The summer of 2007 is a summer of unspeakable shock and loss not only for Europe but the whole world. It is also a summer of immense emptiness and grief that wrenches the hearts of millions who love the theatre and the cinema. On July the 30th, the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) and the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), “great admirers of each other’s work” (Eric Lyman, “Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni dies”, The Hollywood Reporter, 2007), both died (on the same day) as though they had, after working over six decades in theatre and cinema, consented to their dramatic exit to “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns”. As a fervent admirer of many of their films, I stand petrified, utterly unable to articulate, and feel deeply “idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”.
To pay my homage to these two great masters of cinema, I would like to share with the reader, not how I would decode their films in terms of their diverse themes or cinematic aesthetics but some of my very personal thoughts on only two topics related to the Chinese: 1) the ideological controversy and cultural misreading around Antonioni’s documentary Chung Kuo(China,1972); and 2) the influence of Antonioni and Bergman on some contemporary Chinese film directors.
Recalling my own learning and viewing experience of European cinema, I could remember very clearly that，on January 30th, 1974, Renmin Ribao (The People’s Daily) published an enraged and also politically motivated long article (over 6,000 Chinese characters) entitled “A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks—A Criticism of Antonioni's Anti-China Film Chung Kuo” (“?憾镜挠眯模?傲拥氖址?/span> – 批判安?|尼?W尼拍?z的??椤吨??返姆慈A影片”). I was then a second-year high school student in a remote rural region of Sichuan Province. Only Chairman Mao’s words (our “Red Bible” then) could have gone so deep into the mountains and have had such a big impact on ordinary people. With instructions from the county education authorities, our schoolmaster organised a series of “Critical Sessions” with each student delivering an article/speech of his/her own, saying how evil Antonioni must be to have presented to the West such an unflattering image of “Modern China”, a new socialist country that has made unprecedented political, economic and cultural progress in a short period of 25 years since the founding of the republic in1949. Being labeled a “Reactionary Westerner” along side the “American Imperialists” and “Soviet Revisionists”, “An Dong Ni Ao Ni” (Antonioni) was the very first big name from the Western world (apart from a few directors and their films from the former Soviet Union and some Eastern European socialist countries) that I had ever heard and truly remembered. It may sound absurd today because very few of the 800 million Chinese back in 1973-74 saw or could have seen the documentary Chung Kuo but it was a matter of immeasurable gravity when the whole of the People’s Republic of China was mobilized to condemn Antonioni for this 3-hour-40-minutes documentary. However, contrary to what the authorities had hoped, this nation-wide criticism of Antonioni aroused my intense interest in Antonioni, as with many other young students, and later my passionate love for Italian cinema, especially films by Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), Luchino Visconti (Death in Venice, 1971), Federico Fellini (Amarcord, 1973) and Michelangelo Antonioni (The Red Desert, 1964), most of which I managed to see in the U.K., U.S.A and Hong Kong in the 1980s and early 1990s. Naturally, I included them in my Film Culture and Comparative Cultural Studies courses for both BA and MA students that I was teaching in Guangzhou from early 1990s to the beginning of the new millennium.
As the old saying goes, “Forbidden fruit is sweetest”; and this is certainly true of Antonioni. He became known to all the Chinese people overnight not because of his “popularity” but because of his “notoriety” as “enemy of the people”. And I feel that most of the so-called “Fifth Generation” of Chinese film directors such as Zhang Yimou (Judou, To Live) Chen Kaige (King of Children, Farewell My Concubine), Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Horse Thief, The Blue Kite, ), Huang Jianxin (Black Cannon Incident, Face to Face and Back to Back), Wu Ziniu ( Bloody Dark Valley, Eveving Bell), and even Gu Changwei (Peacock) must have had their first dose of ideological and cultural controversy around Italian film master Antonioni during this period before they entered Beijing Film Academy in early 1978 after the national college entrance examination system was re-introduced in late 1977. I remember taking that long article criticizing Antonioni (among other reading materials such as Chairman Mao’s Quotations, the “Little Red Book”) with me when I was boarding my train in Chengdu heading for the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages (located in the northern suburbs of Guangzhou). In those years, the name of “Antonioni” was like a dark and seductive enigma for us young students. But it was not until mid-1980s did some Chinese in the film and culture circles begin to have some access to some of his films and the Italian film archives, thus starting to reflect on the ideological, cultural and aesthetic aspects of Antonioni’s films.
