Feng Xiaogang’s haunted utopia, Chinese modernity, and carnivalesque social critique in the era of Xi Jinping

ABTRACT

This paper seeks to illustrate how Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang constructs and delivers social commentaries in his New Year comedies The Dream Factory (1997) and Personal Tailor (2013). These two films are unique in terms of narrative strategy compared to his other New Year films. Both films turn on the premise of temporarily granting people’s wildest wishes, out of which arise multi-layered utopian and dystopian elements that I connect to Feng having made these two films shortly after his realist films were censored. Exploring these two films, I argue that Feng employs the carnivalesque as an alternative narrative strategy to perform subversive resistance, to counter monolithic and hegemonic discourses of Chinese modernity, and to expose social issues in the context of China’s tightening of censorship restrictions. A comparative study of these two films reveals their value as visual records of Chinese modernity over the course of a decade and as important facilitators or mediators of societal self-critique.

KEYWORDS:

• Feng Xiaogang
• carnivalesque
• utopia
• dystopia
• New Year comedy
• social critique

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Maria San Filippo for her insightful comments on drafts produced later in the process. I also wish to thank the anonymous readers of New Review of Film and Television Studies for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A detailed account of China’s ‘9550’ project is available in Zhang Rui’s book (pp. 65-67).

2. Feng changed this scene from Wang Shuo’s novella, in which the underling who loses the battle is ordered back to America. The top-down death sentence added to this episode calls to mind Feng’s experience with film censors banning his work.

3. ‘Service the People’ (wèi rénmín fúwù) is a political slogan which first appeared in Mao-era China. It originates from the title of a speech by Mao Zedong, delivered on September 8, 1944.

4. Feng’s subsequent film, I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016), further explores government incompetence in a more explicit way.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yi Lu

Yi Lu is Lecturer of Chinese in the Department of Global Languages and Cultures at Texas A & M University. Her research has appeared in Journal of Chinese Cinemas. Her research interests include constructions of gender in women’s films, film exhibition, film style, and media industries. She is currently working on a book project examining China’s comprehensive restructuring of the film industry and its significant impact on industrial structures, film-making practices, and film culture from 2001 through 2015.