MCLC: Oliver Stone slams Chinese film industry (7,8,9)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rujie Wang <RWANG at wooster.edu>
Subject: Oliver Stone slams Chinese film industry (7)
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I find Canaan’s remark very thoughtful, but realize that there are
different benchmarks for what constitutes “political reform”. When I say
political reform inevitable in the course of China’s economic reform, what
I have in mind may be different from what Oliver Stone had in mind when
blaming Chinese film producers for not quickly taking on the challenge of
rewriting history and Mao, or from what Yu Hua had in mind when arguing
that there had not been genuine political reform since 1989. I believe
that with Deng Xiaoping coming to power as China’s paramount leader to
instigate economic reform, there had been various political changes as
well: local elections, anti-corruption campaigns, internet, travel, etc.
What happened in Tiananmen in 1989 was in fact one of the direct
expressions and logical outcomes of this political openness. But if by
“political reform”, one means Western parliamentary democracy, checks and
balances in governance, free press and free assembly, abolition of the CCP
and indictment of Mao, then a case can indeed be made that there has not
been real political reform. The political changes we want to see quickly
should not be brought about in spite of the Chinese people, the way Obama
wants to spread freedom and democracy in Pakistan through drone attacks.

I don’t think the TV show 蜗居 is a piece of crap that “blunt sharp
messages, promote mediocrity, and make war against plural
interpretations”. Liu Liu’s novel is not a political satire for sure, but
it (and the TV show) presents, among other things, a scathing criticism of
some political leaders and government officials, in the corrupted
character of Song Siming, depicting them as without any political
conviction and moral conscience, driven by greed for social privileges and
lust for mistresses. Sure, it does not offer any real solution to the
problems of economic reform and inequality, but nor do I expect a fiction
writer or film producer to do that. The penetrating analysis of the
problems of urbanization reminds me of Balzac, his realism and cynicism.
The show undresses China’s politics to expose the kind of ideological
bankruptcy or moral crisis in which both the ruler and the ruled find
themselves today. I think it’s a great piece of literary and film art, and
a perfect example of the kind of openness and political change that many
in the West, like Oliver Stone, would not want to recognize or have little
patience for.  

Rujie

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From: A. E. Clark <aec at raggedbanner.com>
Subject: Oliver Stone slams Chinese film industry (8)

Many thanks for Canaan Morse's incisive comment.

That totalitarian regimes cannot allow "relating the details of different
lives […] without […] distortion" is almost a tautology.  But it is not so
obvious why a regime whose goals are more modest — chiefly, the ruling
class's retention of power without accountability — would also be unable
to tolerate a mass medium's honest depiction of everyday life. Yet that is
the case, as Mr. Morse points out.

I'd be interested to hear him further develop his thoughts as to why this
is so.  He observes that funding authority is vested in philistines whose
business is to export Chinese culture, and that this arrangement tends to
"blunt sharp messages, promote mediocrity, and make war against plural
interpretations."  The ascent of formulaic blandness when culture is a
business is familiar to us all, but I don't think it fully explains
something like the discontinuation of the wildly popular _Woju_.

Speculatively, I would highlight two aspects of the Chinese situation:

(a) The philistines do not merely control a great deal of  funding; they
wield coercive power.

(b) The honest depiction of everyday life would evoke frustrations and
resentments related to the ruling class's privileges or abuse of authority.

Just my two fen worth.

A. E. Clark

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From: Magnus Fiskesjo <magnus.fiskesjo at cornell.edu>
Subject: Oliver Stone slams Chinese film industry (9)

Just to add to the mix, on the issue of Empire:

In this case Oliver Stone does have good points, but one (more) thing he
also fails to understand is that the legacy of empire is one of the most
powerful factors shaping today's China and Chinese self-identity.

Of course, granted, he shares this failure with many others. It is not
just him, who try to think of China as another "country", --as when Stone
says "I can understand you are a new country since 1949. You have to
protect the country against the separatist movements, against the Uighurs
or the Tibetans, I can understand not doing that subject. But not your
history for Christ's sake," -- as if the history of Chinese imperial
conquest and domination of those places didn't inevitably make that
history a core part of "your history" -- as the burden of empire.

It seems to me that the deeper remaining taboo against addressing history
and how imperialist expansion created today's "country" (which is instead
rendered as if it somehow was naturally already there/is manifest
destiny), is of course also one shared with the US, a country basically
built by annexing and stealing other's lands, killling them in the
process, genocide and ethnic cleansing coast to coast. Where are the
Hollywood movies showing George Washington's generals finishing off their
killings by burning the winter corn stores of the Ithaca, NY area Iroquois
so that the last survivors would starve and die and empty the land for
resettlement by the victors. And so on. No films on that -- at best, you
have pathetic pictures where the lives of the last Indians are saved by
some cowboy. In China, the story is similar.

It seems that this deep taboo against facing history is one shared by the
whole US-Chinese Hollywood "we", and beyond, also crossing
neoliberalist-"Left" boundaries.

In his statements Oliver Stone comes across very similar to his recent
very interesting documentary Untold History of the USA: it too is
illuminating -- sometimes very illuminating indeed -- and pathetic, at the
same time, on some counts.

Magnus Fiskesjö