以下是引用若王子葵在2005-1-30 20:39:00的发言：
Westernizing Chinese Movies
In the 1980s, China began its reformation; meanwhile, Chinese mass media began to introduce new elements of other cultures. In the year 2001, China entered the WTO, which opened the door for Chinese movies’ westernization.
Compared with the old days when people could only choose to watch movies which told the sorties about the heroes and armies in the civil wars such as Ying Xiong Er Nu [Children of the Heroes], or watch movies about the new lives of the peasants in new China such as Lee Shuangshuang, Chinese people today have more and more choice when they go to the cinema. In October 2004, there were six movies shown in most cinemas in Beijing: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Warner Bros, US), The Prince & Me (Paramount, US), King Arthur (Disney, US), ersonName>Les RiveresersonName> Pourpres2: ersonName>Les Anges de L’apocalypseersonName> [Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse] (Europacorp, France) and “Long Feng Dou” [Yesterday Once More] (Media Asia, Hong Kong). Most of these movies were produced by foreign companies, especially American and European ones. Only one of those movies was produced in China. Chinese audiences are receiving western elements of culture from the cinemas actively or passively. Therefore, Chinese movie audiences are being westernized.
Audiences in China do not watch only foreign movies but also indigenous ones. The real condition of the Chinese film industry is that Chinese movies are being westernized in many aspects.
The leading element of a film is the director. Nowadays Chinese film companies are trying to invite more and more world famous western directors to China to produce movies. ersonName>Quentin Tarantino, director of Kill Bill I and II, will come to China and shoot a film which will tell a story about traditional Chinese martial arts[1]. Meanwhile, directors in China today are shooting movies and sending them to international film festivals abroad such as Cannes Film Festival and Berlin Film Festival, or the Academy Awards. Ang Lee is a world famous Chinese director nowadays. His great work Wo Hu Cang Long [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] won the Oscar for the best foreign language movie 2002.
All the big film festivals are in western countries and the voters in these festivals are mostly from the west, which means their tastes will be more western. So in order to win important awards and oversea box office, more and more Chinese directors are trying to make their works to be adapted by the western audiences. Zhang Yimou, a famous Chinese director, is a good example of this trend of Chinese directors. He used to focus on Chinese peasants’ lives and during that time he made movies such as Hong Gao Liang [Red Sorghum][2], Qiu Ju Da Guan Si [The Story of Qiu Ju’s Case][3] and Wo de Fu Qin Mu Qin[The Road Home][4]. After these outstanding movies, Zhang became world famous and he began to work for winning the Oscar awards. He made two Chinese martial art movies: Ying Xiong [Hero][5] and Shi Mian Mai Fu [House of Flying Daggers][6]. Both the two movies had bad feedback from Chinese audiences and commentators because of their dull plots, but were welcomed by audiences overseas. In these two movies Zhang gave up his usual style of telling stories. Instead, he tried a new way which was called “the Hollywood style” — superstars, a large amount of capital, high-level techniques of shooting, magnificent views but simple and crude sublimation of the characters’ innermost beings. In Hero, the so called theme was simplified by building up several heroes and heroines whose characters were far from completed. Wu Min, the main character in that movie, is a Chinese-dressed copy of James Bond or Neo in Matrix. The box office gross of Hero won 30,000,000 RMB inside China and more than 50,000,000 RMB outside China,[7] so people said that Zhang made these movies just in hopes of winning the Oscar’s award, not for local people. But the director’s successes have shown that the skills and the methods Chinese directors are using today are closer and closer to the taste of western audiences.
In China, not only the directors but also the actors and actresses also dream about going to Hollywood, attending the Oscar ceremony and walking on the red carpet for Oscar. Some of them have reached their goals. Jacky Chan, the hero of the movies Rush Hours I and II, is thought to be the first Chinese actor who was accepted by the western people after Bruce Lee. Tony Loung (who played in Hua Yang Nian Hua [In the Mood for Love]) and Maggie Cheung (who played in Clean) won the best actor and actress awards in Cannes. More and more Chinese actors and actresses are taking part in films produced by western companies. Ziyi Zhang, who played in Rush Hour II, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers and Hero, is one of the successful Chinese actresses who are loved more by overseas audiences. People magazine even said that she was one of the fifty most beautiful persons in the world in the year 2002.
Chinese film companies are also inviting famous western actors and actresses to play in Chinese movies while more and more Chinese players are going abroad. In 2000, Donald Sutherland (who played in The Italian Job, The Spirits within Final Fantasy, Cold Mountain) was invited to play in a Chinese movie Da Wan [The Funeral of the Famous Star]. It was the first time for a famous Hollywood star to take part in a Chinese film and the beginning for audiences in China to see foreign actors more frequently.
Besides the more and more western-influenced directors, actors and actresses, the ways in which Chinese film companies run their business have also become more and more westernized. In the middle of the past century, lots of films were produced by the money given by the government. Audiences were forced to go to the cinema to see the movies which most people were not interested. In these days, films are mainly produced by private companies who could get the investment of their films in different ways. The companies use many methods to attract audiences to cinemas such as advertising and asking superstars to play in the movies. At the same time, Chinese movie studios cooperate more and more with western companies. The Funeral of the Famous Star and Kekexili [Protecting Tibetan Antelopes] were both movies produced by a Chinese studio and US company: Columbia.
There are also some other elements which are becoming closer to western world. For example, Zhang Yimou asked famous singer Kathleen Battle to sing the song “Lovers” in his movie House of Flying Daggers. Karwai Wong’s (directed In the Mood for Love) best working partner, cameraman Christopher Doyle is an Australian. His style is said to be a mixture of Australian and Chinese culture. These elements are not the main sign of the westernization of the Chinese film industry, but also show the underlying reality in some ways.
These days some Chinese people are talking about “how to protect the Chinese movies from being westernized”. They think Chinese culture is being eroded by being westernized. Actually, people simply cannot tell whether it is good or bad for the Chinese film industry to be westernized because everything has its own advantages and disadvantages. It has just been a very short time from the day Chinese movies began their westernization. Whether to copy Hollywood or to build a Hollywood in China is a question asked by people working in filmdom for a long time. The only thing people can be certain of is that on the way to westernization, the long-standing Chinese culture and the large amount of Chinese movie audience will still be the decisive element to the growth of the Chinese film industry.
[1] 163 news center http://news.163.com
[2] “Red Sorghum” is a story happened in the countryside of northeast China.
[3] “Qiu Ju’s Case” is a story about how a poor, uneducated housewife in the countryside went to big cities to ask for the justice of the law.
[4] “The Road Home” is a story of the life of a couple in a small village in north China.
[5] “Hero” is about a story of a king and four assassinators’ negotiation for the “people”.
[6] “House of Flying Daggers” is a story about the love and hatred among two men and a woman who were all Chinese traditional knight-errants.
[7] Jichuan Jia, National Movies: puzzle and destiny, Modern Movies, 75-78,123.
