An Interview with Noah Cowan on A Century of Chinese Cinema
By Betty Xie
On the night of May 6, when director Chen Kaige walked onto the stage to introduce his masterpiece Farewell My Concubine (1992) to a full house at the TIFF Bell Lightbox theatre, the audience foresaw the success of an unprecedentedly comprehensive Chinese film series – A Century of Chinese Cinema. With eighty films, two exhibitions, numerous panels and special guests, the series was not merely a thorough retrospective but a multidimensional showcase of Chinese cinema.
In many ways, the ambition of the series was to tell the story of a “difficult cinema.” Chinese cinema did not enter the gaze of international film critics until the 80s, but has since been widely appreciated for its expanding industry and more importantly, for its history and diversity. Precisely because of its exceptionally rich diversification, however, this late discovered treasure resists conventional categorizations. When I sat down with the man behind the series, Noah Cowan, the Artistic Director at TIFF Bell Lightbox, he embraced the conceptual challenge at stake: “Chinese cinema by its very nature overthrows one of the central pillars of film criticism – the notion of a coherent, centralized, and hierarchical national cinema.” Though the series foregrounded three main regions – mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan – Noah remarked, “Chinese cinema is multipolar.” The centre of film production has travelled according to the flow of capital and shifting sociopolitical tides – from Shanghai where the Golden Age of silent cinema flourished, to Xi’An where Fifth Generation’s politically vigilant films emerged, and to Beijing where filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke led a new kind of social commentaries on rapid development.
To map a multipolar cinema is to surface the nexus of relations established geographically and historically. “There is an imagined history that must be informed today,” and Noah highlighted that, in the case of Chinese cinema, the imaginers are not film critics or scholars, but filmmakers themselves. Participating in a larger historical enterprise rather than installing a radical break has been the prevailing motivation of Chinese filmmakers and visual artists. The curation of the series therefore invited careful scrutiny at these historical connections, be they deliberately reflective, like the linkages between the old and the new that young Chinese artist Yang Fudong draws in his exhibition New Women, or purely personal, like the inspiration that John Woo took from Patrick Lung Kong’s The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967) to make his genre classic A Better Tomorrow (1989).
More dedicated than any other component of the series in calling for critical understanding of Chinese cinema were the Higher Learning panels. Organized by TIFF in collaboration with the Asian Institute, the Higher Learning panels gathered renowned filmmakers, academics, and practitioners to discuss topics significant to the scholarship on Chinese cinema. Noah Cowan’s favourite? The Fourth and Fifth Generation Panel that put Fifth Generation auteur Chen Kaige in conversation with his mentor Xie Fei, researcher Chen Biqiang from the China Film Archive, and scholar Bart Testa from the University of Toronto to underline the easily dismissed lineage between two generations of filmmaking. The success of these panels and the series overall has proven that international exchanges of ideas and collaborative thinking on the past, present and future of Chinese cinema is absolutely necessary. “If we are all talking about it, let’s talk together,” Noah concluded. In this light, A Century of Chinese Cinema in itself is a milestone that engaged with and participated in the Chinese cinematic genealogy.
The Toronto International Film Festival’s A Century of Chinese Cinema ran from June 5 to August 11, 2013. Learn more at http://tiff.net/century.
