Ethnic ChinaLit

In what could be interpreted as another victory for the marketing of China’s Tibet to the world, in The Guardian’s Oriental Dreamworks Jeffrey

And next: animated film for the wider world

Katzenberg of Dreamworks Animation has announced that his firm will work with a Chinese partner to produce an animated version of The Tibet Code:

He Ma’s series of novels follow an expert on the Tibetan mastiff dog breed as he searches for ancient Buddhist treasure in Tibet. The books, which have been compared to the Indiana Jones films, are hugely popular in China.

However, they are a reminder of Chinese rule over the province, long repudiated by the Central Tibetan Administration – Tibet’s government in exile – which was headed until 2011 by the Dalai Lama. He Ma is an ethnic Han Chinese writer who was raised in China’s Sichuan province and has spent more than a decade living in Tibet.

The winners of the “2^nd Annual Competition for Screen Plays with an Ethnic Theme”  (第二届少数民族题材优秀影视文学剧本遴选活动) will be announced at the Beijing International Film Festival during April 16-23.  Five winners and twenty Awards for Excellence—for scripts authored in 2009 or later that have never been produced—will be recognized at the event.

Don’t hold your breath if you’re looking for proposals for hard-hitting documentaries, however. According to the guidelines to the competition published at the National Literature Magazine web site, scripts that focus on heroic epics or contemporary themes are both welcome, but should be “forward-looking” ones that foster “prosperity, unity and harmony within the all-China family of ethnicities.”

Taiwan’s Mandarin-free “Seediq Bale”: When will China shoot a feature film entirely in a non-Han language?

The competition is co-sponsored by a host of official bodies including Nationalities Literature Magazine (民族文学).  This is a high-profile publication that claims to be the only “national-level” literary magazine that focuses on writing by authors of who are not Han, and now appears in Han (汉文), Uyghur (维文), Tibetan (藏文), Kazakh (哈文), Mongolian (蒙文) and Korean (朝文).

Various media including The China Daily (Bring Asian Magic to US) have reported the rumor—as yet unconfirmed—that China’s crowd-pleasing 76-part TV series Empresses in the Palace (甄嬛传) may soon be recut and dubbed in English for re-broadcast by a US firm.

The TV adaptation of the historical novel of the same name depicts the intrigue between empresses and consorts during the reign of  the Yongzheng Emperor in the 1720s.  When the concubine Zhen Huan (see photo) first enters the palace, she is innocent and gullible, but she learns to fend for herself and through cunning and deception eventually becomes empress.

Perhaps piqued by the thought of the series giving a less than flattering image of China to overseas audiences, Hou Jianyu (侯健羽) penned a sharply worded critique that has been widely circulated on the Chinese internet, including as a Letter to the Editor at The Financial Times Chinese site (价值观).  Entitled What Sort of Values Will be Exported via “Empresses of the Palace”? , the essay not only disses this low-brow entertainment, it also predicts most Americans won’t be won over:

The popularity of the broadcast of “Empresses in the Palace” is a mere gust of wind in today’s China, and its artistic value falls far short of the classics that have been passed down over the centuries. It cannot represent mainstream Chinese culture.

I predict that, at best, “Empresses” will gain the attention of a generation of Asian immigrants in the US; but as for Americans who are deeply influenced by Western values, they will not be willing to accept the import of this set of backward values. Those values will have no cultural resonance for such viewers, and they have no motivation to master the scheming portrayed in the series. 

If China wishes to export its own culture and set of values, then it must first improve its own social system. Chinese must first believe that we can achieve success via hard work, perseverance and integrity, without employing our “art of deceit” [厚黑哲学]. 

By this standard, shouldn’t the export—i.e., translation—of Machiavelli’s The Prince have been banned?

White Deer Plain, a newly launched movie based on Chen Zhongshi’s novel of the same name (白鹿原, 陈忠实著), has aroused controversy both as a book and as a film.

