From Auto-ethnography to Autobiography : Representations of the Past in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
by Jie Li
Introduction: Nostalgia vs. History?
“The essential capacity of cinema in its huge temples was to shape society by putting order into visual chaos”, writes Paul Virilio, “so that it may gratify the wish of those away from home for a dreamy ‘homeland’ at the same time that it turns everyone who watches into a kind of migrant.” (1) Cinema, especially films representing the past, could momentarily soothe our nostalgic longings through “metonymical re-experience” (2), and the past – in rich colours and extreme close-ups, dramatic spectacles and breathtaking plots – figures most prominently in Mainland Chinese films since the 1980s. Often, there is a certain elegiac, almost “gone with the wind” mood to these films, as they attempt to restore in images something that is supposed to be irrevocably lost in reality, be it the art of winemaking or the culture of Peking Opera. Such nostalgic sentiments, however, have been criticized by cultural critics like Dai Jinhua as poor “substitutes for historical consciousness” (3). Geremie Barmé has also criticized the surging culture of nostalgia in 1990s as an “indulgence” and “luxury” only made possible through the amnesia of the past’s horrors. (4)
In exploring the relationship between nostalgia and history on film, I would like to look at four Chinese films, made between the early 1990s to the year 2000, that depict modern Chinese history. The first two are both multi-decade historical epics made by two of the most famous representatives of the “Fifth Generation”: Zhang Yimou’s Huozhe (To Live, 1994) and Chen Kaige’s Ba wang bie ji (Farewell My Concubine, 1993). Against the grain of these two films, I would like to read in greater detail Yangguang Canlan de Rizi (In the Heat of the Sun, 1994) by Jiang Wen and Zhantai (Platform, 2000) by Jia Zhangke. Both Jiang Wen and Jia Zhangke are commonly referred to as members of the “Sixth Generation” by film critics in China and abroad, but since neither of them willingly identifies with this designation (5) I shall refrain from using the term. However, I would like to argue that the two younger directors, in spite of huge divergences in style, engage in a more reflective and critical kind of nostalgia than their Fifth Generation forerunners. I borrow the term “reflective nostalgia” from Svetlana Boym, who distinguishes between two kinds of nostalgia:
Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance. [...] Restorative nostalgia evokes national past and future; reflective nostalgia is more about individual and cultural memory. (6)
While the two films of the Fifth Generation promise to reconstruct bygone times and lost civilizations with collective emblems and rituals, the two later films rework the same songs and symbolic artefacts of the past into individual, personal “memoirs” with humour, irony and retrospection.
Reification of Eras
In Primitive Passions, Rey Chow points out that the ethnic details in Zhang Yimou’s early films – Hong gao liang (Red Sorghum, 1987), Ju Dou (1990) and Da hong deng long gao gao gua (Raise the Red Lantern, 1991) – are not there simply to “mean” themselves, but rather to signify “I am feudal China”:
Zhang is representing a timeless China of the past, which is given to us in an imagined because retrospective mode. It is also a ‘China’ exaggerated and caricatured, in which the past is melodramatized in the form of excessive and absurd rituals and customs. (7)
Even though decades and years are ostentatiously given in the inter-titles of To Live and Farewell My Concubine, a similar observation may be extended to the use of details in the two most well-known historical epics from the Fifth Generation.
Jie Li is a doumentary filmmaker and Ph.D. candidate in modern Cinese literature and film studies at Harvard.
