By Grady Hendrix
Translator: Qin Tian
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Film Comment (August 5, 2014)
On 9 and 11 August 2014, the British Film Institute will screen director Huang Jianxin's 1985 work The Black Cannon Incident, part of the "Chinese Film Century Retrospective", which was screened in Toronto, with a slight change in format. Huang Jianxin is a famous director of the fifth generation in China, alongside directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang. These film directors and other filmmakers revolutionized China's film industry, bringing international acclaim and numerous awards to China.
But while we can still see works by Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang in places like Berlin and Cannes, Huang Jianxin has largely been forgotten. In the British Film Society retrospective, an introductory, lavish program book contains an entire chapter on the fifth generation, but the section on Huang Jianxin is only 71 words. This neglect is not just a problem for the British Film Institute, it is ubiquitous. Browsing on the Internet, you'll find that the only large amount of English-language information about Huang Jianxin is a series of comments written by Matthew Lee on the fan site Twitch Film in 2009.
Why do people forget Huang Jianxin? Because he's a comedy director.
Fifth-generation directors' films tell the story of what happened to feudal women in China ("The Red Lantern Hangs High"), the life of Tibetans ("Horse Thieves"), and homosexual issues ("Farewell to the King"), but Huang Jianxin's films are about the loss of marriage licenses ("Who Says I Don't Care"), robots attending boring executive meetings (misplaced), and politics in the office ("Back to Back, Face to Face"). Comedies have never been as respected as politically charged films, but Huang Jianxin's films are the only films of the fifth generation that have the courage to portray contemporary Chinese society.
While other fifth-generation filmmakers are praised for their courage, no one points to the fact that most of their films are set in the past, mostly in pre-liberation China, or in distant minority provinces. Huang Jianxin did not do this, and his film background is set in major cities such as Shanghai and Xi'an, and is firmly rooted in the contemporary era.
Back to Back, Face to Face
Like most fifth-generation people, Huang Jianxin stands out from wu Tianming's Xi'an Film Studio. After graduating from university, Huang Jianxin worked as a producer, script consultant and assistant director before entering the prestigious Beijing Film Academy and becoming a director.
His first film, The Black Cannon Incident, caused a sensation in the Chinese film industry. Zhao Shuxin, a German-savvy engineer at a mining company, complained in a telegram that a black cannon had been lost in a set of chess he bought. Suddenly, he was dismissed because local officials were convinced that it was some kind of code. The matter was further resolved when the translator who succeeded him proved incompetent and the German company with whom they worked had to know nothing about what was happening. After his eventual clearing, Zhao was told that he should thank the organization for its efforts to clear his reputation (they tarnished his reputation in the first place). The film's last line comes from a weary Letter from Zhao: "I'll never play chess again."
The Black Cannon Incident
Films like "The Black Cannon Incident" are few and far between, a bureaucratic farce not seen in China for decades (at least not since Shi Dongshan's Carnival Night in 1936), and achieved great success, winning Liu Zifeng the Golden Rooster Award for Best Actor.
In January 1986, two conferences were organized to discuss the Black Cannon Incident, one by the editors of Film Art magazine and the other by the China Art Research Center, but critics could not accept the film's radicalism. Huang Jianxin's sarcasm was too sharp, so they pretended not to understand. Some claim that Huang Jianxin is making fun of the eternal weakness of human nature, while another claims that the film is calling for "personal modernization". Even Huang Jianxin has tried to show that he is not criticizing the system, but talking about humanity in general. A small spoiler reminder: He is criticizing the system.
Huang Jianxin's next film, Misplaced (1986), is a sequel to this satirical style, in which the discredited translator invents a robot stand-in to attend a boring meeting for him, only to find out that it demands independence.
"Misplaced"
This was followed by Reincarnation (1988), an artistic essay about the son of a high-ranking official wandering aimlessly in a life of mild crime, squandering his advantages, like pampered children his age. A few months later, the seemingly thawing film culture cooled down again. But both the cultural crackdown and Wu Tianming's travel to the United States have been erased from official history and have not even been invited to a retrospective of "China's 20 Most Important Films of the 1980s." It wasn't until 1993 that he made his next film.
Reincarnation (1988)
When Huang Jianxin continued to shoot his works, he had more ideas. Stand Up Straight, Don't Lie Down (1993) is the first in Huang Jianxin's "Urban Trilogy" satire series. The film takes place in an apartment building where a writer rubs shoulders with a variety of characters around him, ranging from conservative officials to small businessmen who have been bribed by capitalist enterprises.
Huang Jianxin's next work, Back to Back, Face to Face (1994), is one of his best films, and at the heart of it is the most interesting character in his work, Wang Shuangli, a small official in a remote city who has been acting curator of the cultural center for three years. Everyone thought he would be appointed curator, but when an outsider was appointed to that position, he fought back with his knowledge of bureaucracy. From sabotaging polls, to bad ideas suggested to his "boss," to investigating the whereabouts of tiny sums of money, Wang Shuangli is a monster, but also a comical monster, and as his "war of instruments" spirals out of control, the film portrays a bureaucratic relationship of stinginess, ignorance, corruption, and serious corruption.
The third work in Huang Jianxin's "City Series", "Red Light Stop, Green Light Line" (1995), takes place in a driving school. This light-hearted narrative outlines an amazing array of scams at the school that cause three different students (a greedy journalist, an addict, an upstart) to band together in order to pass the final driver's license test.
"Red Light Stop, Green Light Line"
The next film, Ambush (1997), co-directed by Huang Jianxin and Yang Yaya, seems to me to be basically a combination of Waiting for Godot and Emergency Stalking Order. In the early 21st century, Huang Jianxin tempered his social criticism with a more benevolent and gentle view of human nature, making films such as "Can't Sleep" (2000) related to the city police, and "Who Says I Don't Care" (2001), which tells the story of a couple who are in trouble because they can't find nominal documents. In 2005, he filmed Please, Praise Me, a quiet but poignant film about a man who lied that he had prevented a rape and demanded public praise from a local newspaper for his actions.
"Please, Praise Me"
After that, there wasn't much news about Huang before he became a producer for the state-owned China Film Group. It's a breathtaking leap that's hard to find answers to. In 2009, he co-directed the large-scale main theme film "The Great Cause of The Founding of the People's Republic" with Han Sanping, the chairman of the China Film Group at the time.
In 2011, the two co-directed another film, "The Great Cause of Party Building". Both films feature well-known actors Andy Lau, Donnie Yen, Jet Li, jackie Chan, Wu Yusen and Chow Yun-fat.
"The Great Cause of Party Building"
Ironically, the fifth-generation director, who had boldly satirized the dying, bureaucratic, and detached social ethos, has now made a main theme film. In any case, he left behind a neglected, very interesting and humane film legacy.
A very knowledgeable reader once disputed this claim – these filmmakers are not wrong. Getting an education is always a good thing! But I think the point is that Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and others have been praised for their criticality, and only Huang Jianxin has the courage to criticize through contemporary urban theme films – and it still works. In addition, someone should plan a film festival called "Fifth Generation Embarrassing Movie": "CodeName Jaguar" and "Rock 'n' Roll Youth" will be very "dazzling".