The novel tells the tale of two families, Bai and Lu, living through the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the beginning of the Republic and the rise of Communism in Shaanxi Province. It won the Mao Dun Literary Prize in 1997, but as documented in an article today (删改性写), not before the sensitive political content and sex scenes were appropriately trimmed:

《白鹿原》曾因其尖锐的历史政治观点及大胆的性爱描述，在竞选第四届茅盾文学奖前进行过一定程度的编辑和删减。据人民文学出版社副总编辑何启治(《白鹿 原》首版编辑)回忆，当时评委会负责人打电话给陈忠实，转述了一些评委要求他进一步修订作品的意见。这些意见主要认为：书中关于政治斗争的若干描写可能引 起误解，应以适当方式予以廓清；另外，一些与表现思想主题无关的较为直露的性描写应加以修改。陈忠实随后对《白鹿原》进行了适当修改。

Which makes you wonder: which version of the novel were Baoqing Shao and Solange Cruveillé working from when they translated the novel into French (Au pays du Cerf blanc)?

In A Book in Wolve’s Clothing, Global Times reports that French director Jean Jacques Annaud has begun preparations for filming Wolf Totem, Jiang Rong’s novel about a young Beijinger who finds himself sent down to the countryside of Inner Mongolia in 1967, at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution:

Producers are currently holding auditions for the main roles. One main requirement for actors is to have strong language skills. 

“Translations cannot be perfect. Even with interpreters, it is important for actors to have the ability and intelligence to understand the director’s explanation,” said [executive producer] Xu.

The production team is now filming experimental scenes with animals, as the most difficult part of this film project is to prepare and film a large number of animals.

To purchase baby wolves, train, feed and protect them involves many complexities. The producing company invited four Canadian wolf trainers to Beijing.

“The wolves can only understand English now,” added Xu.

The first director ever to film a movie entirely in Tibetan on the ground in China, Pema Tseden (万玛才旦), now has another award-winning flick to his name: Old Dog. It captured the Grand Prize at the Tokyo Filmex in late 2011, and will premier on the West Coast of the US in Los Angeles on May 11, 2012. The director will be on hand for a post-screening Q & A.

“Old Dog,” writes Nicola Davidson in Tibet New Wave for the South China Morning Post, “is a story centred on an aged Tibetan Mastiff. The creature has caused a rift between a father who dresses in Tibetan Garb and rides a horse to town, and a son, an alcoholic who rides a motorbike.”

The son sells the mastiff to a dog dealer, but his father retrieves it and sets it free in the mountains—only to find the dog once again in the hands of the dog dealer. In the end, the father takes drastic action to liberate his long-time companion.

Pema Tseden is arguably China’s poster-boy Tibetan filmmaker. The son of nomads, he went on to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy and shoot Silent Holy Stones (2005), the first-ever feature film in the Tibetan language and using an all-Tibetan cast and crew.  He followed this up with The Search (2009), which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Shanghai International Film Festival.

“I think Tibet has always been mythologized and worshipped, and made more remote,” says Pema Tseden in a revealing interview (audio and print) with NPR (Director Seeks to Capture Life in Modern Tibet). “People’s psychological expectations and experiences of Tibet are stuck in the past. They don’t understand the new Tibet.”

But he faces considerable obstacles in telling his story about the “new Tibet.” According to the NPR report, his second film The Search “was vetted by the State Administration of Film, Radio and Television, as well as by the Religious Affairs Bureau and the United Front Work Department, which manages relations with ethnic minority groups in China.”

Nor does he necessarily relish his role as the China-based director who has brought Tibetan film to the world’s attention.  The Silent Holy Stones won a Golden Rooster, a major Chinese award, in 2005—the year the PRC celebrated 100 years of film.“Lots of people asked me if I felt it was a very glorious and proud moment. But I felt very sad that it’s taken 100 years to have a Tibetan film. I’m not proud; I think it’s a matter of great sorrow,” he told NPR.

