Look out Hollywood, here comes Chollywood

The name Xuanzang may not be familiar to you. But if you spell it the alternative way – as Huien Tsang –it suddenly becomes a name that every Indian school student will recognise from their Class 5 history lesson: the Chinese monk who made an epic journey to India during the reign of Harshavardhana, in the 7th century.

Xuanzang, a film about the Chinese monk’s 17 years of travels in India, won the Best Director award for Huo Jianqi at the BRICS film festival in Delhi in September. Stunningly shot in China and India – in places like Nalanda, Gaya, Ajanta and Hampi – the film presents a vivid, authentic image of what life must have been like in the 7th century. And it has the kind of voluptuous production values that are typical of Huo Jianqi’s films, and are a hallmark of Chinese cinema.

China got its first glimpse of cinema in 1896 – just as India did – with a short film show by the Lumiere brothers. The first Chinese feature film was made in 1913, the same year as India’s Raja Harishchandra. China then went on to evolve its own unique cinema to resonate with its audiences more deeply than the aggressively marketed Hollywood cinema of the time, just as India did. And, just as in India, Chinese cinema would closely mirror the country’s dramatically changing political and social themes over the decades.

By the 1970s, however, the once vibrant Chinese cinema had been reduced by Communist leader Mao Tse-Tung and his policies to unwatchable propaganda melodramas. But in the ’80s, Chinese cinema suddenly burst onto the global scene, and Chinese films became the toast of the international film festival circuit.

So how did this transformation happen?

In 1978 the Beijing Film Academy, which had been shut down during the excesses of Mao’s notorious Cultural Revolution, finally reopened. And four years later, in 1982, it produced its first new batch, which included now legendary names like Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Zhang Junzhao.

Between them, over the next decade, this extraordinary batch produced a body of internationally-acclaimed films including One and Eight (1983), Yellow Earth (1984), The Horse Thief (1986), King of Children (1987), Red Sorghum (1987), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), Farewell My Concubine (1993) and The Blue Kite (1993).

These directors, along with other slightly younger contemporaries, became famous in world cinema as the Fifth Generation, and film scholars enjoy debating about the exact set of factors that triggered their unprecedented explosion of creativity – but that is another story.

This Fifth Generation created a new wave of Chinese cinema that is characterised by its luscious visual images, ultra-long shots, spectacular landscapes and wonderful story-telling. They turned their focus to the Chinese countryside and Chinese history, telling allegorical tales of human nature that remains unchanged despite the changing times. And because of the challenges of the domestic Chinese market, they turned increasingly to the international art house circuit, sparking the accusation that they were exclusivists, interested only in peddling oriental exoticism overseas.

After the turmoil of 1989, and the Tiananmen Square incident, the Fifth Generation was followed by an angry young Sixth Generation, which burst onto the scene with a whole different agenda, and a whole different style.

Rebelling against the political establishment and the Fifth Generation in equal measure, these film-makers created another new wave of cinema, characterised essentially by urban stories about the little people pushed to the margins of society – stories that were told in an edgy, documentary, cinema verite style that reflected the shoestring budgets they worked on.

If the Fifth Generation was typified by Zhang Yimou’s sumptuous period drama, Raise the Red Lantern, the Sixth Generation was typified by gritty films like Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards, a free-form portrait of the city’s rootless punk-generation kids in search for meaning in life, or like Lou Ye’s internationally acclaimed Suzhou River, a story of obsession set in a decrepit part of Shanghai, far from the usual glittering boom-town skyscrapers. Lou Ye was subsequently banned by the authorities from making films for two years – a not uncommon incident. But bans such as this could be useful, because they helped increase the appeal of the film, and the director, in the international circuit.

Today, the Fifth Generation and Sixth Generation are both working parallel to each, to create an astonishing breadth of styles in Chinese cinema. And in the past forty years they have together won 17 awards at Cannes, including one Palme d’Or, one Grand Prix, and three Best Director awards. It’s a long, long way from the Communist propaganda pulp of the 1970s.

But where does Chinese cinema go from here?

Good question. Some cinema buffs believe that the quality of Chinese cinema has now been overtaken by Iranian cinema. But on the other hand, the question that is often asked in China is: When will we win an Oscar for the Best Film? (It’s significant to note that they no longer seem interested in winning a mere Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film.)

There are interesting new dynamics at work. For example, the global success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon got directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige to bring their unique sensibilities to the genre of wuxia (or martial arts) movies, resulting in sword-and-changshan spectaculars like Hero and House of Flying Daggers, which have been huge successes overseas, as well as at home.

It has also resulted in a trend towards international productions: Hollywood studios are falling over themselves to work with the Chinese film industry, and US-Chinese co-productions have featured heavy-duty stars like Robert Downey Jr, Kevin Spacey, Christian Bale and Keanu Reeves.

One of the reasons for this Hollywood interest, of course, is that the Chinese domestic film market is growing at a scorching pace and, according to projections, by 2017, it will be the world’s single largest film market. As a result Hollywood executives, when they’re planning a new blockbuster, must now factor in the question of how it will work in the Chinese market. Indeed, some Hollywood films now not only include a mandatory Chinese location, scene or star, but they sometimes even have an entire China-specific module for the version that will be released in China.

But, even more interesting is the fact that things are now beginning to work the other way around as well.

The Chinese – filmmakers, as well as the government – have been looking at the global cinema market and asking themselves why Hollywood should have a monopoly on it. And that seems to be the next horizon for Chollywood.

Today the world’s biggest film studio is in Hengdian – the size of the two biggest Hollywood studios put together – and one of China’s wealthiest billionaires is now setting up an even bigger studio in Qingdao, backed by Hollywood heavyweights like the Weinstein brothers and various A-List stars, as well as by the Chinese government. As the axiom goes, where there is scale, there is money; and where there is money, there is talent. So in the not-too-distant future we are very likely to see Chinese-made films (with international scriptwriters, film stars and marketing experts) up there among the big global box office hits. Work on this long-term game-plan is already well under way.

There are many learnings in this for Hindi cinema, obviously. But, meanwhile, it’s interesting to think that all these developments in Chinese cinema can, in some way, be traced back to a small group of students who graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, simply wanting to make films in a different way.