Industry

Beijing Film Academy
China Film Corporation
Guangxi Film Studio
He Qun (Art director)
Hou Yong (Cinematographer) 
Xi'an Film Studio
Xiao Feng (Cinematographer) 
Wu Tianming (Producer)
Zhao Fei (Cinematographer)
Zhao Jiping (Composer)





History of the industry:

1942: Yan'an Forum on Literature and art, Mao delivers pronouncements on the function of art, including film only in passing.

Chinese cultural history since 1949 (and thereby filmmaking) has been dominated by three themes: 1) the expansion of mass national culture; 2) relations between Party, artists and audience; 3) tensions between Yan'an and Shanghai (and artistic/intellectual legacy of May Fourth Movement). [Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema p2]

1920s and early '30s: domination of foreign films in Chinese market (e.g., 88% of all films shown in 1936 were foreign-made). Key studios of the 1930s period (in Shanghai especially): Mingxing, Lianhua

Films of this period include:
Three Shanghai Girls (1926)
Sing-song Girl Red Peony (1931, first talkie)
Sister Flowers (1933)
Spring Silkworms (1933, Mingxing studio, adaptation of a May Fourth short story by Mao Dun)
The Goddess (1934)
The Big Road aka The Highway (1934, directed by Sun Yu)

The Spring River Flows East (1948) struck a deep chord among Chinese audiences after the war with Japan, its epic melodrama narrative of a family, and individuals caught in the vastness of the natural and human order, articulated some of the shared common feelings in post-war post-trauma China. Paul Clark (p17) claims that if in the 1910s the main artistic medium to articulate the national consciousness was the short story, and in the 1920s poetry, and in the 1930s the essay, in the 1940s it could be argued to have been film.


Film often regarded as a literary artform (story & screenplay paramount--- some magazines publish screenplays, people sometimes thus read films they do not get to see.). Debate on this matter took place in the 1980s, when the C5G etc tried to distance cinema from literature as a more independent artform. Zhang Junxiang (screenwriter/director?) wrote: "Film is literature --- literature written with the filmic means of expression" [Chinese Film Theory, p21]

"The emphasis on the literary aspect of film... started early in China and remained strong long after 1949. In part it can be explained by the filmmakers' urge to find a respectability for the modern medium by association with the most honored of cultural activities..... after 1949, these ties among film, theater and literature remained firm and could be said to have hindered the emergence of an independent art of film in China." [Paul Clark, p20]

Cultural Revolution era: near standstill. Post-CR, film production gradually rose again to around 125-150 per year.

Rapid change, and first rise of independent Chinese cinema in 1980s and 1990s.

"broadly speaking, since the Communists took power in 1949, China has had a state film history, which has been state mandated, state controlled, state financed. The state has controlled every aspect of it, from the censorship of the individual films right through to the distribution, the sales, where the films are shown, when they’re shown, how they’re shown, how they’re exported. It was a state monopoly, in effect. Since Deng Xiaoping in 1987 launched the movement to move state industries into the private sector and make them self-supporting –in other words, to reintroduce capitalism into China– the film industry has been in some disarray. The first stage of this was that the studios were told that they were no longer under direct state control, that they had to take responsibility for their own affairs, but that they could still have an unlimited line of credit at the Bank of China and they didn’t have to worry about the financial side too much just yet. So they kept going to some degree. Knowing that there was unlimited credit available to them, it didn’t really matter what they did. In the early nineties that was further modified: they were told that there was no longer a line of credit for them at the Bank of China, and they basically had to be cast up on their own feet and become financially self-supporting. This actually paralyzed the film industry. Forty years of state control did not produce anybody at all, not a single person that I’m aware of, who had the knowledge, the skill, or even the mindset to produce films cost-effectively, do a budget, do a schedule, etc. And then they were made to figure out how to distribute them, promote them, and sell them overseas. So the film industry in the 1990s went into a kind of paralysis, and nothing happened, I mean really for a long time. The level of official production in China plummeted, because no studio was willing to produce anything at all, for fear of losing money on it, because they were told suddenly: You have to take care of it, you control your own distribution, now you look after it yourself, you control your own sales, your own promotion, all the production aspects, all of it is your business now. And people, suddenly handed these responsibilities, had no idea what to do with them. So it was a catastrophic time, actually, for the film industry. Very, very slowly it has built itself back up again, although nothing like the scale it was on before, and a large number of private film companies have come into being. Until very recently the state law was that a private film company would have to make its films in cooperation with an old state studio. That was mainly to prop up the old state studios; it was to make sure that they had their names on something that was being made. It was a recognition, a very cynical recognition, actually, that the energy to make new films was all coming from the private sector. It was only new companies that were producing films, really, but to save face and to keep the old Shanghai and Beijing film studios alive, films had to be co-produced with them, which in effect meant paying money to them for the use of their name, because the private company was actually doing all the work. That was obviously a very iniquitous system and of course it produced a lot of resentment and complaint. And that’s recently been rescinded, so now it’s possible for private film companies to just make films. They no longer have to bail out anybody else or save anybody’s face; they just make what they want to make. And censorship has loosened up to some degree as well. The society is on the point of introducing a ratings system, so that not all films have to be suitable for all audiences, and that’s obviously going to be a step forward. The filmmakers, particularly the filmmakers that move from the indie sector into the state sector –or into the commercial or mainstream sector– have all reported that censorship has not been too bad. Most of them have had some…tension, but most of them have been reasonably happy with the way things worked out. In the 1990s, when the industry was, as I described, kind of in paralysis, if you wanted to make films, and there was a whole generation of kids graduating from the Beijing Film Academy who did want to make films, there were no openings. It was made doubly difficult by the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, because after that nobody wanted to hire students. Students were seen to be trouble. Few wished to have the wrath of the Communist Party come down on them for allowing these dangerous dissidents, these unstable people, to do anything. People were absolutely paranoid about employing the new generation of students. And what happened was that quite a large number of young people started to make indie films, outside of the system. And if you made a film outside of the system then you really were outside the system; you were an outlaw in Chinese terms. You didn’t submit your script for pre-censorship. You didn’t submit the finished film for censorship. Very often, because there was no opening to show the film in Chinese cinemas, you smuggled the film out of the country and you started showing it in festivals overseas. Vancouver, actually, was one of the first festivals where this type of film was shown. The international premiere of Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days (1993) was in Vancouver. The international premiere of He Jianjun’s Red Beads (1993) was in Vancouver. I think some of Zhang Yuan’s early films had their international premieres here, or if not their premieres then very early screenings outside China. So I think Vancouver in the early nineties was pretty much in the forefront of introducing this new independent cinema from China, and obviously we’ve remained very faithful to it since. In the last few years since the law changed again and allowed private companies to operate without having to prop up the old state film industry, or what’s left of it, there’s been a shift from the independent sector into the mainstream, and some of the leading filmmakers like Jia Zhangke, Zhang Yuan and some others have been urged by the authorities to make legal films. And they have. So Jia Zhangke’s last two films have both been legal films, after the first three were not. Zhang Yuan’s last four films, five films even, have been legal films, where the early ones were not. I think many people expected, as a result of this shift, that indie filmmaking would kind of disappear in China. The opposite has been the truth; in fact, there’s been an explosion, there’s been ever more of it, and much of it away from the big centers. So, for example, we’re showing in this festival a film called Betelnut ([2006), by Yang Heng. It’s his first feature, it’s made on digital, it’s shot in a town in Hunan, and it’s an indie film. It’s a very low-budget film that could only have been made in that way, I think. I mean, no commercial producer would have invested in it because it’s not commercial enough. It doesn’t have any sex or violence, it has no strong story line, it’s a mood piece, basically. So that kind of filmmaking continues to exist in China, in fact in ever larger numbers. We have several other examples here too; we have Withered in a Blooming Season (Cui Zi’en, 2005), and a number of other Chinese indie films that have no connection with the mainstream. These continue to be made, and I would say if anything the numbers are increasing." [Tony Rayns http://offscreen.com/view/tony_rayns]

