MCLC: Wu Tianming (1939-2014)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Berry, Chris <chris.berry at kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: Wu Tianming (1939-2014)
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Colleagues may be interested in this informative and appreciative obituary
of Wu Tianming by Tony Rayns.

Chris

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Source: ArtForum (7/30/14): http://artforum.com/passages/#entry47593

Wu Tianming (1939–2014)
By Tony Rayns

WU TIANMING came into his own in the Chinese culture wars of the late
1980s. He’d been a “movie brat,” a village kid in love with films since
childhood, and he first thought that he’d like to be an actor. In 1960,
aged twenty, he managed to get into a training class for film acting run
by the Xi’an Film Studio, of China’s sixteen state-run studios the one
nearest to his home in Sanyuan, Shaanxi Province. Having joined the
studio’s payroll he did some bit-parts in the studio’s productions of the
early 1960s, but his dreams of stardom ended—along with almost everything
else in the film industry—in 1966, when Mao’s Cultural Revolution turned
most areas of Chinese life upside-down. Wu never talked about how he got
through the “years of turmoil” but we know that he came out of them
wanting to be a director. He spent the last three years of the Cultural
Revolution (1974-76) studying directing at the partly re-opened Beijing
Film Academy.

Back in Xi’an, he co-directed two features with his friend Teng Wenji and
then made his debut as a solo director with River Without Buoys (Meiyou
Hangbiao de Heliu) in 1982. It’s hard to overstate the impact this film
had in China at the time. First, it was the most accomplished and original
movie ever to come out of Xi’an Film Studio, a less than lustrous
production center founded only to pay lip service to the communist
government’s policies of de-centralization and regionalism. Second, its
tale of rafters on the Xiao River played into the contemporary fashion for
“scar fiction”—novels, poems, and films which lamented the emotional and
psychological wounds inflicted on ordinary people during the Cultural
Revolution—but transcended the genre by focusing on surly, hard-bitten men
and doing without tear-jerk sentimentality. Shot entirely on location with
an almost tactile immediacy, the film gave veteran star Li Wei (who had
made his screen debut thirty-four years earlier in Fei Mu’s legendary
Spring in a Small Town) his last great role as Pan Laowu, a hard-ass loner
unjustly criticized by extremist leftists.

The prestige, the commercial success, and the emotional resonances of
River Without Buoys led to Wu Tianming’s appointment as the new head of
Xi’an Film Studio in 1983. Approaching his forty-fifth birthday, he was
the youngest studio head in the PRC and, according to a 1987 New York
Times report by Edward A. Gargan, immediately made his presence felt by
telling the studio staff it was shameful that so many Xi’an Studio films
appeared on “Year’s Worst” lists. A good five years before Deng Xiaoping
called for sweeping economic reforms in the public sector, Wu began making
radical changes in the studio. He went straight into production of his own
new feature Life (Rensheng, 1984), attacking what he defined as the three
main problems in Chinese society: having to accept assigned posts rather
than choose one’s own employment, the practices of nepotism and
favoritism, and “unhealthy tendencies in the Party.” All but unnoticed
outside China, the film created national shockwaves at home and fueled
intense debate.

Life inaugurated a policy of producing “westerns”—by which Wu meant movies
with deep roots in the West China regions around Xi’an, although one of
the films he greenlit, He Ping’s The Swordsman in Double-flag Town,
actually was a brilliant “translation” of codes and conventions from the
American Western. On top of high-grade entertainments, Wu insisted on
producing a number of tansuo pian—literally “experimental films”—which he
saw as important for raising aesthetic and conceptual standards,
regardless of their commercial performance. They included Tian
Zhuangzhuang’s Horse Thief (Daoma Zei, 1986), shot in Tibet and Gansu, and
Chen Kaige’s King of the Children (Haizi Wang, 1987), shot in Yunnan; both
films obliquely reflected their directors’ experiences in the Cultural
Revolution.

By employing “Fifth Generation” directors like Tian and Chen and allowing
them to make defiantly non-commercial films, Wu found himself at odds with
Wu Yigong at the Shanghai Film Studio, who regularly spoke out against
“elitist” films which the mass audience couldn’t understand or relate to.
But Wu Tianming prevailed, not least because his once-moribund studio
produced as many hits as Shanghai did, but also because his tansuo pian
were premiered in international festivals and acclaimed as breakers of a
“new wave” in Chinese cinema.

Wu cemented his strategic alliance with the “Fifth Generation” by making a
deal with Chen Kaige’s cinematographer Zhang Yimou: in return for letting
him turn director to make Red Sorghum (Hong Gaoliang, 1987), Zhang agreed
to act in Wu Tianming’s new film Old Well (Lao Jing, 1987) as well as
supervising its cinematography. Both films took the China market by storm
and went on to achieve considerable international success. These triumphs
strengthened and emboldened Wu. When the head of Shaanxi Propaganda Bureau
criticized his policies, Wu Tianming fought back by publicly denouncing
him as “a bureaucrat who doesn’t understand films but wants to control
filmmaking.” As the International Herald Tribune commented, it was
“virtually unheard of for a well-known Chinese artist or intellectual to
criticize a Party official to a western reporter.”

Wu Tianming was traveling abroad in the spring of 1989, as the
protest-occupation of Tiananmen Square gathered momentum: first in
Australia, as the head of a Chinese film delegation, then in the US by the
time the Party opted for military force to end the protest. He chose not
to return home, and American universities queued up to offer him “visiting
scholar” posts to get him through the crisis. By 1993, though, he was
reduced to running a video-rental store in Monterey Park, California, and
stumbling through daily English-language lessons; he told me that he
learned five new words each morning and had forgotten four of them by the
afternoon. It was inevitable that he would eventually return to China, and
inevitable that his many enemies in the Communist Party would make his
life difficult when he did.

There were two last films as director: King of Masks (Bian Lian, 1995), a
charming fable about a 1930s street entertainer, financed by Shaw Brothers
in Hong Kong, and An Unusual Love Story (Feichang Aiqing, 1998), in which
strong performances just about redeem the mawkish plot. There was also a
return to his origins as an actor when he starred in the 2012 film Full
Circle. But, like too many of China’s greatest film talents, Wu Tianming
had a career curtailed by circumstances beyond his control. When it
mattered in the late 1980s, though, he was a one-man reform movement—and
boy, did he achieve.

Tony Rayns is a London-based freelance filmmaker, critic, and festival
programmer.