Esther Yau

... In one TV drama series after another, romance, betrayal, and everyday justice take center stage ... an obscure background and often becomes a reference without an image in the grand official story of ... of the Tracks (Ti xi qu [Wang Bing, 2003]), Feast of Villains (Liu mang de sheng ...

For over two decades, Chinese filmmakers and films have taken from “scar literature” and “search-for-roots literature” the memories that gave shape to filmic representation of the 1970s. Even if the 1970s saw many signs of transitional identities no longer fixed in the past, the established icons and visual idioms from films and literature that refer to Mao and the Cultural Revolution have firmly established a hold on the visual content of that decade. Many overseas viewers with Red guards, struggle meetings, and big-character posters have been impressed by exaggerated reference points. As historical and critical consciousness changed when they crossed boundaries, sensational and melodramatic moments have become screen memories for the audiences who have no social experience of the Cultural Revolution over the more subtle approaches. Chinese film directors, moreover, consciously put their works in dialogue with the cinematic realisms and modernisms in different cinemas. The representation of the 1970s on film, in this regard, was not coming from a historical consciousness seeking visual expression but arguably, it was aesthetic and cultural consciousness anchoring in a collectively remembered past to rupture it through innovative attempts. An inverse perspective such as this one regards the mass-mediated memories of the Cultural Revolution as doubly distanced from the traumas of the past and from historical consciousness. This essay investigates the claims on the Cultural Revolution “memoryscape” made by two recent Chinese films: PEACOCK (Gu Changwei, 2005) and THE SUN ALSO RISES (Jiang Wen, 2007). These films have lifted the 1970s China from well-established associations with the Cultural Revolution onto locally-situated narratives whose affinities are with the discoveries and sexual frustrations in coming-of-age stories. The notion of “memoryscape” is adapted from Appadurai’s use of the topographic analogy to discuss the shifting and disjointed topographies of memories of the inaccessible and receding Cultural Revolution that are dispersed rather than located in Beijing or Shanghai alone. These films do not revive official images and discourses to contest with the legacies of Maoist culture, unlike the acclaimed Fifth generation films of the early 1990s such as Zhang Yimou’s TO LIVE and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s BLUE KITE. Rather, their autobiographical narratives appear as a retrospective of the years which the signs of a transitional middle-class identity appear. These films' participation in film festivals for recognition to gain access to global art house screens will be related to the adaptation of memories to the much diminished state of historical and critical consciousness in art cinema, and to more elliptical references to the 1970s in a Hong Kong film directed by Ann Hui and written by the same scriptwriter of PEACOCK.

Continuous Transnational Exposures: A Brief Personal Account. In the winter of 1984, an energetic MFA student at UCLA, Mishka Chen, made some duplicate copies of contemporary Chinese films on videocassettes for his schoolmate. He was one of the earliest production graduate students at UCLA. Not only did he show a superior knowledge of who’s who in official culture, he was active in getting movies from the cultural section of the Chinese embassy in San Francisco that consistently supplied overseas Chinese student associations with new movies coming out from China.