Portrait: Chen Kaige
Celluloid Liberation Front
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.