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GODDESS
Wu Yonggang / China / 1934 / 77 mins

The epitome of Chinese realist filmmaking in the 1930s, Goddess features Chinese superstar Ruan Lingyu as a struggling mother in Shanghai who is driven to prostitution. Ravishingly beautiful and full of bravura sequences and astonishing detail, the film draws its power from Ruan’s subtle performance. It is the first film ever to portray a prostitute sympathetically and is screened with a brand new, specially commissioned score composed by Hongkongese-Scottish artist Kimho Ip. Tragically, hounded by the tabloids, Ruan killed herself, aged 25, just one year after Goddess was released. Her funeral made the front page of the New York Times. Barely remembered now, this landmark film about motherhood, scape-goating and social esteem, remains a glorious tribute to her.

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SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN
Fei Mu / China / 1948 / 85 mins

Voted the best Chinese film ever, Fei Mu’s engrossing portrait of a woman locked in a dead marriage ranks along side the best films about women by Mizoguchi, Bergman or Naruse. Wei Wei plays the wife, Zhou Yuwen, whose passions are revived by the arrival of a former lover. Visually, the film is rich in symbolism, and the shooting of some of its night scenes makes you catch your breath. The astonishing, trance-like commentary sometimes shifts into present tense, as if Zhou has stepped out of the film and is watching with us. The overall effect is as evocative as Last Year in Marienbad. Remade in 2002 by Tian Zhuangzhuang, this original is a masterpiece and one of cinema’s greatest achievements.

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READ THE LECTURE

The Courage to Live': Woman, morality and humanism in Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town
DOWNLOAD MICROSOFT WORD DOCUMENT

CROWS AND SPARROWS
Zheng Junli / China / 1949 / 113 mins

A key figure in the Shanghai film industry, actor-director Zheng Junli starred opposite Ruan Lingyu in New Women in 1934. Seen today, his second film as writer/director, Crows and Sparrows, is remarkable. As pacy as early Hawks, it is a richly detailed comedy of tenement life, peopled with Dickensian characters like Mr Hou (played by Li Tianji, who wrote the screenplay for Spring in a Small Town), the nationalist stooge, and the amoral journalist Mr Kong. Though Zheng began production before the Communists routed the nationalist KMT and completed filming afterwards, the film’s tone is remarkably consistent throughout - mocking the seriousness of politics in lines like “stop trotting out slogans!” A highly entertaining film and a crucial insight into Chinese life as it underwent profound change.

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THE LOVE ETERNE
Li Han Hsiang / Hong Kong / 1963 / 126 mins

An inspiration to Ang Lee and remade by Tsui Hark in 1994, this lavish musical, the jewel of the famous Shaw Brothers’ studio, retells the centuries old Chinese legend of the ‘Butterfly Lovers’. A wealthy girl dresses as a boy in order to go to school and falls in love with a peasant boy, who is troubled by his apparently gay feelings. For audiences it is more complex still, as both characters are played by actresses: classically trained Le Di and Ling Po. The result is part Huangmei opera, part Some Like it Hot, and part riot of studio set design; cherry blossom trees, gorgeous tea-houses and eye popping outfits. The ending has to be seen to be believed.

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ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN
Chang Cheh / Hong Kong / 1967 / 111 mins

Leading Hong Kong martial arts director Chang Cheh’s most famous film is a visual and kinetic feast. Set in a high coloured studio world of bold and beautiful compositions and intensely reactive music, it shows how Fang Gang copes with the social stigma of his birth, and then the emasculation of having his sword arm cut off – by a woman. He tries to settle down to fish and farm but his pride is wounded. It is a landmark film because it marks the moment when Hong Kong cinema morphed from the feminine genre of melodrama, into something more masculine, eventually paving the way for Bruce Lee. One-Armed Swordsman is remarkably pictorial and full of symbols of femininity, but laced with testosterone.

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A TOUCH OF ZEN
King Hu / Taiwan / 1969 / 200 mins

More operatic than Once Upon a Time in the West, with better bamboo forest fight scenes than Crouching Tiger, and a more abstract ending than 2001; this is what the movie screen was made for. A mysterious stranger draws a small town artist to a haunted fort, where rapture alternates with some of the greatest action ever filmed. Hu’s camera flicks like a whip one second, flies like a bird the next. Gravity disappears from this world of chivalry, of the clash between male and female, Confucianism and Buddhism. The editing is a percussive masterclass and the flight of the Buddhists is amongst the most lyrical scenes in cinema. Once seen, A Touch of Zen is never forgotten; its significance for Chinese language film history is immense.

