting political viewpoints (for Leung’s and Jet Li’s characters, from revolutionary to counter-revolutionary) and the narrative’s many falsifications and revelations, this performance works as a key textual feature in organizing viewer knowledge. In addition to aiding his films’ reception in disparate regions, Leung’s restrained acting style enables him to embody and exhibit multiple, variant signs of sexuality. Aside from his distinctive facial hair, his character in Hero is visually almost identical to that of female co-star Maggie Cheung. Both wear loose, full-body robes in colours matching the film’s various set pieces, and both have long, black hair that occasionally obscures their features (as in the calligraphy school sequence, during which scenes show each character pouting alone, flowing locks covering half of his or her face). Cheung’s Flying Snow plays a more active role in the narrative as well, repeatedly duelling Li’s Nameless and remaining a combative revolutionary throughout the film. She also commands and traverses physical space more vigorously and more often than does Leung’s Broken Sword. Indeed, the key act that defines Broken Sword’s heterosexual masculinity is not an episode of martial combat but his impulsive, consensual tryst with his protégé, Moon (Zhang Ziyi), an act that positions him psychologically at virtually the same level as the headstrong girl. Although not at all pansexual, Leung’s character here is indisputably androgynous, and the film’s action and romance plots, like its thematics, align him both with male and female characters and with connotatively masculine and feminine iconography, actions and attitudes. For viewers not fluent in the languages of Leung’s characters or with limited exposure to Chinese culture, the characters’ sexual ambiguity forms just one aspect of a larger sphere of ambiguity that surrounds them, not just as an actorly persona but as a relatively quiet Asian male. In Stars, Richard Dyer reminds readers of work on kinesics demonstrating that “no kind of movement or gesture has meaning of itself but only by virtue of its cultural context” (Dyer, 1979: 150). Arguably, audience understandings of Leung’s characters’ sexuality depend less on performance signs than on narrative contexts, which strongly shape reception. In the two films in which Leung plays explicitly gay characters, the unhappy romance Happy Together (Chunguang zhaxie, 1997) and the campy action-comedy Gorgeous (1999), Leung’s performance style is consistent with those of fellow cast members and with his own straight roles in comparable films. His smiling, ingratiating performance in Gorgeous, for example, parallels his other broad performances in romance and comedy productions. In the case of Happy Together, two anecdotes suggest foundations for his performance. In the first, a whimsical creative decision prompts the shift in tone. Interviewed by the UK’s Guardian newspaper in 2004, Leung claims that director Wong Kar-Wai supplied a ‘fake script’ giving his character a gay father, then on location informed the actor that “I think it would be much more interesting if your character is gay” (Rose, 23 February 2004).6
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The second anecdote appears in a 2001 interview asking about his romantic roles opposite different Cheungs, Maggie (in In the Mood for Love) and Leslie (his gay lover in Happy Together). Leung observes: Working with Maggie is much easier for me. With Leslie, especially in Happy Together, I did have some difficulties at the beginning of the shooting. I’m not gay, so it was hard to get into that character. I have to find a way to get into that so I treat him as a girl, don’t treat him as a man. I think it’s just like a relationship, no matter whether it’s a man or a woman. (Wong & Nakamura, Spring 2001) Though this comment does not specify whether ‘him’ refers to Leung’s character or Leslie Cheung’s, Leung clearly argues that performance of homosexuality can be undertaken according to the same acting protocols as performance of heterosexuality. This marginal adjustment in performance style for Happy Together exemplifies Dyer’s further claim that “the signification of a performance sign is determined by the multiple codes in relation to which it is situated, and also by its place in the totality of the film” (Dyer, 1979: 153). In effect, his own pre-filming anxieties aside, Leung’s performance does not differ from that required by the ‘fake script’, and only narrative (and directorial) caprice determines whether his romantic interests will be men or women. Linked to Leung’s enactment of different sexualities is his restrained performance style, which may be seen to produce the paradigmatic ‘women want to sleep with him, men want to be him’ appeal that popular critical discourse has identified with regard to his star persona.7 In his dramatic roles, Leung uses a range of facial expressions best discerned in close-up or medium shot, limited or unhurried body movement, and a relaxed carriage even in Hero and in thrillers such as Infernal Affairs (Wu jian dao, 2002). Notably, his performances in comedies and action films incorporate broader, theatrical facial expressions and gestural language, along with faster movements.8 Measured against other dramatic male performers globally or against Asian male leads specifically – notwithstanding one UK journalist’s contention that among Hong Kong actors, “When it comes to standing still and giving a dramatic performance, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is practically the only name on the list” (Rose, 23 February 2004) – Leung constructs a mature, contemplative masculinity that suggests no competition for dominance of screen space or narrative events. Such a middle position suggests not only why he often appears in roles somewhere between lead and supporting performances, such as those in Hero, Cyclo and Hard Boiled, but also helps account for his international success as a dramatic actor. Leung’s dramatic style depends much on facial expressions, which as Dyer (1979: 151) notes contribute to ambiguity in reception. His acting style and the narratives built around his characters endow him with the degree of ambiguity that facilitates his reception in local and transnational venues. Moreover, this ambiguity contributes to Leung’s cosmopolitan appeal, as it helps unfix him from specific cultural foundations (and thus partly accounts for his roles in films of many different territories and set in many historical periods).
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Typage and thematics No actor, and no star especially, performs in a style or in roles that produce wholly ambiguous readings, and Leung’s dramatic works show a fair degree of consistency. Notable across his filmography is a tendency toward roles built on reconciliation of contradictions. His role in Hero as calligraphy master and antiimperial revolutionary Broken Sword exemplifies this tendency. In one of many flashback sequences, Broken Sword engages in acrobatic swordplay as he and Flying Snow attempt to assassinate the King of Qin (played by Chen Daoming). In another scene in which archers attacks his school, though, he sits indoors, writing calligraphy in sand and leaving the combat to Flying Snow and Nameless. Broken Sword’s entanglements with women are similarly contradictory: one sequence includes his cruelly conceived tryst with the young Moon, intended to arouse Flying Snow’s jealousy, while others emphasize his silent devotion to Flying Snow as lover and fellow would-be assassin. In the various flashbacks, he repeatedly allows Flying Snow to stab him fatally, demonstrating not only his avowed commitment to Chinese nationalism but also to a romantic-heroic ideal of male deference in relation to women. Arguably, neither contradictory situation compromises his masculinity, as the film defines it and his character in terms of reconciliation of opposites. The name of Broken Sword also illustrates this reconciliation, referring to an ostensibly useless weapon he wields in combat nonetheless. Aside from the narrative machinations required to combine pacifist/ warrior and lover/cad into a single character, Leung’s performance style enables such combinations. Across his dramatic filmography, Leung’s performance signs help establish a masculinity that accommodates the taste preferences of the global art-house cinema. In Hero as elsewhere, he is a passive presence, acted upon rather than active, deploying attributes that hew closely to many constructions of cinematic femininity. As already indicated, these include quiet and restrained speech, a body language of small gestures, a casual and confined rather than expansive carriage, and perhaps most prominently, a limited range of facial expressions, dominated by those that convey romantic melancholia. Even the film’s combat scenes show Leung performing with this melancholic demeanour, for example, in the languid, lake-skirting duel with Nameless, which occurs around the body of the avowedly dead Flying Snow. Like many films in which Leung appears, Hero’s narrative relies heavily on contradictions or deceptions. Its repeated presentation of events revealed as false in later narration links it thematically to films such as Chungking Express and the Asian box-office hit Infernal Affairs. In the latter, Leung plays an undercover policeman who infiltrates a Triad gang and whose loyalties remain divided between the opposing groups. In the former, he plays another policeman, the second protagonist in a split-narrative film that includes two policemen, two airline stewardesses, two women in sunglasses and numerous other pairs and doubled plot elements. Infernal Affairs in particular calls upon Leung to play simultaneously criminal and virtuous, limning the two roles through passivity (alternately legible as Hamlet-style paralysis and inaction) and through non-engagement in explicit
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violence. This thematic thread running through portions of Leung’s filmography might be understood as a subtle case of typage. As Wyatt observes, “[s]tar persona reinforces […] character typage by limiting the boundaries between which a character may be defined” (Wyatt, 1994: 53). Yet Leung’s roles overall show considerable variation, and his large body of work in East Asian films constructs a highly polysemic star persona different from, if not altogether at odds with, his more circumscribed persona as visible to Western audiences generally. Films in different genres deploy varying aspects of Leung’s persona to suit narrative and promotional requirements, though many films have profitably redeployed apparently incongruous aspects of that persona. Leung’s casting as a passive hero, for example, presents narrative challenges for the many thrillers and action films in which he appears. In compensation, such roles usually set him against – or subordinate him to, in terms of star power and screen time – a male star more specifically affiliated with urban crime or martial arts film roles. His role in Hero is a supporting one, with plots involving Broken Sword and Flying Snow filtered through the sensibility of the lead protagonist, Jet Li’s Nameless. Broken Sword provides the film’s thematic and moral centre, but with his belief that swordsmanship’s highest principle is not engaging in swordsmanship at all, another performer must supply the spectacular action that motors the film. Predictably, promotion for Hero’s American release in summer 2004 foregrounds only Li, banking on his name recognition from mid-budget action films such as Cradle 2 the Grave (2003) and The One (2001). Generally in the action films and thrillers in which he co-stars, Leung becomes a focal point for romance or psychological narratives (Chungking Express, for example, wholly excuses his character from its partial thriller plot) while other characters traffic in martial arts or gun violence.9 The popular Hard Boiled allows Chow Yun-Fat’s protagonist, Tequila, free rein while styling Leung’s character, Tony, as again an undercover policeman masquerading as a killer. Hero manages coherence by making all its male protagonists share the same ideology – i.e. national unification ensures peace, and thus should not be resisted – and the outlook of Leung’s character defines the film’s thematic and ideological project. (It is also the outlook of the tyrannical King, but Leung arguably makes a more suitable cinematic-fantasy apologist for imperialism than does the black-armoured Chen in his role as the King.) Leung’s art-house accommodating masculinity allows Broken Sword to serve as a repository of nationalist political sentiments that might otherwise hinder the film’s successful transnational circulation and reception. Infernal Affairs similarly makes the anguished, inactive protagonist the film’s thematic anchor; in this instance, Leung need not pass the action duties to another character, as the film features no action sequences to speak of, and co-star Andy Lau’s character engages in similarly little violence before the film’s climax. In Hard Boiled too, Leung’s character serves as a moral and psychological barometer for the onscreen carnage (though in this film, Chow also plays a weary avenger, anguished over violence yet always at the centre of it). With Leung’s other roles contributing to viewer expectations that his characters will embody films’ thematic cores, Hero’s narrative takes advantage of its star’s
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special significance. Leung’s Broken Sword thus functions as the stealth carrier of nationalist sentiments, freeing Li’s Nameless to cause commotion as the ostensible revolutionary for much of the film’s running time.
Genre, art cinema and critical discourse Leung’s diverse roles indicate the degree to which attributes of stardom are both linked to and independent of genre. As with many other stars successful in regional and transnational cinemas, Leung exhibits sufficient range as an actor to perform in multiple genres – thriller, urban action film, wuxia pian, contemporary and historical drama, and even romantic and slapstick comedy. Outside East Asia, though, even dedicated cinephiles and Hong Kong film devotees have had few opportunities for exposure to this breadth of roles, particular in theatre settings. Leung’s most notable performances – that is, those in films that have gained prestige at international film festivals and subsequently achieved some form of global distribution – have been in films directed by men canonized as international auteurs by the Western critical establishment. In addition to his repeated starring roles in films from celebrated Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, Leung has worked under Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-Hsien for A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, 1989) and Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua, 1998), Vietnam’s Tran Anh Hung for Cyclo, Taiwan-born US-based Ang Lee for Lust, Caution (Se jie, 2007), Hong Kong’s Stanley Kwan for Love Unto Waste (Dixia qing, 1986) and of course China’s Zhang Yimou for Hero. Distinct from these many dramatic roles, films starring Leung that fit more readily into mainstream genre categories – for example, the romantic comedy Love Me, Love My Money (Youqing yinshui bao, 2001), the comic action thriller Tokyo Raiders (Dongjing gonglue, 2000), or the wuxia pian Butterfly Sword (Xin liuxing hudie jian, 1993) – have tended not to receive festival screenings or corresponding attention from North American and Western European critics. Thus, while a diverse body of films structures Leung’s star persona in Hong Kong and across East Asia, a much narrower body of work, that which passes through the twin filters of festival programmers and critical discourse, comprises his persona in the West. These filters demonstrate the formal and informal limits on the international circulation of star texts, irrespective of differences of language, cultural specificity and other forms of cultural discount. Hero again provides a particular rich case in point. It fits well within a range of internationally successful genre categories – historical epic, romantic drama and martial arts or action film – while also serving as a return to form of sorts for the celebrated auteur director of such films as Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, 1988), Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong denglong gaogao gua, 1991) and The Story of Qiuju (Qiuju da guansi, 1992). Hero played on the international festival circuit throughout 2003, locating it alongside other art-house films, then received wider releases in many countries in 2004 and 2005, repositioning it in the global mainstream. Moreover, Leung’s performance in the film straddles genres and modes. Broken Sword’s physicality and his easily apprehensible character psychology locate him in wuxia and popular entertainment frames, and his dramatic
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expressiveness and the film’s jealous lovers subplot plants him in the realm of historical romance and the art-house. In the US, no film to date featuring Leung, apart from Hero, has received wide distribution or played in venues other than art-house cinemas, whose fare typically includes foreign-language films and those produced by major Hollywood studios’ boutique divisions rather than the studios’ mainstream arms. Consequently, films which in Hong Kong target general viewerships – in particular, Leung’s romantic comedies, comic thrillers and martial arts films – do not circulate theatrically to the US or UK. Action films featuring Leung have received showings at repertory cinemas, and such films typically do receive local DVD releases directed at martial arts fans and Asiaphiles, but comedies without action have not received such releases. This pattern accords with understandings of comedy films as highly localized or regionalized forms, difficult to market overseas thanks to cultural differences in understandings of constituent elements of comedy. In the West, tastederived biases regarding broad comedy also enforce restrictions on transnational circulation. Except in rare mutant forms – for example, comedies as exemplars of idiosyncratic national cinemas or from auteur directors such as Japan’s Juzo Itami or Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki – comedy tends to inhibit circulation to arthouse cinemas, just as cultural differences more generally inhibit circulation to mass-market venues. The virtual absence of comedy from Hero helps position it within categories that historically have circulated globally with relative ease: overlapping categories of historical drama, epic romance and spectacular action film, as variably noted above. Notably, some but not all of these categories respect the strongly class-based taste boundaries that in practice distinguish mainstream from art-house cinema. No distinct production efforts, textual properties or reception practices specifically locate films as ‘mainstream’ or ‘art-house’ or their cast members as mainstream figures (i.e. stars or celebrities) or serious, professional performers (i.e. actors). Such distinctions accrue through a range of distribution, exhibition and marketing strategies, combined with critical discourse and audience demographics and response. Jigna Desai writes that “[t]he phenomenon of the art house is based on positioning ‘foreign’ films as ethnographic documents of ‘other’ (national) cultures and therefore as representatives of national cinemas” (Desai, 2004: 39). Commenting on Desai’s formulation in their own work on transnational cinema, Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (2006: 3) note that the phenomenon of distributing ‘foreign films’ exclusively to culturally prestigious art-house cinemas “has served to reinforce the notion that US cinema is the site of entertainment … while other cinemas are sites of instruction or edification”. This implicit taste framework helps explain why Leung’s ‘entertainment’ films fail to appear at art-houses or Western cinemas generally, except those such as Hero which can be reframed as ‘art’ films by marketers, programmers and critics. Leung’s existing star image in the West, based principally on dramatic roles, suits this reframing project. As a representative of Chinese or Hong Kong national cinemas, Leung circulates a different version of Chinese male stardom than do other, more prominent transnational stars of like origin. Through their own transnational releases, Jackie
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Chan, Jet Li and Chow Yun-Fat have dominated the Western market for violent, more or less comic East Asian male stars. Their films most widely distributed in the US and those with US studio funding cast them as asexual figures or figures involved in sexless romances at best, e.g. Chow in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000) or Li in Romeo Must Die (2000). Distinct from these men, Leung’s films in circulation in the West present him as a romantic lead – Variety has referred to him as a “Hong Kong heartthrob” (Rooney, 11 September 1995) – and only infrequently an agent of violence. Various discourses easily reconstruct the four men as unthreatening Chinese others; English-language roles for all but Leung strongly present them as assimilated figures, positioned in or near the global mainstream. Thanks to his Mandarin-language roles in Crouching Tiger and in the Zhang directed Curse of the Golden Flower (Mancheng jindai huangjin jia, 2006), Chow retains much art-house currency, his occasional forays into co-leading or supporting roles in US genre films notwithstanding. Ultimately, though, only Leung retains a clear status as a highbrow, art-house figure, in large part thanks to the limited distribution of his films not aimed at viewers with high degrees of cultural capital.10 Much English-language critical discourse surrounding Leung positions him as emphatically a serious actor rather than a celebrity star. A 2003 Newsweek profile labours in this regard, asserting that “[t]he actor’s gravitas sets him apart from all the pretty boys, action heroes and slapstick comedians who dominate contemporary Chinese cinema” (Seno, 24 February 2003). Having thus ignored much of his filmography, the profile further opines that Leung “may be the most serious actor of his generation”. Somewhat incongruously, the article then notes the existence of many Tony Leung fan clubs, failing to recognize that fan clubs tend to arise around popular stars irrespective of ‘seriousness’. Another English-language interview calls on Leung to address the mainstream/art-house binary. Noting his role in the local success Tokyo Raiders, which the interviewer describes as a “commercial film”, she asks, “Do you enjoy making popular films like that, or would you rather spend more time making serious cinema?” Leung both acknowledges and refuses the formulation in his response: “As an actor I love to work on different projects, not only the art-house movies but also some mainstream movies” (Maunder, April– May 2001). The exchange indicates the significance of the individual performer – both in film texts and in extra-textual utterances – in preserving the false binary of ‘commercial film’ versus ‘serious cinema’. ‘Serious cinema’ is understood as its own reward, while ‘popular films’ might be a waste of an actor’s apparently limited time and talent. Presumably no stranger to this question, Leung plies a diplomatic middle ground in response. Critical tunnel vision surrounding actors such as Leung arises from the mainstream/art-house binary, from related biases about disreputable genres, and from responses to particular modes of performance. The critical bias toward dramatic roles, and against comic or action-centred ones, corresponds to a widespread critical preference for ostensibly cerebral rather than accessible performances. Leung’s flexible performance style thus produces varying critical responses, ranging from strong affirmation to wholesale neglect. Even a superficial study of Leung’s acting
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in different films reveals that films critically lauded showcase Leung’s acting in what James Naremore (1988: 36) terms a “representational” style, while those neglected feature Leung performing in a “presentational” style. Naremore identifies both styles at work in theatrical performance, distinguishing them to the degree that one explicitly acknowledges the audience (the presentational style), while the other attempts to preserve the illusion that no audience is present (the representational style). In films such as Hero, In the Mood for Love and even the popular thriller Infernal Affairs, Leung acts in the representational mode, conveying psychology through small gestures, facial expressions best viewed in close-up, and limited onscreen dialogue. In comic roles such as those of Tokyo Raiders and Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Tian xia wu shuang, 2002), Leung gives presentational performances, playfully acknowledging his characters’ comic situations with expansive gestures (including many fight scenes in both), broad smiles and extensive and often rapid dialogue. As with much broad action and comic performance, such roles may be read (or misread) as having no psychological dimension, and thus demanding limited intellectual engagement from viewers to comprehend and appreciate.
Regional stars in global circulation In cinema’s transnational circulation, signifiers of cultural capital and prestige often merge with generic elements presumed to appeal to different taste cultures. Sensitive, sombre dramatic roles account for the bulk of Leung’s performances in films distributed widely outside Asia, but audiences within the region gain exposure to a fuller star persona. Significantly, Hero and other films excise the comic elements Leung’s characters exhibit in other films, elements Western audiences rarely see in theatrical or locally distributed video releases. Neither the popular Tokyo Raiders, released in 2000, nor its 2005 sequel, Seoul Raiders (Hancheng gonglue), received theatrical releases in the US or UK, for example. In both, he plays a cartoon adventurer firmly in the Jackie Chan mould, abetted by a group of young, female sidekicks. Seoul Raiders also showcases Leung’s legacy as an action star, thus retroactivity throwing his performance in Hero into further relief. In the newer film, Leung appears in a near-constant stream of martial arts fight sequences, his performance sometimes embellished with a stunt double but most often aided only by careful action choreography and his co-stars’ timing. Leung’s casting in action parts suggests the degree to which Hong Kong and transnational producers regard him as a bankable star capable of diverse roles. Curiously enough, his roles in the Raiders films show his overlap with mainstream global star Chan, who developed his trademark action-comedy persona by the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, Leung, age 43 the year of Seoul Raiders’ release and eight years younger than Chan, remains viable in the regional market both as an action star and a romantic lead. Again, Hero provides the litmus test for this proposition, presenting Leung in two substantial action sequences – the lakeside battle with Nameless and the palace duel with the King of Qin – while also foregrounding his romantic appeal in his many scenes with Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi. Notably, on an English-language supplement to the film’s US and UK Miramax DVD release, Leung observes that prior to Hero’s
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filming, he had not done martial arts wirework for nearly ten years11, a statement that perhaps downplays the substantial action work he did in 1980s TVB series such as The Duke of Mount Deer (Lu ding ji, 1984) and The New Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre (Yitian tulong ji, 1986) and in 1990s films such as Butterfly Sword and The Eagle Shooting Heroes (Shediao yingxiong zhuan, 1993). Leung’s omission or underplaying of this substantial aspect of his Hong Kong career helps in his continued positioning as a transnational, dramatic star.
Polysemic stardom and transnational cinema Leung’s career demonstrates ways East Asian media industries make use of creative labour across media, genres and producing nations. Like fellow Hong Kong stars Chow Yun-Fat, Stephen Chow and many others, Leung gained stardom as a lead performer in long-running dramatic series on the colony’s popular TVB channel. While Leung’s highest-profile films circulating in the West show him as a sensitive male who engages only reluctantly in violence, he has also starred in many successful straightforward action films, comedies and romances. Leung has enjoyed a breadth of roles within disparate industries and varying cultural and linguistic contexts. A native Cantonese speaker, he has played roles in Mandarin and Vietnamese and acted in films with co-stars speaking Korean and Japanese (even though fluent in English, he has not yet played an English-language role). He has worked in productions for industries housed in Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China and Vietnam, and some of his films have involved French and US production capital as well. Companies financing Leung’s films include Media Asia (Hong Kong producer of films including the Infernal Affairs and Tokyo Raiders series), Paradis Films and Orly Films (French co-producers, alongside other companies, of 2046), Block 2 and Jet Tone Productions (Hong Kong co-producers of many films from director Wong Kar-Wai, the latter company co-founded by Wong) and many others. The co-production Cyclo puts Leung under the aegis of eight distinct French production entities, including the international brand Canal+ and the Société Française de Production (SFP), which funds mostly French domestic television. Similarly, the credits for 2046, with Leung in the lead role, list 12 separate production companies from seven countries in North America, Western Europe and East Asia. A more recent starring effort for Leung, the lavish historical epic The Battle of Red Cliff (Chi bi, 2008), pairs him again with frequent TaiwaneseJapanese co-star Takeshi Kaneshiro and lists production companies housed in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, further attesting to transnational investment in Leung’s continued stardom. As Julian Stringer and Qiong Yu (2007: 238–254) argue, the film Hero, while often discussed as a ‘Chinese blockbuster’, is best understood as a thoroughly transnational film, not only in its financing and distribution but in the vast array of production resources from which it draws, including actors. Production and circulation of films such as Hero re-territorializes individual creative workers, supplementing their pre-existing cultural, artistic and economic affiliations. Detailed attention to a single performer reveals just some of the ways commercial cultural
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industries operate across borders. Consideration of transnational stardom merits attention to multiple inter-textual phenomena, including understandings of genre, performance codes, production histories and the contexts provided by global media industries. This chapter has, I hope, illuminated some of the ways Leung has worked in the realm of, and been shaped and received according to, these disparate and intersecting phenomena. Clearly the subject of transnational film and television stardom can not only produce rich case studies but can also help elucidate the significance of individual creative performers within the artistic and industrial systems that comprise contemporary media production.
Notes 1 Special thanks to Julian Stringer and Lin Feng for valuable assistance in the completion of this chapter. 2 For exemplary recent work on transnational stardom, see Hudson (Summer 2006) and Williams (Fall 2006). 3 This chapter does not promise exhaustive coverage of Leung’s many screen roles, but only those most relevant to his role in Hero and its transnational circulation. Since his feature film debut in 1983, Leung has appeared in nearly 70 features and more than ten long-running television series. 4 Binary distinctions between East Asia and ‘the West’ pose numerous methodological problems, not least because of migration of social subjects across these geographically and symbolically defined regions. However, popular media performers born and raised in Hong Kong, and whose principal creative work occurs in Cantonese or Mandarin, are received very differently in areas where these languages and Chinese ethnicities do not dominate cultural or commercial landscapes. Where possible I draw examples regarding Leung’s career from specific events in the US and UK, though I use ‘the West’ and ‘Western’ as shorthand for other industrialized nations outside East Asia where films featuring Leung and other Chinese-ethnicity actors circulate, including Canada, France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere in Europe and South America. 5 Both actors also appeared in The Eagle Shooting Heroes (Shediao yingxiong zhuan, 1993), a comic treatment of the same Louis Cha novel that Ashes of Time adapts. The 1993 release, executive-produced by Wong Kar-Wai, features much of the same cast from Ashes of Time as well. While the Wong-directed effort began production earlier, its lengthy production meant that the comic wuxia film was released sooner. Hong Kong viewers and other fans of the two stars have learned to distinguish them by height, nicknaming them ‘Big Tony’ and ‘Little Tony’ (Leung Chiu-Wai being the latter, despite the dubious Internet Movie Database biographies listing their heights as virtually the same). 6 Interviews with Leung shed little light on his performance process or the degree to which he tries to embody characters psychologically. His published comments regarding work on Wong’s films suggest a fairly freewheeling approach, given the director’s penchant for delays, diversions and script changes. 7 Newsweek’s profile of Leung includes a similar assertion from radio host Leung TakMan: “Girls like his style. Guys feel they grew up with him. He’s just a regular guy” (quoted in Seno, 24 February 2003). Likewise, the two men interviewing Leung for Giant Robot describe him as “affable” and say to him “a lot of our female friends are totally in love with you” and then ask “what can I do” to emulate him (Wong & Nakamura, Spring 2001). 8 I do not mean to suggest through this comparison that Hero exists outside the genre or mode of ‘action film’, only that psychology and romantic emotion rather than
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physicality and action define Leung’s character and performance in the film. 9 Notably, not all Leung’s films sideline him from violence. Butterfly Sword (Xin liuxing hudie jian, 1993), for example, immerses him fully in wuxia spectacle alongside co-stars Donnie Yen and Michelle Yeoh. 10 Also not distributed in the West, notably, are Leung’s many recordings as a pop musician. Like many other Hong Kong stars, including Jackie Chan and Andy Lau, Leung enjoys a prolific, parallel singing career, releasing ten records between 1986 and 2002. Details about this career and other aspects of Leung’s fandom appear at a comprehensive, unofficial fan website, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai’s Page, http://www.tonyleung.info/ (accessed 5 June 2007). 11 Hero Defined (2004) DVD supplement (directed by Stanley J. Orzel), Hero Miramax Home Entertainment/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD.
References Desai, Jigna (2004) Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film, London: Routledge. Dyer, Richard (1979) Stars, London: British Film Institute. Ezra, Elizabeth and Rowden, Terry (2006) ‘General introduction: What is transnational cinema?’, in Ezra and Rowden (eds), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 1–12. Hudson, Dale (Summer 2006) ‘“Just play yourself, Maggie Cheung”: Irma Vep, rethinking transnational stardom and unthinking national cinemas’, Screen 47, (2), pp. 213–232. Internet Movie Database (2007a) Available online at: http://www.imdb.com (accessed 19 May 2007). —— (2007b) ‘Biography for Tony Leung Chiu Wai’. Available online at: http://www.imdb. com/name/nm0504897/bio (accessed 19 May 2007). Maunder, Trish (April–May 2001) ‘Interview with Tony Leung’, Senses of Cinema, Issue 13. Available online at: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/13/leung.html (accessed 5 June 2007). Naremore, James (1988) Acting in the Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press. Oon, Clarissa (22 January 2003) ‘Chinese Bacall and Bogart’, The Straits Times (Singapore). Available online at: http://www.tonyleung.info/news/interview2003_2.shtml (accessed 5 June 2007). Rooney, David (11 September 1995) ‘Cyclo’ (film review), Variety. Available online at: http://www.variety.com/story.asp?l=story&r=VE1117910118&c=31 (accessed 31 May 2007). Rose, Steve (23 February 2004) ‘It never gets any easier, Tony Leung’, The Guardian. Available online at: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004–05/19/content_331961.htm (accessed 19 May 2007). Seno, Alexandra A. (24 February 2003) ‘Asia’s moody hero’, Newsweek. Available online at: http://www.tonyleung.info/news/interview2003_1.shtml (accessed 5 June 2007). Stringer, Julian and Yu, Qiong (2007) ‘Hero: How Chinese is it?’, in Paul Cooke (ed.), World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 238–254. ‘Tony Leung Chiu-Wai claims he was misquoted regarding Tiananmen’ (19 December 2002) Hong Kong Entertainment News in Review. Available online at: http://www. hkentreview.com (accessed 5 June 2007).
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Williams, Melanie (Fall 2006) ‘“The most explosive object to hit Britain since the V2!”: The British films of Hardy Kruger and Anglo-German relations during the 1950s’, Cinema Journal, 46 (1), pp. 85–107. Wong, Martin and Nakamura, Eric (Spring 2001) ‘Tony Leung’ (interview), Giant Robot, 21. Available online at: http://www.tonyleung.info/news/giant1.shtml (accessed 5 June 2007). Wyatt, Justin (1994) High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Recordings used Hero Defined (2004) DVD supplement (directed by Stanley J. Orzel), Hero Miramax Home Entertainment/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD.
9
Fifteen minutes of fame Transient/transnational female stardom in Hero Olivia Khoo
Zhang Ziyi features in only 15 minutes of screen time in Hero (Wen, 29 January 2002). Despite this brief appearance, her presence in the film, in the form of her casting and performance, adds a crucial dimension to Hero’s global appeal. Maggie Cheung, as the only other female lead, plays an assassin, Flying Snow, who is twice thwarted by her male collaborators. Flying Snow’s death does not occur in direct pursuit of her goal (to kill the King), but as an outcome of its failure. Notwithstanding the marginal nature of these actress’s roles, and their significantly less screen time than their male counterparts, the casting of these two female stars is vital to the making of China’s first global blockbuster. In this chapter, I examine how female stardom operates both transnationally and transiently in aid of Hero’s global appeal. The transnational dimensions of stardom emerge as a result of the increasing globalization of film production, distribution and reception, resulting in stars that have an appeal beyond their national boundaries. Rather than view the national and the transnational as separate entities affected by, or produced through globalization, I follow the approach of Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar to consider the place of the national within the now prevalent expression ‘transnational female stardom’. Berry and Farquhar return the focus in transnational Chinese cinema studies to the national, not as it has previously been understood, that is, as a fixed known entity, but as “contested and construed in different ways”, and as “maintained, and challenged, at the centre’”(Berry and Farquhar, 2006: 2–3). This ‘return to the national’ is particularly important in the context of a study of Hero, given that in the many writings that have appeared on the film, Hero has been accused of (or alternatively praised for) its production and interpretation of a trenchant version of mainland Chinese nationalism. In Zhang Yimou’s choice of lead actors, however, the film arguably also does something to problematize such a straightforward claim for nationalism, using the transnational appeal of these stars to bring the film to a wider audience. In particular, as a counter to the predominantly masculinist narrative of Chinese nationalism offered by Hero, the two female actresses, and the star personae they embody, move between the overlapping discourses of the national and the transnational, challenging an easy understanding of either. Beyond the common understanding of transnational female stardom as an appeal that crosses national affiliations, significations and identifications, I would also
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like to consider how transnational stardom might be something we are able to trace over time in and across the careers of both of these actresses. In characterizing stardom as ‘transient’ (or transitory) in this way, I am not referring to the ephemeral or insubstantial nature of these (and other) actors, although in some cases this may be relevant to questions of performance and/or reception, but in how star personas move and change, sometimes quite dramatically, over the course of a career. I will plot some of these movements in relation to Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi’s career trajectories, and also in their changing significations that impact on what the film Hero comes to mean. In her fascinating study of Takeshi Kaneshiro’s transnational stardom, Eva Tsai adapts Appadurai’s notion of ‘-scapes’ to construct the starscape as a way of describing the complex case of mobile transnational stars and to situate them within global flows and signifying structures. Tsai writes: In Asia, starscape materializes from the intensifying and routinizing flow of people (e.g., migrations, repatriation), technology (e.g., pirating hardware, VCDs, DVDs), capital (e.g., investment in China), ideas (e.g., format trade, fashion), and media (e.g., cable channels, Internet) on a global scale. (Tsai, 2005: 105) Although Tsai is interested in Kaneshiro’s movements throughout inter-Asia, the starscape is useful in that it allows us to trace the various economies through which these stars move and become constructed. In considering the transient and transnational aspects of Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi’s overlapping starscapes, I am again aided by Berry and Farquhar’s notion of the transnational “understood not as a higher order, but as a larger arena connecting differences so that a variety of regional, national, and local specificities impact upon each other in various types of relationships ranging from synergy to contest” (Berry and Farquhar, 2006: 5). Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi represent different versions of modern Chinese femininity. However, between and against each other, they also maintain both a productive synergy and a contestation that contributes to the film’s broader appeal. The ensemble cast with dual male and female leads, employed equally to great effect in Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time (Dongxie xidu, 1994) among other examples in Chinese film history, works precisely through the synergies created by the main actors. Thus, stardom can also be shared, and the enduring love story between Flying Snow and Broken Sword is especially poignant because it reprises the fate of Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung’s characters as separated lovers in In the Mood for Love (Huayang nianhua, 2000) and 2046 (Er ling si liu, 2004). Stardom is both maintained and transformed with each subsequent role. Transnational female stardom can therefore also be regarded as transient, as star images move across national boundaries and attach to different sites of desire before popularity coalesces around an alternative figure or movement. Desire is also addictive, and to a large extent follows economic capital and other markers of power that flow beyond national borders.
