THE buildings on the
studio lot of China Film Group, a vast government-owned company, are grey,
windowless and identical. The air, even 20km outside Beijing, is heavy with
pollution. Inside, Jiang Wen is filming his newest movie, “Gone with the
Bullets”, about a dance competition in 1920s Shanghai. He is standing on a
stage with sequined dancers. Around 400 extras in black tie look on from a
Gaudiesque theatre, built for the shoot. Mr Jiang, in a grey T-shirt and 3D
glasses, scurries up and down the stage giving directions. Mr Jiang has been
known to hold up a white board with “Sexy” written in red marker pen, and show
the dancers how it should be done. Cameras swivel around the dancers, capturing
their gyrations and the audience’s reaction.
Mr Jiang, an actor as
well as a director, is one of the stars of China’s film business. His 2010
movie, “Let the Bullets Fly”, attempted to invent a new genre: the Chinese
Western. It was about a bandit who poses as the mayor of a remote Chinese town.
The government did not appreciate its portrayal of an illegitimate leader
gulling the masses, but the film was wildly popular. If everything goes
smoothly “Gone with the Bullets”, which is being shot in 3D, will open in
theatres in China and around the world by the end of 2014. In terms of cost,
the film is pushing the boundaries. It has a budget of around $50m, a princely
sum by Chinese movie-making standards. A Broadway choreographer and American
dancers have been brought in. On stage right near the dressing rooms, Keith
Collea, an American 3D expert, sits in the dark watching his screens. “China is where it’s at,” he says.Most Chinese movies lose money: only around a quarter
make it into theatres, and piracy means there is no legitimate DVD market. But
then many films in Hollywood and elsewhere are unprofitable these days:
according to a report by the British Film Institute earlier this month,
only 7% of British films turn a profit. Chinese people like films and they like
to gamble, so money is racing into the movie business. In September, for
instance, Wang Jianlin, China’s richest man, announced he would build the
world’s largest film-studio complex, for an estimated $8.2 billion, in Qingdao. Last year China overtook
Japan to become the second-largest film market after America, with box-office
receipts of around 17 billion yuan ($2.8 billion). Some people think it will be
the world’s biggest in five years’ time. Young people, flush with cash, are
eager to get out of the house. Films have become central to Chinese courtship
and consumption. Enormous IMAX screens and 3D films are the rage, and in big
cities carry a similar ticket price to America. Screens are flickering on around
the country. More than ten a day were erected in 2012; today there are around
18,000, more than four times the number five years ago. “Journey to the West”,
an adventure film released in 2013, has grossed more than 1.2 billion yuan
($205m).
Hollywood is also trying
to push in. Only 34 big-budget films, and a handful of independent foreign
ones, are allowed into China each year, and foreign producers are allowed to
keep only a small share—usually less than 25%—of box-office revenues. Even so,
foreigners are desperate to get their product into China. Sometimes films are
specially adapted for the market: four extra minutes of footage, featuring
Chinese actors, were added to the Chinese version of “Iron Man 3”, made by
Disney’s Marvel.
To gain a foothold in
China, Hollywood studios are helping finance films or co-producing them. Mr
Jiang’s “Gone with the Bullets” has backing from Sony, a Hollywood studio;
DreamWorks, which made cartoon hits like “Shrek”, has set up Oriental
Dreamworks, a joint venture with Shanghai Media Group, a state-owned studio,
and two other firms, to make animated films for the Chinese market. There are
risks to working in China as Relativity Media, a Hollywood studio, discovered
in 2011. It got flak from the Western press for shooting a movie in Linyi, an
ambitious city in Shandong province, when Chen Guangcheng, a well-known
human-rights activist, was being held under house arrest in the city. But the
lure of the Chinese market tends to outweigh reputational risk, and Relativity
is financing a new film located in the city of Linyi (see article).
American influence in
China’s film business is nothing new. “Everything we learned, we learned from
Hollywood,” says Yu Dong, the boss of Bona Film Group, one of China’s largest
independent studios. In some ways China’s movie industry resembles 1930s
Hollywood, when studios controlled all business lines—from talent to production
to theatres—before a 1948 Supreme Court ruling forced them to divest. In China,
this is called “being a dragon from head to tail”. Huayi Brothers, one of
China’s largest studios, whose name evokes the fraternal Warners, oversees
actors, production, distribution and cinemas.
