Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.1015 Film History/Historiography (Streible)
3. How might any one of these concepts be used in the historical study of one of the films we have screened? (nation, studio, classical style, audience)
Smoodin’s essay “Regulating National Markets: Chinese Censorship and The Bitter Tea of General Yen” demonstrates how the concept of nation can be used in the historical study of Hollywood films. His research materials comply with Bordwell’s stringent materialistic criteria. Among his primary sources are correspondences between high-profile personnel, memorandums of their conversations, and various legal documents between China and America. Because he is able to synthesize 1930s Hollywood movie business with 1930s Chinese history and international relations, his analysis passes muster with the interdisciplinary standard of film history that Grieveson, Sklar, and Crafton advocate. Most importantly, his findings open up the discussion of film genre development, illuminate yet more factors affecting the success or failure of a film, and “call for a more nuanced understanding of the place of American movies in the world” (Smoodin 75). Such complex achievements could only be sufficiently appreciated with White’s philosophical investigation of the notion of narrative in mind. To White, a film historian’s must concoct both the historical and non-historical aspects of the past so as to make a logical and useful explanation of the past.
Although Smoodin’s essay is praiseworthy based on a range of film historiography theories, it does not spell out all the ways that the concept of nation can be used for writing film history. First of all, it is possible to go into more depth with film reception. Allen and Gomery mention a British film historian, Roy Armes, in their book. Armes argues that outside America, many countries’ film history begins in viewing American films instead of making their own films (A&G 61). He proposes that film historians start examining film reception in some Third World countries as an effort towards building a more comprehensive understanding of film history. Immediately, each Third World country presents itself as a different case study. For some primitive societies like the Papua New Guineans, or nomadic peoples like the Mongolians, film history does not even begin with imported Hollywood films. The first outsiders who visited them with some kind of filmic technology were anthropologists. Films were made for ethnographic research purposes. In some cases, shot footage was edited and shown to the filmed subjects, but the impact of film on their ways of life was hardly of any lasting significance or interest for follow-up research. Film served itself as a tool and then quietly withdrew from its intruded space; presently nothing could be inferred further.
Unlike primitive societies, civilized societies interested business people from Europe and America much more than anthropologists. Movies arrived in China, India, and other places in the world first and foremost as a commodity fighting a place in their markets. Exactly because movies were not simply a commercial product but a cultural product too, when their content was deemed inappropriate, they met resistance in the recipient countries. In the 1930s, China’s Censorship Board vigorously fought with American film companies for a fair representation of Chinese people in Hollywood movies. The staunch determination to either have it right or have nothing could not be divorced from the political climate of China at that time.
China had been the world’s biggest exporter during the Qing Dynasty until it went downhill starting from the first Opium War (1839-1842) with the British. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, the country was getting worse as a whole as regional warlords fought one another incessantly in hope of becoming the ruler of all. One of these warlords, Yuan Shikai, almost succeeded, but he expressed no wish to modernize China. Yuan was only interested in becoming an emperor again himself. Although he had a group of warlords under his command, his death in 1916 plunged China into another round of even bloodier internal conflicts. Throughout 1910s and 1920s, there were many political movements among Chinese intellectuals to save China. The Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) was founded in 1919, and the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1921. With the aid from the Soviet Union, KMT’s power grew fast and steadily over the years. After the Northern Expedition, which lasted from 1926 to 1928, the KMT reunited China by eliminating several local warlords, and it established the nationalist government in Nanjing in the same year. However, because the KMT was internally divided into leftwing and rightwing, and its chairman Chiang Kai-shek saw the communists as a potential threat to building a nationalist regime, open warfare and underground assassinations never ceased. Worst of all, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. The nationalist government’s military power stretched very thinly in dealing with all its enemies. Even though Japan had no right to colonize Manchuria, it did so like the other European colonizers at that time. While these foreign countries were exploiting and mistreating ordinary Chinese, the KMT focused its attention on vanquishing the remaining warlords and the CPC. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, more and more Chinese began to affiliate themselves with the CPC rather than the KMT because the CPC called for the eradication of all foreign powers from China whereas the KMT let them trample over China freely. From 1927 to 1937 otherwise known as the Chinese Civil War, KMT’s armies did not succeed in wiping out the communists. The CPC only grew bigger and stronger as a result of KMT’s enmity and partly Mao Zedong’s military prowess.
