"To have seen a movie is not enough, we have to talk about it," the smart vagabond in Waiting for Godot might have remarked were he to live in contemporary China. It has become a national pastime to see the film everyone around you is discussing, or in an increasing number of cases, is dismissing.
"Several years ago, Chinese argued a lot before it finally became clear that the box office had nothing to do with the quality of a film. But today I am not even sure if the box office has anything at all to do with a film," said Dong Shu, a film selector for the Shanghai International Film Festival and the producer of a series of popular film podcasts. Last Saturday Dong gave a lecture titled Crash Course in How to Chitchat about Chinese Films in a coffee shop on Yan'an Road East.
The lecture turned out to be rather comprehensive, paying great respect to the history of Chinese cinema, which can be roughly divided into five parts: the early period (1905-1931), the war period (1931-1949), the "17 years" (1949-1966), the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the opening period (1976-2002) and the fusing period (2002 to now). The periods roughly coincide with the major political changes in China.
"Film is fragile. It can be easily destroyed by politics," Dong sighed, lamenting the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, during which no films except the eight model plays were produced.
Dong described each period with stars and anecdotes, which bridged past and present. For instance, a teenage Osamu Tezuka, who went on to become the "father of Japanese animation," was inspired by China's first animated feature, Princess Iron Fan, made in 1941. And the fact that South Korean stars have enjoyed wild popularity in China in recent years, "from Kangta to Psy," could be regarded as an echo from the 1930s, when the Korean-born actor Jin Yan was loved by Chinese audiences as the first "film emperor."
Dong also mentioned another emperor of the movie industry, Sir Run Run Shaw (1907-2014), who presided over the golden age of Hong Kong cinema from the 1960s to the 1970s, exactly the same time when the Chinese mainland was experiencing the darkest days of its cultural history.
Shaw was probably best-known for his martial arts movies, but his decision to turn down rising star Bruce Lee likely played a role in his studio's decline. Lee later signed to Golden Harvest, the studio founded by Shaw's former employee Raymond Chow. It was Bruce Lee's films that beat Shaw's productions at the box office and revolutionized the kung fu genre.
Apart from genres, another way to trace the development of Chinese cinema is by generations of directors. The most recognizable names today are mainly from the fifth (such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige) and the sixth (like Jia Zhangke).
"You can tell from Chen's Farewell My Concubine that the film is about the whole culture. Characters are both flesh and symbolic. Whereas in the works of the sixth generation, like Jia's Platform, the director focuses more on the fate of nobodies," Dong said.
"Of course, there are more recent directors, but they don't see themselves as the seventh generation. Things are totally different, just as each generation significantly differs from the one before it," Dong said. "Personally I enjoy the works of the fourth generation a lot. They appear very fresh to me, full of the energy of life." He reminded the audience of Wu Tianming's The Old Well (1986), starring none other than Zhang Yimou, who, at the time, was not yet a director himself. Originally a carpenter, Zhang actually lived in a remote village for a whole year to research the role of a mason.