Director Feng Xiaogang’s gaze graces the cover of several publications this week, and indeed, the “disaster movie” genre in China may never be the same again thanks to him.  His adaptation of Zhang Ling’s Aftershock (张翎的 “余震”) is mesmerizing the nation’s moviegoers, and this tale of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake that killed over 200,000 leaves many drenched in tears.

Even Time is writing about the new film, the first IMAX film ever shot outside the US, based on the fictional work by the Chinese-Canadian author. Here’s Time’s synopsis of the plot:

As if a deadly earthquake weren’t devastating enough, a Tangshan mother is forced to decide between saving her son or daughter.Both are trapped under a collapsed building, and rescuers can reach only one of them before the structure topples. She chooses the son, but, unbeknownst to her, the daughter miraculously survives. With her mother’s betrayal fresh in her ears, the little girl flees her family and is raised by a husband and wife in the People’s Liberation Army. Thirty-two years later, she travels to help victims of the earthquake in Sichuan. There she sees how another mother is forced to make a similar choice, and the experience changes her appraisal of the past.

I haven’t read the book or seen the movie (唐山大地震), but I just read a fascinating interview in the weekly SMW (2010.7.26 南都周刊), that offers insights into how the movie script was conceived: From Cold Novel to Warm Movie (从冷小说到暖电影).

As you read my translated excerpt (below) from SMW’s interview with Su Xiaowei (苏小卫)—the screenwriter for Aftershock, pictured above—keep in mind that she also puts in two days a week at the Film Review Board, i.e., she works for the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), the body that enforces China’s censorship guidelines.

(Note: Words inside quotation marks below are quotes from Su Xiaowei cited by the author of the article, Chen Yu (陈雨)).

The excerpt:

Besides [changes to] the structure of the story, the movie also “performed major surgery” on the theme; the basic tone of the story was altered from one of darkness and pain, to one of warmth and hope [in the film]. The novelist Zhang Ling intended to convey that even after the disaster was over, the ravaged land gradually flattened and structures rebuilt, the blood from the wounds scratched open by the earthquake in the souls of children continued to ooze silently long thereafter.

The novel emphasizes the description of how the daughter, Fang Deng, undergoes a “series of post-earthquake disasters”: her adopted mother dies, she’s molested by her adopted father, her husband falls in love with another woman, her daughter leaves home, she finds herself in a hospital unit for psychological therapy, and tries to commit suicide several times.  These somber and cruel events reflect the fate assigned to the female protagonist by Zhang Ling: Having lived through an earthquake, Fang Deng’s soul is veiled in darkness, her personality has become skewed, she cannot return to her family nor can she live a normal life. The novel leaves the reader downcast and tearful.

But “the movie is much more heart-warming, and cuts parts such as the adopted father’s sexual aggression, the husband’s infidelity and the departure of her daughter,” says Su Xiaowei. “Much more of the story is devoted to describing daily life and warmhearted emotions. After the earthquake, people overcome their grief, regain a sense of calm, and get on with their lives.”

“Film is a mass medium that speaks to greater numbers of viewers, and it’s not like a book that represents a more ‘personalized’ account,” says Su Xiaowei.  “After all, a film should offer a sense of warmth and consolation.” At the outset, Su Xiaowei was told quite clearly by the director and producer that she was to write a script for a film that would warm the hearts of the audience, not a film that would hurt their feelings and leave them in despair. The film should “cure” the daughter of her hatred for her mother.

In order to create a heart-warming theme, the movie not only cut the scene in which the adopted father violates Fang Deng, it also recasts the adopted parents as People’s Liberation Army soldiers.

“All these requirements were decided after discussion with the producer,” says Su Xiaowei frankly. “We didn’t reject a melodramatic approach to the story, but everyday life can also fully express a person’s emotions. In everyday life, the great majority of fathers would not molest their adopted daughter. We chose to represent good relations between the father and adopted daughter as in a normal life. And our film is not rated—adults and children can view it—so we intentionally altered this part.” [end excerpt]