Mid-1980s: decline in cinema audiences: 27 billion in 1984 and 85, to 22 billion in 1987. Increased access to films from other markets. Rise of televisions. VCR: major black market.

Until late 80s, China Film Distribution & Exhibition Corporation and the China Film Export & Import Corporation controlled all film business in China. But then studios began demanding larger share of profits, and the Corporation had to negotiate leading to a better deal for the studios, and allowing them to distribute their own films. (see Variety 19 Oct 1988)

The popularity of big-budget domestic pictures in 1995 belied the fact that the majority of Chinese films performed poorly at the box-office. While the 10 domestic blockbusters accounted for $3.1 million at the box-office in 1995, the remaining 135 Chinese films produced in the same year earned only an average of $15,000 each (Brent 1996).

Chinese theaters’ bidding war on Hollywood’s big productions contributed to the “big import fever.” China’s first auction for first-run rights of a Hollywood blockbuster was held in Shanghai on October 12, 1998. The auction, staged by Shanghai Paradise Co. Ltd. and the Shanghai Auction Co., was for the rights to premiere the Polygram film The Game. (Ying Zhu 2002).

Two broad periods of the Fifth Gen: 1) experimentation in the 1980s when state-owned studios provided enough financial crutch, 2) 'Zhang Yimou model', emphasis now had to be more on box office (characteristics: female protagonists + voyeuristic appeal, exotic rituals sometimes invented, metaphorical dimension).

The Studios
16 studios officially permitted to produce commercial works (post-1976).
Larger well-established studios: Beijing, Shanghai, Changchun (Jilin province, NE).
Xi'an studio: fresh and innovative in 1980s under leadership of Wu Tianmng.
Pearl River Studio: reflect proximity to Guangzhou and HK.

Classic Chinese genres (pre-5th Gen):
The melodrama
The 'model opera' (esp. during CR)
The spy drama of the 1950s (see essay on Black Cannon Incident in Chinese Films in Focus)

Some major themes of Chinese cinema (and also in other arts):

• Individual vs. Collective (personal desires vs self-sacrificial duty, a conflict present within all Chinese melodramas infused with Confucian ethical values, but also other films such The Big Parade, One and Eight, etc --- its political relevance is clear, the CPC always emphasised that everyone had to work hard 'for the good of the nation')
• Displacements/Migrations ('sent-down youths', workers, migrations due to natural disasters, people dislocated from their families and roots due to political reasons or otherwise, etc)
• Performance (a theme scene in films as varied as Two Stage Sisters, Farewell My Concubine, Jia Zhangke's, etc ---- in a society where traditionally keeping face was paramount and furthermore the paranoia of a totalitarian state where neighbours ratted on other neighbours or sometimes family members etc, performing is a central metaphor. Can be tied in to state-approved operas etc)

The latter can also be linked to the maxim jia chou bu ke wai yang (domestic shame should not be made public), i.e. don't wash your dirty linen in public. This correlates with the domestic principle that the most shameful thing is to lose face in front of others (beyond the most immediate family), but it is also an apt summary of the situation regarding some of the fifth generation (and later) filmmakers. They and their films are accused of bringing China into disrepute, of 'washing China's dirty linen' on an international world stage...

Resources:
Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema
Chapter in The asian film industry (John Lent)