A Critical Review and Analysis of Contemporary Chinese Gay Cinema - Essay Example

Contemporary Chinese Gay Cinema: A Critical Review and Analysis Cinema actually arrived in China from the West in the year 1986, and this was one year after the Lumiere brothers showed their films in a café in Paris on December 28, 1895, a date which is generally considered as being the beginning of cinema in the world. Then, from the year 1905 on, with a constant influx of foreign films, China began to really develop its own film industry, working by merging Western technological intervention with rich resources from Chinese literacy and performing traditions. Chinese cinema in general is consistently reinventing itself with the emergence of new talents and forums, and one of the forums which has been most majorly reinvented recently is that of the contemporary Chinese gay cinema, which includes mainland, HK and Taiwan directors and their films, such as The Wedding Banquet, Farewell my Concubine, Lan Yu, Happy Together and Brokeback Mountain, for instance. All of these films are predominant of contemporary Chinese gay cinema, and yet at the same time, they have each been influenced at least in some way by Western cinema. The aim of this paper is not only to discuss the issue of contemporary Chinese gay cinema and the impact and influence that it has on the country of China as well as on the Western world, but furthermore it is to discuss the different major directors who participate in this particular cinema forum, specifically speaking of director Ang Lee and of his most notorious film, Brokeback Mountain. In order for readers to be able to gain a proper and intelligent understanding on this issue overall, the previously noted points as well as any and all other key and related issues must be thoroughly addressed and discussed. This is what will be dissertated in the following. Basically ever since its release in 1993, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet has received a great deal of attention and incredibly wide acclaim from audiences and reviewers alike, and yet at the same time we see how a seemingly simple anecdote cited by Chris Berry in his article ‘Sexual Disorientations: Homosexual Rights, East Asian Films, and Postmodern Postnationalism’ has gone to throw a rather interesting twist on the overall reception of Lee’s film, particularly at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival; it is said that when international film critics met in Berlin to discuss their prize for the year, The Wedding Banquet is one which came up for consideration, and one elderly gentlemen in particular, from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the only Asian representative on the panel, strongly protested his opinion that Ang Lee’s film should absolutely not be considered due to the fact that ‘it was a lie’. This brings up the fact of how homosexuality is a forbidden topic in most Asian communities and how more specifically and significantly, there is really no need to talk about the issue because “it is only a problem for white people: ‘it’ is a disease” (Chaudhuri, 155). However this does not go to say that homosexuality never existed in Chinese culture, as this elderly film critic from the PRC claimed, and as a matter of fact, the stories about gay relationships recorded in certain philosophical and historical texts as Hanfeizi (Han Fei, d.233 B.C.) and Hanshu (History of the Han, Ban Gu, 32-92 A.D.) date gay history all the way back to around the sixth century B.C. in China. Farewell my Concubine is a film which was in fact initially banned from China because of its political and homosexual aspects, and it is one which opens and closes with a scene in Beijing in 1977, immediately after the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution. The main body of the film is that of a flashback narrative of the life stories of two Peking opera actors, and “The storyline covers a particular historical era when China experienced radical political changes: starting from the warlord occupation of Beijing in 1924 to Japanese invasion from the 1930s to 1945 to the civil war between Nationalists and the Communists in the 1940s to the actual foundation of the PRC in 1949, and finally to the chaotic Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976” (Lu, 101). At the opening of the film, Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou are dressed in Peking opera costumes of Concubine Yu and Chu King respectively, and they enter an empty theater for a rehearsal after eleven years since they had last met, and twenty-two years since they had performed together. After going through the ups and downs in their life and portraying them vividly in the film, the film then closes at the same setting: the theatre stage where Cheng commits suicide after his last performance with Duan. Thus the basic storyline of this story is one which tells a famous tale in Chinese history: the defeated Chu King bids farewell to his favorite Concubine Yu. And when his troops are about to be utterly smashed, Chu King asks Yu to flee for survival without him, and Yu refuses to leave alone, and instead, she cuts her throat after performing her last sword dance for her beloved king. Given the cultural depth and political contents that this story involves then, labeling Chen Kaige’s film as gay cinema is truly not without controversy, and to some degree, Farewell my Concubine is two films at once: “an epic spanning a half century of modern Chinese history, and a melodrama about life backstage at the famed Peking Opera” (Chaudhuri, 2006). What attracts the most attention to this film is that of the deftly interwoven stories of the characters, and particularly in terms of being centered on the ‘female’ role of Cheng, and the politically unsophisticated Cheng perceives that his survival and suffering in various sociopolitical environments are truly and significantly related to his talent and skill, and as well, to date, the homosexual and homo-social relationships that are represented in the film have not been given enough attention and focus in scholarly discussion, perhaps because if one were to actually sit and consider the fact of how weighty the narrative of the film is as a whole, then they would see that homosexual relationships are not portrayed equally or properly. “Duan is portrayed as heterosexual without uncertainty and Cheng never comes out of the closet. The two plots in which gay intimacy is somewhat implied occur between Cheng and his high-ranked patrons. After his successful debut on the stage, the teenage Cheng seems to be raped by a former eunuch Zhang, and after he becomes a superstar in opera and falls into a deep depression due to Duan’s marriage, Cheng becomes an intimate friend of Master Yuan although no aspects of their physical relationship are directly portrayed in the film. Ang Lee is one of the most popular and notorious directors strongly involved in contemporary Chinese gay cinema, and he has also been one of the most