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Prior to Hero, Zhang Ziyi had only made a handful of films, yet these roles have been significant enough for her to develop a recognizable star persona. In particular, it was Zhang Ziyi’s role as Jen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000), which led to her international recognition and star appeal. Maggie Cheung, on the other hand, has made close to 90 films in her career; she is a veteran of the Hong Kong film industry with an established global following. Together, the choice of these actresses is deliberate and vital to Zhang Yimou’s desire to create a film that would appeal to a global market as well as to a domestic and East Asian audience, primarily through star power. Although Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a phenomenal hit in the West, it did not do quite as well in Hong Kong and China. Jenny Kwok Wah Lau sees Hero as “an experiment in Zhang’s global/local strategy, a search for a model for a Chinese blockbuster” (Lau, Spring 2007). In going global, the film does not dissolve Chineseness into an easily consumable homogenous entity through similarly signifying actors, rather, it plays on the complications of Chineseness embodied by its female stars as an important part of this global/local strategy. In her study of ethnic female stardom, Diane Negra notes: Not only do stars function to present the organizing concept of a film, but they also serve as a crucial link between representation and reality, and in many instances, are indicative of the complex relationship between representation and social history. (Negra, 2001: 9) The use of these two stars is a result of tendencies that have been building in Chinese and international cinema for some time, resulting in globally ‘ripe’ conditions that make the appearance of these stars, and their hyper-mobility, not only possible and comprehensible, but also desirable. The question ‘why a Chinese actress?’, which haunted the crew of Olivier Assayas’s film Irma Vep (1996), and which marked, self-consciously, the first foray of Maggie Cheung ‘the star’ into international cinema, is now replaced by almost an expectation or a claim for global audiences. It is fitting that China’s first global blockbuster features an actress such as Cheung who has not only self-consciously performed and played with her own star image several times (for example in Centre Stage [Ruan lingyu, 1992] and Irma Vep), but who also embodies Zhang Yimou’s desire to internationalize and to ‘go global’ through her very own career trajectory. At the same time, the casting of Zhang Ziyi allows the film to remain ‘centred’ on China, through gendered nationalism, while poised on the verge of international success. All this is achieved through a very ‘transient’ display of stardom – Zhang Ziyi’s ‘15 minutes of fame’ in Hero. As I will explain, it is significant that the two female stars in Hero emerge from very different origins and diverge to different futures. Although there are brief moments of contestation between them on screen, it might be more accurate to say that in the film the two women barely meet, moving along their own paths and taking the story in different directions in Zhang Yimou’s search for domestic, regional and global audiences.
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Transit Moon In the final flashback sequence, the ‘real’ version of the story’s events, Flying Snow engages Broken Sword in a duel because Broken Sword has persuaded Nameless to abandon their plan to kill the King. In order to prove his loyalty to Flying Snow, Broken Sword does not defend himself and is killed by her sword. Moon arrives only in time to see Flying Snow drive the same sword into her own body so that the two lovers lie fallen together. Moon’s function in this version of the story is to witness and finally, to mourn. Although the point of view in the film shifts, and this is where the film becomes open to multiple interpretations, at this crucial point spectators see the events through Moon’s eyes. Her cries are muted, then muffled and echoed, leaving us to resound our own feelings of anguish and regret at the futility of lost lives. Moon’s presence at the scene, a moment too late, is vital in extending the sense of pathos at this moment, through the fact that there is a witness to these events. As witness, Moon shows us not only what to see, but also how to see it. Whatever pedagogical or persuasive impulses the film may have regarding China’s quest for a unified nationalism, we learn this through Moon’s eyes and through an appeal to affect. Most importantly however, we learn, becoming fellow witnesses, only after the fact, just as Moon arrives on the scene a moment too late. By aligning ourselves with Moon at this most tragic of moments, the film attempts to engage us into its dominant narrative of tian xia – sacrifice for the greater good of ‘all under heaven’. Just as Moon is powerless to do anything at this point, as spectators, we can do nothing but watch in horror as the narrative unfolds. Moon’s positioning, as witness and mourner, signifies towards both the future and the past. As the only figure associated with the assassins still alive at the end of the film, we do not know the outcome of her destiny. There is no fateful epilogue as there is for Sky. Rather, Moon’s transient stardom marks an unknown future. At the same time, by representing a naive innocence and fierce loyalty, Moon’s character gestures towards the past. In at least three of her most significant film roles to date, Zhang Ziyi has played a student or apprentice, often learning from an older female role model, but also from sympathetic male mentors. For example, as Jen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon she was tutored by Jade Fox (Cheng Peipei) and by Li Mubai (Chow Yun-Fat), and as Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) she was taken on as an apprentice geisha to Mameha (Michelle Yeoh). In Hero, Moon is Broken Sword’s faithful student. This acknowledgment of debts owed to the past, reconfigured into a forward-looking modern day blockbuster, is integral to Zhang Yimou’s global/local strategy. Zhang Yimou has been forced to concede Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s international success and the generic similarity Hero bears to that film, but he has also been determined to announce to critics and audiences alike that the idea for his film preceded the conception of Ang Lee’s. As the link between these two films, Zhang Ziyi is the ‘transient’ star who moves between the roles demanded of her by these mentor-directors, and in her brief screen time brings to Hero the inter-textual connotations of her earlier successes.
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Hero is Zhang Ziyi’s second role in a Zhang Yimou film; her first role was in Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home (Wode fuqin muqin, 1999). As mentioned, it was her part in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that brought her international stardom, leading to a small part in the American production Rush Hour 2 (2001), starring with Jackie Chan. Since Hero, Zhang Ziyi has gone on to make nine films in five years, with several others in production. These have ranged from smaller Chinese art productions, such as Lou Ye’s Purple Butterfly (Zi hudie, 2003) to Feng Xiaogang’s lavish The Banquet (Ye yan, 2006). Throughout the rest of Asia, Zhang Ziyi has worked with veteran Japanese director Seijun Suzuki in Princess Racoon (2005) and with Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-Wai in 2046 (2004). She gained a lead role in Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha alongside Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh and looks set to continue much of her career in Hollywood. Zhang Ziyi clearly has global appeal. The transnational dimensions of her stardom, however, depend largely on the version of a modern mainland Chinese femininity that she represents. A large part of her appeal comes from the fact that she remains one of China’s best known female stars in a national industry which does not produce a lot of international celebrities. Like Gong Li before her, while she may be known globally, she is still a Chinese film star, signifying transnationally her very nationality. Dubbed ‘little Gong Li’ upon her first appearance in cinema, Zhang Ziyi has done much to distinguish herself from her famous predecessor and to bring a new modern image of Chinese femininity to the rest of Asia and to the West. Whereas Gong Li embodied the suffering, tormented body of the Cultural Revolution, and hence a repressed albeit mature sexuality, Zhang Ziyi represents a youthful and coquettish innocence. As Song Hwee Lim suggests, Zhang Ziyi “exhibits a new confidence among Chinese youth in openly rebelling against the familial and societal roles assigned to her” (Lim, 2007: 46). She is not Gong Li’s version of China, embodying the nation as it emerged out of the Cultural Revolution, but a modern China embracing the West yet remaining different and separate from it. Even her roles set in mythical times in the past, such as in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, have been translated into a modern day appearance in a Visa advertisement made directly after the film. Zhang Ziyi arrives on a date with James Bond’s Pierce Brosnan. The two dine together in a French restaurant and Zhang uses her newfound confidence (and English-language skills) to complain, “this soup is too salty”. Far from representing a ‘primitive’ China, Zhang Ziyi embodies a modern Chinese femininity tied to a rising capitalist China. Yet despite her latent petulance, she remains loyal and subservient in Hero as in other films, stereotypically ‘traditional’ characteristics of Chinese femininity. It is no wonder that she has been cast in an upcoming live-action production of the folk tale Mulan.1 Zhang Ziyi is able to represent modern Chinese femininity as heroic (often involving a challenge to the patriarchal order), and simultaneously as retaining tradition and innocence, with a loyalty that suggests she would not pose a serious threat to any dominant authority. In characterizing Zhang Ziyi’s transnational stardom in this way, there is an important distinction to be made between her popularity in the West and her
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popularity in East Asia (which is, admittedly, somewhat lacking in Hong Kong as I discuss below), since her courage and traditionalism signify different things to audiences in different territories. Zhang has readily embraced a desire to appear in American films, learning English as an important first step in fulfilling the aim many Asian stars have to “go global/Western”’ (Tsai, 2005: 102). Time Magazine voted her one of the ‘100 Most Influential People’ in 2005 and referred to her as “China’s Gift to Hollywood” (Corliss, 2005). Through her transient movements across national borders, Zhang Ziyi signifies a mainland Chinese cultural identity that has been embraced by the West but has been unpalatable to others. The Hong Kong tabloids have been cruel to Zhang over the years, suspicious of how she represents ‘New China’, and criticizing her early attempts to speak English at public functions. Zhang Ziyi’s transnational appeal, her stardom, is highly uneven in terms of what it represents to ‘Chinese’ audiences around the world. Her popularity and stardom, as a measure of China’s ascendancy and the nation’s heightened appearance in everything from the global economy to global cinema, may have been too much for some to bear. As Jenny Kwok Wah Lau writes: As a film which attempts to break the national barrier and represent the emerging sense of China’s internationality Hero is caught in the contradictions between narrow nationalism (security and unity) and self-conscious cosmopolitanism (world peace – ‘Tian xia’ peace). This confusion, perhaps, can also be seen as a reflection of China’s own situation since the country is still in the process of balancing its semi-dictatorial feudalism with modern global internationalism. (Lau, Spring 2007) Zhang Ziyi, reflecting in part some of these contradictions in China’s search for a place in the world, has therefore met with some resistance to her star image. In the rest of East Asia, however, she has had more success. She has been considered one of the ‘100 Sexiest Women’ by FHM Taiwan (2001) and topped Japanese Playboy’s ‘100 Sexiest Women in Asia’ in 2006 (China Daily, 16 May 2006). Singapore’s The Straits Times referred to her as “China’s best export” (Seah, July 2001). She has sold everything from Tag Heuer watches to Maybelline cosmetics and Korean mineral water, suggesting a regional marketability based on her ‘exporting’ Chineseness. Admittedly, many of these markers of ‘success’ came after Zhang’s appearance in Hero. At the time of Hero, she still presented a fairly coherent image of modern mainland Chinese femininity against Maggie Cheung’s more diffuse cosmopolitanism.
Flight of Snow Unlike Zhang Ziyi’s career, which has taken off since Hero, Maggie Cheung’s seems to have slowed down by choice. Cheung has made only two films since Hero – Clean (2004) and 2046. Cheung has said in interviews that she is thinking
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of leaving acting to pursue other interests such as painting and music (Flynn, 10 April 2007). Across the span of her movie career, Maggie Cheung has made films in Cantonese, Mandarin, French and English, resulting in a substantial screen presence albeit one that is not entirely reliant upon her varied and variable language skills.2 Sheldon Lu notes that although Cheung’s speech in Hero “do[es] not sound like the kind of elegant Mandarin delivered by mainland Chinese actors and actresses”, this is not so important since the film is targeting both the wider Asian audience and an international market (as was the case in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon regarding Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat’s Mandarin language skills). What is important is that “the presence of these stars from Greater China would guarantee box-office success”(Lu, 2007). Although this is true, what exactly does Maggie Cheung represent that Zhang Ziyi, for example, does not, or cannot? While Zhang Ziyi is predominantly associated with a mainland Chinese femininity, the same cannot be said of Maggie Cheung in relation to her affiliation with a Hong Kong Chinese version of femininity. This is partly to do with the fact that Cheung spent many of her formative years in England, but also to do with Hong Kong’s own complexities as an urban cosmopolitan centre. Cheung’s connection to France later in her life and career has further complicated any easy attempts to define her. Thus, although Cheung has had a long career in Hong Kong cinema, she has a star appeal that transcends national and even regional boundaries. It was Cheung’s casting as Musidora in Olivier Asssayas’s Irma Vep in 1996, her first role outside Asia, which represented a major turn in her career towards a more international (and decidedly European, rather than American) orientation. In this sense, Cheung is unique among her contemporaries who have aspired to the United States as a means of entering the ‘global’ film industry. Cheung has very deliberately steered clear of becoming absorbed into the American film and image-making machinery. Her only role in an ‘American’ film, Chinese Box (1997), was set in Hong Kong and directed by the Chinese American Wayne Wang. This does not mean that Cheung is unknown to American audiences. Her roles in Wong KarWai’s films such as Days of Being Wild (Afei zhengzhuan, 1990), In the Mood for Love and in Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage, have led to considerable fame in America, especially among art film audiences. In fact, as one of Asia’s most prominent actresses of the 1990s, Maggie Cheung was the first to be associated with what was then Steven Spielberg’s plan to translate Arthur Golden’s best-selling novel Memoirs of a Geisha to the screen. The project dragged on for years with Spielberg handing the directing job to Rob Marshall and Maggie Cheung also pulling out. She was replaced by Michelle Yeoh in the role of Mameha, who takes on Zhang Ziyi’s Sayuri as an apprentice geisha. With Gong Li’s presence in the film as Sayuri’s arch-rival Hatsumomo, the casting appeared all but complete with several of the world’s top Asian actresses. When the role of Mameha went to Yeoh, fans wanted to know whether there had been any rivalry between the two women. Yeoh informed that Cheung withdrew from the project because of work commitments but that she had been the first to
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congratulate her on gaining the role. It was later reported in Singapore’s United Morning Post (Lianhe zaobao) that Cheung did not want to “bungle Western movies”, and that she did not want people to say that she “sold [her] culture” (China Radio International, 27 December 2005). Since her international success in Irma Vep, Cheung has been determined not to take on stereotyped roles for Asian actresses and in an interview with Bérénice Reynaud protested that she could not ‘sell’ her acting by playing those types of roles (Reynaud, 1997a: 24–26). The result is a star appeal that has been created through complex film choices over the course of a long career. Today, Maggie Cheung represents a very modern cosmopolitanism and a Chineseness that is multifaceted. Reynaud famously referred to her as an “icon of modernity” who represents “a less codified, less traditional, less easily fetishized version of Chinese femininity” (Reynaud, 1997b: 33). This is as close as possible to a version of the transnational ‘separated’ from the national. More than anything else, what Maggie Cheung brings to her role in Hero is a credibility amongst international audiences. Not only is she hugely popular in Hong Kong, East Asia and in parts of Europe and America, she has also gained increasing critical acclaim, being the first Chinese actress to win the Best Actress award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1992 (for Centre Stage), and at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 (for Clean). This credibility takes Hero beyond the blockbuster model towards something of an enduring cultural artefact. As Jenny Kwok Wah Lau notes, what makes Hero unique, apart from its status as China’s first global blockbuster, is that it is a “culturally sophisticated [Chinese film] … because of the many different levels of ‘Chineseness’ and Chinese arts that it invokes” (Lau, Spring 2007). This is true also of the versions of Chinese femininity presented in the film, particularly against the masculinist Chinese cultural nationalism offered by its dominant narrative. To return to Zhang Yimou’s ‘global/local’ strategy, although both Zhang Ziyi and Maggie Cheung are transnational female stars, they bring very different elements to the film. Zhang Ziyi works to ‘nationalize’ the film through her representation of a modern mainland Chinese femininity (which is not in itself uncomplicated or unproblematic), and Maggie Cheung’s presence ‘internationalizes’ it, giving it a credibility and a cosmopolitanism necessary to appeal to wider audiences. If Zhang Ziyi’s Moon is the film’s witness, then Maggie Cheung’s Flying Snow can be seen as its agent. Flying Snow is a counter to the male characters’ non-action (or impotence?). As Berry and Farquhar note, “not one of the male assassins uses the sword as a deadly weapon against the king throughout this movie” (Berry and Farquhar, 2006: 166). Broken Sword gives his weapon to Nameless to bring to the King, Nameless ultimately refuses to kill the King and drops his sword, and Sky also relinquishes his sword in honour of his fallen friends. Heroic masculinity becomes absorbed into a vision or an ideal of a unified Chinese nation. But what of the female assassin? What does the film say about gender and the nation by leaving us with the film’s witness but not its agent?
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Crossing paths: transitory futures By tracing the trajectories of the two lead actresses in Hero, what emerges is a complicated picture of transnational Chinese female stardom used transiently as a marketing (and aesthetic) device to support the film’s dominant masculinity. The two women are unique in their significations and hence in their functions in aiding the film’s global appeal, despite their somewhat marginal roles. There are many ways in which these two stars “delight and trouble the transnational imagination” (Negra, 2001: 2): delight it through their engagement and rivalry on screen, and trouble it because their paths do not converge but move in different directions allowing different identifications and interpretations consistent with the film’s flashbacks and multiple narrative structure. Maggie Cheung’s film career has slowed to a (temporary?) halt, whereas Zhang Ziyi’s is accelerating, and with this rise she is transforming what Chinese femininity ‘looks like’ on the screen in the new millennium. I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that it would be more precise to consider the two main actresses as distinct figures in Hero, following their own separate paths and taking the film in different directions rather than as a duo or pair as we might see in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or in Memoirs of a Geisha. Significantly, the two female characters confront each other directly only twice in the film, both in the first flashback of Nameless’s fabricated story to the King. In this ‘false’ sequence the women are played off against one another as rivals for Broken Sword’s affections. In her first appearance in the film Flying Snow is reclined, cold and impassive, as Moon enters her chamber to ask if she can borrow a pot of red ink for her master’s calligraphy. Flying Snow’s response is to throw a cup of water or tea into her face, commanding Broken Sword to come in and ask for it himself. The second scene of confrontation, one of the most memorable in the film, occurs in a clearing amid a beautiful cover of yellow and orange autumnal leaves. Broken Sword has used Moon to make Flying Snow jealous and in retaliation Flying Snow kills him. To avenge her master, Moon challenges Flying Snow to a duel which the latter does not want to fight. Flying Snow is all calm, poise and experience to Moon’s violent and vocal slashing. In a swirl of yellow leaves, the women swoop and strike, staged through a mix of slow motion shots interspersed with rapid cutting. Moon is wounded and dies after laughing briefly like a mad woman. The yellow leaves turn blood red and keep falling, blanketing Moon. The performances of all of the actors in this sequence are extremely exaggerated and staged. While the director’s use of colour is often commented on as providing a separation to the various stories or narrative strands (in addition to the colours’ own connotations), what is less noticed is how the various performances by these stars alters throughout the film to convey different points of view. In this ‘fabricated’ version, the women are rivals to the end, catering to an inherent appeal (both cinematic and extra-textual) to see women behave badly towards one another, especially over a man. There has been much extra-textual commentary about the on-set rivalry between Zhang Ziyi and Maggie Cheung. Whether or not these rumours
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are true (and both have denied them in interviews), Zhang Yimou has nevertheless fed this narrative into the film, although he has embedded it into a ‘false’ version of the events. The rumours around star rivalry seem to suggest that there is not enough room for several big name Chinese actresses to exist internationally (or at least in the eyes of the West) at the same time. Not since Gong Li has there been another mainland Chinese female actress as internationally renowned until Zhang Ziyi came along, and similar rumours plagued Zhang Ziyi’s relationship to Gong Li, culminating on the set of Memoirs of a Geisha. The falling leaves in the scene of confrontation, and their brilliant seasonal colours, reflect an ephemerality and transience to female stardom that also plays a part in Zhang Yimou’s (temporally precise) global/local strategy. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon used martial arts veterans Cheng Peipei and Michelle Yeoh for their female star appeal, both ‘teaching’ Zhang Ziyi how to fight and how to be a lady. As China’s first global blockbuster, Hero also employs Hong Kong and mainland Chinese stars in an attempt to reach domestic as well as international audiences, relying on or alternately denying the ‘national’ dimensions to their transnational stardom. It is interesting to note that subsequent Mandarinlanguage blockbusters utilize stars not only from Hong Kong and China, but from across the rest of East Asia as well, in an attempt to create regional blockbusters. These include Chen Kaige’s The Promise (Wu ji, 2005) and Stanley Tong’s The Myth (Shen hua, 2005); the latter employs Korea’s Kim Hee-Seon and India’s Mallika Sherawat to create a wider appeal through a regional Asian femininity. Hero is not particularly interested in the creation of a regional imaginary; true to its nationalistic character it (re-)Sinicizes its stars personas while the stars themselves, and their career trajectories, complicate this. Chinese femininity is manifold and dynamic, and in this sense both transitory and transient. Amid the globalization of the international film industry, Hero presents a pan-Chinese cultural identity, albeit a decidedly China-centric version of this. The flights or transits of these female stars cannot however be reined in. No one can anticipate where Zhang Ziyi will go from here, nor what we may see creatively from Maggie Cheung in the future. China may have put itself at the centre of this film, and at the centre of where it sees itself in the worldview, but stars exist in another stratosphere; they are altogether out of this world.
Notes 1 The tale of Hua Mulan is originated from the Ballad of Mulan (Mulan ci) written in the Northern Wei Dynasty (386–534). There have been various retellings of the story in different contexts and across several genres – from verse to novels to animated films. However, the core of the story remains the same in most versions: a young woman, Mulan, goes into battle disguised as a man in place of her ageing father who has been conscripted to the imperial army (also see Edwards in this volume). The latest live action version mentioned in this chapter, to be directed by Peter Pau and starring Zhang Ziyi, has been put on hold as of mid-2009. 2 French in Augustin, Roi du Kung Fu (1999) and English in Irma Vep and Chinese Box (1997).
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References Berry, Chris and Farquhar, Mary (2006) China on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press. China Daily (16 May 2006) ‘Zhang Ziyi’, China Daily. Available online at: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/entertainment/2006–05/16/content_592299.htm (accessed 8 May 2008). China Radio International (27 December 2005) ‘Maggie Cheung on Memoirs of a Geisha’, China Radio International. Available online at: http://english.cri.cn/349/2005/ 12/27/
[email protected] (accessed 28 February 2008). Corliss, Richard (2005) ‘Ziyi Zhang: China’s gift to Hollywood’, Time Magazine. Available online at: http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/2005/time100/artists/100ziyi.html (accessed 28 February 2008). Flynn, Bob (10 April 2007) ‘Maggie Cheung: Why the Asian star is turning her back on film’, The Independent. Available online at: http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/film-and-tv/features/maggie-cheung-why-the-asian-star-is-turning-her -back-on-film-444101.html (accessed 28 February 2008). Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah (Spring 2007) ‘Hero: China’s response to Hollywood globalization’, Jump Cut, 49. Available online at: http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/Lau-Hero/ index.html (accessed 8 May 2008). Lim, Song Hwee (2007) ‘Is the trans- in transnational the trans- in transgender?’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 5 (1), pp. 39–52. Lu, Sheldon (2007) ‘Dialect and modernity in 21st century Sinophone cinema’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 29. Available online at: http://www.ejumpcut.org/ currentissue/Lu/index.html (accessed 1 March 2008). Negra, Diane (2001) Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom, London and New York: Routledge. Reynaud, Bérénice (1997a) ‘I can’t sell my acting like that’, Sight and Sound, (73), pp. 24–26. —— (1997b) ‘Icon of modernity’, Cinemaya, (37), pp. 32–36. Seah, Lionel (July 2001) ‘Zhang Ziyi is China’s best export’, The Straits Times (Singapore). Available online at: http://www.helloziyi.us/Articles/Ziyi_Chinas_Best.htm (accessed 28 February 2008). Tsai, Eva (2005) ‘Kaneshiro Takeshi: Transnational stardom and the media and culture industries in Asia global/postcolonial age’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 17 (1), pp. 100–132. Wen, Jing Song (29 January 2002) ‘Red, green, blue and white join four sections together: Zhang Ziyi reveals her thoughts about Hero’, Sina.com. Available online at: http://www. helloziyi.us/Articles/Zhang_Ziyi_Talks_About_Hero.htm (accessed 28 February 2008).
Part III
Local vs. global Deconstructing global Chinese blockbusters
10 Camp pleasure in an era of Chinese blockbusters Internet reception of Hero in mainland China Sabrina Qiong Yu Hero is without a doubt one of the most contentious Chinese-language films in recent years, having stirred up extensive discussions both inside and outside China. Since its initial release at the end of 2002 in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), critical interest in this film has not faded away. For example, two articles in 2007 provide yet again new readings of Hero. Vivian Lee (October 2007) tries to identify a strategy of ambivalence and indeterminacy necessitated by the film in order to prevent “any easy closure to its meanings”. At the same time Jenny Kwok Wah Lau (Spring 2007) draws attention to the film’s cultural sophistication as manifested in various levels of “‘Chineseness’ and Chinese arts that it invokes”, a major accomplishment of the film which Lau believes has been largely ignored by critics. As a successful transnational hit, Hero has triggered diverse readings which indeed show its wide appeal to audiences around the world. However, this chapter has no intention to offer another interpretation of Hero but focuses rather on the reception of Hero in mainland China. After Hero’s grand premiere in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, the film broke one box-office record after another, while heated discussion about it flooded newspapers, magazines and websites in mainland China. No Chinese film had brought so many people into the cinema for a long time and the Chinese media had never before given so much attention to a film. Although, as some critics have observed, it is hard to obtain an accurate figure of positive and negative reviews out of hundreds of thousands of articles and postings, their tone is more one of condemnation and derision than praise and support (Dai, November 2006: 115; Sha, 2004: 6). More notably, many academics in the humanities who usually keep a distance from ‘low-brow’ popular culture actively engaged in the debate by publishing reviews of the film in a range of famous journals such as Film Art (Dianying yishu), Arts Criticism (Yishu pinglun), Movie Review (Dianying pingjie) and Film Literature (Dianying wenxue) during 2003 and 2004.1 These articles analyze the strengths and weaknesses of Hero from various aspects, but the prevailing opinion is that Hero’s visual strength cannot make up for its seriously flawed idea of ‘hero’ and ‘tian xia’ (‘all under heaven’). This indignation and rebuke from the intelligentsia climaxed in two events, both of which happened in the second half of 2004: the first was a group interview conducted by the editors of Arts Criticism in which several Chinese cultural elites vented their frustration at director Zhang
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Yimou (Sha, 2004: 4–17); the second was a symposium in Beijing entitled ‘Zhang Yimou and Chinese Cinema’ (Zhang Yimou yu Zhongguo dianying) when film scholars criticized Zhang and his two wuxia (martial arts) epics – Hero and The House of Flying Daggers (Shimian maifu, 2004) (Jin, 2004: 48–52). However, I must point out the changes in the Chinese reception of Hero after 2004, when critics started to place Hero in the context of the emerging ‘da pian’ (blockbusters) trend in China and the politics of globalization. Consequently the views on Hero after 2004 are not as critical as prior to 2004.2 This change of attitude can be sensed from online discussions. For example, on a famous film website Mtime, although Hero scores only 6 out of 10 in overall ratings, there is an apparent gap between the scores given before and after 2004. The film has received more positive reviews in recent years. Having noted this interesting change that might stimulate further research, my study of the Chinese reception of Hero nevertheless will focus on the period of 2003 and 2004, shortly after the film’s release. Moreover, while critical attention has usually been given to film reviews published in the press, in this chapter I shall examine online discussions, in the belief that Internet users (netizens)3 comprise the majority of Hero’s audience and critics.
Internet users: audiences and critics of Hero Before the release of Hero, the high cost of cinema tickets, the prevalence of piracy, the domination of television and the growing popularity of the Internet had conspired to keep Chinese audiences away from the cinema. Certain Hollywood blockbusters and many of Feng Xiaogang’s ‘New Year Films’ (he sui pian) can still attract big audiences; however, cinema-going as a form of entertainment was seen as old fashioned in pre-Hero China, as demonstrated by a rapidly diminishing film market between 1994 and 2001.4 One of the least contestable achievements of Hero lies in its success in helping bring Chinese audiences back to the cinema, and from 2003 to 2006, Chinese box-office returns increased by 44.1 per cent per year. In the meantime, the box-office for domestic films surpassed imported films for four consecutive years and accounted for 55 per cent of the overall gross return by 2006 (Yin and Zhan, 2007). So, who are cinema audiences in contemporary China, and in particular who went to watch Hero? Among the many records associated with Hero (the most expensive Chinese movie, the highest-grossing Chinese film and the first mainland Chinese blockbuster in international markets), it is noteworthy that the film set a new record for the ticket price for a Chinese movie in mainland China. The premiere ticket, costing RMB 100 (US$12.25) was unprecedented at the time, while the first run ticket in Beijing at RMB 80 (US$9.80) was equivalent to around 10 per cent of the average monthly income of Beijingers in 2002. Given the sky-high ticket price, it is unlikely that many ordinary Chinese people would have been willing to watch this film in the cinema. Thus Jinhua Dai (November 2006: 115) argues that Hero provided a new consumption trend for the followers of metropolitan fashion rather than signifying the revival of cinema-going as a form of mass entertainment. According to Dai, although this audience was big enough to create the box-office miracle, they
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were still a minority of Chinese. Dai then identifies “the minority’s mass culture” as a key characteristic of contemporary Chinese culture, where the cultural activities of the urban minority take centre stage and thus shape mainstream taste. I agree with Dai’s argument that the well-educated and well-paid urban youth who are sensitive to fashionable cultural trends account for a big percentage of Hero’s audience. However, I am unsure if labelling them as followers of fashion is an accurate way to describe this particular social group. I prefer to define them as a new generation of Chinese youth who might be best described as ‘netizens’. Dai rightly points out that the viewers of Chinese blockbusters (pioneered by Hero) to a large extent overlap with Internet users in that they are the people who can and are willing to pay for expensive cinema-going activities or costly computer equipment and high Internet fees (Ibid.). According to the China Internet Network Information Centre, by the end of June 2003 China had 59 million Internet users comprised mainly of students, professionals and government officers living in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, 65 per cent of whom were between the ages of 18 and 35 (China Internet Network Information Centre, n.d.). On the other hand, as China’s first internationally standardized survey of film audience shows, it is exactly this group of Internet users which makes up the majority of cinema-goers in contemporary China (Huang, n.d.). Despite the number of netizens in China being still relatively small, they have played an increasingly important role in the consumption and dissimulation of popular culture. Their influence can be seen from the Chinese reception of Hero between 2003 and 2004. Although film critics, previously journalists and academics, traditionally play an important role in constructing critical discourse, when it comes to the reception of Hero their views on the film appear to be submerged by those voiced by a much greater number of Internet reviewers.5 In the case of Hero the views of the ‘experts’ were certainly not as noticeable as before. Shortly after its release, the alleged “first Chinese book of film reviews” was published in 2003 which includes around 70 Internet reviews of Hero and aims to promote “mass film criticism” (Li, 26 February 2003). The editor of the book, Xiaoming Gu, claims, “In an increasingly democratic world, for a film industry hugely relying on the masses, the key to success is not in the hands of the king or his soldiers … but in the hands of nameless audiences” (Gu, 2003: 2). Gu further declares, “Everybody is a critic …. How do we let the world hear the voice of the nameless mass is a fundamental issue in the new century” (Ibid.: 233). Judging from how the book is edited Gu certainly thinks that netizens, rather than traditional film critics, better represent the “nameless mass”. We can therefore conclude that mainly Internet users were watching and talking about Hero in the PRC between 2003 and 2004. In other words, an overwhelming number of the audiences in mainland China who watched Hero later became its critics. It is important to acknowledge this particular situation about Hero because for most films shown in China, critics only make up a small percentage of their audiences. Yet in the case of Hero, the more people rushed to watch it, the more it received harsh criticism from them, and the more others attended the cinema and contributed to its box-office success. The Chinese reception of Hero is intriguing: why did the film receive such overwhelmingly poor reviews prior to 2004 but
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was still such a commercial success? Why did the Chinese viewers go and watch the movie when they knew all the shortcomings of the film beforehand? Reading through the book edited by Gu and the diverse opinions published on the Internet reveals an interesting trend in which the film was often discussed in a playful, ironic and parodic way. I shall demonstrate in this chapter that this discussion initiates camp consumption of Chinese blockbusters within the new generation of Chinese audiences.
Can the Chinese camp? ‘Camp’ is admittedly one of the most elusive and complex terms in modern culture. While it has a close affiliation with homosexual culture, it is certainly not confined to it (Sontag, 1964, rpt 1966; Cleto, 1999: 1–42). As several theorists have argued, camp favours transgressiveness, subversion and queerness, but it is also vulnerable to the appropriation and reorientation of dominant culture (Meyer, 1994: 1–22; Cleto, 1999). It is extremely difficult to define ‘camp’ as it seems to mean different things to different people at different times. It could be sensibility, taste, vision, style or aesthetics; it is both subcultural and mainstream; it is vulgar, elitist and sceptical; it is a noun, an adjective and a verb … Rather than trying to provide a lengthy definition of camp, it seems to be more relevant here to explain in what sense this chapter uses the term in its discussion of Hero’s reception in mainland China. This chapter focuses on camp as vision or perception, i.e. a way of looking at things and a strategy of reading. More specifically, as Susan Sontag claims, camp is to appreciate the artifice in a playful, ironic and parodic way, therefore converting “the serious into the frivolous” (Sontag, 1964, rpt 1966: 276). Camp is culturally specific and time sensitive. Not only does camp work among different audiences in different ways, but also the way of being camp and the attitude behind it change subtly over time. Therefore, it is always important to examine a camp reading against the cultural, historical and political environment in which it emerges. Camp is not typically Chinese. As Ben Xu (4 August 2007) puts it, “the space for camp is very limited in Chinese society. Everyone is wearing a heavy mask and very few people are able to relax by means of exaggeration or humour.” Indeed, there is a lack of camp sensibility in a culture that distinctly favours seriousness and grandness. However, this is not to say that camp elements do not exist in Chinese art or society. As Sontag (1964, rpt 1966) and Kleinhans (1994: 182–201) observe, camp sensibility is easily fostered in an affluent, democratic society with highly developed mass media, the pervasion of popular culture and probably the label of postmodernity. Of the three Chinese societies of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, only Hong Kong appears to meet all these prerequisites and has produced rich camp texts. Julian Stringer (Winter 1996/7: 46) tells us that “Hong Kong cinema is probably the campest in the world.” However, while Hong Kong’s products are often treated as camp in the West, people from Hong Kong do not necessarily have similar views. For example, when John Woo’s The Killer (Diexie shuangxiong, 1989) was first shown in America, audiences frequently burst out laughing during the screening and called it “the theatre of the ridiculous” due to
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their unfamiliarity with Woo’s unashamed displays of male intimacy and poetic (or exaggerated) orchestrations of action.6 The Killer has become a camp classic among Western fans while for many Hong Kong/Asian audiences, it is a typical male-bonding film that embodies deep-rooted xiayi (chivalry and righteous) tradition and masculine ideals.7 Compared with Woo, Stephen Chow might be less well known in the West, but his trademark mou-lie-tao (‘wu-li-tou’ in Mandarin, literally ‘nonsense’) comedy has probably provided the richest source for camp readings in China as demonstrated by the huge popularity of A Chinese Odyssey (Da hua xiyou, 1994) in the late 1990s. At first, this film did badly at the box-office and received poor reviews when it was released in Hong Kong and mainland China in 1994 due to its seemingly nonsense plot and exaggerated style. A couple of years later, the film’s dialogue suddenly became extremely popular in Chinese universities and the film was regarded as an absolute classic by young audiences in the PRC. The craze, climaxing in 1999/2000 with the help of the hot sales of its VCDs, the repeated broadcast on television and the fast dissemination through the booming Internet, lasted for several years in the mainland and created a generation of ‘Da hua’ fans and a particular way of speaking.8 Chow was adored by the Chinese youth as a master of postmodernism and was invited to give a lecture at Beijing University in 2001. During the height of its popularity, university students in Beijing gathered to watch A Chinese Odyssey every year and yelled out the dialogue with their friends. As Guanzhong Chen (4 July 2006) says, it is “the most typical camp”. Although the ‘Da hua’ craze was largely limited to the university campus at the time, it indicates the emergence of camp sensibility within Chinese urban youth. Camp, a prominent term in contemporary Western culture, was introduced to Chinese readers only recently9 and has not received much attention within Chinese critical discourse. Guanzhong Chen, the founder and chief editor of a Hong Kongbased journal, City Magazine, wrote one of the few important articles discussing camp in China (Ibid.). Chen claims that he wants to introduce the notion of camp rather than discuss what camp means in a Chinese context. However, the article lists several examples of camp in China such as the annual Spring Festival Party held by China Central Television, pseudo-classical architecture on Chang’an Street in Beijing and ‘Da hua’ viewing mentioned above. Hero contributes two items to this list: first, the love story between Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung); second, the moment the King of Qin (Chen Daoming) weeps when he hears that Broken Sword abandons his assassination for the purpose of tian xia. Here, I would like to add a third item to the above list, that is camp appreciation of Hero among mainland Chinese audiences.