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THE ARCH
Cecile Tang (Shu Shuen) / Hong Kong / 1970 / 94 mins

Yellow Earth heralded a new wave of Chinese cinema in 1984 but, 14 years before it, The Arch prefigured the modernity that was to come. Directed by Cecile Tang Shu-Suen, it tells of a widowed schoolteacher who falls for a young man but realises that Ming dynasty feudalism requires her to suppress her desire in favour of her daughter, who is also attracted to the man. Tang’s multi-viewpoint filming established her as a singular new voice. Shot by one of the world’s great DPs, Satyajit Ray’s Subatra Mitra, and edited by multitalented Les Blank, its deeply felt understanding of the main character made it one of the first Chinese language films to be acclaimed in the West.

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A CITY OF SADNESS
Hou Hsiao-Hsien / Hong Kong & Taiwan / 1989 / 157 mins

On February 28th 1947, 20,000 Taiwanese were shot when they rebelled against their nationalist government. Until 1988, there was a ban on mentioning the incident, and then Taiwan’s greatest director released this film about it. Yet this is no ordinary historical film, as the incident is not depicted. The film, which centres around a deaf photographer played by Tony Leung, is about business, art, health and gangsterism as much as conflict. It has a musical structure, with situations and camera-angles repeating. Characterisation and story are built like a mosaic. Its form is mesmerising, and the result is as rigorous and complex as Yasujiro Ozu’s best work. A City of Sadness is one of the greatest history films ever made.

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LISTEN TO THE LECTURES

Style and Meaning in the films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien


War and Revolution in China 1937-1949


A Cinema of Enchantment:
Contemporary Taiwanese Cinema

HHH - A PORTRAIT OF HOU HSAIO-HSIEN
Olivier Assayas / France & Taiwan / 1997 / 91 mins

Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: “The 21st Century belongs to Asia, and Hou is its historian, its prophet and its poet laureate.” In this feature documentary film critic and filmmaker Olivier Assayas, films this poet laureate on a journey around Taiwan, as he visits places from his youth and people whom he knew. Their relationship becomes a dialogue about filmmaking, its techniques, ideas and challenges. Hou emerges as a far more forthright and streetwise character than his restrained films suggest. The result, part of the long-running French TV series Cinema Of Our Time, is a great portrait of a world class filmmaker, in the tradition of François Truffaut’s long interviews with Alfred Hitchcock.

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LISTEN TO THE LECTURES

Style and Meaning in the films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien


A Cinema of Enchantment:
Contemporary Taiwanese Cinema

THE WEDDING BANQUET
Ang Lee / Taiwan & USA / 1993 / 106 mins

Twelve years before Brokeback Mountain, Taiwan’s most famous filmmaker, Ang Lee, made this delightful family melodrama, the first Taiwanese film to treat homosexuality sympathetically and one of its most profitable movies. Set in New York, it charts the trouble landlord Wai-tung and his white lover Simon get into when his parents visit and they try to hide their relationship by staging a fake wedding between Wai-tung and a tenant from Shanghai, Wei wei. Whereas Taiwanese Tsai Ming-liang emphasises the loneliness in modern life, Lee’s film is about empathy across generational, sexual and racial divides. Lee – together with John Woo, the most successful Chinese director to cross the Pacific – believes that “deep down we’re all the same.” The Wedding Banquet brims with such optimism.

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READ THE LECTURE

Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
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VIVE L'AMOUR
Tsai Ming-Liang / Taiwan / 1994 / 118 mins

Bernardo Bertolucci once said that Tsai Ming-liang is re-inventing cinema. Malaysian by birth, his films are set in present day Taiwan, where rapid urban development is bewildering ordinary people, where loneliness is palpable, and sexuality uncertain. In Vive l’amour, his third and perhaps best film, his regular actor Lee Kang-sheng steals the key to an empty apartment that Yang Kuei-Mei is selling for a real estate company; Chen Chao-jung plays her new lover, whom she meets there. The three interact and the result is like Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, remade by Michelangelo Antonioni. Filming in long, engrossing takes, Tsai attempts nothing less than a portrait of the human soul. In the extraordinary last shot of this film, he succeeds.

