CINEMA-CHINA: ‘Titanic’ Scores an Ideological Hit

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Jun 2 1998 (IPS) - The Hollywood blockbuster ‘Titanic’ has achieved what no officially-sanctioned Chinese movie has done – earn personal acclaim from President Jiang Zemin for being an ideologically correct film.

The Oscar-winning film, which portrays the 1912 sinking of the ‘Titanic’, has been a huge hit among Chinese moviegoers bored by years of watching ‘mainstream’ films judged to have correct ideological content.

Thus, film studio managers in China have had good reason to cheer. By the end of April, the screening of the ‘Titanic’ had grossed some 30 million U.S. dollars, bringing much-needed cash to cinemas that have been in the doldrums since the early 1990s.

In Beijing alone, the film broke the box office record for a foreign film: 1.9 million dollars set last year by ‘True Lies’ starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

While ‘Titanic’ has been a money-spinner in the western world, few here believed that a Hollywood product could win the high- level backing of no less than Chinese Communist Party chief Jiang.

“You should not imagine that there is no ideological education in capitalist countries,” Jiang told delegates to the National People’s Congress in Beijing after a special pre-premiere screening for China’s top leaders.

“Titanic speaks of wealth and love, the relationship between rich and poor and vividly describes how people react to disaster. I told my comrades in the Politburo to see this film,” said Jiang, confessing he had been moved by the movie.

Such an endorsement might have taken jarred some Communist Party veterans, who remember the late Chairman Mao Zedong’s teaching that cinema is a more important art than literature as it possesses more strength to affect people’s minds.

Applied to a film produced in Hollywood – long regarded as one of the supreme symbols of capitalism – Jiang’s comments seem even more daring. After all, China opened its film studios for imported blockbusters only three years ago. It still allows only 10 Hollywood films to be screened here each year, in order to protect its own beleaguered film industry.

“I don’t mean to publicise capitalism,” Jiang declared. “But as the saying goes ‘know the enemy and know yourself’ and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat.”

If his thundering endorsement was meant as a reminder to China’s own film industry that western imports could still provide an insight into moviemaking, then the message seems to have reached its target.

The government-run Xinhua news agency responded with a lengthy analysis of the success of ‘Titanic’, promising that “China can soon make a ‘Titanic’ of its own”.

The report traced film’s tremendous success to its special visual effects, which made many Chinese moviegoers feel “that they were really in a disastrous situation when they were watching it”, Xinhua said.

Chinese films have a long way to go before reaching the level of the ‘Titanic’, but the industry is investing in more slick technology. Since last year, the government has spent 3 million dollars on a joint programme between scientists and film-makers to produce ‘the sort of technology’ used in Oscar-winning films.

“Technologically speaking, there will be no problem to do that,” Yang Buting, deputy director of China’s Film Bureau, was quoted as saying. But the magic recipe for producing China-made, Oscar-winning films may not just lie in using state-of-the-art technology. As Xinhua’s report had to admit: “About 80 percent of the films distributed in China are Chinese products — and most of them are boring.”

This is why the number of Chinese moviegoers has dropped by more than a million since the early 1990s, and most film studios are in the red. The importation of Hollywood films has helped satisfy popular tastes and rejuvenate China’s sluggish film market.

The Chinese movie industry is still tightly controlled by the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party, which favours films that follow the Party line on ‘correct’ educational content.

As Chen Kaige, one of China’s most renowned filmmakers, said recently: “Hollywood is of one mentality and Ding Guangen (the propaganda chief) and China are of another. Putting them together is very frustrating.”

With the premier of the ‘Titanic’ on the mainland, the Communist Party’s censors of taste and the general public seemed to have reached rare consensus. The film took most major cities by storm despite hefty ticket prices. At up to 80 yuan, tickets cost about 10 percent the average monthly income of Beijing residents, and at least double the price of other imported Hollywood blockbusters.

Joining the ‘Titanic’ bandwagon, the ‘Beijing Youth Daily’ reported that six Chinese, probably students, had died when the ship sank in 1912. They had purchased the cheapest, 30 dollar third-class tickets for the voyage from Britain to the United States, and were in the section said to have suffered the highest number of fatalities.

While Jiang’s endorsement of ‘Titanic’ made little difference to ordinary people flocking to watch it, Chinese policemen appear to have taken to heart his call for people to go see the film.

Last month, the Public Security Bureau in Beijing gave Xu Wenli, a 54-year-old veteran dissident, a free ticket to go and see ‘Titanic’.

Released from prison in 1993 after spending 12 years in solitary confinement for his pro-democracy activities, Xu is under constant police surveillance but is reported to have established almost neighbourly ties with his guards.

“I told them I’ve seen the movie,” Xu told IPS. “But they said — it doesn’t matter, I can go and see it one more time.”