A Century of Chinese Cinema

By Noah Cowan, plus one collaborative note with Davide Quadrio
TIFF Cinematheque/TIFF Bell Lightbox 180 magazine
June 2013

Original texts—see PDF—include work from Aliza Ma, Todd Brown, and Jesse Wente (and are great!)

This program was easily the most ambitious I played a leading role in assembling (to date). It was both a political and critical adventure to navigate the respective fears and

Chungking Express

A Century of Chinese Cinema. It’s a daunting title for a cultural project, and one appropriately subject to skepticism. The doubts begin with the first “C,” for “Century.” There are several possible dates to use as a starting point for any centenary, especially a milestone like this. Cinema first came to China with a Lumière roadshow in 1896, one year after its Paris debut. Films were soon integrated into variety shows, featuring comedy, acrobatics, Chinese opera and puppetry, that were performed in tea houses (the Chinese equivalent of American vaudeville theatres), first in Beijing and then in Shanghai. The first Chinese-produced film appeared in 1905, when Fengtai Photography filmed an episode from the Chinese opera Dingjun Mountain. The first proper movie theatres opened in Beijing in 1907, the first film studio was founded in Shanghai in 1909, while the first narrative films that approached something like feature length—The Difficult Couple and Zhuangzi Tests His Wife, produced in Shanghai and Hong Kong respectively, and both now destroyed—appeared in 1913. The fate of those landmark first films would be shared by hundreds of other examples of early Chinese cinema. The first decades of the twentieth century saw China engulfed in social and political chaos, carved up by colonial powers, facing the slow yet inexorable end of the exhausted Qing dynasty and beset by riots, warlords and civil war in both city and countryside—a state of brutal, almost unremitting conflict that swallowed up an untold amount of China’s film heritage in its destructive wake. Yet those invaluable films that remain give evidence that Chinese cinema could provide not only a much-needed escape for the country’s beleaguered citizenry, but a tentative vision of a new society freed of both stultifying tradition and anarchic terror.

Now to the second questionable “C”: “Chinese.” East Asia’s social and political history created a unique model for film production, one that calls the very idea of a single “Chinese” cinema into question. Due to conflicts of various kinds that created unwelcome environments for cultural expression, filmmaking in the region has been multipolar in the extreme, with significant production centres located in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Xi’an, Beijing and numerous points both between and farther afield. In this respect, Chinese cinema has always defied the film-historical myth of a unified “national cinema” focused on a single location (Paris, Hollywood, Rio de Janeiro, etc.). For this reason, critics and scholars have tended to isolate major centres of Chinese filmmaking—namely the Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan—and champion these as distinct national cinemas. There is, certainly, a great degree of logic to this approach. Each region has its own unique set of historical experiences that has informed its approach to cinema; each has absorbed a different set of cinematic influences (Soviet and left-wing European cinema on the Mainland, Hollywood popular cinema in Hong Kong, classical Japanese cinema in Taiwan); and each has developed its own distinctive film genres unshared with the others. Yet it is difficult to deny that the films made in these different places share more with each other—culturally, aesthetically, philosophically—than with any other non-Chinese cinema. Furthermore, recent scholarship has done much to reveal the remarkably fluid movement of Chinese filmmakers between these three regions, from cinema’s very beginnings to the present day: the Mainland wars of the thirties and forties drove Shanghai’s cultural elite to Hong Kong, some of whom would remain there permanently; the first generation of Taiwanese filmmakers frequently recruited skilled technicians and creative talent from Hong Kong; while Taiwanese and Hong Kong producers were some of the first to take advantage of the Mainland’s late-century opening to outside investment, making large-scale epics on Mainland soil. It is this rich, complex and continuing inter-/intra-cinematic dialogue between these three regions—changing, evolving, rupturing and reforming over the course of a century—that this programme explores. And now for that final “C”: “Cinema” itself. As the ways in which films are created, distributed and viewed continue to change with astonishing speed, the very definition of “cinema” itself has been called into question, with visual arts, gaming, and multiple other forms stretching the boundaries of moving-image culture. We engage these new trends in our accompanying exhibition, which features new works commissioned especially for this programme by internationally acclaimed visual artist Yang Fudong and the legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle Du Ke Feng, whose work for such filmmakers as Wong Kar-wai and Zhang Yimou has helped to shape the global image of contemporary Chinese cinema.

A film programme of this magnitude could only have been made possible with the support of individuals and institutions who wish to celebrate what unites Chinese cinema rather than what divides it, and we are indebted to the amicable cooperation of the China Film Archive, the Chinese Taipei Film Archive and the Hong Kong Film Archive in working with us towards this shared goal. Nevertheless, we are keenly aware that, no matter its scope, this series could have taken several alternate and equally valid forms. Chinese cinema is rich beyond belief, and at least twice this many films could have been included in such a survey. We have aimed to achieve a balance between the canonical and the unjustly neglected, the historically vital and the thematically intriguing, and we have tried to cover as wide a spectrum of the key genres as possible. (Even so, we had to make the difficult decision to exclude notable traditions of documentary, animation and experimental filmmaking, each of which merits a programme of its own.)

In an effort to offer a general overview of this programme, we have divided this remarkably rich and complex cinematic history into five sub-sections. The Golden Age focuses on what has been acknowledged as the classical era of Shanghai filmmaking, from the early 1930s to its culmination with Fei Mu’s masterpiece Spring in a Small Town in 1948. Blending progressive politics with exciting aesthetic experimentation, this period was also notable for the ascendancy of the legendary and tragically short-lived actress Ruan Lingyu. The second section, A New China, opens with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and traces the developments within both Mainland cinema and the cinemas of Hong Kong and Taiwan—whose industries had received an influx of talent from the Mainland—up until the end of the 1960s.

From here, we break chronology slightly and segue into a capsule history of the Chinese action and fantasy films—wuxia swordplay epics, kung-fu films, gangster thrillers, folklore/ghost films, and the various hybrids of these extremely permeable genres—that have found enormous popularity and often represented Chinese cinema to the world. The fourth section, New Waves, celebrates the astonishing post-Cultural Revolution cinematic renaissance in all three regions from the 1980s and 1990s, from the renowned Fourth and Fifth Generation films on the Mainland to the dazzling genre revisionism of the Hong Kong New Wave and the new cohort of art-house masters that emerged from the Taiwanese New Wave. Our final and most (intentionally) diffuse section, New Directions, follows some of the intriguing paths that Chinese cinema has taken as it entered the twenty-first century, which both build on the innovations of the various New Waves while charting new territory in terms of form, narrative and subject matter.

It is necessary to reassert that none of the above categories or distinctions are hard and fast. As you will see in the short section introductions to follow, there is considerable continuity between various eras and genres, even in the case of such a decisive historical break as 1949—not least, as we hope to show, in the remarkably prominent place of female characters throughout the entire history of Chinese cinema. Just as we seek to trace a dialogue between cinema traditions, our series is designed to encourage discussion, not close it down. And even though the very notion of positing films from these three regions as a unitary cultural enterprise is an inherently controversial one, we regard this programme as an opportunity to both discover those elements they share and explore potential new pathways of scholarship and cinematic discovery.
—Noah Cowan

SPECIAL EVENTS

OPENING FILM

Farewell My Concubine 霸王别姬 dir. Chen Kaige | Mainland 1993 | 171 min.
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and the first Chinese film to find significant mainstream success in North America, Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine is one of the most beloved and important Chinese films of all time. Not only has its sweeping visual and narrative style come to define the Chinese epic—bold colours, exquisite compositions, decades of history told through emblematic characters, resonant cultural signifiers (here Peking opera), all with a garnish of political and sexual scandal—but it also introduced the world at large to the late, great Leslie Cheung, one of the most important screen actors of the last century. Cheung plays Dieyi, an opera performer who as a youth is brutalized into accepting his fate as a boy turned into a girl in order to play female roles on stage. Dieyi’s best friend and fellow performer Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) becomes his protector and unrequited love interest, but later his enemy when Xiaolou weds high-class courtesan Juxian (indelibly portrayed by Gong Li). Chen’s frank take on the rarely acknowledged impact of gay men on Chinese arts and history is as remarkable as his unsparing portrayal of the violence that accompanied the Cultural Revolution. A mesmerizing tale of a performer lost between genders and historical eras, “Chen’s visually spectacular epic is sumptuous in every respect. Intelligent, enthralling, rhapsodic” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out London).
—Noah Cowan

SPECIAL EXHIBITION

Yang Fudong: New Women

The new project by celebrated Chinese visual artist and filmmaker Yang Fudong draws inspiration from the decadent aura of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. As immortalized in the racier films and literature of the era, Shanghai was an uneasy mixture of Chinese and foreign influence, of corruption and religious rectitude, of poets and policemen, and of the numerous types of “women of the night,” from streetwalkers to “sing-song” girls. All of this came to an end with the Japanese occupation of the city, but it left an indelible mark on succeeding generations of Chinese artists, and Chinese filmmakers especially. Shanghai’s creative energy, sexual charge and political ferment were a crucible of change for a society tentatively emerging from the stagnation and humiliations of the imperial era. Its key stylistic ideas, a particular blend of East and West known as haipai (in contrast to the more traditional, Beijing-centred jingpai), finds no finer expression than in the city’s freewheeling filmmaking during the Art Deco age, always circumscribed by Guomindang censorship, impacted by war and its privations, and loathed and unrevived by China’s new rulers after 1949. New Women locates haipai in the female nude, a form considered the height of Western pollution by traditionalists at the time, but of course prevalent in private Chinese art from its earliest expressions. Yang Fudong seeks to resurrect a possibly invented form of decadent Shanghai storytelling: the erotic memoir. Actresses, each depicted on a large screen, move in an ephemeral world where architectural elements both within the film frame and physically in the gallery create tri-dimensional, highly staged and narratively rich situations. Five iterations appear in the gallery space, slightly tilted to echo the screen positions in the earliest movie theatres—a reminder that the boldest of these new women were to be found in the cinema, both on screen and in the audience, hungry for the arrival of the modern world. The work serves not only as an evocation of an improbably remembered creative past, but also functions as an admission of how important women—and, more, ideas about women—were to China’s transition to modernity over the past century. Yang Fudong cleverly situates this discourse in an “in between” space—part photography, part cinema, part painting, part sculpture—that mirrors the difficulty of deploying women as icons of progress. Existing in total silence, these women are restless ghosts of a past truncated by history. Yang Fudong is himself a fascinating haipai artist, gleefully mixing cinema and visual art practice, European art cinema with Chinese painterly compositions. The artist will underline these connections with a screening of his early film work, An Estranged Paradise, which he describes as an early precursor to New Women. The film took over four years to complete and holds the key to Fudong’s particular poetics. The first scenes contend with the principles and complications of Chinese painting history, its rules revealed in a meditative voiceover narration, followed by a manifesto for transposing those rules to the contemporary moment.
—Noah Cowan & Davide Quadrio

Laborer’s Love 劳工之爱情 dir. Zhang Sichuan | China 1922 | 30 min. | 35mm
Although virtually all of early Chinese cinema has been destroyed, what remains offers a fascinating glimpse into the creative crucible of 1920s Shanghai. Laborer’s Love, written by Zheng Zhengqiu and directed by Zhang Sichuan—both of them regarded as founding fathers of the First Generation of Chinese cinema—is a synthesis of Harold Lloyd-like silent comedy and the May 4th literature then in fashion. While the film’s charming story of a soft-hearted carpenter turned fruit peddler trying to impress his future father-in-law does not much seem like a call to class warfare, the pointed references to urban corruption and the character of a happily liberated young woman anticipate the progressive impulse in much Chinese cinema to come.
—Noah Cowan 

Romance Of The Western Chamber

Romance of the Western Chamber 西厢记 dir. Li Minwei | China/Hong Kong 1927 | 45 min. | 35mm
Less than an hour remains of this sumptuous costume epic, at the time one of the most lavish Chinese productions ever made. Based on a scandalous Yuan Dynasty play, the film chronicles the blossoming affair between a young scholar and a courtier’s daughter, set against the backdrop of a bandit siege. Featuring a few breathtaking hand-tinted sequences and replete with breakneck action, intrigue and old-fashioned romance, Romance of the Western Chamber anticipates the later “anything goes” spirit of Hong Kong New Wave director Tsui Hark.
—Noah Cowan 

