Kong Degang
After fifteen years, when Chen Kaige's film "Wuji" came to the public view again because of the variety show "Actors Please Take Place", the once familiar hustle and bustle of controversy was already a matter of the last era. When Chen Kaige once again expressed his nostalgia for "Wuji" and his dissatisfaction with what he called "unfair criticism", the response and evaluation of the mass media was no longer direct, but more appealed to a certain "retro futurism" of the era in the early 21st century, which had not yet passed for a long time - it seems that not many people in the mainstream of the public opinion field today have seen "Wuji", and it seems that it is difficult to understand the magical scene of a film dominating the national cultural topic for several years. In the face of the controversy between Chen Kaige and Li Chengru, we all seem to be facing a distant, forgotten film, re-establishing the coordinate system to look at "Wuji" and the controversy that surrounds this work: re-watching "Wuji" or "making up lessons" "Wuji" has become a retro behavior exercise.
Chen Kaige participated in "Actors Please Take Place"
In addition to the consistent tolerance of chen kaige in the public opinion circles, the call for a re-evaluation of "Wuji" has actually surged for a long time: the trend of thought that takes this as a footnote is a re-examination of the "costume commercial blockbusters" of the "fifth generation of directors" in the early 21st century. Zhang Yimou's "Hero", "Ten Faces Ambush", "Golden Armor in the City", Chen Kaige's "Wuji", Feng Xiaogang's "Night Feast", He Ping's "Heroes of Heaven and Earth" and other works, which have been characterized as "commercial degeneration" and "bad films", seem to have been forgotten by mainstream audiences - and it is precisely because of these more "a priori" stereotypes for today's audiences that they have become the premise for the re-evaluation of works: the "fifth generation of directors" who dominate these works have "returned" in a "low-key" state in the second decade of the 21st century. They are more alive in the film industry as "highly respected" than "Mu Xiu Yulin", and with their gradually improved wind ratings, they have promoted the opportunity for the former "black history" to be redeemed. The negative opinions handed down more than a decade ago provide a more relaxed and low starting point, and seem to be more conducive to the audience's objective and kind view of this era of costume blockbusters that once flocked to the crowd and made a lot of noise.
In fact, after commercial films such as "Wolf Warrior 2", "The Wandering Earth", "Nezha: The Magic Child Descending" really define "domestic commercial blockbusters", the Chinese film market has gradually developed into the world's forefront of the film commercial market, the audience's distinction between art films, author films and commercial films has gradually become clear, and the narrative routines and shooting modes of commercial films have become familiar, and the "commercial attempts" of the fifth generation of directors in the early 21st century have actually exposed their essence is not a commercial film. It also brought down the most important core argument in the critique of these films more than a decade ago. Box office, commercial value, star and other "rapid decay" factors have dissipated with the times, these works can eventually face the later scrutinists with the film itself, and the "author characteristics" of the "fifth generation" directors they show have finally become the core values that can be retained.
Can we revisit Infinity?
It is no secret that the author has also recently re-watched "Wuji" - our indignation against Chen Kaige's criticism and "pranks" of "Wuji" can be understood, because in the noisy public opinion field in 2005, the entire film criticism environment of Chinese film criticism of "Wuji" is relatively lacking in a more serious and substantive art criticism. The loss of focus began with the storm of the film's initial release, and developed to the extreme of chaos and complexity: the director and Chinese the spoof short film "A Blood Case Caused by a Steamed Bun" edited by Hu Ge, an Internet celebrity in the early days of the Internet, almost monopolized people's only impression of "Wuji", Chen Kaige sued Hu Ge in court, demanding that his personal reputation and his speech that was considered "out of shape" was not only sensational entertainment news, but also became a metaphor for "Wuji" as a film itself, which was completely distracted from the focus. Chen Kaige has repeatedly emphasized that "Wuji" is China's "first fantasy film" and an aesthetic attempt of "oriental new fantasy", and Chen Kaige's statement is generally ignored or even ridiculed by the public opinion field in the Chinese field of public opinion - the a priori judgment position of this attitude is that the weakness and failure of "Wuji" under the framework of commercial film judgment is an unbreakable indemnity, so if the foundation is not solid, all aesthetic or artistic concepts seem to be castles in the air.
