Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film

Conclusion

193 Conclusion Throughout this book I have pulled at many threads in the fabric of Chinese film, literature, and cultural politics. Rather than pursuing the question of “fidelity” in adaptation—a trap in every guise from the political to the philosophical to the technical—I have emphasized individual contexts and meanings, each of which has advanced Chinese cinema and literature in an important way. Looking back, what stands out is a range and diversity— China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities—that challenge the very idea of geographical or linguistic unity. We saw basic forms as different as cinematic adaptation of literature, literary adaptation of film, self-adaptation, and nonnarrative adaptation, along with an array of genres, including martial arts, melodrama, romance, autobiography, and documentary drama. And so many literary and cinematic movements! The Fifth Generation Movement, Taiwan New Cinema, Taiwan Second New Wave, Hong Kong Second Wave, martial arts fiction, Hong Kong modernism ,Chinese experimental modernist fiction,postrealism,realist neonativism, postmodernism,the list goes on.Seven of the most influential contemporary Chinese-language directors—Ang Lee, ZhangYimou, Stanley Kwan,Wong Kar-wai, Dai Sijie, Hou Xiaoxian, and Chen Guofu—have ascended to the rank of auteur in large part because of their success in reinterpreting Chinese literature. The evidence of this book suggests that we can appreciate the aesthetic philosophies and ideological positions of Chinese cinema only if we take literature into account. With such diversity in play, general comments seem reductive. Still, in the interest of providing markers for future discussion, a few tentative conclusions may be warranted. The first one I am tempted to draw is that adaptation succeeds best 194 Conclusion when the source text inspires complex character psychology.The examples are numerous and striking:Jen’s moral ambivalence in CrouchingTiger, Lotus’s madness in Raise the Red Lantern, Jiaorui’s composite image as a good-yetbad -woman in Red Rose, Mrs. Chan’s ethico-romantic predicament in In the Mood, the narrator-protagonist’s transcendental and yet down-to-earth third-cultural vision in Balzac, Aha’s China-Taiwan-Hakka complex in A Time, and Jiazhen’s first-second-third-person identity crisis in The Personals. In each case a literary vocabulary or narrative strategy was extracted and changed in order to articulate the struggles of characters that were simultaneously internal, in the individual mind and body, and external, in a changing world. Of course, the richness of characterization may be a cornerstone of adaptation in non-Chinese settings, too.As we saw in Chapter 4, such “literary ” directors as Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni are expert at dissecting and visualizing human psychology, and other major filmmakers could be mentioned who share this penchant.Akira Kurosawa in Japan, Satyajit Ray in India, Ousmane Sembène in Senegal, and Luis Buñuel in Spain are a few seminal figures who have brilliantly experimented with literary characters to produce period dramas, social-realist stories, postcolonial tales, and surrealist fantasies. But perhaps Chinese adaptation features to a special degree a stylistic commitment to dialogue scenes. Again, this is by no means unique on the world stage, but the films we have seen undeniably showcase conversations as one of the richest loci or flashpoints for cine-lit symbiosis. Contemplative or stichomythic, subdued or passionate, conversations of all kinds concretize larger political, symbolic, historical, and aesthetic strata. Recall how Ang Lee,Wong Kar-wai, and Hou Xiaoxian deftly and often radically used shot-reverse-shots to juxtapose words and images in blends of connection and disconnection. In fact virtually every adaptation featured in this book screens multilayered, dialogical mixtures of minds and bodies, with such elaborate mises-en-scène often depending upon the audience to perceive tensions between what is said and unsaid, seen and unseen. What is the future of Chinese adaptation?This question may be imprudent and difficult, but it is also natural. For my part, I expect to see more successes in the area of cinematic fiction. Zhang Yimou’s blockbuster hit Hero (2002) was adapted into a novel with the same title by Li Feng in 2002. Taiwanese director Wei Desheng’s (Wei Te-sheng) sensational Cape No. 7 (Hai jiao qi hao, 2008) recently broke all box office records in Taiwan and has now been adapted into a best-selling novel with the same title by Lan Gefeng.This two-way street of adaptive exchange will surely continue, Conclusion 195 extending...