Hero: a seriousness that fails Camp appreciation of Hero can be observed from at least three types of responses. First, journalists and netizens report that laughter was frequently heard during screenings of Hero (Di, 29 December 2002; Zhou, 24 December 2003). “‘Da hua’-like laughing stocks caused by unforgiving flaws filled the screen, which
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turned the Hero screening into a parody party. Audiences were still laughing as they left the cinema.” (Dake Zhu, 2003: 78) This reaction is quite unusual for a film labelled a tragic martial arts epic. The anachronistic and over-the-top theatrical dialogue seems to be the main reason for laughter. For example, many Internet reviewers mention that when they heard the ancient swordsman Nameless (Jet Li) say the modern expression, “according to my investigation, Sky and Flying Snow had a one-night stand”,10 they could not help but burst into laughter (Di, 29 December 2002). Surprisingly, one of the most romantic couples on the Chinese screen, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (Huayang nianhua, 2000), became targets of ridicule for Hero’s audience. According to Meng (2003: 178–183), the audience laughed when Broken Sword said to Flying Snow, “I know you saw this. I did this on purpose as I don’t care about you!” They laughed even harder when they heard Flying Snow complain, “You only think of tian xia!” and Broken Sword replied, “I think of you as well.” For many netizens the dialogue between the King of Qin and Nameless is also very amusing. For example, Dingmu Xi (16 October 2003) thinks that one of the funniest moments in the film is when the King stares at Broken Sword’s calligraphy, the character for ‘sword’, and suddenly acclaims, “I’ve got it! … This word means no killing!” Secondly, irony and mockery, two typical camp strategies, are widely applied in Internet discussions of Hero. These strategies are a stark contrast to the tone of condemnation and indignation used by critics and scholars. Many Internet reviewers choose to talk about the weaknesses of the film in a playful and humorous manner as demonstrated in the following quotations. About visual effects: What’s Hero? Hero is an advertisement film, MTV, and an Olympic promo film! Isn’t this satisfactory enough? (‘Anon’, 2003a: 17) About dialogue: The photography is excellent, the music copies Crouching Tiger, the dialogue is ridiculous. It would be much better if Hero was a silent film. (Lin, 2003: 29) About action: The fighting at the top of the maples is almost a copy of the scene at the top of the bamboos in Crouching Tiger except the colour of the leaves changes from green to golden. Is Zhang Yimou paying homage to Ang Lee? (‘Shang Ke’, 4 November 2002) About the theme:
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I cannot help but suspect that Hero is a Model Play of the Great Cultural Revolution. (Ibid.) About performance: Jet Li apparently has developed a new, cool acting style in Hollywood, that is, no smiling, no crying, and no frowning! (‘Anon’, 2003b: 114) As a whole: Hero offers great materials for parody. It is a pity that we do not have the Wayans brothers in China. Otherwise, a Chinese version of Scary Movie [2000] based on Hero would be a hit. (Lin, 2003: 29) Third, another form of camp, parody (e gao) proves a popular strategy among Internet discussants. E gao is a humorous, satiric imitation or reinvention of an original text as a way of mocking or commenting on it. It is not difficult to find various parodic versions of Hero online in which the film’s dialogue, characters, subject or director are ruthlessly parodied in order to highlight their absurdity and fallaciousness (‘Coolsky’, 23 December 2002; ‘Stone’, 26 February 2004). For example, the conversations between the King of Qin and Nameless about the King’s ambition to unite all the states in order to bring permanent peace are adapted into an exchange between Japanese war criminal Tojo Hideki (1884–1948) and Chinese politician Wang Jingwei (1883–1944). During their conversation, Hideki tells Wang that his motivation for conquering China is to bring peace and prosperity to the Chinese people.11 Some Internet users were keen to invent film reviews on behalf of different political figures, for example: … after watching Hero, Annan said, “the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 should be given to Broken Sword”. Bush said. “I never expected that the person who really understands me is a Chinese called Zhang Yimou”. Chen Shuibian [president of Taiwan at the time] said, “Hero must be banned in Taiwan to avoid peaceful revolution from the Mainland...” (‘Anon’, 5 January 2003) Noticeably, many such texts parodied the political and ideological messages of the film. It is intriguing to notice that while the intelligentsia are worried that the historical interpretations of Hero may have a negative impact on the public, netizens have demonstrated that they are sophisticated enough to realize the flaws of the film in a playful and ironic way. In a 1964 article, Susan Sontag distinguishes between naive and deliberate camp. She argues that naive, or pure camp is unintentional and its “essential
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element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails” (Sontag, 1964, rpt 1966: 283). In comparison, deliberate camp is conscious and “knows itself to be camp” (Ibid.: 282). Following this distinction, many Hong Kong films are deliberate camp because, as Stringer (Winter 1996/7: 48–50) observes, they are “playful”, “selfreflexive” and “knowing”. I believe that Hero belongs to naive/pure camp because Zhang Yimou’s ambition is to make a serious, ground-breaking martial arts epic to change the image of wuxia films as a low-brow genre.12 Therefore the intention behind the making of Hero is unmistakably ‘dead serious’. Yet as seen from its Internet reception, the seriousness of the film fails, thereby becoming a source of camp pleasure. In this sense, if the camp appreciation of A Chinese Odyssey discussed earlier is what Sontag (1964, rpt 1966: 288) calls being “serious about the frivolous”, in contrast the camp reception of Hero is being “frivolous about the serious”. By refusing to take the film seriously, Internet reviewers find pleasure. The camp response to Hero indicates a playful and disengaged attitude among the new generation Chinese audiences. However, as Christopher Isherwood (1999: 51) has commented, “You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously … You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.” Such an observation is correct when it comes to Chinese audiences’ camping of Hero. If Hero becomes a great camp text because of its failed seriousness, a camp reading results from frustrated expectations among the Chinese audiences. If Hero’s textual camp is completely unintentional, its camp reception is wholly conscious and a way of venting disappointment, anger and contempt. To understand more about this camp sensibility, it is probably worth making a brief comparison between readings of the film in China and the US where Hero was a commercial and critical success. It is not the task of this chapter to discuss in details the American reception, but a couple of quotations will offer some insight.13 Many American critics unreservedly embrace its visual beauty and exalt it as the most beautiful film ever made despite their awareness of the film’s numerous flaws. James Berardineli (August 2004) believes that “few who see Hero will be there for its thematic content. They will be there to enjoy the spectacle of wire-fu battles”. Similarly, Josh Bell (26 August 2004) suggests, “in spite of people who want to view it as an example of a martial arts movie with depth, it’s actually best appreciated on the surface”. As I have discussed elsewhere, American critics mainly treat Hero as a cinema of spectacle, and indulge in its visual extravagance and stylistic fantasy while setting aside other dimensions of the film.14 To some extent, American critics still conventionally apply a camp strategy to their appreciation of Chinese films, not unlike the way they consumed kung-fu films in the 1970s and John Woo’s romantic hero films in the early 1990s. However, their camp gaze is quite different from the Chinese. While Chinese netizens are ridiculing and parodying Hero, they still express a desire to take the film seriously – they wish it could be much better. By contrast, when American critics praise and enjoy the film, they may never take it as seriously as Chinese audiences. Because the American viewers do not have high expectations of the film, they remain emotionally detached. Therefore, if the American camp reading of Hero blends condescension and entertainment, the Chinese
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camp appreciation complexly mixes disappointment and vindictive pleasure. This comparison demonstrates that camp could convey very different attitudes such as fondness, contempt or fondness mixed with contempt, depending on its context. An immediate question then is what kind of social or discursive context fostered the camp reading of Hero among the netizens in mainland China?
Camp as a discursive resistance Although in my discussion of Hero’s reception in the PRC, I have largely applied Sontag’s definition of “camp as the serious that fails”, I do not agree with her codification of camp as an “apolitical” taste which is “above all, a mode of enjoyment … not judgment” (Sontag, 1964, rpt 1966: 291). Chinese netizens’ camp reading of Hero might be playful and sometimes disengaged, but it is neither pure enjoyment devoid of judgment nor completely apolitical. In fact, Sontag’s assertion of camp as apolitical has been criticized by many later theorists for its nullification of the transgressive nature of camp and its conformity to the dominant order (Meyer, 1994: 1–22). As Fabio Cleto (1999: 1–42) puts it, the marginality of camp is commonly regarded as one of its definitional features. Exploring the relationship between camp and the politics of the marginalized, Ben Xu (4 August 2007) argues that all kinds of camp have a similar function, that is, as a form of self-protection and a social psychological mechanism for the powerless. Camp thus not only reflects an aesthetic need, but also a practice of the marginalized/powerless for negotiating with the dominant/power. Stringer (Winter 1996/7: 55) further points out that camp is a matter of cultural power. The camp look, as “a look of superior cultural capital” (Ibid.), is a kind of empowerment, an effective way for certain groups to grant themselves cultural power no matter whether this group might be marginalized gays or minority intellectuals (Babuscio, 1999: 117–135; Sontag, 1964, rpt 1966), the middle class in Western mainstream society or white fans of Hong Kong cinema (Klinger, 1994; Stringer, Winter 1996/7: 45–66). In the case of Hero’s reception, it is netizens as its audiences and critics who were eager to gain cultural power. So, with whom did they struggle for this power? Or to put it differently, who made them feel marginalized or powerless in the first place? And what kind of cultural power did netizens endeavour to obtain in the Chinese context when they ridiculed Hero? First, it is worth noting how filmmakers respond to the burgeoning camp taste among Chinese audiences. For example, the conflict between director Zhang Yimou and ‘malicious’ journalists was widely reported. In the news conference immediately after the premiere of Hero, a journalist asked a light-hearted question: “Apart from fighting, scenery and stars, what else does Hero offer?” The question angered Zhang and he replied that the use of the word ‘fighting’ shows disrespect for the entire martial arts film industry. In subsequent interviews Zhang continued to accuse some media of being hostile and aggressive. He argued that malicious criticism is unhealthy and will impede the development of Chinese cinema. Zhang’s views stirred ardent debate about the criteria of art criticism across the country, and he was supported by several of his fellow directors
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including Feng Xianing, but suffered more vehement attack in the press and on the Internet. For example, ‘Pandora’ (15 January 2003) points out that Zhang’s counter-criticism reveals a dictatorial mentality and hypocrisy, and argues for the urgent promotion of ‘malicious’ criticism in China as a way of protecting freedom of speech. The indignation of Zhang Yimou and other filmmakers offers a good example of how a society lacking in camp tradition could be seriously offended by the disrespect and irony that characterize camp sensibility. The dispute between Zhang and the journalists provided huge publicity for the film and attracted curious spectators into the cinema. On the other hand, the dispute also contributed further to the camp approach to the film. Zhang’s self-defence delivered a message – this is a highquality, serious wuxia film and so you should take it seriously – which only made the audiences feel more antipathy towards what they felt was Zhang’s arrogance and arbitrariness. Many Internet reviewers admit that when they walked into the cinema they were ready to criticize and mock the film. “Why did I watch Hero? I want to see how bad it could be.” (Su, 2003: 66) Jinhua Dai also observes that some audiences’ motivation of watching the film is based on such an attitude – “if we’ve never watched it, how can we criticize it?” (Dai, November 2006: 115) For many netizens, camping Hero is not only a way of expressing their opinion about the film, but is also a way of defending their right to speak. They are showing resistance to an internationally acclaimed director and the hegemonic cultural logic he and the Chinese government have attempted to construct, that is, the box-office decides everything. Another group that camp reviewers tried (to a lesser extent) to fight against is the intellectual elite represented by traditional film critics and scholars. Antiintellectualism, as one of the prominent features of camp, can clearly be sensed within the Internet reception of Hero. Xiaoming Gu’s collection of Internet reviews (2003) overtly challenges elite film criticism by pointing to its mediocrity and vapidity, and extols Internet writings as the most unostentatious, direct and sharp comments on a film (Gu, 2003: 2–3). A tendency I have noticed with Internet reviews of Hero is that some consciously try to keep a distance from critical discourses mainly constructed by film critics and scholars, although to be fair in the discussion of Hero film critics and scholars more or less agree with Internet reviewers. A sentence pattern that repeatedly emerges from Internet reviews is “those critics often think in this way but I, like most ordinary audiences, view it differently”. Camp proves an effective strategy of being different from serious criticism and detailed analysis. As Stringer (Winter 1996/7: 55) has argued, “to partake of a camp aesthetic is to advertise the fact of one’s own knowledge and cultural status”. Camp appropriation of Hero can be seen as a way for netizens to challenge the elite discourse and the high culture, and to seek their own distinctive cultural identity which has not been fully recognized, at least at the time of Hero’s release. Finally, a camp response to Hero indicates an overt resistance to the official ideology, as manifested through mocking Zhang as a leitmotif film director, describing Hero as a ‘Model Play’ or ‘political wuxia film’ and ruthlessly parodying the film’s articulation of peace and tian xia. Few Internet users comment directly on the
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current government; instead, they apply parody as a strategy to make a connection between the film’s political message and the domestic and international political situation, for example, by relating the King of Qin’s ambition to unify tia xia to the Taiwan issue or by linking the King’s idea of using war to bring peace to the conflict in Iraq. In China’s political environment, expressing one’s own ideas on sensitive topics is still to a large extent impossible. Although the Internet offers a more open and freer space for speech, ubiquitous Internet censorship limits this newly gained freedom. Compared with straightforward critiques a camp reading is politically safer, but not less poignant. As Chuck Kleinhans (1994: 199) observes, “camp, as parody, has an ability to expose what the power-that-be would like to keep neatly hidden and out of sight”. Let us come back once again to the title of the collection of Internet reviews, Nameless Fights Hero. If netizens represent the ‘nameless masses’ whose voices have hardly been heard before, ‘Hero’ symbolizes not only the film itself, but more significantly authority. The cultural power that netizens fight for is actually the basic right to speak. By applying a camp strategy, what they intend to challenge is an authoritarian discourse represented by a prestigious film director, an imposed and dominant ideology, and an intellectual elite group. In this sense, camping Hero is not just a harmless game in postmodern popular culture, but also a discursive resistance and a way of pursuing cultural democracy in contemporary China.
Camp consumption of Chinese blockbusters We are now able to answer the question asked earlier in the chapter, namely why did Hero get overwhelmingly negative reviews yet was extremely successful at the box-office? Among the various reasons which may explain this contradiction, such as successful marketing strategies and its status as the first Chinese blockbuster, this chapter adds another important explanation: an emerging camp sensibility among Internet users who comprise the majority of Hero’s audiences. These audiences went to watch Hero not necessarily because of the appeal of the film, but because of the chance to join a hot debate, to be able to mock or satirize the film, and thus to gain a kind of camp pleasure. In the years after Hero, this camp look has continued to exist and sometimes even to dominate the consumption of domestic blockbusters, especially costume epics such as Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower (Mancheng jindai huangjin jia, 2006), Chen Kaige’s The Promise (Wu ji, 2005), Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet (Ye yan, 2006) and most recently, John Woo’s The Battle of Red Cliff (Chi bi, 2008). Not only do netizens seem to develop a new habit of summing up ‘laughable dialogues’ from these period dramas, but the media are keen to report laughter during their screening (xiao chang) (‘Ding Ding’, 12 December 2008). For example, Youth Times comments that “it is almost a miracle if you can’t hear laughter when you watch a Chinese blockbuster in the cinema” (Zhao, 11 July 2008). On the one hand, box-office success and overwhelmingly negative reviews continue to co-exist as a unique cultural scene in twenty-first century China. On the other hand, ‘laughing during the screening’ and ‘parodying after the screening’, two
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visibly camp activities, seem to have become predominant ways of consuming recent mainland Chinese blockbusters among the new generation of Chinese audiences as represented by netizens. A recent case demonstrates this point: an Internet user, Hu Ge, produced a short clip, A Bloody Crime Caused by a Steamed Bread (Yige mantou yinfa de xuean, 2006), to parody Chen Kaige’s wuxia film The Promise. The clip became extremely popular on the Internet, but prompted director Chen to sue Hu. The quarrel, which drew huge media and critical attention, was the most eye-catching cultural event at the beginning of 2006.15 Clearly, the pervasion of camp responses to recent Chinese blockbusters delivers a deep dissatisfaction and an acute critique by Chinese audiences. While camp seems to have gradually lost its original momentum and to have become a purely aesthetic taste in Western society (Benshoff, n.d.), it is more politically progressive in the Chinese context in terms of its political implication as a form of resistance and subversion to dominant discourse. Yet, if the camp appropriation of Hero conveys anger and disappointment, Internet reviewers have become more detached and playful in their later camp consumption of domestic blockbusters. Sometimes, the object of camp (e.g. the film) is less important than the camp behaviour itself; the frustration caused by unsatisfactory work is less visible than the pleasure deriving from camp reading. Nowadays, when Chinese audiences in the mainland go to watch a domestic blockbuster, they might not know whether the film is good or bad, but do know for sure that they will laugh at some point. Camping Chinese da pian has acquired some characteristics of what Barbara Klinger (1994: 133) calls “mass camp”, a commonplace way of consuming cultural products and a finely developed sense of taste available to mainstream film audiences. Although camp readings of Hero and other domestic blockbusters often indicate a low opinion of the films, it is not necessarily a bad thing, or as Zhang Yimou argues, an obstacle to the development of Chinese cinema. On the contrary, it has proved to be an accelerator for box-office takings. Presently in China, films alone are not enough to bring audiences to the cinema because of the high price of tickets and cheap DVDs. A light-hearted and mirthful atmosphere created by a camp way of film viewing therefore becomes an important factor in attracting young people into the cinema. To watch the latest blockbuster in good time so as to join in Internet discussions has become a fashion and a way of living for many urban youths. In this sense, camp taste undoubtedly contributes to the rapid growth of Chinese blockbusters and the revival of domestic films. The significance of Hero, therefore, lies not only in its inauguration of the era of domestic blockbusters, but also in its introduction of a new way of consuming films for Chinese audiences. Noticeably in recent years, with the help of the fast expansion of the Internet, camp has been widely applied in the consumption of all kinds of cultural goods. Camp sensibility, an increasingly visible phenomenon on the map of contemporary Chinese popular culture, certainly deserves more critical attention. This chapter, through a discussion of the Internet reception of Hero in mainland China, demonstrates that camp, a powerful tool of deconstructing seriousness, classicism and authority (at least when it first appears in a society), can function as an effective approach to cultural democracy in specific social and political circumstances in
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China. By consciously employing a camp strategy, what netizens seek is not only the right to speak, but also an individual form of expression outside official or elite discourse. The controversies and conflicts surrounding Hero present China as a bizarre mixture: postmodern mass culture, a pre-modern political environment and an intellectual struggle for a modern country.
Notes 1 I collected the articles for analysis during my research trip to Shanghai in 2005. They are: ten reviews published in New Cinema (Xin dianying) (No. 9, November 2002; No. 10, December 2002; No. 11, January 2003), four in Film Art (Dianying yishu) (No. 2, 2003), five in Contemporary Cinema (Dangdai dianying) (113, No. 2, 2003), eight in Culture and Art of China (Zhongguo wenyi jia) (No. 4, 2003), five in Film Literature (Dianying wenxue) (No. 2, 2003; No. 12, 2004), three in Movie and Television Art (Yingshi yishu) (No. 3, 2003), two in New Films (Dianying xinzuo) (No. 2, 2003), two in Movie Review (Dianying pingjie) (No. 3 and 4, 2003), one in Popular Cinema (Dazhong dianying) (No. 4, 2003), one in Science Chinese (Kexue Zhongguoren) (2003), two in Arts Criticism (Yishu pinglun) (No. 8 and 12, 2004), and five in Film (Dianying) (No. 2 and 3, 2003; No. 10, 2004). The titles of these journals listed in the references will only be in English. Please check the list above for their Chinese pinyin. 2 I got this impression from over 30 articles in the Chinese Journal Database in 2008, as well as from the presentations I heard in international conferences in May 2005 taking place in both Beijing and Shanghai. 3 According to the China Internet Network Information Centre, ‘netizen’ refers to any Chinese citizen aged six and above who has used the Internet in the past half a year. 4 For example in 1989 the box-office gross was RMB 270 million (c.US$33 million) and the number of audiences was 2,930 million. But in 1999, the box-office return was only RMB 81 million (c.US$9.93 million) and audiences were less than 30 million. Many cinemas in China faced the prospect of closure prior to 2002 (‘Fada ayi’, 26 September 2002). 5 I do not mean that journalists and academics cannot be Internet reviewers in China. However, they tend to publish their views in the traditional press rather than write on websites. Nevertheless in recent years, there are increasingly more journalists working for websites, while many film scholars have also started to use blogs to express their opinions. 6 Jami Bernard, New York Post, quoted from An (2001: 95). 7 See An (2001: 95–113) for the comparison between The Killer’s camp appeal in the US as a cult film and its reception in South Korea as a more earnest text on masculinity. 8 The ‘Da hua’ phenomenon has attracted much academic attention. See Zhu (2003: 50–54) and Yao (2005: 73–77). 9 Susan Sontag’s ground-breaking book, Against Interpretation, was translated into Chinese in 2003, published by Shanghai Foreign Language Press. 10 All English subtitles cited in this chapter are the author’s translations based on the Chinese version of the film. 11 This is from an online article I read at the beginning of 2003, which can no longer be accessed. 12 See Zhang’s interviews in the documentary Cause (Yuanqi, 2002). 13 For further discussions of the reception of Hero in North America, see Larson in this volume. 14 This conclusion is derived from the research I conducted in 2007 comparing Chinese and American critical responses to Hero (a cinema of national parable vs. a cinema of spectacle) which is part of my doctoral thesis. In this research, I examine around
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150 reviews of the film from the Rotten Tomatoes’ collection. See Yu (March 2008), Chapter 9. 15 Please see the Sina Entertainment (Xinlang yingyin yule) website for related reports on the event (available online at: http://ent.sina.com.cn/f/mantouxuean/index.shtml, accessed 20 June 2009, in Chinese).
References An, Jinsoo (2001) ‘The Killer, cult film and transcultural (mis)reading’, in Esther C. M. Yau (ed.) At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in Borderless World, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 95–113. ‘Anon’ (2003a) ‘What is Hero?’ (Yingxiong shi shenmo), in Xiaoming Gu (ed.), Nameless Fights Hero: Decoding Zhang Yimou’s Hero (Wuming dou Yingxiong: Zhang Yimou ‘Yingxiong’ chaijie), Beijing: 21st Century Publishing House, pp. 17–20 (in Chinese). —— (2003b) ‘Jet Li as Nameless’ (Wuming shi Li Lianjie), in Xiaoming Gu (ed.), Nameless Fights Hero: Decoding Zhang Yimou’s Hero (Wuming dou Yingxiong: Zhang Yimou ‘Yingxiong’ chaijie), Beijing: 21st Century Publishing House, pp. 114–115 (in Chinese). —— (5 January 2003) ‘Hero’s authoritative reviews’ (Yingxiong de quanwei pinglun), Paopao Club. Available online at: http://pop.pcpop.com/zpt/default.html?MainUrl=http:// pop.pcpop.com (accessed 15 June 2008, in Chinese). Babuscio, Jack (1999) ‘Camp and the gay sensibility’, in Fabio Cleto (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp.117–135. Bell, Josh (26 August 2004) ‘Once upon a time in China: Hero finds beauty in violence’, Las Vegas Weekly. Available online at: http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/content/fileadmin/ oldsite/2004/08/26/screen.html (assessed 11 October 2007). Benshoff, Harry M. (n.d.) ‘The end of camp?’ Available online at: http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Academy-Awards-Crime-Films/Camp-THE-END-OF-CAMP. html (assessed 20 May 2009). Berardineli, James (August 2004) ‘Hero’, Reelviews. Available online at: http://www. reelviews.net/movies/h/hero.html (assessed 1 October 2007). Chen, Guanzhong (4 July 2006) ‘Camp, trash, kitsch: For people who have been given too much humanity education’ (kanbu, laji, keqi), IdeoBook. Originally published in Wang Xiang No. 4, 2004. Available online at: http://www.ideobook.com/232/camp-trashkitsch/ (assessed 15 June 2008, in Chinese). China Internet Network Information Centre (n.d.) ‘12th statistical survey on Internet development in China’, China Internet Network Information Centre. Available online at: http:// www.cnnic.cn/en/index/0O/index.htm (assessed 28 May 2009). Cleto, Fabio (1999) ‘Introduction: Queering the camp’, in Fabio Cleto (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–42. ‘Coolsky’ (23 December 2002) ‘Hero: The dream of Zhang Yimou’ (Yingxiong: Zhang Yimou zhi meng), csdn.net. Available online at: http://topic.csdn.net/t/20021223/15/1291956. html (assessed 2 June 2008, in Chinese). Dai, Jinhua (November 2006) ‘Chinese cinema at its centennial turn’ (Bainian zhi ji de Zhongguo dianying xianxiang toushi), Academic Monthly, 38 (11), pp. 113–121 (in Chinese). Di, Wei (29 December 2002) ‘Laugh at Hero’ (Xiaokan Yingxiong),csdn.net. Available
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online at: http://topic.csdn.net/t/20021229/18/1310713.html (assessed 24 May 2008, in Chinese). ‘Ding Ding’ (12 December 2008) ‘Laughing is a pleasure: Taking about Chinese blockbuster’ (Xiaochang yeshi yizhong lequ, pandian Zhongguo da pian), Neteasy Entertainment. Available online at: http://film.chengtu.com/news/983.shtml?title (accessed 10 June 2009, in Chinese). ‘Fada ayi’ (26 September 2002) ‘Follow the road of marketization: Talk about China’s film market in 2000’ (Zou shichang hua de xiwang zhi lu: Cong 2000 nian Zhongguo dianying shichang tanqi), Filmsea. Available online at: http://www.filmsea.com.cn/geren/ article/200209260060.htm (assessed 20 June 2009, in Chinese). Gu, Xiaoming (ed.) (2003) Nameless Fights Hero: Decoding Zhang Yimou’s Hero (Wuming dou Yingxiong: Zhang Yimou ‘Yingxiong’ chaijie). Beijing: 21st Century Publishing House (in Chinese). Huang, Miaosong (n.d.) ‘Survey and analysis on film audiences in China: An introduction’ (Zhongguo dianying guanzhong celiang yu pinggu baogao: Jian jie), Media Digest. Available online at: http://www.rthk.org.hk/mediadigest/20080214_76_121745.html (assessed 28 May 2009, in Chinese). Isherwood, Christopher (1999) ‘From The World in the Evening’(reprinted from The World in the Evening, 1954), in Fabio Cleto (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 49–52. Jin, Yan (2004) ‘Report on “Zhang Yimou and Chinese cinema” symposium’, Arts Criticism, (12), pp. 48–52. Kleinhans, Chuck (1994) ‘Talking out the trash: Camp and the politics of parody’, in Moe Meyer (ed.) The Politics and Poetics of Camp, London: Routledge, pp. 182–201. Klinger, Barbara (1994) Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture and the Films of Douglas Sirk, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah (Spring 2007) ‘Hero: China’s response to Hollywood globalization’, Jump Cut, 49. Available online at: http://www.ejumpcut.orh/trialsite/Lau-Hero/text.html (Accessed 1 June 2009). Lee, Vivian (October 2007) ‘Into/out of the critical divide: the indeterminacy of Hero’, Scope, (9). Available online at: http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=9&id=955 (accessed October 2007) Li, Jianzhong (26 February 2003) ‘No heroes but Nameless, independent film critics lurk at the bottom of water’ (Zhiyou Wuming meiyou yingxiong, duli yingpingren qianfu shuidi), Xinhuanet.com. Available online at: http://news.xinhuanet.com/newsmedia/2003–02/26/ content_746617.htm (accessed 30 June 2008, in Chinese). Lin, Feng (2003) ‘Audiences talking about Hero’ (Qi zui ba she shuo Yingxiong), Popular Cinema, (2), pp. 28–29 (in Chinese). Meng, Hanyao (2003) ‘Hero banquets with soul lost’ (Linghun xuexi de Yingxiong sheng yan), in Xiaoming Gu (ed.), Nameless Fights Hero: Decoding Zhang Yimou’s Hero (Wuming dou Yingxiong: Zhang Yimou ‘Yingxiong’ chaijie), Beijing: 21st Century Publishing House, pp. 178–183 (in Chinese). Meyer, Moe (1994) ‘Introduction: Reclaiming the discourse of camp’, in Moe Meyer (ed.), Politics and Poetics of Camp, London: Routledge, pp. 1–22. Mtime (n.d.) ‘Hero thread’, Mtime. Available online at: http://www.mtime.com/ movie/12469/comment.html (assessed 28 May 2009, in Chinese). ‘Pandora’ (15 January 2003) ‘Discussing malicious criticism on Hero’ (You Yingxiong zaishuo e yi piping), Southern Metropolitan Daily. Available online at: http://movie.163. com/edit/030115/030115_148735.html (assessed 20 May 2008, in Chinese).
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Sha, Lin (2004) ‘Settle accounts with Zhang Yimou: Chinese intelligentsia’s critique on internationally well-known director Zhang Yimou’ (Pandian Zhang Yimou: Zhongguo wenhua jie jiti zhenbian ‘guoji da diaoyan’), Arts Criticism, (8), pp. 4–17 (in Chinese). ‘Shang Ke’ (4 November 2002) ‘Hero: A Hollywood rubbish’ (A ji zhizuo shi Yingxiong geng xiang haolaiwu lanpian), Sina Entertainment. Available online at: http://ent.sina. com.cn/r/m/2002–11–04/1043110733.html (accessed 2 June 2006, in Chinese). Sontag, Susan (1964, rpt 1966) ‘Notes on “camp”’, in Sontag, Against Interpretation, New York: Farra, Straus and Giroux, pp. 275–292. ‘Stone’ (26 February 2004) ‘After Bush watched Hero’(Bushe zongtong kanwan Yingxiong zhi hou), Bo’ai Forum. Available online at: http://www.hljcl.gov.cn/1216/oldsf/topic. asp?topic_id=164 (assessed 15 June 2006, in Chinese). Stringer, Julian (winter 1996/7) “Problems with the treatment of Hong Kong cinema as camp’, Asian Cinema, 8 (2), pp. 44–65. Su, Peiji (2003) ‘Why did I watch Hero?’ (Wo weishenmo xiang kan Yingxiong), in Xiaoming Gu (ed.) Nameless Fights Hero: Decoding Zhang Yimou’s Hero (Wuming dou Yingxiong: Zhang Yimou ‘Yingxiong’ chaijie), Beijing: 21st Century Publishing House, pp. 66–68 (in Chinese). Xi, Dingmu (16 October 2003) ‘Hero is about killing’ (Shuopo Yingxiong shi sharen), Tianya Forum. Available online at: http://www.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/filmTV/1/38605. shtml (assessed 1 June 2008, in Chinese). Xu, Ben (4 August 2007) ‘Drag techniques, performance politics and camp aesthetics’ (Zhuangban jiyi, biaoyan zhengzhi yu ganpu meixue), TECN. Available online at: http:// www.tecn.cn/data/detail.php?id=15469 (assessed 25 March 2008, in Chinese). Yao, Aibing (2005) ‘“Da hua” culture and youth subculture’ (‘Da hua’ wenhua yu qingnian ya wenhua ziben), Theory and Criticism of Literature, (3), pp. 73–77 (in Chinese). Yin, Hong and Zhan, Qingsheng (2007) ‘2006 movie industry in China’ (2006: Zhongguo dianying chanye beiwang), in Baoguo Cui (ed.), Report on Development of China’s Media Industry: 2007 (2007 nian: Zhongguo chuanmei chanye fazhan baogao), Beijing: Social Science Academic Press. Available online at: http://www.china.com.cn/city/ zhuanti/07chuanmei/2007–12/20/content_9408810.htm (assessed 10 June 2009, in Chinese). Yu, Qiong Sabrina (March 2008) ‘Chapter 9: National identity, transnational identity and Chinese and American critical readings of Hero (2002)’, The Changing Meanings of Jet Li: Mansculinity, Stardom and Trans-Cultural Reception, University of Nottingham (PhD thesis, unpublished). Zhao, Yanping (ed.) (11 July 2008) ‘Is it possible not to laugh when watching a da pian?’ (Zheniantou dan da pian nayou bu xiao chang de?), Youth Times, p. 8. Available online at: http://www.qnsb.com/fzepaper/site1/qnsb/page/1/2008–07/11/B08/20080711B08_ pdf.pdf (accessed 10 June 2009, in Chinese). Zhou, Ming (24 December 2003) ‘Good cinematography, weak Hero’ (Huamian jianchang, Yingxiong qiduan), Xinmin Evening News. Available online at: http://www.chinanews. com.cn/2002–12–24/26/256844.html (assessed 26 May 2008, in Chinese). Zhu, Chongke (2003) ‘Deconstruction and reconstruction: Studies on subjective interventions in A Chinese Odyssey’ (Xiaojie yu chongjian: Lun ‘Da hua xi you’ zhong de zhuti jieru), Taiwan, Hong Kong and Overseas Chinese Literature, (54), pp. 50–54 (in Chinese). Zhu, Dake (2003) ‘Who is responsible for the aesthetic of violence?’ (Shui lai wei baoli meixue fuzhe?), China Newsweek, (1), pp. 78 (in Chinese).
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Recordings used Cause: The Birth of Hero (Yuanqi) (2002) special feature included in the Hero DVD available in the Chinese market, directed by Gan Lu, produced by Beijing Xuanliu Documentary Studio (Beijing xuanliu jilupian gongzuoshi, in Chinese).