Poster of Wuji
Judging by the commercial standards of public understanding and publicly acceptable aesthetic appeals, "Wuji" is obviously beyond the scope of acceptance and appreciation of audiences at that time and even now in many dimensions. The birth and popularity of "A Blood Case Caused by a Steamed Bun" may not be that the audience who watched the movie summarized the plot as "a bloody case caused by a steamed bun", but a large number of grotesque, bizarre, beyond the scope of common sense and settings and scenes in the movie, which gave the audience a strong sense of defamiliarization and discomfort from the first stage of the film. Excessively Japanese and bright "flower armor", Zhang Dongjian and countless yaks running when the special effects make people play, "full of gods" bizarre hairstyles and grotesque expression management, palace architectural design dubbed "ring set ring", Xie Tingfeng holding a "thumb" in his hand, Liu Ye, who rotates three hundred and sixty degrees in the sky in a black costume and calls himself "I am a person dressed in black", and a bad Chinese accent that gathers the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, and is obviously requested by the director, deliberately emotional, Grotesque and discrete forms of performance - if you look at "Wuji" from the perspective of popular aesthetics, then every second of the film is almost a comedic disaster, sitting in danger, and every moment in the process of telling a serious book is funny and mysterious: "Wuji" has a "Douban short review" that reads, "Is it not a bad film over time?" This may be a footnote to the film' seemingly out-of-the-crowd and even subcultural aesthetics in any era: it's hard to imagine the aesthetic environment of a mainstream culture that is the aesthetic, narrative, and performance style of wu ji.
Any film lover familiar with the commercial film screenwriting model and must say that McGee's "Script" can take the pulse of "Wuji" with a list of symptoms, but perhaps the most fundamental problem is that Chen Kaige's "Wuji" exposes the separation of artistic conception and actual execution at multiple levels in "Wuji" - or that the film as a carrier cannot carry Chen Kaige's conception. First of all, Chen Kaige and his screenwriting team set up an almost completely empty fantasy possible world, which is even different from the real world in basic operating logic. This kind of world construction, which is completely based on fantasy, not only makes it difficult for the audience to use the experience in the real world to make "common sense inference" through deductive thinking, but also forces the creator to spend a lot of energy and length that the film content cannot carry in explaining the worldview and explaining the composition of the world - what is worse is that when Chen Kaige spends the film time to explain the worldview, his narrative style is "freehand" and point-to-point. This makes it almost impossible for this completely empty virtual world to be understood by the first-time audience, but can only be "thrown" in front of the audience in an abrupt state. That is to say, the length of the 2-hour film cannot carry a completely overhead world view, and although the film plot is "self-consistent" in the logic of world construction, it cannot prevent the audience from deriving a ridiculous perception of "common sense", which first of all directly rejects a part of the audience.
Secondly, the story and speculation written by Chen Kaige's team for this worldview are freehand and allegorical, but it is difficult to fit the grand epic background set out - Chen Kaige can think that telling a fable story floating in the air in a freehand worldview is self-consistent, but when the audience faces a relatively strange and novel world view, the initial reaction must be to use the operation logic of the real world to understand: that is, to accept the bizarre and grotesque worldview of "Wuji" for the first time, and the audience who is willing to watch it. Their acceptance is based on a "real" attitude, they suppress doubts about strange things, internalize all the freehand parts of it into the identity of "existence is reasonable", and they construct an "epic sense" in their hearts. After such a difficult layer of identification, it is greeted by a mysterious fable story that does not conform to the basic plot conflict modes such as human feelings and interests, which once again creates a betrayal of the audience's expectations. "Wuji" provides "freehand world + freehand narrative", the initial expectation of commercial film audiences is "real world + real story", and the audience who has experienced a layer of forced identification process is encountered with "I believe in the real world + freehand narrative", this layer of conflict is probably more difficult to solve than the original grotesque perception.
In the end, what "nails the coffin with the last nail" is the separation of character portrayal that follows the two dimensions of "freehand narrative" and "grotesque and bizarre worldview aesthetics", and inevitably leads to the logic of artistic creation. Chen Kaige's treatment may not be deliberate, but logical in the aesthetic logic he constructed. Therefore, in the face of the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, five different Chinese accents, he boldly chose not to use dubbing but to let the actors give the original voice; the actors adopted an emotional first, extreme and crazy stage play performance method, which separated from the real traditional imitation performance; whether it was performance, lines or even character modeling design, there was always a discrete design of "pulling people out of the play", and always implemented the aesthetic idea of "fake when it is true and false"... What needs to be admired is the high degree of consistency between the execution of the whole team and the final aesthetic effect, but the final result is that the more the film can implement Chen Kaige's artistic conception aesthetically, the more it achieves a high degree of unity with the aesthetic concept in various fields and levels, and the more it runs counter to a commercial film that meets the aesthetic needs of the public. Yes, the key to discussing whether "Infinity" is a success/failure film is the criterion of judgment. It is undoubtedly a failure as a commercial film, contrary to all commercial films and popular aesthetic laws; but it may at the same time have no objection to an author's film with an extremely strong author color, although the evaluation is still different, but it is certain that every frame of the film implements the ultimate will of the director, is not blurred by commercial logic and other factors, and is an excellent example of the dissection of the director's art and creative ideas.
