At Least the World Knows : The new generation of Chinese filmmakers face tough censors, and their films don’t exactly ‘open wide’ in their own country. But fame in the West has focused the world’s eyes on what might be a changing industry

Four months after “Farewell My Concubine” by Chinese director Chen Kaige was the co-winner of the best picture award at the Cannes Film Festival, Communist Party officials finally permitted the movie’s widespread showing in China.

Even so, the decision to release the film here early last month appeared to have had more to do with Beijing’s then-pending bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games than it did with any sudden artistic awakening on the part of the Ministry of Broadcast, Television and Film, which controls what 1.2 billion Chinese get to see in their theaters.

Just as he had done nine years ago with his celebrated film “Yellow Earth,” set in the terribly impoverished loess plains of Shaanxi Province, Chen managed to get under the skin of the Chinese thought police, rekindling the chronic Maoist debate about the role of art in a socialist state: Does art exist to serve the people? The party? Art itself?

Chen, Beijing Film Academy colleagues Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern,” “Ju Dou” and “The Story of Qiu Ju”) and Tian Zhuangzhuang (“The Blue Kite”) and other directors who form what is called the “Fifth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers are widely criticized by party hard-liners for dwelling on the “dark side” of Chinese society.

“We thoroughly disapprove of an attitude that delights in the ignorance and backwardness of the masses,” critic Xia Yan commented in a party-line denouncement of Chen’s “Yellow Earth.”

Yet, because of the glory they bring China with their international honors, the filmmakers appeal to the regime’s ravenous craving for acceptance and recognition in the world community.

In some instances, party leaders accept the praise but ban the films anyway.

For example, when “Farewell My Concubine” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May, it was celebrated enthusiastically in the Chinese official press. “Chen’s victory is a great triumph for the Chinese film industry,” trumpeted an article in the Beijing Youth News.

But after a one-night, invitation-only Aug. 1 “gala premiere” of the movie in the capital before what passes as Beijing glitterati, authorities reinstituted the ban.

When it was finally released to general audiences, the three-hour drama tracing the lives of two performers of the Beijing Opera under the successive rules of Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Tse-tung and--briefly but tellingly--Deng Xiaoping played to a steady stream of viewers in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and other cities. The film opened in Beijing on Sept. 1 and ran until Sept. 20, three days before the International Olympic Committee chose Sydney, Australia, over the Chinese capital as the Olympic site.

At the Capital Movie House in Beijing, despite the unprecedented high price of more than $3 a ticket (it is usually more like 50 cents a ticket), more than 40,000 people attended the 243 showings, according to the theater management.

Chalk up one small victory for art over suppression in the Chinese film industry, where directors run a high-risk obstacle course of government censors and unpredictable propaganda officials every time they attempt a movie.

“Farewell My Concubine,”which opens in New York on Friday and in Los Angeles on Oct. 22, contains many elements that government censors found distasteful, including scenes of homosexuality and a candid baring of the witch hunt horrors of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

But the film’s greatest sin, according to Chen and others in the film industry here, was to include a scene depicting a suicide that occurred in 1977, a year after Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping began to take power. Under the constantly shifting, unwritten Chinese cinematic code, it has become acceptable to show the abuses of the Cultural Revolution when Deng was in political exile; after 1977, however, the Chinese are supposed to be content, restored to happiness by the diminutive proponent of Market-Leninism.

“Maybe it was not the best timing for this suicide,” Chen joked during a telephone interview from Venice, Italy, where he served recently as a judge in that city’s annual film festival. “That was the main reason they wanted me to change the ending of the movie.”

There are ironies surrounding the rising international renown of the “Fifth Generation” directors, a term used to describe members of the first class to enroll at the Beijing Film Academy when the Cultural Revolution ended, even though there are no previous “generations” in Chinese film directing. The acclaim comes in a period of general, precipitous decline in audiences in movie theaters. China Film magazine reports movie attendance in China fell from 21 billion in 1982 to less than 4.5 billion in 1991.

Because of the widespread installation of satellite dishes, smuggling of imported videocassettes and the booming popularity of karaoke bars, millions of Chinese have turned away from cinema. Little appetite remains for the once-standard fare of selfless, heroic characters demonstrating, as Beijing film critic Shao Mujun put it, “the achievements of the party after liberation and the deeds of these ‘new men.’ ”

The movies that Chinese do watch tend to be American action imports or Hong Kong kung fu thrillers.

