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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Hollywood actress Meryl Streep recently hitched a ride on a Chinese
businessman’s private jet to Beijing. Once there, she met up with
idiosyncratic writer-director Joel Coen and Raise the Red Lantern director
Zhang Yimou to promote “China’s exploding film industry.”
Zhang, who served as the artistic director for both the 2008 Beijing Olympic
Games and the lavish 60th anniversary celebrations of the Chinese Communist
Party, also unveiled his remake of Coen’s influential first film – Blood
Simple.
And this sounds simple enough.
But for some industry insiders, the trio personify a growing partnership
between Beijing’s aspirations to export what it calls “soft power” – a
sugarcoated version of China and its myriad social problems – to the West
and Hollywood producers, who are bending over backwards to get a piece of
the world’s fastest growing film market.
“It’s obvious why media is controlled in Communist societies. But what
makes China unique is that for the first time, it has the money and market
to shift control of media for a local audience to control of external
representations of the country,” says Liu Lee-shin, a China film expert at
Taipei’s National Taiwan University of Arts.
“Chinese-Hollywood co-productions are vehicles for Beijing to dictate the
China narrative outside its borders.”
Liu says that Beijing has made no secret of its eagerness to build that
narrative through movies, and points to a recent plenum of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party endorsing guidelines to boost what it calls
“cultural security,” by “propelling Chinese culture overseas.”
To do this, Beijing says it will double its entertainment and cultural
earnings to roughly $460 billion within the next five years.
Critics claim that studios will be pressured to produce works that depict
China in a sympathetic light, a fear prompted by China’s strict controls
over film importation, distribution and production, along with the rebuffing
of recent WTO rulings to allow foreign distribution and expand a 20-a-year
cap on foreign movies.
“They made it very clear in their last congress meeting that the overriding
theme would be projecting an image overseas that they want projected, while
Hollywood’s No.1 concern has always been the bottom line,” says Michael
Berry, a lecturer of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at University
of California, Santa Barbara.
“U.S. producers are taking an ultra-conservative route, and self-censorship
is happening at a very early stage. In concept development there’s already
an understanding of what will fly in China, and that gets concentrated by
the time it gets to a screenplay.”
And what flies in China today isn’t very much.
Beijing’s thumbscrew restrictions include: No sex, religion, time travel,
the occult, or “anything that could threaten public morality or portray
criminal behavior.”
All film scripts have to be signed off by a government censor and anything
that depicts Tibet, Tiananmen Square, the Dalai Lama, Falun Gong, Uyghur
separatists or Taiwan favorably is typically banned.
For Hollywood, however, the proof is still in the numbers. Turnstile
revenues in China skyrocketed by 64 percent to $1.5 billion, and have surged
nearly tenfold since 2003.
While China has been heavily criticized for its foreign film cap, Western
producers are bypassing those restrictions by aligning with local partners,
most of which are state-run, and all of which have strong ties to the party
and state.
The deals also offer filmmakers access to cash-rich Chinese investors, who
face significant restrictions on sending their money overseas.
Relativity Media, which produced last year’s Social Network, is one such
example of a partnership gone wrong.
Relativity, which entered into a co-production with Beijing-based Huaxia
Film Distribution and SkyLand Film-Television Culture Development, was
blasted by rights groups in December for its decision to shoot a comedy in
Linyi after touting its close personal connections with local party
officials.
Linyi, a city of 10 million, is home to blind activist Chen Guangcheng. Chen
won acclaim for documenting late-term abortions and sterilizations before
being sent to prison for four years. Currently under house arrest, he has
allegedly been the victim of a number of state-sponsored beatings.
Journalists and diplomats attempting to visit the self-taught lawyer are
routinely roughed up and turned away. While Relativity’s misadventure
highlighted the dangers of cozy relationships with state officials, the
potential financial rewards are too much for some investors to ignore.
Bona Film Group, a film distributor and subsidiary of the People’s
Liberation Army controlled conglomerate Poly Group, secured about $100
million through listing on the NASDAQ last year after investors were buoyed
by Bona’s strong ties to the PLA and Beijing. Poly Group is China’s
biggest arms trader and counts substantial investments in Sudan and
contemporary Chinese art among its many holdings.
Western producers have also learned from past experience that besmirching
China's image can have serious implications for the many arms of a media
conglomerate.
In the late 1990s, the relationship between Beijing and Disney soured
following the Martin Scorsese-produced Kundun, a film about the Dalai Lama
that featured Chinese soldiers stomping on the portrait of the exiled
religious leader.
Plans to open a Shanghai Disney theme park were put on hold for years,
leading to the axing of the company’s No. 2 executive and the surreal
hiring of Henry Kissinger to iron out their differences.
“For a company like Disney it’s not just movies. They have theme parks,
broadcasting, toys, education and retail. Shanghai Disney is just getting
off the ground now following the problems they had because of Kundun. I
think they learned their lesson,” says Berry.
As China’s policies on censorship, production and distribution aren’t
likely to change, space for making films critical of the Asian powerhouse is
likely to shrink.
“You have to realize the government is controlling everything: the script,
distribution, the licenses, production and the partnerships,” says an
American producer who has worked in China and spoke on condition of
anonymity.
“Criticism means the film won’t be shown and the studio and producer will
likely be blackballed in the future. The irony is that Hollywood went
through a traumatic experience with blackballing during the McCarthy witch
hunts. Now you can get blackballed by the Communist party.”
Highlighting the lengths that Hollywood is willing to go to appease Beijing,
MGM changed the nationality of the antagonists in its 2010 remake of Red
Dawnfrom Chinese to North Koreans after state-run mouthpiece, the Global
Times, wrote scathing editorials about the movie and “hawkish elements” in
the U.S. film industry.
The move marked the first time an entire group of characters has been
changed in postproduction.
But as Larry Gerbrant of Media Valuation Partners told the Washington Post
in a recent interview: “Hollywood would figure out how to shoot in
Greenland if they were offered the right financial incentives.”
Cain Nunns is a Taipei-based journalist who writes for The Guardian, Monocle
and Global Post, among other publications. |
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