11 North American reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero Wendy Larson
As is the case in China, reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero in North America is varied, ranging from enthusiastic adulation of its lush imagery and colour, fantastical technique, emotional intensity, subtle symbolism and deep meaning, to scornful criticism of its excessive showiness, shallow plot, lack of character development, toadying politics and fascist aesthetics. Interpretations of one of the film’s key moments – when Nameless and Broken Sword refuse to kill the King of Qin – cover a similarly expansive scope, with some critics praising it as complex or subtle, and others condemning it as an overt acceptance of totalitarian unity over diverse plurality. With a profusion of film review websites as well as blogs and commentaries, hundreds of pages of English-language commentary on Hero are readily accessible, without the location or national affiliation of the writer always apparent.1 Those writing on Hero include people of many nationalities, races, ages and interests, some of whom approach film as completely amateur critics, others with professional training, as well as everything in between. The ideas they express are hardly uniform in ideology, style, depth of analysis, sophistication or historical understanding. It is impossible, therefore, to pinpoint one common interpretation of the film or to claim that there is an identifiable quality to North American reception of Hero. Viewers in Chinese language and culture locales such as China, Taiwan and Hong Kong engage in heated, nuanced and historically informed debates, and appear more interested in topics such as national identity. However, it makes little sense to state that while Chinese viewers “were angered by what they believed to be the film’s political stand – a justification of despotism in the history of China”, American viewers “were simply enchanted by this spectacular epic and no one (except some from the Chinese community here) seems to have felt offended by it” (Zhang, 2005: 47). A cursory survey of reviews in North America shows that statement to be at best a simplification. The film, therefore, has been the beneficiary of both criticism and praise in many locales. Chinese audiences were eager to see Hero and compared it favourably to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000). As Shelly Kraicer (Spring 2003: 9) notes: Audiences in China have responded to Hero with a fervour that’s completely unprecedented. Helped by availability – the film is playing continuously (as of
North American reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero 153 this writing) in most of China’s first-run urban theatres – and by strict control over illicit DVD copies, which are only now appearing on the streets almost four weeks after Hero’s Beijing premiere in the Great Hall of the People, Chinese audiences have made this the most popular Chinese film ever released in the country. In a weird twist, these bootlegs, shot on video from the back of a theatre, were actually released by the official rights holder, who claimed that they couldn’t wait until the authorized release date without losing substantial sales. It is the second most popular movie release in Chinese history, after the Titanic (1998) [Titanic 1997] juggernaut, and receipts are still rolling in. (The box-office of the previous Chinese-language record holder, the dutiful anticorruption film Fatal Decision [Shengsi jueze, 2000], was inflated by mass ticket purchases by government work units.) A friend reported in January (with only slight exaggeration) that the traditional Chinese greeting of ‘Chibao le ma’ (literally: ‘Have you eaten?’) has recently ceded to ‘Ni youmeiyou kan Yingxiong’ (‘Have you seen Hero yet?’). In North America, the film was generally positively received, although overall reception to the more apolitical Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon appears to have been somewhat better. On the film review website metacritic.com, for example, professional reviewers on average rate the film at 84 out of 100 possible points, while popular commentary places it at a much lower 6.8 out of 10. Another site, rottentomatoes.com, gives the film 8.2 out of 10. Crouching Tiger received 93 out of 100 by professional critics at metacritic.com, and 7.1 out of 10 from the popular commentary; at rottentomatoes.com, it received 8.5 out of 10.2 However, while the affiliations and full reviews of the professional reviewers are posted, it is impossible to know anything about those who write the commentaries. Therefore, it is neither accurate nor enlightening to attempt to imagine or trace a cohesive North American reading. Moreover, we should resist the alluring temptation to unify something as complex and varied as the reception of a certain film by national/cultural affiliation, rather than recognizing the diversity of opinion that exists within a given culture or geographical locale. It is possible to identify the main points of conflict and the debate, although these issues may be similar (if weighted differently) in other locations.3 By organizing a small amount of the popular commentary along a positive-negative pole, and taking a more in-depth look at the strongly favourable and strongly unfavourable positions, we can get a good idea of the framework within which discussion of the film takes place. Roughly speaking, the themes that critics identify are Hero’s political implications, film techniques and aesthetics, commercial/art aspects and relationship to the martial arts film tradition. The connection between the political stance Hero takes and its filmic methodology is a major concern. Below, I will describe commentary and criticism in each of these four areas, marking the opposite ends of the positivenegative spectrum and providing a general sense of the tendency of the reviews I have read. My discussion, organized into two sections below, recognizes that these areas are not mutually exclusive but blended and dialectic.
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Political implications Although overall North American critics, in comparison to their colleagues in China, surely are not as sharply aware of the historical discourse surrounding the King of Qin and the founding of the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE), many recognize and actively discuss the historical background and the implications of the refusal of Nameless and Broken Sword to kill the King when they have the opportunity. From the relatively far-away perspective of North America, the divisive and personal issue of national identity also may not cut deeply into the debate. Yet many are interested in the question of whether director Zhang Yimou, in apparently recognizing and accepting both the inevitability and the desirability of unification, has thrown his lot in with either the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or more broadly, any totalitarian government, and whether his overarching concern is the construction of a tempting fascist aesthetics that lures the viewer into a certain ideological perspective. A second political/moral concern is the issue of self-sacrifice for the greater good, which both the director and many of his viewers consider to be a primary theme of the film. The review by Bruce Kirkland (27 August 2004) typifies one critical position, which recognizes the power of the poetic fighting scenes while simultaneously arguing that the film’s message is troubling, and that it is difficult to determine whether self-sacrifice occurs on behalf of war or peace. In an interview in 2004 (when Hero was released to American audiences, two years after its release in China), Zhang Yimou confirmed that his interpretation of the film was based on the sacrifice of the individual for the ‘big picture’ (Gilchrist, 7 September 2004). Yet to what extent that big picture includes some distasteful pandering to political authority or a narrow nationalism is open to interpretation. While Jeffrey Chen (16 August 2004) argues against the idea that Zhang Yimou is “trying to make the King come off smelling like a rose”, Manohla Dargis (27 August 2004), writing for the New York Times, states that the film is pleasurable only if “you don’t think too hard and long about the implications of the noble sacrifices various characters make in the name of a unified China or what this subtitled version of the film calls ‘our land’”. Echoing this sentiment, J. Hoberman (17 August 2004) criticizes Hero for containing “more than a bit of Leni Riefenstahl”, a reference to the filmmaker and photographer whom Susan Sontag criticized as epitomizing fascist aesthetics. In her classic 1975 deconstruction of the public persona of Leni Riefenstahl as a lover of beauty, Sontag argues that generally: Fascist aesthetics […] flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets,
North American reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero 155 uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, ‘virile’ posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death. (Sontag, 1980 rpt) Hoberman (17 August 2004) continues to condemn Hero for its vast imperial sets and symmetrical tumult, its decorative dialectical montage and sanctimonious traditionalism, its glorification of ruthless leadership and self-sacrifice on the altar of national greatness, not to mention the sense that this might somehow stoke the engine of political regeneration … Steven Hunter (27 August 2004) continues along the same lines, arguing that the film “declares itself in agreement with the tyrant” and “endorses his right of conquest and unification on the grounds that fewer people will die than if the six nations continued to war against one another”. Hunter ends by mentioning Hitler and Stalin and “that latter-day king of Qin named Mao, another great unifier who stopped the fighting and killed only between 38 million and 67 million in the process”. One of the most critical reviews on Hero’s political stance, however, is that of Joshua Tanzer (27 August 2004), who states that “the truly jaw-dropping thing about ‘Hero’ is how it instantaneously turns from ‘Crouching Tiger II’ to ‘Honey I Shot the Dissidents’”. He argues that the “emperor stands for today’s rulers, who routinely justify human-rights horrors in the name of national unity and stability”, mentioning Taiwan unification, the repression of Falun Gong and other political and human rights abuses, and passing judgment on the film as a “manifesto of evil”. In that Tanzer believes Hero to exalt in killing enemies of the state, and teach “beauty, violence, and authoritarianism all at once”, he argues on behalf of interpreting the politics and aesthetics of the film as unified in their goal. David Walsh (7 September 2004) writes that Hero’s conclusion is “reprehensible”, while University of California Berkeley Chinese literature professor Michael Nylan (2005) calls it a “brashly patriotic” exercise in which the “First Emperor is an obvious stand-in for the Chinese Communist Party”. This connection has been made by many critics, including Brian Marple (30 September 2004), Andy Klein (26 August 2004) and others. Some also observe that the parallels between the film’s presentation of empire and political power may be interpreted as directed at US imperialism. Such a perspective is mentioned by Liza Bear (27 August 2004), who notes in her introduction to an interview with director Zhang Yimou that trying “to see things from an Emperor’s perspective at a point in our own contemporary history when ‘empire’ has again reared its ugly head” may be culturally presumptive, but that the red, white and blue colouration of the film is difficult to ignore. As critics transition into the theme of self-sacrifice for the greater good, they are somewhat less judgmental, as this idea is recognized as more universal and philosophical, a concept that may or may not be connected with specifically Chinese (or other) political issues. However, self-sacrifice for the greater good is not unrelated to the topics discussed above, as the definition of ‘greater good’ is
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always unfixed, and the power to make decisions on behalf of the greater good can, like any form of power, become self-serving or corrupt. In the post-9/11 environment, the topic of the greater good and its relation to state-sanctioned forms of violence also is relevant to other media productions in North America, so critics may be primed to look for such a theme. The Fox television hit 24, for example, is sometimes cited both positively and negatively as taking on the issue not of the greater good, but specifically the right of the state and/or its semi-professional, semi-rogue agents acting out of loyalty to the idealized state to engage in torture in the name of protecting large numbers of people from violence (Bersanti, 6 March 2006). Along these lines, one interpretation of Nameless’s decision to not kill the King is to accept as foundational and crucial his statement to the effect that more people will die if he does kill the King than if he does not. He is, therefore, acting in a way that will prevent countless deaths, or so he thinks. Although this point complicates the representation of the King of Qin, generally thought to be a tyrant who among many evil acts did do one good thing in the unification of China, it highlights the emotionally unsavory possibility that support for an authoritarian regime may directly or indirectly protect the common people. Director Zhang Yimou has promoted this approach, stating: ‘Hero’ follows the ancient tradition. The number one fighter in the country would care for the people first. Jet Li understands that if he doesn’t kill the Emperor, it’s better for the people, because the war will end. The number one martial arts fighter decided not to kill the king, for the sake of peace. In this movie, my idea was to convey the message of peace. (Bear, 27 August 2004) And as James Berardinelli (2004) notes: Hero’s theme of self-sacrifice being necessary to serve the greater good isn’t revolutionary, but it is presented with enough force that we don’t discuss it lightly. There’s a universality to this that allows Western audiences to relate to it with as much immediacy as Asian audiences. At the same time, Berardinelli both condemns the film as “emotionally shallow” as well as insisting that most viewers are there only to “enjoy the spectacle of wire-fu battles”, comments that are not dissimilar to those often directed at 24, which provides the viewer with well-paced action, suspense and narrative even as it delves into thorny philosophical and political issues.4 Writing from Thailand, Wesley Hsu (2003) interprets the colour motifs of Hero as emphasizing the subjugation of the main characters’ individual wills, while the repetition of the story in four different versions also works to “blur the absolutism of each one individually”.5 While Rob Vaux (27 August 2004) disagrees that Hero is not about truth, and locates a central theme in the question of what happened, he also acknowledges that the film’s “meditations encompass the warrior-poet’s philosophy, pondering such notions as duty, honour, and how far noble ends justify
North American reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero 157 violent means”. And Daniel Kasman (1 September 2004) calls “sacrifice for the greater good” the fundamental theme of Hero, despite his recognition of political themes that may not be “agreeable”, and brands the film a parable with links to contemporary China. In being more open to the theme of self-sacrifice than the idea of catering to authoritarianism, critics also note that this theme is common in film across national, cultural and temporal borders. The emphasis on self-sacrifice is also noted by McDonagh (2008). Finally, some reviewers find the political message of the film to be, at minimum, highly complex and ambiguous, and in a few cases, clearly positive. Kevin Lee (2004) details his reaction in three different viewings of the film. In the first, he can’t decide if this is a spectacularly aestheticized, Zen-like mediation on the art of martial arts cinema, worthy of the great King Hu, an over-produced commercial attempt to capitalize on the global appeal of CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON; or a coded, submissive, possibly ironic 2-hour propagandistic commercial for the Chinese government. In his second viewing, he is caught “going back and forth as to whether this film is a ringing, uncomplicated endorsement of the Chinese government, or a nuanced statement on personal transcendence in the face of social turmoil”. Finally, Lee concludes that Hero “shows how disastrous and tragic this state formation really is”, arguing that although Evans Chan (March 2004: 14–23) dismisses this aspect of the film as a “bogus endorsement of heroic sacrifice”, Lee sees it as a more common and universal film theme. Lee ends up by stating that the film is, therefore, not more “fascist” or “monolithic” than a well-known modern classic such as John Ford’s 1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Guan-Soon Khoo (2007) admits to mixed feelings upon seeing the film, especially its focus on ‘our land’ (a term the English version of the film uses to mean tian xia, the literal translation of which should be ‘all under heaven’), a concept that has been widely debated in Chinese communities. Most positive of all is the review of Robert Y. Eng (7 September 2004), professor at the University of Redlands, who begins by noting that the US release of Hero in 2004, two years after its release in China, once again stirred the same debate that had plagued the film in its Chinese release, with American reviewers also vehemently criticizing the movie. Eng, however, argues that not only is Hero not a paean to authoritarianism, but is even a “sharp rejection” of it. Arguing that the “vision of ‘all under heaven’ is contradicted both by the cinematic representation of the Qin state in Hero and by actual historical events”, Eng claims that the film represents the Qin state not as a site of national regeneration, but rather as an agent of merciless expansionism. This slant, and the “relentless imagery of the Qin”, critically highlights the state’s attempt to force cultural and ideological uniformity on the people. Although Jia-Xuan Zhang does not recognize the various positions on the film in the US, he too argues that Hero is critical of excessive state power, both in its aesthetic vision and in its thematic approach. Encouraging a “macrocosmic view, rather than a limited vision, of history”, the film is fundamentally ambiguous,
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Zhang states, breaking the grip of a unified narrative (Zhang, 2005: 52). Agreeing that Hero questions the concept of authoritative narrative through its contradictory tales, which deprive the viewer of the pleasure of experiencing a line between real and false, Shelly Kraicer (Spring 2003) counters those arguing that the film supports brutality and totalitarianism. Kraicer emphasizes the film’s “clear strategy of distributing – hence undermining – the limited authority of any single character, and of the idea of narrative closure itself”. At Yellowworld Forums, commentators from across the globe argue about whether the film is supporting communism or critical of the Chinese government. ‘Dailo’ (8 March 2003, 10:50AM) argues that: Sky sacrificed himself for the greater good of Jet Li’s mission to get closer to the king. Tony Leung sacrificed himself so that Maggie Cheung could understand his conviction to his belief in the greater good. And Jet Li sacrificed himself so that the king could show that no one was above the law. That even the king cannot make an exception to the law. They all sacrificed their lives for the greater good of a unified nation and that is why they are heroes. Pointing out that the TV series Star Trek also is full of socialist ideologies, ‘SunWuKong’ (3 August 2003, 11:01AM) states that not only in Hero but also in Star Trek, “people don’t work for money anymore … they work for the good of society”. A nuanced argument in an academic article by Tzu-Hsiu Beryl Chiu (2005), formerly of the University of Alberta, translates the politically distasteful acts of submission by Nameless and Broken Sword into an expression of deep Chinese philosophical principles developed over hundreds of years, but also relevant in contextualizing Chinese intellectuals under Communism. Chiu argues that the imaginary political allegory of the desirable cause for the sake of the majority in fact has been embedded in Chinese intellectuals’ minds and ardently practiced by righteous Confucians for thousands of years, including idealistic Communist proponents […] In a way, this public secret may also represent the intellectuals’ justification of self-sacrifices during the Communist revolution, the Cultural Revolution, and even to justify some intellectuals’ submissive mentality to the inhuman dictatorship of the Communist party, consummated in the horrible Tiananmen Square massacre. To push it further, Zhang Yimou’s reshaping of the first emperor from the assumed tyrant to a new heroic image to highlight the political allegory of a genealogical legacy of centricity may also reveal an emerging cultural ideology nurtured among contemporary Marxist extremists, intellectuals, and ambitious politicians in light of the neoConfucian utilitarianism or nationalist patriotism. (Chiu, 2005) Chiu extends this argument to the ‘condescending Sinocentrism’ that Michelle Yeh criticized in some mainland scholars who “act like the only authentic and
North American reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero 159 authoritative sources to talk about the Chineseness simply because they’re from the official China” (Ibid.). Overall, political considerations have been a common theme for North American reviewers, most of whom have made note of the potentially pro-authoritarian position of Hero. Some focus on the obvious connection between authoritarian regimes and China, some extend the analysis to include Taiwan and Hong Kong, and others interpret the political aspects of the film as applying to other nations they regard as imperialistic, such as the US, or to a more general philosophical realm. The relationship between the film’s political meanings and its filmic aesthetics, as well as the context revolving roughly around the poles of ‘art’ and ‘commerce/ popular culture’ within which those aesthetics makes sense, is a related concern that I will address below.
The aesthetics and kung fu of Hero: art or commerce? A long review by Alan A. Stone (2004/2005), a professor of law and psychiatry at the Harvard Law School, blithely states that for “most mainstream American film reviewers, Hero was fabulous cinematography, brilliantly balletic kung-fu battles, and great entertainment”. However, as with interpretations of the film’s political stance, analysis and judgment of Hero’s aesthetics and kung-fu aerobatics varies widely. The most important overarching question critics ask is whether the film’s spectacular martial arts displays, stunning use of colour and representations of ‘Chinese culture’ are primarily for commercial benefit, or do they possess ‘deeper’ meanings? Contextualizing the film along a spectrum whose ends are marked as ‘popular’ and ‘art’ is a common approach. At both ends, critics are positive and negative about the film’s artistic appeal; some applaud its blockbuster popular aesthetics and reject the art/popular culture divide, while others decry it, and some praise its poetic artfulness, while others either deny that it exists or belittle its pomposity. The link between politics and art, whether elite, popular or transcending those divisions, also is commonly discussed. Some reviewers focus mostly on the aesthetic attraction of Hero, while only briefly mention that its message may contain disagreeable political proposals. Bruce Kirkland (27 August 2004) lauds the film for its “breathless” visual poetry, its “machine-precision ballets in which a droplet of water sliced by a sword is given the same visual weight as a blow to a person’s flesh” and a fight in which the “rain of arrows … is unparalleled in cinema history for its physical impact”. Kirkland’s recognition of Hero as “a ravishing beauty, an elegant, sinewy creature blessed with such art and grace that the visual poetry of the piece literally leaves you breathless” is balanced only by a brief paragraph questioning the film’s message that the “individual should sacrifice for the greater good”. While stating that Hero is one of the most “spectacular and beautiful martial arts movies ever made”, Jeffrey Anderson (27 August 2004) claims a position outside the ‘arts vs. commerce’ binary, arguing that the director has avoided pretension by not trying to turn the film into ‘high art’, instead making it a film “of movement and color and poetry”. James Berardinelli (2004) also sees the film as a kind of abstract visual
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poetry, arguing that the narrative and any other possible meanings are inconsequential because they are overwhelmed by images so stylish that they bring a vacuous emptiness to the characters and events: Hero is about motion, images, and colors. It’s a series of moving paintings that, when strung together, assemble a basic story. Character development is almost non-existent, acting is muted […] and the film’s attempt at forming an emotional bond between the audience and its protagonists falls short of the goal. No death left an impression on me. Hero is visually deep, but emotionally shallow. Calling Hero “beautiful and beguiling, a martial arts extravaganza” and a “visual poem of extraordinary beauty”, Roger Ebert (27 August 2004) also attributes to the film a poetic nature that “transcends action and violence and moves into poetry, ballet and philosophy”. Some critics go farther than a mere contrast between the film’s spectacular images and political message would imply, attributing a far more loathsome hidden and yet directed goal to Hero’s glossy sheen. Although they may not use the term ‘fascist aesthetics’ or argue that the film’s beauty is entwined with the political message, these critics claim that the purpose of Hero’s amazing acrobatics and beauty is to distract the audience’s attention from its vile politics. Like Alan A. Stone (2004/5), these reviewers often imagine themselves as members of an elite group: a small number of non-Chinese viewers who have the intelligence and knowledge to see past the film’s virtuoso exhibition, stunning beauty, technical virtuosity and its appeal to deep cultural values. For example, claiming the film as “one of the most visually beautiful films of our time”, Brian Marple (30 September 2004) contrasts the “beautiful package” with the offensive message, which “Americans may not fully appreciate”. Others who argue that Hero’s deceptive and beguiling appearance masks a heart of darkness include Mark Harrison (15 October 2005), whose admiration for the film’s fight sequences, which are “spectacularly choreographed and staged, wielding colour, form and movement with virtuosic skill”, and for the beautiful cast, is tainted not only by the film’s politics, but also by its lack of a plot, a dialogue composed of “fortune-cookie clichés” and overall the feeling of empty spectacle. With the commercial success of Crouching Tiger, many viewers assumed Zhang Yimou was trying to produce his own martial arts blockbuster, although the director insists he had already finished the script when Ang Lee’s movie hit the screens: “We started in ahead, and now they say we try to imitate [Ang Lee]” (Monkey Peaches, 31 March 2002). In the same interview, Zhang described his early fascination with martial arts novels, and his take on the meaning of martial arts in Hero and in general: HERO is a commercial action film (in contrast to artistic film). I will add my understanding of Chinese culture into it […] Wuxia (martial arts) is a fantasy world [that] exists in everyone’s mind. Sometimes you will find out that
North American reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero 161 transforming your fantasy into reality is very enjoyable but is also hard to do. Such as one move of a sword described in a wuxia novel, the strength and the speed, you have plenty of room to imagine, very exciting. But in a movie, it’s just less than one second […] HERO is a combination of my personal feeling and the commercialism. Zhang repeats his desire to use martial arts as a way to represent Chinese culture globally in a second interview in which he states, the Chinese movie market is facing severe problems, as most of it has been occupied by foreign movies: Hollywood movies … If no one in China makes commercial movies, the entire market will be taken by foreigners, and then no one will care about Chinese culture and tradition. (Barboza, 1 July 2007) While claiming he tried to make a commercial movie that had Chinese cultural elements in it, in a third interview Zhang contradictorily stated that Hero is at least part art: The problem is that Hollywood is competition for Chinese art films. So I thought I should make a film with box-office promise that refers to Chinese culture, but also contains an art element. That’s why everything is in one film. (Bear, 27 August 2004) Zhang’s claim to represent Chinese culture both shallowly as entertainment, and deeply as art is picked up by some critics, who delve into his attempt to capture ‘Chineseness’ for the domestic and global market. The central theoretical issue for these critics is the politics of cultural representation and national identity. For Mark Harrison (15 October 2005), Hero is yet another view of a real or imagined China, joining the history of such representations along with Fu Manchu, Suzy Wong, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat and so on. Referring to work by Rey Chow (1995), Harrison finds Hero to take the reflexive globalization of Chinese popular cultural forms to a new level of excess, presenting China as a challenge rather than an invitation, in an exercise in cinematic bombast which denies universality and insists on a singular and totalizing version of Chinese culture […] Hero has stepped up to speak from the centre in an indignant register, aiming to be more spectacular, more impressive and more successful than its marginal rival. The “marginal rival” to which Harrison refers is Taiwan and to some extent, other locations where Chinese language and culture are prevalent. Extending Harrison’s comments, we could understand Hero, with its impressive showing on the world stage and financial success, as working within the nation-state global model’s demand for a unified culture that has identifiable markers – fantastic imaginary
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martial arts, Chinese chess, unique philosophical traditions – and that can legitimately claim the right to represent cultural China. The film’s fight scenes, along with its attention to aesthetics, are part of this concentrated self-presentation and, in Harrison’s opinion, grabbing of cultural power through visually spectacular, mystifying and mystical references to Chinese culture. As Alan A. Stone (2004/5) argues, Zhang has arguably positioned himself as the chief artistic spokesman for the new China, an emerging political and economic giant whose Maoist political ideology has collapsed and which now seeks to base its claim to legitimacy on the nationalist pride of its citizens. According to Shelley Kraicer (Spring 2003), traditional wuxia films, as opposed to kung-fu, “exist in the more idealized realm of legendary heroes living marginalized, carefree lives on the edges of everyday society”. Heroes are drawn into the “everyday world in order to fight, reluctantly, but with a firm moral compass, to defend the helpless against corrupt officials or leaders”. Yet postmodern wuxia, says Kraicer, has taken a different turn with one goal of “addressing sources of Chinese culture”. Kraicer argues that Zhang follows a strategy developed by Wong Kar-Wai in Ashes of Time (Dongxie xidu, 1994), “cutting off wuxia pian from the firm, stable satisfactions of simple narrative”. Within this context, martial arts are deployed artistically and with cultural goals as a kind of Daoism, “a set of ideals and a way of living that finds fullness in absence, transcendence in renunciation, in letting go of struggle, of desires, of the material world”. Fighting progresses “from closely pictured combat through abstracted jousting to ethereal non-combat, from the ground to the air, from physical conflict to spiritual opposition” (Ibid.). Through this strategy, Zhang’s representation of Chinese culture comes across as brash and nuanced, crude and refined, bold and subtle all at once. Although her concerns are not exactly the same as those of Kraicer, Jenny Kwok Lau (Spring 2007) uses the term ‘cultured’ when she argues that a primary goal of the film is to investigate the question “can Chinese filmmakers develop a ‘cultured blockbuster’? If so, what is a Chinese cultured blockbuster? How can a film be both Chinese (not simply having a Chinese story but more importantly carrying Chinese aesthetics and values) and a blockbuster?” She also comments: “[Hero] presents Chinese culture with style and dignity.” That viewpoint is seconded by actor Donnie Yen (who plays the character Sky), who believes the martial arts function as a form of philosophy or self-expression in the film (Bottenberg, August/September 2004), and in a web posting, Russell Arben Fox (20 January 2005) takes director Zhang Yimou to task not for empty spectacle, but for failing to live up to the promise of the wuxia tradition by not letting it ‘flow’. Comparing martial arts films to musicals, Fox argues against the common criticism of Hero as too fantastical or lacking realism: People do not break out into song and dance while going through their everyday lives; the conceit of post-Oklahoma musicals is that, if done right, singing and dancing out a story needn’t be reserved for Gilbert and Sullivan-style
North American reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero 163 comedies and fantasies; the music and choreography can actually enhance the ‘realism’ of the tale, putting the excess to use. In wuxia, the fighting is the excess; it is what brings the emotional terrain of the story into gritty, realistic focus by paradoxically making the characters themselves larger than life […. positive comments on Crouching Tiger] Whereas in Zhang Yimou’s wuxia movies, I can’t help but feel the director moving them forward like chess pieces. Another group of critics who discuss the martial arts scenes and their role in the film range from those who see them, and the film itself, as a “pompous excuse for special effects and cinematography” (Medley, 27 August 2004) and a “martial arts extravaganza” that is the “essence of shallow gravitas” (Hoberman, 17 August 2004) to being “brilliant after the Chinese fashion … . showy, flamboyant and exquisitely choreographed” (Hunter, 27 August 2004) or a spell-binding “procession of gorgeous sequences” (Maurstad, 26 August 2004). Are the martial arts fantasies that the film depicts simply an empty display of spectacle with characters who “exist in an idealized dream world where ancient Chinese warriors suck down massive amounts of helium before they fight and then do silly over-romanticized things like battle in their hearts”, with martial arts pasted in the film as mere “kung-fu entertainment” (Tyler, 6 September 2004)? Is it, as Michael Nylan (2005) claims, a “grandiose spectacle laced with toxic pretensions to high culture?” Then there are some, like Gapers Block (27 August 2004), who are looking for a good romp and are disappointed in Zhang’s failure to deliver, calling him a “sort-of action director”. While many critics mock the martial arts scenes as empty spectacle, laud them as great entertainment or blame the director for not coming through on the promise of the martial arts aesthetic, some judge him to be quite successful in Hero. Ed Gonzalez (6 April 2003) finds the colour-coded scenes to be “heavily psychological”, and the “sumptuous mise-en-scène, delirious pacing, and eye-popping aerial effects” to be “invasively mood-enhancing” and to contribute to the film as being “elliptical, primal, radically disjointed, and female-empowering. Everything a wuxia should be … and then some”. Suzanne Bella (26 January 2006) seconds the descriptor “mood-enhancing” by commenting that she found herself “put into the most exquisite of hypnogogic [sic] states” by the film, in which “the sword plunges and words spoken or not upon receiving mortal wounds are emblematic and bespeak of larger principals in an ancient Chinese way”. Coming full circle with those who find in Hero a poetic visuality, these viewers focus on the experience of watching the film, rather than the political message, narrative or spectacularity of the images.
Conclusion As this discussion has illustrated, North American reception of Hero turns out to be a complex and diverse phenomenon. From incidental web commentators to dedicated bloggers, from professional film critics to academic specialists, a wide range of reactions and analyzes in many registers are available. Whereas most
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critics and writers recognize complexity in the film and resist a simple pro or con structure, their knowledge of Chinese history and culture, understanding of film theory and experience in interpreting the martial arts tradition varies. For a film that challenges cultural myths and national identities as strongly as Hero, we should not expect the intensity of discussion seen inside China, Hong Kong or Taiwan to exist within audiences outside cultural China. Often viewers in Chinese cultural locales are familiar with other films on similar themes, such as Zhou Xiaowen’s The Emperor’s Shadow (Qin song, 1996) and Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin (Jingke ci qinwang, 1998), both of which deal with the Qin emperor and the founding of China. But it is a testimony to the reach of internationally known directors such as Zhang Yimou that commentary on Hero outside Chinese cultural locales is well informed and multifaceted. While analysis of Hero written by specialists in a Chinese environment may recognize additional layers of historical complexity, philosophical density, moral ambiguity and contemporary relevance, as even North American reception shows, Hero scuttles any simplistic identifying categories, confusing art and commerce, fighting and poetry, and fascist aesthetics and anti-government stances.6 The result of this engaged interest is a lively debate in print journals and on the Internet, which has facilitated exchange of ideas in a way that was impossible only a short time ago, when academics and professional reviewers were the most likely participants in a slow-moving print culture. The advent of the Internet has encouraged not only participation by a broad variety of critics on a spectrum that ranges from expert to totally uniformed, from film and Chinese culture specialists to the casual but interested viewer, but also a form of discussion that allows for the expression of confusion, ambivalence and uncertainty. Academic and professional critics often work out their initial film-viewing impressions (which may also include a sense of bewilderment and perplexity) before they commit pen to paper, and only when they have taken a stance on behalf of a specific interpretation of the film do they allow their words to enter the public sphere. Less specialized critics or those who are simply looking for a more informal environment often feel free to elaborate on their mixed response to the multilayered presentation that characterizes Hero, and the relative low cost of web publishing, as well as in some cases an absence of gatekeepers who maintain certain standards, foci, or approaches, makes it possible for them to do so. Writing published on the Internet, then, opens the door to a more impressionistic essay or comment form, which in turn can help us understand that for many viewers, Hero is an intriguing network that may include contradictory and unsettling implications. With this rich debate before us, it is impossible to argue that North American reception is in any way consistent, but like the film itself, is thought-provoking and multivalent.
Notes 1 For this chapter I read over 50 reviews in English, mostly posted by reviewers in Canada and the US, and read through hundreds of comments posted in response to the reviews
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2 3
4 5 6
and on blogs. While I refer primarily to North American sources for this chapter, I also make use of a few sources written by critics outside North America whose articles are readily available to the North American audience through publication in English on the Internet. These figures were in effect in early January 2008. A sociological survey that included a wide range of sources not only in North America but also in other locations may turn up general differences in focus or areas of concern. However, the public sources of information would have to be weighted as to their influence; does a review in the New York Times, for example, carry more weight than a review in a regional or small metropolitan newspaper, and how would websites and blogs, many of which have hundreds or thousands of hits a day, be compared to print reviews? For the discussion on the themes of ‘9/11’ and ‘peace’, also see the co-written chapter by Wang and Rawnsley of this volume. Hsu’s website states that he grew up in Chicago and attended the Master’s writing programme at the University of Southern California. One issue of the journal Contemporary Cinema (Dangdai dianying) focused on Hero (No. 2, 2003). An introduction by Jianyong Zhang and articles by Ke Hu, Shixian Huang, and Yichuan Wang present a nuanced perspective on the film. For the reception of Hero in China, see Larson (2008: 181–196) for references, as well as Yu’s and Fung and Chan’s chapters in this volume.
References Anderson, Jeffrey M. (27 August 2004) ‘Hero 2004: Hail the conquering “Hero”’, Combustible Celluloid. Available online at: http://www.combustiblecelluloid.com/2004/ hero.shtml (accessed 9 January 2008). Barboza, David (1 July 2007) ‘A leap forward, or a great sellout?’, The New York Times. Available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/movies/01barb.html?_ r=1&oref=slogin (accessed 9 January 2008). Bear, Liza (27 August 2004) ‘Fighting for peace (and art films), Zhang Yimou on “Hero”’, indieWIRE. Available online at: http://www.indiewire.com/article/fighting_for_peace_ and_art_films_zhang_yimou_on_hero/ (accessed 24 May 2005). Bella, Suzanne (26 January 2006) ‘Hero by Zhang Yimou’, Tribe. Available online at: http:// cinemacosmiconsciousness.tribe.net/thread/00f12137-bdc5–4ce1–9380–37acb3f515cc (accessed 9 January 2007). Berardinelli, James (2004) ‘Hero (2002): A film review by James Berardinelli’. Available online at: http://www.reelviews.net/movies/h/hero.html (accessed 24 May 2005). Bersanti, Chris (6 March 2006) ‘Network sadism: Is Fox’s 24 an advertisement for torture?’, PopMatters. Available online at: http://www.popmatters.com/tv/features/060306–24. shtml (accessed 30 January 2008). Block, Gapers (27 August 2004) ‘Hero’, Gordon McAlpin. Available online at: http://www. chasesequence.com/writing/moviemake-out9.html (accessed 9 January 2008). Bottenberg, Rupert (26 August–1 September 2004) ‘Hero sandwich’, Montreal Mirror, 20 (10). Available online at: http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2004/082604/ cover_film.html (accessed 9 January 2008). Chan, Evans (March 2004) ‘Zhang Yimou’s Hero and the temptations of fascism’, Film International, 2 (8), pp. 14–23. Chen, Jeffrey (16 August 2004) ‘Hero (2004, U.S. release)’, LVJeffrey’s Window to the Movies. Available online at: http://windowtothemovies.com/LV-hero.html (accessed 9 January 2008).