Red Heroine 红侠 dir. Wen Yimin | China 1929 | 95 min. | 35mm
The only surviving section of the thirteen-part serial Red Knight Errant, this barn-burner of an action epic is a prime specimen of the martial arts/fantasy film explosion of late-twenties and early-thirties Shanghai—but one with a significant twist. In place of the typical manly hero, Red Heroine presents a swashbuckling woman clad in exotic costume soaring through the air, disappearing in clouds of smoke and laying waste to armies of baddies with a sweep of her sword. Opening with Red Heroine’s abduction by a tyrannical warlord, the film follows her rescue by a hermit monk, her training to become an unstoppable killing machine, and her efforts to stop the warlord ravaging the countryside and enslaving numerous (very) scantily-clad young women. (Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist strongman then ruling China, had threatened to ban all martial-arts cinema for its immorality, but one wonders if the films’ politics cut a bit too close to the bone as well!) Reportedly a smash hit on its release, Red Heroine helped set the template for later revivals of the martial-arts genre in Hong Kong and elsewhere.
—Noah Cowan

Dust in the Wind 戀戀風塵 dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien | Taiwan 1986 | 109 min.
Both a heartbreaking coming-of-age tale and a quiet revolution in film style, Dust in the Wind was a crucial transitional film for Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien: placing a seemingly small-scale coming-of-age story against a vast spatial canvas, Hou signals the exponential growth of his unique cinematic universe in the historical epics he would embark upon soon after. Dust in the Wind follows Wan (Wang Chien-wen), a studious teenager from a small mining town, who moves to Taipei with his girlfriend Huen (Xin Shufen), where they make new friends, obtain tedious employment, and pledge to get married upon Wan’s return from compulsory military service—but as both discover, life’s seeming certainties are always less than certain. Conveying deeply felt emotion through a reserved, observational style and a painterly appreciation of space and distance, Hou’s distinctive poetics has exerted a tremendous influence upon contemporary Asian cinema, most notably in the similarly precise films of Jia Zhangke; Hou’s use of Taiwan’s rugged landscape—at once a source of spiritual calm and a barrier creating physical entrapment—is particularly rich. “A miracle of humane observation and compositional perfection” (James Quandt); “As studied in its compositions as Ozu, as subtle in its melodrama as Naruse” (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice).
—Noah Cowan

THE GOLDEN AGE

The 1930s in Shanghai were a Golden Age in many spheres of Chinese culture, cinema chief among them. Widely considered by the rest of the country as a den of iniquity, catering to foreign invaders walled off in concessions throughout the city, Shanghai presented an “anything goes” attitude that proved enormously fruitful for the upstart new medium. Despite heavy censorship by the Guomindang (Nationalist) government, Shanghai filmmaking during this period—aided considerably by the Chinese Communist Party cadres who infiltrated the growing studio system—was able to shatter age-old taboos and champion utopian ideals. Early masterpieces such as Street Angel and The Big Road (one of the first Chinese sound films) not only look towards a more just and equal society, but question how the art of cinema itself might be reconceived along progressive lines by experimenting with innovative visual techniques and unusual narrative structures. The unquestioned symbol of thirties Shanghai filmmaking was Ruan Lingyu, the Garbo of Chinese cinema, who became the industry’s biggest star with her performances in such classics as The Goddess and New Women before tragically taking her own life at the age of twenty-four. (Ruan’s life and legend would later inspire one of the key works of the Hong Kong Second Wave, Stanley Kwan’s masterful 1992 biopic Center Stage; see page 64.) Not only did Ruan’s outsized screen presence pave the way for a Chinese cinema that would largely be dominated by major female stars, but she helped make women in cinema emblematic of the larger progressive struggles then taking place. Both Nationalists and Communists viewed the liberation of women from the barbaric practices of the imperial era as a necessary component of a modern, twentieth century China. Furthermore, female characters feature largely in the literature of the progressive, Western-oriented May 4th Movement, whose works and authors figured largely in Golden Age Shanghai cinema and well into the post-1949 era. The other major influence on the cinema of the Golden Age was another, considerably more dire struggle. Following numerous incursions into China by Japanese armies from the start of the 1930s, the Sino-Japanese War broke out in earnest in 1937 and led straight into the carnage of World War II—over a decade of traumatic conflict that cut China in half, filled its cities with starving refugees, and resulted in the deaths of as many as twenty million Chinese. Several of the key films of this period naturally take the war and its aftermath as its subject, from the two-part epic The Spring River Flows East (regarded as China’s Gone With the Wind) to the crowning achievement of the Golden Age, Fei Mu’s 1948 masterpiece Spring in a Small Town, considered by many critics as the finest Chinese film ever and one of the greatest films of all time.
—Noah Cowan

Spring Silkworms 春蚕 dir. Cheng Bugao | China 1933 | 100 min.
Hailed as one of the first successful attempts to weave progressive politics into Chinese popular cinema, Spring Silkworms is as notable for its exquisite attention to the details of rural life as it is for its revolutionary spirit. Scripted by the greatest screenwriters of the day, Cai Chusheng and Xia Yan, from the (decidedly unmilitant) short story by May 4th writer Mao Dun, Spring Silkworms follows a humble silk-farming family struggling to be free of debt to exploitative middlemen (shades of Visconti’s classic La Terra Trema). While bristling with rage at the destructive macroeconomic forces brought on by late-stage colonialism, the film never sacrifices empathy to ideology; the Marxist message is further modulated by First Generation master Cheng Bugao’s lyrical depictions of local farming practices and the gorgeous Zhejiang countryside. Indeed, Cheng’s luminous landscape sequences (influenced by ancient scroll painting) attests to Spring Silkworms’ enormous continuing importance: regarding nature as virtually a character in itself, the film anticipates similar strategies in such later masterpieces as Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town and Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth. “A milestone in the development of Chinese, and indeed world, cinema” (Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949).
—Noah Cowan

The Spring River Flows East Part I: Eight War-Torn Years Part II: The Dawn 一江春水向东流 （上、下) dirs. Cai Chusheng & Zheng Junli | China 1947 | 186 min. (96 min. + 90 min.)
“The most significant of the films of the late 1940s … China’s equivalent of Gone With the Wind” (Paul Clark). A milestone classic from two heavyweight Second Generation directors, the two-part The Spring River Flows East was released to widespread acclaim and massive success. Opening in early-thirties Shanghai and traversing the decade-spanning chaos and aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War, Spring River follows a man, Zhang Zhongliang (Tao Jin), and a woman, Sufen (Bai Yang), who meet and marry in the early years of the conflict. The couple is separated when Zhang travels inland to join the resistance against the Japanese invaders, finally going to seek work in the free city of Chongqing, where he becomes the lover of a wealthy debutante. When, after the war, Sufen goes to work for her husband’s lover, loyalties of heart and class are tested—and ultimately succumb. An expansive, go-for-broke melodrama that poignantly depicts the painful moral decisions forced upon ordinary people by war, poverty and suffering, Spring River retains a remarkable sense of time and place amidst all the heightened emotions and impossible predicaments.
—Noah Cowan

Street Angel 马路天使 dir. Yuan Muzhi | China 1937 | 91 min. | 14A | 35mm
Loosely based on Frank Borzage’s 1927 silent classic Seventh Heaven (though bearing the title of the film he made a year later) and a major hit upon its release in Shanghai, Street Angel is a curious mélange of leftist Chinese cinema motifs and Hollywood bravado, and plentiful other delightfully discordant elements. (The opening parade scene, featuring copious cross-cutting between bemused onlookers and the film’s playful main characters, could be mistaken for early Fellini.) Zhao Dan (the lanky hero of Shen Xiling’s Crossroads) stars as a misfit street musician who sets out to rescue two hard-luck sisters—one already sold into prostitution, the other on the verge of the same and barely subsisting as a teahouse singer—from their dire straits. A scintillating mixture of melodrama, social realism, exuberant musical numbers and slapstick comedy, Street Angel is considered the definitive portrait of Shanghai street life in the 1930s, marvelously capturing the earthy energy and wild collective mood swings that preceded the incipient Japanese invasion.
—Noah Cowan

The Goddess 神女 dir. Wu Yonggang | China 1934 | 85 min.
Silent screen legend Ruan Lingyu, giving a fierce and tragic performance in her signature role as a wronged prostitute, is the electric centre of The Goddess, one of the most powerful silent films of all time and an early high point for Chinese cinema. Ruan plays a nameless young “goddess” (1930s slang for her actual profession) who walks the streets in order to provide for her son. A run-in with a petty gangster results in the hoodlum becoming her pimp against her will; after he does nothing to help when her son is expelled from school, and ultimately steals the tuition money she had set aside, she exacts a terrifying vengeance. Key Second Generation director Wu Yonggang brings both an unsparing eye and a gentle humanism to this exceptional film, never flinching from the realities and consequences of the heroine’s work but never judging her for resorting to what was (and is) a relatively normal profession. But Ruan’s luminous performance and presence is the true crux of the film: scholars Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar consider her character in The Goddess “a remarkable condensation in one figure of different aspects of the times,” including Confucian family devotion, gender, national identity, the new complexities of capitalism, and Ruan’s own scandalous of-screen image (as brilliantly depicted in Stanley Kwan’s Ruan biopic Center Stage).
—Noah Cowan

New Women 新女性 dir. Cai Chusheng | China 1935 | 106 min. | 35mm
New Women was iconic actress Ruan Lingyu’s swan song, released mere months before her suicide; its story, thinly adapted from the memoir of Ai Xia, an actress hounded to death by the press several years earlier, eerily parallels Ruan’s own tragically short life. “Often seen [by critics] as a metaphor for China itself, suffering under semi-colonialism, semi-feudalism and Japanese invasion” (Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China On Screen), Ruan here plays the very model of a “new woman,” an independent-minded music teacher who dreams of becoming a celebrated writer. Her struggles, intensified by lecherous and vengeful men out to manipulate her and the need to provide for her sick daughter in the countryside, are contrasted with those of her best friend, a patriotic female factory worker who is presented as a model figure for post-revolutionary women. Influential left-wing director Cai Chusheng experiments with both the literary humanism of the May 4th Movement and the new revolutionary class politics in this fascinating transitional film, making Ruan both the embodiment of the era’s complexities and contradictions and the hope for their resolution; as Berry and Farquhar write, “If Ruan herself embodies a China that cannot act now, she also acts as a channel for the expression and articulation of hopes for future agency.”
—Noah Cowan

Spring in a Small Town 小城之春 dir. Fei Mu | China 1948 | 93 min.
Spring in a Small Town is the apotheosis of Golden Age Shanghai cinema, at once a deeply literary work that forges unexpected connections between pre- and post-Republican prose forms, and a breathtaking visual masterpiece that marries symbolism derived from ancient landscape painting with innovative camera and editing ideas. His once great wealth lost in the aftermath of the Second World War, the sickly, middle-aged Dai Liyan (Shi Yu) now pines for the past in his ruined estate with his alienated wife Zhou Yuwen (Wei Wei), his young sister, and an old servant. The couple’s mutual ennui is temporarily lifted when an old friend—and Yuwen’s former lover—arrives for a visit. As old feelings rekindle, Yuwen becomes torn between loyalty to her husband and his family and the chance to begin life anew with her old flame. Cited as a formative influence by Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke and Wong Kar-wai, Spring in a Small Town evokes the astonishing visual fluidity of Orson Welles while predicting the cinema of modernist master Alain Resnais in its beautifully affecting restraint and time-jumping, Marienbad-ish voiceover. Wei Wei is exquisite as the tortured Yuwen, her poetic voiceover suggesting a regretful ghost recalling her last possible moment of happiness; she endows the film with a tragic pain that lingers long after the wistful last shot. “An extraordinary work, anticipating Antonioni in its slow unfolding of an erotic situation, treated with a mixture of sympathy and austerity” (David Bordwell).
—Noah Cowan

Song at Midnight 夜半歌声 dir. Ma-Xu Weibang | China 1937 | 119 min.
A loose adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, Song at Midnight is “an oddball mixture of horror film, propaganda piece and musical; it rates historical importance as the first acknowledged Chinese horror film” (Donato Totaro). Soon after the fall of the Qing dynasty, an opera troupe arrives at a theatre overseen by a troll-like custodian and a catatonic woman named Li Xiaoxia, who is entranced by the haunting voice of a plaintive, unseen singer. The young leftist leader of the troupe delves into the mystery and discovers that the voice belongs to a mysterious man named Song Danping, once a famous opera singer who was tortured and hideously disfigured by an evil lord over his love for the woman who now thinks him dead. Beautifully rendered in gothic black and white, Song at Midnight is intriguing both for its political content—making the wronged hero Song Danping “a fugitive revolutionary, using the theatre as a sanctuary ... with clear references to the chaotic political struggles of the 1920s” (David Robinson)—and its evocation of 1930s Hollywood horror films. Director Ma-Xu Weibang went on to be a force in postwar Hong Kong cinema, and may have helped institute its tradition of cleverly appropriating visual and narrative motifs from both Hollywood and other national cinemas.
—Noah Cowan 