But being a filmmaker in China--any filmmaker, from artists such as Chen to directors of quick-and-dirty martial arts movies--requires a continual dialectic with government officials. Before they can begin filming, all directors must first establish a relationship with a government-sanctioned production unit, such as the Beijing Film Studio. The principal production units are in Beijing and Shanghai, but there are many others in cities throughout China. Scripts must be approved by the Chinese Film Co-Production Co., the Ministry of Broadcast, Television and Film and finally the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. The process can vary in length, depending on whether the script is approved or the director is called in to meet with officials or asked to make changes or rewrite portions.

The subject of films must be judiciously chosen to include an element considered socially redeeming by the propaganda cadres. For example, party officials approved the script for Zhang’s “Story of Qiu Ju” because it focused on a relatively new system of formal legal appeals for citizens seeking redress for acts committed by lower-level public officials.

In Zhang’s film, the villain was the town boss in a remote rural village, accused of kicking another villager in the testicles. The film’s cause was not hurt by stories that Deng himself is said to have requested a private screening. But the film can be read in different ways. On one level, it looks like a propaganda movie portraying the regime’s new freedoms; on another level, those same theories could be used to support human rights.

Once the script is approved, directors then usually have little trouble getting the cooperation of studios and filming, no matter how sensitive the subject.

This apparent anomaly can be explained simply because all the major Chinese film studios, including the biggest in Beijing and Shanghai, need the money. Under Deng’s economic reforms, studios are required to turn a profit. Works by high-profile directors like Chen and Zhang usually attract the substantial foreign investment from overseas Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan necessary to keep the studios afloat.

During the creative process of making the film, directors proceed freely and openly. No propaganda officials are assigned to hover over them on remote locations.

But after a film is finished, the next level of censorship commences. Each film is viewed by a panel of officials in the Ministry of Broadcast, Television and Film. Directors and their assistants are allowed to appear and argue in favor of scenes, sometimes frame by frame.

Usually, the censors board suggests changes or cuts. In Chen’s case, they wanted the director to lop off the suicide that occurred on Deng’s shift. Chen opposed that, but cuts were made over his objections. The scene clearly implies that a suicide takes place, but Chinese audiences don’t see the act and the sound has been edited with the censors board’s intent to de-emphasize a homosexual relationship between two characters. (Chen trimmed the version of “Concubine” that U.S. audiences will see by 15 minutes to get the running time down to 2 hours and 36 minutes.)

If the changes or cuts are not made, the film is simply not released. Zhang had to wait years before his films “Raise the Red Lantern” and “Ju Dou” were permitted to be shown in China, long after they both had gathered dozens of awards overseas, including Oscar nominations.

For internationally famous directors like Chen and Zhang, this cumbersome process is less threatening: They know that even if their films are banned at home, they will still be shown to their avid audiences overseas.

“Banning is the best kind of publicity for the film,” Chen explained. The threat of censorship, he said, even has its positive aspects.

“I’m not saying it is good for creative life,” he said. “But it also stimulates you. You have to be careful. It reminds you that you have to do things differently.”

Chen said he tries to make all his films in a way that will be acceptable for showing in China.

Here in Shanghai, meanwhile, China’s movie capital of the ‘20s and ‘30s, a director who lacks Chen’s international connections is still waiting to learn why her latest film, “Spirit of a Woman Artist,” has been blocked from release for more than eight months.

Like Chen’s “Concubine,” the movie by Shanghai director Huang Shuqin about the life of Chinese expatriate artist Pan Yuliang stars the beautiful Gong Li, mainland China’s most exportable movie star. But unlike Chen’s epic work, “Spirit of a Woman Artist” has no obvious political edge.

“It is just a story about a woman’s life,” Huang said in an interview in her 17th-floor apartment above Shanghai Film Studio.

“There is nothing in the film violating China’s ideology. The heroine in my film longed to have a good husband and a happy family. She wanted to learn painting and be a good teacher. That was a very common story and had nothing at all to do with politics.”

