Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons

Blush

53 Blush The use of multiple perspectives in Chinese painting was not for the purpose of making a hologram, nor was the use of parallel perspectives for the purpose of retaining the true dimensions of the objects represented. What was desired was rather a point of view which transcended that of the individual. The apparent horizon and vanishing point employed by Renaissance perspective made the image seem concrete, but demanded substantial identification with a particular viewer. Such images were perceived as both individual and momentary, seen by a particular person at a particular time. Chinese painting strove for a timeless, communal impression, which could be perceived by anyone, and yet was not a scene viewed by anyone in particular. Chinese paintings did not portray reality; the world which the viewer entered was the realm of literature or philosophy, a realm which transcended nature. To enjoy a long tableau with small figures, one must shift one’s line of sight left and right, or up and down, a necessary condition for the appreciation of Chinese visual representation. This reminds one of the tracking technique used in films. When viewing a ≥≠ cm x ∞≠ m scroll which can only be enjoyed with the help of two persons unrolling and rolling the scroll at opposite ends (‘‘scrolling’’ it past the viewer), one is in fact viewing a lengthy lateral tracking shot. —Hao Dazheng, ‘‘Chinese Visual Representation: Painting and Cinema’’ There are a number of lengthy lateral tracking or crane shots in Li Shaohong’s Blush (1995), and most if not all of them proceed from right to left, the same direction in which Chinese is written and read. Though we don’t often think about it, most lateral camera movements in Western movies proceed from left to right, the direction in which we write and read. Of course, the relation of writing to visual representation isn’t the same in China as in Western cultures. Anyone who attended the Art Institute’s recent superb ‘‘Splendors of Imperial China’’ show, drawn from Taipei’s National Palace Museum, noticed that most Chinese landscape painting contains writing—and therefore belongs to the realm of literature and philosophy, as Hao Dazheng suggests, rather than constituting a portrayal of reality in the Western sense. But because the linear flow of both writing and camera movement suggests a narra- 54 ESSENTIAL CINEMA tive, the direction in which the eye travels inflects the voyage taken by a reader or spectator in following a story—even if this individual reading doesn’t necessarily correspond to something ‘‘seen by a particular person at a particular time.’’ (A few of the more interesting right-to-left crane shots in Blush begin high over a courtyard, viewing events below in a ground-floor apartment, before proceeding through a window into the second-story apartment—a journey no ordinary individual could take.) It’s been over a year and a half since I first saw Blush—the most emotionally complex picture I’ve seen from mainland China about the effect of the communist revolution on the lives of ordinary people—at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won one of the top prizes, the Silver Bear. It impressed me a great deal at the time, and reseeing it recently on video, I was only more impressed. Admittedly, calling the three central characters of Blush ‘‘ordinary’’ may seem a stretch. Two of them are former high-class hookers at the same brothel, an establishment known as the Red Happiness Inn, located in an area called ‘‘Little Venice’’—presumably because of its many canals—on the outskirts of Shanghai. The third is a former client of one of the prostitutes, a wealthy playboy who becomes an accountant after the revolution and winds up marrying the other former prostitute, now a factory worker. But even if these characters seem atypical , all of the action in Blush occurs after the revolution, when these three characters are scrambling to readjust to a new life. From this standpoint all three might be regarded as prototypical. Blush was adapted by director Li Shaohong from a novel by Su Tong, a popular short-story writer whose better-known works include ‘‘Wives and Concubines,’’ the basis for Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern, and ‘‘Opium,’’ the basis for Ho Fan’s Hong Kong feature The Szechuan Concubine. The only female member of China’s celebrated Fifth Generation of filmmakers—a group that includes Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Tian Zhuangzhuang—Li was born...