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Chen, Ken (Summer 2004) ‘Red desert: Hero’, Linklater Symposium. Available online at: http://www.reverseshot.com/legacy/summer04/hero.html (accessed 9 January 2008). Chiu, Tzu-Hsiu Beryl (2005) ‘Public secrets: Geopolitical aesthetics in Zhang Yimou’s Hero’, E–ASPAC Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast. Available online at: http://mcel. pacificu.edu/easpac/2005/tzuchiu.php3 (accessed 8 June 2006). Chow, Rey (1995) Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press. ‘Dailo’ (8 March 2003, 10:50AM) Hero thread in Yellowworld.org. Available online at: http://yellowworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25&page=6 (accessed 6 March 2009). Dargis, Manohla (27 August 2004) ‘Hidden truths in the court of a king who would be emperor’, The New York Times. Available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/ movies/27HERO.html (accessed 9 January 2008). Ebert, Roger (27 August 2004) ‘Hero’, rogerebert.com. Available online at: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040826/REVIEWS/408260304/1023 (accessed 9 January 2008). Eng, Robert Y. (7 September 2004) ‘Is HERO a paean to authoritarianism?’, Asia Media: Media News Daily. Available online at: http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article. asp?parentid=14371 (accessed 10 January 2007). Fox, Russell Arben (20 January 2005) ‘I miss the old Zhang Yimou’, In Medias Res. Available online at: http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2007/01/zhang-yimous-gorgeousbloody-curse.html (accessed 9 January 2008). Franklin, Erika (2007) ‘Not my kind of hero: Zhang Yimou’s Hero’, Firecracker-Media. com. Available online at: http://www.firecracker-media.com/reviews/dvd_reviews/article07.shtml (accessed 9 January 2008; not available as of 6 June 2009). Gilchrist, Todd (7 September 2004) ‘Five months, two masterpieces’, FilmStew.com. Available online at: http://www.filmstew.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ContentID=10297 (accessed 9 January 2008). Gonzalez, Ed (6 April 2003) ‘Hero’, Slant Magazine. Available online at: http://www. slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=659 (accessed 9 January 2008). Harrison, Mark (15 October 2005) ‘Zhang Yimou’s Hero and the globalization of propaganda’, Taiwan/China Theory/Futures. Available online at: http://mharrison.wordpress. com/2005/10/15/zhang-yimous-hero-and-the-globalization-of-propaganda/ (accessed 15 March 2007). Hoberman, J. (17 August 2004) ‘Man with no name tells a story of heroics, color coordination’, The Village Voice. Available online at: http://www.villagevoice.com/ film/0434,hoberman2,56140,20.html (accessed 9 January 2008). Hsu, Wesley (2003) ‘Hero (2003): Last tango in Shaolin’, Movieseer. Available online at: http://www.movieseer.com/ReviewsBil.asp?moID=2777&rID=350&Channel=2 (accessed 24 May 2005). Hu, Ke (2003) ‘Inspiration from the audience: An observational perspective on the phenomenon of Hero’ (Guanzhong qishilu: ‘Yingxiong’ xianxiang de yizhong guancha jiaodu), Contemporary Cinema (Dangdai dianying), (2), pp. 5–10 (in Chinese). Huang, Shixian (2003) ‘The triumphant return of the market for Hero and its cultural paradox’ (‘Yingxiong’ de shichang kaixuan ji qi wenhua beilun), Contemporary Cinema (Dangdai dianying), (2), pp. 19–22 (in Chinese). Hunter, Stephen (27 August 2004) ‘Hero: An ending that falls on its own sword’, The Washington Post. Available online at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/ A37325–2004Aug26.html (accessed 9 January 2007).
North American reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero 167 Kahn, J. (20 October 2007) ‘Film on ruthless dynasty delights Chinese leaders’, Drammaturgia.it. Available online at: http://www.drammaturgia.it/recensioni/recensione1.php?id=1698 (accessed 1 March 2007). Kasman, Daniel (1 September 2004) ‘Hero’, d+Kaz. Available online at: http://www.d-kaz. com/reviews/review.php?id=171 (accessed 24 May 2005). Khoo, G. S. (2007) ‘Hero: Zhang Yimou’s controversial epic’, OffScreen, 5 (11). Available online at: http://www.offscreen.com/biblio/pages/essays/hero/ (accessed 19 December 2007). Kirkland, Bruce (27 August 2004) ‘A hero to worship’, Canoe. Available online at: http:// jam.canoe.ca/Movies/Reviews/H/Hero/2004/08/27/pf-753141.html (accessed 9 January 2008). Klein, Andy (26 August 2004) ‘Flawed “Hero”’, Los Angeles City Beat. Available online at: http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=1170&IssueNum=64 (accessed 15 March 2007). Kraicer, Shelley (Spring 2003) ‘Absence as spectacle: Zhang Yimou’s Hero’, Cinema Scope Magazine, 5 (1, 14), pp. 9. Available online at: http://www.chinesecinemas.org/hero.html (accessed 21 January 2008). Larson, Wendy (2008) ‘Zhang Yimou’s Hero: Dismantling the myth of cultural power’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2 (3), pp. 181–196. Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah (Spring 2007) ‘‘Hero’: China’s response to Hollywood globalization’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 49. Available online at: http:// www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/Lau-Hero/text.html (accessed 19 December 2007). Lee, Kevin (2004) ‘Film diary: Trying to catch a Hero by the tail’, Also LifeLike Productions. Available online at: http://www.alsolikelife.com/FilmDiary/Rantsandraves/hero.html (accessed 23 March 2007). McDonagh, Maitland (2008) ‘Hero: Review.’ TV Guide. Available online at: http://www. tvguide.com/movies/hero/review/136556 (accessed 9 January 2008). Marple, Brian (30 September 2004) ‘Movie review: Whose story does the beautiful “Hero” tell?’, AFAR: Association for Asian Research. Available online at: http://www.asianresearch.org/articles/2330.html (accessed 10 March 2007). Maurstad, Tom (26 August 2004) ‘Hero’, GuideLive. Available online at: http:// www.guidelive.com/portal/page?_pageid=33,97283&_dad=portal&_schema= PORTAL&item_id=23911 (accessed 9 January 2008; unavailable as of 6 June 2009). Medley, Tony (27 August 2004) ‘Hero (3/10)’, Tony Medley. Available online at: http:// www.tonymedley.com/2004/Hero.htm (accessed 9 January 2008). Monkey Peaches (31 March 2002) ‘Hero news 58: Zhang Yimou interview’, Monkeypeaches. com. Available online at: http://www.monkeypeaches.com/hero/interview01.html (accessed 15 March 2007; unavailable as of 6 June 2009). Morris, Wesley (27 August 2004) ‘”Hero” puts up a beautiful fight’, The Boston Globe. Available online at: http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie&id=4219 (accessed 9 January 2008). Nylan, Michael (2005) ‘Hero’, The American Historical Review, 110 (3), pp. 769–770. Available online at: http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/printpage.cgi (accessed 9 January 2008; unavailable as of 6 June 2009). Sontag, Susan (1980, rpt) ‘Fascinating fascism’, in Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980, pp. 73–105. Originally published in the New York Review of Books (6 February 1975). Quoted from http://www.history.ucsb.edu/ faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm (accessed 21 January 2008).
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Stone, Alan A. (September 2004–January 2005) ‘See no evil’, Boston Review. Available online at: http://bostonreview.net/BR29.6/stone.html (accessed 21 January 2008). ‘SunWuKong’ (3 August 2003, 11:01AM) Hero thread in Yellowworld.org. Available online at: http://yellowworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25&page=6 (accessed 6 March 2009). Tanzer, Joshua (27 August 2004) ‘Hidden dragon’, OFFOFFOFFfilm. Available online at: http://offoffoff.com/film/2004/hero.php (accessed 9 January 2008). Tung, Chi. (3 September 2007) ‘To America, with love: Zhang Yimou’s one-note rapsody’, Asia Pacific Arts (UCLA Asia Institute). Available online at: http://www.asiaarts.ucla. edu/article.asp?parentid=14271 (accessed 10 March 2007). Tyler, Joshua (6 September 2004) ‘Hero – Review’, Cinema Blend. Available online at: http://www.cinemablend.com/review.php?id=638 (accessed 9 January 2008). Vaux, Rob (27 August 2004) ‘Hero’, Flipside Movie Emporium. Available online at: http:// www.flipsidemovies.com/hero.html (accessed 20 September 2007). Walsh, David (7 September 2004) ‘Chinese filmmakers need to see a way out’, World Socialist Web Site. Available online at: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/sep2004/ hero-s07.shtml (accessed 8 January 2008). Wang, Yichuan (2003) ‘The post-emotive period of Chinese film: Inspiration from Hero’ (Zhongguo dianying de houqinggan shidai: ‘Yingxiong’ qishilu), Contemporary Cinema (Dangdai dianying), (2), pp. 6–18 (in Chinese). Zhang, Jianyong (2003) ‘Introduction’ (Zhuchiren daoyu), Contemporary Cinema (Dangdai dianying), (2), pp. 5 (in Chinese). Zhang, Jia-Xuan (2005) ‘Hero’, Film Quarterly, 58 (4), pp. 47–52.
12 Heroic music From Hunan to Hollywood and back Katy Gow
“What is film music? It has different functions climaxing with the picture and driving the rhythm of it. Also there’s a spiritual function that can tell what the director cannot tell in words and action.” — Tan Dun1
This chapter will focus on the composition and contribution which the film score makes to Zhang Yimou’s aspirations for Hero to appeal to both a Chinese and a worldwide audience. Zhang selected the Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun, whom he had first met some 20 years earlier, when Tan was a young student in Beijing.2 Zhang clearly recognized him as someone who, by his musical background and training in both Chinese and Western traditions, was superbly equipped to produce a soundtrack to provide the musical fusion that could support his filmic ambition to create a genuinely global Chinese blockbuster. Given the sometimes under-studied and under-recognized role of film music in general and transnational cinema in particular, an examination of Tan Dun’s approach to the film score itself, tracing his selection of instruments, artists and musical material, will provide the basis for an evaluation of the impact of his score, and how and why it might appeal to a crossover audience. Born in central Hunan Province of China, Tan Dun’s musical training embraces both his strong traditional musical heritage and Western classical repertoire. His compositions cover a wide musical genre3 including scores for both Chinese and Hollywood films. In 2001, his soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000) won him the Academy Award for Best Original Score. It was the screening of this film in Beijing that re-established Zhang Yimou’s contact with the composer: I found the score wonderful and it really helped the film a great deal … I suddenly realized that I had lost touch … So when I made my first martial arts film, Hero, the first person that came to my mind was Tan Dun. (Fan, 25 May 2004)
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As a wuxia (martial arts) film, Zhang Yimou brings this otherwise aggressive, captivating and violent subject into a fantastical choreographed world of bright colours, precision and superhuman perfection. The film Hero is a combination of my personal feeling and the commercialism. It won’t work with only my personal feeling. That’s experimental film and the boss will lose everything. Just like taking a joyride at another’s expense. The so-called commercialism includes elements like story, plots, rhythms and large big scenes. (Southern Daily, 24 November 2001) The intricate storyline is a labyrinth of intrigue and deception, more often than not relayed through a series of flashbacks and slow-motion cinematography, “plus extended facial close-ups of characters who are often nano-seconds away from either killing or being killed” (Stearns, 28 August 2004). Such a visual feast demands a score to support and complement the esoteric style. For this commission Zhang turned to his long-time friend, Tan Dun, who explained, “the whole design of martial arts in the film is like a ballet … the movie unfolds like four acts of an opera” (Hilferty, 12 August 2004). Many will remember the colour-coded sequences, whether it be the chess court scene with its grey-toned spiritually elevated ‘imagined’ duel between Nameless and Sky or the golden hued and blood-red forest with its swirling leaves and gravity-defying leaps of warrior maidens, Flying Snow and Moon, or indeed, the luminous blue-green lakes and mountainous landscapes with floating ballet-style acrobatics of Nameless and Broken Sword. However, who can claim to remember the accompanying music to these scenes? “To remember back to the most enjoyable parts of the films rarely includes a similar remembrance of the music that accompanied them. Thus the film music ‘disappears’ from the effect (the memory) of the film/film music complex.” (Spande, n.d.) Film scores are often referred to as ‘unheard music’. Audiences are conditioned to experience film viewing with a musical soundtrack, resulting in the fact that if no score is employed most viewers would quickly sense its absence. Even the earliest silent films relied on musical accompaniment, often improvised, to help create an atmospheric backcloth to the narrative whilst also serving to drown out projector noise and undesired ambient sound. There are, however, other practical reasons for incorporating music into the movie world, “to humanize the artificial image on screen … to effect smooth transitions between disjointed shots … to strengthen the impact of scenes that are dramatically weak” (Cooke, 2001: 806). However, as Tan Dun reveals in the opening quotation, movie music has other important functions. Music can suggest time, place, atmosphere, mood and character traits, as well as influencing audience reaction to the moving images or anticipation of what is to come. Music has the power to manipulate our emotions through the use of different musical devices and techniques: harmony, dissonance, scales, pitch, dynamics, tempo, rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration or merely association, are some of the tools employed. Moreover, traditional and culturally specific music, as well as the appropriateness of musical placement, can enhance
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or distract from the visual and/or narrative. The manner in which music is used in film can be divided into two basic categories: diegetic music, which features as an integral part of the film, and non-diegetic music, which has been added externally to the film. There is a third technique comprising a combination or overlap of both methods, and all three techniques are engaged in Hero. Of course, in order to communicate with the viewer the composer needs to be aware of the target audience and any cultural implications that may impede understanding of the embedded musical codes. Therefore, this chapter will examine the overall effectiveness of the score in contributing to Hero’s worldwide success by appealing to both its Chinese audience and its international audience. It will also look at the commercial considerations of not only box-office revenue, but also CD music soundtrack sales, and the impact this has on the musical production. Ultimately then, the task fell to Tan Dun to decide on a suitable score, the instrumentation and the musicians to perform it.
From local to global: Tan Dun Born in 1957, Tan Dun’s early childhood was spent with his grandmother, experiencing shamanistic culture in the rural village of Simao in central Hunan Province. During the Cultural Revolution he spent two years planting rice and living among the peasants of the Huangjin commune. Music was his saviour and he collected many folk songs. At the age of 17, he became a village conductor for local musical celebrations using whatever instruments he could lay his hands on, including pots, pans and other household items. He was also a string player and as fate would have it, a local boating accident resulted in the drowning of many members of the local Peking opera ensemble, and he was drafted in to play the fiddle and arrange music. In 1978 he was fortunate to receive a place at the newly opened Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing – there were thousands of entries for only 30 places. At the age of 22, he composed his first symphony Li Sao, winning a special national prize. More compositions and more awards followed. In 1986 Columbia University offered him a fellowship to study for a Doctorate of Musical Arts, which he completed in 1993. This brought him in touch with many influential musical figures, and three composers who especially inspired him were Shostakovich, Cage and Takemitsu. “I owe deepest thanks to these three composers, whose contributions to music have also helped me develop myself – as a composer from a traditional culture, growing up in a high-pressured society, living in a new international world.”(Humphrey, 16 September 1998) It was this new international world that Tan Dun embraced, and conversely it embraced him when he signed a new and exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical towards the end of the 1990s.4 His first recording with Sony was Symphony 1997, commissioned for the Hong Kong handover ceremonies. Featuring the celebrated cellist Yoyo Ma,5 it was a global success. Prior to that, his biggest recording sold less than 3,000 copies (Gelb, 26 September 1977). The Hong Kong handover was a worldwide event with a huge potential audience, not least China’s billion-plus population, and this was exactly
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what Sony’s President, Peter Gelb, had been seeking for the Sony Classical label. His mission was to inject new life into the ailing classical music recording industry, and his strategy, although not entirely new,6 was more robust in its execution: At Sony Classical, not only are we signing composers, we are helping them in the creation of their works, guiding them towards the vehicles that will help bring their compositions to the widest possible audience. Sometimes, this means connecting a composer to a very prominent soloist, or to a world event or to a feature film, or all three at once! To be given the chance to be successful, new music must be heard in concert halls and on classical radio stations and television so that audiences have the opportunity to hear the music […] and to respond. (Ibid.) Hero’s soundtrack was produced by Peter Gelb at Sony Classical. Gelb’s strategy was to produce and promote ‘dream team’ film soundtracks: he brought together composer John Corigliano with violinist Joshua Bell and conductor Essa-Pekka Salonen for The Red Violin (1999), and composer/conductor Tan Dun with cellist Yoyo Ma for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The potential commercial advantage of combining such high calibre international musicians in terms of marketability for stand-alone recordings was not inconsiderable. In both cases, the expectations of such collaborative forces were wildly exceeded when, in consecutive years, each was awarded the Oscar for Best Film Score. On accepting his award, Tan Dun was at ease when referring to himself as a “classical composer” (Wager, December 2004), a comment which may have raised some eyebrows within the film industry fraternity, possibly refuelling the ‘classical music versus film music’ debate and the old chestnut of ‘high art versus low art’. The Academy’s apparent seal of approval to classical musicians two years in succession showed that the mood may be changing and enthusiasm for musical crossover was gaining momentum, at least in the world of cinema soundtracks. What it certainly did highlight was the success of the ‘dream team’ package – both soundtracks not only being produced by Sony Classical, but all five musicians being exclusive Sony Classical recording artists. This created much excitement as audiences pondered what other combinations of musicians might be brought together. Hero provided Tan Dun with just such an opportunity: not only would he be able to unleash his creative talents to once again explore the East Asian aural world within a Hollywood film music package, but also to put together his own musical ‘dream team’. Although Hero is a Chinese film, Zhang Yimou had his sights firmly fixed on the international market and he was already amassing his own cinematic global ‘dream team’, with a huge concentration of star power both in front of and behind the camera, including highly acclaimed Chinese actors and actresses led by international martial arts actor Jet Li. The crew included Japanese costume designer, Emi Wada, who won the Oscar for Best Costume Design for Akira Kurowsawa’s Ran (1985), multi award-winning Australian cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, and action director, Ching Siutung. All of these collaborators
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are living testament to the film’s cross-cultural transcendence.
In search of a cross-cultural music Much has been written over recent years about the ‘blend’, ‘fusion’ and ‘synergy’ of Western and Eastern musical traditions. Such cultural cross-referencing is nothing new as composers have been doing it for centuries: Mozart used Turkish themes; Debussy was inspired by the Indonesian gamelan and Japanese art/artefacts; The Beatles introduced Indian sitar music to the strains of modern pop. Indeed, this is how music has evolved, by introducing new elements and experimenting with new sound worlds. Talking about his Silk Road Project, Yoyo Ma commented: “Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them from everywhere and certainly a lot of classical music has included influences from all over the world.” (Eisler, April 2001) He goes on to qualify this by explaining that the literal translation of the Chinese instrument, the erhu7 means: er = two; hu = foreign; two-stringed and came to China from elsewhere. As for film music itself, many of the early soundtracks were scored by German and Central European, largely conservatoire trained composers, who brought with them the lush thick orchestral textures of Romanticism: These characteristics soon found their way into the oeuvre of scorers such as Erich Korngold and Max Steiner, who both exemplified the continuation of this tradition. Another European device which soon became standard practice in Hollywood was the Wagnerian leitmotif – the assignment and repetition of short melodic phrases to signify key characters, places or social groups. (Dickinson, 2003: 2) Tan does not fully adopt this Wagnerian technique, but chooses to opt for an essentially monothematic score.8 But where did he get his compositional inspiration from and what sources did he access? His extensive experience in compositional and experimental music amply qualified him for the job in hand, but what of the musical material itself? He has scored for only a handful of films, although his wide classical output is extensive embracing opera, multimedia, music ritual, experimental, orchestral theatre, organic music, symphonic works, chamber, solo, oratorio and chorus. Many of these works incorporate Chinese traditional instruments and natural elements (water, stones, etc.), and all of them embody some aspect of Chinese culture. Music is the wellspring of internal feelings and my music is completely based on the Chinese culture, said Tan … I am always a Chinese-Chinese in all aspects. I have never been and will never become a Chinese of other countries. (China Daily, 23 November 2003) Fresh from the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it was highly likely
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that Tan was looking for new sounds and ideas. The potential audience was domestic and international, art-house and mainstream. Thus Hero’s marketing and commercial potential gave him the opportunity to bring to the fore and expose Chinese musical elements to Western/international audiences, and introduce Western/Hollywood musical elements to Chinese audiences (although Chinese audiences were already familiar with Hollywood film music style, whereas Western audiences were more likely to be familiar with the Occidental view of ‘oriental’ music, rather than authentic Chinese music). The international market did not just mean ‘Western’ audiences, but other Asian viewers too, specifically the Japanese and Korean market, since they are avid watchers of martial-arts movies. With such a wealth of experience, Tan was able to harness not only his rich traditional roots, but also his Western classical training. Added to this was his fast-growing international reputation and the prospect of other world-class musicians seizing the opportunity to work alongside him. As one critic put it, “Tan Dun has the clout to get the most prominent soloists in the business …” The composer comments that he was “most nostalgic about the cross-cultural experiences he went through while creating the music. It was like a new Song of the Earth, Mahler’s symphonic work of 1908 – inspired by Chinese poems from the Tang Dynasty (618–907).” (China Daily, 12 December 2002) In an interview for Bloomberg News, Tan Dun talks about his thinking behind the score: My favourite parts are the two scenes fighting on the water, which gave me my favourite things to do – to make sounds as I did in my ‘Water Concerto’ and the ‘Water Passion after St Matthew’ […] According to my research, there were two kinds of popular instruments 2,300 years ago. The first are drums, huge ritual drums. For these, I use the famous Kodo Drummers of Japan. The second is like an ancient mourning fiddle. […] This instrument has disappeared, only mentioned in historical books. So a lot was left to imagination. I needed someone who could be a dreamer with me to find the voice of this lost fiddle. So I called Itzhak Perlman. (Hilferty, 12 August 2004) Itzhak Perlman, also a Sony Classical artist, is probably best remembered among Western cinema audiences for his violin solo performance on John Williams’s Academy Award winning score for Schindler’s List (1993). So why did Tan choose a Western violin, or more specifically Perlman, to reproduce the tones? Why not merely use a traditional Chinese stringed instrument for an authentic timbre, like the erhu? Tan’s research refers to ‘the voice of the lost fiddle’ and clearly Perlman’s remarkable technical ability amply demonstrated in his sorrowful rendition of the Schindler’s List main theme, was something akin to the sound Tan was looking for. Perlman was also a long-standing friend of Yoyo Ma, whom Tan had worked with on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. So perhaps this further secured Tan and Perlman’s collaboration on Hero. But most important, Tan believed that Perlman was someone he felt could create the ‘lost voice’ of the ancient mourning fiddle. “Perlman said that the music in Hero calls for a kind of high pitched ancient
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Chinese melody, something that imparts the desolateness of a distant desert.” (Ruan and Zhuang, 19 August 2002) Tan was meticulous in trying to recreate this ancient sound. He had discovered that during the Warring States period (c.475–221 BCE), a stringed instrument called a qinxianzi gave a hoarse but high-pitched melody. “The unheard sound produced by the lost ancient stringed instrument kept lingering in my mind and I wanted to recapture the sound because it would fit the mood of the Movie.” (China Daily, 12 December 2002) He went to great lengths trying to achieve this, and does so by composing for two solo violins: Perlman’s six-million-dollar violin which he retunes; and his own 17-year-old Beijing violin which he restrings using silk strings as used for the sanxian, a traditional Chinese three-stringed plucked instrument. He referred to these as yin and yang respectively with Tan performing as an additional soloist. Tan also mentions that he spent a good deal of time with Perlman explaining Chinese fingering and rhythms in order to capture the essence and timbre of the Chinese idiom. Clearly, Perlman was just as fastidious in aiming to produce the authentic slurring nature of the haunting tones. Tan’s creative energy and attention to detail were augmented when, for the pounding rhythmic steam of the movie, he turned to the Kodo Drummers of Japan. He said, “The group’s dynamic and exhilarating performances of traditional and contemporary Japanese drumming have captivated audiences worldwide for years.” (China Daily, 12 December 2002) Tan stayed with the Kodo Drummers on Sado Island in Japan in an effort to appreciate their unique rhythmical understanding and also learned their appreciation of oral rhythm. When they had difficulty with his written score, Tan had to verbalize it for them. They had no problem understanding exactly what he wanted and the 70-minute recording was completed in one day during his short visit. The percussive sound is primal, earthy, pulsating and Tan uses it frequently in the film. For the supporting orchestral sound and chorus, Tan commissioned the China Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus. In contrast, the sweet-toned female voice featured in the autumn forest scene was an interesting addition. Tan wanted to find a sound something between a lullaby, popular music and classical music. But after recording a few well-known soprano singers without success, he discovered a Dong minority group singer in New York. One commentator reports, “The lovely voice (‘Gone with Leaves’) belongs to You Yan, a Chinese woman who worked part-time cleaning Dun’s New York office; a chance audition led to her fairytale-like appearance on the soundtrack.” (Johnson, n.d.) You Yan was born in Guizhou Province and is from the Dong minority and graduated from the Music Department of the Chinese Central Minority Nationality University in Beijing. She won the 11th China Youth Singer Television Competition Excellence Award, and in 1998 went to study opera at The Julliard School in New York (Lu, 1 May 2006). An even more interesting story lies behind the guqin performance that features as diegetic music in the chess court scene. Here, music plays an important part in the drama. The recording is played by Liu Li, a renowned guqin artist now living in New York. In 1988 she graduated from the Folk Music Department of the Central Conservatory of Music, and later became an Associate Professor there. She was
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also a member of a number of different orchestras and guqin societies in China. In 1994, she moved to America where she performed as a soloist and with many different ensembles and orchestras, and is engaged in research on the performance and teaching of guqin. Liu Li remains one of the only professionally trained guqin players in America and is currently a member of the Melody of Dragon Ensemble (N.A., 2004). However, the on-screen performer is not an actor but 85-year-old guqin Master Xu Kuanghua, from Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. Born into a guqin musician’s family, his father was a prominent master of the Zhejiang School of Guqin. Following in his father’s footsteps, Xu Kuanghua also became an excellent exponent of the instrument and eminent performer throughout China. Xu said: The guqin is an instrument that you should play not only with your fingers, but also with your soul. When I play it, I feel I’m having heart-to-heart communication with the instrument. To me, the guqin is more than a musical instrument. It’s an embodiment of traditional Chinese culture and most expressive of the essence of Chinese music. Since ancient times, playing the guqin has been regarded as a good way to cultivate one’s mind. (China Info Travel, n.d.) Master Xu Kuanghua spent many years researching and teaching well into his advanced years. His performance in the chess court is one of the most compelling components, adding to the authenticity of the story and making this such a gripping memorable scene. Sadly he died at the age of 90 in February 2007 (N.A., 13 February 2007). There is, of course, one further significant reason why all these performers comprised the favoured ‘dream team’, and that is their outstanding musicianship. It would also be important to mention their ability to work together as a creative force, but in fact in this case each musical component was composed, conducted and recorded separately and mixed in the studio later. All these factors are essential for the stand-alone soundtrack, but the experience of listening to the CD is very different to that of the movie-goers’ holistic sensual experience of visuals, dialogue, ambient sound and musical stimulation. In this scenario, the most important factor is how well the music ‘fits’ with the images, and the appropriateness and effectiveness of its placement. In this respect Tan Dun would have worked closely with Zhang Yimou to understand just exactly what the director wished to highlight, emphasize and communicate to the audience.
The effect of the Hero music The Hero score is a true hybrid of elements of traditional Chinese and Western classical music. Tan achieves this by skilfully weaving lush orchestral strings and symphonic brass blasts, with the spirit, rhythms, timbre and instrumentation of China. The main musical theme is first played by the solo violin in the opening sequence: a plaintive pentatonic melody representing the sound of the long-lost mourning fiddle. This essentially monothematic musical material comprises two
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short sections and each part is repeated throughout the score in a number of differing guises by truncating, elongating, embellishing or merging them. Different instruments/voices also take their turn in delivering these variations, sometimes solo, but often in counterpoint. Although the treatment given is imaginative, it does, nevertheless, have a repetitive quality which adds to the tension, ambiguity and suspense of the action, drawing out the drama in the same manner as the choreography coupled with the slow motion cinematography. In this way, the music cleverly supports the film’s technique of flashbacks within a flashback, by reiterating musical material heard before, but with a different approach. In a wuxia film with so many fantastical fighting sequences, it is challenging to come up with new scenarios. How many sword fights can be choreographed into one film? Perhaps one answer might be the same number as a musical theme can be arranged into different variations. Repetition of anything will be monotonous in the hands of one person and inspiring in the hands of another. Zhang and Tan’s combined creative forces produce an absorbing poetic spectacle. Non-diegetic music opens the film with very quiet ‘distant’ drums. The melancholy folk-like Chinese theme of the solo violin (Itzhak Perlman) takes up the main theme. More drums and percussion increase the rhythm with punctuated single note brass blasts. The dynamics crescendo as a wordless robust bass chorus and chimes are added with vibrato strings. The juxtaposition of the musical gestures provides a sonic backdrop and sets the scene for the inner conflicts that follow, and heighten the expectation of what is to come. The tempo quickens, and galloping horses, cracking whips and racing chariots all add to the cacophony and climax of the opening scene as Nameless arrives at the King’s palace. After being searched by the eunuchs for concealed weapons, the music fades out, Nameless enters the palace inner compound for his audience with the King, and non-diegetic music prepares the viewer with the sound of quiet resonating deep chimes, which is then revealed as diegetic music when the huge bronze ancient chime bells come into vision (4:55)9 being struck with long handled hammers by a black-clad eunuch. Bronze chime bells and chime stones are amongst the oldest instruments found in China, dating back to approximately 500 BCE. The chimes Tan uses are the Ancient Rao Ensemble from the Changsha Museum in his native Hunan Province. Their sound is ‘other worldly’ and appropriately placed as an instrument befitting a king or an emperor. The tone colour has a spiritual quality, a beckoning of the gods/ spirits, also indicated by the rows of flickering candles positioned in front of the King and acting as a barrier between him and Nameless. So, having set the scene for the whole movie, the opening sequence includes most of the musical elements which Tan employs. The elements omitted are two musical components specific to two later scenes. This has the effect that when these two scenes do arrive, the audience is treated to fresh musical material, adding to the atmosphere and drama of the action, thereby strengthening and heightening the impact. The first of these scenes is perhaps the most impressive scene musically, and takes places in the chess court (7:20), filmed at Hengdian World Studios10 in Zhejiang Province. A blind guqin performer is central to this chapter and is featured playing throughout the first part of the scene. The quiet diegetic guqin
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music is heard as Sky is fighting the Qin court elite soldiers, and we are told that he “loves chess and music and is a frequent visitor to the chess house”. Sky defeats them and is about to exit when Nameless appears. Abruptly, the music changes (9:35) to low grumbling strings, then high strings and increased dynamics with repeated notes and no resolution, leading to ‘the stinger’.11 Drums, percussive sounds, rain drops/splashes and steel on steel add to the drama. With a repeated circular string motif, the dynamics increase but do not climax, the non-diegetic orchestral music at this point is reminiscent of a Spaghetti Western showdown12, suggesting that the protagonists are about to draw weapons. At the same time the small old wizened guqin player wraps up his instrument and is about to leave. The rhythm of his ‘tapping’ white cane takes over from the music as the non-diegetic music stops. The action is cleverly suspended by the use of more diegetic music, when Nameless asks the guqin player “kind sir, would you please play again for us”. Nameless says, “martial arts and music share the same principals, both wrestle with complex harmony and elusive melody”. The guqin player resumes his seat, unwraps his instrument and prepares to perform with hand motions akin to martial arts ritual as though he was preparing for a ‘duel’ with his instrument. He plays in a classical Chinese traditional manner resembling a Western improvisatory style, twanging the strings in an almost hypnotic state as Nameless and Sky battle it out in their minds. Clearly this scene is precisely displaying what guqin Master Xu Kuanghua explained, “ … when I play it [the guqin], I feel I’m having a heart-to-heart communication with the instrument” just as the two protagonists are having mind-to-mind communication for their duel, thus taking this scene onto a higher ‘spiritual’ level – a correlation between the music and the martial arts. The on-screen visuals are drained of colour to represent the imagined duel, and the grey tones are thus supported by the musical colour of the traditional instrument. Torrential rain, clashing swords, shouting and screaming, punctuate the intermittent slow-motion cinematography. The tempo quickens with frantic close-ups of the guqin player’s lightening fast fingering, mirroring the lightening fast actions of the fighters, cadencing in a split second, when a guqin string breaks, the guqin music falls silent, everything is frozen in time, colour fills the screen (14:15) and the ‘actual’ duel resumes. Non-diegetic dramatic orchestral music signals the demise of one of the fighters, climaxing with the final blow and death of Sky. The second scene featuring fresh musical material is filmed on location at an ancient oak grove in Inner Mongolia. A most memorable and surreal duel between female love rivals Flying Snow and Moon (33:20) takes place in a golden forest amid a swirling leafy vortex, set against a soundscape of screams, drums and steel on steel. One commentator describes it as a “scarlet-soaked balletic swordplay” (Ong, January 2003). Yet once again this surprising imagery, ambient sound and brutality of the action are elevated to a higher level through the feminine ethereal nature of the delicate harpsichord introduction and You Yan’s soft, soaring, solo soprano vocalize. This new ‘floating’ melodic theme supports the slow-motion cinematography in a dream-like sequence, when in fact the flame-coloured images betray the exact opposite: anger, revenge and jealousy. Both females are dressed in
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silky flowing red costumes, and as the action climaxes the final blow is dealt; the drum beats cease as a droplet of blood from Flying Snow’s sword falls to the floor. Moon delivers her parting message to Flying Snow. A solo flute plays the main theme, accompanied by sinister dissonant glissandi strings, heralding the demise of Moon, as red seeps through the entire canvas. The use of a harpsichord for the introduction to this scene is a rather intriguing choice. A cameo role perhaps, for the first Western instrument brought to China in 1601, by the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci, who presented it to the Ming imperial court and trained four eunuchs how to play it. In choosing a 50-strong bass chorus, Tan adds to the power, strength and military precision of the massive Qin warrior army. Despite their wordless chant, their message is loud and clear – this is not an army to mess with. Nevertheless, there are moments in the score when they sensitively hum the central themes (24:00, 46:00 and 87:42). “The massed voices of choirs are, of course, commonly used in films to give an effect of emotional ‘uplift’” (Manvell and Huntley, 1980: 159). Tan Dun mentions that his favourite parts are the water scenes. One of these was filmed on a calm, blue lake at Jiuzhaigou in Sichuan Province (50:20). “Yimou would only shoot when the water was as still as a mirror. That happened only two hours a day.”13 Much of this scene has little musical accompaniment, only sounds of birdsong, splashing water, ghostly cries, shouts and steel on steel. Gradually, the composer uses quiet and delicate repetition of previous musical material as Nameless and Broken Sword dart, swoop and hover like dragonflies over the lake. What is of particular interest is the placing of the entry of the solo violin theme, just as a drop of water from Nameless’s sword flies through the air and drops like a tear on the cheek of the dead Flying Snow (50:20). The mournful melody emphasizes the sobbing broken heart of Broken Sword as he wipes away the ‘tear’ from her face in the vain hope of easing his own pain. This is a powerful use of thin-textured musical support. There are, of course, sections of the film that are kept free from scoring, most notably during dialogue scenes between Nameless and the King of Qin. Since the storyline is somewhat complicated, it is crucial to be able to follow the dialogue and the fact that music does not drown out the speech is an essential criterion. There are also some action scenes that rely only on ambient sound or just the Kodo drums and percussion. Unlike the visuals of a film, which are ever-present and as a result have the opportunity for smooth organic growth, music is not one of the ongoing elements of a film. Good film music is used sparingly and only at those moments where it will be most effective. (Prendergast, 1992: 231) Zhang Yimou commented: “I wanted the language sparse and spare to reflect the elegant austerity of classical Chinese literature. In many scenes the visuals and music will carry the narrative” (Short and Jakes, n.d.).