Crossroads 十字街头 dir. Shen Xiling | China 1937 | 110 min.
A free (and music-free) adaptation of La Bohème crossed with Frank Borzage’s romantic and socially conscious Hollywood classics, Crossroads is a charming, engrossing, and finally heartbreaking portrait of impoverished young artists in Depression-era Shanghai. Four unemployed, artistically-minded friends are increasingly downhearted by their poverty and lack of opportunity. As talk of suicide floats through the air, one of the guys has to contend with an annoying new neighbour, who turns out to be the girl of his dreams. Much situational comedy, and occasional tragedy, ensues, until everyone marches off to defend the country against the invading Japanese. Directed by Shen Xiling, a leading figure in the progressive cinema movement (and famed for the seminal film The Boatman’s Daughter), Crossroads possesses a sweetness and joy that belies its political agenda, infusing the Shanghai leftist-cinema template with frothy, dynamically Hollywood-style energy, helped considerably by the Jimmy Stewart-like Zhao Dan in the lead role. The film’s mix of exuberant humour and down-and-out alienation finds an echo six decades later in the work of the Sixth Generation filmmakers, especially Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days.
—Noah Cowan

The Big Road 大路 dir. Sun Yu | China 1935 | 104 min.
A big-hearted classic of the 1930s progressive film movement, The Big Road (also known as The Highway) chronicles the efforts of six young, patriotic and unemployed city men building a highway to aid the anti-Japanese war effort. Among the many major achievements of Second Generation master Sun Yu, the film is also an early and mesmerizing experiment in sound design: as Paul Clark explains, “the silence of the film is broken by songs, particularly the road-making songs, which the workers sing together, and by a curious device, a series of percussion sounds, when one of the four men playfully taps the nose, chest and forehead of a gang comrade.” (This unabashed physical intimacy extends to a surprising nude bathing scene with the men, following some fairly raw talk from two women who are following the road crew’s progress.) Wearing its patriotism on its sleeve, The Big Road emphasizes the necessity of presenting a united front against the Japanese invaders; the only real villain is a Chinese collaborator who kidnaps two of the men to impede the highway’s progress. The film’s insistence on identifying class enemies reveals a darker side of this otherwise effusive and joyous work.
—Noah Cowan  

A NEW CHINA

The victory of the Chinese Communist Party over the Nationalist forces in 1949 marked the end of the long Chinese civil war and the birth of a radically diferent nation. Yet despite the vast and far-reaching changes effected throughout all spheres of Chinese society by the ideological imperatives of the new regime, it is intriguing to trace the many continuities between the cinemas of the pre- and post-Revolution periods. While Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Rectification Campaign of the early 1940s had sought to purge the influence of the Western-oriented literature of the May 4th Movement and make the Party line supreme in all cultural fields, many of the most critically and commercially successful Mainland films of the “Seventeen Years” period (dating from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966) would still be derived from these acknowledged classics of Chinese progressive culture. Furthermore, brief periods of cultural experimentation such as the Hundred Flowers Campaign emboldened filmmakers to once again engage in social commentary and take both political and aesthetic risks in their films, leading to such recently rediscovered masterworks as Lu Ban’s extraordinary Unfinished Comedy. The revival of this progressive spirit also allowed women to return to the forefront of Chinese cinema in comedies such as Li Shuangshuang, which features the fiery Zhang Ruifang gently but pointedly satirizing Party rigidity. This intriguing period would come to an end with the onset of the Cultural Revolution, the last and most brutal crackdown on intellectuals, which halted narrative film production for more than a decade; only model operas, adhering to the strict ideological guidelines of socialist realism, were permitted. The 1949 Revolution would have an enormous impact on the cinemas of the other regions as well. In Hong Kong, where the British officials who ruled the colony were wary of films that might stir up social conflict, the commercial cinema of Hong Kong—infused with a steady stream of transplanted artists from the Mainland since the 1930s—kept the progressive spirit of the Golden Age alive by using the frameworks of popular entertainment to address social issues. In particular, commentary about the impossibility of housing the Hong Kong poor—an extremely pressing issue in the postwar period—would become a prominent theme in such powerful melodramas as Parents’ Hearts and In the Face of Demolition, and provide the context for Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece In the Mood for Love five decades later. In Taiwan, where the defeated Guomindang (Nationalist) forces had taken refuge and instituted a form of martial law, cinema could similarly serve as a vehicle of political inquiry. While the dictates of “healthy realism”—the Guomindang correlative to the Mainland’s socialist realism—presented a cinematic portrait of Taiwan scrubbed clean of class struggle, crime, promiscuity and (especially) left-wing politics, political commentary found its way into films under the guise of historical drama (in the brilliant Execution in Autumn) or as subplots in romantic melodramas. As before, progressive sentiments in Chinese cinema went hand in hand with the presence of strong female characters: gentle realist dramas like Li Han-hsiang’s wonderful The Winter set box office records, as the island’s largely female audiences tired of seeing the retrograde depictions of themselves in the industry’s rote melodramas and period pieces.
—Noah Cowan

Red Detachment of Women 红色娘子军 dir. Xie Jin | Mainland 1961 | 110 min.
“The films I directed before the Cultural Revolution are mostly about the contrast between the old society and the new society,” said Xie Jin, whose distinguished career extended from the pre- to post-Cultural Revolution periods. “What was the past like? What happened after the founding of New China?” The director boldly answered those questions in this tale of a violated peasant girl turned vicious fighting machine. The film’s first half, situated on the sweltering island of Hainan, has the feel of a “James Bond of the East,” as a dashing spy recruits our heroine to the Communist cause; the second half, featuring her army training and fearsome all-female combat scenes, crosses the eye-popping style of Communist propaganda posters with the gritty realism of Soviet war films, creating an unclassifiable, proto-pop art socialist cinematography. While Red Detachment is certainly brimming with cadre spirit—it became one of the Mainland’s most important films up to the fall of the Gang of Four, remade successively in literary, theatre, model opera and new film versions—Xie Jin never lets the proceedings sink into sloganeering; he later claimed that he kept such classic (and decidedly un-revolutionary) Chinese novels as Romance of Book and Sword in mind while making the film.
—Noah Cowan

Execution in Autumn 秋決 dir. Li Hsing | Taiwan 1972 | 99 min.
An intense historical drama of enormous emotional impact, Execution in Autumn was a departure for acclaimed director Li Hsing, best known as a pioneer of the “healthy realism” genre devoted to a clean image of Taiwan. Set in Han-era China, Execution concerns a bullish young man who is sentenced to death for three murders he committed during a brawl. As he languishes in prison waiting for his date with the executioner, his manipulative mother attempts to free him—or at least ensure that he produces an heir. Li’s scenario allows him to subtly critique Confucian values by setting them against these extreme circumstances: How much should we sacrifice for our families? To what ends will we go to make sure that a family line continues? The film’s heightened emotions are more than matched by its dazzling visual flair, from the perfectly composed and designed sets to the spectacular use of smash zooms and unsettling music cues; the long-held introductory shots of each of the four seasons as the young man awaits his fate are exceptional works of art in themselves.
—Noah Cowan

Li Shuangshuang 李双双 dir. Lu Ren | Mainland 1962 | 104 min.
A brief relaxation of strict socialist realism guidelines in the 1960s saw the emergence of several wonderful and now rarely-seen comedies, the most popular of which was the deft and enormously charming Li Shuangshuang. The title character (“Seventeen Years” superstar Zhang Ruifang) is a model member of a village commune who cheerily denounces the laziness and minor corruption of the village men, especially her kind but not overly bright husband. As she spurs on the other village women to do the same, she and her husband become estranged and unhappy. All ends well, of course, as the couple triumphantly reunite in the name of Party and Nation, but beneath the breeziness one can feel greater metaphors at work, and harbingers of things to come: is Li Shuangshuang perhaps a stand-in for an overly demanding Party, and her husband the exhausted people of China? (For Kevin B. Lee, “Li Shuangshuang’s uncompromising stance toward her community foretold the kind of behaviour that would explode full-scale during the sweeping, destructive purification campaigns of the Cultural Revolution just a few years later.”)
—Noah Cowan

Unfinished Comedy 没有完成的喜剧 dir. Lu Ban | Mainland 1957 | 80 min. | 35mm
“Seventeen Years” director Lu Ban was a master of comedies that gently tweaked the Party bureaucracy; his most famous film, When the New Director Arrives, poked good-natured fun at the feudal impulses and reactionary mindset of some lower Party officials. But Unfinished Comedy, easily the most surprising discovery of this series, is something else entirely. Never screened upon release and rarely seen since, its formal audacity and radical critique of Party censors landed it in hot water just as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the brief period of significant artistic freedom in the late 1950s, was coming to a close; Lu himself was heavily persecuted, and never made another film. More or less playing themselves, two famous comedians from pre-Revolution days perform a series of sketches in a theatre for a group of Party cadres (purported to be “authorities in literary criticism”). The stage performances blend over into absurdist, self-contained fantasy episodes where the two comics allegorically parody Party propaganda and ideological orthodoxy. The cadres, as one might imagine, are far from amused, and their reactions parallel the film’s real-life treatment at the hands of the government. “Perhaps the most accomplished film made in the seventeen years between 1949 and the Cultural Revolution” (Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949).
—Noah Cowan

This Life of Mine 我这一辈子 dir. Shi Hui | Mainland 1950 | 120 min. | 35mm
“Shi Hui, driven to suicide in Mao’s ‘Anti-Rightist Purge’ of the late 1950s, was one of the greatest screen actors ever and a very fine director; this adaptation of a short story by Lao She was probably his best work” (Tony Rayns, Time Out London). The first film produced in Shanghai after the end of the civil war, This Life of Mine delicately balances the interest in earthy local language that was a hallmark of the May 4th Movement with the class analysis demanded by the new regime. It is also among the first fully realized examples of Soviet-influenced cinematography in Chinese cinema: the film’s sublime play of light and shadow was much admired and frequently imitated in the years to come. The film traces the history of twentieth-century China from the fall of the Qing dynasty through to the 1949 Revolution through the eyes of a simple Beijing policeman, played by actor-director Shi Hui, who brilliantly conveys the changing face of the Chinese people through four tumultuous decades of conflict. “The ultimate discovery. As an expression of the New China’s spiritual turmoil, the film engages in intense moral inquiries and ambiguities that are unparalleled in socialist cinema, even as it tries to toe the party line” (Andrew Chan, The L Magazine).
—Noah Cowan

The East Is Red 东方红 dir. Wang Ping | Mainland 1965 | 117 min.
Though often thought of as the epitome of kitsch, model operas represent a key development in Chinese cinema’s tradition of filmed performance, unique both for their extreme ideological rigidity and their mesmerizingly abstract design. While the genre hit its peak during the second phase of the Cultural Revolution, when such films as Xie Tieli’s Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy were the only films permitted in theatres, the form was developed over a number of years. Made during the first stirrings of the Cultural Revolution, and in many ways setting the template for what was to come—not least in the ideological fervour of its hard-line director Wang Ping, one of the very rare women allowed behind the camera during the period—The East Is Red was the most lavish, and most important, of these earlier films; its title song became the unofficial national anthem, and the film itself remained a cornerstone of Mao’s cult of personality until his death a decade later. Retelling the history of the Chinese Communist Party, from its founding in 1921 to its victory over the Nationalists in 1949, as a grand musical pageant, The East Is Red is both breathtaking and discomfiting in its monumental design; the opening sequence, for example, with vast numbers of spectators entering the Great Hall of the People, eerily recalls the films of Leni Riefenstahl.
—Noah Cowan 

Red Crag: Life in Eternal Flame 烈火中永生 dir. Shui Hua | Mainland 1965 | 137 min.
A taut wartime thriller, Red Crag: Life in Eternal Flame anticipates the paranoia and violence of the imminent Cultural Revolution while harking back to the aesthetic splendour of the Golden Age Shanghai cinema of the late 1940s. (This opulence is largely due to the work of cinematographer Zhu Jinming, the master visual stylist of Shangrao Concentration Camp and other key “Seventeen Years” films.) The film concerns a hard-boiled woman working in the Chongqing Communist underground during World War II, whose commitment to the guerrilla cause is only intensified after she witnesses her husband’s head mounted on the city walls by the Nationalist forces. Arrested while escorting a weapons shipment to her comrades, she resists Guomindang torture and becomes a leader in the rough-and-tumble prison. As the Communist army approaches and the prisoners are threatened with execution, a desperate escape is planned. As directed by Shui Hua, one of the more reliably orthodox directors with talent during this period, Red Crag features much chest-beating and many Mao-inspired smiles as it revels in the glories of martyrdom, but it also has a swagger and bravado that is rarely seen in Chinese films of the period.
—Noah Cowan

