BRIC POP: The Blog

While I do like Jia Zhangke, especially The World, this article by Grady Hendrix from Slate gets the Chinese film industry dead right.

American distributors like to import movies that toe a certain political line, depicting modern-day China as an environmentally degraded hellhole where human life has little to no value, where most people live in poverty and women have no rights. (See Lost in Beijing, Blind Shaft, Still Life, Summer Palace, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju, etc.) The best marketing tool for selling a Chinese film in America is to plaster “Banned in China!” across the poster. American audiences love the idea of the little guy with the shopping bags blocking the tank at Tiananmen Square; we’re schooled to think any officially approved movie out of China is going to be propaganda and the only way to “really see” China is through the eyes of filmmakers out of favor with SARFT, China’s official film censorship body.

This is an overall BRIC trend in filmmaking — the tension between the arthouse and the box office.  Only Russia seems to have some balance between their Tarkovskys and their Balabanovs.  In India and Brazil, both are dull.  This is welcome news and good for global mass-market cinema.

I have Big Shot’s Funeral in my Netflix queue and think I’ll go watch it now.