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LISTEN / READ THE LECTURES

A Cinema of Enchantment:
Contemporary Taiwanese Cinema


Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
DOWNLOAD PDF

TWO STAGE SISTERS
Xie Jin / China / 1965 / 112 mins

One of China’s most famous directors, Xie Jin, directs one of the best remembered actresses of the pre-Cultural Revolution era, Xie Fang. The story follows a runaway bride who befriends an actress and gets caught up in the world of theatre, but comes to reject its commerce and patronage. The themes are the classic ones of melodrama: fortitude, stoicism, and the agonies of friendship tested by time. But it’s the film’s style that astonishes. Its swishing camera moves and deep, vivid use of space is almost like Minnelli’s musicals. After about an hour communist ideology takes over as the film celebrates modesty over greed, yet the extravagant style continues. Director Xie’s career has undergone many twists; this film is the key to understanding him.

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JU DOU
Zhang Yimou & Yang Fengliang / Japan & China / 1990 / 95 mins

Zhang Yimou’s third film is the Chinese Black Narcissus; a fabulous tale of sexual passion set in a village dye-house in the 1920s. Gong Li plays an abused wife who’s had enough of ancestral law and enacts her revenge on her husband. The dye-house is an astonishing visual achievement – as grand as a silent movie, beautiful and hellish. The film grips because we want to rescue her, but its tone shifts to Stephen King black comedy, then Grand Guignol. The result is one of the most entertaining films of the Chinese new wave, a denunciation of pre-revolutionary gender relations and a biting, theatrical, compelling piece of pure cinema.

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Tragedy and Melodrama in Chinese Cinema


The Minimal and the Exotic:
The Contrasting Worlds of Zhang Yimou


The Role of the BFA in Chinese Cinema

RAISE THE RED LANTERN
Zhang Yimou / China, Hong Kong and Taiwan / 1991 / 125 mins

Gong Li’s fourth, Bafta-winning collaboration with Zhang Yimou starts with a close up as she says “So I will be a concubine – isn’t that a woman’s fate?”, then cries. Becoming the fourth mistress of an authoritarian grandee, she enters his sumptuous, strictly ritualised home. The mistresses get to know each other, the “master” is hardly glimpsed, and the indignity of waiting for him to choose his woman for the night is heartbreaking. Few films have used colour, architecture and the human face to express their themes so well. Like so many of Zhang’s films, it is about resistance. Like so many of Gong’s, it is captivating. One of the most beautiful films ever made, it was later adapted as a ballet (also directed by Zhang).

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Tragedy and Melodrama in Chinese Cinema


The Minimal and the Exotic:
The Contrasting Worlds of Zhang Yimou


The Role of the BFA in Chinese Cinema

RIDING ALONE FOR THOUSANDS OF MILES
Zhang Yimou / Hong Kong, China & Japan / 2005 / 107 mins

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is a different Zhang Yimou - quiet, intimate, contemporary and made in Japanese. The director shows us China through the eyes of a tourist in a series of breathtaking vistas, by now his recognisable signature. Zhang casts Takakura Ken, the Clint Eastwood of Japan, as a withdrawn father who is trying to repair a relationship with his dying son by journeying to southeast China to film a village opera singer whom his son admires. Riding Alone feels like Zhang’s rebuke to critics who accused his earlier films of exoticizing China. The dynamics of the difficult Chinese-Japanese relationship are reworked in the territory of the private and familial with a remarkably poignant result.

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The Minimal and the Exotic:
The Contrasting Worlds of Zhang Yimou


The Role of the BFA in Chinese Cinema

CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER
Zhang Yimou / Hong Kong & China / 2006 / 114 mins

Bringing our focus on Zhang Yimou right up to date, Curse of the Golden Flower finds him working on his broadest canvas yet. Set near the end of the Tang dynasty, the film charts how the Imperial court unravels after the Emperor (Chow Yun Fat) returns to it unexpectedly from fighting in Mongolia. Gong Li, who plays the Empress, is re-united with Zhang for the first time since their professional and personal split a decade earlier. As in Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou, their theme is encroaching madness and architectural splendour. This time the scale is so vast, and the images (by DP Zhao Xiaoding, who also shot Hero and The House of Flying Daggers) are so dazzling that Cecil B. DeMille and the Shakespeare films of Akira Kurosawa come to mind.

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The Minimal and the Exotic:
The Contrasting Worlds of Zhang Yimou


The Role of the BFA in Chinese Cinema

YELLOW EARTH
Chen Kaige / China / 1984 / 89 mins

Northern China, 1939. Life is basic and gruelling. A communist army
folklorist collecting peasant songs arrives in a village and stays
with a family, whose young daughter dreams of leaving with him. Her
yearning for a better life is heartbreaking, her beautiful song –
"suffering is forever, sweetness is short-lived" – representing how
the whole of China viewed life in those days. The gorgeous long-lens
landscape photography – by Zhang Yimou – is based on Chinese scroll
painting, and the film hints at unseen things. Yellow Earth is a
ravishing film, whose images and melodies are remembered long after
the credits roll. It re-introduced Chinese film to the world and
showed that the Beijing Film Academy is one of the world's great film
schools.