Parents’ Hearts 父母心 dir. Chun Kim | Hong Kong 1955 | 111 min.
Life imitates art in this heartbreaking drama about the tragic life of a bit-part Cantonese opera actor: the decline of the once prominent Cantonese opera scene, and its ultimate migration into Hong Kong cinema, is a persistent theme throughout the film, and its finest moments take us backstage to witness the workings of this highly localized art form. Real-life Cantonese opera star Ma Si-tsang plays an actor who, laid off from his job at the opera, is forced to play a clown in a low-rent company and become a street performer in order to support his family. When his beloved son decides that he wants to become a performer himself, the conflicted patriarch must make some difficult choices about his family’s future. Transcending the sticky sentimentality of so many Hong Kong films of this period through Chun Kim’s sensitive direction and Ma’s astonishingly rich performance, Parents’ Hearts continues to inspire fervent love from Hong Kong critics: it was voted to Time Out Hong Kong’s list of the hundred greatest Hong Kong films ever made, while a recent Hong Kong Film Archive programme note gushed, “Parents’ Hearts is one of the best Hong Kong films, ever!”
—Noah Cowan

The Arch 董夫人 dir. Cecile Tang | Hong Kong 1968 | 95 min.
The incomparably original Cecile Tang, one of the few female filmmakers working in Hong Kong in the sixties and seventies, made two of the most interesting and important films of the era with her debut The Arch and its follow-up China Behind. A profound character study that feels like a hybrid of Kenji Mizoguchi’s tales of female sacrifice, the tragic romances of Chinese costume drama and the interruptive techniques of the French New Wave, The Arch focuses on a wealthy widow (Lisa Lu) in the early Qing dynasty on the eve of her crowning achievement, the erection of a triumphal arch in honour of her many good works. When a young and handsome cavalry officer is billeted at her palatial house and soon begins to court both the matriarch and her immature daughter, the widow is forced to choose between her own happiness and her daughter’s well-being. Shot in soft, luminous black and white by Satyajit Ray’s longtime cinematographer Subrata Mitra, The Arch is “one of the most significant art-house classics in [Hong Kong] film history … as if Alain Resnais met Henrik Ibsen in seventeenth-century China” (Edmund Lee, Time Out Hong Kong).
—Noah Cowan

China Behind 再見中國 dir. Cecile Tang | Hong Kong 1974 | 89 min.
Influenced by the French New Wave and presaging many aspects of the Hong Kong New Wave to come, the films of Cecile Tang stand apart from the kung-fu and Chinese opera films that dominated seventies Hong Kong cinema. One of the most exciting discoveries of this series, Tang’s second film China Behind—banned for over a decade by the Hong Kong government, on the grounds that it would “damage good relations with other territories”—follows a group of Mainlanders as they desperately try to flee from a China in thrall to the Cultural Revolution. Narrowly escaping capture as they set out, the fugitives are willing to do anything—including a long, death-defying swim—to reach freedom. But what they find when they reach the haven of Hong Kong is a far cry from their dreams of liberty; the final passages of the film are a damning and powerful indictment of both the socialist and free-market “utopias” that defined the ideological landscape of the century just past. “One of the earliest films to deal with the clash of Communist and capitalist ideals that would inevitably manifest itself with the 1997 handover[;] the moral degradation and spiritual disenchantment of its characters reveal the dehumanizing effects felt [on] both sides of the border” (Edmund Lee, Time Out Hong Kong).
—Noah Cowan

Two Stage Sisters 舞台姐妹 dir. Xie Jin | Mainland 1964 | 112 min.
Two Stage Sisters was denounced at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution for its glorification of the bourgeoisie, and the charge is not far of the mark: this stunning film noir melodrama by “Seventeen Years” master Xie Jin is a sumptuous treat straight out of the Bette Davis-Joan Crawford playbook. The film follows two (unrelated) country opera singers in a traveling troupe who relocate to Shanghai in the 1940s, where they engage in a bitter rivalry over nothing less than the New China itself: one woman convinces a major theatre to mount a revolutionary model opera, while the other embraces the glamorous trappings of capitalism as provided by her industrialist boyfriend. A scenery-eviscerating performance by Xie Fang, a host of memorable tunes, and an over-the-top (and truly fabulous) final courtroom scene made this a major revelation at last year’s (Re)Inventing China series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “Two Stage Sisters feels like a culmination of the contradictory forces that shaped Communist Chinese cinema up to that point…. Above all, [it] is a story of how art itself is a means for both societal reconciliation and revolution” (Kevin B. Lee, Moving Image Source).
—Noah Cowan

The Winter 冬暖 dir. Li Han-hsiang | Taiwan 1969 | 95 min.
Best known for such lavish epics as The Kingdom and the Beauty and The Love Eterne, veteran director Li Han-hsiang reveals a more intimate and nuanced side with this rarely screened film, whose understated tone was enormously influential on both Hou Hsiao-hsien and Ang Lee (who used the lead actress, Ling Fang, in several films), as well as many directors of the Hong Kong New Wave. The Winter tells the deceptively simple story of a woman returning to her hometown and reconnecting with an old family friend, a restaurateur who cannot bring himself to confess his love for her. His feelings are finally revealed when he challenges some small-time hustlers to a fight at a street festival; after tending his wounds, she leaves town, only to return years later with a child. Much like the socialist realism of the Mainland, Taiwan’s state-sanctioned “healthy realism” offered a scrubbed-clean cinematic image of the country free of poverty, immorality or left-wing politics; within its gentle, small-scale story, The Winter defies these conventions, depicting a Taiwan beset with far more fraught social conditions and offering a more complex view of sexual morality. It’s also a very beautiful film, its night scenes cast with a tremulous glow that heartbreakingly mimics the couple’s tentative, fragile emotional connection. “A delicate and touching work that is now considered one of the best Chinese-language films of the 1960s” (Sam Ho, Hong Kong Film Archive).
—Noah Cowan

The Love Eterne 梁山伯與祝英台 dir. Li Han-hsiang | Hong Kong 1963 | 126 min. | 35mm
Shaw Brothers’ in-house epic specialist Li Han-hsiang had his greatest success with this Huangmei opera film based on the legend of the Butterfly Lovers, a whirlwind cross-dressing romance sometimes referred to as the “Romeo and Juliet of the East.” A true “event” movie, The Love Eterne broke box-office records throughout Asia (especially in Taiwan, where it apparently was the first film to make the young Ang Lee cry), and unlike many of its creaky contemporaries stands up extremely well today: the songs are eminently hummable and the performances of the female leads Betty Loh and (especially) Ivy Ling Po are wonderfully balanced between classical theatre and modern gesture. In the distant past, young male scholar Liang Shan Bo (Po) bumps into the aristocratic Zhu Ying Tai (Loh) on her way to attend a male-only school disguised as a boy. They become unusually close and spend an idyllic three years studying together. When Zhu must leave the school, Liang becomes frantic, eventually learning her true identity and tracking her down ... but he may be too late to win her back. “The Chinese folk legend of the Butterfly Lovers may have been adapted countless times, but this sumptuous rendition—with its catchy tunes, poetic lyrics and eye-searing colour scheme—is hard to be surpassed either artistically or historically” (Edmund Lee, Time Out Hong Kong).
—Noah Cowan

New Year’s Sacrifice 祝福 dir. Sang Hu | Mainland 1956 | 110 min.
One of more confounding aspects of Chinese cinema of the “Seventeen Years” period is the prevalence of films derived from works associated with the left-leaning, Western-influenced May 4th Movement, which Mao Zedong had implicitly denounced as being insufficiently attentive to the lives of the peasantry and the mechanics of class struggle. However, the literary cachet of these works assured audiences that the film adaptations would be “quality pictures,” while their mildly progressive politics made them reasonably acceptable to the ideological dictates of the new regime. Hugely successful at the time, these films have a fascinating awkwardness about them, the square peg of early modernist literature meeting the round hole of socialist realism. Based on the celebrated short story by literary lion Lu Xun, New Year’s Sacrifice—which chronicles the travails of a poor servant (Bai Yang) in the house of a wealthy noble family who is twice sold into marriage, twice widowed and forced back into lowly servitude—is among the most successful of these adaptations, largely due to a refined screenplay by May 4th acolyte Xia Yan and the carefully detailed direction of Second Generation master Sang Hu.
—Noah Cowan

In the Face of Demolition 危樓春曉 dir. Li Tie | Hong Kong 1953 | 125 min. | 35mm
Set almost entirely within the walls of a crumbling apartment complex, this early Hong Kong left-wing social drama established a now omnipresent theme in Hong Kong cinema—the plight of the urban poor—and demonstrates both the genre’s shaggy, rambling charm as well as the political urgency that gives an edge to even the film’s most sentimental or melodramatic moments. With its panoramic portrait of the building’s various down-and-out denizens—a taxi driver, an unemployed teacher, a professional reduced to selling his blood and, of course, a venal landlord—the film is also a fine example of the multi-character Mandarin-language melodramas, featuring displaced Mainland stars, that were especially popular during this period. “The mise-en-scène has a Renoirian flavor, and at certain points, the film clearly recalls Le Crime de M. Lange: like Renoir’s hero, the teacher hero of In the Face of Demolition is an aspiring writer who is promised the moon by a would-be publisher and gets let down badly” (Chris Fujiwara); “A film that defines its time” (Sam Ho, Hong Kong Film Archive).
—Noah Cowan

Shangrao Concentration Camp 上饶集中营 dirs. Meng Sha & Zhang Ke | Mainland 1951 | 96 min.
One of the major discoveries of our series and one of the greatest POW films of all time, Shangrao Concentration Camp is set in the hellish confines of a Guomindang (Nationalist) prison, where the brutal officials try to force two female Communist prisoners to reveal their leader’s identity and location. While its subject and year of production might suggest a propaganda film, Shangrao has garnered some interesting (if chronologically impossible) comparisons to Bresson from some critics for its intense, haunting minimalism, though its true roots are in the Soviet cinema then widely distributed in China; in particular, the great cinematographer Zhu Jinming offers a brilliant echo of Dovzhenko’s overwhelming landscapes in his images of China’s rugged northern climes. With an extraordinary use of long takes and surprisingly mobile camera movements accentuating the passionate, earthy performances of leads Tang Hua Da and Jiang Jun, Shangrao Concentration Camp is “a powerful meditation on human relations under pressure” (Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949).
—Noah Cowan

SWORDSMEN, GANGSTERS AND GHOSTS: THE EVOLUTION OF CHINESE GENRE CINEMA

Martial-arts schools played a major role in late imperial Chinese history: the Boxer Rebellion, the notorious anti-foreigner crusade that lasted from 1899 to 1901 and led to the fall of the Qing dynasty, was spearheaded by one such school. Despite the rebellion’s total failure, it became a powerful symbol of Chinese nationalism; and hardly coincidentally, most examples of the emergent silent-era martial-arts film (known as wuxia pian, literally “chivalrous combat films”) were fiercely patriotic in the Boxer spirit. Mingxing, the same company that launched Shanghai’s progressive cinema movement in the 1930s, was also responsible for the earliest documented martial-arts film (actually a series of films), the now-lost The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple. The immense popularity of this long-running serial, and the many other martial-arts films that followed in its wake, flew in the face of officially sanctioned opinion. Patriotic sentiments aside, the films’ outré special effects and bevy of louche women led to a ban on the genre from the Guomindang (Nationalist) government as promoting “superstition and moral decadence.” The Communists would continue this policy for much the reason, claiming that wuxia films promoted the worst aspects of feudal China.

