Wen 丨 Gray Wolf
The appearance of Zhao Ting means that Ang Lee has a real sense of succession in Hollywood. Even many people claim that Zhao Ting will surpass Ang Lee because she has the opportunity to win the Academy Award for Best Picture that Ang Lee has not won.
If this argument only stays in the sense of a secular award, it is nothing to say, and the movie is certainly not the Olympic Games.
"The Land of No One"
However, in addition to artistic achievements, there are many comparisons between Zhao Ting and Ang Lee. Most importantly, both of them went to the West to study filmmaking when they were young, and lived abroad for a long time, as well as deeply integrated into the American film industry.
Brokeback Mountain
The similarity of resumes, in addition to making people feel a certain "inheritance", also highlights the age advantage of Zhao Ting, she was born in 1982, and she is only in her thirties. Ang Lee at this age has just finished filming "The Wedding Feast" and has not yet had the opportunity to make his first pure English film.
Zhao Ting
Zhao Ting's characteristic, or advantage, is that she went abroad earlier (fifteen or sixteen years old) and more deeply integrated into English culture and American culture. She also has a "virtuous helper" Joshua James Richards, a British photographer who is not only Zhao Ting's boyfriend, but has worked on all her film projects and established her image style.
Joshua James Richards
In these aspects, Zhao Ting has almost reached the best state for a Chinese director to integrate into the foreign film production industry, and there are few successful cases of such integration. In fact, before the outbreak of the epidemic, there were hundreds of Chinese students who went abroad every year to study film production, but what could really stay, persist, integrate, and succeed was probably not able to call a few names.
Historically, the pioneers of cinema in The United States can be traced back to the second generation of directors such as Hong Shen and Sun Yu in the 1920s, but these people had no intention of integrating into American culture, and returned to China as soon as they finished their studies, becoming the mainstay of Shanghai's film industry.
Sun Yu
Even the San Francisco-born female director Wu Jinxia was only an early Versailles person, she had a wealthy rent a studio in Hollywood, but the films she produced were aimed at Hong Kong and Chinese in the United States, and had no practical connection with the American production industry.
Wu Jinxia
It was only around the end of 1960 that the Chinese film industry began to show new signs of integration into foreign cultures. In the 1970s alone, More than a dozen Hong Kong directors who went to the United Kingdom and the United States to study film production included Tam Ka Ming, Xu Ke, Hui Anhua, Fang Yuping, Yu Rentai, Yan Hao, Yu Yunkang, Leung Pu Chi, Liu Chenghan, Weng Weiquan, Cai Jiguang, Huang Zhiqiang, etc., who formed a powerful phalanx known as the "New Wave of Hong Kong Cinema". Unfortunately, these Hong Kong directors did not have sustained foreign integration after graduation, some quickly returned to Hong Kong to develop, and the rest basically gave up their efforts to make a living in other places after insisting on three or five years.
In parallel with Hong Kong, there are ke Yizheng, Wan Ren, Li Youning, Yu Weiyan, Yu Weizheng, Yang Dechang and others from Taiwan in the 1970s (the earliest can be traced back to Bai Jingrui of the Italian Experimental Film Center in the 1960s), who are also the main group of "Taiwan's new films", and their choices are almost masterful, giving up the opportunity to integrate into external culture.
Bai Jingrui, Li Xing, Hu Jinquan
In this wave of Hong Kong and Taiwan students in the name of the "new wave", only two people persevered and eventually integrated into the American film circle, one is Wang Ying from Hong Kong, and the other is Ang Lee from Taiwan.
Wang Ying's special feature is that she "immigrated first, then studied" and became a U.S. citizen, which gave him a deeper bond with foreign countries. In the mid-1970s wave of academic returns to Hong Kong, Wang Ying did not resist the temptation, but the difference was that everyone else later stayed in Hong Kong, while Wang Ying returned to the United States a year later.
Wang Ying
According to Wang Ying, he was not accustomed to the traditional system of Hong Kong at that time, which was full of the legacy of Shaw's master-apprenticeship system, paying attention to gang thinking, and newcomers could only start from the television industry. So returning to the U.S. doesn't necessarily mean more opportunities, but at least working in a habitual atmosphere.