In my understanding, that huge controversy that shocked Antonioni and many Italians and other Europeans, especially film artists, was largely due to a number of enormous gaps of ideological, socio-cultural and cinematic nature. Firstly, the ideological gap. China (as a new socialist nation that was facing lots of hostility from the western capitalist camp from 1949 to the 1970s) and Italy (a capitalist country which was playing a declining role as a second-class western power in world politics) both agreed to appoint Antonioni the Sino-Italian cultural messenger by making this super-long documentary on modern China, a joint image-enhancement project that was not only to symbolize he good will of both the Chinese and the Italians to each other but also to invoke favorable interpretations of the political situations in both China and Italy via this Marco Polo-like adventure. To the Italian Government, it would be of great interest and benefit to them to make use of Antonioni to report on China to the rest of the world. And the Chinese Government also wanted to communicate positive images of the most populous socialist country to the West. Given Antonioni’s unique position in Italian cinema and his “leftist” political inclination, there should be no better choice than Antonioni for this mission. And this was, to a certain extent, why Antonioni and his crew were allowed to visit places of great ideological and cultural interest such as Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou and Linxian County in Henan Province, places that had been totally inaccessible by western cameras since 1949. Although their itinerary had been strictly drawn and closely monitored by the government departments concerned and their guides/ interpreters, Antonioni managed to shoot footage, outside the “itinerary”, of “undesirable” places such as dark streets, shabby houses and backward factories (in stead of tall modern buildings and offices), in extreme close-ups of some puzzled or wooden Chinese faces (in stead of healthy and smiling ones), and even footage of forbidden spaces (with his hidden camera) such as Chinese battle ships. The fact that Antonioni took all the footage out of China without being properly checked or censored made the Chinese authorities very angry, angry about the film director on the surface but in fact about the Italian government for this almost unforgivable negligence. According to Umberto Eco and Christine Leefeldt,
China was protesting the imminent showing of Antonioni’s documentary Chung Kuo at the Fenice. The Italian government had done everything possible to prevent the showing, the Venice Biennial Exposition had resisted in the name of the right to information and to artistic expression ….Those who saw it on TV remember it as a work that manifested, from the start, an attitude of warm and cordial participation in the great event of the Chinese people; an act of justice on TV’s part which finally revealed to millions of viewers a true China, human and peaceful outside of the western propagandistic schema. All the same, the Chinese have denounced this film as an inconceivable act of hostility, an insult to the Chinese people (from “On the occasion of Antonioni’s China Film”, Film Quarterly, 30.4, 1977).
By “activating all one’s own anthropological antennae” while being “alerted by the fact that words and images acquire different meanings according to the cultures which interpret them”, Eco tried to understand that when political debate and artistic representation involve different cultures on a worldwide scale, art and politics are also mediated by anthropology and thus by semiology. Therefore, to open a dialogue on identical problems among different cultures, the problem of symbolic superstructures through which different civilizations represent to themselves the same political and social problems needs to be resolved. Unfortunately, no such possibility was available then.
