MCLC: movie censorship

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Han Meng <hanmeng at gmail.com>
Subject: movie censorship
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Source: The New Yorker
(5/24/13):http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/05/django-uncha
ined-when-night-falls-china-censorship.html

“When Night Falls” and “Django Unchained”: Movie Censorship in China
Posted by Richard Brody

I’ve never been to the Cannes Film Festival, and this year I regret
missing it—judging from the word of critics whose judgment I value, it’s
an extraordinary harvest, and one of the movies premièring there that I’m
most impatient to see is “A Touch of Sin,” the new film by the Chinese
director Jia Zhangke. Happily, the film has American distribution and will
be arriving later this year (though his previous film, the extraordinary
blend of documentary and fiction “I Wish I Knew,” is still awaiting a U.S.
release).

When production on “A Touch of Sin” began, it was reported to be a change
in direction for Jia—a martial-arts film, and one co-produced, according
to Clarence Tsui, of The Hollywood Reporter, by “the major state-backed
studio, Shanghai Film Group,” which is “usually a very strong indication
that the film got official script approval long before production.” But “A
Touch of Sin” is being described as an extremely violent drama, seemingly
based (Tsui writes) on real-life events that suggest a country in which
peaceful redress is an impossible dream. In other words, despite its roots
in genre and its official backing, Jia’s new film is a political critique
as scathing and radical as his prior works.

Right now, the Museum of Modern Art is presenting a superb series,
“Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions
<http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1371>,” co-curated by Sally
Berger and the young maven of Chinese cinema, Kevin Lee, in which one of
Jia’s films, “24 City,” is playing. But there’s also another movie
screening (today and Sunday) called “When Night Falls” and directed by
Ying Liang that dramatizes a subject close to that of Jia’s new film: the
case of Yang Jia, a young man who, after suffering abuse at the hands of
the police, entered the local police station and stabbed six officers to
death. I wrote about “When Night Falls” last year, when its director was
just beginning to confront his movie’s upshot—his exile from China lest he
face arrest there. Watching “When Night Falls” again on the occasion of
its New York première, I find it all the more impressive and moving.

Ying doesn’t show the killings themselves—there’s no bloodshed on-screen.
Rather, the story is centered on three days in the life of the accused’s
mother, Wang Jingmei, who, at the time of her son’s arrest, is also, in
effect, arrested—essentially kidnapped by the government. She is charged
with nothing and forcibly confined in a mental hospital, confronted by her
son’s so-called attorneys and compelled to sign official documents, and
then returned to her Beijing apartment two days before her son’s
execution. But by the time of her release, her son has already become
something of a folk hero and his case has become a cause célèbre among
daring activists (including the artist Ai Weiwei) who are willing to
challenge the authorities in court and online. When she returns home, a
group of them—including a documentary filmmaker—is awaiting her.

Ying’s decision to avert the filming of violence in favor of a drama of
legal maneuvering and personal grief fills the calm and contemplative
frames with the ambient menace of ubiquitous power. From the announcements
on public loudspeakers of the “splendid Olympic games” to the severe but
sham formalities of the courtrooms, Ying depicts a society in which secret
official force turns the air as thick and weighty as water. He’s a
filmmaker of law and apocalypse, and the catastrophes that, in his earlier
films, arise from (and symbolize) corruption, mismanagement, and cavalier
indifference are here reflected, off-screen, in Yang’s execution, the
irreducible and natural end result of government authority. Jia’s tender
compassion for the law’s victims is simple and touching: ultimately, he
suggests, there’s no such thing as making good on an injustice once
committed, and the impotence of the law to aid its victims leads to a
quietly radical and absolute desperation.

The movie has been banned in China, and, worse, Ying is a subject of a
vicious legal campaign that has sought, first, to suppress and destroy the
film itself, that has threatened members of his family, and that has
resulted in his exile. The journalist Tsui’s report about Jia’s “A Touch
of Sin” offers speculation about whether that film will end up censored,
too: “ ‘I don’t know whether this film can be shown in [China],’ wrote one
Weibo user. Another replied: ‘It doesn’t matter, Summer Palace [Lou Ye’s
2006 film, which was banned in China] wasn’t screened here but we got to
watch it anyway.’ ”

The censorship of movies in China makes news in the U.S. mainly through
its impact on Hollywood movies—in particular, through reports of the
changes that are required of Hollywood movies in order for them to be
shown in Chinese movie theatres. The theatres, of course, are under state
control, and it’s always a question of whether the studios and the
filmmakers will knuckle under and make the desired changes. (Evan Osnos
wrote recently about some of the more notorious cases.) The most striking
recent example is the censorship of Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.”

The movie was scheduled for release earlier this year, soon after its
heralded U.S. opening. At first, the Chinese government demanded only a
small array of changes—to the color and amplitude of spurting blood—and,
when Tarantino complied, the movie was scheduled for an early-April
release. Then, the day of its release, it was suddenly pulled from
screens—rumor had it that full-frontal male nudity was the reason. At the
time, I wondered whether the Chinese government’s real problem with
Tarantino’s film wasn’t nudity or the intensity of its violence but the
political implications of its violence—whether the movie might seem to be
a call for insurrection, a praise of crime on behalf of freedom that might
resonate distinctively for Chinese viewers.

The Chinese government’s effort to ban “Django Unchained” from its screens
even after gaining Quentin Tarantino’s consent to its bowdlerization was
the finest tribute that it could pay the filmmaker. His apparent pleasure
in depicting violence—and his apparent desire to render the violence moral
through the narrative of liberation from a cruelly oppressive and wantonly
violent authority—runs the risk of being taken as a wake-up call in a
place that is so cavalierly indifferent to rights, including of its
minorities.

Sure enough, Clarence Tsui writes in The Hollywood Reporter that “Django
Unchained” has finally opened in China, albeit on far fewer screens and
shorn of far more than the red of its blood:

According to a report published on the online portal of state-backed
Xinhua News Agency, the new version released on Sunday is shorter than the
original by three minutes. The deleted scenes include Django (Jamie Foxx)
annihilating a racist plantation owner’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) clan in a
massive shooting spree; King Schultz’s (Christoph Waltz) flashback about a
man mauled by dogs; and scenes featuring Django and his wife, Broomhilda
(Kerry Washington), being tortured while in the nude.

These are moments of shocking and repellent horror—but one depicts violent
retribution for officially sanctioned violence, and the other two are
morally repellent scenes of cruelty exerted by authority, which might well
cause viewers to associate them with the practices of the Chinese
government on its citizens at home.

The series at MOMA offers yet another extraordinary film this weekend that
spotlights the Chinese government’s abuse of its citizens: the
full-length, five-hour-and-ten-minute version of Zhao Liang’s documentary
“Petition,” about Chinese people who travel to Beijing to petition the
government and the government’s often-brutal repression of them. (The
screening will be followed by a discussion with the writer and
professor—and, in the interest of full disclosure, my friend—Sukhdev
Sandhu.) The shorter, two-hour version, which I’ve written about, will
play next Friday. It’s a revelation and a shock.

P.S. If you can’t get to MOMA this week, there’s a good selection of films
by Jia Zhangke available on DVD. I particularly recommend “The World” and
“Still Life.” Ying Liang’s first feature, “Taking Father Home”, is on DVD,
too; his second, “The Other Half,” is available to stream on Amazon.