1984. Dir: Tian Zhuangzhuang.
Lu Tonglin: "Tian’s minority film, On the Hunting Ground (Liechang zasa, 1984), bears an astonishing resemblance to documentary. At first, the Mongolian language was not translated into Mandarin, although the film addresses a specific Han audience, familiar with film culture and completely alien to this language. Due to objections from reviewers, Tian unwillingly added the offscreen voice of a male interpreter, who translates male and female, old and young voices with an equally monotonous tone. Like the title, written in the Mongolian language, the Mongolian culture in the film is objectified through this impassive voice, which serves mainly as a signifier of something more significant: the Han culture. Tian claimed that he was interested only in the Han Chinese society while making minority films.3 Furthermore, this documentary quality is also put in question by the very title of the film: Liechang zasa, a hybrid combination of Mandarin and Mongolian, means rules (zasa in Mongolian) on the hunting ground (liechang in Mandarin). Despite the documentary appearance, these rules are fictional in contemporary Inner Mongolia, since collective hunting activities are themselves inventions of the filmmaker in this specific geographical and historical location."
"The introductory shot of ruins of ancient palaces gives these rules an origin: the Mongolian nation as unified by Genghis Khan. In the following scene, a group leader on the hunting ground, Jirguleng, explains these rules in detail to other hunters. His explanations provide these rules with a hybrid nature by combining ancient Mongolian culture and current Chinese state policy. The first rule – a hunted animal belongs to the owner of the dog that first grasps it – seemingly has its origin in ancient times, since it appears free of any current political implication. By contrast, the two other rules – the care of childless aged people and the prohibition of shooting at state-protected animals – appear to belong to the era of the People’s Republic of China, because they use a contemporary politicized vocabulary. By combining supposedly ancient Mongolian rules with those of contemporary China, the film suggests that these apparently exotic rules do not separate the Mongolian community in the film from the political reality of the Han Chinese audience."
"The story line is deceptively simple and sketchy. Against the rule, a hunter named Wangenzabu takes possession of a deer that was first grasped by the dog of Bayasiguleng, a hunter from a neighboring village. By chance, a passerby happens to witness his transgression and reports it to the legitimate owner. Bayasiguleng angrily reports the thievery to Wangenzabu’s village chief, Jirguleng. As a result, according to a traditional ritual of punishment, Wangenzabu’s mother publicly whips her transgressive son and forces him to kneel down until next morning in front of a tree trunk to which the deer head is nailed. Wangenzabu’s public humiliation angers his elder brother Taogetao, the manager of the cooperative shop, and triggers a series of vengeful acts against Bayasiguleng. The animosity between the two men intensifies to the point that, armed with sickles and knives, men in the two neighboring villages almost battle over the use of a piece of grassland. Moreover, this animosity also destroys the male bonding between Wangenzabu and Jirguleng, although the latter just saved his former friend from a wolf den at risk of his own life. At the end the film, partly through the intervention of their wives, the male community of Mongolian hunters finally reconcile by kneeling down one after the other in front of the tree trunk."
"Tian’s film endows the dual nature of this law with a universal flavor by reminding audiences what happened recently in their own society – that is, mainstream Han society. During the Cultural Revolution, self-contradictory political rules often led to destruction of traditional human ties, as did zasa in the Mongolian hunting community. These rules engendered conflicts among neighbors, former friends, and close family members by pitting them against each other, while triggering selfishness in human beings by promising rewards or promoting fear. One can see the story of the fictive Mongolian hunting rule as an allegory of recent Chinese social history."