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Gender, Revolution and Modernity in Chinese Cinema


The Role of the BFA in Chinese Cinema

UNKOWN PLEASURES
Jia Zhang Ke / South Korea, France, Japan & China / 2002 / 113 mins

The industrial city of Datong, Shanxi province 2001. Two teenagers hang about in pool halls, ride motorbikes, watch TV and drift through life, searching for unknown pleasures. These kids are in the prime of their lives, they are beautiful and into clothes, and yet all they can do is bounce around in their world, and off each other. Jia’s film, like those of Tsai Ming-liang in Taiwan, shows how globalisation can leave young people high and dry, lonely and despairing. It teems with social detail, is masterfully shot and staged, and marks its director as amongst the most alert and talented of the Chinese Sixth Generation, and in the whole of Asian cinema.

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SHORTS AND ANIMATIONS
AN EXCLUSIVE SELECTION OF SOME OF THE BEST RECENT FILMS FROM CHINA’S NEWEST CROP OF DIRECTORS

GRASSLAND
Wan ma chai dan
Staggering beauty, great stillness and the limitless horizons of the Mongolian steppe mixed with the humbling stoicism of their nomadic inhabitants are sources of the otherworldly atmosphere of Grassland, reminiscent of Yellow Earth. The story tells the journey of an elderly couple in search of their stolen sacred Yak.

MAMA
Li Jia
Chinese cinema has created some of the most gripping and sensitive portrayals of women, mothers in particular. Li Jia’s autobiographical film Mother continues this tradition of Chinese cinema’s engagement with womanhood and motherhood as he uses the relationship with his mother in order to understand his passion for cinema.

SUNSHINE ON HER SHOULDERS
Zeng Xiaoxiao
One warm July day, an afternoon visit to a zoo causes the relationship between three childhood friends to become unbalanced. Jealousy warps a human triangle that was once peaceful and harmonious.

INNOCENT AS I WAS
Xiao Xiao
A little boy, Xian Tong, lives with his grandparents. Grandpa suffers from dementia and sometimes eats his grandson’s favourite foods. Xian Tong decides to get rid of the aging grandpa. The plot thickens, transforming the film into a moral tale about filial bonds, responsibility and family love. A great companion piece to The King of Masks and Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.

RECAUDITA ARMONIA & ABOUT LIFE
These short animations show that the great tradition of Chinese animation, whose epitome was Uproar in Heaven, continues.

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The Role of the BFA in Chinese Cinema

DISTANCE
Wei Tie / China / 2006 / 92 mins

Neither a cinema of spectacle nor an urban comedy, both of which have recently dominated the Chinese box office, Distance belongs broadly to the category of 6th Generation filmmaking. Determined to find work in the city against all the odds, Zhu Ming ends up moving in with his cousin Zhu Kun, a struggling student, and his girlfriend Jing Jing. What follows is an urban tale about dingy apartments decorated with magazine cutouts, fragile human relationships, failure, corruption and mobster employers, all strangely reminiscent of early Rohmer and Chabrol. Distance, which screened in competition at Pusan 2006, is a testimony to the price paid by young Chinese for their country’s economic growth and evidence that the Beijing Film Academy remains a hotbed of innovative and provocative filmmaking.

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The Role of the BFA in Chinese Cinema

BLACK SNOW
Xie Fei / China / 1990 / 107 mins

Made three years before Women from the Lake of Scented Souls, Black Snow won the Silver Bear in Berlin in 1990 and demonstrates Xie’s remarkable versatility. Written by Liu Heng, who also penned Ju Dou, and shot by Xiao Feng, who filmed the Fifth Generation breakthrough film One and Eight (1983), it tracks Li Huiquan as he leaves prison at the end of the 1980s to find that his lack of schooling (courtesy of the Cultural Revolution) ill equips him for rapid social change. Black Snow is a grittier work about a male character unaware that in the new China money rules the roost, but like Scented Souls it captures forever the social impact of political change in China at the time.