This leads us to another level. As we could see clearly, there existed a sizable discrepancy in terms of socio-cultural expectations of “being a guest” between the Chinese and the Italians. As a specially invited “National Guest of Honour” to China, Antonioni was expected to “behave” like one. Without saying, the Chinese wanted something similar to what they had enjoyed from “friendly and sympathetic” westerners such as Edgar Snow (1905-1972) from the USA (who visited China again in the 1960s and wrote Red China Today: The Other Side of the River, and The Long Revolution) or Dr. Norman Bethune (1890-1939) from Canada (who helped the Chinese in their anti-Japanese war as a medical doctor and died for the Chinese revolutionary cause). In terms of the traditional Chinese way of being a “guest”, the Chinese found Antonioni (or the Italians for that matter) lacking in cultural decorum in this cross-cultural context. Umberto Eco (from “On the occasion of Antonioni’s China Film”, Film Quarterly, 30.4, 1977)observes,
Those who saw it [Chung Kuo] on TV remember it as a work that manifested, from the start, an attitude of warm and cordial participation in the great event of the Chinese people; an act of justice on TV’s part which finally revealed to millions of viewers a true China, human and peaceful outside of the western propagandistic schema. All the same, the Chinese have denounced this film as an inconceivable act of hostility, an insult to the Chinese people.
What really offended the Chinese, in fact, was not just some of the images in the documentary but also some of Antonioni’s culturally “shocking” and politically incorrect commentary as voice-over on the sound track. For instance, when commenting on the Great Wall, a symbol of power and national solidarity for the Chinese, Antonioni said, “The Great Wall was built by slaves 2,500 years ago. They say it is the only man-made object on earth that can be seen from outer space. But astronauts didn’t say so…. If there is a monument that records the uselessness of military art, that is the Great Wall, which some people call ‘the longest graveyard on earth’ because resistant slaves were buried alive among the bricks when the wall was being built”. The Chinese strongly felt that this undoubtedly revealed Antonioni’s “unfriendly” attitude to the Chinese people and cultural ignorance of the rich Chinese heritage. The critics did not really care that much about Antonioni’s general approach to cinema and his way of critically representing Italian social reality but insisted on reading those images and his comments in Chung Kuo as typical Western misreading of Chinese symbols which are so ideologically, historically and culturally loaded. As a specially invited guest, Antonioni did not genuinely “give face” to the Chinese as he had been expected by including those “undesirable” images and harsh comments.
When Antonioni and his crew were visiting the small village in Linxian County, his voice-over made the following comment, “In China, you can hardly feel or detect their emotions or miseries because they are all well hidden behind their simplicity and subtlety.” When the whole nation was drenched in the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution, it would be too difficult for Antonioni to know or understand that China had been refusing to allow any trace or expression of misery in art or life. Of course, today the Chinese would not find Antonioni’s comments in the film particularly offensive or problematic as many Chinese cultural critics today have said things that are much more critical or even hostile than these but the early 1970s was a period of hyper-sensitivity for both political and socio-cultural issues as the Chinese Cultural Revolution was at its very height of absurdity and insanity. And the Chinese were certainly too closed in their mentality or simply too nationalistic then to possibly understand Antonioni as an imaginative film artist who had his own way of representing China in an Italian cinematic form and also as a “post-religious Marxist and existentialist intellectual” (Virginia Wright Wexman, A History of Film, Pearson, 2006) who, as a contradictory, elusive and experimental film artist, always tried to “reflect the times in which they lived ... to capture their effect upon us, and to be sincere and conscientious” (“Michelangelo Antonioni – a flawed legacy” by Richard Phillips, World Socialist Website, Nov. 10th, 2004).
In short, Antonioni was among the risk takers in both cinematic form and content. His own curiosity and the mission jointly assigned by the Chinese and Italian governments took him to China for this dream project Chung Kuo. But to his amazement, he gotpolitically and culturally “burnt” because of political, social and cultural misreadings on both sides. Now thanks to China’s new reform and opening to the outside world, this ideological controversy and intercultural misreading could finally be resolved and, with the help of digital technology, virtually all of his films are available today in DVD stores all over China and have made their way into culture and cinema classrooms in Chinese universities, although some lovers of Hollywood and Chinese blockbusters (such as Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers, The Curse of the Golden Flower or Feng Xiaogang’s Banquet) continue to insist that many of Antonioni’s films are too slow, neurotic, alienating and even pretentious.
