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331 Chapter 13· The Concubine and the Figure of History Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine· Wendy Larson Yuejin Wang has pointed out an ironic cross-cultural situation: it is precisely the films of the Fifth-Generation directors, films that posit a “cultural identity that the current Chinese public are reluctant to identify, and which they keep at arm’s length” that have received acclaim abroad as a “cinematic representation of Chinese culture.”1 Wang elaborates the cinematic codes that bear cultural specificity to China—understatement in emotional rhetoric, exploration of emotional subtlety, indulgence in faint sadness, a “distracted” narrative structure, and the evocation of familiar lyrical motives from traditional poetics, as well as other common characteristics such as lyricizing about departure, absence, and memory.2 It is these codes that are broken in some Fifth-Generation films such as Red Sorghum, which through “the bold indulgence in violence with sound and fury” and “the shift from the quiet back alleys of townscape to the dusty and naked land” constructs a radically new cinematic code and national identity.3 Eventually himself sliding into the position of the Fifth-Generation directors, Wang claims that while earlier films “lick the wounds” of the Cultural Revolution, Red Sorghum violently shatters any illusion of an innocent utopia and shows how the “indulgence in emotional delicacy for its own sake” and the traditional virtues of restraint and concealment are in fact historical restraints that limit action and fulfillment.4 Wang is careful to point out that the so-called Chinese cinematic codes are neither absolute nor unchanging but are really a combination of traditional Chinese theatrical consciousness, the “grammatical mold” of classical Hollywood, Chinese didacticism, and Soviet dogmatism.5 Nonetheless, he sides with the Fifth-Generation directors in their implicit critique of the “physiology and the pathology” of the Chinese social psyche and situates this bent against the fact that now cultural identity is only meaningful when it is “posited against the Western Other”6—to do something else is an “indulgence” that results in complacence. As Wang implies, entry into the 332 Wendy Larson Western film community occurs only through identity and specificity; Western viewers want from China a film about China. It is along these culturally specific lines that Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine has entered the international film arena, sharing with Jane Campion ’s The Piano the Cannes Palme d’Or award in May 1993 and, like a limited number of Fifth-Generation films before it, playing widely in art theaters. In the United States, Farewell is mostly read as a film about Chinese civilization; commentators often interpret it as a historical epic. The twentieth -century setting, which progresses historically through the decades and recognizes the two major political and cultural events of the Japanese invasion and the Cultural Revolution, leads many reviewers to comment that this is indeed Chinese history and thus, China. Kevin Thomas, writing in the Los Angeles Times, sums up this approach to Farewell and thus links it to Chen Kaige’s King of the Children and Yellow Earth: “the films possess an epic scope much like ‘Farewell My Concubine,’ which spans half a century and covers a sizable portion of China itself. That’s because they are subtle, understated journeys into the heart, soul and mind of their people.”7 Calling the Fifth-Generation directors the “greatest and bravest in [Chinese] history,” Nigel Anderson quotes Chen Kaige’s comment on the filming of Yellow Earth in a remote area where cameras had virtually never been before: “ ‘People were very quiet, very guarded, very austere. Yet reading their faces was like reading Chinese history.’ ”8 In interviews with Western writers, Chen Kaige does nothing to debunk the film’s reception as a Chinese epic; over and over he links Farewell with his personal experience in the Cultural Revolution and a broader history outside the Cultural Revolution that he knows intimately. The entire film, he claims, is a result of his present anger at being “duped” and, like the rest of the Chinese population, falling victim to revolutionary ideology.9 Chen places himself in the position of the characters for whom “the opera means everything” yet who have “paid a huge price to be part of the spectacle.”10 The term “spectacle” is used not only by the film’s director but also by others commenting on the film’s success or failure; in awarding Farewell the International Critics’ Prize as well as the Palme d’Or, judges...

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