Loosening the knot: on the set of Zhang Yimou’s To Live

December in Changchun, and it’s unimaginably cold. Changchun is famous for a few things: its hard winters and long, mild springs, its mining and heavy industry, and its brief heyday as the capital of Manchukuo, the puppet state set up by the Japanese in the 30s with Pu Yi as its figurehead. Later, as the Communists marched to victory in the Civil War, Changchun was the centre of the Liberated North East; the first openly Communist movies were made here in the late 40s. Latterly, though, Changchun Film Studio has been busy reviving the spirit of American International Pictures, producing murder thrillers , break-dance musicals, wrestling movies and sleazy ‘social problem’ dramas that have earned it little but contempt from the rest of the industry. Now Changchun Film Studio (like all but the three studios in Beijing that continue to enjoy government subsidies) is heavily in debt to the Bank of China, and its future is uncertain at best. But none of this affects Zhang Yimou. He has come to Changchun, with a team of longtime collaborators, a crew from Shanghai and money from Hong Kong/Taiwan, for the snow.

To Live (Huozhe) is Zhang’s sixth feature, and in some ways his most ambitious. The story, from a recent novel by the not yet famous writer Yu Hua, spans some four decades and follows one fragmented family from the war years of the 40s to the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in the late 70s. The husband Fugui, played by Ge You, loses house and home on a dice throw at the outset, and scrapes a living as the narrator of shadow-puppet plays until he is pressganged as an entertainer for the troops of the KMT (Nationalist) army. The wife Jiazhen, played by Gong Li, struggles to keep going in his absence, raising their daughter Fengxia (who is left dumb by an illness) and their infant son Youqing. Reunited when the war ends, they find that their poverty gets them through the birth pangs of the People’s Republic intact, but they suffer a series of misfortunes and setbacks in the following decades. Events climax during the Cultural Revolution, when Fengxia has to give birth to her first child in a hospital whose doctors have been dispatched to the ‘cow-sheds’ as class enemies.

Bearing in mind the needs of his lead actors, who have to age considerably as the story progresses, Zhang has shot most of the film in sequence. The opening scenes in and around Fugui’s ancestral home were shot in Shaanxi Province, in a small town outside Xi’an, and the core of the story has been shot on locations in Shandong. But two departures from chronological sequence have been necessary. The first involved moving the unit to the city of Tianjin, where Zhang found the ideal location for the interior of the gambling house in which Fugui loses everything. And this is the second: a week in the Changbai Mountains outside Changchun, for the scenes in which Fugui and his friend Chunsheng are trapped between the retreating KMT army and the advancing Communists. These are in fact the last scenes to be shot – and the most spectacular, since they involve some 2,000 extras drawn from local detachments of the PLA. Zhang has left these scenes until last for two reasons. First, because it makes logistical and economic sense to do so: big-scale scenes featuring only a couple of the main actors are best dealt with separately. And second, because he wants to be sure there is snow on the ground.

And snow there is, along with an underlay of what feels like permafrost and a wind-chill factor that must be off the scale. Changchun television last night was admitting to minus 15 degrees Celsius, but it’s well below that in these mountains. Even kitted out in army greatcoats, snow boots and thick fur hats, many members of the crew find conditions hard to take. But Zhang himself, stoic as ever, barely seems to notice. I make increasingly frequent trips back to the unit minibus to warm up. During one of them, over a peanut bun and a sausage containing something like Spam, one of the army officers responsible for the extras tells me he thinks the maximum reasonable exposure is around three hours. But his charges are out in the open from dawn to nightfall, grouping and regrouping according to the radioed instructions of the assistant directors.

The main shot of the day is complicated. Zhang is shooting foreground action with Fugui and Chunsheng, then tilting the camera upwards to show the mountainous landscape, the snow… and the 2,000 extras running down a mountainside. Getting everything right entails many takes. Ge You and Guo Tao (the young actor who plays Chunsheng) have trouble with their lines and movements, mostly because of the extreme cold. In the shot, they wake in a dug-out after a night’s heavy drinking and find the KMT encampment deserted; then they notice the Communist army advancing down the next mountain. There is also a problem with some of the extras; half of them are near the end of their three-year term of active duty and about to be discharged, which makes them impatient to get this over with and reluctant to run down a precipitous slope with the kind of enthusiasm Zhang requires. With one thing and another, it takes the better part of the day to get the shot.