With films of historical, cultural and aesthetic significance such as The People of the Po (1943), Crisis (1946), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1956), The Outcry (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), The Adventure (1960), The Virgin Spring (1960), The Night (1961), Through a Glass Darkly (1961),The Eclipse (1962), Winter Light (1963), The Red Desert (1964), Blowup (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972),Chung Kuo (1972),Scenes from a Marriage (1973),Fanny and Alexander (1982), Beyond the Clouds (1995), Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, each in his own innovative approach, succeeded in taking the cinema across new frontiers of expression; and the works they created have influenced not only European and American cinemas but also many Chinese film directors from China’s Mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and they have now become an indispensable part of visual cultural heritage that will continue to influence the future of Chinese cinema. In the rest of this article, I would like to focus on the different kinds of influence that Antonioni and Bergman have had on Chinese film directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige of “the 5th Generation” and Jia Zhangke and Wang Xiaoshuai of “the 6th Generation” as well as directors from HK and Taiwan such as Wong Kar-wai, Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang.
Although Bergman and Antonioni both made very personal films following their intellectual and spiritual preoccupations, very often turning to ethical issues, social conflicts and psychological dilemmas such as alienation, loneliness and neurotic fears of modern men and women in a world of uncertainties, they each have influenced many Chinese film directors in different ways. As a cinematic rebel with “a high-strung personality, passionately alive, enormously sensitive, very short-tempered, sometimes quite ruthless in the pursuit of his own goals, suspicious, stubborn, capricious, most unpredictable” (Carl Anders Dymling, “Rebel with a Cause”, Saturday Review, August 27th, 1960), Bergman developed the Swedish motion picture tradition of maintaining an intimate connection with the art and standards of the theatre by directing films as well as stage productions of plays by masters such as Strindberg, Chekhov, Molière, Shakespeare and also his own plays. Refusing to see or produce films as cheap entertainment, Bergman wanted films to become an important cultural force comparable to the theatre. In fact, his screenplays were translated and introduced to China’s Mainland in the late 1970s and many contemporary Chinese writers and film-makers had read his film scripts before seeing any of the films. And most of the Fifth and Sixth Generations of Chinese film directors studied the works of Bergman and Antonioni as they have always been an integral part of the curriculum in China’s film academies or film and television studies departments.
Commenting on Bergman’s style of film-making, Jean-Luc Godard wrote in "Bergmanorama" (Cahiers du cinéma, July 1958),
The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean team-work. One is always alone; on the set as before the blank page. And for Bergman, to be alone means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them. Nothing could be more classically romantic.
Indeed, what lies deeply beneath most of Bergman’s films is not just his endless search for new ways of expression with his unique understanding of narration, plot construction, camera angle/movement, light and music but more importantly his passionate desire to raise social, political, religious and philosophical questions and his uncompromising determination to explore humanity in its diverse forms in the national as well as European contexts. For Chinese directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, European films such as those by Bergman and Antonioni were made available during their undergraduate studies (1978-82) at Beijing Film Academy. Looking critically at the Chinese Confucian cultural tradition and also the present-day social reality, they began to make movies in mid-1980s that were later called “Cultural Cinema” – the Chinese equivalent of European “Art Cinema”. Comparing Bergman’s prominent characteristics of techniques and dominant themes in his movies with those movies from the Fifth Generation of Chinese directors from the late 1980s to late 1990s, one could easily detect Bergman’s spiritual and intellectual as well as aesthetic influence one way or another: the fatalistic poetic realism and mirror-and-dream sequences inCrisis (1946); the social critique of impoverished circumstances and the indifference of God in Port of Call (1948); the profound exploration of life and death, faith and atheism, light and darkness, innocence and corruption, hope and despair, love and lust, and crusading piety and religious hypocrisy in The Seventh Seal (1957);the uncompromising yet sensitive portrayal of psychological dilemmas and moral issues in terms of life and death, youth and old age, love and betrayal in Wild Strawberries (1957); the ruthless representation of the problems of religion with the pastor’s inability to cope with his self-doubt and emotional uncertainty in The Winter Light (1963); and the profound study of the pains and sorrows of solitude, disillusionment, greed, ingratitude, godlessness and death in Cries and Whispers (1972).
