/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-CHINA: Heroic Blockbuster Takes on Hollywood

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Jan 21 2003 (IPS) - In their ambitions to fend off cultural imperialism, Beijing’s mandarins have done them all – challenged Disney characters by creating homegrown cartoon heroes, and made a pilgrimage to the theatre mecca of Broadway to seek inspiration for Chinese musicals.

Now, they have a China-made blockbuster tipped to compete with Hollywood films for the Oscars.

Star director Zhang Yimou’s martial arts epic ‘Hero’ has raked in 200 million yuan (24 million U.S. dollars) after just a month in theatres, becoming the highest-grossing Chinese film ever.

The film shown in China that has made the most money to date is the Hollywood blockbuster
Titanic’, which took in 320 million yuan (38.6 million U.S. dollars). But at the moment, it seems to be losing its crown to Zhang’s film, which opened in theatres here in mid-December and is still playing to full audiences.

Meantime, its performance at the box office is feeding intense nationalism and swelling national pride among film critics and cultural officials.

"Domestic film industry awaits more heroes," declared the English-language newspaper ‘China Daily’ earlier this month. " ” ‘Hero’ is a spark of hope for China’s film industry," said a signed commentary in the paper. "It demonstrates that China is capable of making its own blockbuster films."

‘Southern Metropolitan News’, published in the southern city of Guangzhou, agreed: "Hero is a symbolic film, and all the frames in the movie have the same symbol: Made in China".

The film endorses a questionable vision of a unified China whose greatness justifies the sufferings of thousands by lauding the deeds of Emperor Qin – one of China’s most controversial rulers and a role model for Chairman Mao Zedong.

A cruel founder of the country’s imperial system, in 220 BC Qin Shihuang succeeded in unifying numerous warring states in the Middle Kingdom under centralised power.

Yet unification was just the beginning of his cause – keeping the country under totalitarian control was a must. For this purpose, Qin Shihuang had his enemies tortured and killed, Confucian scholars buried alive and their books expounding peace burnt.

It was he who launched the construction of the Great Wall, and the thousands of terracotta warriors that guard his tomb in the central city of Xian are world-famous.

Qin Shihuang emerges as the real hero in Zhang’s film as his unwavering pursuit of country unity subdues Nameless – the assassin hero dispatched to kill him.

‘Hero’ is Zhang Yimou’s first film to be received not only without objection, but with praise by China’s cultural mandarins.

Although the director’s artistic portfolio includes an impressive collection of awards – one Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, two Golden Lions and a Silver Lion at Venice and two Academy Award nominations – in the past Beijing has been reluctant to lavish praises on China’s most internationally feted director.

‘Red Sorghum’,
’Raise the Red Lantern’ and ‘Ju Dou’ – three of the director’s best-known films, presenting a visually stunning and tormenting vision of China from the past, were all banned domestically after they were made. They all have since been released.

‘To Live’, Zhang’s 1994 work which delves into the life of a couple enduring modern China’s numerous political campaigns and self-inflicted calamities – the civil war, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution – went to win the Cannes Palm d’Or award, but is still prohibited from showing at the cinemas around the country.

Zhang Yimou is the foremost talent to emerge from the Fifth Generation, the group of first filmmakers to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy after the Cultural Revolution and who tried to push the limits of communist China’s artistic tolerance.

Yet ‘Hero’ – despite popular expectations of earning censure for delving into the sensitive topic of Chinese tyrants – has impressed China’s cultural gurus so much that they are submitting it as China’s nominee for best foreign film at the Oscar Awards.

The film "symbolises the rise of Chinese commercial cinema", said the newspaper ‘China Times’, commending what Beijing arbiters of taste believe would be China’s elite combat division to counter Hollywood omnipresent influence.

With a budget of 31 million dollars, making it China’s most expensive film ever, a star-studded cast of actors known beyond mainland China and well-choreographed martial arts scenes, ‘Hero’ is touted as Beijing’s attempt to rival the success of Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’.

However, some domestic critics say the film pales in comparison to two other films that have covered the same historical ground as ‘Hero’.

"The film reminds me of a beautiful photo album, a collection of incredible shots, but there is nothing to make them hold together," said one Chinese film commentator.

‘The Emperor’s Shadow’ – a 1996 film by Zhou Xiaowen, another Fifth Generation director, also revived the epoch of Qin Shihuang. The film presented the Qin emperor as an anguished tyrant who drowned his ideal of unified great China in rivers of blood and tears.

Similar historical overtones rang through Chen Kaige’s 1998 ‘The Emperor and The Assassin’. Chen, one of China’s most sophisticated film directors and also Zhang Yimou’s peer, portrayed the Qin emperor as a weak and brutal man.

He sets off on a just cause to unify the country and install peace and stability but becomes infatuated with power and ends up a wicked despot.

Both Zhou’s and Chen’s films were criticised at the time for being violent and bloody. Strangely, Zhang Yimou’s ‘Hero’ is pleasingly blood-free. But its message has left many shocked.

"Commercial success? Yes! And think of all these hundreds of youngsters who have learned their lesson of ‘worship the emperor’ as they set mesmerised by the fighting scenes," fretted film critic Wei Minglun in the Guangzhou-based ‘Southern Weekend’ newspaper.