In his essay, Smoodin gathers the statistics needed for his arguments. For example, he has the number of movie theaters in China in the 1930s. However, he has very little to offer in terms of whether the film was close to the reality of China at that time, and he refrains from going any further into the Chinese mentality other than presenting what is available in the official letters. From the Chinese history of 1930s, it is not hard to tell that the people who went to theaters were not the majority of Chinese because most Chinese were far from being well-off. China’s censorship board allowed them to watch movies of American life and crave for such a life, but it did not want them to watch a movie about war- and poverty-struck China and acknowledge that “this is China.” Furthermore, it did not want the world to recognize China in The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Chiang’s army was fighting warlords in the 1930s. Since General Yen dies in the story, the biggest problem with the film could not be so much about its plot as about its depictions of Chinese refugees and soldiers, which might become meaningful signifiers of China.
America has never worried about what signified itself because it is the cradle of moving images. One derogatory picture simply does not have the power to overturn the general perception of it. As a capitalist country, America will rather let its economic concerns dictate in its movie business. In American theaters today, foreign-made blockbusters tend to be pushed to art houses, even though some of these are tailored for a Hollywood audience. The reason for this could be that these foreign-made movies would not make as much money as American movies. Red Cliff, made in China by John Woo, which will be released here in November 20, 2009, shall be an excellent case study for this speculation. Another reason that American commercial theaters exclude foreign features could be that so many homemade movies are competing to be exhibited that foreign films are simply pushed to the end of the line. Unfortunately not everyone with an agenda in film research can penetrate the cooperate world and get to the bottom of their business.
Increasingly though, the role of politics is becoming clearer and easier to spot in the movie business. In April 2008, Stephen Spielberg criticized China for selling weapons to the Sudanese government and resigned his job as the art director of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Mysteriously, in the same year, Spielberg’s film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skullwas banned in China. The official reason that China’s Censorship Board gave termed Spielberg’s film derogatory to communism, but the communists in the film were Russian, and the film was released in Russia. More mysteriously, in the following months, Chinese movie theaters played no Hollywood films; they were all replaced by domestic movies, especially Hong Kong films. For a period of time, a Google search of Spielberg’s name yielded nothing in all Chinese websites.
It is not true that Chinese hate Spielberg. There are Indiana Jones fans in China just as anywhere else in the world. However, people have no power in overturning the state’s decision. Westerners can grit their teeth at Chinese for being incomprehensibly collectivistic and patriotic; they can say that they do not understand why Chinese do not lobby the national censorship board; they can criticize China for its lack of human rights. However, they must not overlook the fact that ordinary Chinese do not suffer much from such oppressions. Since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was still released in Hong Kong, it would be impossible that it never traveled to the mainland. In fact, unless Hollywood decided not release this film at all, mainland Chinese would see it.
Right now, Hollywood films still dominate the moving picture world, but the rest of the world, and especially Asia, have been cranking out high quality movies for their domestic markets too. These films were once grouped by nations and popular writings referred to them as national cinemas. Quite often, national cinemas show signs of fostering a national identity and consciousness. For example, Chinese films during the post-Republic era from 1949 to 1966 shared a strong patriotic undertone that was cheeringly embracive—minority groups participated actively in the moviemaking sector, both as directors and actors and actresses, and produced many popular titles. As a film historian, such movements are perfect for historical discussions of film, for their political backgrounds allow ample room for detailed thematic and stylistic analysis.
However, arguably, national cinema could only remain popular and identifiable for a period of time in any nation’s film history. The increasingly extensive collaboration between and among nations in recent years in producing films is slowly eroding the concept of national cinema, and “transnational” cinema is slowly replacing national cinema. Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou was partially funded by a Japanese company. It is just one out of numerous such examples. Very frequently too, Hong Kong films are shot in multiple locations all around Asia. While the concept of nation interests a western film historian because it is useful in thinking about film reception outside his or her home country, especially in the early years of the twentieth century, it is an exciting concept for non-western film historians too because film is a potentially useful political token. Film censorship used to center on film content only, but film content is so open-ended that film censorship is able to hem and haw until it lodges itself in useful political purposes. In the case of China, the picture of film history can suddenly expand ten-fold in size because where we used to find film audiences film audiences may no longer be found, and an underground film culture needs to be contextualized in the discussion of film reception.
Hegel thinks that history is a chain of self-reflections, and the progress of history will eventually lead humankind to self-consciousness. For me, film history seems more purposeful than any other history. With the concept of nation, it awakens and expands a film historian’s political consciousness immeasurably.