In fact, we can not only say that "Wuji" is representative, because there is almost a collective commonality of the "costume commercial blockbuster" of the fifth generation of Chinese directors in the early 21st century: in that era, whether it was investors, directors, audiences or critics, they all thought that big investment, movie stars and action scenes meant "business", and the "fifth generation" directors who were new to commercial film production were not like their Hollywood counterparts. Think of large investments as elaborate budget tables and formulaic script writing that strictly controls audience emotions, but rather as an opportunity and means to magnify the stylistic characteristics of their own authors a hundredfold or a thousandfold. Years later, when we all understand that these films are not "commercial films", the criticism of the "fifth generation of directors" in the original public opinion circles for "losing speculation, losing depth, embracing business and vulgarity" may be a pre-modern fantasy, and the reason why these films have encountered public criticism is precisely because the directors have overexpressed their own authorial style, we will find that these works are rare and precious - throughout the film history of countries around the world for more than a hundred years. We rarely see an author's film come to fruition with such budget and creative freedom.
Is it possible to "rehabilitate" Zhang Yimou?
Discussing the wave of costume commercial blockbusters of the "fifth generation of directors" in the early 21st century, we naturally cannot skip Zhang Yimou, the "first person to eat crabs". The groundbreaking nature of Zhang Yimou's transformation and attempts in the early 21st century has always been controversial: some people think that "Hero" is actually just a follow-up work after the success of Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", and the cause of the wave of costume commercial blockbusters should be "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" rather than "Hero"; some people think that Chen Kaige's 1998 "Jingke Thorn Qin King" is the beginning of China's costume commercial blockbusters, including the Hengdian QinWang Palace, which became an important filming location for Chinese film and television because of "Hero", and was also the earliest for Chen Kaige's "Jingke Thorn Qin King" The real scene that was built. But it is indisputable that compared with other fifth-generation directors' shallow taste of the route of costume commercial blockbusters, scattered practices, and even a failure to stay away, Zhang Yimou is unswervingly using the "martial arts trilogy" of "Hero", "Ten Faces Ambush", "Full of Golden Armor", and even many years later, pure Hollywood commercial films to produce "The Great Wall", "Shadow" and other works that still adhere to the established route have carried out more than ten years of costume commercial blockbuster practice, perhaps because of this, he is full of slander. But there is no doubt that he is the fundamental spokesperson for this line: compared to Chen Kaige, who is more actively using commercial investment to achieve the author's style, Zhang Yimou may subjectively try to suppress his own author's style and try to explore the correct shooting mode of commercial films - although the results are the same, his "martial arts trilogy" may only be his strong personal authorship characteristics.
When it comes to the "rehabilitation" of the "fifth generation director" in the early 21st century costume commercial blockbuster, 90% is about "Hero": the bad reviews that the film encountered at the beginning of its release came from two dimensions of public aesthetics and public opinion criticism. The dimension from the public is still focused on the non-commercial nature of the film's narrative approach: Zhang Yimou and his team construct a short allegorical story narrated from different perspectives with reference to Rashomon, and because of the aesthetic appeal to freehand, the text is hollow and weak, and the contradictions and conflicts of the film are relatively empty, which makes audiences looking forward to seeing a full, stimulating and gripping commercial film narrative feel unsatisfied. However, compared with the later "Wuji", the world view construction of "Hero" is based on the Chinese freehand painting tradition that has existed for many years, so its aesthetic logic of "freehand world view + freehand narrative" can be understood by the audience, and can also fully expose the author's film characteristics contained in the wrapping of commercial production: most of the bad reviews from the audience believe that the film is "not energetic enough", and the audience can accurately grasp the director's unfamiliarity and jerkiness in the shooting techniques of commercial films. It is perceived that the film still exists in the category of the author's film and is not suitable for everyone, as the propaganda says.