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Xie Fei's ‘Black Snow’and ‘Women from the Lake of Scented Souls’:Men and Women
getting by in post-Mao China


The Role of the BFA in Chinese Cinema

WOMEN FROM THE LAKE OF SCENTED SOULS
Xie Fei / China / 1993 / 105 mins

Xie Fei’s Women from the Lake of Scented Souls, which shared the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival of 1993 with Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, gives a vivid snapshot of China in a period of unprecedented transformation. The feisty Xiang Ersao, who runs a small rural enterprise, is drawn into a brave, and at times bewildering, new world of joint business ventures and extramarital affairs, whilst coping with an abusive husband and an adult son who suffers from epilepsy. The material is harnessed by acclaimed director Xie Fei, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy whose work is rarely seen in the West, into a powerful and gloriously photographed film, aided by a wonderful performance from Siqin Gaowa.

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Xie Fei's ‘Black Snow’and ‘Women from the Lake of Scented Souls’:Men and Women
getting by in post-Mao China


The Role of the BFA in Chinese Cinema

CENTRE STAGE
Stanley Kwan / Hong Kong / 1992 / 167 mins

There is no better introduction to Chinese cinema. Acclaimed director Stanley Kwan directs one of the icons of world film, Maggie Cheung, in a lush portrait of the tragic life of the Chinese Greta Garbo, Ruan Lingyu. The 30s Shanghai film colony is a place of political intrigue, ambition, high style and rumour, in which Ruan exists as an isolated sensualist, passively observing the upheavals of history – until she is attacked by the tabloids for her modern morality. Centre Stage delivers a tour de force performance from Cheung, a daring rethink of the biopic, and a rich study in tenderness and succour. It has been voted one of the best Chinese language films ever made.

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IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
Wong Kar-wai / Hong Kong & France / 2000 / 98 mins

To Western eyes, In the Mood for Love looked like the latest example of ravishing dream films, stretching from Von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress to Lynch’s Blue Velvet. To Chinese people it was something more. Set in 1960s Hong Kong, the subtle story of an affair between Maggie Cheung’s and Tony Leung’s characters – neighbours in a cramped apartment – was studded with specific cultural references. The use of the Shanghainese dialect indicates a disjunctive, émigré setting, as does the disapproving, old world landlady. Full of nostalgic details, such as old songs and quotes from novels, it abounds with Wong’s themes – manipulated time, memory, and the way people in love slalom around each other. It heralded the new cinematic millennium with aplomb.

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Tragedy and Melodrama in Chinese Cinema

HERO
Zhang Yimou / Hong Kong & China / 2002 / 99 mins

A landmark in the history of Chinese film, Hero was the first to go to number one at the US box office. It was also the first dapian or “big film” in the Hollywood mode, with an all-star cast (Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Zhang Ziyi, Donnie Yen). A further turning point in the complex career of master director Zhang Yimou, physically, it was astonishing and used CGI with a new maturity. Zhang’s trademark theme of resilience led some to see Hero as nationalistic but its significance is that it took the tools of 21st Century filmmaking and applied them to the wuxia genre, resulting in something so decorative and pictorially rich, that other epic cinema looks dowdy in comparison.

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The Minimal and the Exotic:
The Contrasting Worlds of Zhang Yimou


The Role of the BFA in Chinese Cinema

UPROAR IN HEAVEN
Wan Laiming / China / 1965 / 114 mins
SCHOOLS’ SCREENINGS AND EDUCATION WORKSHOPS ONLY

This fantasy film is one of the glories of Chinese cinema and the country’s first feature animation in colour. Directed by pioneering cartoonist Wan Laiming, it tells the story of a monkey that wields a magic club, who leads a group of monkeys in rebellion against the rule of the Jade Emperor in heaven. The monkey is brave but also a joker, and so messy that the phrase “uproar in heaven” is now used in colloquial Chinese to describe untidiness. Vibrantly coloured and constantly on the move, the film is beloved by generations of Chinese children. Cinema China is delighted to screen it in our education section, exclusively for school groups. Book now and discover the magical adventures of the Monkey King!

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THE KING OF MASKS
Wu Tian-Ming / China & Hong Kong / 1996 / 95 mins

In 1930s northern China, an aging street performer and maker of masks has no apprentice. So he literally buys a small boy from a market, and begins to teach him his craft. Until he discovers that the boy is not all he seems… This delightful film has a gripping story with many surprises, a fantastic
performance from eight-year-old Zhou Renying, exquisite visuals and
thought-provoking scenes about various aspects of Chinese culture.
The film’s director, Wu Tian-ming, a major figure in Chinese film
history, was the head of Xi’an Film Studio and a mentor to many
of the 5th generation directors. Cinema China has devised an
online learning environment about the film, which will be available on our website.

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