In my interpretation, films such as Zhang Yimou’s The Red Sorghum (1987), Judou (1989), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), To Live (1994), The Road Home (1999) and Chen Kaige’s King of Children (1987), Life on a String (1991), Farewell My Concubine (1992), and Temptress Moon (1996), have presented, like many of Bergman’s films, a consistent portrait of humanity in its painful struggle to deal with the ideological, spiritual and psycho-sexual aspects of existence and their impact on the characters’ moral, social and cultural choices. Before their huge commercial productions such as The Emperor and the Assassin (1999), Hero, House of Flying Daggers, The Promise, The Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige did have the admirable courage and also artistic subtlety to tackle contentious issues.
Perhaps, one of the most obvious and also significant connections between Bergman and Zhang Yimou is the use of closed space which the characters inhabit and the red colour in Bergman’s masterpiece Cries and Whispers, one of his bleakest yet bravest films, and in Zhang Yimou’s major films from the late 1980s to early 1990s. In Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers, almost all action takes place within a claustrophobic house and red is the dominant colour from the opening to the last sequence, with a shockingly oppressive red décor which is heightened by the dark currents that run deep in the hearts of the characters. For instance, we are blatantly presented the horror and bloodiness of Karin’s hands and lips after she mutilates her labia before her confused and bored husband Fredrik. In another scene, Karin’s sister Maria looks on with contemptuous indifference when her spouse inflicts a stomach wound upon himself at the dining table. Bergman’s stylized and intense colours (mainly red, white and black) seem to give the film an unnatural hue with an intensified theatrical atmosphere.
In Zhang Yimou’s films, we see the passion of human love, raw sexuality, the blood and death on the fiery island of sorghum fields in The Red Sorghum, the full-scale bloody struggles of individuals (like Ju Dou and Song Lian the Forth Mistress) against the overpowering weight of Confucian values, feudal peasant culture and stifling patriarchy and the oppressive dye-house with sanguinary dye-vats in Ju Dou and the enclosed dark mansion with brightly red and black-shrouded lanterns in Raise the Red Lantern. These films are conveyed through a series of well-calculated cinematic techniques such as long, drawn out close-ups of faces and studied but fluid shots of objects like the red sorghum wine vats and bowels and the unreeling of wet red cloth over the dye pit. Making comparisons between Bergman and Zhang Yimou (from late 1980s to late 1990s) conjures up the idea of deeply serious, artistic and passionate films that probe into the darker territories of the human soul with explicit pain, suffering and persistence. The films of Bergman as artist have been celebrated and academically studied as any true poet, painter or writer. Director Ang Leeonce said that Bergman's The Virgin Spring was like “a personal revelation” to him: "Bergman made me realize the existence of the director and the power of art house film" (China Daily, August 4th 2007). Like Bergman, the earlier Zhang Yimou (before the New Millennium) was able to make emotionally charged, thematically daring and technically innovative films, establishing new conventions for dramatic cinema that his later movies fail to present. In him, the audience could feel the power and beauty of a new kind of Chinese Art Cinema. And it was the younger 6th generation directors such as Wang Xiaoshuai and Jia Zhangke that continued this kind of artistic and intellectual search when Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige decided to go for Hollywood-style mega productions in the late 1990s.
