Notes on Wang Xiaoshuai

It’s about one degree Celsius, a typically chilly Beijing winter morning, as I nervously wander through the grounds of a sports-club complex, late for an interview with Wang Xiaoshuai. The estate is dwarfed by ageing high-rises and the sky is a bleak shade of grey, the kind of environment usually reserved for British social-realist films. There are no signs of life and all the buildings share the same locked-and-barred visage. Most of the signage is written in Chinese characters and the ‘gardens’ are covered in a thin layer of ice. My friend, accompanying me as a translator, leads us down one path only to meet an ominous carpark. We’re late as it is and we’re both terrified that our eventual reception will be chillier than the locale.

We put a call through to Wang’s assistant and we finally enter a building, ride the sardine-can elevator and knock on a door which looks like it should be on the front of a bank-vault. Wang’s assistant ushers us in, hands us some tiny plastic bags to slip over our shoes and seats us on a plush leather sofa. Wang’s office is inviting but orderly and there’s no sign of the filmmaker. After a few minutes of small talk with his assistant, Wang shuffles in, greets us, lights up a cigarette and sits down to talk.

Wang’s career stretches right back to the early nineties when he established himself as a key figure of China’s Sixth Generation filmmakers after graduating from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy. His landmark debut The Days, starring renowned painter Liu Xiao-dong, transplanted a Euro-minimalist formal approach onto an extremely intimate love-story: the result remains a haunting tribute to the lovers and intellectuals of the twentysomething generation struggling in the shadows of Tiananmen. The film travelled to numerous festivals and attracted the (unfortunate) attention of the mainland’s film bureau who placed Wang on their blacklist: this ban led him to direct Frozen under the pseudonym ‘Wu Ming’ (literally translated as “no name”) as he submitted another project through the official channels. Individual struggle in the face of society’s pressures seems to be a broader constant flowing through Wang’s work but more acutely, he seems fixated on how Chinese society’s constant transformations scar compact ‘family’ units – families, in the traditional formation or in makeshift unions like the Nightclub singer and her two male kidnappers in So Close to Paradise or the commune of performance artists in Frozen. After a reworked title and numerous edits, 1997’s So Close to Paradise located elements of the hard-boiled gangster noir within a tale of rural migrants struggling to make ends meet in the big smoke. 2001’s Beijing Bicycle, which brought Wang acclaim at Berlin with the Grand Jury Prize and the Best Actor award, continued Wang’s focus on the pressures and pitfalls facing the working youth by charting the devastating consequences of a stolen bike on two teenage boys. Bicycle obtained levels of dramatic tension well exceeding its heritage, namely De Sica’s film, and provided a terrific snapshot of Beijing’s contemporary youth culture: unsurprisingly it’s probably Wang’s most well known film in the West.

The spectre of American migration which hung over Wang’s debut resurfaced in Drifters and the two films share somewhat of a continuity with their downtrodden protagonists and long-take formal execution. But whereas The Days ended with departures, Drifters opened with arrivals; a young man returns to his home town after a stint in the States to face reassimilation into his family which includes a baby son living with the mother’s relatives. Shanghai Dreams explored the growing pains of a teenage girl coping with political exile during the Cultural Revolution and the film picked up the Jury Prize at Cannes 2005. From these brief descriptions you’ll probably notice a few themes cropping up which seems to make Wang’s latest Left, Right a natural progression in the career of a filmmaker so intensely focused on familial dynamics and individual struggle.

On his film IN LOVE WE TRUST
A while ago, I watched a few television shows with the kind of stories where a mother is looking for her ex-husband and the program is there to help the search as well as the audiences at home. There was another one about sisters who were apart for more than two decades; there were a few stories like that. When we were gossipping about these stories later, it attracted my attention and interests. In China, of course, it’s a happy celebration for a family to have a baby, but it isn’t easy to bring up a child, there will be a series of troubles along the way. In such a difficult situation, imagine a broken family and ex-partners having to conceive a child together. Two separate families reuniting for the purpose of having a new baby, try imagining the trouble which would arise from such a situation. This story is quite suitable for a film premise and quite suitable for the feeling that I want my films to have at the moment.

On his student years at the Beijing Film Academy
Beijing Film Academy was the only comparatively professional academy relating to films in those years [the eighties]. There were a few academies of music and art; however, there was only one film academy. The most important thing was that it provided an environment which allowed students to see many films that we otherwise could not have seen. Watching films is actually a process of studying film: therefore, this environment was very essential. Nowadays, the advantage doesn’t exist anymore, films are available on the market once they are released. It was different in those years hence it was an advantageous environment that the academy could offer to students. In addition, it was relatively difficult to make a film then, a film would cost one to two million RMB. No one would believe in you or invest if you had not been trained in the academy. In other words, it was necessary to have a qualification to make a film. This, once again, doesn’t apply anymore. Nowadays, a group of young people can shoot a film using a digital camera as long as they have passion and a story they want to tell. These are the functions of the academy.

Influences
In the beginning, it was Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini; and then Ozu Yasujiro’s films which I saw at university; Yang and Hou’s films that were brought in by Tony Rayns, they all influenced us. The influence became orientalised, it went from the west to the east. Hiroshima Mon Amour made by Alain Resnais looked like a film made by a person from the east rather than France.

Being Blacklisted
I was confused and lost at that time, I could not work out my way. I thought in a very simple way, and I believed that I was not wrong. Instead I felt proud of myself because I did not spend one cent that was from the government to make the film. I thought I understood completely that our country was a very poor country which had no money. Yet it still needed films. So I made a film without financial assistance from the government which responded to Chairman Mao’s call of “paddling one’s own canoe and being self-dependent”. It was a bit naïve. It is a lot freer now, and the rules have changed. But I kept thinking I didn’t do anything wrong, it wasn’t anything illegal. Sometimes, a very simple idea can be your spiritual support for a very long time.