A Centennial of Chinese Cinema Delights, Instructs

The Chinese word for film is dianying-literally, electric shadow. No image could better suit Chinese film, bound to the policies of the Chinese government as tightly as a shadow to its lamp post. At times, it seems like a doll that can perform only as long as it obeys its ventriloquist government.

Starting today, Lincoln Center's "A Centenary of Chinese Cinema" provides an enlightening, varied retrospective of thirty-two films that have remained high art despite being made within political restrictions.

The event celebrates the 100th year after the first Chinese film, The Battle of Dingjushan, was made as an adaptation from a Chinese opera. But the retrospective opens with Wu Yonggang's Goddess (1934), as though to locate the origin of Chinese film in leftist cinema. It stars diva Ruan Lingyu as a prostitute roaming the streets of Shanghai's flashing night district, striving to offer her baby son an honorable existence. Ruan Lingyu evokes the awe-inspiring glamour of Marlene Dietrich or Ava Gardner without letting it detract from the emotional depth of her performance.

Ruan Lingyu's male counterpart, actor Zhao Dan, stars in the retrospective's Crossroads, another example of Shanghai's leftist cinema before the 1938 Japanese invasion. Zhao enacts an impetuous graduate reduced to a proofreader in a patched shirt who falls in love with his shrewish neighbor. Later, he becomes a journalist and champions the cause of the factory workers, at which point the love story is carelessly dropped, a mere prop for the film's political message.

There is a surprisingly direct correlation between the Communist Party's increase in power in China and on screen. Fervent patriotism becomes a kind of romance with the Communist Party. In 1970's Red Detachment of Woman, affection sprouts between Chunghua, a landlord's slave, and the party member who delivers her and encourages her to join the army against the vampire-faced nationalists. But the prolonged glances and romantic violins turn out to be symptoms of a quasi-religious admiration for the man's accomplishments and, more particularly, for his membership in the Party. After an arduous application process (unlike contemporary China's straightforward, genealogically based selection), Chunghua's acceptance in the Party ends the movie.

For its transparently Communist screenplay, the scenic backdrop, bombastic explosions, and melodramatic violin bursts strangely echo such Hollywood fare as Independence Day or Pearl Harbor.

The retrospective is curated by Ying Zhu and Richard Peña, a professor of the Columbia University film department who taught Chinese film last spring semester. Professor Peña, a walking encyclopedia of cinema, paced through his lectures with a bright smile, coaxing out the flow of information with dramatic gestures. Many of the films screened in his class have been incorporated into the retrospective.

I remember his arm gestures were a bit more theatrical than usual when he introduced 1986's Yellow Earth, one of the festival's most remarkable films. Chinese film history, he explained, is divided into the generations of its filmmakers. The first and second generations turned out Shanghai's leftist cinema, while the third and fourth produced socialist films such as Red Detachment of Women. Yellow Earth is the first film of the fifth generation, the first filmmakers to attend film school after the Cultural Revolution's crackdown. Directed by Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) and photographed by Zhang Yimou, the director of Raise the Red Lantern, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers, Yellow Earth rejects socialist realism's straightforward plot and glorified Party officials.

In the film, a Party member meanders on barren mountain slopes to collect inhabitants' folk tunes and graft communist lyrics onto them. During his mission, he stays with a wrinkled old man whose daughter is the victim of an arranged marriage. The Party member eventually leaves, but before doing so, promises the girl he will return in time to prevent her marriage and enroll her in the Communist Liberation Army. But the movie ends with a dreamlike sequence in which the villagers kowtow before a rain god. The Party member's return remains doubtful.

Yellow Earth combines many characteristics of later fifth-generation cinema, from man-dwarfing landscape stills-Zhang Yimou's Hero-to magical realism-Chen Kaige's Life on a String.

Regrettably, very few fifth-generation films are featured in the retrospective, even though they are milestones of Chinese cinema. Because of their politically ambiguous content, many were refused distribution inside the country. Fifth-generation film directors were responsible for the international premiere of Chinese film. Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum, for example, was the first Chinese film to be awarded an international film prize, the Golden Berlin Bear.

The retrospective largely jumps over Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, the two most famous directors of China. It stops for Yimou's widely recognized masterpiece To Live, a three-hour epic reconstruction of a couple's struggle to survive through China's drumroll of revolutions from the 1930s through the 1950s. It was awarded the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.

Because of his international exposure and the recent blockbusters Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou has often been accused of catering to foreign audiences with aesthetic stereotypes of Chinese customs and people.

In contrast, the rising sixth generation focuses on a no-fantasy, contemporary China. The festival represented this category with Jia Zhangke's Platform (2000), which tracks a poor performing troupe across the desolate countryside. Its long takes and medium shots, with lighting that shrouds facial features, lend a documentary feel to the film. However, the retrospective passes over other masterpieces of the sixth generation. Lou Ye's Suzhou River creates a realistic feel by elegantly bleeding tacky nylon lighting onto the grunge of the Shanghai streets. Jia Zhangke's The World is an insidious critique of Chinese citizens' dead-end lives amid the shimmering colors of a theme park just outside of Beijing.

Platform was banned from distribution in China. Four years later, The World's subtle political critique breezed through and even pleased the scrutiny of the Communist board.

The shadows are no longer tied down as tightly. Today, Chinese films can be non-political or even subtly rebellious, like The World. But if Communist Party officials have failed to get the film's message, what portion of the rest of the Chinese population will?

This retrospective is an invaluable opportunity for New Yorkers to gain insight into the attitudes of China and see some great films on the way.