Next day, we’re back on the same location. Zhang started the day before we got here with a relatively simple shot of a field of corpses. Now he’s working on another complicated shot. Fugui and Chunsheng have surrendered to the Communists, who have pressed them into service as entertainers, just as the KMT troops did. Hundreds of soldiers are gathered around a bonfire in the middle of the abandoned KMT encampment, watching a shadow-puppet play performed on a makeshift screen in the beam from the headlights of an army truck. The film’s specialist adviser on traditional shadow-puppetry is on hand to instruct Guo Tao in the handling of the puppets; Ge You is miming the half-sung narration to a playback tape. Zhang Yimou wants a sweeping, Storaro-esque shot that starts on the performers, moves on to the screen and then rises to show the large and appreciative audience. But he doesn’t have a crane, so the camera is mounted on one end of an elaborate see-saw rig, with three hapless crew members providing the counterbalance at the other end; a team of strong men manipulate the rig with ropes to provide a smooth and flowing camera movement. No matter how often I visit Chinese film sets, it’s always a shock to be reminded that Chinese directors and cinematographers often achieve very high technical standards without access to the high-tech equipment used in other countries. Once again, there have to be several retakes before Zhang is satisfied and calls it a wrap.

Resilient laughter 

It’s clear from a glance through the script that the scenes I’ve watched being shot are not typical of the film as a whole, so it’s good to hear Zhang Yimou talking about the project during and after dinner that evening. Dinner occurs in what the production manager considers to be Changchun’s only good private restaurant, a mutton-ribs operation that began on the ground floor of a dingy, backstreet tenement and is now expanding into the upstairs apartments; afterwards we move to the hostel where Zhang and the crew are billeted, which turns out to belong to the local Family Planning Training Centre. It has been a long and demanding shoot, these few days in Changchun perhaps the most demanding of all, but Zhang (who seems impervious to hardships of any kind and never seems to need much sleep) is relaxed and extremely forthcoming.

“It was a short story called ‘Hebian de Cuowu’ [Mishap on the River Bank] that first got me interested in Yu Hua’s writing,” he explains. “I met him every day for a week to talk about the possibilities of filming it, and he kept dropping hints about his other writings. One day he turned up with a pile of all his books, including To Live, which had just had its first printing. I began reading it at one in the morning, and didn’t stop until I finished it. What I particularly liked was the second half, in which he describes how ordinary people survive tragedies and surmount obstacles when all they want is to live simple, normal lives. What really attracted me was the way he pinpointed their attitude to life.”

All Zhang’s films to date have been based on existing novels or stories. I ask him why he doesn’t write or commission original screenplays. “If I drew on my own experiences or used my own ideas for stories, I think I’d be limiting myself. Starting from another person’s perspective broadens your own. It’s like cooking. If you cook, you often don’t feel like eating the food yourself. But if someone else cooks, you’re ready to take the whole range of tastes: the sweet, the sour, the bitter, the hot chilli… In this case, I felt that Yu Hua had expressed a fundamental truth about the way we face life, especially those of us who have lived through the period he’s writing about.”

On the face of it, the film covers some of the same ground as recent films by Zhang’s classmates Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang; like Farewell My Concubine and The Blue Kite, it chronicles the political mistakes and consequent hardships of the early years of Communism in China. How is To Live different?

“Mainly, I guess, in its focus on ordinary, unexceptional people. As you know, the kind of film I like best is one with several layers; the more you look into it, the more you see. But it worries me that hidden meanings are beyond the reach of many viewers. This film is a kind of experiment for me, going further than I did in The Story of Qju Ju. I want to make something that any viewer can get, and if they want to look past the surface story to find what’s underneath, they’ll find that easy too.

“As far as the politics is concerned, films like Farewell My Concubine and The Blue Kite have dwelt on the pain and suffering of the Cultural Revolution period; Xie Jin’s Hibiscus Town was like that too. My own feeling is that that’s not adequate as a way of representing what we all lived through. I want to see and show it in a different way. What interests me is not so much the pain and suffering as what it was that enabled people to pull through. You watch Tian Zhuangzhuang’s film and Chen Kaige’s film with knotted brows; I want to loosen that knot a little. Of course, that period wasn’t at all funny, but there was certainly some resilient laughter behind some of the tears, and that’s what I want to get at. Some things that happened in the Cultural Revolution were so grotesque, they were funny.”

Ge You, who is playing the first dominant male protagonist in a Zhang Yimou film since Jiang Wen in Red Sorghum, is known to western audiences for his role as the gay aesthete in Farewell My Concubine, but in China he’s mainly associated with comedy. He has appeared in several adaptations of the writings of the hip/cynical young novelist Wang Shuo, and he starred in the popular television comedy series Bianjibu de Gushi (Scenes from Office Life). Are these associations why Zhang cast him as Fugui?

