If you asked me the first Chinese film I ever saw, I’d answer “Red Dawn”, the 1984 Cold War would-be apocalyptic starring Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. The film imagines a successful Soviet invasion of the United States, and has absolutely nothing to do with China, except for one exchange between Patrick Swayze's teenage American guerilla and a soldier reporting on the state of the world at war. “Who's on our side?'' asks the youth. ''Six hundred million screamin' Chinamen” replies the grizzled veteran. “Last I heard there were a billion screamin' Chinamen,'' the youth responds. ''There were'' is the grim reply.
I call “Red Dawn” my first Chinese film because for much of my youth, everything I knew about China was summed up in that bit of memorable dialogue, the same way the country itself seemed no more than a sum: “one billion”. A country and a number so large it defied individuation, a notion reinforced by my parents’ frequent observations that individual rights (and perhaps even individual life) mean far less in China than they do in the soft liberal West. “Life is tough in China,” they frequently reminded me.
My impressions of China changed as actual Chinese cinema burst onto the international film scene in the 1990s. The dramatic works of the Fifth and realist works of the Sixth generations of Chinese filmmakers shifted the focus away from the monolithic mass of China the nation to its people in all their teeming individuality. Nevertheless, you cannot separate the Chinese from China. The sheer force of Chinese history, billions of lives hurtling through time together, permeates even the most intimate Chinese films in much the same way 20th century Chinese history has consumed the lives of individual Chinese.
This consumption is the subject matter of the ruthlessly unsentimental but beautiful work of director Jia Zhangke, whose latest film “Still Life” opened in New York this week. The two primary characters in the film search for lost spouses amidst the chaos and upheaval of the destruction of the city of Fengjie by the Three Gorges Dam. Their stories unfold fatalistically, as if pre-ordained by the forces unleashed upon their lives by their society, their culture, and their government.
If you believe that the human condition has improved over time, films like “Still Life” present a formidable challenge to that belief. But the fact that they are made at all is evidence that we struggle against the downward pull, and I believe (or at least want to believe) that filmmakers like Jia are not the chroniclers of our eventual ruin, but guides who keep us focused on our path forward.
Comments