Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works

Writing of documentary films, I have to see this, not least because it seems to have been highly contentious for the Director’s (Yan Ting Yuen) decision to avoid dwelling too much on the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and focusing instead on the kitsch value of the model operas, albeit with the constant haunting presence of Jiang Qing (aka Madame Mao) who provides a voice over (fictional, but based on her biography) from beyond the grave.

More info here (Guardian article) and here (official film ‘presskit’ -pdf file).

And there’s a podcast of a Q&A session with Yuen available here in which she discusses the difficulties associated with gaining interviews with the original performers, filming in China, recreating the Yang Ban Xi for the musical segments and the rehabilitation of the once banned operas and their growing popularity in China in recent years. Well worth a listen.

Young and old alike seem fascinated by the Yang Ban Xi operas. When the operas are revived on stage today, both parents and their children flock to see them. Teenagers, Yuen says, regard them as “fun and campy - they look at the operas with so much irony. They like them but they laugh about them.”

…

Yuen is not apologetic in the slightest about tackling a seismic moment in Chinese history with “a big, big wink”. “You just have to look at the Yang Ban Xis with irony,” Yuen insists. “It’s like with Leni Riefenstahl. She is completely taboo, but nobody denies that she made perfect, beautiful art.”

(Guardian Unlimited, 4th March 2005)

So, the Chinese find it as ‘easy’ to ignore the ideological baggage of CultRev material culture as westerners, though I’m sure it goes without saying that the younger and older generations approach and mentally process this material from radically different perspectives.

In the podcast, Yuen makes the same points as Bright Sheng, i.e. Jiang’s appropriation of western forms (despite the attendent ideological issues) in devising the operas, and the nostalgia value of the Yuan Ban Xi for those that grew up with them. She also discusses how the failure of the Chinese Government to deal effectively with the legacy of the Cultural Revolution has left the post-CultRev generation bereft of education about this period, meaning that they too - like westerners - have few points of reference from which to fully appraise the true political and cultural significance of the Yuan Ban Xi, and other aspects of CultRev material culture.

Problem is I can’t find a copy of the film on sale in the UK and I’m really not 100% certain that region 1 DVDs will work on player. Do I take the risk? That’s a rhetorical question btw, I don’t expect an answer!

All this talk of the 8 Model Works and Jiang Qing also reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write a post about former revolutionary opera performer Anchee Min’s brilliant autobiography Red Azalea for quite some time (something to add to the ‘to do’ list).

Though I Am Gone: Cultural Revolution Documentary

Via Danwei and loads of other blogs is this Chinese-made documentary about Bian Zhongyun, supposedly the first teacher to be beaten to death (by her female students) during the Cultural Revolution.*  The documentary has attracted attention, not just for its powerful subject matter, but because its inclusion in a film festival in Yunnan lead to the event’s cancellation by the Chinese authorities.

The whole documentary, with English-language subtitles, is available in ten parts on You Tube.  I’ve only had a chance to view the first part so far (via the Citizen of Philadelphia blog), but I’ll definitely make the time to watch the rest over the next couple of days.

*In an addendum to the Danwei post Geramie Barme suggests that Bian was neither the first teacher killed, nor that she was beaten to death (though she was clearly beaten).  But that her death remains notorious, probably in no small part due to her husband’s efforts to document her death and the events and persecution she suffered leading up to it.

Revolution is Not a Garden Party

I’ve been bad.  Rather than finishing the books I’ve already got on the go, I’ve done a ‘Stasiland’and picked up something else instead.  However, I have a good excuse.  A family bereavement just before Easter has left me feeling fairly ‘numb’. But I’m not going to beat myself up about abandoning schedules and reading plans .  I’m just going to read/write whatever appeals for however long it takes.  At least that way I’ll continue to make progress, if a little haphazardly.

Anyway, back to the publication in question: Revolution is Not a Garden Party - the catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition of the same name currently on display at the Norwich Gallery (which I missed the chance - through no fault of my own - to see.  I’m still seething!).

Taking Mao’s famous quote and applying it to the legacy of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, the organisers have gathered together a collection of contemporary (Eurocentric) works and installations that consider ‘the resonances of social and political revolution’.  So, while there’s little (despite the title) tieing the exhibition to China, the essays and responses to the works compiled in the catalogue have provided me with a few ideas and pointers for my own research and a list of theorists to investigate; Deleuze, Levinas and Guattari.

One particular installation which caught my eye (though - of course - I’ve only seen it on paper and on the Internet, dammit!) is Sanja Ivekovic’s ‘Figure and Ground’ and the response to it written by Dora Hegyi.

Revolution is Not a Garden Party Flyer (see second page of the pdf for excerpt)

Ivekovic has taken a series of fashion shots produced for the Face in 2001 and juxtaposed them with photo-journalist images of terrorists published in Der Speigel in the same year.  The models are clothed in a ‘terrorist look’ without consideration of the ideological meaning behind the reality.  Hegyi argues that through these images (which are, despite the connotations, really quite beautiful - I’m totally inspired by the slash of red eye shadow sported by the model featured in the exhibition flyer) consumers are encouraged to identify with the terrorist as ‘hero’.  In my opinion the associations are little more fuzzy and less fixed than that.  I doubt these visual references were used in as considered a manner as that.  Surely the representations employed by the stylist and photographer have more to do with an enduring image of rebellion, the outsider, the individual rallying against the norm/society?     I’m immediately put in mind of the Manic Street Preachers’ infamous performance of ‘Faster’ on Top of the Pops. Which is sadly no longer available on YouTube and so I can’t share it here (though it is featured on the DVD which accompanies the 10th anniversary edition of ‘The Holy Bible’).  Anyway, it featured James Dean Bradfield in a balaclava on a stage set inspired by Irish paramilitary stylings, replete with burning torches.  Still - supposedly - the catalyst for the most complaints ever received by the BBC in the shortest period of time. Hurrah for the Manics! 

Hegyi does go on to make the point that in these images, fashion is making a [superficial] connection between freedom and terrorism [without recourse to the ideological baggage of course].  Though, it has to be said, in the case of the Manic Street Preachers, the images they invoked through the appropriation of paramilitary and - indeed - communist iconography in the mid-1990s carried considerably more power and shock-value than they might today.  The overall effect was really quite seditious and menacing at the time; the IRA had not yet announced its ceasefire and the menacing spectre of communism in western imaginings remained fresh, despite the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR.

I appear - as ever - to have gone off on a bit of a tangent…