controversial. Lee is an Academy Award-winning film director from Taiwan, and in 2006 he won the Best Director Oscar for Brokeback Mountain. Many of Lee’s films have focused on the interactions between modernity and tradition, and as well some of his films have had a rather light-hearted comic approach to them, and they tend to draw on deep secrets and internal torment and drama that come to the surface, such as in the gay-themed films The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Brokeback Mountain (2005), the martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director, and the comic book adaptation Hulk (2003). In regards to the film Brokeback Mountain in particular, which was the single film of Lee’s which caused the most controversy and speculation both in the West and in China, the 2005 movie about the forbidden love between two Wyoming cowboys immediately caught public attention and initiated some very intense debates, and there was speculation that the film’s depiction of homosexuality might have been the reason for that upset, while others speculate that Crash was simply a better movie. Lee is a director who is a master of situational comedy, and he is one who constantly receives praise for his daring and meaningful work. The film Rebels of the Neon God is one which translates as ‘The Young Nezha’ – Nezha in Chinese mythology is known as being a headstrong and rebellious Chinese deity famed for defying his parents. Seen in all totality, the film is a study of a youth’s longing to be free from loneliness, gloom and deprivation, and as well it deals with the apparent homosexual fascination and repulsion of one man for another. This is just one example of a film which was banned for its homosexual content, and one which was absolutely not considered with enough positivity. The subject of homosexuality is, after all, considered as being taboo in Chinese films, and ever since Chinese cinema gained world prominence in the 1930s with Mainland Chinese social protest works like Street Angel and Crossroads (both which were made in 1937 by the socialist Mingxing Film Company), no other major Chinese film has dared to venture into this taboo theme. It was only in the realm of martial arts film genre (the wu hsia pien) that a renegade major director like Chu Yuan could tackle this "unspeakable" subject in his 1972 successful Ai Nu, the Chinese Courtesan and its more daring 1984 remake Lust for Love of a Chinese Courtesan. The former is one which hints at a lesbian relationship between a brothel madame Chung and Ai-nu, her innocent protégé who is manipulated by the older woman for her selfish ends. The latter was more explicit with some graphic and titillating scenes of the two women (Hu Kuan-chen, known for her prim and proper roles, and Yu An An, as the procuress). In fact the Ai-nu remake was inspired by director Eddie Fong who in the same year made the hybrid Japanese-Chinese erotica, An Amorous Woman of the Tang Dynasty, which features the willowy and sensuous Pat Ha as a "liberated" Tang woman poet/prostitute involved in a deadly dalliance with her maid. In fact to date, only two major Chinese films, both of which have been discussed here – The Wedding Banquet and Farewell to my Concubine – have dared to touch on this incredibly taboo subject however it was done in an extremely humane and relatively subtle way. Lee is considered as being one of the most diverse and daring directors to have ever come out of China, and his film Brokeback Mountain in particular is one which goes to prove this distinct fact. Lee’s filmmaking mastery has truly never been more evident than within this film, and without much dialogue, he is able to create a whole world that can be read eloquently and movingly on the faces of the actors. The film itself opens in the summer of 1963, with two men, Ennis and Jack, who end up being hired by the same gruff sheep rancher, and after one night in particular, after some heavy drinking, a tipsy Ennis decides to stay at the base camp where Jack is and during the cold morning hours, Ennis is invited by Jack to come and sleep in the tent with him. They end up getting into an intimate touching action which results in a brief, but very arousing sexual encounter, however afterwards both quickly quip that they ‘ain’t queer’, however over the remainder of summer, their emotional and physical relationship deepens incredibly. The two end up going their own ways soon after, largely in part due to the fact that they are both somewhat in denial, and each ends up going off and marrying a woman, and then four years later Ennis ends up receiving a postcard from Jack saying that he will be passing through the area and he asks Ennis if he would like to meet up with him. Jack arrives, their passion ends up rekindling, and they end up spending a night together in a motel. The story then continues on, Jack ends up dying in the end from a freak accident while changing a tire that exploded, and Ennis continues on with his falsified life. The way that Lee portrayed this story is absolutely incredible, as he uses a variety of innuendos and poignant and intellectual thoughts and views in order to get his view across. From this review we can conclude many different things, several of particular importance, namely the fact of just how much American cinema has affected and influenced Chinese cinema overall, and, being an imported form, cinema in China has been influenced by foreign films, particularly by that of Hollywood films in the 1920s-1940s and Russian films in the 1950s-1960s. As well it should be noted that Chinese audiences are constantly exposed to Western films before the early 1950s “were mainly young and middle-aged intellectuals and white-collar professionals in coastal cities while audiences with lower education and ordinary workers and farmers in cities and rural areas preferred domestic films” (Chaudhury, 2006). We have also seen the fact of how gay-themed films are an incredibly important part of political and social reform in China, and although there has certainly been much negative and derogative speculation surrounding it, overall nonetheless there have been many positive aspects which have come out of the situation overall, and there certainly would not be nearly as many problematic issues surrounding this matter in the future. After all there are still many movies which are banned from cinemas or home viewing in China due to homosexual content, and when we compare the actual amount of homosexual content to that of the amount of the same content in North America, for instance, we see that it is much more accepted in the West than in the East. Regardless of the factors that this is due to, the overall fact still remains that there must be something done in order to improve this situation. References Chaudhuri, S (2006). Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia. Scotland, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Lu, S. H. P (1997). Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. Read More