In the late-1940s, with anti-wuxia policies in place both on the Communist Mainland and Guomindang-controlled Taiwan, talent from both the world of filmmaking and that of the martial-arts schools began a migration to Hong Kong, which had begun to rebuild the studio complexes destroyed during the war and would soon become the undisputed centre of martial-arts cinema worldwide. Beginning in 1948, the fantastic popularity of the series of Hong Kong films based on (and considerably embroidering) the life of the real-life martial-arts guru Wong Fei-hung inspired a boom in martial-arts film production, driven by the Shaw Brothers studio and its rival Golden Harvest, that would reach its peak in a roughly ten-year period from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. While directors like King Hu (Come Drink With Me) and Chang Cheh (One-Armed Swordsman) took the fantasy-heavy, swordplay-focused wuxia film to new heights, it was an offshoot of wuxia that would bring the martial-arts film to the world: the unarmed combat-based kung-fu genre, exemplified in the films of the great director Lau Kar-leung (The 36th Chamber of Shaolin) and finding its global figurehead in the one and only Bruce Lee.

The eighties and nineties saw several major evolutions in Chinese cinema’s unique contribution to the action genre as the craze for the “classic” martial-arts film began to wane. Once touted as a successor to Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan instead found global superstardom as the clown prince of kung fu, blending the often solemn martial-arts template with slapstick and low comedy while taking the genre’s incredible physical displays to eye-popping new heights. Prolific Hong Kong New Wave leader Tsui Hark would take the wuxia film into a lavish new era with such ambitious epics as Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, and re-energize the classic kung-fu film for the nineties with Once Upon a Time in China. Blending Chan’s populist comedy with Tsui’s outrageous flights of fancy, the Tsui-produced A Chinese Ghost Story and Jefrey Lau’s two-part A Chinese Odyssey brought fantasy and the supernatural into the martial arts mix. Finally, at the turn of the century martial-arts cinema returned to the Mainland that once spurned it: following Ang Lee’s global success with his King Hu-inspired Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a series of baroque, Mainland-produced wuxia epics emerged, with the best among them—such as Zhang Yimou’s Hero and Feng Xiaogong’s The Banquet—garnering significant domestic and international success.

Concurrent with and intrinsically related to the rise of the wuxia and kung-fu genres were the Hong Kong gangster and crime thrillers, which refracted the martial-arts films’ themes of loyalty, brotherhood and patriotism through a dark, distorting lens. As evidenced by Patrick Lung Kong’s long-neglected 1967 milestone The Story of a Discharged Prisoner, the gangster film originally had its roots in Hong Kong’s socially progressive cinema, stressing the connection between crime and poverty and holding out some hope, however faint, that these social ills could be healed. In the 1980s, however, the genre began to evolve in a considerably darker, more nihilistic and hyperbolic direction, in such films as Johnny Mak’s startlingly bleak Long Arm of the Law and, most famously, John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow. A loose remake of Discharged Prisoner infused with the influence of Leone, Peckinpah and Kurosawa, A Better Tomorrow made “heroic bloodshed” the new byword of Hong Kong action cinema with its outrageously stylized, over-the-top gun battles. The decades to come have seen several other innovative directors take the genre to exciting new places: Andrew Lau and Alan Mak reinvigorated Hong Kong cinema as a whole with their 2002 hit Infernal Affairs, while the great Johnnie To took a considerably more cynical and sardonic look at Woo-style blood-brothering in a series of hard-edged crime films that culminated in his 2005 diptych Election and Election 2.
—Noah Cowan

A Touch of Zen 俠女 dir. King Hu | Taiwan 1971 | 200 min.
Legendary director King Hu began his career at the Shaw Brothers studio in the late fifties, and achieved his first major success with the classic 1966 wuxia film Come Drink With Me. Temperamentally opposed to the macho stylings of Chang Cheh (One-Armed Swordsman) which then dominated at Shaws, the art school-educated director relocated to Taiwan, where he founded his own company so that he could be free to pursue his own unique artistic vision. Hu made his masterpiece in 1971 with A Touch of Zen, an acknowledged influence on Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the only martial-arts film ever admitted to competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Technical Grand Prize. An epic fantasy about a timid artist and scholar (a stand-in for the director) drawn into a battle to protect a beautiful young woman from corrupt nobles intent on wiping out her entire family, Touch introduces those features that would come to define Hu’s cinema: exquisite, painterly compositions cut through by rapid-fire editing and spectacular physical and cinematic choreography, often taking place in near-silence. Intertwining its extraordinary visuals with themes from traditional Chinese philosophy, A Touch of Zen is not only a classic of the martial-arts film but a complex and enduring work of cinematic art.
—Noah Cowan

Long Arm of the Law 省港旗兵 dir. Johnny Mak | Hong Kong 1984 | 100 min.
Introducing a note of giddily amoral brutality into the previously moralistic Hong Kong gangster genre, Johnny Mak’s socio-political time bomb was wildly successful and widely influential, laying the groundwork for the “heroic bloodshed” films of Ringo Lam and John Woo that would soon make Hong Kong action cinema into an international phenomenon. Arriving in Hong Kong to pull off a jewel robbery, a Mainland gang of former Red Guards is forced to go underground when the heist goes south. Tension with their Hong Kong allies, and within the gang itself, soon leads to explosive violence, until the authorities put a fittingly nasty and brutish end to their rampage. Featuring exceptionally choreographed shootout set-pieces and ostentatiously spare direction by Mak—with much emphasis on primitive lighting sources like exposed lightbulbs, traffic lights, police flares and market stall lanterns—Long Arm of the Law has a nastiness and intensity that clearly signals that there is more going on here than just gangster gunplay. The film’s toughness, desperation and dead-end nihilism have been interpreted as symptomatic of the “handover syndrome” preceding Hong Kong’s return to the Mainland in 1997, while the apocalyptic ending takes place in Kowloon Walled City, which, as critic Li Cheuk-to notes, is “a symbolic site of Chinese resistance to British rule.”
—Noah Cowan

NEW WAVES

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—the mass social-political movement that sought to affirm “Mao Zedong thought” and purge capitalist, traditional and “cosmopolitan” elements from Mainland society—looms as large in Chinese memory as the traumatic experience of the war years. Launched in 1966, the Cultural Revolution paralyzed cultural and intellectual life and violently uprooted society in both the cities and the countryside, as swarms of militant young Red Guards attacked or publicly humiliated their “backwards” elders and destroyed artifacts of China’s historical and religious heritage, while the military, the factories and even the Communist Party itself were subjected to systematic purges. As with all the other arts, cinema was profoundly affected by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution: film production was stopped altogether for a time, and only gradually re-emerged with an exclusive output of ideologically orthodox model operas.

As the Mainland finally emerged from the shadow of this cataclysmic event a decade later, the Mainland filmmakers who became known as the Fourth Generation—a pre-Cultural Revolution cohort many of whom had themselves been denounced, “re-educated” and forced to endure the ridicule of the young militants for their commitment to cultural life—sought for ways to express the ordeal that had been visited upon the country. The result was the so-called “scar films,” simple, affecting dramas that employ intimate and small-scale narratives focusing on individual tragedies as microcosmic representations of massive societal trauma. This style of storytelling would prove remarkably influential even beyond the context of the Cultural Revolution; perhaps the most surprising echo of the Fourth Generation’s work would come in the mid-1990s during the Mainland’s race toward capitalism, when filmmakers like Jia Zhangke and Wang Xiaoshuai produced quiet, observant and obliquely political critiques of their own, vastly different society.

Some of the Fourth Generation’s most notable figures, such as Xie Fei (Black Snow) and Wu Tianming (The Old Well), served as mentors to the far more celebrated group of Mainland directors whose work closely followed their own. The filmmakers who became known as the Fifth Generation were children during (and sometimes participants in) the Cultural Revolution, and became the first students admitted to the Beijing Film Academy following its end. Marked by radical aesthetic experimentation, boldly emotive performances, and complex and critical thinking about the events leading up to and following 1949, such celebrated films as Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Horse Thief came to represent a definitive break with preceding Mainland cinema. The films’ dazzling play with colour and striking, often symbolic use of landscape—drawing explicit inspiration from ancient scroll paintings, though such Golden Age films as Spring Silkworms had already established a cinematic precedent—endowed them with an epic dimension that brought Chinese cinema to the forefront of the international art-house circuit. Yet while the Fifth Generation is largely identified with the sweeping historical dramas of Chen and Zhang, several other brilliant filmmakers from that same cohort have explored other dramatic, thematic and generic territory, from jaundiced, distinctly anti-heroic war films (Zhang Junzhao’s One and Eight) to dark social satires (Huang Jianxin’s The Black Cannon Incident) to modernist murder mysteries (Li Shaohong’s Bloody Morning).

As these radical changes in cinematic culture took place on the Mainland, much was changing in the other regions as well. The Hong Kong New Wave challenged the predictable, studio-bound commercial Hong Kong film industry with a combination of boundary-pushing content, local specificity and outré stylization that both alienated and galvanized local audiences. No less than their peers on the Mainland, the New Wave filmmakers were greatly affected by the Cultural Revolution and its echoes in Hong Kong, evinced in their work by an atmosphere of wary paranoia and a dark expectation of violence and cruelty. Ann Hui, after infusing genre cinema with complex meta-cinematic experimentation and pointed political themes in The Spooky Bunch, shifted seamlessly to tough-minded realist drama with Boat People, which is often cited as the greatest Hong Kong film of all time. Following a Japanese photographer as he confronts the brutality of everyday life in postwar Vietnam, the film serves as an allegory for the powerless rage felt by Chinese filmmakers of all regions in the face of the upheavals they helplessly witnessed in their youth. Meanwhile, the unstoppably prolific producer/director Tsui Hark—who shook the local film scene to its core with the anarchic, cynical and politically charged Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind—became Hong Kong cinema’s most successful and ceaselessly creative genre revisionist/extremist, merging the opera and martial-arts genres in the wildly successful Peking Opera Blues and resuscitating classic period martial-arts cinema with the Once Upon a Time in China series.

In Taiwan, the gradual easing of strict Guomindang (Nationalist) censorship allowed for the emergence of Hou Hsiao-hsien and the late Edward Yang, two of the greatest auteurs in contemporary cinema. Though the contrast in their styles is pronounced, the work of both filmmakers is palpably haunted by the violent political cultures, both on and off the island, that characterized the sixties and seventies. They also were (and shared) close friends and collaborators: Hou starred in Yang’s Taipei Story, while Hou’s frequent screenwriter Wu Nien-jen—whose masterful directorial outing A Borrowed Life also screens in this series—would play the lead in Yang’s last film Yi Yi.

Hou first came to international prominence with a series of semi-autobiographical dramas such as The Time to Live and the Time to Die and Dust in the Wind. These films developed a new kind of cinematic grammar—characterized by spare dialogue, long, lingering shots, extraordinarily precise compositions and a remarkable use of deep focus—that would become vastly influential on art cinema worldwide, particularly after the international success of Hou’s ambitious historical drama A City of Sadness, which elevated his unique artistry to a new level and stands as one of the milestones of the last half-century of world cinema. The Western-oriented, more conspicuously cosmopolitan Yang showcased a consciously and aggressively modernist style in The Terrorizers, his lacerating portrait of contemporary Taipei, and made his masterpiece with the novelistic epic A Brighter Summer Day, a portrait of wayward youth that is at once highly personal and emblematic of the larger cultural and historical currents informing the cinema of the time.