Heroes poster
Interestingly, at that time, the public opinion criticism circles 'encirclement and suppression' of Zhang Yimou was quite "carrying out a clear and pretending to be confused" meaning. The ideological criticism of Zhang Yimou's "anti-martial arts" and "flattering system", as well as the criticism of the "pure art" nature of "flattering business and willing to degenerate", completely drowned out the objective evaluation of the work itself. In fact, most of the critics at that time were well aware of the author's characteristics contained in "Hero", so they could quickly grasp Zhang Yimou's overthrow and deconstruction of the traditional martial arts concept of personal liberalism, and realize that the aesthetic shock brought about by Qin Jun's highly regular and terrible "fascist aesthetics" in the film meant that the author's heart moved from rebellion against the system to reconciliation. But at the same time, it is precisely out of the inadmissibility of this ideology and the inability to directly criticize the film for objective reasons (first, because of the sensitivity of the topic, and second, because liberal intellectuals themselves oppose the image construction of ideological criticism), so they deliberately blur the focus and focus the criticism on "the degeneration of the act of engaging in commercial films". This critical discourse was most thoroughly rehearsed in 2006 when "The Golden Armor in the City" was released on the same day as Jia Zhangke's "Three Gorges Good Man", and Jia Zhangke's sentence "In the golden age, who cares about good people" intuitively made a priori stipulations on the nature of the two films - but this is actually subjectively suppressing "The Golden Armor in the City" as some characteristics of the author's film, and looking back more than a decade later, it may be just an outdated pre-modern "pastoral pastoral" statement.
"Full of Golden Armor" is a work that Zhang Yimou may not be able to "rehabilitate" in his career, but it is indeed worth mentioning. Under the dazzling packaging of 350 million yuan investment, the palace design of carved beams and paintings, the tactics of the sea of people, the exposed design of the palace women's reference to French costumes, and the dazzling packaging of stars such as Zhou Runfa, Gong Li, Jay Chou, "Golden Armor" was of course regarded as the most important attempt of Chinese commercial films at that time, and it was naturally a representative work of the fallen failure of domestic costume blockbusters. But at the same time, I am afraid that it is difficult to deny that "Full of Golden Armor" is similar to "Wuji", which is a "collection of masterpieces" of Zhang Yimou's personal authorial style as a director: a large number of close-up metaphors about chrysanthemums, medicines, and gold jewelry, a highly regular sense of ceremony that plays a more curtain at each hour, indifferent and ruthless, morbidly distorted lines and characters, a gloomy and dark soundtrack and a desperate ending that finally resists hopelessly and can only lead to collective destruction, all of which are almost the concentrated amplification of the core of Zhang Yimou's works over the years. "Golden Armor" aesthetically seriously implements the double oppression of the audience visually and spiritually, which makes it difficult for the audience to accept the aesthetic irony of "gold and jade on its surface, defeat in it", but can only simply perceive the "physical discomfort", and finally the general impression left by the film to the public is only meaningless luxury, excessive visual rape of color, and even the low-level fun of selling female color - however, if you do not ignore the praise of the second prince played by Jay Chou in the film, who slashed the king flag with a knife, persecuted women and desperately resisted. The square of the failure of the rebellion is full of blood, quickly washed and laid with chrysanthemums after five minutes of singing and dancing scenes, "Golden Armor" may be the most extreme metaphor and direct exposure of contemporary Chinese films for the dark history of feudal politics: the attitude of the director himself may be highly controversial in the public opinion circles, but "Golden Armor" is quite valuable for the presentation and research of Zhang Yimou's author's style - Zhang Yimou is actually an aesthetic niche director, and his artistic pursuit has inherent paranoia and extremism. In the early 21st century, he was not good at grasping the psychology and aesthetics of the masses, and when he was placed in the position of a commercial film directly facing the public, the criticism and dissatisfaction he encountered were ultimately justified: this argument is the same for other "fifth-generation directors".
Zhang Yimou's "Pan-Europe and America" and Chen Kaige's "Pan-East Asia": Two New Orientalisms
As the second decade of the 21st century began to emerge examples of domestic commercial films that truly met the requirements of the public, and created many box office myths supported by the public in the true sense, the "fifth generation of directors" finally gradually left this position that they did not fit, and were able to return to the essential identity position of film authors, which is also the hidden reason for the sound of "rehabilitation" in their commercial blockbuster attempts more than a decade ago. After years of practice and experience, Zhang Yimou's "Shadow" and Chen Kaige's "The Legend of the Demon Cat" almost simultaneously showed the public that after they were familiar with the narrative methods and shooting logic of commercial films, they were re-filmed, and the "costume commercial blockbusters" that were more "audience-friendly" - but unfortunately, although these two works enabled the director to "turn over" in public evaluation, the box office and attention of the film have long been unable to set off the storm of the year, and the two well-polished commercial productions have also lost the creator "Angular": It doesn't make sense to let authors like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou master the techniques of commercial films in essence—for art history and film history, mediocre works are even inferior to the indulgent and wanton "bad films" of a decade ago.