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Conclusion This chapter has highlighted the crucial ingredients required in creating a musical soundtrack for a Chinese blockbuster. It was Zhang Yimou’s imperative selection of Tan Dun as composer which proved a significant factor in contributing to Hero’s success. It was Tan’s grounding in Chinese culture and music, blended with a deep experience and knowledge of Western music, specifically his understanding of the functions of film music, which qualified him for the job. Scoring for any film is demanding; scoring for a global Chinese cinema is a potential minefield requiring sensitivity to differing cultures. The diverse audience requires a soundtrack acceptable to the domestic Chinese/Asian market and one that translates well for the Western ear. If viewers are bombarded by sounds that are completely alien, no matter how authentic the musical material might be, any intended musical codes may be lost. The score needs to support the action and/or prepare the viewer for the unfolding drama. An international audience will expect and prepare for some musical material indigenous to the locale of the film. A Chinese audience well versed in both their own musical heritage and Hollywood film music style will be listening for familiar material but something inspiring as well. In both cases, the composition of the musical ensemble requires sensitive treatment in order not to diminish the symbolism and dramatic effect, or even worse, lose it altogether. In considering all of these factors, the overriding criterion remains – how well the music ‘fits’ with the images. Backed by Sony Classical, Tan Dun’s compositional expertise in creating the themes and sound world for the score, coupled with his reputation, was such that he was able to attract superior collaborators, each bringing with them their own audience following. This was precisely Sony Classical’s mission, as Peter Gelb stated, “bringing their compositions to the widest possible audience … connecting a composer to a very prominent soloist, or to a world event or to a feature film, or all three at once” (Gelb, 26 September 1977). With Hero becoming a global blockbuster, it is safe to say that Gelb achieved his triple whammy. For Tan Dun, this successful soundtrack, although not winning him another Oscar, has nevertheless given him an even wider international and Chinese audience.14 For cinema goers, he has helped to expand their exposure to non-Western musical traditions, thus raising the level of the bar for future film scores and enabling audiences worldwide to experience and appreciate other sound worlds. So, from Hunan, Tan Dun brought his rich traditional musical heritage to the fore, journeying through Western music traditions, embracing the functions of Hollywood film music, and bringing these back to his homeland to greatly enhance Zhang Yimou’s fantastical visual and aural feast.
Notes 1 Quote from a conversation between Tan Dun and writer Rudy Koppl (Winter 2001) about the nature of scoring. 2 Their friendship began in Beijing. When the Central Music Conservatory reopened in 1978, Tan Dun won one of the 30 slots for composition students and in the same year, Zhang Yimou entered the Beijing Film Academy. Both students at that time were
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introduced to Western music/film forms. “I have known Tan Dun for over 20 years. We are old friends dating back to before he came to the US. He was outstanding in his generation, the so-called ‘fifth generation’ of the Music Academy” (China Daily, 12 December 2002). He has scored for only a handful of films, although his wide classical output is extensive, embracing opera, multimedia, music ritual, experimental, orchestral, theatre, organic music, symphonic works, chamber, solo, oratorio and chorus. A comprehensive list is available on Tan Dun’s music publisher’s website (http://www.schirmer.com). There are a number of excellent online sources, including Tan Dun’s personal website (http://www.tandunonline.com), giving detailed biographical information, published compositions and recorded works. Yoyo Ma was born to Chinese parents in Paris in 1955 and moved to America when he was seven years old. In November 2005, he held a concert in the family ancestral home of Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China. One of the most defining moments in recent classical music performance was The Three Tenors concert in Rome, held on the eve of the final of the 1990 FIFA World Cup. The concert had a worldwide television audience, catapulting Placido Domingo, Jose Carerras and Luciano Pavarotti, from their specialist operatic classical music world into meteoric global stardom, to the delight of their recording label, whose sales went through the roof. This was the football sporting world meeting the classical music world, and for many audience members, it was their first introduction to this type of music. An erhu is a two-stringed traditional Chinese instrument with a small body and a long neck. The performer is seated and the erhu is placed vertically on the lap and played with a bow. The instrument has a range of around three octaves and has a much thinner tone than the Western violin. It is the most popular bowed instrument in China today. Monothematic music is a term used to refer to a piece of music that is essentially constructed around a single melody. Hence, a monothematic score will be composed of material drawn from one theme, but may have a number of variations. The DVD version used for this analysis: Hero, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2004, 96 minutes, Quentin Tarantino presents Jet Li HERO uncut. The bracketed number refers to the specific DVD timing of the textual analysis. Subsequent bracketed numbers refer to the corresponding timing of the analysis. Hengdian World Studios, often labelled ‘Chinawood’, is China’s largest TV and film studio including several film sets recreating different Chinese periods. Building started in 1996 and is ongoing. It is situated in the middle of Donyang City in Zhejiang Province approximately four hours by road from Shanghai. For further information visit http:// www.hengdianworld.com/english/park/ . ‘The stinger’ is sustained high-pitch chords or low bass chords accompanying a harsh or sudden change in the narrative. Interesting to note that in the Spaghetti Western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Clint Eastwood plays ‘the man with no name’, perhaps inspiration here for Zhang Yimou’s ‘Nameless’? Furthermore, A Fistful of Dollars was the unofficial remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), in which the main character also had no name. See Jet Li’s commentary in Hero Defined (2004) DVD supplement (directed by Stanley J. Orzel), Hero Miramax Home Entertainment/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD. A further global collaboration, spawned from his work on Hero, is the opera, The First Emperor, starring operatic tenor and living legend, Placido Domingo. Commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Opera, directed by Zhang Yimou and premiered in December 2006, it was a complete sell-out. However, Tan’s most recent success was when his original compositions were chosen by the Beijing Olympic Committee as the official music for the ceremonies and all competition venues throughout the 2008 Summer Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. The opening and closing ceremonies were directed by Zhang Yimou.
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References Adorno, Theodor and Eisler, Hanns (1947, 2nd edn 1994) Composing for the Films, London: The Athlone Press. China Daily (12 December 2002) ‘Interview with Tan Dun: Composer achieves goal with Hero score’, China Daily. Available online at: http://www.china.org.cn/english/ NM-e/51029.htm (accessed 4 October 2007). —— (23 November 2003) ‘Tan Dun, a musical journey back to roots’, China Daily. Available online at: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003–11/23/content_283937. htm (accessed 6 January 2006). China Info Travel (n.d.) ‘Guqin master Xu Kuanghua’, China Info Travel. Originally available online at: http://www.chinainfotravel.com/Guqin_Master_Xu_Kuanghua_1104.htm (accessed 15 August 2007). Now available online at: http://www.china.org.cn/english/ NM-e/55853.htm (accessed 17 November 2008). Cooke, Mervyn (2001) ‘Film music’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.) The New Grove Dictionary of Music ad Musicians, 2nd edn, vol. 8, London: Macmillan, pp. 797–810. Dickinson, Kay (ed.) (2003) Movie Music the ‘Film’ Reader, New York: Routledge. Eisler, Edith (April 2001) ‘Yo-Yo Ma and the silk road project’, Andante. Available online at: http://www.andante.com/article/print.cfm?id= 12731&varticletype=INTE (accessed 6 January 2006). Fan, Lili (tran.) (25 May 2004) ‘Interview with Zhang Yimou’, Asia Source Interview Q&A. Available online at: http://www.asiasource.org/arts/zhangyimou.cfm (accessed 6 January 2006). Gelb, Peter (26 September 1997) ‘Hope for the future of classical records’, speech delivered at the Klassik Komm Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Originally available online at: http://www.sonyclassical.com/news/gelb_speech.htm (accessed 21 August 2007), now available online at: http://www.gregsandow.com/gelb.htm (accessed 17 November 2008). Hilferty, Robert (12 August 2004) ‘Interview with Tan Dun’, Bloomberg News. Available online at: http://www.tandunonline.com/composition.php?cmd=view&id=40&part=inte rview (accessed 17 November 2008). Humphrey, Mary Lou (16 September 1998) Tan Dun – Composer Essay. Originally available online at: www.shirmer.com/composers/tab_essay.html (accessed January 2006), now updated on Tan Dun website as Tan Dun: Biography in Depth, available online at: www.tandunonline.com/biography.php?cmd=view&id=2 (accessed 17 November 2008). Johnson, E. J. (n.d.) ‘Soundtrack review’, Barnes & Noble. Available online at: http://music. barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?ean=696998772625&z=y (accessed 15 August 2007). Koppl, Rudy (Winter 2001) ‘Tan Dun in conversation’, excerpted from Music from the Movies Magazine, issue 31/32, published on Film Music and Experimentation. Available online at: http://www.tandunonline.com/encounter.php/?id=5 (accessed 17 November 2008). Lu, Qinjian (1 May 2006) ‘Interview Dong singer You Yan of Guizhou in New York’ (Niuyue liying: fang lümei guizhouji dongzu geshou You Yan), QDN News. Available online at: http://www.kapilsharmafilms.com/the_creative_pool.html (accessed and translated 15 August 2007, courtesy of Ding Peng, in Chinese). Manvell, Roger and Huntley, John (1980) The Technique of Film Music, London: Focal Press Limited. N.A. (2004) ‘Liu Li’, Melody of Dragon. Available online at: http://www.melodyofdragon. org/liuli.html (accessed 15 August 2007).
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N.A. (13 February 2007) ‘Xu Kuanghua: Guqin master passed away’, Friends of Guqin. Available online at: http://guqin.mybesthost.com/en/index.cgi/XuKuanghuaPassedAway (accessed 15 August 2008). Nelson, Robert U. (October 1946) ‘Film music: Color or line?’, Hollywood Quarterly, 2 (1), pp. 57–65. Ong, Diana (January 2003) ‘Hue and cry – Titans of cinema’, 8 Days, No. 64. Available online at: http://www.wu-jing.org/News/M03/2003–01-Hero_Feature-01.php (accessed 29 September 2007). Prendergast, Roy M (1992) Film Music a Neglected Art, 2nd edn, London and New York: Norton. Ruan, Wei and Zhuang, Yuna (19 August 2002) ‘Itzhak Perlman interview with Ruan Wei and Zhuang Yuan’, Yangcheng Evening News. Available online at: http://www.wu-jing. org/News/MO2/2002–09-Itzhak-Perlman.php (accessed 6 January 2006) Short, Stephen and Jakes, Susan (n.d.) ‘Making of a hero’, Time Asia. Available online at: http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/hero/story.html (accessed 29 September 2007). Southern Daily (24 November 2001) ‘Interview with Zhang Yimou’, Southern Daily. Available online at: http://www.monkeypeaches.com/hero/interview01.html (accessed 10 October 2007). Spande, Robert (n.d.) ‘The three regimes: A theory of film music’, Useless Industry. Originally available online at: http://uselessindustries.com/robobo/filmmusic.html (accessed 28 May 2002), now available online at: http://web.archive.org/web/20031208182300/http://www. franklinmarketplace.com/filmmusic.html (accessed 17 November 2008). Stearns, David Patrick (28 August 2004) ‘Classical music meets the martial arts’, Philadelphia Inquirer. Originally available online at: http://www.tandunonline.com/Discography/ default.asp?t=1&id=17 (accessed 14 August 2007), now available online at: http://www. tandunonline.com/composition.php?cmd=view&id=40&part=critical_acclaim (accessed 17 November 2008). Wager, Gregg (December 2004) ‘“Classical” versus “film music”’, Perfect Sound Forever (online music magazine). Available online at: http://www.furious.com/perfect/classicalversusfilmmusic.html (accessed 6 January 2006).
Recordings used HERO CD (2004) soundtrack composed by Tan Dun, produced by Sony Classical. Hero Defined (2004) DVD supplement (directed by Stanley J. Orzel), Hero Miramax Home Entertainment/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD. HERO DVD (2004) Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 96 minutes, Quentin Tarantino presents Jet Li HERO uncut.
13 Visual effects magic Hero’s Sydney connection1 Mary Farquhar2
In a New York Times review, Robert Mackey calls Hero an “unlikely collaboration between two dazzling visual stylists: the Chinese director Zhang Yimou and the Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle” (Mackey, 15 August 2004). The result is a ravishingly beautiful film with colour-coded flashbacks within a black-hued framework. Black represents the dark dynastic power of the main protagonist, the King of Qin, as he fights successfully to unite China and become the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty over 2,000 years ago. The flashbacks feature stylized combat in gorgeous scenery: a golden birch forest, a blue-green lake, bleached white deserts and a soft grey chess house. While the story is controversial, the sumptuous imagery is widely applauded. Hero’s imagery is enhanced through visual effects. Visual effects (VFX) are a sub-category of special effects (SFX), a craft, art and science that have brought ‘magic’ to the screen since the beginnings of cinema (see VES Awards, 2007: 5). Since the explosive growth in digital and other technologies towards the end of the twentieth century, visual effects have quickly evolved into a discrete and high-tech industry with both professional organizations and specialist houses servicing the film, television, advertising and gaming sectors. Indeed, high-end digital effects are now so crucial to the film industry that Oscar-winner George Miller claims that digitization is the most important innovation since the advent of sound.3 According to Eric Roth, executive director of the worldwide Visual Effects Society (VES): We are entering a digital revolution. Everyone knows it’s happening, everyone sees it happening and everyone sees it coming, but everyone’s asking, How does it affect me? (Gurnani, 13 February 2008) In our case, the question is how the digital revolution affects Hero. Hero exemplifies two ways in which digital technologies have revolutionized the industry. First, the traditional production boundaries are blurred as part of a new global paradigm in filmmaking wrought by the “advancing technological juggernaut”, including visual effects. Second, this production paradigm involves a “hybrid workflow”, that is, “when what is shot in front of the camera is only part of the elements that make up the final image” (Dunlop et al., 8 July 2008: 6, 8).
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In Hero, visual effects span the entire production process, adding a magical element to the final imagery that is applauded by filmgoers, film professionals and film scholars alike. The first section of this chapter discusses visual effects within a new production paradigm, a significant element in the production of Hero as a global blockbuster, even though both Zhang and Doyle de-emphasize their roles. The second section shifts to the film’s hybrid workflow, using before-and-after stills and footage to demonstrate the ways that in-camera effects and digitization transform background plates and action sequences into magic visuals within the director’s overall design aesthetic. Before-and-after images come from Animal Logic, based in Australia and the US, as the primary visual effects house working on Hero. Most of Animal Logic’s work on Hero was done in the company’s Sydney studio. When we look at Hero’s visual effects magic, then, we look primarily to Animal Logic as Hero’s Sydney connection.4
The new production paradigm: Hero and visual effects Visual effects personnel work to the filmmakers’ brief. In Hero, they are working to the renowned visual artists, Zhang Yimou and Chris Doyle. As director and a former cinematographer famed for his visual storytelling, Zhang is the acknowledged auteur of Hero. However, Julian Stringer and Qiong Yu (2007: 238–254) suggest that the credits at the end of the film reveal much about Hero as a global film because so many of the personnel have international profiles in the industry. But lesser-known contributors are hidden behind the star-studded list of director and cast. Doyle’s position as director of photography emerges about halfway through the long list of credits, however, the value of his contribution to the film is acknowledged widely. Indeed, he has won numerous awards for Hero’s cinematography. The longest list of names in the credits is the 65 people responsible for visual effects and yet these people are comparatively neglected, their names appearing almost at the end of the credits, just before ‘wardrobe, hair and makeup’. What about these people behind the effects? In the new paradigm, they are part of a ‘unique pipeline’ that is created for individual projects, blurring the assembly line mode of the classic studio system (Dunlop et al., 8 July 2008: 6). Hero’s VFX specialists were contracted to the film through international studios but the names of these studios are not listed in the credits. However, individual work was acknowledged by the industry when the four leading VFX personnel on Hero won the visual effects category at the 2003 Hong Kong Film Awards.5 We therefore have to tease out the actual visual effects contribution to the film’s sumptuous imagery. Both Zhang Yimou and Chris Doyle downplay the role of high-end visual effects in Hero. They claim to shoot the old-fashioned Hong Kong way: in-camera whenever possible. When asked about computer graphics, Zhang said that “the actual objects and locations are real”; he feels that “the less computer graphics, the better; we should shoot as much as possible and rely less on computers” (Berry, 2005: 118). Doyle agrees. When asked about ‘special effects’, Doyle answered
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that 90 per cent of the work was captured on camera with computers used for such mundane work as removing the wires in wirework action sequences. Zhang and Doyle differentiate Hero from the high-percentage computer-generated imagery (CGI) in The Promise (Wu ji, 2005) and The Matrix (1999) respectively (‘Chris Doyle masterclass’; Rodriguez-Ortega, Summer 2004). Overall, they treat Hero’s visual effects as low-end special effects, limited to mostly routine work. I argue this is not the case. In fact, Hero is a visual effects film according to criteria from the worldwide industry. First of all, visual effects are now integral to the Hollywood global blockbuster modes that Hero sought to emulate, with visual effects films making up 80 per cent of the highest grossing works in film history (Dunlop et al., 8 July 2008: 10). The crucial role of visual effects sits alongside celebrity directors, huge budgets, superstars and so on (Berry and Farquhar, 2006: 204–213; Lau, Spring 2007). Zhang’s comments therefore appear disingenuous when he also admits, in the same interview, that he relied on the action choreographer, Tony Ching Siutung, to introduce him to high-end visual effects houses with global fire power. Hero is Zhang’s first foray into martial arts movies and his first use of the computergenerated imagery that proved so popular in the first Chinese-language film to win an Oscar, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000). As for Crouching Tiger, the Hero filmmakers assembled a galaxy of global stars: actors, martial arts choreographers, cinematographers, musicians and costume designers. These stars include visual effects specialists. Hero’s visual effects award winners at the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) were nominated by the film’s producers or director as the individuals most responsible for the film’s VFX work. The four winners come from some of the best houses in the world: Murray Pope from Animal Logic (Australia), Richard Schlein from Tweak Films (US) and Ellen Poon from her own company, Dfreedom Zone, but formerly from the leader in the field – namely, George Lucas’ Industrial Light + Magic or ILM (US). ILM was founded in 1975 and has since been at the forefront of the visual and special effects industry. Its founder George Lucas directed Star Wars (1977), a pioneer in cinematic visual effects that tops the VES 50: the Visual Effects Society’s “50 Most Influential Visual Effects Films of All Time” (Visual Effects Society, 10 May 2007). Poon was Hero’s VFX supervisor and so integrated work from the contracted studios. She appears to have worked on visual effects with the director from as early as the story-boarding phase of the film, but much work was also done on location and during post-production.6 Hero clearly belongs to the new production paradigm where visual effects promote specialization and blur production lines: Visual effects technologies blur the line between pre-production, production and post, almost the exact opposite as it [i.e. the assembly line] was in the 1930s. This new reality leads to a far more active and collaborative role for VFX Supervisors and artists across every phase of production, long before other collaborators have joined and long after they’ve moved on. (Dunlop et al., 8 July 2008: 5)
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In this new global paradigm, the early choice of Poon as Hero’s VFX supervisor and the presence of Animal Logic personnel on location were significant elements in the film’s planning, production and reception. Poon supervised the various visual effects companies working on Hero. As noted, Animal Logic was the primary company. Founded in 1991, this company had also worked on many blockbusters, including The Matrix under VFX supervisor John Gaeta. The Matrix was filmed mostly at Fox Studios next door to Animal Logic in Sydney. A surprise hit, it won an Oscars’ visual effects award and shares third place in the VES 50. The Matrix and its sequels introduced a range of new technologies that are now benchmarks in transnational action choreography in twenty-first century martial arts films: [The Matrix] made reference to prototypical elements of the 21st century hightech culture, such as hacking and virtual reality, and included bullet-dodging (digital effects dubbed ‘flow-mo’ and ‘bullet time’ were created with suspending actors on wires, and filming segments with multiple still cameras from multiple angles), cyber-punk chic, time-freezing, shoot-outs, wall-scaling, virtual backgrounds, and airborne kung-fu. These tremendous visual effects were combined with Eastern world-denying philosophy, metaphysical Zen statements, Japanese anime, neo-Cartesian plot twists, film noir, and Lewis Carroll references. (Dirks 1996–2008) Animal Logic’s effects included creating the matrix code itself. So Hero’s Sydney connection is a carefully chosen node within a global VFX network that supports the blockbuster model. A second reason for challenging Zhang and Doyle’s claim that Hero relies mostly on old-fashioned filmmaking is their discussion of the different VFX categories and definitions now circulating in a fast-paced industry. They compare Hero to VFX-driven motion pictures where high-end effects are ‘visible’, such as The Matrix, rather than to pictures that are supported by VFX, where the effects are ‘invisible’. These are two separate categories in the annual awards of the worldwide Visual Effects Society (VES) and are further distinguished from awards for special effects and animation in motion pictures. VES was established in the United States in 1997 to project the industry’s work across sectors and define diverse categories of VFX work. For the “supported by VFX” award category, visual effects “augment but are not necessarily essential to the telling of a story”. The VES definition continues: Supporting visual effects when taken as a whole are incidental to the furtherance of the plot; may help create the setting, mood or environment of a film; and are generally photorealistic so as to blend subtly and realistically with the live action. (VES Awards, 2007: 9)
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Zhang and Doyle rightly disclaim Hero as a VFX-driven motion picture. Given that apparent authenticity of action and combat is so integral to the martial arts genre, it is not surprising that the filmmakers downplay Hero’s visual effects. But as demonstrated later in this chapter, digital effects blend with live action to augment Hero’s “setting, mood and environment”. In other words, Hero is a film supported by VFX. A third reason for claiming that Hero deploys digital as well as traditional effects lies in Zhang and Doyle’s distinction between in-camera work and CGI, although both may be part of visual effects. Zhang and Doyle emphasize the former and minimize the latter. The distinction parallels the VES definitions of special effects and visual effects respectively. Special effects are “practical or ‘floor effects’ that are photographed ‘live’ and either stand alone or are substantially composited [combined] with other visual effects elements to make a complete visual effects shot”. This is akin to Chris Doyle’s in-camera work. Visual effects, in contrast, are “created via digital means” (VES Awards, 2007: 13). This is Zhang Yimou’s computer graphics (CG) or computer-generated imagery. As we see in the next section on before-and-after images, Hero adopts a hybrid workflow, combining both in-camera and high-end visual effects within a brief to the VFX team to be as photoreal as possible.
Hybrid workflow: before-and-after visuals The first question is how to assess the role of visual effects in creating onscreen magic. The Oscar and Hong Kong International Film Festival category and now the two VES film awards require before-and-after footage to determine prize winners in any one year. VES award rules leave written explanations to the discretion of the nominators. This chapter therefore turns to the industry method, using before-and-after footage and stills from Hero supplied by Murray Pope and Anna Hildebrand of Animal Logic. The before-and-after footage on DVD showcases hybrid production through digital enhancements of takes within five scenes in the following order: the birch forest fight (labelled Forest Fight or FF); the library scenes (Lb); lakeside (LS); palace exterior (PE); and Jet Li (Nameless) as a horseman, riding across a vast desert (RH). The stills are frames within the DVD footage. Two before-and-after stills of the library scene highlight the difference between in-camera and digital effects as part of hybrid production in the new paradigm. In the library, Nameless shows his lethal ‘killing within ten paces’ (shibu yisha) swordsmanship by piercing one white calligraphy brush amidst a swarm of black brushes falling through the air. Nameless’ sword pose is all in-camera, including an extreme close-up of a reflective shield that refracts light (shown on the DVD only) held under the drawn blade (Figure 1a). There are no brushes in the before-footage. Blurred circular scroll shelves, ceiling high in the long shots, form the background. The refractive shield, removed from the final frame, brings glint, glow and a magical sense of the blade and the warrior who wields it. In the after-image, the background has been digitally removed, the light intensified and
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computer-generated brushes added into the frame. The sword tip splaying the virtual white brush amid virtual black ones exemplifies the ways in which VFX augments mood and furthers the plot (Figure 1b). The sword would be meaningless without this CG rendition of its precision in the hands of a master, whether Nameless or indeed the masterly VFX personnel. The flying black arrows in the final palace exterior (PE) scene are similarly computer-generated, giving lethal movement to Nameless’s execution in long shots, medium shots and close-ups. A hail of virtual arrows fly towards him in a point-of-view shot, cutting to a close-up of the wall he stood against, now studded with real arrows. Amid these arrows, a body-sized empty space on the wall signifies his death. Real and virtual – in-camera and digital – images are seamlessly
Figure 1a: Before – the sword in the library scene. Source: Visual Effects by Animal Logic © EDKO Film.
Figure 1b: After – the sword piercing the white brush. Source: Visual Effects by Animal Logic © EDKO Film.
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interwoven to give a sense of the photoreal and the surreal. This ‘empty’ silhouette is symbolic, foreshadowing Nameless’ funeral. The horse-riding (RH) and lakeside (LS) scenes were partly shot in situ but also use green-scene techniques, common in the visual effects industry. In this second method, the actors work in front of (or on) a large monochromatic green screen (or stage) as background for the action sequences: riding across a desert or swirling over, on and under the lake. To produce these images, the animators pull a key against the green to isolate Nameless on horseback (RH) or he and Broken Sword duelling in a dance around the dead body of Flying Snow (LS). Wires are digitally removed if necessary. The background plates of desert (RH) or lake (LS) are then
Figure 2a: Before – green scene combat. Source: Visual Effects by Animal Logic © EDKO Film.
Figure 2b: After – lakeside combat. Source: Visual Effects by Animal Logic © EDKO Film.
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inserted and enhanced. The lakeside underwater combat segment, for instance, crops the background plate of the camera panning the mountains, adds in a 3D layer of water, and inserts it against the action footage so that the two warriors seem to be fighting under the lake. Finally in this process, the layers are tied together, or composited, and the digital image recorded onto the film negative in a seamless mechanical process. Figures 2a and 2b are before-and-after LS stills of this process as the fighters soar above green stage and lake respectively. The director’s lakeside brief was to create a mood of serene mourning. Images of the actual lake and live action required more sophisticated software that was both mood-enhancing and highly visual. The water droplet that lands like a tear on Flying Snow’s face is one example. Virtual water droplets took about eight weeks of post-production work at Animal Logic’s studio, half of the time spent on research and development and half spent on animation: producing, lighting, rendering and finally compositing. Zhang Yimou said that the final blue-green lake scene, which brings a Monet-like serenity to a dream flashback, is one which will stay in audience memories: “a lake still as a mirror where two men convey their sorrow [at Flying Snow’s death] through their swords like birds flying on the water, like dragonflies”.7 If the lake scene projects serenity, the gold and red birch forest scene is one of the most richly gorgeous in martial arts film. This scene was fully filmed in situ but digitization supplied both the sea and swirl of golden leaves, based on real autumn leaves in an actual Mongolian birch forest. Once again, in-camera and digital imagery combine to produce the final scene: “I had a guy over there specifically to keep an eye on the leaves’, says Zhang [Yimou, the director]. He made videotapes of their progress as they turned from green to yellow. I’d call every day. ‘What do they look like?’ ‘Too green. Still too green.’ As soon as half the leaves were golden, the crew rushed north. Says Zhang: ‘We used three or four cameras simultaneously at different angles. And the leaves had to be perfectly yellow. We even implemented a leaf classification system.’ (Short and Jakes, n.d.) The before-and-after footage consists of live combat between Flying Snow and Moon dressed in red using wires and cranes in the forest (erased during postproduction) (Figure 3a), and finally of CG leaves and CG colour transformation add a mood of ominous enchantment to the combat (Figure 3b). The fight scene is a red-gold tapestry of red warriors fighting amid golden leaves. Flying Snow summons the leaves into a magical vortex that foil Moon’s flying attack against her opponent. While the forest location decides the colour, the real autumn leaves fell during shooting so that the trees were almost bare by the end of the location filming (Figure 3a). Crew on cranes dropped some real leaves on the fighting women and collected others to carpet the ground so the effects were all in-camera. But this was insufficient; the trees were almost bare. Animal Logic’s VFX staff had
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Figure 3a: Before – wire-fu in the birch forest. Source: Visual Effects by Animal Logic © EDKO Film.
Figure 3b: After – CG leaves swirl in the birch forest. Source: Visual Effects by Animal Logic. © EDKO Film.
to create CG leaves through new software tools. Existing particle systems within the Maya program could not handle the problems of scale: hundreds and hundreds of thousands of leaves. The toolmakers overcame the scale problems, created leaf models and added texture variations and movement: a swirling, lethal, sea of gold. The after-shot shows combat against the original tree trunks with a CG background of CG yellow autumn leaves on the trees and swirling leaves in the mid- and foregrounds (Figure 3b). At Moon’s death the scene is digitally suffused with a palette of reds, crimsons and puce, taken from a CG droplet of blood. The golden forest scene ends as an art-deco tableau of deepening reds in a variety of forest shots, including Flying Snow leaning against a tree trunk and Moon lying
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slain on the leaf-strewn forest floor. Unusually, the after-footage makes the special effects transparent or ‘visible’ in a celebration of colour, movement, and death. Zhang said that “if someone says ‘Hero’ in a few years, you’ll remember colour such as the sea of golden leaves in which two ladies dressed in red are dancing in the air”.8 Once again, the CG leaves that turn into a virtual wind add both a lethal weapon and a visual magic to the final scene. In these before-and-after examples of hybrid production, CGI is used in conjunction with traditional effects techniques. In each example, digital imaging adds content that is crucial to the storyline and visual impact: brushes, arrows, water droplets and leaves. Digital effects also add movement to the frame that is significant in terms of the warriors’ combat. The lethal cloud of flying arrows fills the frame like a swarm of black locusts. They symbolize the King’s power as they kill Nameless. The VFX team was briefed to build the lakeside water-droplet duel between Nameless and Broken Sword into its inauspicious fall onto Flying Snow’s dead face, leading to the fighters’ eloquent grief. The whirlwind of golden leaves becomes Flying Snow’s weapon, drowning Moon’s attack in a tangible demonstration of Snow’s prowess as a swordswoman. Digitization allows image creation and manipulation of the in-camera shot to produce spectacular action on the screen and a sense of wonder in the audience.
Conclusion Hero’s Sydney connection through Animal Logic’s visual effects is a significant aspect of the film’s production as a global blockbuster. The filmmakers were aware of the role required of high-end visual effects in the blockbuster model and deliberately contracted global studios to work on the film, blending in-camera and digital effects into final images of startling beauty. These effects, along with those of other studios, bring a magical aura and kinetic energy to the frames: the lush locations, the stars’ performances, Zhang Yimou’s visual imagination and Chris Doyle’s poetic cinematography. The digital effects visualize movement as spectacle to the extent that Vivian Lee claims that (virtual) flying objects are the film’s “recurrent visual motif”, eclipsing the body-in-motion. She argues that Hero joins other transnational martial arts films, such as Crouching Tiger, in transforming China’s mythical martial arts world into a “digital imaginary” with global currency (Lee, 2007: 9, 21). Indeed, Hero brings the mainland Chinese blockbuster into a new global production paradigm, now well recognized in the West. This paradigm is a revolution in both the film and wider entertainment industries. It is driven by global technologies that allow filmmakers to realize dreams onscreen in unprecedented and spectacular ways through unique pipelines, hybrid crafts and high-tech specialists. Hero is a visual effects film, despite the filmmakers’ denial. They reflect ¾ or deflect ¾ controversies on the digital imaginary at work in martial arts blockbusters like Hero where the digital-real can eclipse authenticity in bodily performances. While the martial arts world is an imaginary space, Hong Kong kung-fu movies, in particular, have long invested in realistic onscreen performances by a Kwan
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Tak-Hing, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan or Jet Li. With digitization and motion capture technologies, the real body-in-action can be enhanced or even replaced à la Matrix. Hero’s makers therefore emphasize a magical realism with live combat by genuine action stars, such as Jet Li and Donnie Yen, within real locations. They mostly aim for the photoreal and play down the role of visual effects by making them ‘invisible’. However, the filmmakers sought the best high-end visual effects houses and personnel to transform location and action footage into realms of enchantment. Indeed, digitization allows a film like Hero to look toward global films like The Matrix whilst capturing elements of early martial arts movies from China. Hero realizes the fantastique dimensions of early twentieth century swordplay films where realism was irrelevant. In their spirit-demon (shenguai) guise in the late 1920s, fantasy and spectacle so dominated the genre that it was banned in 1931 as superstition, that is, unscientific and so unreal. Yet the magical warriors a century ago were criticized for doing the same ‘unimaginable things’ that they do in Crouching Tiger or Hero today (Hu, 2003: 72–73). Warriors and villains shoot white light from their hands, fight in mid-air, leap over high mountains and lakes, and fly through the skies (Jin, 1931: 666–667). In twenty-first century Chineselanguage films, Hero’s digital effects are the latest global stage in a century-old re-invention of the martial arts world: a wondrous realm of super heroes and spectacular action.
Notes 1 This chapter, ‘Visual Effects Magic: Hero’s Sydney Connection’, is an earlier version of a chapter that will also be published as ‘Digital Imaginaries: Zhang Yimou’s Hero and Sydney’s Animal Logic’, in Twenty-first Century China: Views from Australia, edited by Mary Farquhar and published by Cambridge Scholarly Publications (2009). Reprinted with permission. All images in this chapter are reprinted courtesy of Visual Effects by Animal Logic © EDKO Film. 2 I acknowledge the support of the Australia Research Council in funding this research. I wish to thank the following people at Animal Logic for interviews and materials (2005–2007): Murray Pope, Anna Hildebrand, Andy Brown (who was mostly closely involved day-to-day with VFX work on the film from Animal Logic’s perspective), Justin Marshall, Luke Hetherington, Howard Fuller, Danielle Rubin and Kirsty Miller. I wish to also thank Andy Brown and Maureen Squillace for answers to follow-up questions. Thanks too to Maureen Todhunter and Robyn White for editorial work on this chapter. 3 George Miller, unpublished interview with Marilyn McMeniman, Brisbane, Australia, 13 March 2007. 4 What about Doyle, originally “a scrappy surfer from Sydney’s southern suburbs”? Chris Doyle claims to be a Chinese, not Australian, cinematographer who has worked on films around the world. As journalist Richard McGregor writes, Doyle may well be Australian but his signature work comes out of Hong Kong cinema. Doyle even claims, with his trademark bravado, that he is “Chinese with a skin disease” and “probably the best known Chinese cinematographer, both in China and overseas” (McGregor, 4 March 2005). 5 The relevant leading VFX experts, according to the producers or director, were Murray Pope (Animal Logic), Richard Schlein (Tweak Films), Luke O’Byrne and Ellen Poon (as CEO of Dfreedom Zone). The key VFX personnel in Hero (and hence the relevant
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visual effects houses) were taken from the names listed at the Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Visual Effects in Hero, 2003: Pope, Schlein, O’Byrne and Poon in that order. According to the 26th Hong Kong Film Awards – Rules of Election (Note 6): “Best Visual Effects is determined by the contribution the visual effects make to the overall production including computer special effects operating in production stage and scene shooting [of] (i) explosions (ii) miniature and mechanical special effects. Primary individuals who [are] directly involved with, and principally responsible for, and have a major contribution to the visual effects are eligible for the nomination… . The names of the primary individuals shall be provided by film producer, executive producer or director and [are] not to exceed four in number (sic).” (Hong Kong Film Awards, n.d.) These rules appear to mimic the Oscar rules for the same category. See Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (n.d.). 6 The VFX supervisor on Hero, Ellen Poon, wrote that she was approached by the producer of both Hero and Crouching Tiger, Bill Kong, to work on the film. In an interview, she described her work during the various production phases: “As for working with Zhang Yimou, I went through the script with him and discussed which part of the movie would need visual effects and animation. After that I would do storyboards and concept art to see if he liked them. His input would be to determine whether the design fitted into his vision of the film. There was however room for discussion as to the style of CG work, some of the decisions could only be made once we started production. So a lot of the decisions were made once we started shooting the movie and during post production.” (N.A., February 2003) In terms of the new production paradigm, the production pipeline includes visual effects considerations in the pre-production phase (pre-visualization or ‘pre-viz’) that decides the overall look of a film (Dunlop et al., 2008: 7). I have discussed ‘pre-viz’ in Hero (also using visuals from Animal Logic) through the Chinese aesthetic concept of the idea-image (Farquhar, 2009). 7 See Zhang Yimou’s commentary in Hero Defined (2004) DVD supplement (directed by Stanley J. Orzel), Hero Miramax Home Entertainment/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD. 8 Ibid.
References Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (n.d.) ‘Rule 22: Special rules for the visual effects award’, 78th Academy Awards Rules for Distinguished Achievements During 2005. Available online at: http://www.oscars.org/78academyawards/rules/rule22.html (Accessed 12 November 2007). Berry, Chris and Farquhar, Mary (2006) China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, New York: Columbia University Press. Berry, Michael (2005) Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, New York: Columbia University Press. ‘Chris Doyle masterclass’ (n.d.) Close-up Film. Available online at: http://www.closeupfilm.com/features/Interviews/chrisdoyle.htm (Accessed 19 October 2007). Dirks, Tim (1996–2008) ‘Milestones in film history: Greatest visual and special effects and computer-generated imagery (CGI), part 9, The Matrix (1999)’, Milestones in Film History. Available online at: http://www.filmsite.org/visualeffects9.html (Accessed 10 February 2008). Dunlop, Renee, Malcolm, Paul and Roth, Eric (8 July 2008) The State of Visual Effects in the Entertainment Industry. Available online at: http://www.visualeffectssociety.com/ documents/VES_StateofVFX_3.pdf (Accessed 12 November 2008). Farquhar, Mary (2009) ‘The idea-image: Conceptualizing landscape in recent Chinese
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martial arts movies’, in Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi (eds), Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Gurnani, Anand (13 February 2008) ‘6th Annual VES Awards celebrate and honor world’s best’, Animation Xpress.com. Available online at: http://www.animationxpress.com/ anex/y2k8/headlines/anex2960.htm (Accessed 16 November 2008). Hong Kong Film Awards (n.d.) ‘The 27th Hong Kong film awards – rules of election’, Hong Kong Film Awards. Available online at: http://www.hkfaa.com/nominee/regulation_e. html (Accessed 12 November 2007). Hu, Jubin (2003) Projecting a Nation: Chinese National Cinema before 1949, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Jin, Taipu (1931, rpt in 1996) ‘After investigating god-spirit films: Where will the film world go from here?’ (Shenguaipian jiancha hou: Jinhoude dianyingjie xiang nali zou?), in Zhongguo dianying ziliao guan (ed.), Chinese Silent Film (Zhongguo wusheng dianying, Zhongguo dianying wenxian ziliao congshu), Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, pp. 666–667 (in Chinese). Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah (Spring 2007) ‘Hero: China’s response to Hollywood globalization’, Jump Cut, 49. Available online at: http://www.ejumpcut.orh/trialsite/Lau-Hero/text.html (Accessed 23 October 2007). Lee, Vivien (2007) ‘Virtual bodies, flying objects: The digital imaginary in contemporary martial arts films’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 1 (1), pp. 9–26. McGregor, Richard (4 March 2005) ‘Lunch with the FT: Sworn enemy’, Financial Times. Available online at: http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id= fto030420050050001531 (Accessed 23 October 2007). Mackey, Robert (15 August 2004) ‘Film: Cracking the color code of “Hero”’, The New York Times. Available online at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE0D7 1E3CF936A2575BC0A9629C8B63 (Accessed 19 October 2007). Miller, George (13 March 2007) unpublished interview with Marilyn McMeniman, Brisbane, Australia. N.A. (February 2003) ‘GirlGeek of the week: Ellen Poon’, GirlGeeks. Available online at: http://www.girlgeeks.org/innergeek/gkwk/gkwk_poon.shtml (Accessed 12 November 2007). Rodriguez-Ortega, Vincente (Summer 2004) ‘Zen palette: An interview with Christopher Doyle’, Reverse Shot. Available online at: http://www.reverseshot.com/legacy/summer04/doyle.html (Accessed 20 October 2007). Short, Stephen and Jakes, Susan (n.d.) ‘Making of a hero’, Time Asia. Available online at: http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/hero/story.html (Accessed 10 March 2008). Stringer, Julian and Yu, Qiong (2007) ‘Hero: How Chinese is it?’, in Paul Cooke (ed.), World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 238–254. VES Awards (2007) The Sixth Annual VES Awards, Rules and Procedures. Available online at: http://www.vesawards.com/documents/RP2007_Finalv.5.pdf (Accessed 16 November 2007). This document and site has later been replaced with a revised but similar document for the subsequent annual awards submissions: VES Awards (2008) The Seventh Annual VES Awards Rules and Procedures: Submission 2008 [n.d.]. Available online at: http://www.vesawards.com/awards/nominations/rules&procedures/index.htm (Accessed 12 November 2008). Strictly speaking, these VES Awards documents have no date but I have added them in for clarity. Visual Effects Society (VES) (10 May 2007) ‘The visual effects society unveils the 50
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most influential visual effects Films of all time’, VES. Available online at: http://www. visualeffectssociety.com/pressReleases.cfm (Accessed 10 January 2008).
Recordings used Hero Defined (2004) DVD supplement (directed by Stanley J. Orzel), Hero Miramax Home Entertainment/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD.
14 Towards a global blockbuster The political economy of Hero’s nationalism1 Anthony Fung and Joseph M. Chan
Introduction Hero is a record-breaking Chinese movie that has sold well to global audiences, including Chinese communities. The box-office takings in Hong Kong are HK$26.6 million (c. US$3.4 million)2, whereas in China takings amount to RMB 245 million (c. US$30 million) (Ma, 8 January 2007). Following the footsteps of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000), Hero prevails in both the Asian and Western worlds. In the two months that Hero was screened in Japanese cinemas, it set a record of 4,300 million Yen (c. US$35.38 million) in box-office takings – much higher than the takings of Stephen Chow’s movie Shaolin Soccer (Shaolin zuqiu, 2001) and Jet Li’s Shaolin Temple (Shaolin si, 1982), the most popular foreign movies in the history of Japan. In Korea, as the first Chinese movie marketed by a triplicate joint marketing effort, Chinese distributor Beijing Zhongbo Media Company, Korean Samhwa and Korea Picture, Hero generated ticket sales of US$20 million, reaching an audience of 2.4 million, the biggest grossing Chinese film in Korea (Su, 16 January 2003; N.A., 8 September 2004). In the US, Hero exceeded its predecessors in terms of both ticket sales (US$70 million) and number of outlets screened (2,031 cinemas). Our primary aim in this chapter is to explain why Hero has enjoyed such global economic success. Indeed, Hero is not alone in this regard: It is preceded by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the success of which has led some researchers to treat it as a rare example of reversed cultural flow (Wu and Chan, 2007: 195–218). Crouching Tiger’s success is found to hinge upon a ‘global-local alliance’ in capital formation, production and distribution. In the case of Hero we will argue that the key to its success lies in the nature of capital, which is a joint venture of three parties: the local Chinese private capital of the New Picture Movie and Television Corporation owned by Zhang Weiping (who is closely connected to director Zhang Yimou), Hong Kong Edko Films Ltd, which helped attract international funds, and the national Chinese distributor China Film Company Corporation. In this chapter, we will discuss how these sources of investment facilitated and constrained the management, strategic planning, shooting and distribution of the movie. In addition, we will explain how forces combined to meet the political needs of the Chinese state and to reach a global audience. Despite online discourses that have
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criticized Hero for serving as propaganda for the People’s Republic of China (PRC), satisfying both political requirements and the need for global expansion aroused a national discourse that corresponded to the state’s agenda without undermining the movie’s market potential. The movie in this case represents a popular text that the state can harness for propaganda purposes. But such a text has to be carefully packaged, so that it appears non-confrontational on the one hand, and shows no obvious signs of pandering to authority on the other. This chapter helps to (re)construct the political economy of Hero by examining the discourse of its storylines, production and distribution. Based on an interview with the line producer of Hero, analysis of market data and textual analysis of the discourses that Hero has aroused, we examine the political and economic factors that shape the making of this global Chinese movie. This is particularly important for this cultural industry, because the economic and market values of movies reflect not only the monetary return or GNP of a country, but also the cultural power of a nation in the new global political order. The significance of this study lies in the fact that Hero exemplifies the successful model of a Chinese global blockbuster that embodies both political and market values and typifies how a Chinese movie is marketed locally and globally in terms of content, production and distribution. Hailing Hero as a successful model does not mean we are endorsing it as the right model. We are interested in explaining how a Chinese movie can have an impact on the global scene. Specifically, while other chapters open our eyes to different interpretations of content, this chapter evaluates the strategic calculations that are built into the production process to fulfil the needs of both the market and the state, and identifies the factors that will widen the distribution channels in a global market.
The question of globalization Globalization refers to the multiple processes that connect and integrate different aspects of social life and that interconnect the world in reality and experience (Tomlinson, 1999). Theories of globalization have concluded that the process has two major consequences. The first perspective suggests that it encourages an uneven spread of popular culture, political ideals or consumption values. National cultures eventually absorb this homogeneous culture and therefore become similar (e.g. Robertson, 1995: 25–44). Global circulation of Hollywood movies and its cultures is a typical example that spreads globally American cultural, political and economic values (Olson, 2000: 3). The second perspective suggests that the global culture will dilute traditional culture and the local culture will become more hybridized through global interconnectivity. Although we witness a growing connection between cultural production, consumption and policy across geographical areas, globalization is not equivalent to global uniformity; it involves complex and diverse global phenomena involving multiple origins, time and space (Crane, Kawashima and Kawasaki, 2002). Anthony Giddens (1994: 56–109) argues that globalization no longer refers to a one-way communications flow that spreads a homogenous global culture based on Western ideology. Rather it is more a multidirectional and multi-dimensional set of processes (Barker, 1997) that allow the
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enrichment of global culture by diversity while as maintaining a variety of local discourses, codes and practices (Featherstone, 1990; Hannerz, 1990: 237–252). As the theory of globalization becomes more mature, the second perspective seems to be more dominant. First, there is a resistance to corporate-led globalization by activists who promote the rights of nation to resist cultural homogenization (e.g. Barlow, 2004: 69–94). Second, more empirical research has observed the flaws in the argument of cultural homogenization. For example, Anne Allison (2000: 67–88) documented examples of a growing cultural influence of the East on the West, such as the growing popularity of Hong Kong kung-fu movies in the United States since the 1970s, the global success of Japanese game and television cartoons since the 1990s, and the popularization of Asian food and cultural practices in some Western communities. From a political economical perspective, however, we challenge the latter belief. While we appreciate the basic assumption that the production and promotion of goods and services on a global scale requires close and ongoing sensitivity to cultural difference (Robertson, 2001: 458–471), we do observe that the specific political and economic environment can develop the content and strategy of a global production in such a way that local cultural essence is overlooked. This does not mean the production excludes local elements. Quite the contrary, Hero juggles huge numbers of complex Chinese elements, a nationalist imperative and the demands of a global market. But the final production ignores local voices, counterarguments and aspirations. Such a cultural phenomenon seems to be counter-intuitive to the arguments about the rise of local in the throes of globalization. Various concepts illustrate the dialectic relationship between globalization and localization, including those such as “glocalization” (Robertson, 1995: 25–44), “hybridization” (Pieterse, 1995: 45–68) and “transculturation” (Chan, 2002: 225–248), which are meant to indicate the global production of the local and the local production of the global. These ideas may represent cases where both the global and the local play a role, but they do not necessarily explicitly indicate which side is prevailing. In the case of Hero, we want to argue, through analysis of its political economy, that the tilt is in favour of globalization in the local–global nexus.
The nationalist discourse and dissent The details of the plot are described in other various chapters, and so we do not want to repeat what is said elsewhere, or engage with other more practical dimensions such as the film’s aesthetics and the quality of production. However, we would like to highlight the set of national discourses about, and the positive and negative responses to the movie. A prominent mediated discourse of Hero is its national sentiment. A hero has to sacrifice himself for a bigger cause, in this case national interest, and this is a theme that is compatible with the state’s interest and ideology. More specifically, the fragmented narratives and self-reflection of Broken Sword and Flying Snow are instructive: a hero is not to freely exercise rights of citizenship, break the social contract out of egoistic tendencies or start a revolution in the name of the public interest; there is simply no place for personal
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or vested interests in the making of a hero. Nor is a hero to change history or to hand pick a ruler for the people. Instead, a hero is expected to rescue society from chaos and restore a state of stability. A hero should also be patient, allowing time for the ruler to carry out his plan, far-sighted and tolerant of suffering in the shortterm for long-term benefit. In the Baidu Forum on Hero, a reader wrote a poem: Emperor Qin will forever remember the sword of Broken Sword and Nameless’ dagger. Furthermore, he will also forever remember his dearest friend in the story the assassins told, And also the big character “sword”. Qin knows people died for friends. Qin now bears the bad name for performing outrageous acts to the land. But he doesn’t regret. They all are Heroes. All [sacrifice] for the world. They hate, hate again, become martyrs, and give up [what they insisted] finally. Is forsaking one’s own goal a Heroic act? Yes, a Hero always puts the land (nation) first. (‘Pipaxing 15’, 30 January 2006, 12:11) This viewer obviously has a preferred reading of Hero, eliciting a set of nationalistic or patriotic thoughts. From this vantage point, viewing the King of Qin as a dictator is a misreading of his intention. Among all the actors, the King in fact is the most respectable. Despite various dilemmas and his widespread unpopularity, he braves the challenges before him to unite the warring states. In comparison to the King and tian xia (‘all under heaven’), the assassins’ personal agendas and feelings are trivial. The message conveyed is that individuals have no reason to overturn authority even though they may find his behaviour inappropriate because subordinates can never know the mind of the ruler. However, this national discourse backfired in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, especially among film critics within Chinese communities. In Hong Kong and China, for instance, Hero was often condemned as too pro-China and for apparently justifying the one-party dictatorship. Such criticism appeared mainly in online forums, while the anti-China critique was almost completely absent from politically monitored Chinese media (Fung, 2005: 91–101). In one of the major online forums in the PRC, Baidu Forum, we found that while Zhang Yimou had a large group of fans, there was a strong current of negative sentiment against his apparent nationalism. Dissatisfied with Hero’s attitude in rationalizing war, some audience members said they hardly identified with the theme of Hero (N.A., 6 September 2005, 21:02). One reader problematized the position of the ruled vis-à-vis the ruling class, wondering whether “the sheep should give up their rights when they are to be eaten by wolves” (‘Yuexiayouhu’, 6 February 2006, 09:14). Another contributor said: Foreigners worshiped Jet Li … In the end of the movie, when Jet Li defeated
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The discourse of this audience epitomized the critical worldview of audiences in the Chinese mainland. Some Chinese disliked what they considered the distortion of history and the Western tendency to frame discussions around the abstract and pointless pursuit of virtue and ideals. For this audience Hero does not represent Chinese culture, but rather Hollywood’s attempt to attract foreign audiences through simplification. Using the analogy of junk food, one forum participant suggested that the commercialization of Hero does not make a genuinely good Chinese movie (N.A., 9 January 2005, 23:05). For this viewer, the fast and easy way to present Chinese history is not to the taste of Chinese whom he believes should be more sophisticated in their historical knowledge. It may be a new trend that Chinese elements are now packaged in blockbuster form for a global audience; non-Chinese viewers are being offered a fresh and unseen version of Chinese history as opposed to dated Chinese films that portrayed stereotypical feudalist Chinese society (e.g. Raise the Red Lantern [Dahong denglong gaogao gua, 1991] by Zhang Yimou) or sold Chinese kung-fu or wuxia (martial arts) and its aesthetics (e.g. The House of Flying Daggers [Shimian maifu, 2004] also by Zhang). However, no matter how attractive the film to the international audience, the story does not offer something new – no new evidence of history, no new presentation of Chinese characteristics, etc – to the Chinese audience, only a new interpretation of the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE). As implied by the contributors to the Baidu Forum, Chinese people would not be so naïve as to erase all their memories of Qin and replace the version of Chinese history passed from generation to generation with the movie’s new interpretation.3 From the perspective of political economy, it is interesting how the production team of Hero calculated such political backlash while trying to appease the authorities. Surprisingly the line producer, Philip Lee, whom we interviewed on 4 May 20064 said clearly that audiences’ animosity against the nationalist discourse was never anticipated when they financed the movie, and thus ‘management’ of such a political response was not factored in during the planning stages. According to Lee, the producers were more concerned with the quality of the script and whether potential investors around the world could have confidence in selling the movie in their respective regions. Yet, there are two possible interpretations of Lee’s response. First, Lee was responsible for financing the movie. His view naturally focused on the market strategy and it might or might not represent the views of his colleagues who may have considered a political agenda. Second, market considerations might have already precluded content that could lead them to political errors. A rational economic calculation would rule out the production of a cultural product that may undermine the legitimacy of the authorities who might impose a ban. Even in the most liberal states, cultural productions have to avoid creating discourses that provoke religious protests, cultural hatred and diplomatic rows. It is therefore understandable that every director or producer, including the production
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team of Hero, who plan to screen their films in China, must exercise self-restraint consciously or unconsciously. This conforms to the hegemonic media response (Herman and Chomsky, 1988) in that the media are not suppressed or censored but, because of various political and economic constraints, they must produce cultural products which are eventually acceptable to both the state and the market.
Global and national capital at work in the local market Given Hero’s appeal to the West and the resulting nationalist discourses in China (antagonizing liberals who criticize the film for towing the party line) would its investor, the director or producer worry about its local market? In a free market economy, films are in direct and fierce competition with each other, and audience taste is the primary determinant for a movie’s success or failure. The lack of local appeal often results in market failure. However, because the media ecology in China is controlled and closed, with the state able to filter movies for screening, Hero and other Chinese films operate according to a very different logic: both external and internal forces are at work. First, Hero requires a certain level of local popularity because the local market generates a substantial portion of its total revenue. But the movie also depends on global box-office success, meaning Hero had to rely on a global and a local market. For a Chinese movie or any other movie to maximize its global sale, its circulation must follow an international market structure. The Asian (including Chinese) market usually serves as a barometer for the American market. Should the movie run strong in the Korean or Japanese market, it will sell for a good price for screening in the US. In contrast a bad Asian experience may postpone indefinitely the film’s screening even though the US distributors may have already acquired the copyright. Hence Miramax did not screen Hero until two years after its screening in Asia; they wanted to see how strongly Hero performed in the Asian market before they marketed the film in the US.5 A triumph in the US market will in turn reassure buyers in Europe.6 Second, the key for local sales lies less in how the Chinese audience perceives the quality of the films, than on whether the various political, economic and cultural discourses of the film can become so prevalent that audiences simply cannot ignore the film. However, the public’s awareness of discourses depends very much on the state-owned media and other state apparatuses. Thus, within the specific political-economic environment, Hero could still secure its ticket sales even though the storyline invited trenchant criticism. The essence of the story is how Hero as a cultural production could hijack or be hijacked by the state propaganda machine to launch a massive commercial-cum-political campaign. Nevertheless, we are not arguing that the state directly intervened in the market to ensure the seamless sale of a movie. In fact, the concept of national cinema in China has gradually faded since the PRC signaled the opening of the film market in 2003 by ending the 50-year monopoly of the China Film Group Corporation (formerly China Film Corporation prior to 1999) – the national movie production company and the sole importer of Hollywood movies – and by officially allowing
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foreign companies to own less than 49 per cent of a joint corporation. However, it is true that private and local capital, and nationally renowned filmmakers could receive certain privileges from the state by connecting to the formerly state-owned enterprise. The Chinese investor and production company of Hero, the Beijing New Picture Distribution Company (one of two private film companies which joined with a foreign company like Miramax at the time of production) collaborated with the China Film Group Corporation for distribution. The latter streamlined the production, distribution and screening as required by the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television. With such a state-local-global capital or joint production, the investors could go beyond what is normally allowed for a local or national movie. With the benefits of both real capital and political privilege, the two Zhangs (director Zhang Yimou and the investor Zhang Weiping) were able to promote Hero in a way that other films could not possibly achieve. The scale of promotion was unprecedented. Beijing New Picture spent US$600,000 to advertise on five national television channels, showing five promos per day for five days. On 14 December 2002, the joint production premiered Hero at the Great Hall of the People at a cost of RMB 18 million (c. US$2.25 million). At the press conference, 600 local and global media were invited to the dinning hall that was guarded by two hundred Beijing University students measuring 179–182 centimeters in height and dressed as Qin soldiers. This large-scale promotion required not only huge financial support, but also the collaboration of many local parties, manpower and official units. Its presence in a political locale, the Great Hall of the People, reflects how Hero is accepted by the authorities and forms part of the state’s cultural activities. Similar premieres were also launched in Shanghai and Guangzhou.
The guaranteed local market Creating public discourse is the prerequisite for success. The financial return relies on guaranteeing ticket sales and distribution in China. This is directly connected to the elimination of piracy that has significantly eroded revenues from ticket sales and the distribution of DVDs or VCDs (mainly for Hollywood movies) in China. Hero, with the collaboration of players from inside and outside China, successfully controlled the movie’s underground circulation. For Hero to be nominated for an Academy Award, the movie had to be shown in theatres a week before the end of October 2002, meaning there was a substantial distance from the premiere and the period for formal screening. Pre-screening presents technical challenges as it provides an opportunity for piracy, but Hero avoided this. The Hong Kong investor Bill Kong Chi-Keung of Edko arranged to show Hero in his own specially designed cinema, New South Movie City in Shenzhen. With a high level of security, including admission only upon presenting an identification card, the investors were able to prevent loss of revenue to the underground pirate DVD network (Zhou, 2006: 84–88). Second, the structure of distribution channels in China also protected Hero from high financial risks. In China, since the disintegration of the national film
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distribution system after the abolition of the China Film Corporation’s monopoly, different, non-unified and unorganized forms of distribution have entered the playing field (Tang and Xiao, 2005: 364–367). Hero-mania and Hero’s reputation as a big-budget movie, meant that a RMB 50 (c. US$6.25) ticket could sell for the absurd price of RMB 500. The Beijing New Picture was able to set in its own favourable terms and secured a pre-sale guarantee of RMB 60 million (c. US$7.5 million) for the right to screen Hero, and received 40 per cent of the ticket sales, although the proportion was relatively low in comparison with the American standard (a very promising movie can usually receive up to 70 per cent of the ticket sales in advance). Hero’s share was much higher than other Chinese movies (around 20 to 30 per cent on average).7 Hero proved to be so popular that cinemas in China stopped screening Hollywood productions, a decision we should note which was taken for economic rather than political considerations. The ticket sale is not the end of the economic chain, which may be the case for other local productions. The common rule is that when the wave of pirated versions affect theatre attendance, the copyright of the DVD or VCD version of a movie will not have great selling value. In contrast, before the pre-screening of the movie, Hero’s investor went to great length to prevent any of footage falling into the hands of pirates who, during the Hero hype at the end of 2002, were prepared to pay RMB 5 million (c. US$625,000) to buy a copy of the film. As a consequence, the copyright for unscreened DVDs and VCDs could also be sold at a very high price, and finally Zhang Weiping decided to auction it at an exorbitant price of RMB 17.8 million (c. US$2.23 million) to Guangdong Weijia Audio-Visual Company. Once the copyright was sold, criticism about the national discourse would have little impact on the DVD and VCD revenues. Moreover, because of the high investment by the audio-visual company, it was able to press all official sites, including Xinhua Bookstore and many state-owned department stores, to boost the sales of DVDs and VCDs by displaying Hero in the most prominent place. When Hero was first screened in China, the authors paid several ethnographic visits to hotbeds of DVD piracy in Beijing and found no pirated version of Hero.8 Only the pirated version of the documentary of the making of Hero was available. The illicit DVD copies of the actual movie did not appear on the streets until four weeks after Hero’s premiere in the Great Hall of the People.
Selling a Chinese movie globally The global market was the key to Hero’s economic success. Considering that the joint investment by Beijing New Picture and Edko reached US$31 million, its four stellar cast and the two months promotion campaign that cost RMB 15 million (c. US$1.88 million), Hero could not possibly break even if it had only fared well in the China market (amounting at most to around one-third of the revenue). A rough estimation is that Hero would not be able to make a profit unless its ticket sales in the US reached 60 million (‘Paleface’, 9 September 2004). Thus, there are real economic reasons why the investors emphasized and customized Hero for the global market.
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The investors confessed that Hero was largely a global movie to them. In a public interview, managing director of Edko Films Ltd, Bill Kong Chi-Keung, stated explicitly that Hero was not intended for the local (Luo, 2003). The line producer of Hero, Philip Lee, emphasized that the strategy was to produce a non-historical story; the movie was not meant to be either a historical narrative or a record of facts. Chinese history did inspire the script and plots. The story is merely a combination and transformation of various historical facts which means the movie cannot be considered an account of history. Reduced to a commercially viable story, Hero has to convey a simple message and a complete story that can be understood by all audiences around the world.9 Resembling the strategies of other global cultural producers like Disney, the making of Hero decontextualizes and dilutes the historical details and disengages from the social verity (Chan, 2002: 225–248). Many Chinese viewers missed the point that Hero was not created for mainland Chinese audiences only, but for viewing around the world. The capital investment of Hero defines its global appeal. The pre-sale as well as the fund-raising structure of the Asian movie industry indirectly have pressured the globalization of Chinese production. No local private capital in China could afford the risk of running a US$31 million-budget movie. The owner of New Picture had to partner with the director of Hong Kong distributor Edko who not only supplemented the capital, but was also able to devise and construe a screenplay with a global vision (under the name of Hong Kong Elite Entertainment Company). Besides, the strategic position of Hong Kong as an international finance centre was also valuable to production when the cast and the screenplay, diluted of its ‘Chineseness’, were ready. In general, this kind of global formation serves two purposes. First, it helps movies to accumulate capital from pre-selling the copyright. In the case of Hero, the Hong Kong investor mentioned that the pre-copyright sales amounted to about US$2.5 million when the screenplay of Hero was still being revised (Tian, 10 August 2007). Second, the screenplay could be sold to international insurance agencies to minimize the financial risk. With that assurance, the investors could further borrow loans from international banks to finance the production, which is a standard Western practice in movie financing. With all these financial strategies, Hero was transformed and enlarged into a global-scale movie, which in turn required that it follow the norms of a global blockbuster, such as investing heavily in marketing and promotion.
How much Chineseness can a global movie hold? To sell Hero globally, historical complexity or anything ‘too Chinese’ that might confuse the audience would have to be avoided. To ensure that the overseas audience gets the morsel of Chineseness that can be easily understood, the production team repackaged the classic philosophy espoused by the movie. In recent years, many Chinese mystical ideas, including Zen, Taichi (taiji), yin-yang and Confucianism have become attractive to many around the world who look for a deeper meaning of being Chinese. Hero exploited this trend and sold a major idea: against resistance to the idea of a Leviathan – a strong government that deprives
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individual rights (Hobbes, 1996 rpt) – Hero addressed the danger of extreme individualism. Although this is not a new idea in Western philosophy, it is a concern even for the most liberal thinkers. John Stuart Mill (1989 rpt: 61), for instance, compared the harm rendered by excessive “spontaneity and individuality” and a highly controlled government. For Mill, individualism would have degenerated into “selfishness” and “egotism”. Fighting for its own interest at the expenses of the state constitutes a “bad and odious moral character” (Ibid.: 79). Hero simply re-narrates the same philosophy in Chinese terms and against a Chinese context. So, one might wonder what Chineseness is. The wuxia or the warriors could be elements that attract foreign audiences who fantasize about China. Nevertheless, Hero tends to dilute the traditional linkage between wuxia and Chinese culture, which is generally shared among the Western audiences. This might disappoint or surprise some viewers. As a reviewer on amazon.com says: I feel like I have been waiting for a long time to see this movie as the trailer of Hero has been teasing us for at least a year. I have to admit that I expected to see an epic full of battle scenes and massed armies of men. My mistake. This film from China is a pointed fable, originated from a legend that may well be just myth, and with a theme that may well be lost among the Western audiences. This is clear from those viewers who are unwilling to accept the conventions of wire work in Chinese martial arts pictures and whose sense of realism refuses to allow for the poetic ballet of combat (Bernabo, 30 August 2004). Clearly, what Hero sells is not kung-fu, as compared to Hong Kong director Tsui Hark’s movies or any films featuring Bruce Lee. In fact, what seems to be most appealing in the US is Jet Li, a kung-fu star. This is suggested by the poster of Hero, in which Zhang Yimou, Zhang Ziyi and other actors are all removed while Jet Li is in the limelight and accompanied by Quentin Tarantino, the director of Kill Bill (2003, 2004) who recommended the movie. Before the movie was launched, Miramax even considered renaming the movie as Jet Li’s Hero (Yi, 31 March 2004). Ostensibly, this suggests that the movie was not intended to sell its famous director or any historical narrative to the West, only to target the global audience with a fraction of Chinese taste and a martial artist hero, Jet Li.
The Western interpretation10 For a Western audience with a liking for Chinese culture, would they also develop negative feelings towards Hero similar to those found in China’s national discourse? One reviewer said: Criticism of Hero as Communist Party propaganda is laughably absurd and demonstrates a severe lack of knowledge about Chinese history. Qin Shihuang was a product of his times, no more or less tyrannical than the Egyptian
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A. Fung & J. M. Chan pharaohs, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, Suleiman, or the American generals who ‘cleared’ the Wild West of Indians. Regardless of his methods, Qin Shihuang accomplished a grand unification (All under Heaven) that continues two millennia after his death. HERO evokes the founding of a nation and one unknown man’s ultimate decision to sublimate his desire for revenge to the greater good of his country. That makes it no more propagandist than stories of Abraham Lincoln’s struggle to re-unify the North and the South at the cost of countless thousands of lives, and far less pathetically propagandist than the recent ‘American Hero’ movies celebrating Jessica Lynch or Ronald Reagan. Americans need to take a long, hard look in the mirror more often before screaming propaganda about the cultural work of other countries. (Koss, 21 November 2004)
According to this interpretation, Qin Shihuang (i.e. the First Emperor of China, 259–210 BCE) might have been just another great conqueror of ancient or Western civilization. Brutal and forceful as he was, he united China and ended the chaotic Warring States period (c.475–221 BCE). Although he was a dictator who exterminated Confucians, he did advance Chinese culture. As is also clear in the reviewer’s interpretation, the entire movie sold a simple Chinese and universal philosophy: sacrificing one’s own personal desire and even life for the public good. Nameless explains he decided not to kill the King because his assassination might give rise to a new king who is even more ruthless. The King’s death may have launched a whole new war with the next strongest faction competing for the throne of China rather than ending the cycle of violence in divided China. The success of the story of Hero for the Western audience lies in this simplicity of message.
Towards a global blockbuster To summarize, this analysis of the political economy of Hero serves to demonstrate how its team has successfully produced a global movie that ideologically matches the agenda of the state. We argue that Hero, as a joint investment of state-localglobal capital, could secure large box-office takings from the local market despite the generally pejorative discourse on dictatorship in connection with the movie. Globally, the national discourse is deprived of Chinese historical details and is interpreted as a universal, simple philosophy that would easily fit in with the philosophy of the Western audience. While it is possible for many Chinese to blame Hero for preaching a national discourse, some Western viewers accept it readily as it speaks to a general theme in world geopolitics. Hero was produced, managed and screened as a global blockbuster. It is global not only in the sense that the production and distribution involved multiple parties, but also because its content was primarily for a global audience. Its production only wanted to go global; it was not willing to localize. This logic operates in stark contrast to that of Hollywood, in which local American culture predominates because of the self-sustainability of the large local market.
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The political economy of nationalism in Hero well illustrates a paradox: as a corporate-led production in Chinese communities, Hero does not aim to be a national movie that every Chinese could be proud of. Rather, to make Hero notable in Chinese film history, it has to succeed in the Western market. Metaphorically, to be a Chinese hero does not require one to be heroic in China. Once Hero conquered cinema worldwide, it returned to its motherland to symbolize a national pride for its own people. Even though local audiences do not need a clue about why Hero became popular in the West, Hero is elevated to the status of a cultural symbol of Chinese identity. Even the most critical response to the film could not undermine the glory that Hero brings to China. If the nationalism that the state would like Hero to preach is not effective in the first place, we would say that this understated second-level nationalism is powerful enough to unite the people. The success of Hero also means the state’s conventional practice of forestalling dissent through propaganda or cultural work in a top-down manner is no longer effective; it merely serves to solicit more anti-state discourses in non-official online channels. The more effective approach is for the state to partner with private corporations to reinvent and reproduce the nationalistic ideology in cultural products.
Notes 1 This chapter is based on a project fully supported by the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Project No. CUHK4016-PPR-2). 2 This is the Hong Kong ticket figures up to 16 March 2003. After that week, Hero was no longer publicly screened on Hong Kong cinema. 3 For Chinese reception of the film, also see Yu in this volume. 4 Interview with Philip Lee, 4 May 2006, Hong Kong. 5 Although Jet Li said he was surprised at the delay, major Western media considered this an economic calculation. Hero was shown in the US in the off-peak season to benefit ticket sales (‘Paleface’, 9 September 2004). 6 Interview with Philip Lee, 4 May 2006, Hong Kong. 7 Interview with Philip Lee, 4 May 2006, Hong Kong. See also Tang and Xiao (2005): 370. 8 The authors did at least ten visits in different DVD/VCD retail shops in Beijing and Shanghai in 2003–2005. 9 Interview with Philip Lee, 4 May 2006, Hong Kong. 10 ‘The West’ in this chapter simply refers to the American or European settings. The use of the term does not contain any ideological overtones. For North American reception of the film, see Larson in this volume.