Wang Ying's strategy is to take the characteristic culture of the "Chinese community" as a breakthrough, and he has a certain market in the American independent film industry on this topic, so he has done his best in this direction. Wang Ying's first works, "Looking for Someone", "Dim Sum", "Fate Expensive Paper", and "Eat a Bowl of Tea", are all intended to present a Chinatown from a Chinese perspective, thus subverting the mimetic environment constructed by white people in the past. In order to fully attract American audiences, Wang Ying also added some jokes and genre elements to these films.
"Eat a Bowl of Tea"
While creating a Chinese community on the screen, Wang Ying also pursues a lineup concept of a "Chinese actors' union", including Wang Fangzheng, Huang Ziqiang, Miao Xianren, Chen Chong, Fang Yuping, and Deng Gang who stayed in the United States in the early days. In 1993, "Xifuhui" also gathered a number of Chinese actresses who stayed in the United States at that time, including Zhou Caiqin, Lu Yan, Wen Mingna, Yu Feihong, Wu Junmei, Ding Yi, Zhao Jialing and so on. This ambitious work not only constructs the vertical "genealogy tree" of Chinese films in the United States, but also constructs the horizontal connection of Contemporary Chinese actors, thus making the topic of "Chinese community" hot and successfully leveraging the American market.
In this regard, the "Happy Blessing Club Model" composed of vertical genealogy and horizontal community has become the basis of Wang Ying's foothold in the United States, and he can easily transfer this model to male groups or other ethnic topics (such as "Smoke", "Smoke Variations of Spitting Out The Heart", "Fangxin Tianya", etc.). In addition, this model has become a springboard for Wang Ying to join Hollywood, which may value his ability to grasp subtle emotions and express minorities, but judging from several Hollywood works directed by Wang Ying, the effect is not ideal - under this commercial system, Wang Ying's works have almost become a kind of small chick movie with empty content.
"The End of the World"
Similarly, because the positioning is placed in the "Chinese community" rather than the "Chinese world", Wang Ying's films cannot be fully accepted by domestic audiences, because this is always a "different world", a world composed by Chinese writers living with China, and this strangeness will turn into a curious eye in the eyes of the Chinese people, which may be the reason for the overall failure of the box office reputation of "Snowflakes and Secret Fans". For Wang Ying, the "Chinese community" has always been a double-edged sword, which fulfills a possibility of integration into a foreign country, but also alienates Chinese audiences, which determines that Wang Ying is unlikely to become a director who is well known and recognized by the domestic public.
Snowflakes and Secret Fans
Ang Lee, from Taiwan, is a director who is often compared horizontally with Wang Ying. Both immigrated to the United States in their twenties, but Ang Lee's waiting time and more twists and turns compared to Wang Ying's quick finding of a breakthrough made his integration into the United States a more rare exception.
In 1988, Lee received funding from Taiwan to shoot "Pusher", "Wedding Feast" and "Eating Men and Women", several films were produced by Taiwanese film companies, so it was just his curve strategy, but these films not only involved Sino-American cultural issues, but also laid a foundation for a basic theme of Ang Lee's films, which was not the "father-son relationship" that the audience talked about but was not very accurate, but the "original family" problem.
"Eating Men and Women"
Ang Lee's films do not have Wang Ying's community extension, most of them can be called family ethics films, within this framework, Ang Lee excavates many irreconcilable contradictions within a native family, hindered by a universal moral and ethical restriction, the morphological structure of these families is maintained, but on the spiritual level, these families have been torn apart and cannot be restored.
Ang Lee has a unique vision in this regard, "Pusher" and "Wedding Feast" are his own scripts, and a series of subsequent films are adaptations. In the process, Ang Lee is particularly adept at creating or discovering texts that focus on the contradictions of the original family and are vigorous, and the screenwriter James Shams, who is his partner, also plays an extremely important role. Overall, Ang Lee's film is a kind of film based on story and script, and the intensity of the narrative constructs his unsearching, epee characteristics.
"The Wedding Feast"
Because of his success in Taiwan and the honor of the Golden Bear Award, Ang Lee successfully entered the field of work in Western films, but it is not difficult for us to find that the stories in these Western films and his Chinese stories always have some similarities, on the one hand, because the texts selected by Ang Lee are representative of the stories of the original family, and on the other hand, the problem of the original family has a certain universality.
This "native family model" is naturally easy to cut to the text of "Sense and Sensibility", "Ice Storm", "Ride with the Devil", "Hulk Hulk", "Making Woodstock Music Festival", "Billy Lynn's Halftime War", people often say that Ang Lee's film genre texts are different and can challenge different themes. But in fact, his core proposition has never changed, and he only cuts into other sub-texts under this premise, such as science fiction, homosexuality, eroticism, music, war and other topics.
