Farewell My Concubine: All the World’s a Stage
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In 1993, Chen Kaige’s masterpiece Farewell My Concubine was released to international acclaim, becoming the first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Beginning soon after the fall of China’s last emperor and culminating in the violence and betrayal of the Cultural Revolution, the film tells the story of two childhood friends whose tortured bond is tested by one of the most tragic and tumultuous periods in Chinese history. Even as it went on to win the Golden Globe and British Academy Film Award for foreign-language film, and to be nominated for two Academy Awards (including Best Cinematography), Farewell My Concubine was banned in China—presumably for its depiction of suicide, homosexuality, and the Cultural Revolution—exemplifying the tight control that the Chinese Communist Party has always wielded over artists. (An edited version of the film was eventually released.)
Like the story that Farewell My Concubine tells, Chen’s early life also represents the convergence of powerful historical and political forces in twentieth-century China. In 1966, when Chen was fourteen years old, Chairman Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution to root out “bourgeois” elements in China, encouraging students to tear down established authorities. Chen publicly denounced his own father, a respected film director, and the following year he was sent to the remote countryside, along with millions of other students, to be “reeducated” by doing grueling physical labor alongside peasants.
It wasn’t until almost ten years later, after Mao’s death, that Chen was allowed to return to Beijing, where he soon attended the Beijing Film Academy, which, like other universities, had been closed during the Cultural Revolution. After graduating, Chen and his classmates Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Zhang Junzhao—later known as the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers—began to make a series of innovative and highly acclaimed films at state-sponsored studios far from Beijing. Like earlier Communist movies, these films—including Chen’s Yellow Earth (1984) and King of the Children (1987), Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1988) and Ju Dou (1990), and Tian’s The Horse Thief (1986)—were social critiques. However, instead of lauding revolutionary heroes, the Fifth Generation films are far more ambiguous. For example, Yellow Earth, Chen’s groundbreaking first film, depicts a Communist soldier who tries to bring the ideals of the revolution to a desolate part of northern Shaanxi. The film explores the weight of China’s past, its millennia of authoritarian rule and women’s oppression—and how hard it is to effect social change.
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