So You Think You Know Chinese Film: Beyond Jackie Chan and Crouching Tiger

Curated by Katherine Chu and Kaitlin Solimine from a course taught by USC Professor Stan Rosen

You’ve seen the American blockbusters—like Star Wars and Spiderman—and the classics—like Casablanca and The Godfather. Maybe you’ve seen some of the most renowned European films, those by Fellini and Bergman. But China, with its population of 1.35 billion and annual box office revenues for Hollywood predicted to reach $5 billion USD in 2017, has somehow eluded your grasp. You know of Jackie Chan and have heard of Raise the Red Lantern—yet Chinese cinema extends much deeper than these internationally popular films and their stars.

University of Southern California Professor Stan Rosen is a specialist on Chinese film. He has shared with Hippo Reads some of his introductory required viewings and readings for students of Chinese cinema. This list includes the more mainstream Chinese productions as well as those from the Chinese “underground” (a term scholar Paul Pickowicz explains in From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China).

Chinese film matters and here’s why: an understanding of Chinese film allows a deeper examination of the ways globalization carries risks for China in terms of heightened interdependence and weakening of sovereign autonomy. Chinese culture, and in particular China’s film industry, is finding audiences around the world, with the side effect of maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risks of China’s globalization. By watching a range of Chinese films, viewers can begin to understand how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) struggles to control what information, ideas, and opinions can be publicly articulated within its borders. Viewership of Chinese films also allows a more global examination of the role China’s domestic political system plays in the exercise of power that might affect the CCP’s activities outside China.

Consider this list a jumping off point into a much deeper engagement with the diversity and complexities of historical and contemporary Chinese film [note: this list is certainly not exhaustive]. What’s important to recognize is that the questions and themes addressed by these films are as diverse as the multiplicity of narratives found in the sprawling nation itself. As Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke has said:

We’re living in a globalised age, in a world saturated by mass media, in an international city, as it were. But despite all that, the problems we’re facing are our own problems.

Just as Jia notes, these films bring the individual and national problems faced to the fore—doing so in dramatic, comedic, romantic, and, as always, poignant ways.

Pre-1949 China on Film

• “The Lin Family Shop” (1959)
• “Early Spring in February” (1963)
• “Crows and Sparrows” (1949)
• “A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop” (2010)
• “Flowers of War” (2011)
• “Let the Bullets Fly” (2011)
• “The Opium War” (1997)
• “Beginning of the Great Revival” (2011)
• “Founding of a Republic” (2009)
• “Forever Enthralled” {梅兰芳} (2008)

Recommended Readings:

• Mao Dun, “The Lin Family Shop” (short story from 1931)
• Gray and Cavandish, Chinese Communism in Crisis

The Mao Years (Post-1949) and The Cultural Revolution

• “Hibiscus Town” (1986) [Fourth Generation Representative Film by Xie Jin]
• “The Blue Kite” (1993) [Fifth Generation Representative Film by Tian Zhuangzhuang]
• “Farewell My Concubine” (1993) [Fifth Generation Representative Film by Chen Kaige]
• “To Live” (1994) [Fifth Generation Representative Film by Zhang Yimou]
• “The Red Lantern” (1970) [Revolutionary Model Opera]
• “Serfs” (1963) [Chinese view of the Liberation of Tibet]

Recommended Readings:

• “Yiman Wang, Crows and Sparrows,” in Chris Berry, Chinese Films in Focus
• Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen, Art, Politics and Commerce in Chinese Cinema
• Chris Berry, editor, Perspectives on Chinese Cinema
• Paul G. Pickowicz, “Melodramatic Representation and the ‘May Fourth’Tradition of Chinese Cinema,” in Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang, From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth Century China
• Chen Kaige, “Breaking the Circle: The Cinema and Cultural Change in China,” Cineaste, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1990
• Hubert Niogret, Interview with Zhang Yimou (on “To Live”), in Gateward, ed., Zhang Yimou Interviews

China under Reform, including negative consequences of the post-1978 reforms:

• “A Touch of Sin” (2013)
• “Blind Shaft” (2003)
• “Suzhou River” (1999)
• “The Troubleshooters” (1989)
• “Back to Back, Face to Face” (1994)
• “Ermo” (1994)
• “Women from the Lake of Scented Souls” (1993)
• “Railroad of Hope” (Documentary on rural women migrant workers, 2001) {Shown at international film festivals, not in China}
• “Meishi Street” (2008) (documentary on resettlement before the 2008 Beijing Olympics)
• “The Story of Qiu Ju” (1993)
• “The Forest Ranger” (2006)
• “Still Life” (2007)
• “Platform” (2000)
• “The World” (2004)
• “Shower” (2000)
• “Not One Less” (1999)
• “East Palace, West Palace” (1998)
• “Beijing Bicycle” (2001)
• “Brilliance in Europe” {点亮欧洲} (2008)
• “Oxhide” {牛皮} (2009)
• “Spring Fever” (2009)
• “Disorder” (2010), an interesting documentary on Guangdong life
• “Tuya’s Marriage” {图雅的婚事} (2007)
• “The Equation of Love and Death” {李米的猜想} (2008)
• “Black Coal, Thin Ice” (2014, Winner, Berlin International Film Festival)

Recent Box Office Blockbusters

• “Lost in Thailand” (2012)
• “American Dreams in China” (2013)
• “Tiny Times 1, 2” (2013); Part 3 was released in China in July 2014
• “Journey to the West” (2013)
• “So Young” (2013)
• “Finding Mr. Right” (2013)

Recommended Readings:

• Evan Osnos, “The Long Shot: Can China’s Archly Political Auteur Please the Censors and Himself – and Still Find an Audience?,” The New Yorker (2009)
• Paul Pickowicz, “Popular Cinema and Political Thought in Post-Mao China: Reflections on Official Pronouncements, Film, and the Film Audience,” in Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic
• Cui Shuqin, “Working from the Margins: Urban Cinema and Independent Directors in Contemporary China,” Post Script, 20, Nos. 2-3, Spring & Summer, 2001
• Stanley Rosen, ed. “’The Troubleshooters,’ by Wang Shuo,” Chinese Education and Society, Vol. 31, No. 1, January-February 1998 (this is a translation of the filmscript with an editorial introduction that compares the novel, the original screenplay and the final, released version of the film)
• Zha Jianying, “Killing Chickens to Show the Monkey: Impressions of the Film Industry in China,” Sight and Sound, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January 1995)

Image credit: davjdavies via flickr