Riding with the Devil
Because there is a universal core (which is the source of the script's stamina), Ang Lee's integration into the context of foreign production is no longer simply selling community features (that is, eating cultural price differences), but can read what foreigners like to watch and what Chinese like to watch in a more reflexive dimension. An accurate text of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", Western audiences see the spectacle world of martial arts, while Chinese audiences see full of artistic conceptions.
Since the 1990s, Ang Lee's career has been smooth sailing, and he is not only the pride of Hollywood independent productions, but also the call of blockbusters. It's all thanks to his practicality — Ang Lee's films are both of the same quality as Weinstein's, their ability to compete for European film festivals and Oscars, and a certain level of commerciality. Therefore, among the many directors in foreign countries, only Ang Lee can stand out and become a worldwide director and a master director, precisely because of the survival of the fittest.
Wang Ying's integration and Ang Lee's integration are among the few cases of lasting success in the Chinese field. But on the other hand, the time when the two entered the world market, that is, in 1993, when Wang Ying filmed "Happy Luck Club" and in 1995, when Ang Lee filmed "Sense and Sensibility", when the "China fever" — jointly promoted by the fifth generation of the mainland, the Hong Kong New Wave and the new Taiwanese film — also accelerated their attention and integration into American culture. Also at this time, a group of Chinese directors were invited to Hollywood to develop.
"Happy Blessing Society"
This group of directors includes Wu Yusen, Xu Ke, Yu Rentai, Lin Lingdong, Huang Zhiqiang, Tang Jili, Chen Kexin and Chen Kaige in the mainland, etc., and in the 21st century, it has extended to the Peng brothers, Yuan Kui, Liu Weiqiang, Chen Guo and so on. Hollywood's basic strategy was to create a peripheral lineup of Chinese elites at the peak of Chinese films to reflect the dominant power of their own online world talents (similar to American universities recruiting elites into their own East Asian departments), and the Chinese directors at that time were also proud of entering Hollywood.
Hollywood values the ability of these Chinese directors to shoot genre films, but the actual consequences are not as optimistic as imagined, Xu Ke and Shange Winton's two action films "Double Fire" and "K.O. Thunder Strike" have a bad reputation, Lin Lingdong's two breaks into Hollywood's "Extreme Adventure", "Replicants" and "Hell Awakens the Dragon" are also difficult to say successful, Chen Kaige, Chen Kexin, Huang Zhiqiang and others are "one round" passers-by, have returned home.
Hell Awakens the Dragon
More sustainable directors, only Yu Rentai and Wu Yusen, Yu Rentai has a study abroad background, it is relatively easy to integrate, and his consistent evil style also allows him to find a cheap business route.
In the past few years in the United States, Yu Rentai has almost maintained the speed of one film every two years, shooting four films such as "Five Elements Warrior", "Ghost Baby Bride", "Formula 51", "Freddy vs Jason" and so on, of which "Ghost Baby Bride" broke 50 million US dollars at the box office and "Freddy vs. Jason" broke 60 million US dollars at the box office. Although this achievement is good among Chinese directors, Yu Rentai has never been able to get the opportunity to direct first-line blockbusters.
Freddie vs Jason
Wu Yusen is the most successful of a group of Chinese directors who broke into Hollywood, which is indisputable, starting from 1993's "Ultimate Target", Wu Yusen has almost achieved sustained success in Hollywood, his two-male model is invincible, "Broken Arrow", "Face Change", "Mission Impossible 2", "Wind Whisperer" are among the highest-grossing American blockbusters at that time, largely because Wu Yusen's heroic feelings and the golden age of Hollywood action movies have a high resonance.
But as the mainstream trend of Hollywood movies shifted to modern science fiction and superheroes, Wu Yusen's space became smaller and smaller, and he could only leave after filming "Memory Rift".
"Memory Rift"
Around 2006, when Wu Yusen and Yu Rentai's fate ended, a wave of Asian compilation fever in Hollywood prompted Yuan Kui, Peng Brothers, Liu Weiqiang, Hu Dawei, Liang Puzhi, Chen Guo and others to continue the footsteps of their predecessors. This wave of directors is facing basically universal failures, with the exception of Won Kui's "Desperate Express" and the Peng brothers' "Bangkok Killer", other works have been almost completely forgotten.