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Filmography
I Films 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, UK/US, 1968) 2046 (Er ling si liu) 2046／2046 (WONG Kar-Wai, PRC/France/Germany/Hong Kong, 2004) Anger Management (Peter Segal, US, 2003) As Tears Go By (Wangjiao kamen) 旺角卡门／旺角卡門 (WONG Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, 1988) Ashes of Time (Dongxie xidu) 东邪西毒／東邪西毒 (WONG Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, 1994) Augustin, Roi du Kung Fu (Anne Fontaine, France/Spain, 1999) Babe (Chris Noonan, Australia, 1995) Babe: Pig in the City (George Miller, US/Australia, 1998) The Banquet (Ye yan) 夜宴／夜宴 (FENG Xiaogang, PRC, 2006) The Battle of Red Cliff (Chi bi) 赤壁／赤壁 (John Woo, PRC, 2008) A Better Tomorrow III (Yingxiong bense III: Xiyang zhi ge) 英雄本色3: 夕阳之歌／英雄 本色3：夕陽之歌 (John Woo, Hong Kong, 1989) Big Shot’s Funeral (Dawan) 大腕／大腕 (FENG Xiaogang, PRC, 2001) Black Mask 2: City of Masks (TSUI Hark, Hong Kong/US, 2002) The Blue Kite (Lan fengzheng) 蓝风筝／藍風箏 (TIAN Zhuangzhuang, PRC/Hong Kong, 1993) Bulletproof Monk (Paul Hunter, US, 2003) The Butterfly Murders (Die bian) 蝶变／蝶變 (TSUI Hark, Hong Kong, 1979) Butterfly Sword (Xin liuxing hudie jian) 流星蝴蝶剑／流星蝴蝶劍 (Michael Mak, Hong Kong/Taiwan,1993) Centre Stage (Ruan lingyu) 阮玲玉／阮玲玉 (Stanley Kwan, Hong Kong, 1992) Charlie’s Angels (McG, US/Germany, 2000) Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (McG, US, 2003) Chinese Box (Wayne Wang, France/Japan/US, 1997) A Chinese Ghost Story 3 (Qiannü youhun III: Dao dao dao) 倩女幽魂3：道道道／倩女 幽魂3：道道道 (Siu-Tung Ching, Hong Kong, 1991) A Chinese Odyssey (Da hua xiyou) 大话西遊／大話西遊 (Jeffrey Lau, Hong Kong, 1994) Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Tian xia wu shuang) 天下无双／天下無雙 (Jeffrey Lau, Hong Kong, 2002) Chopper (Andrew Dominik, Australia, 2000) Chungking Express (Chongqing senlin) 重庆森林／重慶森林 (WONG Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, 1994)
Filmography
213
A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi) 悲情城市／悲情城市 (HOU Hsiao-Hsien, Hong Kong/Taiwan, 1989) Clean (Olivier Assayas, Canada/France/UK, 2004) Come Drink with Me (Da zui xia) 大醉侠／大醉侠 (King Hu, Hong Kong, 1966) Confession of Pain (Shang cheng) 伤城／傷城 (Wai-Keung Lau & Siu-Fai Mak, Hong Kong, 2006) Cradle 2 the Grave (Andrzej Bartkowiak, US, 2003) The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course (John Stainton, Australia/US, 2002) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong) 卧虎藏龙／臥虎藏龍 (Ang Lee, US/ Taiwan/PRC, 2000) Curse of the Golden Flower (Mancheng jindai huangjin jia) 满城尽带黄金甲／滿城盡帶 黃金甲 (ZHANG Yimou, Hong Kong/PRC, 2006) Cyclo (Tran Anh Hung, Vietnam/France/Hong Kong, 1995) Dark City (Alex Proyas, US/Australia, 1998) The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, US, 2004) Days of Being Wild (Afei zhengzhuan) 阿飞正传／阿飛正傳 (WONG Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, 1990) Double Impact (Sheldon Lettich, US, 1991) Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (Rob Cohen, US, 1993) The Eagle Shooting Heroes (Shediao yingxiong zhuan) 射雕英雄传／射鵰英雄傳 (Jeffrey Lau, Hong Kong, 1993) Eight and a Half Women (Peter Greenaway, UK/Netherlands/Luxemourg/Germany, 1999) The Emperor and the Assassin (Jingke ci qinwang) 荆轲刺秦王／荊軻刺秦王 (CHEN Kaige, France/Japan/PRC, 1998) The Emperor’s Shadow (Qin song) 秦颂／秦頌 (ZHOU Xiaowen, Hong Kong/PRC, 1996) Fantasia (James Algar and Samuel Armstrong, US, 1940) Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bie ji) 霸王别姬／霸王別姬 (CHEN Kaige, PRC/Hong Kong, 1993) Fatal Decision (Shengsi jueze) 生死抉择／生死抉擇 (YU Benzheng, PRC, 2000) A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, Italy, 1964) Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) 海上花／海上花 (HOU Hsiao-Hsien, Taiwan, 1998) Fong Sai Yuk (Fang shiyu) 方世玉／方世玉 (Corey Yuen, Hong Kong, 1993) The Gang’s All Here (Busby Berkeley, US, 1943) Gohatto (Taboo) (Oshima Nagisa, Japan/UK/France, 1999) Gorgeous (Boli zun) 玻璃樽／玻璃樽 (Vincent Kok, Hong Kong, 1999) Happy Together (Chunguang zhaxie) 春光乍洩／春光乍洩 (WONG Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, 1997) Hard Boiled (Lashou shentan) 辣手神探／辣手神探 (John Woo, Hong Kong, 1992) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, UK/US, 2005) Hero (Yingxiong) 英雄／英雄 (ZHANG Yimou, PRC, 2002) Hibiscus Town (Furong zhen) 芙蓉镇／芙蓉鎮 (XIE Jin, PRC, 1986) Holy Smoke (Jane Campion, US, 1999) The House of Flying Daggers (Shimian maifu) 十面埋伏／十面埋伏 (ZHANG Yimou, PRC, 2004) In the Mood for Love (Huayang nianhua) 花样年华／花樣年華 (WONG Kar-Wai, Hong Kong/France, 2000) Infernal Affairs (Wu jian dao) 无间道／無間道 (Wai-Keung Lau & Sui-Fai Mak, Hong Kong, 2002) Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, France, 1996)
214
Filmography
Jiang Hu 江湖／江湖 (Ching-Po Wong, Hong Kong, 2004) Judou 菊豆／菊豆 (ZHANG Yimou, PRC, 1990) Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, US, 2003) Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (Quentin Tarantino, US, 2004) The Killer (Diexie shuangxiong) 喋血双雄／喋血雙雄 (John Woo, Hong Kong, 1989) Kiss of the Dragon (Chris Nahon, US, 2001) Kung Fu Hustle (Gongfu) 功夫／功夫 (Stephen Chow, Hong Kong/PRC, 2004) Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne and John Stevenson, US, 2008) Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (Jan de Bont, US, 2003) Last Life in the Universe (Pen-Ek Ratanarwang, Thailand/Japan, 2003) Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, UK, 1962) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, US/New Zealand, 2001) Love Me, Love My Money (Youqing yinshui bao) 有情饮水饱／有情飲水飽 (Jing Wong, Hong Kong, 2001) Love Unto Waste (Dixia qing) 地下情／地下情 (Stanley Kwan, Hong Kong, 1986) The Lover (Jean-Jacques Annaud, France/UK/Vietnam, 1992) Lust, Caution (Se jie) 色戒／色戒 (Ang Lee, US/PRC/Taiwan/Hong Kong, 2007) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (John Ford, US, 1962) Master and Commander (Peter Weir, US, 2003) The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers, US, 1999) Memoirs of a Geisha (Rob Marshall, US, 2005) Mission to Mars (Brian De Palma, US, 2000) Motel Cactus (PARK Ki-Yong, South Korea, 1997) Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, US, 2001) Mousehunt (Gore Verbinski, US, 1997) Mulan Joins the Army (Mulan congjun) 木兰从军／木蘭從軍 (Wancang Bu, ROC, 1939) The Myth (Shen hua) 神话／神話 (Stanley Tong, PRC/Hong Kong, 2005) New Dragon Inn (Xin longmen kezhan) 新龙门客栈／新龍門客棧 (Raymond Lee, Hong Kong, 1992) New Police Story (Xin jingcha gushi) 新警察故事／新警察故事 (Benny Chan, Hong Kong/PRC, 2004) Not One Less (Yige dou buneng shao) 一个都不能少／一個都不能少 (ZHANG Yimou, PRC, 1999) Old Well (Lao jing) 老井／老井 (Tianming Wu, PRC, 1986) Once upon a Time in China (also known as Wong Fei Hung) (Huang Fei-Hung) 黄飞鸿／ 黃飛鴻 (TSUI Hark, Hong Kong, 1991) The One (James Wong, US, 2001) One and Eight (Yige he bage) 一个和八个／ㄧ個和八個 (Junzhao Zhang, PRC, 1983) The One-Armed Swordsman (Du bi dao) 独臂刀／獨臂刀 (ZHANG Che, Hong Kong, 1967) Princess Raccoon (Seijun Suzuki, Japan, 2005) Project A (A jihua) A计画／A計劃 (Jackie Chan, Hong Kong, 1983) The Promise (Wu ji) 无亟／無極 (CHEN Kaige, PRC/Hong Kong/Japan/South Korea, 2005) Prospero’s Books (Peter Greenaway, Netherlands/France/Italy, 1991) Psycho (Gus van Sant, US, 1998) Purple Butterfly (Zi hudie) 紫蝴蝶／紫蝴蝶 (LOU Ye, PRC/France, 2003) The Quiet American (Phillip Noyce, US/Germany/Australia, 2002) Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, Australia, 2002)
Filmography
215
Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong denglong gaogao gua) 大红灯笼高高挂／大紅燈籠高高 掛 (ZHANG Yimou, PRC/Taiwan/Hong Kong, 1991) Ran (Akira Kurusawa, Japan/France, 1985) Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang) 红高粱／紅高粱 (ZHANG Yimou, PRC, 1988) The Red Violin (François Girard, Canada/Italy/UK, 1998) Riding Along for Thousands of Miles (Qianli zou dan qi) 千里走单骑／千里走單騎 (ZHANG Yimou, PRC/Hong Kong/Japan, 2005) The Road Home (Wode fuqin muqin) 我的父亲母亲／我的父親母親 (ZHANG Yimou, PRC, 2000) Romeo Must Die (Andrzei Bartkowiak, US, 2000) Rush Hour (Brett Ratmer, US, 1998) Rush Hour 2 (Brett Ratner, US, 2001) Rush Hour 3 (Brett Ratner, US/Germany, 2007) Scary Movie (Keenen Ivory Wayans, US, 2000) Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, US, 1993) Seabiscuit (Gary Ross, US, 2001) Seoul Raiders (Hancheng gonglue) 韩城攻略／韓城攻略 (Jingle Ma, Hong Kong/South Korea, 2005) Seven Swords (Qi jian) 七剑／七劍 (TSUI Hark, Hong Kong, 2005) Shadow of China (Yanagimachi Mitsuo, Japan, 1990) Shanghai Triad (Yao a yao, yaodao waipo qiao) 摇啊摇，摇到外婆桥／搖阿搖，搖到 外婆橋 (ZHANG Yimou, France/PRC, 1995) Shaolin Soccer (Shaolin zuqiu) 少林足球／少林足球 (Stephen Chow, Hong Kong/PRC, 2001) Shaolin Temple (Shaolin si) 少林寺／少林寺 (Xinyan Zhang, Hong Kong, 1982) Shine (Scott Hicks, Australia/UK, 1996) Sin City (Frank Miller et al, US, 2005) Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (Robert Rodriguez, US, 2003) Star Wars (George Lucas, US, 1977) Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, US, 1999) Still Life (Sanxia haoren) 三峡好人／三峽好人 (JIA Zhangke, PRC/Hong Kong, 2006) The Stormriders (Fengyun xiongba tianxia) 风云雄霸天下／風雲雄霸天下 (Andrew Lau, Hong Kong, 1998) The Story of Qiuju (Qiuju da guansi) 秋菊打官司／秋菊打官司 (ZHANG Yimou, PRC/ Hong Kong, 1992) Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, Australia, 1992) Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, US/Australia, 2006) Swordsman (Xiao ao jiang hu) 笑傲江湖／笑傲江湖 (King Hu & TSUI Hark, Hong Kong, 1990) Temptress Moon (Fengyue) 风月／風月 (CHEN Kaige, PRC, 1995) That Day on the Beach (Haitan shang de yitan) 海滩上的一天／海灘上的一天 (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1983) Titanic (James Cameron, US, 1997) To Live (Huozhe) 活着／活着 (ZHANG Yimou, PRC, 1994) Tokyo Raiders (Dongjing gonglue) 东京攻略／東京攻略 (Jingle Ma, Hong Kong, 2000) Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, UK/US, 1997) Vive L’Amour (Aiqing wansui) 爱情万岁／愛情萬歲 (TSAI Ming-Liang, Taiwan, 1994) Wedding Banquet (Xi yan) 喜宴／喜宴 (Ang Lee, Taiwan/US, 1993) The White Countess (James Ivory, UK/US/Germany/China, 2005)
216
Filmography
The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, US, 1969) William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, US, 1996) Yellow Earth (Huang tudi) 黄土地／黃土地 (CHEN Kaige, PRC, 1984) Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1961) You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, UK, 1967) Zu Warriors (also known as Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain) (Xin shushan jianxia) 新蜀山剑侠／新蜀山劍俠 (TSUI Hark, Hong Kong, 1983)
II Documentary Cause: The Birth of Hero (Yuanqi) 缘起／緣起 (Gan Lu, Beijing xuanliu documentary studio／北京玄流纪录片工作室／北京玄流紀錄片工作室, PRC, 2002) Hero Defined (2004) DVD supplement (directed by Stanley J. Orzel), Hero Miramax Home Entertainment/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD
III Television series 24 (US, 2001–present) The Duke of Mount Deer (Lu ding ji, Hong Kong, 1984) 鹿鼎记／鹿鼎記 The First Emperor (Qin Shihuang, PRC, 2002) 秦始皇／秦始皇 Jackie Chan Adventures (US, 2000–2005) The New Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre (Yitian tulong ji, Hong Kong, 1986) 倚天屠龙 记／倚天屠龍記 The Sopranos (US, 1999–2007) Star Trek (US, 1966–2005)
Chinese glossary Selected names and terms
Broken Sword (Can Jian) 残剑／殘劍 caizi jiaren 才子佳人／才子佳人 Cao, Gangchuan 曹刚川／曹剛川 Chan, Jackie (Cheng Long) 成龙／成龍 Chen, Daoming 陈道明／陳道明 Chen, Kaige 陈凯歌／陳凱歌 Cheng, Pei-Pei (Zheng Peipei) 郑佩佩／鄭佩佩 Cheung, Leslie (Zhang Guorong) 张国荣／張國榮 Cheung, Maggie (Zhang Manyu) 张曼玉／張曼玉 Chiang, Kai-Shek (Jiang Jieshi or Jiang Zhongzheng) ／蔣介石 (蔣中正) Ching, Siutung (Cheng Xiaodong) 程小东／程小東 Chow, Stephen (Zhou Xingchi) 周星驰／周星馳 Chow, Yun-Fat (Zhou Runfa) 周润发／周潤發 Chu 楚／楚 Cihai 辞海／辭海 cike 刺客／刺客 Ciyuan 辞源／辭源 Confucius (Kongzi) 孔子／孔子 da hua 大话／大話 da pian 大片／大片 Daojia 道家／道家 e gao 恶搞／惡搞 Efanggong 阿房宫／阿房宮 erhu 二胡／二胡 Ernü yingxiong zhuan 儿女英雄传／兒女英雄傳 Fajia 法家／法家 Fan, Zhongyan 范仲淹／范仲淹 Feng, Xiaogang 冯小刚／馮小剛 fenshu 焚书／焚書 Flying Snow (Fei Xue) 飞雪／飛雪 Gao, Jianli 高渐离／高漸離 Ge, Nenniang 葛嫩娘／葛嫩娘
蒋介石（蒋中正）
218
Chinese Glossary
Ge, You 葛优／葛優 Gong, Li 巩俐／鞏俐 Guo qin lun 过秦论／過秦論 guqin 古琴／古琴 Han 汉／漢 Han 韩／韓 Han, Feizi 韩非子／韓非子 he sui pian 贺岁片／賀歲片 hen seqing 很色情／很色情 heping 和平／和平 heping fazhan 和平发展／和平發展 heping jueqi 和平崛起／和平崛起 Hou, Hsiao-Hsien (Hou Xiaoxian) 侯孝贤／侯孝賢 Hou, Ying 侯嬴／侯贏 Hu, Jintao 胡锦涛／胡錦濤 Hu, King (Hu Jinquan) 胡金铨／胡金銓 Hu, Yaobang 胡耀邦／胡耀邦 Hua, Mulan 花木兰／花木蘭 huangdi 皇帝／皇帝 Jia, Yi 贾谊／賈誼 Jia, Zhangke 贾樟柯／賈樟柯 jian (sword) 剑／劍 jiang hu 江湖／江湖 Jiang, Wen 姜文／姜文 Jiang, Zemin 江泽民／江澤民 jianke 剑客／劍客 jiating lunli pian 家庭伦理片／家庭倫理片 Jin Yong 金庸／金庸 Jing, Ke 荆轲／荊軻 Jinghua yuan 镜花缘／鏡花緣 junzi 君子／君子 kengru 坑儒／坑儒 kung-fu (gongfu) 功夫／功夫 kung-fu pian (gongfu pian) 功夫片／功夫片 Kwan, Stanley (Guan Jinpeng) 关锦鹏／關錦鵬 Kwan, Tak-Hing (Guan Dexing) 关德兴／關德興 Lau, Andy (Liu Dehua) 刘德华／劉德華 Lee, Ang (Li An) 李安／李安 Lee, Bruce (Li Xiaolong) 李小龙／李小龍 Leung, Tony Chiu-Wai (Liang Chaowei) 梁朝伟／梁朝偉 Leung, Tony Ka-Fai (Liang Jiahui) 梁家辉／梁家輝 Li, Feng 李冯／李馮 Li, Jet (Li Lianjie) 李连杰／李連杰 Li ji (The Book of Rites) 礼记／禮記 Li, Ruzhen 李汝珍／李汝珍
Chinese Glossary
219
Li yun 礼运篇／禮運篇 Liang, Hongyu 梁红玉／梁紅玉 Lin, Zexu 林则徐／林則徐 Lu, Xun 鲁迅／魯迅 Lun tian xia 论天下／論天下 Lunyu 论语／論語 Ma, Yoyo (Ma Youyou) 马友友／馬友友 Mao, Zedong 毛泽东／毛澤東 mei, shan 美，善／美，善 Mingmo yihen 明末遗恨／明末遺恨 Moon (Ru Yue) 如月／如月 mou-lie-tao (wu-li-tou) 无厘头／無厘頭 Mu, Guiying 穆桂英／穆桂英 Mulan ci 木兰辞／木蘭辭 Nameless (Wu Ming) 无名／無名 Ouyang, Yuqing 欧阳予情／歐陽予情 ping tian xia 平天下／平天下 Qi 齐／齊 qijia 齐家／齊家 Qin 秦／秦 Qin, Liangyu 秦良玉／秦良玉 Qin Shihuang (Shi huangdi) 秦始皇（始皇帝）／秦始皇 (始皇帝) Qin Shihuang benji 秦始皇本纪／秦始皇本紀 Qin wang 秦王／秦王 Qin wang buneng sha 秦王不能杀／秦王不能殺 Qing 清／清 qinxianzi 琴弦子／琴弦子 Rujia 儒家／儒家 sanxian 三弦／三弦 shenguai 神怪／神怪 sheshen quyi, shashen chengren 舍身取义, 杀身成仁／捨身取義，殺身 成仁 shibu yisha 十步一杀／十步一殺 Shiji 史记／史記 Shisan Mei 十三妹／十三妹 shisi rugui 视死如归／視死如歸 Shu jing (The Book of History) 书经／書經 Sima, Qian 司马迁／司馬遷 sishi 死士／死士 Sky (Chang Kong) 长空／長空 Sun, Yat-Sen (Sun Yixian or Sun Zhongshan) 孙逸仙（孙中山）／孫逸 仙 (孫中山) taichi (taiji) 太极／太極 Tan, Dun 谭盾／譚盾 ti tian xing dao 替天行道／替天行道
220
Chinese Glossary
tian dao 天道／天道 tian ming 天命／天命 tian xia 天下／天下 tian xia wei gong 天下为公／天下為公 Tsui, Hark (Xu Ke) 徐克／徐克 Wang, Bin 王斌／王斌 Wang, Jingwei 汪精卫／汪精衛 wang you 网友／網友 Wei 卫／衛 Wen, Jiabao 温家宝／溫家寶 Wen, Kang 文康／文康 wen-wu 文武／文武 Wong, Kar-Wai (Wang Jiawei) 王家卫／王家衛 Woo, John (Wu Yusen) 吴宇森／吳宇森 wuxia 武侠／武侠 wuxia pian 武侠片／武侠片 wuxia shenguai pian 武侠神怪片／武侠神怪片 xia 侠／俠 xiake 侠客／俠客 xian tian xia zhi you er you, hou tian xia zhi le er le 先天下之忧而忧，后天 下之乐而乐／先天下之憂而憂，後天下之樂而樂 xiao chang 笑场／笑場 xiashi 侠士／俠士 xiayi 侠义／俠義 xiayi jingshen 侠义精神／俠義精神 Xie, Jin 谢晋／謝晉 xiushen 修身／修身 Xunzi 荀子／荀子 Yan 燕／燕 Yan, Jiangang 阎建钢／閻建鋼 Yangjia nüjiang 杨家女将／楊家女將 Yen, Donnie (Zhen Zidan) 甄子丹／甄子丹 Yeoh, Michelle (Yang Ziqiong) 杨紫琼／楊紫瓊 yi he wei gui 以和为贵／以和為貴 yi tian xia wei ji ren 以天下为己任／以天下為己任 yin—yang 阴阳／陰陽 Ying Zheng 赢政／贏政 Yueyanglou ji 岳阳楼记／岳陽樓記 Yugong yi shan 愚公移山／愚公移山 Zeng, Qinghong 曾庆红／曾慶紅 Zhang, Che 张彻／張徹 Zhang, Yimou 张艺谋／張藝謀 Zhang Yimou shenhua 张艺谋神话／張藝謀神話 Zhang, Yuan 张元／張元 Zhang, Ziyi 章子怡／章子怡
Chinese Glossary Zhao 赵／趙 Zhao, Ziyang 赵紫阳／趙紫陽 zhiguo 治国／治國 zhiji 知己／知己 zhong, xiao, jie, yi 忠，孝，节，义／忠，孝，節，義 Zhongguo 中国／中國 zhongyuan 中原／中原 Zhou, Xiaowen 周晓文／周曉文 Zhu, Hai 朱亥／朱亥 Zhuangzi 庄子／莊子 zhuxuan lü (zhu xuanlü) 主旋律／主旋律
221
Chinese dynasties at a glance
Shang Dynasty, 商／商 (c.1523–1027 BCE) Western Zhou, 西周／西周 (c.1027–771 BCE) Eastern Zhou, 东周／東周 (771–476 BCE) Warring States period, 战国时代／戰國時代 (c.475–221 BCE) Qin Dynasty, 秦／秦 (221–206 BCE) Western Han Dynasty, 西汉／西漢 (206 BCE–9 AD) Xin (New) Dynasty, 新朝／新朝 (9–25) Eastern Han Dynasty, 东汉／東漢 (25–220) Partition: Three Kingdoms, 三国／三國 (220–589) Sui Dynasty, 隋／隋 (581–618) Tang Dynasty, 唐／唐 (618–907) Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, 五代十国／五代十國 (907–979) Northern Song Dynasty, 北宋／北宋 (960–1127) Southern Song Dynasty, 南宋／南宋 (1127–1279) Yuan Dynasty, 元／元 (1271–1368) Ming Dynasty, 明／明 (1368–1644) Qing Dynasty, 清／清 (1644–1911)
Index
Note: references in bold indicates a table or a figure 2046 108, 117, 122, 125–6 ‘all under heaven’ 6, 13, 30–1, 33, 35, 37–9, 40n5, 46–7, 49, 55, 67, 78–9, 99–100, 124, 135, 157, 201; see also tian xia Animal Logic 185–8, 189–90, 191, 192, 193 art-house 92, 112–15, 174; cinema 111, 114; international film festival 80, 90, 101n1, 113, 128, 186, 188 Ashes of Time 107, 118n5, 122, 162 Assaya, Olivier 123 The Banquet 4, 125, 145 The Battle of Red Cliff 4, 117, 145 Beijing Film Academy 91, 180n2 A Better Tomorrow III 107 box-office 58, 60, 93, 111, 127, 139, 144–6, 153, 161, 171, 203; of Hero 44, 93, 135–7, 145, 198, 208; in China 136, 147n4 The Butterfly Murders 96 Butterfly Sword 113, 117 camp 138–47 Centre Stage 107, 123, 127–8 Chan, Jackie 6–7, 93, 116, 125, 161, 194 Chen, Daoming 43, 111, 139 Chen, Kaige 4, 18, 27, 33–4, 43–4, 53–6, 95, 101n1, 130, 145–6, 164; see also The Emperor and the Assassin; The Promise Cheng, Peipei 124, 130 Cheung, Leslie 110 Cheung, Maggie 43, 67, 109, 116, 121–3, 126–30, 139–40, 158; see also 2046; Ashes of Time; Centre Stage; Chinese Box; Clean; Days of Being Wild; In the Mood for Love; Irma Vep China Film Group Corporation 203–4;
China Film Corporation (prior to 1999) 203, 205 Chinese Box 127 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 15, 29, 40, 60, 81, 154–5 A Chinese Ghost Story 3 107 A Chinese Odyssey 139, 142; see also ‘da hua’ Chinese Odyssey 2002 116 Ching, Siutung 172, 186 Chow, Stephen 117, 139, 198 Chow, Yun-Fat 6, 19, 112, 115, 117, 124, 127, 161 Chungking Express 107–8, 111–12 A City of Sadness 101n1, 113 Clean 126, 128, Come Drink with Me 19, 96 Computer-generated imagery (CGI) 186, 188, 193 Confucius 58–9; Confucian 13, 16–17, 19, 28, 34, 38–40, 48, 50, 59, 74, 75n3, 158; Confucianism 19–20, 39–40, 59, 206; see also Jia, Yi; Rujia; Xunzi Cradle 2 the Grave 112 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 7, 19–20, 65, 71–4, 86, 93–4, 115, 123–5, 127, 129–30, 140, 152–3, 155, 157, 160, 163, 169, 172–4, 186, 193–4, 198 Cultural industry 2, 199 Cultural Revolution 16–17, 19, 29, 36, 125, 141, 158, 171 Curse of the Golden Flower 4, 115, 145 Cyclo 108, 110, 113, 117 ‘da hua’ 139; see also A Chinese Odyssey Daoism 162; Daoist 48, 59, 60; Daojia 48; see also Zhuangzi Days of Being Wild 127 Doyle, Christopher 6, 172, 184
224
Index
The Eagle Shooting Heroes 117 Edko Films Ltd. 198, 206 The Emperor and the Assassin 18, 33, 43–6, 49, 53, 95, 164 The Emperor’s Shadow 18, 33, 43, 53, 59, 95, 164 erhu 173–4 Fajia 16; see also Han, Feizi; Legalism Feng, Xiaogang 4, 125, 136, 145 Fifth generation 15, 21 First Emperor 7, 16–19, 27, 32–3, 43–4, 48–51, 53–6, 78, 82–3, 85, 94–5, 99–100, 155, 158, 184, 208; see also Qin, King of; Qin Shihuang; Shi huangdi; Ying Zheng Flowers of Shanghai 113 Gao, Jianli 33, 54–5, 57–8, 60 Globalization 1–8, 101, 121, 130, 136, 161, 199–200, 206; glocalization 3, 200; localization 200; transculturation 200; transnationalization 2, 7–8 Gong, Li 43, 80, 125, 127, 130 Gorgeous 109 The Great Hall of the People 43, 135, 153, 204–5 Guqin 175–8 Han, Feizi 20; see also Legalism Happy Together 109–10 Hard Boiled 107, 110, 112 Historical Records 34, 45, 53, 83; see also Shiji; Sima, Qian Hou, Hsiao-Hsien 113 The House of Flying Daggers 4, 136, 202 Hu, Jintao 14, 38, 81 Hu, King 19, 93, 96, 157 Hua, Mulan 65–6, 69, 73; see also Mulan In the Mood for Love 6, 107–8, 110, 116, 122, 127, 140 Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) 186 Infernal Affairs 110–12, 116–17 Internet 5, 14–15, 108, 122, 135–7, 139, 144–6, 164; reviews in China 137–8, 140–2, 144–6; reviews in North America 164; usage in China 137 Irma Vep 123, 127–28 Jet Tone Productions 117 Jia, Yi 17, 34; see also Confucius; Rujia Jing, Ke 28, 34–5, 40, 45 Judou 79–80, 101n1
Kaneshiro, Takeshi 117, 122 The Killer 138–9 Kodo drummers 174–5 Kong, Bill Chi-Keung 204, 206 kung-fu 56, 95, 97, 142, 159, 162–3, 187, 193, 200, 202, 207 Kwan, Stanley 107, 113, 127 Kwan, Tak-Hing 193–4 Lau, Andy 112 Lee, Ang 7, 19, 86, 93–4, 113, 124, 140, 152, 160; see also Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Lust, Caution Lee, Bruce 93, 161, 194, 207 Legalism 16, 20–1, 23, 38, 40, 59; Legalist 13, 20–1, 23, 39–40, 59; see also Fajia; Han, Feizi Leung, Tony Chiu-Wai 43, 67, 106–20, 122, 139–40, 158; see also 2046; Ashes of Time; Butterfly Sword; A Chinese Ghost Story III; A Chinese Odyssey 2002; Chungking Express; A City of Sadness; Cyclo; The Eagle Shooting Heroes; Flowers of Shanghai; Gorgeous; Happy Together; Hard Boiled; In the Mood for Love; Infernal Affairs; Love Me, Love My Money; Love Unto Waste; Lust, Caution; Seoul Raiders; Tokyo Raiders Leung, Tony Ka-Fai 107 Li, Jet 6, 43, 67, 93, 96, 109, 112, 115, 140–1, 156, 158, 172, 188, 194, 198, 201, 207; see also Cradle 2 the Grave; Once upon a Time in China; The One; Romeo Must Die; Shaolin Temple Love Me, Love My Money 113 Love Unto Waste 113 The Lover 107 Lust, Caution 113 Ma, Yoyo 171–4 Mao, Zedong 16, 60–1, 155 The Matrix 6, 93, 186–7, 194 Media Asia 117 Memoirs of a Geisha 124–5, 127, 129–30 Miramax 116, 203–4, 207 Mulan 66, 71, 73, 125; see also Hua Mulan music 3, 6, 43, 54–9, 86, 127, 140, 163, 169–80; diegetic music 171, 175, 177, 178; non-diegetic music 171, 177, 178 The Myth 130 nationalism 5–6, 8, 13, 18–19, 22, 43, 49–50, 111, 121, 123–4, 126, 128, 154,
Index 198, 201, 209; national identity 27–9, 152, 154, 161; patriotism 40, 79, 158 netizen 136–7, 139–47 ‘New Year Films’ 136 Not One Less 80, 91–2 Once upon a Time in China 96 The One 112 The One-Armed Swordsman 19, 96 Orientalism 80; Orientalist 92 Orly Films 117
225
tian xia 6–7, 13, 18, 30–1, 34, 39, 46–50, 55, 67–8, 78–87, 99–100, 116, 124, 126, 135, 139–40, 144, 157, 201; see also ‘all under heaven’ Titanic 153 To Live 15, 23, 91 Tokyo Raiders 113, 115–17 Tsai, Ming-Liang 101n1 Tsui, Hark 6, 96, 207 TVB 117 Utilitarianism 21, 91, 158
Paradis Films 117 Perlman, Itzhak 174–5, 177 The Promise 4, 130, 145–6, 186 Purple Butterfly 125 Qin Dynasty 16, 18, 53, 94–5, 154, 184, 202 Qin, King of 13, 16–18, 20–1, 23, 27, 30, 32, 34–5, 39, 44–9, 54–9, 67–8, 78, 81–7, 94–5, 98–100, 111, 116, 139–41, 145, 152, 154, 156, 179, 184, 201; Qin Shihuang 7, 27–8, 32–3, 43, 48–9, 54, 207–8; see also First Emperor; Shi huangdi; Ying Zheng Raise the Red Lantern 15, 23, 79–80, 113, 202 Red Sorghum 79–81, 90, 92, 113 Riefenstahl, Leni 23, 154 The Road Home 91, 125 Romeo Must Die 115 Rujia 19; see also Confucius; Jia, Yi; Xunzi Rush Hour 2 125 Seoul Raiders 116 Shaolin Soccer 198 Shaolin Temple 198 Shi huangdi 16, 19; see also First Emperor; Qin, King of; Qin Shihuang; Ying Zheng Shiji 34, 45, 48, 53, 57, 83; Sima, Qian 17, 34–5, 38, 45, 53, 83; see also The Historical Records Sontag, Susan 138, 141, 154 Sony Classical 171–2, 174, 180 Special Effects (SFX) 96, 163, 184–8, 193 The Story of Qiuju 15, 80, 92, 113 Tan, Dun 43, 169–72, 174, 176, 179–80 Tarantino, Quentin 93, 207 Tiananmen 14, 38, 43, 106, 158
Visual Effects (VFX) 96, 140, 184–91, 192, 193–4 Visual Effects Society 184, 186–7 Vive L’Amour 101n1 Wang, Wayne 127 Warring States period 34–5, 38–9, 44, 175, 208 wen-wu 55–9 Wong Fei-Hung 96; see also Once upon a Time in China Wong, Kar-Wai 109, 113, 117, 122, 125, 127, 140, 162 Woo, John 4, 6, 93, 138, 142, 145 Wuxia 13, 19–20, 56, 65, 93, 95, 99, 107, 113, 136, 142, 144, 146, 160–3, 170, 177, 202, 207 Xia 41n6, 98–9; jianke 35, 41n6; xiake 35, 41n6, 81–2, 98, 100; xiashi 98; xiayi 34, 139 Xu, Kuanghua 176, 178, Xunzi 34, 38; see also Confucius; Rujia Yen, Donnie 162, 194 Yeoh, Michelle 6, 19, 124–5, 127, 130 yin-yang 206 Ying Zheng 43–6, 48, 54; see also First Emperor; Qin, King of; Qin Shihuang; Shi huangdi) You, Yan 175, 178 Zhang, Che 19, 96 Zhang, Yimou 2–4, 13, 15, 17–18, 21–3, 27–8, 34, 36, 43–4, 53, 55–6, 58, 60, 78–87, 90–5, 97–101, 113, 115, 121, 123–5, 128, 135–6, 140–6, 152, 154–6, 158, 160–4, 169–70, 172, 176–7, 179–80, 184–8, 191, 193, 198, 201–2, 204, 207; see also Curse of the Golden Flower; The House of Flying Daggers; Judou; Not One Less;
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Index
Zhang, Yimou (continued) Raise the Red Lantern; Red Sorghum; The Road Home; The Story of Qiuju; To Live Zhang, Ziyi 19, 38, 68, 72, 74, 109, 116, 121–30, 207; see also 2046; The Banquet; Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon; Memoirs of a Geisha; Purple Butterfly; The Road Home; Rush Hour 2 Zhou, Xiaowen 18, 33–4, 43, 53–9, 95, 164; see also The Emperor’s Shadow Zhuangzi 48, 60; see also Daoism Zu Warriors 96
