Chinese Cinema Moves Off the Farm

In China, the glow of the bright lights and the big city has triggered a massive and rather unwieldy exodus from the countryside to urban centers. This followed the jump-start to the market economy promoted by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s under his economic reform policy--a policy that spurred economic growth but also wreaked social havoc.

This new, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fearsome landscape hardly registers in Chinese films popular abroad, whether due to Western preference for more picturesque fare (tales of peasants and the past) or to Chinese censorship restrictions that ban depictions of “unhealthy subject matter.”

So the UCLA Film and Television Archive series “New Chinese Cinema: Tales of Urban Delight, Alienation and the Margins,” which starts Saturday, is a rare opportunity. Most of these 10 recent films were made by independents who don’t mind showing the warts-and-all version of uneasy urbanization; in fact, they feel compelled to show the reality they see around them.

Granted, since these films are generally made on the cheap and on the run, the production quality may be uneven. Often using hand-held cameras, available light and improvisation, they can range from the loose, slice-of-life casualness of Liu Bingjian’s “Men Men Women Women” (showing Sunday) to the stark minimalism of Zhao Jisong’s “Scenery” (Dec. 10).

“I can’t say they’re all high-quality,” admits You Ni, producer of “Scenery” and now working in Los Angeles as a regular on “ER” (under her other name, Yan Jin). “But in filmmaking they’re innovative and experimental. In background, they’re different from the Fifth Generation directors. They don’t want to deal with the problems of peasants; they want to deal with the lives of people trying to adapt to life in big cities.”

She is referring to the fact that many of these filmmakers are part of the so-called Sixth Generation of Chinese directors, graduates of the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Finding their identity after the splashy debut of the Fifth Generation has been difficult; those in the Fifth Generation were the first to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy after its shutdown during the Cultural Revolution, and they include such international luminaries as Chen Kaige (“The Emperor and the Assassin”) and Zhang Yimou (“Shanghai Triad”).

And when film studios got highly sensitive to touchy subjects--usually anything that may imply that the system is at fault--some in the Sixth Generation went the independent route, which means shooting without a permit. Officially, a permit is still required to shoot a feature--a permit granted by the film bureau after an acceptable shooting script is submitted. Therein many a project gets stalled. Actress-turned-director Joan Chen, for example, had submitted “Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl” to the film bureau, but the suggested changes were so onerous that she decided to skip this step and shoot her film on the sly with little-known actors and locations in remote Western China.

So, unofficially, a feature can be made, as long as the authorities aren’t aware of you. “In China, to make a film you just need the money and the people willing to work with you,” says Deng Ye, the producer of “Men Men Women Women,” shot in seven days and made for $100,000.

“You can still get around restrictions. For example, don’t say you’re shooting a feature, just say you’re making commercials,” Deng Ye says. This kind of excuse is necessary to rent equipment from a rental company or space at a film studio or to develop film at a lab. Deng Ye laughs as she admits, “When we made ‘Men Men Women Women,’ we of course had to say we were making several commercials, about 10 or 12, for the amount of footage we had to develop.”

The film bureau didn’t know of the film’s existence until it was shown at a Belgian film festival, and then contacted director Liu Bingjian, Deng Ye’s husband, with its official disapproval. Because Liu wanted to continue working in China, he agreed to write an apology admitting his transgression and paid a fine.

Other cinema rebels have also written apologies and paid fines to keep working, and recently a few have even moved toward the mainstream, sometimes working with studios. After all, since independent films are considered illegal, they are banned from domestic distribution, cutting off both audience and income. (A major outlet has been international film festivals.)

A recurrent theme in the UCLA series is the clash between the sleepy past and the speedy present. “Chaotic, vulgar, anarchic forms of capitalism have invaded the economy,” series curator Berenice Reynaud writes, “heightening the division between city and country, rich and poor, men and women.”

Two films that clearly demarcate the line between country values and city values are Tang Danian’s “City Paradise” (Thursday) and Wang Xiaoshuai’s “So Close to Paradise” (Dec. 9). In the former, a likable young man from the country tries to make ends meet and to find romance in the big city; the sticking point is that he’s already got a wife back home and his elderly mother keeps begging him to return.

In the latter, a struggling young man from the country allies himself with a hometown comrade who turns out to be a petty gangster getting himself deeper into trouble, especially when he falls in love with a prostitute to the big boss. This rather frank and sensational treatment of burgeoning mafia and prostitution problems stalled the completion of “So Close to Paradise” for years; censors wouldn’t allow its release until it was re-cut.

Zhang Yuan, long the bad boy of Chinese cinema, is represented in this film series with a mature work--the well-scripted and exceptionally well-acted “Seventeen Years.” In the past he made films about rock ‘n’ roll delinquents (“Beijing Bastards”) and a homosexual hauled in by a sadistic policeman (“East Palace West Palace”).

This time around, Zhang shot with an approved script, and the film was released in China. At first glance, “Seventeen Years” seems tame in comparison to his previous work. The story opens with the rivalry of two teenage stepsisters, thrown together between two combative parents in a cramped apartment. Then an accident lands one of them in jail--shot in a real prison in Tianjin--and the aftermath is both fascinating and original.

“Seventeen Years” shows that there are stories yet to be told about the urban landscape of China and not just ones about gangsters and prostitutes, and that the system can sometimes tolerate them.

“We’ve been accused of promoting the dark side of Chinese life, but they’re honest expressions of how we see things,” says You Ni. “Furthermore, urban themes are world themes, the problems of loneliness, alienation, modernization; we all share them.”

* “Tales of Urban Delight, Alienation and the Margins,” Saturday to Dec. 10, UCLA Film and Television Archive, James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA, Westwood. Information: (310) 206-8013.