Fatal Betrayal and Persistent Memory in Lou Ye's Summer Palace

Fatal Betrayal and Persistent Memory in Lou Ye's Summer Palace1 Lily Li In his influential book Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), French philosopher Paul Ricoeur discusses the complex relationship between memory and forgetting of historical events due to suppression of individual testimony and the imposition of an official history by the state, as higher powers impose their "canonical narrative" upon the collective consciousness. As Ricoeur states, "A devious form is at work here, resulting from stripping the social actors of their original power to recount their actions themselves" (448). He further points out that it is a moral imperative for individuals to remember an event, an obligation that is central to the ethics of memory (449). Lou Ye uses his film Summer Palace (Yihe Yuan 颐和园, 2006)2 to fulfill this moral imperative to give a personal account of the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square to battle "the abuses of memory" made by national powers into "the abuses of forgetting," as described by Ricoeur. The crackdown of the Tiananmen student demonstrations on June 4, 1989 remains a taboo in mainland China to this day: "June Fourth was transformed into an 'invisible massacre,' a phantom existing only in the memory of those who experienced or witnessed it" (Berry 300). Such authority-imposed forced forgetting has led to collective amnesia among the public in mainland China, where a generation of college students, who were mostly born in the 1960s and went to college in the 1980s, was involved and affected. With their dreams of freedom and democracy silenced, they have been condemned to disillusionment and dejection, some sent into exile, and some deprived of life itself, following the crackdown on June 4, 1989. By revisiting the past in Summer Palace, Lou Ye attempts to render personal memory, from the protagonist Yu Hong's perspective, of the 1989 Tiananmen events to the Chinese public suffering from collective amnesia. Lou Ye started to film Summer Palace in 2004, obviously to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of June [End Page 276] 4 in the following year. Summer Palace is the third film made in mainland China to openly address the events of June 4.3 In an interview for The Guardian, Lou Ye notes, "I have been wanting to make a movie like this since 1989. I was a college student in Beijing that year. Many things happened around me. It was a year of great impulsiveness." In the same interview, he reveals an interest in the psychological legacy of traumatic experiences: "In my story, I tried to show that it is easier to change the outside than the inside. The pain caused in the 80s continued to be felt in the 90s and beyond. The confusion in people's hearts is not given enough attention when we weigh up social change" (Watts). Lou Ye's Summer Palace is one of the most controversial films in mainland China. It has been officially banned by SARFT (China's State Administration of Radio, Film, and TV), which also led to five years' censorship of its Chinese creators Lou Ye and Nai An,4 officially because the film was submitted to the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 before clearance by the Chinese authorities. However, the consensus among critics is that it was banned mainly due to its audacious depiction of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen events and its daring portrayal of sexuality, including several lengthy sex scenes and representations of male and female full-frontal nudity. The film is still officially banned in mainland China, but it is available elsewhere in the world.5 The story of Summer Palace is a retrospective reconstruction of the love relationship of the protagonists Yu Hong and Zhou Wei, set against the tumultuous sociopolitical events of the late 1980s, following Yu Hong's chronologically unfolding diary. It begins in 1987, when Yu Hong leaves her hometown of Tumen, in northeast China, to start college in Beijing, and ends on the eve of June 4, 1989, when the Tiananmen student pro-democracy movement was suppressed by the military, and when Yu Hong's relationship with Zhou Wei at college comes to an abrupt end due to her betrayal by Zhou Wei and by her...

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