Yet the differences are
more obvious than the similarities. China’s film industry lacks Hollywood’s
technical sophistication. Even costly Chinese movies often look amateurish. “I
fell asleep,” confesses a woman when the lights come on at a Beijing cineplex.
She had left work a few minutes early to catch a late afternoon screening of
“Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon” in 3D. During some scenes the
special effects looked like a 1990s video game. The plot and dialogue were not
much slicker.
China’s movie business
also lacks Tinseltown’s glamour. Mr Yu’s small office is on the 18th floor of a
dingy Beijing tower block above a busy road. Smoke from his cigarettes fills
the air; honks rise from the street below. There is no Hollywood-style party
scene because stars tend to keep out of polluted Beijing. They treat club
openings as work events and expect to get paid to turn up.
But the big difference
is in the location of power. In America power lies with the studios; in China
with the state. The government controls which films are made and has a hand in
every aspect of the film business, from production to exhibition. China Film
Group produces movies and distributes Hollywood and Chinese films. The
government rewards independent producers for making films it approves of—Desen
International Media, a production company, received a bonus of 3m yuan for
“Full Circle”, which promoted filial piety, for instance—and blocks Hollywood
films during national holidays, to help Chinese ones.
Hollywood has always
been the world’s dream-maker, but China’s government wants the country to make
its own. A communiqué released after the Central Committee meeting of the
Chinese Communist Party in 2011 announced that “it is a pressing task to
increase the state’s cultural soft power” and to “build our country into a socialist
cultural superpower”. When Shanghai Media Group signed its deal with DreamWorks
last year, Xi Jinping, then vice-president and now president, attended the
ceremony in Los Angeles.
The government has twin
ambitions in fostering the film industry, one domestic and one global. At home,
it wants people to see films that will inculcate Chinese values and culture.
And it wants them to go voluntarily: the party used to force people to watch
propaganda films, but even it saw that this was like winning an ice-skating
medal after beating up the competition with a bat. Abroad, the government wants
to spread a more attractive image of the country. Hosting the Olympics was one
attempt at this; but film premieres can happen more often. Yet China punches
well below its weight in the film world: it has won the Palme d’Or at Cannes
only once, 20 years ago, for Chen Kaige’s “Farewell My Concubine”—which was
banned in China at the time. The government wants to change that, and has
recently helped organise events to showcase Chinese films in places as diverse
as Fiji, Cambodia and New York.
As with the Olympics,
the government does not feel comfortable leaving creative elements to chance.
Except during the 1930s, when China had a thriving independent film industry
centred in Shanghai and operating with relatively little interference, the
political climate has defined and confined its films. Private studios were
dissolved after the Japanese occupied Shanghai in 1937. When the Communist
Party came to power in 1949, it recognised that movies could be useful.
Government studios made films packed with peasants and propaganda, and wheeled
mobile projectors to rural areas to ensure they reached millions. Tickets were
given out at work, and everybody had to attend. Independent movies started
again in the 1970s, and then sputtered along. Now a few independent studios
operate within the constraints of a state-controlled system.
If it’s entertaining,
cut it
The head of the
censorship board has privately described the films being made today as “trashy”
“The Chinese producer is
the best producer in the world,” claims Mr Yu. “He has to negotiate the Chinese
government and the market.” China does not have a sex-and-violence ratings
system of the sort that operates in most of the rest of the world to protect
children and young people, but films cannot be screened until they have been signed
off by censors at the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film
and Television. Film-makers must submit a draft of the script in advance of
shooting, and later a final cut of the film. The censorship board, which has
around three dozen members, objects to violence, sex, drugs and anything
critical of the party, either explicitly or implicitly—in other words, every
ingredient that might be used to fill seats. Success comes from predicting what
censors will object to, and writing scripts in such a way that they do not.
Overt political commentary is unacceptable; that is probably why so many films
are set in the past.
