David Bordwell - The Grandmaster: Moving forward, turning back

THE GRANDMASTER: Moving forward, turning back
by David Bordwell
Observations on Film Art



The summer has brought us two major films by the two leading Hong Kong directors. I’ve discussed Johnnie To’s fine Drug War earlier. Now it’s time for some ideas about The Grandmaster. Wong Kar-wai’s film displays, in fairly straightforward ways, some of his typical artistic and commercial strategies. Here he adapts his characteristic approach to style and form to a classic genre—and to the demands of the marketplace.

On kung-fu considered as one of the fine arts

Wing Chun is the best-known and most influential Chinese martial art in the world. It owes its renown to two women and two men. In the 1700s the Buddhist nun Ng Mui developed a style called Plum Flower Fist, and a young woman named Yim Wing Chun adapted it into something requiring less strength. Bruce Lee trained in the style, revised it according to his interests, and popularized it in films that reached millions of viewers. Lee’s teacher was Ip Man, a master who settled in Hong Kong after World War II and set up a school. Ip made public a Southern fighting technique that had previously been shared among families and friends.

As both a mainlander and a Hong Konger, Ip is a good symbol of the union of two Chinas. Given the stunning rise of China’s economic and cultural power since the 1980s, it’s not surprising that someone would come up with the idea of a film about him.

Wong Kar-wai claims to have had that idea in the late 1990s. In 2002, he announced that a film about Ip was on his agenda. After finishing 2046 (2004) and an episode for the portmanteau film Eros (2004), he seemed to move forward, slating Tony Leung Chiu-wai as the star and bringing Ip’s family aboard as consultants. But other activities intervened, including an ill-fated three-picture deal with Fox Searchlight. Wong continued to occupy himself with his other businesses, including his lucrative talent-management firm and his advertising unit, for which he made commercials for Dior, Lacote, Motorola, and other companies. He also directed My Blueberry Nights (2007) and recast Ashes of Time (1994) as Ashes of Time Redux (2008).

In 2009 he got to work on the Ip Man film, eventually bringing in funding from many sources, including mainland Chinese companies, Fortissimo, The Weinstein Company, and Annapurna Pictures. Scheduled for a premiere in late 2010, then late 2012, it didn’t appear until January of 2013. It seems that he was still doing postproduction in Thailand hours before its first press screening in Beijing.

During the ten years that The Grandmaster took to reach the screen, other filmmakers had seized on the great man’s life. Two popular Donnie Yen vehicles, Ip Man (2008) and Ip Man 2 (2010), were followed by a prequel The Legend Is Born: Ip Man (2010), and this year, after Wong’s film was released, Ip Man: The Final Fight.

However much Wong fiddles with his movies, in this case he kept the title fixed: Yi Dai Zong Shi. It literally means “The Grandmaster of That Era,” or—since Chinese doesn’t mark plurals in the noun—“The Grandmasters of That Era.” It’s significant that in early publicity, the project was known as The Grandmasters. Wong says his son talked him out of that title. Now, in non-Chinese-speaking countries, it’s The Grandmaster.

The ambiguity about the title takes on special relevance because we have several Grandmasters. After the Beijing premiere, The Grandmaster was released throughout China and in Hong Kong. It did good business, earning over US $47 million in those territories. Wong made a shorter version for the European market, and that was apparently the one premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February. A still shorter version was prepared for the U.S., with The Weinstein Company as distributor. It opened in August, to mostly good reviews, and it has currently reaped about $6 million at the American box office. So far, the film’s worldwide gross is nearly $63 million, making it by far Wong’s most commercially successful theatrical release.

To Read the Rest

Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema (Hong Kong University Press, 2009)

OAPEN Library



To Read it in PDF format

Films We Want to See #31: The Grandmaster (Hong Kong/China/USA: Wong Kar Wai, 2013)

Still Life (China/Hong Kong: Jia Zhangke, 2006)

Still Life (China/Hong Kong: Jia Zhangke, 2006: 111 mins)

Dalle, Eric. "Narrating changes in topography: Still Life and the cinema of Jia Zhangke." Jump Cut #53 (Summer 2012)

Sukhdev, Sandhu. "'Slow cinema' fights back against Bourne's supremacy." The Guardian (March 9, 2012)

Xiao, Jiwei. "The Quest for Memory: Documentary and Fiction in Jia Zhangke’s Films." Senses of Cinema #59 (2011)

Der Spiegel: Mao's Disneyland -- 'Red Tourism' Is Golden for Chinese Economy

Mao's Disneyland: 'Red Tourism' Is Golden for Chinese Economy
By Sandra Schulz
Der Spiegel

China's leaders have responded to waning interest in ideology by setting up a vast "red tourism" industry. While celebrating the great members and moments of the Communist Party of China, it also helps the economy.

Wu Yongtang's great advantage is having a mole on his chin almost exactly where Mao Zedong did. The 56-year-old actor pulls at the bandage covering the spot, then carefully peels it off and touches the scab with his fingertip. He saw a doctor to have the size of the mole reduced, and now it is exactly as large Mao's was. Wu is pleased. He looks like Mao, he speaks like Mao and his mole might be his ticket to landing movie roles as Mao. There's demand for Mao look-alikes in China -- and especially now. "People have deep feelings for the chairman," Wu says.

Wu spent a full theater season playing Mao at the open-air theater in Yanan, a city in central China described locally as the "Holy Land of the Chinese Revolution." Yanan is where the Long March ended in 1935, the military retreat that marked Mao's ascent to power, and where the Communist Party of China established its headquarters for the province of Shaanxi. Every morning, visitors can watch a performance here called "The Defense of Yanan," complete with fake tanks and real horses. A model airplane even drops from the sky at the end of the show, a moment captured by all the mobile-phone cameras of audience.

The Chinese government has dubbed this "red tourism," and it is meant as a response to its people's identity crisis, to a certain sense of emptiness and alienation. What exactly should people in China believe in these days? Who is really still interested in ideology? Taking a proactive approach to these questions, the Communist Party decided to put its own history on stage to create reminders of the revolution in various places around the country -- and to make clear to all Chinese citizens who made their country great. The government has also set up a "National Coordination Group for Red Tourism" and convened "Conferences for Red Tourism" that have even been attended by a member of the Politburo.

But one thing sets this approach apart from similar campaigns in the past. This time, the idea is for Chinese people to have fun with their political party, to enjoy themselves in the great amusement park of Communism. They're invited to feast on braised pork, Mao's favorite dish, in the leader's birthplace of Shaoshan. They can drink from the well Mao himself supposedly dug in Ruijin or carry fake rifles aboard a rollercoaster at the "Cultural Park of the Eighth Route Army," where they can re-enact the war against Japan. There have even been "National Red Games," including events such as "storming the log house" and a "grenade toss." Party training centers and companies send members to these destinations as part of educational holidays. China saw over half a billion "red tourists" in 2011 alone.

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Maximilian Yoshioka: History or Humanity? On Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death - A Nietzschean Perspective on Nanjing

History or Humanity? On Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death: A Nietzschean Perspective on Nanjing
by Maximilian Yoshioka
Bright Lights Film Journal



In 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army stormed into the city of Nanjing in China, causing massive physical and human devastation, in what is now known as the "Rape of Nanjing." The incident, and the broader scheme of Japanese militarism and imperialism in which it took place, is today still a constant source of political tension between the two nation-states and their respective citizens. The 2009 film City of Life and Death, by Chinese auteur Lu-Chuan, is a bold attempt to dig up and redefine the specter of Nanjing that continues to haunt the East Asian consciousness. But instead of ideologically measuring one side or the other on a Manichean scale, Lu chooses to focus on the instances of human compassion and solidarity that are able to manifest themselves even in the mindless, brutal atmosphere he so effectively creates within the cinematic world.

What one comes to grasp after seeing the film is the ultimate importance of history as first and foremost a study of the human condition, and of the art of living itself, as opposed to scientifically detached observation and categorization. The continuities of human consciousness and memory mean that our experiences of the past are necessarily intertwined with those of the present; as individuals inescapably grounded in a specific historical period, we are unable to avoid this contemporizing process. Furthermore, it is something that must be embraced, for it allows us to incorporate these historical "peaks" (and crevasses) of human experience into our future actions and values. But in this integration of the present with the past there is the danger of a selective blindness toward the past that must be understood and overcome. However, the purpose of history as a guide to the present and the future, to "life," must still be emphasized over the "neutral," "objective" study of history as "fact," "statistic," or what Nietzsche, in his essay "The Use and Abuse of History, refers to disparagingly as the "World Process" — that is, an attitude of detached passivity toward a historical narrative that is falsely seen as predetermined and unalterable.

City of Life and Death's narrative shifts between several characters on both sides of the conflict, which allows the film to largely transcend distinctions of nationality and ideology and focus on the more basic human tragedy underlying it. One is never informed of the strategic or ideological Japanese justifications for the various massacres and battles throughout the film; there is no attempt to rationalize the violence. Instead the viewer is presented with a war that is absurd, irrational, and pointless, and this nonpartisan alignment allows for the emergence of a more universal, humanistic perspective that links the various key characters in the film through their shared ethical commitments. These include Kadokawa, a Japanese soldier (Hideo Nakaizumi), Lu Jianxiong (Liu Ye), a Chinese resistance fighter, John Rabe (John Paisley), a German who ran a demilitarized safety zone within Nanjing, his assistant, Mr. Tang (Fan Wei), and several female characters of both Japanese and Chinese origin, all of whom are faced with sexual violence and slavery due to the notorious Japanese "comfort women" policies.

This humanistic impulse manifests itself in various ways, but is mostly emphasized in authentic moments of kindness, empathy, and bravery that shine through the madness. At the end of the film, Kadokawa, under orders to execute two Chinese civilians, one of whom is a young boy, instead decides to release them into the wilderness, much to the amazement but also admiration of his inferior officer. Yet even this act of compassion is insignificant in comparison to what he has previously been required to do and see; under the weight of an intolerable conscience, he kills himself. Earlier in the film he also falls in love with a Japanese prostitute brought in to satisfy the soldiers' animalistic needs; his genuine feelings of care and affection for her contrast strikingly with the objectifying and dehumanizing attitudes of the other soldiers. John Rabe, the only nonfictional character in the film, was a member of the Nazi Party, a group, like the Japanese, condemned for its role in the Second World War. Along with several other missionaries, he saved large numbers of Chinese civilians by instating a safety zone within Nanjing, and his inclusion further demonstrates the director's commitment to a study of war centered on individual human beings rather than political identities.

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Eric Dalle: Narrating changes in topography - Still Life and the cinema of Jia Zhangke

Narrating changes in topography: Still Life and the cinema of Jia Zhangke
by Eric Dalle
Jump Cut



The construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, which reached various levels of completion during the first decade of the 21st century, has become an intensely controversial issue among environmentalists, the government of the People’s Republic of China, and the millions of residents who have been displaced due to flooding caused by the dam’s construction. Set upon the backdrop of Three Gorges Dam, Jia Zhangke’s 2006 film Still Life follows the interpersonal intricacies of two couples from opposite sides of the economic divide of an industrializing China. The characters’ lives play out in relation to the construction and demolition associated with the damming project. Furthermore, the film explores how the impending flood highlights the complexities of the socio-economic while contemplating the human limits of comprehending massive changes in topography.

One prominent long take occurs after Han Sanming and Missy, two of the main characters from an initial narrative thread, reunite after sixteen years of being apart. The estranged pair dawdles in a gutted building. The man and woman are placed in the right–hand side of the frame of this long shot: she standing to his left, and he squatting. To the left of this pair, a wide hole made by the demolition process exposes the backdrop of the city. Missy gives Sanming a piece of candy, and she squats facing him—he continuously smoking a cigarette. The only diagetic sounds within this minute-long shot are distant car horns and even more distant sounds of mallets striking concrete buildings. Suddenly within the panorama of the cityscape, of which the viewer has access through the gap in the wall in the background, one of the larger buildings falls—hiccupping ash and rubble along its rumbling descent. The two characters stand and turn in the direction of the massive movement and accompanying noise that invades the city view. Sanming gently places his hands on Missy’s arms from behind.

When taken in context of the overall plot of the film, this particular shot narrates an implosion of disparate forces in terms of labor, migration, human trafficking, and environmental destruction that is exposed by the vanishing topography as a result of the Three Gorges Dam. Missy’s original home has now been submerged by the rising waters. It is also revealed in the film that she is a victim of human trafficking because Sanming had originally purchased her from that area. The nostalgic Sanming, though, hopes to return to Shanxi with his estranged wife and continue working in the dangerous coal mines to pay off the debt to the man that purchased Missy from her brother. The predicament of the two characters projects an endemic situation of the economics of the locale—they are physically relocated by the commerce environmentally affecting the area of Fengjie and the economics of an industrializing China.

Still Life encapsulates the environmental side of Jia Zhangke’s larger filmic project. Since the beginning of his career, Jia’s works have sought to expose the evolution of China in relation to rapid economic development, the aesthetic implications of globalization, and the human toll of environmental degradation. Jia’s preoccupation with change allows for the vestiges of human resolve to survive among the shifting socio-economics of contemporary society, all wrought by larger interrelated forces, that are state-sponsored, global, and imposed through economic structures. Ultimately, Jia Zhangke’s filmic project sets to critique the very notion of representing the changes in topography by pushing the limits of narrative and documentary film in turn exposing the conceptual holes in comprehending vast ecological change.

This article offers a reading of Jia Zhangke’s films in relation to how his career is invested in narrating changing topography. Jia, as director, embodies many of the influences he describes. His hometown becomes his first major thematic subject, and he is able to utilize the advancement and availability of digital technologies to craft and promote his work. An introduction to Jia’s early films sets the foundation for a reading of his 2006 work Still Life which will be approached from three perspectives: the heterogeneity of environmental impact understood through the migrant experience, the way in which Jia understands nostalgia as a crisis in signification, and the manner in which the film de-centers the notion of home and homelessness. Finally, the conclusion will demonstrate how Jia’s Still Life, when read against his companion documentary Dong, implodes the boundaries of documentary and narrative. Jia Zhangke’s work exposes the limits of logic in comprehending changes in landscape and engages in the act of narrating topography.

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