His parents were both prominent in the Chinese film industry; his father Tian Fang was an actor and one-time Vice-head of the Ministry of Culture's Film Bureau, and his mother Yu Lan was a major star actress. He used to tag along to censorship board screenings with his father as a child, although he avoided films after the age of 12 after vomiting due to sitting too near the screen during the screening of a Soviet epic.
In 1968 he was sent to Jilin province (north-east) as part of the 'sent-down youth' during the Cultural Revolution, and one year later he joined the army. He trained as photographer and cinematographer at the Beijing Agricultural Film Studio in the late 1970s. In 1978, he was admitted into the director's course at the Beijing Film Academy.
Already during his time as a student there, he made a name for himself with a TV play called Our Corner, which already featured minimal dialogue and naturalism - thereby foreshadowing the change from dramatic conventions.
He caused more of a stir, and controversy, with his early films On the Hunting Ground and The Horse Thief. They are almost non-narrative, quasi-documentaries about Chinese ethnic minorities, with spectacular visuals. However their strangeness and difficulty alienated the Chinese audience, while winning plaudits abroad.
He faced a ban after he made The Blue Kite, and did not direct another film for 10 years (his return to directing would be a remake of Fei Mu's Springtime in a Small Town). During these 10 years he did much work as producer, advisor and mentor to the new generation of younger filmmakers, helping them get their projects off the ground.
He has also composed some of the music for his films (e.g Horse Thief) as well as for Chen Kaige's King of the Children, and Life on a String.
In 2003 he made the video documentary Delamu, which depicts the peaceful life of different ethnic communities along the mythic millennia-old Tea Horse Road, and can be seen as a return to the ethnographic interest in ethnic minorities of his early films. "Arguing that there is only a thin line between documentary and fictional feature film, referencing his two previous documentary-like movies (Zhang and Jie 2004: 34), Tian may want to justify why Delamu does not focus strongly on specific histories (though the film has touched on some interviewees’ personal histories in a rather disperse and disorganized way) and social facts (of the ancient Tea Horse Road and the ethnic peoples living along it) but rather on his own personal feelings about the environments and the life stories of the inhabitants in order to convey humanistic issues such as universal human conditions, the meaning of life, and eternal truth. In short, Tian apparently appeals more to universalist ideology than to ethnic particularism, which is conventionally an attractive aspect of ethnicthemed productions." [Kwai-Cheung Lo]
"In his two minority feature films, On the Hunting Ground (Liechang zasa, 1985) and Horse Thief (Daoma zei, 1986), Tian Zhuangzhuang created a new cinematic model through his documentary approach, which subverted the melodramatic pattern of his predecessors in socialist-realist cinema. Both films emphasize the relationship between individuals and their communities. On the one hand, these communities reject any transgressor of their rules. On the other, the arbitrariness of the rules seem to invite transgression and make conformity to the rules difficult, if not impossible. Using minority cultures as allegories of the dominant Han culture, Tian’s films revive the nightmarish situation of the Cultural Revolution indirectly." [Lu Tonglin]
Filmography:
- On the Hunting Ground (1984)
- The Horse Thief (1985)
- The Blue Kite (1993)
Personal quotes:
- "I shot The Horse Thief for audiences of the next century to watch."
- "If it hadn't been for Yellow Earth, there couldn't have been the whole debate about film aesthetics, and there couldn't have been the overall progress that cinema has made."
- "Wu Tianming once said 'I'd rather a film didn't sell a single copy, just so long as the quality is good'. I don't think one should fixate on one person's works, or on a group of people's works. Let's have less yelling and shouting just because one person's work is slightly different from the general run."
- "The theme of [The Horse Thief] is very simple, in fact - the relationships between humanity and religion, and between humanity and nature. Its message is quite clear, too, otherwise how would we have been able to make sense of our fanaticism during the Cultural Revolution?"
References:
Interview, Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 127-.
Profile in idem, 194.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070416073506/http://kinema.uwaterloo.ca/ghy-941.htm
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