Though markedly different in many ways, the roughly simultaneous cinematic renaissances that occurred in Hong Kong and Taiwan share some powerful links with the emergence of the Fourth and Fifth Generation filmmakers on the Mainland. Whether through intimate character study (The Women from the Lake of Scented Souls), flamboyant spectacle (Farewell My Concubine), art-house rigour (A City of Sadness) or displaced allegory (Boat People), the weight of history is keenly felt in the films that emerged from all these assorted New Waves. Furthermore, continuing a pattern that can be seen throughout the history of Chinese cinema, it is notable how these new cinematic movements have foregrounded female characters, as well as the actresses who play them. The changing role of women has always been a barometer of wider changes in Chinese society (or any society), and Chinese cinema has been remarkably forthright in speaking to this fact. Beyond this, the New Waves introduced a trio of actresses—Gong Li (from the Mainland), Brigitte Lin (a native of Taiwan) and the Hong Kong-born Maggie Cheung (soon to be a fixture of the Hong Kong Second Wave)—who would capture the imagination of audiences much as the great Ruan Lingyu did in her day. Ferocious, fearless and astoundingly versatile, these women helped bring Chinese cinema to both new heights of achievement and new levels of international recognition and success.
—Noah Cowan

Yellow Earth 黄土地 dir. Chen Kaige | Mainland 1984 | 89 min.
The film that changed Chinese cinema forever has lost none of its power or beauty since its explosive debut. In 1939, a young cadre comes to a dirt-poor village in Shaanxi province (the cradle of Chinese communism) to collect local folk songs so they can be adapted into Maoist anthems. (This same campaign created the theme for The East Is Red.) He befriends a young girl and educates her about the new social status that women will enjoy come the revolution. After he departs, she tries to follow him, with tragic consequences. Beautifully etching both the beauty and terror of rural life, director Chen Kaige and cinematographer Zhang Yimou upend all the conventions of Seventeen Years-style socialist realism through poetic symbolism drawn from ancient scroll paintings and an exquisite use of traditional folk music. A true milestone, Yellow Earth introduces all the key elements of Fifth Generation filmmaking and would help propel the Mainland to the top ranks of global art cinema. “Chen Kaige and his cinematographer Zhang Yimou have invented a new language of colours, shadows, glances, spaces, and unspoken thoughts and implications; and they’ve made their new language sing” (Tony Rayns, Time Out London).
—Noah Cowan

King of the Children 孩子王 dir. Chen Kaige | Mainland 1987 | 106 min.
Between the simple pleasures of Yellow Earth and the epic sweep of Farewell My Concubine, Chen Kaige made this deceptively small-scale masterpiece. Part allegory, part scorchingly political “j’accuse,” King of the Children recounts the story of an urban exile (a “sent-down” boy) who is assigned to teach children in a remote village in the lush Yunnan province during the Cultural Revolution. He finds a one-room, open-air schoolhouse, no textbooks, and a bunch of rowdy kids thirsty for knowledge. Encouraging his students to think creatively and imagine a different life for themselves, he becomes their hero—until the local authorities get wind of his “subversive” teachings and punish him. One of Chen’s most purely beautiful films, King of the Children is also one of his most ambitious experiments in allegorical storytelling, blending in elements of magic realism that modulate and comment upon the film’s story. “[King of the Children] takes its tonality from the harsh beauty of the Yunnan landscape of soaring forests and misty valleys: a territory of the mind where hard-edged realism blurs easily into hallucination…. By any standards, this followup to Yellow Earth and The Big Parade is also something like a masterpiece” (Tony Rayns, Time Out London).
—Noah Cowan

The Women from the Lake of Scented Souls 香魂女 dir. Xie Fei | Mainland 1993 | 105 min.
Winner of the Golden Bear at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival, The Women from the Lake of Scented Souls marries the relatively straightforward style of the Fourth Generation “scar films” with the ravishing landscapes and dense, visually rich cinematic language of the celebrated Fifth Generation filmmakers. (The film’s director Xie Fei was the former teacher of Fifth Generation figurehead Chen Kaige, and the relationship between the two was never clearer than in this unjustly overlooked film.) Sold as a child bride to a crippled husband, Sister Xiang (the much celebrated Siqin Gaowa) has risen to become a successful sesame oil entrepreneur and the richest person in her village. In a regressively feudal manoeuvre, Sister Xiang uses her free market-acquired wealth to purchase a bride for her mentally challenged son, and rules over her unwilling daughter-in-law with an iron hand. But as surprising revelations emerge through the film’s gentle, unhurried pace, she finds herself transitioning from being the young girl’s oppressor to her fellow victim. Forging a link between the pre-Cultural Revolution women’s pictures of the 1960s and the female-centric rural epics of the Fifth Generation, The Women from the Lake of Scented Souls is “gratifyingly rich in detail […] From the lotus blossoms on the lake to the ceremonial grandeur of a Chinese wedding, the film is gentle, moving and precise” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times).
—Noah Cowan

Black Snow 本命年 dir. Xie Fei | Mainland 1990 | 107 min.
The Fourth Generation cohort of Chinese filmmakers had their careers interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. When films were again allowed to be made, these directors focused on making heartfelt humanist dramas that became known as “scar films,” small-scale stories about personal tragedies that speak microcosmically to the massive cultural upheaval that occasioned them. Xie Fei, the acknowledged leader of the Fourth Generation, helped pioneer this tradition with his celebrated A Girl from Hunan, but it is his second feature Black Snow that marks him as a key figure in the future evolution of Mainland cinema. The great actor Jiang Wen, combining macho brutality with puppy-dog eyes, stars as a petty criminal—a protagonist never seen in Chinese films of the time—who returns to Beijing at the onset of the Mainland’s entry into the global capitalist market. Confused by the changes he sees all around him, he falls for and becomes the bodyguard of a cabaret singer, while his old buddies try to drag him back to a life of crime. Employing handheld camerawork (another novelty in Chinese filmmaking at the time) to accentuate the feeling of its hero’s constricted circumstances and the impoverished urban environments through which he moves, Black Snow presages much of the work of future Sixth Generation luminaries Lou Ye and Jia Zhangke in its picture of the new China at its most contradictory.
—Noah Cowan

Boat People 投奔怒海 dir. Ann Hui | Hong Kong 1982 | 105 min.
“Unquestionably one of the most important films in Hong Kong cinema” (Edmund Lee, Time Out Hong Kong). Ann Hui, the great humanist of the Hong Kong New Wave, first began mixing elements of documentary and fiction in her work for television, and after some milestone achievements in genre cinema (including The Spooky Bunch), she received great acclaim both at home and abroad for this superlative political drama, which is frequently named as the best Hong Kong film of all time by both critics and audiences. Returning to Vietnam three years after documenting its liberation by Ho Chi Minh’s Communist forces, a Japanese photojournalist now encounters a country in a state of perpetual fear and paranoia, living under the omnipresent threat of state brutality and horrific forced-labour camps. Though the film is charged by pressing contemporary concerns—namely providing some context for the scores of emaciated Vietnamese refugees washing up on Hong Kong shores at the time—it has also been interpreted as an allegory about the handover of Hong Kong to the Mainland. Brutal, beautiful and impossibly moving, Boat People has both the immediacy of a news broadcast and a poetry born of fear and despair.
—Noah Cowan

One and Eight 一个和八个 dir. Zhang Junzhao | Mainland 1983 | 90 min.
The filmmakers who became known as the Fifth Generation were the first students admitted to the Beijing Film Academy after the Cultural Revolution, and their work—marked by radical aesthetic experimentation, boldly emotive performances, and considerably more complex and critical thinking about the events leading up to and following 1949—came to represent a definitive break with the cinema that preceded them. Widely considered to be the first feature to emerge from this group, Zhang Junzhao’s One and Eight set the tone for many of the films to follow while also functioning as a superbly tense war film. During the Sino-Japanese War, a political commissar serving with a Communist army unit in the vast landscapes of northeastern China is suspected of treason by his superior, and thrown into prison with eight hardened criminals. When the unit comes under attack by the Japanese, the commissar demonstrates his loyalty by rallying his fellow prisoners to join the Communist troops in a last-ditch rearguard action. Featuring bleached, strikingly high-contrast cinematography by future Fifth Generation standard-bearer Zhang Yimou and some remarkably stylized passages (particularly the tour-de-force, near-silent opening sequence), One and Eight both looks and feels like the start of a new cinematic revolution.
—Noah Cowan

Bloody Morning 血色清晨 dir. Li Shaohong | Mainland 1992 | 103 min
Unavailable for many years and barely known to critics or audiences, Bloody Morning is now considered among the greatest Fifth Generation films. Freely adapted from Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the film follows the investigation of a local teacher’s murder in a small and desperately poor rural village, the story of the crime gradually pieced together from the fragmented memories of witnesses forced to testify at an inquest. Sharing with her Fifth Generation colleagues Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang a remarkable eye for the barren landscapes of northern China and a fascination with small-town life—especially those enduring superstitions that Communism failed to erase—director Li Shaohong also introduces several formal innovations, particularly in storytelling structure, that remain unprecedented in Chinese cinema. “With its maze of snow-dusted paths and smoky, damp interiors, the village provides an ideally insular, almost claustrophobic setting … Scenes such as the joyless wedding proceedings and the villagers’ collective impotence in the final act speak volumes about a psychology mired in tradition and ignorance” (Laura Thielen, San Francisco International Film Festival).
—Noah Cowan

The Black Cannon Incident 黑炮事件 dir. Huang Jianxin | Mainland 1985 | 93 min.
A key Fifth Generation work released during the second phase of Deng Xiaoping’s social and economic reforms, this robust social satire delightfully depicts the clash between the rising class of rapid industrial modernizers and old Party cadres with a serious Cultural Revolution hangover. The film chronicles the Kafkaesque predicament of a bumbling factory translator who is suspected of industrial espionage after sending an innocent telegram that is intercepted by a militant snoop. (The “black cannon” of the title refers to the missing chess piece the hapless hero is trying to locate.) Placed under investigation and reassigned to a less sensitive department but never informed of the reason for his demotion, he petitions to get his job back, sparking an increasingly obtuse and hilarious series of Party meetings, set in a boardroom straight out of German Expressionism. “Take the resulting chaos as comedy or tragedy; either way, there’s no doubt the Chinese ruling class comes in for an unsparing hammering. What’s more, the film’s political daring is matched by a torrent of bright ideas in the plotting, design and colour control departments” (Tony Rayns, Time Out London).
—Noah Cowan  

The Blue Kite 蓝风筝 dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang | Mainland 1993 | 140 min.
Tian Zhuangzhuang’s lyrical, deeply moving film focuses on a young boy named Tietou, who, from his humble vantage point in a traditional hutong courtyard in Beijing, witnesses the terrible human cost of three enormous historical ruptures—the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution—as he grows into a man. A film whose delicate understatement belies its simmering anger, The Blue Kite feels very much in dialogue with the historical elegies of the great Hou Hsiao-hsien, both in its themes and its aesthetics. Like Hou, Tian is a formidable visual stylist—his masterpiece The Horse Thief is among the most beautiful films ever made—and in The Blue Kite he devises a sophisticated design schema that employs a distinct colour palette for each of the film’s three chapters (titled “Father,” “Uncle,” and “Stepfather,” after the three patriarchs who Tietou sees successively swept away by China’s tumultuous mid-twentieth-century history). Bearing quiet witness to what was lost in the Mainland’s lurch into modernity, The Blue Kite creates a feeling of almost universal sorrow without ever leaving its beautifully intimate register. “Of all the remarkable films to have come out of China over the past few years, The Blue Kite could well be the most authentic, the most accessible and, finally, the most powerful” (Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times).
—Noah Cowan

The Horse Thief 盗马贼 dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang | Mainland 1986 | 88 min.
One of the greatest achievements of Fifth Generation cinema, this oblique, ravishingly beautiful epic was famously praised by Martin Scorsese as the best film he saw in the 1990s. Like many of his Fifth Generation peers, director Tian Zhuangzhuang was exposed to the remote countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and his hunger to tell the tales of the people who inhabited these far-flung reaches led to this poetic portrait of rural life in Tibet. Featuring minimal dialogue and structured around a series of elaborate Buddhist ceremonies, The Horse Thief tells the simple story of Norbu, the eponymous horse thief, as he struggles to support his family and attempts to give up his larcenous ways in contrition for his young son’s death. Stunningly gorgeous in all respects—the film’s widescreen cinematography and use of sound is beyond remarkable—The Horse Thief created a new and highly influential form of ethnographic cinema, offering a fascinating glimpse into the seemingly timeless existence of these distant peoples whilst never overlooking their highly specific placement within this politically sensitive land. “Tian’s visionary insistence lofts him to the [heady] realm of such anthropological aesthetes as Sergei Paradjanov, Robert Gardner and Werner Herzog. Its vast empty landscape accentuated by a dramatic use of CinemaScope, [The Horse Thief] has an epic sweep—it suggests a western told from a Native American point of view” (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice).
—Noah Cowan

The Time to Live and the Time to Die 童年往事 dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien | Taiwan 1985 | 138 min.
One of our most important living filmmakers, Hou Hsiao-hsien made his first masterpiece with this semi-autobiographical drama about a family who settle in Taiwan in 1947. At once a highly specific and universally resonant portrait of the cross-generational difficulties facing refugees as they try to adjust to life in a new land, The Time to Live parallels the respective experiences of the young boy Ah-ha, who has never known anything other than his family’s adopted home in a small village; his old grandmother, exhausted by a lifetime of violence and suffering under both feudal rule and the chaos of civil war, who now takes refuge in senile fantasies of a blissful return to the home she left behind; and his father, one foot in each place, torn between his filial obligations and his longing for a new start. Hou’s masterfully measured tone, his impeccable compositions and often astonishing use of deep focus announced him to the world as a major new artist; the widespread acclaim and festival success of The Time to Live laid the groundwork for the triumphant international reception of A City of Sadness four years later. “Everything is right: the miraculous use of sound, the limpid cinematography, the natural acting … one of [Hou’s] simplest films, and one of his most universal” (Derek Malcom, The Guardian).
—Noah Cowan