Desperate Express
This decade-long journey to the street naturally makes people feel the difficulty of breaking through and integrating into Hollywood, and Hollywood has given enough resources: the funds of large companies, the genre of Chinese directors, the elements with selling points, and enough stars (such as Shange Winton).
However, the Chinese directors handed over basically unqualified answer sheets, whether it is action directors or literary directors, they are still following the domestic set of shooting methods, do not know how to adapt, and the domestic can bury the baggage, shake the clever set of technology, change the context, and it does not work at all.
On the edge of this trend, Liu Weiqiang has gone to South Korea to shoot "Daisy", Wong Kar-wai went to the United States to shoot "Blueberry Love", Hou Xiaoxian filmed "Coffee Time" and "Red Balloon Journey" in Japan and France, and Cai Mingming was invited to shoot "Face" at the Louvre.
"Face"
But for these directors, the above works are just "one-shot deals", and they are not aimed at integrating into local industries. Therefore, in this generation of directors (1940-1960 generation), the only people who really integrated into the fringes of the foreign cultural circle, in addition to the previously mentioned Wang Ying and Ang Lee, were Luo Zhuoyao, who immigrated to Australia, Dai Sijie, who immigrated to France, and Zhang Lu, who immigrated to South Korea.
Why is it marginal? Luo Zhuoyao has only made one film in Australia, "Looking for the Goddess of 1967", and the local box office is only 100,000 US dollars, which makes her have to put the focus of her work back on Taiwan. For Dai Sijie, his integration is inseparable from his study at the top film school la Fémis, as well as his influence in literary creation.
In Search of the Goddess of 1967
Dai Sijie, who once went to the countryside as a young intellectual, had a very clear attitude towards the Cultural Revolution, which was expressed accordingly in his early "Cowshed", "The Man Who Swallowed the Moon", and "The 11th Child", but several films did not form an influence in the industry.
His integration into the French cultural scene did not begin until the best-selling book "Balzac and the Little Tailor", and the opportunities brought to him by this book can be said to be a special case that cannot be copied, not only allowing the film adaptation of the same name to be released quickly, but also indirectly giving birth to his later "Chinese Girl of botanists", "Night Peacock", "Midnight Slow Car" and so on.
Midnight Slow Train
Zhang's situation is even more peculiar: he is of Korean ethnicity, attending universities in the mainland and filming in South Korea. His ethnic and linguistic background has made it easy for him to integrate into the Korean film industry – perhaps the most unique of all the cases of transnational convergence.
Zhang Lu's career began in South Korea and became so successful in South Korea that many people forget that he is actually a Chinese director, but his films are divided into two stages, the first stage focuses on border affairs ("Jie" and "Dou Man Jiang"), with the theme of defectors; the latter stage focuses on the concise visual nature of scheduling, seeking the possibility of expressing ambiguous emotions, and the style is comparable to Hong Changxiu, which also establishes his position in the Korean film industry.
"Bean Man River"
In addition to Luo Zhuoyao, Dai Sijie and Zhang Lu, we can hardly count the well-known Chinese directors who have developed in other countries outside the United States. But in the past decade, the prosperity of the second generation of Chinese directors in the United States seems to have become a cluster phenomenon, this group of "American second generation" have Chinese ancestry, but either born and raised in the United States, or moved to the United States at a very young age (at most teenage years old), they have almost no excessive obstacles to integration into local culture, there is no systematic indoctrination of Chinese culture, and the level of Chinese is even more uneven, basically can be regarded as "the generation that grew up as an American".
The representative figure of the second generation of the United States can be traced back to Huang Yiyu, who was born in Hong Kong in 1959 and immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of ten. After graduation, he worked as a screenwriter for several years, and eventually wrote and directed well, becoming the director of the "Death Is Coming" series, "Cosmic Pursuit Order", "Dragon Ball" and other films.
Cosmic Pursuit Order
After Huang Yiyu, three heavyweight American second generations entered the public eye: Lin Yibin, born in 1971, Wen Ziren, born in 1977, and Zhu Haowei, born in 1979. Among them, Lin Yibin immigrated to the United States from Taipei with his family at the age of nine, Wen Ziren was born in Malaysia and grew up in Australia, and Zhu Haowei was born and raised in the United States. They all graduated from professional cinema departments abroad, but they were not interested in their origins and Chinese issues, so they threw themselves into the arms of Western films from the beginning and became the box office directors in Hollywood today.
