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Notes
1. Part of this paper was first presented at the Ninth Biennial Conference, Chinese Studies Association of Australia, La Trobe University, July 2005, and an earlier version was presented at a workshop on ‘The Future of Chinese Cinema’ (University of New South Wales, April 2006). I thank Sean Metzger and Olivia Khoo for inviting me to the workshop and for their constructive comments, as well as those of other participants in the workshop. I also thank the anonymous reader for Asian Studies Review who made very helpful suggestions for revision.
2. By “genre film”, I refer to “a group of films having recognizably similar plots, character types, settings, filmic techniques, and themes. Such conventions are repeated sufficiently from film to film to make it obvious that all these works belong to a single group and that the filmmaker is relying on the past use of these conventions and the audience's familiarity with them” (Konigsberg, Citation1987). Typical genres include movies about gangsters, detectives, war, horror, and various types of comedy.
3. Ying Zhu's definition and use of the term “mode of production”, where she discusses the structural reforms and commercialisation of the Chinese film industry, is helpful to define my approach here: “Mode of production is defined as the overall structure of film production”. This concept highlights both the political and economic conditions of film production and the normative conceptions of film style (Zhu, Citation2003). In other words, my approach will emphasise the effects of the production environment on products, in particular how the changing film industry structure dominated by media corporations has revived genre film, using New Year Comedies as a central example. This approach also distinguishes my paper from previous articles in English that describe Feng's New Year Comedies, including my own (Kong, Citation2003). While previous articles, such as McGrath Citation(2005), still focus on the “content” of the movies, whether on their social relevance or their aesthetic and artistic aspects, this paper will instead focus on the external aspects of the New Year Comedies – that is, the material conditions that have made such commercial films possible.
4. New Year Comedy is not exactly a literal translation of “Hesuipian”, which means “[New Year] celebration film”. I choose the word “comedy” for two reasons: first, most if not all of Feng Xiaogang's New Year films are comedies, even if they sometimes use quite black humour. The consciousness of creating a comedy genre, partly inherited from Hong Kong New Year films, is echoed by Feng's imitators in the genre, so that most Hesuipian produced by other directors are also comedies – for example, Happy Times (Xingfu shiguang, Zhang Yimou), and My Beautiful Homesickness (Wo de meili xiangchou, An Zhanjun). More importantly, comedy is a central feature that exemplifies the genre consciousness of New Year films and the market-oriented tendencies of commercial filmmakers, as I will demonstrate below. In this way, New Year Comedies by Feng represent a new genre, which is closely related to their release time, but also reveals certain generic features.
5. Here I use the term media corporation (wenhua gongsi, chuanmei gongsi) to include both private independent media studios and state studios-turned-shareholding corporations, since these businesses are not just involved in producing and distributing film or television products, but are often conglomerates that have expanded and integrated many different areas of the media and entertainment industry, such as advertising, performance management, etc. Typical examples are Huayi Brothers Media Conglomerate (Huayi xiongdi chuanmei jituan) and China Film Group (Zhongguo dianying jituan). It is very important to be aware of the wide business interests of these media corporations, and their internal connections, even though some have recently split into separate corporations. Instead of using the conventional film and TV production companies as the basic industrial unit, I prefer the much broader definition of media corporations, as the latter have gradually replaced the former state studios to dominate the field of film production and distribution.
6. Such films included Mysterious Buddha (Shenmi de dafo, 1980), Shaolin Temple (Shaolin si, 1982), The Price of Madness (Fengkuang de daijia, 1987), and Lonely Ghost in the Black Mansion (Heilou guhun, 1989). However, they have seldom been seriously analysed by cinematic historians or critics as an alternative to “mainstream” ideological melodramas by Xie Jin or experimental art films by Chen Kaige or Zhang Yimou. If mentioned at all, they are usually listed as examples of “mindless” entertainment – since at that time, entertainment had a derogatory undertone that is no longer common in today's commercialised society.
7. I am fully aware that genre film is not a new concept in the hundred-year history of Chinese cinema. Indeed, the first emergence of genre film as a conscious creative effort by Chinese filmmakers was during the second half of the 1920s, when local forms of costume drama [guzhuang xi] and martial arts and magic-spirit films [wuxia shenguai xi] prospered. But the subsequent social context discouraged the development of commercial film or genre film, especially after 1949. Considering the different cinematic traditions and institutions before and after 1949, I will limit my discussion of the revival of commercial/genre film and its political and cultural implications to the context of cinematic development in socialist and post-socialist China.
8. In fact, the New Year season has been exploited by the cultural industry not just in film, but also in TV drama and stage plays, for which equivalent New Year genres have been developed in recent years. However, most of these productions are one-offs and tend to receive a lukewarm audience response. So far, Feng Xiaogang's New Year films are the only brand products within the genre that have continued to be successful from year to year.
