Wu Tianming, a movie director and former studio head known as the godfather of contemporary Chinese cinema for the generation of filmmakers — including Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige — he shepherded to international acclaim, died on March 4 in Beijing. He was 74.
The cause was a heart attack, the Chinese news agency Xinhua said in reporting on Mr. Wu’s memorial service.
As a director, Mr. Wu was known for “The Old Well” (1986), the story of a poor village’s quest for drinking water in which Mr. Zhang appears as an actor, and “The King of Masks” (1996), about an aging street performer longing to pass on his craft.
He was even better known for his work in the 1980s as chief of the Xi'an Film Studio, a state-run facility in the capital of the Shaanxi Province. In his half-dozen years in the post, Mr. Wu transformed the studio from a provincial operation into a cinematic hothouse, cultivating the cohort of bold young directors, often described as the “fifth generation” of Chinese filmmakers, that also included Tian Zhuangzhuang and Gu Changwei.
Among the movies produced under Mr. Wu’s stewardship were some of the most critically acclaimed examples of late-20th-century world cinema: Mr. Zhang’s first film, “Red Sorghum” (1987), which depicted the hardships of peasant life in the 1930s; “The Horse Thief” (1986), a stark, haunting film about Tibetan nomads directed by Mr. Tian; and Mr. Chen’s “King of Children,” about a schoolteacher during the Cultural Revolution.
“He was my talent scout, and the talent scout to the fifth-generation filmmakers in China,” Mr. Zhang said at Mr. Wu’s memorial, according to Chinese news reports.
Despite Mr. Wu’s requirement that his filmmakers not openly contravene the Communist Party, he let them push the boundaries of what was permissible in China, long known for socialist realist pictures celebrating the myriad glories of the state.
“When I became director of the Xi'an Film Studio, I called together the people at the studio and told them to let real life come out in no disguise,” Mr. Wu told The Toronto Star in 1988. “Being an artist, the most important thing is to tell people the truth.”
That it could be told at Xi'an was a testament both to Mr. Wu’s boldness — he regularly excoriated the party officials charged with censoring his pictures — and to the studio’s location in the interior of China, away from the corridors of power.
“In Beijing you are too near to the emperor,” Mr. Wu said in 1988. “We are far.”
The son of “a very staunch, orthodox party family,” as he later described it, Wu Tianming was born in 1939 in the Shaanxi Province, an impoverished region often described as China’s Appalachia.
Before the Cultural Revolution, Wu Tianming had been an actor attached to the Xi'an studio; passionate about the cinema since boyhood, he hoped one day to study directing in Beijing. Afterward, when such a plan became impossible, he studied filmmaking on his own, in secret.
“Many educational books were destroyed, but film manuals were spared, because film didn’t seem to matter much,” Mr. Wu told The New York Times in 1999. “And then, there were so many books, the Cultural Revolution people could not burn them all.”
Eventually permitted to study directing at the Beijing Film Academy, Mr. Wu graduated in the mid-1970s. His early films include “River Without Buoys,” about the Cultural Revolution, and “Life,” about a teacher who falls in love with a peasant woman.
In 1983, on taking over the Xi'an studio, Mr. Wu called its 4,000 workers together.
“Last year, the Xi'an Film Studio produced more movies than any other film studio in the country,” The Times reported his having told them. “However, the Xi'an Film Studio did not have a single movie on the list of the world’s 10 best movies. Instead, on the list of the world’s seven worst movies, three of them were ours. Isn’t this disgraceful? Of course it’s disgraceful. When you walk down the street with a round metal film canister, you are embarrassed to let anyone glimpse the lettering on the can for fear they will know that you belong to this studio.”
Mr. Wu, who discovered that half his employees could neither read nor write and that only 11 percent had completed secondary school, instituted educational programs for them. He also began cultivating young directors from around the country.
For Mr. Zhang’s first directorial effort, for instance, Mr. Wu raised the thousands of dollars required to plant the sorghum field of the title. “Red Sorghum” went on to win many laurels, including a Golden Bear from the Berlin International Film Festival as the year’s best picture.
After Tiananmen Square, Mr. Wu spent five years running a video store in Monterey Park, Calif., near Los Angeles. He appeared in a small role in “The Joy Luck Club,” Wayne Wang’s 1993 film adaptation of Amy Tan’s novel.
Returning to China in the mid-1990s, Mr. Wu directed “The King of Masks,” for which he won a Golden Rooster, often described as China’s Oscar, as best director. He also directed popular serials for Chinese television.
Mr. Wu’s survivors include a wife, a daughter and a grandson, according to Chinese news reports.
If, as the head of the Xi'an studio, Mr. Wu had qualms about attacking the party functionaries who monitored his films, he did not show it. After all, as he told The Times in 1987, recalling a confrontation with one such official, he had something to fall back on.
“I told him, if I lose my position as studio head, I can be a director,” Mr. Wu said. “If you lose your job as chief of the propaganda department, what can you do?”