Like Bergman, Antonioni also lost his long chess game to Death on July 30th 2007. Many Chinese film critics and cultural studies academics consider him one of the most significant European directors of the post-WWII period whose influence on Chinese cinema is all evident. Wu Guanping, editor-in-chief of Film Art, says that both Bergman and Antonioni have had a great influence on the fifth and sixth generations of Chinese directors but Antonioni plays a more influential role than Bergman:
Maybe it is hard to find a Chinese director who bears a strong imprint of Antonioni in all of his or her works," he says. "But definitely you will feel the delicate influence in cuts, use of color or camera movements in many works. His unique use of color in Red Desert, and his interpretation of the relation between characters and the setting, all have Chinese apprentices. (China Daily, Aug.4th 2007)
Antonioni’s documentaries People of the Po (1943) and Chung Kuo and his features such as The Adventure (1960), The Eclipse (1962), The Red Desert (1964) and Blowup (1966) made deep impact on some Chinese directors such as Wong Kar-wai (HK) and Jia Zhangke. In my view, Jia Zhangke, one of the leading film-makers of the Sixth Generation, is the most genuine Chinese heir to Antonioni's films. Jia says that it was Antonioni who inspired him and also enabled him to realize that space could communicate with people. In many of Antonioni’s films such as The Eclipse and The Red Desert, the director, using stylized and intense colours, created a stark landscape scarred by industrialization – the inevitable reality of capitalist modernity with which the characters are made to feel estranged and neurotic. In Jia Zhangke’s award-winning Still Life (Sanxia haoren, 2006)), the interaction between the characters and the Yangtze Gorges, with the unnerving sounds of demolition of houses of the local people who are ordered to leave their homes because of the Three Gorges Dam Project, shows itself in many details.
In Chung Kuo, one of the most unforgettable scenes was on the ordinary Chinese folks in a small fair. Antonioni used long still takes of one face after another looking at the camera with slightly nervous curiosity. This type of pan shot is frequently used in many of Jia’s films such as Xiaowu (1997), Platform (Zhantai, 2000), Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiao yao, 2002), The World (Shijie, 2004) and Still Life. These films, with Antonionian spare plots, minimalist dialogue, still long takes and fragmented shots of animate and inanimate objects (e.g. a dark skeleton tower on a hill top suddenly rising into the sky like a rocket in Still Life), powerfully presents themes of alienated working-class or unemployed young Chinese, contemporary Chinese culture and society and its ambivalent relationship with tradition and modernity in the age of “glocalisation” (two processes of “globalisation and localisation). Indeed, many young Chinese film directors would love to shoot films like Antonioni but few have managed to both learn from him and go beyond him. Jia Zhangke, in my view, has truly embarked on his road to explore the profound complexity of humanity with an innovative style and this is why I regard him a real heir to Antonioni.
If we accept the conception that human feelings of incommunicability, mental confusion, spiritual alienation and intellectual loneliness are universal, Antonioni and Wong Kar-wai seem to have been speaking a similar cinematic language. That is, like Antonioni, Wong Kar-wai has a very deep understanding of the middle-class or the bourgeois elite who are distraught, bored, confused yet still have a desire (although on the decline) to connect with people. Both Antonioni’s The Eclipse and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (Hua yang nian hua, 2000) have stunningly similar shots of hands of the protagonists trying to touch each other. We know very well that both films are about love and the impossibility of love. In parallel construction, the hands of Piero (Alain Delon) and Vittoria (Monica Vitti) in The Eclipse and those of Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) in In the Mood for Love are frequently shown in search of an erotic contact that is missing. Hands that really want to touch but never really do. In many respects, they are alienated to the world around them although physically they are very close. They no longer have the feeling of empathy or connectedness, thus the eclipse of feelings in contemporary industrial and urban society in spite of their desire or mood for love. This erotic tension indicates the loss of human inability for true love.
Both Bergman and Antonioni are great masters of cinema but what lies in their works is their brave search for the truth and their profound meditations on their specific cultures and societies as well as their problems. They were two of the greatest film directors and masters of spirituality and modernity. Just when I was finishing this short article paying my humble homage to Antonioni and Bergman, Luciano Pavarotti also left us to join the two film masters. Staring at my blurred screen where thousands of images blend into one another, I seem to see the silhouette of Bergman picking wild strawberries while Antonioni holding his old camera for a long shot of Tian An Men Sqaure. Then John Donne starts speaking as if in a “Bergmanian” film: “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”. (John Donne, from "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" [1623], XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris - "Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me: Thou must die.").
To end this article, let me imagine an operatic scenario: Now that Luciano Pavarotti has joined the party of Bergman and Antonioni in heaven, the famed tenor will sing the theme song of the French documentary Le Peuple Migrateur (The Winged Migration, 2001) to the two great masters of the cinema:
