Movie Night at the OACC

A monthly film screening featuring selections and introductions by invited speakers. Organized by Jackie Im and hosted by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center.

Xiaoyu Weng Introduces Summer Palace

Summer Palace - An Introduction 

I do not believe that the sky is blue,

I do not believe that thunder has echo,

I do not believe that dreams are false,

I do not believe that death defies retribution.

                                                                                -        Bei Dao

Whether there is freedom and love or not, in death everyone is equal. I hope that death is not your end. You adored the light, so you will never fear the darkness.

                                                                                - Anonymous 

Summer Palace is a film about youth, love, sex, liberation, and self-questioning. In 1988, Yu Hong leaves her hometown on the boarder of China and North Korea to enroll in college in Beijing. On the train heading over to Beijing, Yu’s smile indicates her optimistic imagination towards a new life – hope of leaving her current mediocre situation behind. The heady college life is depicted with a series of 2-minute consecutive and fast-paced scenes of hectic campus crowds, studying in libraries, drinking and smoking in dorms, poetry readings, music playing, and dancing in the hallways. The background music is Lo Ta-yu’s “Youth Movement” with lyrics like, “my youth will not be called again once it is gone.” Yu’s new life unfolds as she crazily falls in love with her fellow student Zhou Wei. Full of emotional and sexual upheavals, their relationship is intense, contradictory, unstable and even schizophrenic, reflecting Yu’s emotional state as a confused young girl. She wants to live in the most intense way as indicated in her dairy, “if it was not to investigate my life in a kind of idealism, the monotone of everyday would create the unbearable anguish in me.” Twisted love and rebellious sex seem to be the answer. However, again in her own voice she admits, “there is no way out. There only exists fantasy. Fantasy, a deathful thing.” The relationship ends with the student movements and democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and its violent suppression by the Chinese government. 

Summer Palace however goes far beyond a controversial love story with intense sex scenes or the cliché of a hybrid of sex and politics. It is a narrative with loose-ended story lines mirroring the trajectory of a generation - the director Lou Ye’s generation. In 1989, Lou was a senior year student studying at the Beijing Film Academy and a witness and participant of the democratic movement. He is among one of the most important figures of the Sixth Generation filmmakers, who made their debut during the early 1990s when the entire nation was still in the aftermath of the trauma and was engulfed by the societal-wide depression. Alongside directors Zhuang Yuan (Mama [1990]), Wang Xiaoshui (The Days [1993]), Wu Wengguang (Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers [1990]), Lou Ye made his first feature film, Weekend Lover in 1993. These films are considered the beginning of the independent film movement in China.  Like his peers, Lou has a reputation of using a realistic approach to depict ordinary people and their everyday life stories – their longings for individual expression and a basic need for human rights. Though Weekend Lover was not released until 2 years after its completion because of government censorship due to issues of sexuality, gender and obsession, these concepts have continued to be explored in Lou’s films. His second feature, Suzhou River, which brought him fame by winning the Tiger Award at the 1999 International Film Festival in Rotterdam, was again banned. The “illegal” screening at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival of Summer Palace without acquiring approval from the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film and Television resulted in a five-year ban from making films for both Lou and his producer Nai An. 

Expectations of the movie’s political commentary on the Tiananmen Square Protests, also known as the Six Four Incident, led to criticism on Lou’s depiction as being too allusive and overly cautious. However the metaphors and implications of the generation’s desire for liberation and freedom, the hidden fear towards utopia, the uncertainty in an idealized future, and the repressed cultural and political atmosphere are consistent throughout the entire first half of the movie. This is shown in details such as a random conversation in a bar in which a female student scoffs that though protecting the working class and farmers is the most honored thing, what about the intellectuals? Or the lines in Yu Hong’s dairy indicating that idealism is deathful, which seems to be a dark prediction for the fate of the student movement; or when the school officials catch Zhou Wei and Li Ti’s affair by entering their dorm room without notice. Lou’s political standpoint fluidly unfolds and smoothly penetrates the narrative. 

To summarize the important events of a tumultuous decade, perhaps is never Lou’s intention. Instead, as pointed out by film critic A. O. Scott, Lou “distills the inner confusion — the swirl of moods, whims and needs — that is the lived and living essence of history.” Archive materials and documentation of monumental events that happened in the subsequent decade are juxtaposed with the lives evolving around the four main characters. Another series of consecutive images: the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the implementation of the Open Up Policy in China in 1992, and the return of Hong Kong in 1997, are woven into Yu Hong’s transitions from city to city, and Li Ti and Zhou Wei’s relocation from Beijing to Berlin. The background music this time is “Don’t Break My Heart” by Black Panther, the most radical Chinese rock band at the time. The lyrics state, “waiting alone, enduring silently, joyance always appears in my dream.” The choice of soundtrack is another area for important social commentary. Both Lo Ta-yu and Black Panther’s music are socially and politically critical and they were both revolutionary cultural icons among the students of the time.

Towards the end of the film, the story lines increasingly drift apart, with seemingly disjointed episodes such as an abortion and a suicide. Linear or symbolic analyzation becomes inapplicable and seems worthless.  The vague ending further adds a level of absurdity to the stories. This absurdity is precisely what characterizes this generation’s life paths. While time is seemly moving forward, the dimension of it broadens horizontally infused with the everlasting searching for the meaning of life. Any attempt to control the outcome of life is futile.  

________________________

Xiaoyu Weng introduced Summer Palace at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center on December 20, 2011.

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