“Of course, yes, but this film is a great challenge for him. He has a comic face, everyone can see he’s good for comedy, but in this story he has to cry too. He has never cried on screen before! I want him to bring his humour to the role, but he has to combine laughter and pain. Actually, the idea of casting him came from my wish to have the actors pull the audience into the story. In the past, my films have been very carefully composed and structured, but I want this story to be more character-driven. The film will be beautiful, and it will use some of the elements I’ve used before, but those things aren’t so important to me now. For example, the shadow-puppet scenes have much less symbolic weight than the red lanterns did! The Fifth Generation directors have a reputation – perhaps not entirely undeserved – for making a big thing of traditional Chinese arts, but here the shadow-puppets are simply the way Fugui makes a living, nothing more. I want the audience to be more interested in the puppet-play narrator than in the play he’s narrating. The content of the plays is not of great importance.”

Does all this mean that the film’s visual style will be different from Zhang’s other films? “Yes. You saw a fairly elaborate crane shot today, but that’s not typical. Before we started the film, I sat down with my cinematographer Lu Yue [who also shot Yim Ho’s Buddha’s Lock, 1987, and Huang Shuqin’s Spirit of a Woman Painter, 1993] and we agreed that there would be no great stylistic flourishes. The camerawork is as naturalistic as possible, moving when necessary, static otherwise, always at the service of the characters. If audiences are moved by this film, I hope it will be because they’re reacting to the story and characters and not because of anything I’ve done behind the camera to manipulate their perceptions. The fact is that most of my audience will have lived through the events shown in the film, and that will make them strict judges of whether or not we’ve succeeded in capturing the spirit of those times.”

Curtailed freedoms 

To Live, like Raise the Red Lantern, is being financed and produced through the Hong Kong office of the Taiwan company Era International. Zhang has been benefiting from this kind of offshore investment ever since he made Ju Dou, and the same applies to many of his Fifth Generation contemporaries, including Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Li Shaohong, Wu Ziniu, He Ping and Huang Jianxin. It’s hard to imagine any of these directors going back to working in and for China’s own studio system, and it’s impossible to imagine that Chinese cinema would have reached the level of international prominence it has without non-Mainland investment. Foreign companies have supported the Fifth Generation directors at a time when the studio system in China refused to employ them; that studio system is now in apparently terminal decline and increasingly unable to employ anyone without pushing itself further into bankruptcy.

But the Film Bureau in Beijing, architect of the current crisis through last year’s economic reforms which gave the studios full responsibility for their own financial affairs, has now acted to curtail foreign investment in Chinese film-making. At the end of 1992, the Film Bureau thought it had succeeded in halting the post-production of The Blue Kite. Tian Zhuangzhuang was editing the film in Beijing Film Studio, but the project (financed from Hong Kong and Japan) was always supposed to be completed overseas and the negatives and sound tapes were already in Tokyo. By grounding Tian in Beijing, the Film Bureau thought it had prevented the film from being completed. So when The Blue Kite premiered in Cannes and went on to be distributed in all major markets, the bureaucrats in Beijing were embarrassed and greatly annoyed. Their latest move is to insist that future ‘joint venture’ productions must be principally financed in China, and that the negatives of such films must be processed and kept in China. They know full well that these edicts will effectively end foreign investment and are obviously ready to accept the consequences. Production of foreign-financed films such as Farewell My Concubine, The Blue Kite and now To Live has benefited the Chinese studio system by providing work for the overstaffed and financially shaky studios, but very little profit from the films has returned to China. The Film Bureau must have calculated that the small financial returns are not worth the political grief they suffer when ‘banned’ films such as The Blue Kite slip through their fingers.

Incidentally, the Film Bureau has also acted to prevent the country’s independent film- and video-makers from working by making it illegal for any production or service company to work with a list of named directors that includes Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai, He Jianjun, Wu Wenguang and Tian Zhuangzhuang. But that’s a story for another article.

In London last November, I asked Chen Kaige how he saw the situation. He was pessimistic, and related these developments to the rise of Ding Guanggen in the Propaganda Department of the Politburo – part of the jockeying for position that anticipates the power struggle that will follow the death of Deng Xiaoping. In Changchun soon after, I asked Zhang Yimou the same question, and he was not hopeful.

”I’m lucky that I began to make To Live when I did. If the script had been submitted now, I guess it would have been refused. I’ve been away from Beijing for four months working on the film, so I’m not fully informed about what’s happening. But the news that has reached me is very disturbing. I just hope these new regulations are something temporary; if they’re not, they will certainly have serious effects on the development of film in China. Once this film is finished, I have no idea what I’ll be able to do next.”