| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 新聞研究所 === 97 === This essay focus on analyzing the portraits of China’s Cultural Revolution in seven Chinese Language films made during and after the 1990s. This essay points out that three films made by the “fifth generation” directors namely Blue Kite, Farewell My Concubine and To Live, tend to treat the history of Cultural Revolution as a “national allegory”. These “fifth generation” directors are trying to articulate their narrations of Cultural Revolution to the “cultural reflection” ideological trend of the New Era in the late 1970s and 1980s which searched for the “enlightenment” and “salvation” for the Chinese culture.
But this essay also points out that the other three films namely In the Heat of the Sun, Balzac Et La Petite Tailleuse Chinoise and The Foliage, didn’t display the harsher aspects of the Cultural Revolution. Instead they focus on the vigorous and enthusiastic adolescence life of the young protagonists. In the Heat of the Sun also displays the construction and the uncertainty of the human memory, to express that we can’t recapture an “absolute” and a “total” historical image of Cultural Revolution. The portraits of Cultural Revolution in these three films also distance themselves away from the “enlightenment” and “salvation” cultural discourse during the New Era in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Lastly, this essay focuses on the film The Sun Also Rises directed by China’s famous actor-cum-director JIANG Wen. This film slides between elements of “national allegory” and “anti-national allegory” for China. Firstly, this film through its brightly colorful cinematography and unique mise en scene, created a film space that is full of fantasy and a dreamlike historical events of Cultural Revolution. Secondly, this film through its parody of the revolutionary model theater of women images, destroys the role of the women in performing the national allegory. But this film added two characters of overseas Chinese returned to China. Their unpleasant experiences during the time of Cultural Revolution can be read as the national allegory of China. Lastly, this film through its unique narrative structure put the ethnic consciousness of “Chineseness” and the concept of “Greater China” into a process of continuing deconstruction and reconstruction.
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