MCLC: domestic drama

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: domestic drama
***********************************************************

Source: China Economic Review (5/2/13):
http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/domestic-drama

Domestic drama
Chinese directors can play to mainland audiences’ growing weary to
Hollywood blockbusters, writes Ying Zhu

Ying Zhu is professor of media culture at The City University of New York,
College of Staten Island. Zhu is the author of several books on Chinese
film and media, most recently “Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China
Central Television,” published in October.

To its dismay, Hollywood has been put on notice that its high-tech
blockbusters are not faring well in China so far this year. The box office
sales for such movies are particularly lackluster compared to the
spectacular success that US studios garnered last year, with films such as
“Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” leading the Chinese box office and
receiving large shares of their ticket sales from China.

Meanwhile, to the delight of the Chinese studios, sales for
Chinese-language films have risen sharply this year. Speculation abounds
as to whether the honeymoon between Hollywood and its Chinese audiences is
coming to an end or just to a temporary halt.

To be fair, Chinese policies that are protective of domestic pictures
might have played a role in Hollywood’s less-than-par box-office
performance. A government circular issued late last year offers a
financial incentive, in the form of rebates on screening fees, to Chinese
theater chains that receive at least 50% of their annual box-office
revenue from Chinese films. Theater owners therefore have a strong
incentive to keep a lid on box-office receipts from imported films.

Some might have cooked the books to attribute revenue from Hollywood
movies to domestic pictures, which might have deflated the actual receipts
from Hollywood films. But this is hard to verify.

Judging by the chatter on the Chinese internet, mainland audiences
legitimately appear to have discovered anew the likability of domestic
pictures, at least during the first quarter of 2013, and they are willing
to give these pictures a try. Feng Xiaogang, by far the most successful
Chinese director of popular domestic films, predicts that the Chinese
audience may yet prove to be the savior of Chinese directors
<http://ent.qq.com/a/20130412/000525.htm>.

On-again, off-again affair with Hollywood

The reversal of fortune between US and Chinese studio films is not without
precedent. To combat declining cinema attendance, regulators reintroduced
Hollywood to China in 1995 with an annual quota of 10 big pictures. This
instantly restored Chinese audiences’ movie-going habits and led audiences
to discover the country’s own big-budget and high-tech entertainment
pictures, what the Chinese called “domestic big-pictures.”

The domestic big pics all became blockbusters in 1995, and the film
industry in China experienced a sharp rebound, with total box-office
returns 15% higher than in 1994.  The industry dubbed 1995 “the year of
cinema.”

Chinese critics attributed Chinese cinema’s revived popularity to the film
industry’s newly realized “big-picture consciousness,” a revelation about
the value of big investment. Hollywood’s high-cost production values
became the benchmark for predicting quality and performance. Domestic big
pics imitated their foreign rivals, and the amount invested in several of
these domestic films set records for the time.

Among big spending productions, historic epics dominated other genres.
Films about contemporary life did manage to persist in Feng Xiaogang’s
popular Chinese New Year comedies from the 1990s to the mid-2000s, until
Feng too caught the big-pic fever and made a turn to directing big budget
historical epics.

Fast forward to 2013, Chinese cinema’s current favor owes much to the
strong performance of films that don’t qualify as big pics. Rather, a
number of modestly budgeted small pics with local flavor have genuinely
connected with the Chinese audiences.

Popular domestic films such as “Lost in Thailand” and “Finding Mr. Right”
succeeded by spotlighting contemporary Chinese life, something that is
often missing in the fantasy- and explosion-filled Hollywood action genre
and the overbearing historical sweep of Chinese epics. As the director of
“Lost in Thailand” puts it
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/29/lost-in-thailand-xu-zheng_n_29781
85.html>, “There is hunger from the audience for movies that talk about
the real-life situation in China.”

There are some lessons to be drawn from the last resurgence of Chinese
film in the mid-1990s, as that rebound of Chinese cinema did not last. The
popularity of Hollywood entertainment films led to a slew of crude
imitations saturated with gratuitous sex and violence. The proliferation
of cheap knockoffs did not sit well with either the censor or the
audience. Revenue from domestic pictures soon fell, along with the number
of domestic films produced. Chinese cinema entered a downturn in 1996,
leading to serious concern about how viable the domestic film market would
be without big imports.

The recent blockbuster success of “Lost in Thailand” has spurred the same
wave of copycats. The oversaturation of quick, if not cheap knockoffs
might again prove fatal to the desirability of domestic pictures if
Chinese studios are not careful.

Growing up with the audience

Make no mistake that there is a noticeable fatigue among Chinese
moviegoers who I have spoken with regarding the formulaic Hollywood action
flicks and an appetite for other options. One can only stomach so many
explosions, superheroes and supernaturals.

Once the novelty wears off, the attraction of sequels becomes less
appealing, particularly when Hollywood films are no longer forbidden
fruits. The ubiquity of Hollywood makes it less exotic, or desirable.

What we are witnessing is the maturation of a generation of Chinese
cinephiles coming of age in the company of (pirated) Hollywood films. They
have outgrown their adolescent infatuation with action films and now yearn
for more sophisticated films with nuance and subtlety. They are ready to
leave the action-nest. It does not mean that they will not time and again
return to their childhood comfort zone. It does mean that they are
venturing out to explore films of diverse style and scale.

Hollywood has yet to catch up with the evolving appetite of its Chinese
audiences. Its formula for China hits has yet to be recalculated. The US
film industry produces more than the big-budget and high-tech action
adventures. It also produces A-class quality films that elicit real
emotions and provoke real thinking.

But these adult films are not considered viable exports. As the cliché has
it, the dimwitted global audiences are not capable of fathoming spoken
words and savoring subtle verbal cues and that action and explosion are
the only viable transcultural cinematic weapons. In a nutshell, Hollywood
has confined its China pictures to the pantheon of action-adventure, much
as China’s US pictures have managed to relegate themselves to the
martial-arts ghetto.

This hesitancy may be to the benefit of domestic movie directors.
Cinematic poaching at the global scale is no longer a one-way street.
Hollywood has succeeded in repackaging Asian cinema with “The Departed,”
Martin Scorsese’s remake of Hong Kong’s “Infernal Affairs,” winning an
Academy award. Meanwhile, a new generation of Chinese directors is
learning to adapt Hollywood’s small picture style of solid story and human
characters into successful films. “Lost in Thailand,” for example, is
heavily influenced by “Midnight Run,” the genre twisting 1980s
comedy-thriller starring Robert De Niro.

As the whisper in the classic “Field of Dreams” has it, “If you build it,
they will come.” The domestic film market has been built; now Chinese
directors have only to conquer it anew – this time with contemporary
culture instead of flashy special effects.

Ying Zhu is author of “Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central
Television.”