Renewal of Song Dynasty Landscape Painting Aesthetics Combined with a Contemplative Modernism in the Early Work of Chen Kaige

Surprisingly, an interest in the glories of Chinese art history was virtually absent from mainland Chinese film in the past. The Shanghai filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s were involved in producing their own modern brand of cinema that necessarily had to appeal to local audiences through characterization and ideology—young people working together against oppression through a kind of natural socialism—while emulating the fast moving nature of Hollywood product. This model was followed in the 1950s and 1960s by that of state-supported Communism, where although the natural landscape would often appear, invariably it was used as a heroic backdrop to revolutionary characters, ala Soviet Realism. It wasn’t until after the Cultural Revolution that students of the state-run Beijing Film Academy (BFA) had access to the full history of film, including their own, as well as the great depth of China’s art history. Naturally enthused by films of the numerous international ‘new waves’ of the 1960s, and moved by the richness of their specifically Chinese culture, the filmmaking graduates were free for the very first time to regard the past while seriously thinking of the future. By focusing on two of the first three films directed by Chen Kaige— Yellow Earth ( Huang tudi , 1984), and King of the Children ( Haizi wang , 1987)—I propose that Chen (and his cinematographers) incorporates a keen understanding of the aesthetics of Chinese landscape and narrative scroll painting combined with a need to produce original, at times reflexively ‘modernist’ work. Another interest here is that the ancient practice of Chinese painting was accompanied by theory, to the extent that some theoretical principles of media—ink, brush, silk, and paper—can be compared to aspects of twentieth century, medium specific, high modernist art, where, say the representational nature of painting, photography, and film becomes less important than the medium itself. In a sense, then, I argue that these film works are ‘experimental’ both narratively and visually, through both Western and Chinese interpretations.

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