A City of Sadness 悲情城市 dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien | Taiwan 1989 | 160 min.
By the late 1980s, Hou Hsiao-hsien had become recognized internationally for his signature filmmaking style—consisting of spare dialogue, long, lingering shots, extraordinarily precise compositions and a remarkable use of deep focus—and his highly specific but universally resonant stories of intergenerational conflict and change. With A City of Sadness, Hou takes on a far broader historical canvas: the period of the “White Terror” between 1945 and 1950, when Taiwan became host to the Nationalist Chinese government-in-exile as they fled from their defeat at the hands of Mao’s Communists— an era of political repression that reached its brutal culmination in the “February 28 Incident,” the 1947 massacre of thousands of Taiwanese civilians by Nationalist soldiers. Focusing on four brothers, each of whom represents a different response by the Taiwanese to the Nationalist government—with particular emphasis on the gentle, deaf-mute Wen-ching, movingly played by Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung Chiu-wai—Hou keeps the famous historical events of-screen while showing the tragic ruptures they create within the microcosmic world of the family. A Taiwanese mirror of the “scar films” then being made in a Mainland just recovering from the Cultural Revolution, Hou’s beautiful, tragic, and ineffably moving City is “one of the supreme masterworks of the contemporary cinema” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader).
—Noah Cowan

A Borrowed Life 多桑 dir. Wu Nien-jen | Taiwan 1994 | 167 min.
Best known in the West as the star of Edward Yang’s final film Yi Yi, Wu Nien-jen was the screenwriter for many of Taiwanese cinema’s greatest films, including Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Time to Live and the Time to Die and A City of Sadness. This epic, finely detailed study of a coal-mining family during the Japanese occupation and beyond is one of the few films he directed himself. Sharing with Hou’s films a highly deliberate mise-en-scène and a sophisticated rendering of family dynamics, A Borrowed Life proved to be politically incendiary in its depiction of how conflicting loyalties in the Sino-Japanese War put the relationship between a father and son to the test. While the kindly family patriarch remains in thrall to the Japanese culture that he has known all his life, his son, in disbelief at his father’s unthinking faith—especially following revelations of wartime atrocities against the Chinese people—meanwhile grows enamoured of the new Nationalist regime in Taiwan. “One of New Taiwanese Cinema’s masterpieces ... Few films have so vividly re-created the sensation of having known another human being for one’s entire life, while simultaneously evoking the suspicion that all along one has loved a stranger” (Andrew Chan, Film Comment).
—Noah Cowan  

The Old Well 老井 dir. Wu Tianming | Mainland 1986 | 130 min.
Though not well known in the West, the prominent Fourth Generation filmmaker Wu Tianming is a key figure in the history of Chinese cinema. In the period following the Cultural Revolution, he directed several important films that would help reshape Chinese cinema. As chief of the Xi’an Studio, which become the home of the Fifth Generation, he oversaw the production of the early masterpieces by Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Zhang Yimou, the latter of whom starred in Wu’s most celebrated film, The Old Well. The film is a fascinating hybrid: its first section, in which a proud young man returns from his urban education determined to better his hometown, feels akin to the work of the younger Fifth Generation with its vast landscapes, hardy peasants, and pronounced symbolism; but when the man and his former girlfriend get trapped inside the eponymous well in the film’s second half, it begins to feel far more like the Fourth Generation “scar films.” Intimate and highly personal, The Old Well quietly yet devastatingly exposes the horrors of the past and questions the possibility of individual effort in the face of history.
—Noah Cowan

Red Sorghum 红高粱 dir. Zhang Yimou | Mainland 1987 | 91 min.
Already a renowned cinematographer for his work on such landmark Fifth Generation films as Yellow Earth, Zhang Yimou announced himself as a master director with this deceptively simple folk fable; the film also introduced the world to his muse and future wife Gong Li, who went on to become the most famous film actress to ever emerge from the Mainland. Set in the lead-up to the Sino-Japanese War, Red Sorghum tells the story of a young peasant girl, Jiu’er (Gong), whose parents sell her into marriage with an elderly winemaker. Attacked by bandits on the way to her wedding, Jiu’er is rescued by one of her palanquin bearers (Jiang Wen, sporting maximum swagger), who later returns and becomes her lover. Together they turn around the wine business she has inherited, but then have to grimly dig in to face the invading Japanese armies. From its bawdy beginnings to its tragic conclusion, where an unimaginable nightmare becomes all too real, Red Sorghum is above all a formidable visual accomplishment: every shot feels utterly original, every nuance of colour a boldly symbolic flourish. “The cinematography in Red Sorghum has no desire to be subtle, or muted; it wants to splash its passionate colours all over the screen with abandon, and the sheer visual impact of the film is voluptuous” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times).
—Noah Cowan

The Story of Qiu Ju 秋菊打官司 dir. Zhang Yimou | Mainland 1992 | 100 min.
Following a series of lavish and internationally acclaimed historical dramas (Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern), Zhang Yimou struck out in a radically different direction with this bracing, unforgettable foray into contemporary neorealism, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and confirmed Zhang’s muse and then wife Gong Li as one of the world’s most gifted film actresses. Gong plays the pregnant wife of a peasant farmer who is badly beaten (complete with a vicious kick to the balls) by the village chief. Against her husband’s wishes, Qiu Ju complains to the local policeman, who charges the chief a small fine and asks him to apologize; unrepentant, the chief throws the money at Qiu Ju and stomps off without an apology. The indignant Qiu Ju continues to appeal her husband’s case to ever higher authorities in ever bigger cities, until her out-of-control crusade collapses when she goes into labour and receives help from an unexpected source. Providing a fascinating glimpse into the Mainland’s massive, late-century urban migrations and slowly recalibrating justice system,“The Story of Qiu Ju reaffirms Zhang Yimou’s stature as storyteller and sociologist extraordinaire, and as a visual artist of exceptional delicacy and insight” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times).
—Noah Cowan

The Spooky Bunch 小姐撞到鬼 aka. 撞到正 dir. Ann Hui | Hong Kong 1980 | 93 min.
Virtually unclassifiable, The Spooky Bunch is a horror-comedy that oscillates wildly between vaudevillian slapstick and tragic political drama. A low-rent Cantonese opera troupe is lured to the remote island of Cheung Chau by the wealthy Mr. Ma, who wants his playboy nephew Dick (Kenny Bee) to marry bit-part player Ah Chi (the sublime and hilarious Josephine Siao Fong-fong, who went on the become one of Hong Kong cinema’s biggest stars) in order to lift a curse he believes Ah Chi’s grandfather put on his family. As the troupe rehearses, they are assailed by a playful spirit called Cat Shit, whose appearance heralds the arrival of a host of murderous ghosts out for vengeance against the families of Dick and Ah Chi for long-ago betrayals, both personal and political. Possessions, kooky dances, and some particularly gruesome murders follow in quick succession, as the ghosts hijack the production and force the put-upon (and quite terrible) actors to perform classic Chinese dramas that reveal the true stories of what happened during the terrible times of war and conflict. Directed by Hong Kong New Wave master Ann Hui, The Spooky Bunch is both a delightful entertainment and a complex, sophisticated and multi-layered meta-cinematic genre experiment, as Hui fuses the traditions of Cantonese opera with the idioms of contemporary Hong Kong popular film. There is simply nothing quite like it.
—Noah Cowan

Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind 第一類型危險 dir. Tsui Hark | Hong Kong 1980
The discordant and cheerfully offensive trumpet that heralded the arrival of the Hong Kong New Wave has been restored to the vision of its author. Upon its original release, Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind had its incendiary opening sequence banned by the British-led bureaucracy, which was afraid that the film’s depiction of serial bombings of movie theatres would lead to copycat crimes in real life—but if they thought that was offensive, did they even bother to watch the rest of the film? A thoroughly deranged urban rampage by three nerdy teenage “bomb-makers,” a sociopathic blackmailing beauty and an American Vietnam vet reveals Hong Kong as a city of deceit, cover-up, lurking terror and gruesome violence. Dangerous Encounters’ propulsive energy, docudrama feeling and deep-seated, politically-fueled cynicism and anger would become trademarks of the Hong Kong New Wave of the decade to follow, and established Tsui as one of the medium’s most outrageous (and courageous) innovators. “[Tsui] creates a subversive, desperate portrait of a Hong Kong society that has lost its values. A quintessential New Wave film” (Aurélien Dirler).
—Noah Cowan

Peking Opera Blues 刀馬旦 dir. Tsui Hark | Hong Kong 1986 | 104 min.
“A satire on the Chinese ignorance of democracy,” as Tsui Hark provocatively described his first real masterpiece, the much-loved comedy-action-political thriller Peking Opera Blues sees the director’s signature manic style hitting an early peak, perfecting the mongrel, masala-like form that Hark had been developing in his previous films (most notably in Peking’s similarly named predecessor Shanghai Blues). In one of the most famous performances in Chinese cinema history, the magnificent Brigitte Lin sports a close-cropped haircut and tight-fitting military garb as a cross-dressing general’s daughter in 1913 Beijing, who joins forces with a fortune hunter (Cherie Chung) and the daughter of a Peking opera impresario (Sally Yeh) as part of her plot to overthrow the corrupt regime of Yuan Shikai, the first president of Republican China. Tsui loves overthrowing conventions, and innocent flirtation in cross-dressing operas is one of those sacred cows; here, the lesbian subtext bobs to the surface unexpectedly and with great charm. “A speed-crazed riff on what happens when a spy melodrama meets a backstage comedy: Feydeau with blood at 150 beats per minute” (Tony Rayns, Time Out London).
—Noah Cowan

A Brighter Summer Day 牯嶺街少年殺人事件 dir. Edward Yang | Taiwan 1991 | 237 min.
Inspired by a real-life 1960s murder case, Edward Yang’s novelistic epic ranks with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness as the crowning achievement of the Taiwanese New Wave. Its title derived from the mistranslated lyrics of Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” A Brighter Summer Day focuses on Xiao Si’r (Chang Chen), an intelligent but underachieving high school student who becomes involved with a local street gang. When Si’r falls for Ming (Lisa Yang), the girlfriend of imprisoned gang leader Cat (Wong Chizan), her seemingly innate inconstancy pushes him further and further into an unhealthy obsession. Forgoing the more assertive modernism of The Terrorizers, Yang ingeniously uses his small-scale story to create a portrait of a whole society gripped by a perpetual identity crisis: the elder generation still attached to the war-ridden Mainland they forsook for a Taiwan now under the repressive thumb of the Nationalists, the younger generation knowing nothing but their island home and resentfully reacting against their parents’ nostalgia with aimless, no-future nihilism. “[A Brighter Summer Day] belongs in the company of key works of our era … richly realizing a physical and social world as dense with family, community, and other personal ties as any John Ford film, and furnished with more sheer physical presence (including characters, settings, and objects) than any other fiction film I know of from the nineties” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader).
—Noah Cowan

NEW DIRECTIONS

As the millennium approached, Chinese society once again found itself facing profound changes. The Mainland was surging towards global economic pre-eminence. Hong Kong, after over a century as a British colony, was united once again with the Mainland as a Special Administrative Region, while maintaining its special cultural characteristics. In Taiwan, the reinstitution of democratic debate following decades of authoritarian Guomindang rule became a tug of war between those who wanted a future separate from the Mainland and those seeking greater integration. After the terror and violence that had dominated the Chinese experience of the twentieth century, that century’s end felt comparatively optimistic, yet also strangely uncertain—creating a kind of apprehensive malaise that would be both reflected in and expressed by an increasingly more diffuse Chinese cinema. As overt political, cultural and generational conflict appeared to recede, the collective consciousness that had bound the previous Generations and New Waves together began to disperse, allowing for more distinctly individualistic, stylistically eclectic and globally-oriented filmmakers to come to the fore.

