장이모우(張藝謀) 영화 속의 농촌과 ‘농촌문제’ ― 영화 「귀주이야기」를 중심으로

Abstract

Zhang Yimou’s recent blockbusters have occasioned conflicting critical opinions. While some critics denounce these films’ overt commercialism and bemoan the loss of the critical viewpoint, others acknowledge their success in defending the domestic film industry in China from being besieged by Hollywood and drawing a larger viewership to the theater. Before siding with one or the other of these positions, we should take up the question of contemporary reality in Zhang Yimou’s works and locate a consistent perspective that runs through Zhang’s entire oeuvre. Of particular interest in this regard is the status of the ‘countryside’ as the key site that allows us to approach Zhang’s understanding of the contemporary Chinese reality. The countryside-simultaneously a place where the policy and opening and reform first garnered its meaningful success, and a space of alienation boxed out from enjoying the fruits of the policy’s glittering success-represents the proper setting for working out the problems accompanying the rapid transformation of Chinese society. The present paper focuses on “The Story of Qiuju” as a film that dynamically captures the changes taking place within a rural community where the policy of reform and opening is under way. As the old order of production brigades and people’s communes is supplanted by a new system which consigns production to individual households, rural communities in China are exposed to profound economic, political, and cultural changes. In “The Story of Qiuju,” the economic transformation is captured in the episode revolving around the dispute that takes place between Qiuju’s husband and the village elder over the licensing of the new storage construction. The episode reveals the growth of the concept of the market in the aftermath of the commodification of agricultural products and the concomitant intensification of the desire for increased productivity. On the other hand, the increase in the village elder’s political clout and authority offers a glimpse of the political transformation of Chinese rural society. Hitherto incorporated completely into the vertical order of the state, the countryside has become much more autonomous as village units, and in this changed atmosphere, the state agencies at the local level, represented most prominently by the police, fail to exercise the power of mediation. In the sphere of culture, however, there is a lag which contests the breakneck pace of the changes taking place in economic and political arenas. The age-old custom of preferring the male child intensifies the central conflict of the film. A number of quasi-comical sequences show how the old customs, supposedly eliminated by socialism, are deeply residual in the rural community. At the same time, Qiuju’s stubborn refusal to drop legal action against the village elder reveals the individual peasant’s insistence on her rights vis-a-vis the state institutions. This depiction also pits the sprouting concept of rights and emergent civic consciousness against the ineffectiveness of the state’s response. In the process, the film focuses our attention on substantive cleavages that exist between the individual, the political substratum, and state politics. As the film winds down, the village elder and Qiuju reconcile in a scene that reaffirms the internal order of the rural community following the commotion over a childbirth. In a surprise twist, however, the state power intervenes and arrests the village elder in an assertion of the state’s desire to strengthen the rule of law. The film ends with the heroine confronting the absurd consequences of her legal action, and as the camera zooms in on the expression of stupefaction on Qiuju’s face, the film achieves a biting satire of the massive clash between the master narrative of the state and the incipient logic of the rural community. The dissonance thus highlighted between the growing consciousness of individual rights and communal values, and between base power and super power, exposes the multi-layered and varied nature of the problems afflicting China’s rural communities in the 1990s’climate of rapid social transformation. Instead of using the painterly cinematography that propelled him to fame, Zhang Yimou adopts an unadorned documentary style in “The Story of Qiuju.” The stylistic turn also indexes Zhang’s growing interest in contemporary Chinese reality and his move away from presenting Chinese history as a spectacle to be displayed before the audience of international film festivals. “The Story of Qiuju” delves into the dilemmas and agonies shared by the Chinese viewing public by staging a critical intervention into one of the most troubled aspects of China’s contemporary reality.