9. The five films were Beautiful House (Meili de jia, director An Zhanjun), Happy Times (Xingfu shiguang, Zhang Yimou), Defend and Strike Back (Gongshou fanji, Liang Yian), The Final Exam Drew the Family Closer (Kaoshi yijia qin, Liu Xiaoguang), and Making a Fuss Over Nothing (Dajing xiaoguai, Ding Sheng). According to Xu Ying, their failure may have stemmed from lack of quality, as some of these “comic films” were just collections of stage comedy skits, talk shows and farces; but the difference between audiences from the North and the South may also have affected the box office revenues, especially when these films did not have sufficient production and marketing budgets to consciously overcome the North/South market divide as Feng has been able to do. See Xu, 2001, and Wang Yun, Citation2005.
10. Feng has directed serious films, but he does not refer to these as “New Year” films and avoids the New Year release season for such films. One example is the film A Sigh (Yisheng tanxi), which was released in June 2001. In his New Year Comedies, Feng is also careful to avoid elements that might jar with the Chinese holiday audience's festive sensibility. This explains his decision to cut the word “funeral” that was originally part of the Chinese title of “Big Shot's Funeral” (leaving only “Big Shot”), as audiences would be unlikely to associate funerals with either comedy or Chinese New Year. In these kinds of details, we see Feng's conscious attempt to frame his New Year films as a comic genre.
11. Due to the specific focus of my study on media corporations, I will not elaborate on this narrative analysis here. I refer readers to John McGrath's paper (McGrath, Citation2005), which provides excellent detailed analyses of Feng's narrative.
12. During the 1990s the dominant method of charging for advertising space required that a designated amount of the advertising revenue return to the production unit rather than going directly to the broadcaster. As a result, it became extremely profitable to combine both advertising services and film/television production in a single business, as the production side could recoup some of the costs of purchasing advertising space. Because of the State's relatively tighter control over film production and the high budget risk involved in producing movies, at first these advertising/production businesses mostly limited themselves to producing TV commercials, MTV videos and TV dramas. But with the increasing commercialisation of the film industry and the gradual loosening of state regulation, some of the advertising/production agencies realised that the profit potential of films could be even higher, and they gradually started moving into the movie business too. See Dai, Citation2000.
13. For more detailed description of these institutional changes and cultural policies since the 1980s, see Zhu, Citation2003.
14. For more detail about the establishment and business operation of state-controlled companies such as Forbidden City, see Dai, Citation2000, pp. 469-70. With the competition from private companies and the Hollywood “invasion” of China, the government discovered that state-controlled shareholding companies could be more efficient at operating within the film industry and reducing the financial burden on the state, so the government permitted the introduction of such business structures in order to boost the national film industry. While their main agenda is still producing “high quality leitmotif (i.e. propaganda) films”, these state businesses are also permitted to invest in “ideologically acceptable” commercial films to increase their profits.
15. In his memoirs, Feng Xiaogang gave a detailed account of how Forbidden City and Beijing Film Studio helped to bring out his first New Year film, Dream Factory: while Beijing Film Studio provided the necessary studio license and assistance in getting the script approved, Forbidden City provided investment, production, distribution and exhibition support. See Feng, 2003.
16. This is mainly because during the 1990s the dominant method of charging for advertising space required that a designated amount of the advertising revenue return to the production unit rather than going directly to the broadcaster. As a result, it became extremely profitable to combine both advertising services and television production within a single business, as the production side could recoup some of the costs of purchasing the business's own advertising space.
17. This information on the close “cooperation” between the director Feng Xiaogang and producer Huayi is gleaned from many different sources, including Feng Citation(2003), B. Cheng (2005), and in particular Chen Siya's interview with Wang Zhongjun (Chen, Citation2005). Apparently, the “mutual benefit” is also acknowledged by both sides: in Feng's words: “(With this co-operation), I built up the box office reputation of my films, and Wang Zhongjun built up the brand name of Huayi in the film industry” (S. Chen, Citation2005, p. 20).
18. This business model first started with TV production, where due to the separation of TV stations and TV production companies, TV dramas were often sold to TV stations in return for commercial space rather than actual money. The TV production companies often also managed their own advertising businesses, and would then profit from selling their allocated TV commercial slots to other companies.
19. One of the successful players in this “cinema regionalisation” is Media Asia. Since its establishment in 1994, Media Asia has produced many high-profile Chinese-language blockbusters that targeted the regional Asian market, including Initial D (2005), Seoul Raider (2005) and the Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002–03). Media Asia's active role in promoting “cinema regionalisation” is also manifested in its transnational co-production and distribution. In mainland China, besides being co-producer of Feng's recent movies, it also formed a joint venture with China Film Group to distribute films to the mainland Chinese market.
20. Based on my personal observation of the recent development of the Chinese film industry, especially the aggressive strategies adopted by Chinese filmmakers and media corporations in co-production and overseas marketing of Chinese films, I contend that Beijing and the Northern Mandarin film culture will play an important role in the globalisation of Chinese film in the twenty-first century, even if not to the extent of becoming a new “media capital” such as Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, Singapore in the 1940s, and Hong Kong since the late 1950s. However, to elaborate on this point and compare it with previous waves of transnational Mandarin entertainment cinema is beyond the focus of this paper, and I would instead recommend a forthcoming book on the operation of the commercial film and television industries in “global China”, which contains some historical background on the recent development of transnational Chinese commercial film. See Curtin Citation(2007).