This lack of cohesion is particularly pronounced on the Mainland, where the filmmakers who comprise the co-called Sixth Generation—Wang Xiaoshuai and Jia Zhangke chief among them—go to great lengths to deny any shared approach to cinema. Yet especially in their early years, there are distinct group characteristics that link these exceptional artists, despite their disparities in age, style and sensibility. For one, they were the first generation of Mainland filmmakers to be exposed (as students) to the entirety of their own nation’s film history, and also the first to have relatively unrestricted access to Hollywood films and European art cinema. One can also discern a cluster of common influences in their work: their preoccupation with urban life has much in common with the Hong Kong New Wave; their predilection for exquisite compositions and gentle pacing owes much to Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien; while their small-scale, delicately wrought narratives of ordinary people buffeted by vast social change rhyme with the Fourth Generation “scar” films and reject the largesse (some would say excess) of the flamboyant Fifth Generation epics. In Hong Kong, the Second Wave that appeared at the end of the 1980s took the opposite approach to the Sixth Generation’s carefully studied minimalism, one that contrasted as well with the work of the earlier New Wave. Led by Wong Kar-wai and Stanley Kwan, the Second Wavers created impossibly lush, superbly stylized films that diverged from both the low-key realism of Ann Hui and the genre-based wildness of Tsui Hark and John Woo. Following in the modernist footsteps of Edward Yang, the Second Wavers took film itself as a primary subject: self-consciously invoking the history of cinema in virtually every frame of their films, they presented it as a kind of prism through which to view contemporary society during a moment of transformation that was comparably gentler, but no less profound, than the major upheavals that came before. The heavy weight of history so often evident in Chinese cinema becomes a luxurious, even decadent fascination with the past in the work of the Second Wave. Kwan especially ties together many themes of this programme with Center Stage (a.k.a. Actress), his meta-modernist biopic of Ruan Lingyu, which uses the great star’s tragically short life as a means to examine the rise and fall of Golden Age Shanghai cinema, and contrast that era’s otherworldly glamour with a considerably more quotidian present. Wong Kar-wai as well evokes the timeless elegance of the Shanghai 1930s, blended with Hong Kong commercial melodramas of the fifties, in his sinfully gorgeous masterwork In the Mood for Love. Enormously influential, the Second Wave not only produced some of the region’s (and the world’s) most famous actors—notably Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and the late Anita Mui—but also introduced a powerful new art-film aesthetic to international cinema, one that seemed to speak to the anxiety, velocity and instability of contemporary urban existence. Wong’s Chungking Express in particular—in its bold experimentation with editing and framing, fragmentary narrative construction, and woozily beautiful camerawork by Christopher Doyle Du Ke Feng—has been singled out by critics and academics as an encapsulation of the “postmodern” in both its style and subject. With its love-hungry policemen mopily making their rounds through the urban jungle of Hong Kong, Chungking also signalled another important trend. In much of recent Chinese cinema, a certain kind of character emerges: a young man (usually), self-aware, detached, often cynical, and, above all, a creature of the city. Aimless youth had of course been a presence in Chinese cinema for decades, from the charming, streetwise coterie of young men, poor as dirt and devoted to living culturally rich lives, in the thirties screwball melodrama Crossroads, to Tsui Hark’s urban terrorists in Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ambling underachievers and Edward Yang’s no-future street hoodlums in The Terrorizers and A Brighter Summer Day. But whereas these figures were usually sociologically placed, symptoms or exemplars of contemporary alienation or disaffection, this new breed of drifter has more in common with the nineteenth-century flâneur that Walter Benjamin famously found in the work of Baudelaire: an urban wanderer both dazzled by the society of the spectacle (whether capitalist or socialist) that surrounds him while also seeing through it. This neo-flâneur figure has become a virtual trademark of Taiwan’s most important and exciting new filmmaker to emerge at the turn of the century, Tsai Ming-liang. In his second film Vive L’Amour, in which Tsai’s onscreen alter ego Lee Kang-sheng plays a suicidal businessman who hides out in an empty apartment used by a beautiful young realtor for her assignations, Tsai established his distinctively elliptical style, marked by minimal dialogue, a reliance on temps mort, and a deadpan sense of humour. Both strangely otherworldly and remarkably insightful in their oblique social criticism, Tsai’s absurdist reveries transpose the breathless speed of Wong’s money-fuelled Hong Kong to Taipei and slows it down to a mesmerizing crawl. Where Wong’s lovelorn romantics and Tsai’s opaquely yearning drifters speak eloquently to the psychological, social, sexual and spiritual dislocations of millennial capitalism, the wandering protagonists in the films of many Mainland directors evince a comparable rootlessness. The flâneur can be seen in the bohemian artists of Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days, the travelling players of Jia Zhangke’s Platform, and even in the bumbling rural cop of Lu Chuan’s debut feature The Missing Gun—which, in a sign of the Mainland’s re-engagement with the West, absorbed that marginal figure back into mainstream cinema and asserted an edgy new style that paralleled the technical flash and dazzle of Hollywood. Yet even as Lu established himself as a leading figure in Mainland cinema’s ongoing commercial renaissance, he demonstrated with his second film Kekexili: Mountain Patrol—a gritty survival epic that brilliantly questions and repositions the Fifth Generation’s veneration of landscape—that complex dialogue with the past, combined with an ambitious attempt to remake cinematic language, that has been the hallmark of this extraordinary century of Chinese cinema.
—Noah Cowan
(Note [2020]: I owe an enormous debt to curator [and close collaborator on this program] Aliza Ma for signalling the importance of the “flâneur" as a guiding concept for contemporary Chinese cinema and engaging in multiple discussion on the topic. I encourage readers to download the accompanying PDF to see her own take on the concept in various programme notes.)

Chungking Express 重慶森林 dir. Wong Kar-wai | Hong Kong 1994 | 98 min.
Wong Kar-wai’s visually dazzling and endlessly rich fusion of offbeat romantic comedy and coolly postmodern reverie has become a signature film of millennial cinema. In many ways a culmination of the cycle of urban cinema that began with such 1930s Shanghai films as Crossroads and Street Angel, Chungking Express also heralded the emergence of what we may call (after Baudelaire and Benjamin) the flâneur element that one can see in so many contemporary Chinese films: the emphasis on wandering and wondering, exploring the mysteries and sensations of life in the modern city. Combining parallel, inverted stories of unrequited love involving two unnamed cops—Officer 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who pursues a mysterious, bewigged criminal (Brigitte Lin), and Officer 663 (Tony Leung), who is pursued by a spunky noodle-stand vendor (Faye Wong)—Wong and master cinematographers Christopher Doyle Du Ke Feng and Lau Wai-keung transform Hong Kong into a woozy array of sublime neons and entropic slow-motion, a dizzying dance of disorientation and displacement. Rushed to completion in just under two months, Chungking Express has become a remarkably influential cinematic dispatch on life in contemporary urban space: its anomie, its loneliness, its pure silliness and its breathless speed. “A film about time, serendipity, the hard shimmer of night, and the erotics of camerawork, Chungking Express is a genuine wonder: dazzling, bewildering, intoxicating” (Manohla Dargis, The New York Times).
—Noah Cowan

Kekexili: Mountain Patrol 可可西里 dir. Lu Chuan | Mainland 2004 | 95 min.
A rugged hybrid of docudrama and American western set against Tibet’s vast mountain ranges, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol is a harsh reply to the poetic awe that the Fifth Generation classics found in similarly uninviting landscapes. A journalist is embedded with a posse of vigilantes hired (but rarely paid) by the government to track down antelope poachers. He accompanies them on a grim manhunt as they seek vengeance for the murder of one of their own—a blood feud that leaves most of them dead and the journalist’s idealism more than a little deflated. Unlike Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou et al., director Lu Chuan (City of Life and Death) finds not grace in nature so much as grimly Darwinian struggle, a pervasive violence all the more brutally ironic given the land's extraordinary, unapproachable beauty. “As tough and unsparing as its backdrop, a blood-boiling environmental thriller with a dash of Sergio Leone. Filled with strange and horrible visions, it draws you in again and again [with] set pieces that distill the story’s life-and-death struggle to its essence” (Manohla Dargis, The New York Times).
—Noah Cowan

In the Mood for Love 花樣年華 dir. Wong Kar-wai | Hong Kong 2000 | 98 min.
Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece of romantic longing is a love letter to much of Chinese cinema history. Its tale of a man and a woman (Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung), crammed into adjacent tiny apartments, their spouses embroiled in an affair and their own passions repressed by tradition, propriety, and a fear of the unknown, echoes a tradition of wenyi melodrama stretching back to the 1930s. The film has a deep, almost fetishized relationship with the postwar period, especially its clothing and interior design, that speaks to the continuing weight of history and memory on contemporary Chinese filmmaking. (Critic Stephen Teo astutely identifies the film’s deep formal echoes of Fei Mu’s postwar masterpiece Spring in a Small Town, further underlining this connection.) But In the Mood’s most profound connection to the past is in the intoxicating performances of Leung and Cheung, whose grace and vulnerability conjure up the aura of vanished stars from the Golden Age of Shanghai cinema in the thirties and forties. Displaying Wong Kar-wai at the height of his powers, his extraordinary control over tone and gesture felt in every frame, In the Mood for Love was recently anointed as the most important Chinese film on Sight & Sound’s decennial poll of the greatest films ever made. “Rhapsodically sublimated and ultimately sublime” (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice).
—Noah Cowan 

Made in Hong Kong 香港製造 dir. Fruit Chan | Hong Kong 1997 | 108 min.
“Every frame of this tale of wasted youth and irresponsible adults—possibly Hong Kong’s most acclaimed indie feature ever—screams of muffled anguish” (Edmund Lee, Time Out Hong Kong). Where the glistening reveries of Wong Kar-wai and the stately melodramas of Stanley Kwan have become the designated standard-bearers of Hong Kong’s Second Wave, Fruit Chan delivers a far more kinetic, punk-rock experience in his gritty low-life portraits, most often situated in the pungent underbelly of Hong Kong’s ghettoes. Winner of a passel of awards, the independently made, ultra-low-budget Made in Hong Kong focuses on low-rent wannabe gangster Chungchau (played with extraordinary intensity by first-timer Sam Lee) as he ineffectively attempts to wheel and deal his way through the Hong Kong underworld, his desperation and ennui palpable. The film follows his downwards trajectory into triad violence as he tries to forge some kind of emotional connection to two teenage girls, one a suicide who leaves behind a letter that obsesses him, the other a debt-ridden beauty in need of a kidney transplant. Released in the same year that Hong Kong was returned to the Mainland, Made in Hong Kong is often considered the culmination and the ne plus ultra of the “handover anxiety film,” the unofficial genre visible in various guises throughout the preceding two decades of Hong Kong cinema.
—Noah Cowan 

Center Stage (Actress) 阮玲玉 dir. Stanley Kwan | Hong Kong 1992 | 167 min.
The most important actress of prewar Chinese cinema, the tragically short-lived Ruan Lingyu took her own life at the age of twenty-four after she was savagely attacked by the press over an adultery scandal, but her extraordinary legacy continues to be a significant source of inspiration for Chinese artists. Director Stanley Kwan, famous for his lush period films, paid Ruan her greatest cinematic tribute with this exceptionally innovative biopic, and created a new screen icon in the process: Maggie Cheung, whose performance won her the prize for best actress at the Berlin International Film Festival and launched her as a massive global star. An elegant and complex blend of fiction and non-fiction, Center Stage alternates between exquisitely detailed recreations of key moments from Ruan’s life, clips from her films, and charming on-camera conversations between Kwan and Cheung about Ruan. Celebrated in much academic and critical writing as a key text about the status of women in twentieth-century cinema, Center Stage is above all a heartfelt and achingly beautiful testament to one of the true legends of the cinema. “A masterpiece … the greatest Hong Kong film I’ve seen” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader); “tender, vivid and almost overwhelmingly moving” (Tony Rayns, Time Out London).
—Noah Cowan

The Missing Gun 寻枪 dir. Lu Chuan | Mainland 2002 | 90 min.
Loosely based on Akira Kurosawa’s classic Stray Dog, the auspicious debut from leading contemporary director Lu Chuan follows small-town cop Ma Shan (the compulsively watchable Jiang Wen) as he desperately tries to track down the service revolver he misplaced following a night of drunken revelry. As Ma moves up and down the social ladder in his desperate search—with everyday betrayals and unexpected killings cropping up along the way—each of his interactions with the town’s citizenry speaks volumes, through body language and nuanced performance, about the relationship between those in authority and those they are meant to protect. A huge hit at the domestic box office, The Missing Gun brought a brash new energy to Mainland cinema and signalled the absorption of the marginal characters of Sixth Generation filmmaking into the mainstream. While Jiang’s Ma has a kinship with the petty-crook protagonists of the early films by Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye, the film’s madly kinetic camerawork and breathless editing make it far more akin to Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting. “The heart of the film rests on the shoulders of Jiang Wen, who proves more than worthy of the task. His slow-burning intensity with moments of explosive emotion supplies an intriguing interior monologue with the character’s essential decency” (George Wu, culturevulture.net).
—Noah Cowan