China’s Village Voice : Director Tries to Depict Peasant Life Without Riling Censors

The village chief, caught up with envy as he admired a neighbor woman’s month-old baby boy, bitterly rebuked his own wife for failing to give him a son.

“Look what she’s done!” he exclaimed in a vulgar peasant dialect. “She wants to have a son, and she does it. Look at you. You give birth once, and it’s a baby girl. Again, and it’s another girl. Once more, and it’s twin girls! You make me so angry I could die.”

The scene, which captures a key truth of peasant life in China, was repeated until film director Zhang Yimou was satisfied with its authenticity. No preaching here. In a country where art is supposed to be a tool of the Communist Party, Zhang looks reality straight in the eye. That’s all. No comment.

Famous for brutally honest yet highly artistic depictions of pre-revolutionary rural life, Zhang is at work in this remote village of northwest China’s Shaanxi province on a rather tricky task: making a truthful film about contemporary peasants without running afoul of the censors. Whether he succeeds remains to be seen. But his struggle reveals much about life and art in today’s China.

These are tough times for the Chinese cinema. Never totally free of political influence, the film industry is caught in a suffocating web of controls enforced with renewed venom after the 1989 crackdown on China’s pro-democracy movement.

Production during the last two years has largely focused on historical dramas glorifying the Communist Party and its revolutionary founders. Major films have included “Mao Zedong and His Son,” set during the Korean War; “Zhou Enlai,” which portrays the late premier during the 1970s; and “Jiao Yulu,” the story of an upright Communist Party cadre in the 1960s, which authorities picked as the best film of 1990.

Gone are the brief golden years of the mid-1980s, when the liberal head of the Xian Film Studio, Wu Tianming, encouraged a group of young filmmakers, including Zhang, in creative innovation that electrified the Chinese film world.

Films such as Wu’s “Old Well,” in which Zhang acted the hero’s role, Zhang’s “Red Sorghum” and Chen Kaige’s “Yellow Earth,” all of which portrayed life on the dusty loess plateaus of northwest China, brought the studio international renown. The studio even turned out a few contemporary films that dared to criticize some of the more ridiculous shortcomings of communist rule.

But Wu was visiting the United States at the time of the 1989 Tian An Men Square pro-democracy movement, and he stayed on in America after the protests were crushed. He was replaced in 1990 by a man who had been serving as Communist Party secretary of the Shaanxi song and dance troupe. Politics was back in command.

Chinese films today are supposed to be made with san xing tongyi --”unity of the three characteristics.”

“ San xing tongyi refers to ideological content, artistic content and entertainment value,” explained Zhen Changsong, vice director of the Xian Film Studio’s central office. “This phrase is used a lot in the Chinese film industry.”

Zhen cited his studio’s recently released film, “After the Final Battle,” as an example of a movie that meets these criteria. “This was our most important film last year,” he said. “It was well done in terms of ideology, art and entertainment.”

Incredible as it may seem, this film glorifies the Chinese Communist practice of thought remolding that the West calls “brainwashing.”

“The film shows the reform of ex-KMT (Nationalist Party) war criminals at Beijing’s Gongdelin Prison in the 1950s,” explained a favorable review in the official English-language China Daily. “The high-ranking KMT prisoners of war are set on the difficult road from forced ideological remolding to conscious remolding.”

The prisoners spend 10 years “reflecting on their crimes and comparing New China with the old society,” the review stated.

“Finally, they recover from their stubbornness, insensitivity and depression and lay down their arms ideologically,” the review said. “It was a hard job helping those anti-Communist die-hards ‘wash their brains’ and change their political stance in so short a time. But starting in the winter of 1959, more than 1,000 prisoners of war benefited from special amnesties. . . . Even today, there are still some people who wonder what ‘magic weapons’ the Communists used to turn these ‘devils’ into citizens of New China.”

With an atmosphere of repression engulfing most artistic endeavor in China, Zhang, 41, now is one of the few Chinese directors still trying to make high-quality non-ideological films. Any sort of direct challenge to Communist Party rule is out of the question for any filmmaker. The goal, rather, is to find a way to win the flexibility and artistic control needed to do good work.

Zhang has demonstrated that this is possible. His film “Judou,” a rural tale of adultery and revenge set in the 1920s, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991 despite attempts by the Chinese government to get it withdrawn from competition.

But critical acclaim overseas for “Judou” and Zhang’s subsequent film, “Raise the Red Lantern,” also set in the 1920s countryside of North China, has not sufficed to win Chinese audiences a chance to see the films. Both were made with overseas support--a Japanese company helped finance “Judou,” while Taiwan money, funneled through a Hong Kong firm, backed “Raise the Red Lantern.” Such backing helped make high-quality production possible, but neither film has won approval for release in China.

Zhang has now teamed up with a Hong Kong-based, Beijing-controlled film company, Sil-Metropole Organisation Ltd., to make his first film on village life in today’s China. One of China’s top actresses, Gong Li, 26, who starred in both “Judou” and “Raise the Red Lantern,” is cast again as the heroine in Zhang’s current effort.

For an independent-minded director, a contemporary film is even more sensitive than historical dramas, for anything critical may look like an attack on today’s authorities.

