Portrait: Chen Kaige

• October 14, 2011
• Article

14.10.2011 -Abu Dhabi audiences will have the opportunity to discover today Chen Kaige's latest epic, Sacrifice, whose title and historical setting evoke a very familiar vision to the director. This is the perfect occasion for Nisimazine to revisit the Chinese filmmaker's career.

Born in 1952 in Beijing, Chen Kaige was still a child when he befriended fellow director Tian Zhuangzhuang, whose The Horse Thief (1986) is one of Martin Scorsese's favourite films of the 90's. During the Cultural Revolution Chen joined the Red Guards and like many of his generation denounced his father, an act that will inevitably mark his personal as well as professional life. As the Cultural Revolution came to an end in 1978 Chen entered the Beijing Film Academy from which he will graduate in 1982. Two years later, in 1984 Chen debuted with Yellow Earth narrating the story of a communist soldier travelling to the north of China collecting popular songs for the revolution. Already in this first feature Chen's preoccupations emerged, the conflicting relationship between culture and politics, past and present, private and public seen through the allegorical lenses of a refined visual style (cinematography by Zhang Yimou).

A very evocative and philosophically dense film Life on a String (1991) sees the Chinese director trying his hand at meta-cinematographic musings following two blind musicians through the wastelands of creation. His most famous film to date, Farewell, My Concubine (1993) was awarded the prestigious Palme d'Or, the first given to a Chinese film. In what many consider his most accomplished film Chen revisits the defining moments of 20th century China, from the civil war to the Japanese invasion, on to the Cultural Revolution. In a film where the director seems to be dealing with his personal past, the two central characters at some point defame their friendship denouncing each other just as Chen did with his own father; it is interesting noticing the presence of the latter, Chen Huaikai, as art director. Farewell, My Concubine manages to seamlessly unite aesthetic research and epic storytelling without sacrificing a cogent narrative tension.

If in his previous films political events would in turn influence the characters' actions, in Temptress Moon (1996) the director decides to show a love story utterly removed from its social context so as to offer a glimpse into Chinese society exclusively through the characters (Leslie Cheung and Li Gong). The tormented thread running through the private and the political is once again explored in The Emperor and the Assassin (1998), the story of the King of Qin and his quest to unite China. Set in the third century B.C., the film follows the King's concubine as she enters the Han Kingdom as a spy but finds herself unsure about which side her heart is beating for. By now it is quite clear that Chen's vision of history cannot transcend the irrational force of love jeopardising the cold strategic calculations of politics. There is, throughout his career a marked penchant toward the unresolved relation between one's inner will and the over-determined forces of history, as if the two could never match. For a man who lived through the ambition and the colossal failure of the Cultural Revolution, it comes as no surprise.

In 2002, after having contributed to the collective episode filmTen Minutes Older: The Trumpet, Chen catches his audience off guard with a thriller set in London, Killing Me Softly,a film that to these days stands out as an unconventional chapter in his filmography. Most recently, with Forever Enthralled (2008), the director returns to the Opera of Beijing recounting the story of Mei Lanfang, its brightest star.

Scoring 51 millions yuans ($7 millions) when it opened in China the first weekend, Sacrifice, Chen's latest work is an adaptation from Orphan of Zhao, one of the first Chinese operas reaching European audiences. The original text narrates the killing of a son at the hands of his own father committed to preserve the bloodline of a noble clan. The director formulated a complex revenge tragedy set in 583 B.C. involving brain teasing plot twists showing once again his predilection for the complexities of history and the unsettled relations of its agents.