Therefore, strictly speaking, Huang Yiyu, Lin Yibin, Wen Ziren, and Zhu Haowei do not meet the definition of "Chinese directors entering the foreign cultural circle", and as far as our domestic audiences are concerned, they basically recognize their Chinese ancestry, but rarely regard them as Chinese directors. On the one hand, this is because of their "american second generation", on the other hand, because their films are completely decoupled from Chinese culture (Zhu Haowei's "Picking Gold" is just a pure commercial film intended to make profits after the fact), and there is no sign of integration.
"Picking Gold"
But in addition to these people, there are several other "American second generations" who are better, and they can still obtain the cognitive identity of Chinese directors, these people are Wu Siwei, born in 1970, Wang Ziyi, born in 1983, Zhao Ting, born in 1982, and Yan Yuqian, who is also a post-80s female director.
Wu Siwei is a native of the United States, Wang Ziyi immigrated to the United States at the age of six, Zhao Ting was sent to a British boarding school at the age of sixteen, and Yan Yuqian grew up in Hong Kong and Washington. Although they have not been systematically educated in China, these four directors will say that Chinese and have never completely decoupled from Chinese culture.
Wu Siwei
Prince Yi
From the perspective of the integration case laid by the predecessors, there are undoubtedly two ways to succeed, one is Wang Ying's "Xifuhui model" and the other is Ang Lee's "original family model", the former can be called the Chinese community model, and the latter is the Chinese problem model. Judging from the relevant films, Wang Ziyi and Yan Yuqian belong to Wang Ying's Chinese community model, while Wu Siwei and Zhao Ting belong to Ang Lee's Chinese problem model.
Yan Yuqian
Wang Ziyi's "Don't Tell Her" and Yan Yuqian's "Floating City on the Sea" both have a vertical or horizontal family and community characteristics, and their cultural integration is naturally following Wang Ying's old path. The readability of such films does not depend on narrative or image skills, but on the delicate presentation of the community and the feeling of detail, which is why Wang Ziyi has become popular. And once these strategies don't work, they often face widespread skepticism about creating spectacles and collage symbols like Floating City on the Sea.
Floating City on the Sea
Wu Siwei's "Face" and "True Heart Half Solution" are all lesbian topics extended from the original Chinese family, and these two films carry the traces of Ang Lee's stamina and heavy sword bladelessness from the content to the texture. In contrast, Zhao Ting's sense of problems is more open, and she almost finds a perspective and train of thought from the beginning, using her own minority gaze to overlap the stories of other minorities.
"True Heart Half Solution"
Thus, these stories—native Indian stories (The Song My Brother Taught Me to Sing), The Story of Ma Zai (The Knight), and The Wanderer's Story (The Land of NoBody)— constitute Zhao Ting's "anthropological trilogy," and these minorities resonate deeply with Zhao Ting's foreign director's lens. But on the other hand, these films have not left Ang Lee's "native family model", the protagonists are facing the entanglement of the original family, but they have certain variations in action: staying, hesitating, and running away.
"The Song My Brother Taught Me to Sing"
Wu Siwei and Zhao Ting can be regarded as the successors of Ang Lee, and also show the potential of their respective "author films", but in comparison, Zhao Ting's films are obviously more favored by Americans, NYU origins, Sundance and Cannes resumes, minority targeted topics, distinct image style (this is largely due to her photographer and boyfriend), have made her the object of public opinion promotion, the current smooth sailing, there is a great inheritance and even surpass Ang Lee's momentum, even Marvel has to rub her heat.
At this point, Zhao Ting has proved herself in the field of independent production, but whether she has the practicality of all directions like Ang Lee and becomes a world director will take time to test. However, Zhao Ting is already the lucky one of this era, and she has caught up with a perfect opportunity: because of the epidemic, global films are scarce, and "No Place" has been able to sweep the global awards ceremony and become the biggest hit of this year's Oscars.
The current "Hollywood Chinese fever" has achieved box office saints such as Lin Yibin, Wen Ziren and Zhu Haowei, and has also launched film festival darlings such as Wu Siwei, Wang Ziyi, Yan Yuqian, and Zhao Ting, and the "pride" generated by domestic audiences when talking about them is roughly proportional to the strength of their affinity with Chinese culture.
In my opinion, integrating Western institutions and aesthetics with a complete Eastern mind is still the most difficult and culturally valuable challenge, so the achievements of Wang Ying and Ang Lee, whether or not they are surpassed by future generations in some aspects, are the most respectable pioneers.