Censors often ask for
multiple script revisions before giving the go-ahead, and, after seeing the
final cut, request that scenes be eliminated. Film-makers’ reactions to these
restrictions range from acceptance to outrage. Zhao Wei, a famous actress and
the director of “So Young”, a drama about college in the 1990s that came out
this year, had to axe a masturbation scene. She considers herself lucky: movies
can be held up for years. In April the China Film Directors’ Guild honoured
Feng Xiaogang, a director. In his acceptance speech he complained about the
“torment” of censorship. Even when films have been given a green light, censors
sometimes change their minds. Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” was pulled
from theatres after a few days.
While producers in
Hollywood try to drum up as much interest as possible in their films, those in
China keep them quiet, so as not to pique censors’ interest or suspicion. Your
correspondent visited the set of a movie that had gone through around 20
versions of the script before it was approved. The censors signed off on it
only after a sympathetic communist hero was written in. A crew member confided
that the censors were still going through the script, even though shooting had
begun, and were trying to get the final, climactic scene eliminated. When some
of the producers heard a journalist had been on set, they were horrified, lest
the movie’s name be printed.
Some say that the
censors are loosening up a bit. A racy scene was cut from “So Young”, for
example, but several abortions were left in. “No Man’s Land”, a sinister
thriller, was held up for more than two years because censors thought it was
“too dark” and “too distant from real life”. But after what are believed to be
significant modifications, it was released in early December. “Hunger Games:
Catching Fire”—this autumn’s Hollywood blockbuster, in which a totalitarian
regime sacrifices its young for the entertainment of the masses—was, to general
astonishment, screened in Chinese cinemas. Popular online video sites, such as
Youku, host original movies, called “microfilms”, which are not subject to the
same censorship process, but this is probably an oversight rather than
progress.
The government uses
subsidy as well as censorship to get the kind of films it wants made. It forks
out increasing sums for propaganda films, which account for an estimated 10% of
movies being made each year. “The Founding of a Republic”, a 2009 film
celebrating the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, was a
glossy Hollywood-style epic featuring so many stars that some had to be cut out
of the final version.
Yet for all its efforts,
the government is not really getting what it wants from its film industry. Far
from inculcating the masses with Chinese culture and values the party approves
of, successful films are often adaptations of Hollywood hits. “Lost in
Thailand”, a comedy about male friends reminiscent of Hollywood’s “The
Hangover”, did well last year, as did “Tiny Times”, a film about four
materialistic friends in Shanghai and their luxurious lifestyle, which has been
described as a cross between “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Sex and the City” (without
the sex). A saccharine tribute to materialism, “Tiny Times” did particularly
well in smaller, less-developed “tier 3” and “tier 4” cities, whose citizens
aspire to be rich and fashionable but want to watch characters that feel
home-grown. Ann An of Desen International Media, one of the producers, says the
film appealed to stressed, overworked audiences. “We provided a two-hour dream
for them.” A film-maker says the head of the censorship board has privately
described the Chinese films being made today as “trashy”.
Nor do Chinese movies
travel well. “Lost in Thailand” grossed around $192m in China, but a mere
$60,000 in America. Even audiences in Taiwan and Hong Kong do not have much
interest in mainland films. The plots tend to be blunt and the acting
melodramatic. “Flowers of War”, a costly movie about the Nanjing Massacre
starring a Hollywood actor, Christian Bale, was intended to go global. But it
fell flat outside China and failed to win the awards or critical acclaim
officials had been hoping for.
Too many films are both
too foreign and too familiar for audiences abroad: “Finding Mr. Right”, for
instance, is a romantic comedy about a woman who goes to Seattle at the behest
of her married lover to give birth to their baby, and finds love there. The story
feels relevant and modern to Chinese audiences, but to foreign ones it has no
surprises and too many echoes of “Sleepless in Seattle”, a Hollywood classic.
A lighter touch by the
censors might produce films that were more authentically Chinese and artistically
interesting. It would also avoid embarrassing incidents. The Chinese film that
has garnered most attention in the West lately is “A Touch of Sin” by Jia
Zhangke—a gloomy art-house portrayal of modern China that won the award for
best screenplay at Cannes this year. The government has banned it from cinemas
and journalists from interviewing Mr Jia. More Westerners have probably seen
reports of this in recent months than have watched a Chinese film.
Source: Economist
