Advance viewing: Preparing for Summer School film class

It's going to be a busy summer. Besides working on my thesis, I also plan on taking a class at the summer school (Film and History in Postwar Japan and Post-Mao China). As this will potentially lead to a time crunch in July and August, I have been trying to get some of the class readings and outside film viewings out of the way.

The first thing I did was purchase, via Amazon, some of the required books. In April I read Red Sorghum, and halfway finished Inventing Japan.

Additionally, I opened up a basic Netflix account to rent the films required for outside view. Even though most are obscure Chinese and Japanese films that few have ever heard of in this country, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Netflix had almost every single DVD in stock.

Thus far, my wife and I have watched two since signing up for Netflix: Ju Dou (菊豆) by Zhang Yimou (张艺谋) and The Blue Kite (藍風箏), directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang (田壯壯).

I have seen a few of Zhang's films before, and Ju Dou was very recognizable, thanks to Gong Li's (巩俐) role, as well as Zhang's stylistic use of color and the inevitable tragedies that befall the characters. It occured to me that this film must have been very interesting to many Chinese viewers when it first came out in 1989. Set in the 1920s, there is no obvious reference to the party, and while traditional Chinese culture and society are portrayed in a negative way, the heroes of the film -- if you can call them that -- suffer mainly because of their passionate love for each other, rather than the injustices of pre-Communist society. In a way, they can be viewed as cursed because they flaunt the rules of Chinese society of this time. I won't give any more away; see the DVD on your own and make your own judgements.

I enjoyed The Blue Kite far more than Ju Dou. This is partially because it appeals to my academic interest in the policies of the Chinese Communist Party, but also because it is beautifully evocative of China in a way that the carefully staged and shot Ju Dou isn't. Ju Dou looks like it was shot in a movie studio; The Blue Kite often looks like it was shot in a real hutong (胡同), with steam, dust, and dirt always present. Even the indoor shots use lots of natural light. It's sometimes hard to keep track of all the characters and their relationships with each other, but director Tian does a great job of bringing to life 1950s and 1960s China and the CCP policies that turned society upside-down.

I believe Tian's The Blue Kite gives a few symbolic nods to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. The most obvious is the blue kite itself, which represents (in my view) Tietou's brief moment of childhood happiness and love amidst a series of family tragedies and social upheavals, much in the way rosebud symbolized Kane's childhood joy before his life was upended by forces beyond his control.

The Blue Kite also has some similarities with a short story I wrote for my first Harvard Extension School class, and was selected for publication in the 2002 Harvard Summer Review: Black Classes . The title refers to the "five black classes" (黑五类), elements of society which the Chinese Communist Party once identified as undermining the revolution. Like the latter part of The Blue Kite, my short story Black Classes examines the policies of the Chinese Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution (文化大革命) and how it impacts the life of a young boy.