“Movies are getting harder and harder to make, for lots of reasons,” Zhang said. He declined to give a detailed explanation, but said that politics, financing and the general inefficiencies of China all are factors. “We often joke that making movies is a process of overcoming a string of difficulties,” he said.

Zhang has found a way, however, to give himself some maneuvering room. His current film, tentatively named “The Story of Qiu Ju,” is being made in quasi-documentary style. The movie will incorporate actual scenes of rural life filmed with hidden cameras. Professional actors play only four roles. The minor parts go to peasants from the tiny mountainside village of Shiyaohe, where most of the filming is taking place.

Part of the movie is filmed in the home of a peasant family that includes a 78-year-old grandmother and four little girls--the youngest of them twins. The grandmother acts the role of the village chief’s mother in the film, and the girls play his daughters.

“The script didn’t have that old lady,” Zhang said. “When we saw that the house had an old woman, we added her. She’s very good at acting. She thinks it’s a lot of fun. She’s the best because she’s the most relaxed.”

The original script included four daughters for the village chief. But the idea of making the youngest two of them twins--and of writing dialogue about the twins--was added only because the village home chosen for the filming belonged to a family with twins, Zhang said.

Zhang’s technique blurs the edge between reality and art. Some segments open with real-life events, then flow seamlessly to parts acted for the camera. To strengthen the sense of authenticity, the actors from Beijing try to speak the unique local dialect, although this means the film will need subtitles even for a Chinese audience.

These measures alone do not fully solve the problem of censorship, but at least what occurs naturally cannot be scripted or controlled. And while Sil-Metropole is ultimately an agent of the Beijing government, being based in Hong Kong imbues it with a certain openness of spirit lacking at domestic studios.

When questioned about his work, Zhang chooses his words carefully. His goal, he said, is to show the values and personal relations of life in China’s villages. A village actually functions like a large family, he explained. There may be squabbles, but they are resolved according to the flow of personal relationships rather than by abstract standards of law. Awareness of such facts, he said, may bring insight into deeper issues facing his country.

“China is a peasant nation,” Zhang said. “It has the most peasants in the world. There are lots of things about China that you can understand only if you understand peasants. . . . The ruling party developed from a peasants’ party. The vast majority of army recruits are village youths. China’s land, its population, its ideology and many other things--all belong to the countryside.”

Zhang’s own personal encounter with reality--an experience that deeply shapes his art--came in 1968, at the height of Chairman Mao Zedong’s radical Cultural Revolution. At the age of 18, along with most of his generation of politicized urban youth, Zhang was ordered to the countryside to labor alongside peasants. He spent three years in the fields, then seven years in a factory, before finally returning to school to study film.

“We lost our zealous idealism and came in contact with real peasant life,” Zhang explained. “The most important thing was that we learned the details of that life. I realized that China actually needs to travel a very long road.”

In “The Story of Qiu Ju,” Zhang spins a rather simple tale centered on a confrontation between Qiu’s husband, Qing Lai, and the village chief. Qing wants to use some of his land to build a shed for drying his spicy red chili peppers. But the village chief, citing government rules aimed at preserving agricultural land for the growing of crops, tells him he cannot.

As the men argue, Qing taunts the village chief for having four girls but no sons, declaring that he has “raised a flock of hens.” This strikes a sore point with the village chief, who flies into a rage and beats up the farmer.

Much of the movie then records efforts by the pregnant Qiu to get authorities to force the village chief to admit his wrongdoing and apologize. After long bureaucratic runarounds, prosecutors finally investigate the case--and an X-ray shows that one of Qing’s ribs was broken in the beating.

But then, on a cold and snowy night, Qiu goes into difficult labor. The village chief saves mother and child by getting her down the mountain to a hospital in town. Past grudges are quickly forgotten.

Qiu’s earlier efforts, however, have finally provoked official action. Police arrive and take away the village chief. Qiu once again heads into town to battle the bureaucrats, this time to demand his release.

“Peasants sometimes feel the law is right and sometimes feel it’s wrong,” Zhang said. “Actually, law can have only a single standard. The law requires that the village chief be taken away. That’s its standard, because a rib was broken. But she feels it isn’t right. She says, ‘I don’t want that.’ It’s a kind of peasant psychology.”

Although Zhang did not directly draw the comparison, this same lesson applies to his film’s ultimate fate. There is no law that, if followed to the letter, will guarantee that his movie will be released. Rules exist, of course, but these impose restrictions rather than protect rights. Everything depends on whether the powerful ideologues who control Beijing’s censorship apparatus ultimately decide that they can tolerate his finished product.

“It often happens that there’s this possibility: A script is approved, but the script and the movie aren’t identical,” Zhang noted. “And when the movie is examined, it’s not approved. It’s not the case that if your script is approved, you can be sure of being able to release your film. . . . (But) it’s pointless for me to worry about this.”

Zhang might make life easier for himself if he were willing to lecture in his films. But this he refuses to do.

“Movies shouldn’t directly say what’s right and what’s wrong,” he insisted. “People should see things with their own eyes and then decide for themselves.”

In China today, there is no more radical position for an artist to take.