In essence, this artistic attempt, which can be summarized as "commercial Orientalism" unique to China in the early 21st century, is outdated: in the face of an important time node of "internationalization" in China, the "fifth generation of directors" took inspiration from Japan in the 1980s, or more precisely from Akira Kurosawa's "Spider's Nest Castle" and "Chaos" in the 1980s, two "Japanese Warring States Shakespeare", trying to explain to the world a chinese image that is moving towards internationalization from a "self-Orientalist" perspective. Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have taken different aesthetic paths, which is closely related to their personal aesthetic aspirations. Faced with the crucial question of how to present oriental culture and oriental image to the world, both had to be swallowed up by aesthetic appeals in the narrative category, choosing to weaken thinking and textual texts, and appealing to senses, emotions and postmodern "texts" – from which they gave their own interpretations of modern Chinese aesthetics.
Zhang Yimou
What Zhang Yimou seeks is to combine with Western modernism, to retellear the essence of traditional Chinese culture with the construction logic of Western art: the Qin army array like a fascist army in "Heroes", the snow in the sea of Ukrainian flowers in "Ten Faces Ambush", the reproduction of the siege battle shot in "Golden Armor" on Eisenstein's "October" attack on the Winter Palace, the five-colored armor and the monster treatment of "Gluttony" in "The Great Wall", and the almost expressionistic exercise of black and white light and shadow in "Shadow". And the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, which is widely accepted by the world, shows a subversive restatement of "Western learning as the body, secondary school as the use", the essence of the discourse logic of this restatement is western perspective, is an active self-gaze and self-construction - in this sense, Zhang Yimou's imitation of Akira Kurosawa is not just a parody of the "Spider's Nest City" riding scene in "Ten Faces Ambush", not just a tribute to "Shadow Warrior" by "Shadow". It is fundamentally a kind of imitation of Japan in the 1980s by China in the 21st century: a kind of submission and accession to "internationalization".
However, Chen Kaige took a step back, of course, he could not stick to the category of Chinese tradition, and as an aesthetic destroyer, he sought the isomorphism of the East Asian cultural circle, and the "New East" integrated with the traditional cultural factors of Japan and Korea. Chen Kaige's reproduction of the war scene of Akira Kurosawa's "Chaos" in "Wuji", the subjective tolerance of the accents Chinese of various countries, including the co-construction of the "peach blossom" of Chinese culture and the "cherry blossom" of Japanese culture, the common fascination of the "bird" image of the two countries, and the "Legend of the Demon Cat" in the form of Sino-Japanese cooperation, gazing at the Tang Dynasty from the perspective of the Japanese, with the help of the dual identity of the East Asian cultural circle that is both other and self - Chen Kaige's discourse logic is "Asian". He tried to reconstruct 21st-century China back to its position and identity as the East Asian cultural circle of the Tang Dynasty, and realized a way of thinking that "internationalization" was the first to be regionalized. From this, we can finally explain that, although they have different ideas, they are all pursuing an aesthetic pure path–and thus their preciousness lies in the extremes and extremes of their aesthetic exploration: a special and common way, a "fascist" pull and advancement of their own style.
Chen Kaige once said indignantly, "In ten years you will re-understand "Wuji", this sentence may not necessarily be 100% applicable to "Wuji", but it must be applicable to this wave of domestic costume blockbusters in the 21st century: peeling off the fog of commerce, we can see a certain ideal spirit of the times that has dissipated but has always been remembered, or it is a kind of "tears of the times" - we have come to a new era of "internationalization", whether it is to join and surrender to internationalization with a "pan-European and American" attitude. Or with the "pan-East Asian" regionalization of the first idea, as these costume blockbusters are forgotten by the audience, they are also obsolete. Our look back and exploration have become a kind of "retro futurism": we are discussing a future that may happen but ultimately failed to happen, the confusion of the "fifth generation of directors", the thinking and practice are finally written into the history of cinema in their personal authorship, and how we deal with the upcoming "internationalization" of another form, how the so-called "new aesthetics of the East" should be constructed, which will be thrown into the unknowable future.
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Yijia Xu