Huang’s sin--or at least what can be inferred from the government’s silent refusal to release the film, financed with Taiwanese money and partially filmed in Paris--was to have featured an artist known for her nude paintings. Besides their own version of political correctness, Chinese party censors also have a prudish streak.

What is frustrating to the director is that she thought she had observed all government rules to ensure her film’s release. The film was based on a best-selling novel that appeared in 1988. The nude scenes are tastefully done, with not a single suggestion of sexual intercourse. Unlike the more rebellious directors based in Beijing, Huang went out of her way to avoid provoking authorities.

“This matter has become very complicated in a way I don’t quite understand,” Huang said. “They know each film we produced, are producing and will produce. China only makes 100 films a year, and all the scripts are censored beforehand. My film is very tasteful, and we didn’t make it secretly. There were many reports on it in Chinese newspapers. Everything was public and open air.”

In some ways, in fact, the story of Shanghai director Huang says more about operating in a world were the government still dictates what is good for the people than do the more celebrated cases of Chen and Zhang, who many feel have transcended nationality, becoming better known and more popular outside their own country than they are in it.

“The ‘Fifth Generation’ of directors,” said film critic Shao Mujun, in an interview in his Beijing apartment, “is more popular abroad and among film critics and scholars. They are practically unknown to the Chinese masses. There is not enough sex or violence in the films to please the masses.”

When a reporter recently visited the Beijing Film Studio, where much of Chen’s “Farewell My Concubine” had been filmed, he found the same ornate sets being used for a Hong Kong-financed martial arts movie starring Singapore actress Michelle Yeoh Kahn.

The theme of the new movie, Yeoh Kahn explained in between takes in which she viciously kicks the face of an attacker in a shop where her character works, is the history of the wing chun school of self-defense. To avoid an unwanted marriage, the movie heroine must first defeat her would-be husband in mortal combat.

In Shanghai, Guangzhou and other Chinese cities, particularly in the south, the craving for action films has led to the creation of movie houses specializing in surprise showings. Audiences gather in theaters knowing they will be treated to imports--preferably blood spattered and jammed with sex scenes--but having no inkling which film they will see.

To avoid confiscations by authorities, theater owners wait until the last moment before the movies are delivered on motorcycles fitted with special saddlebags to carry the film cans.

Needless to say, the saddlebags seldom contain serious films by “Fifth Generation” directors.

Meanwhile, a “Sixth Generation” of filmmakers is emerging that is already challenging the Communist film officials. “Beijing Bastards,” a documentary film about the underground music scene by director Zhang Yuan, is widely circulated in the Chinese capital although it was banned for release by the propaganda officials.

Only last week in Tokyo, the official Chinese delegation to the Tokyo International Film Festival walked out because the festival insisted on showing Tian Zhuangzhuang’s “The Blue Kite,” a tough, political film that also was shown at the New York Film Festival this month. Zhang Xingyuan, director for external affairs for the Ministry of Broadcast, Television and Film, said the film was copyrighted by the Beijing Film Studio and that the Chinese government had not authorized its showing overseas.

“The Blue Kite” was awarded the Grand Prix at the festival, and its female lead, Lu Liping, shared the best actress award.

The emergence of another contentious generation of filmmakers is proof that, more than any other art form, film remains the cutting edge of political and artistic evolution for Chinese intellectuals. Formerly taboo subjects such as the 1950s anti-rightist movement, Chairman Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution have all become fair game for Chinese directors.

Serious students of film note that democratic reforms in Taiwan, where only a few years ago censorship was nearly as severe as on the mainland, followed the release of several controversial films, including director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1989 film “City of Sadness,” about the 1947 massacre of Taiwanese intellectuals under the ruling Kuomintang Party.

With Taiwan increasingly held up as a model for democratic reform, such comparisons are important.

Other frontiers await the new filmmakers. Still relatively untouched subjects in mainland China are issues of human rights, democratic reform and corruption. How long will it be, some ask, before the 1989 crackdown at Tian An Men Square is tackled by a Chinese director? And corruption, the increasingly pervasive byproduct of racing economic development?

“Every Chinese knows stories about corruption among the Communist Party’s higher leaders,” said one film critic, “but you can’t find it in the newspapers or films. No one dares to do it yet. But they will.”