Review:
The Blue Kite recounts how a child and his mother survive through the turbulence of China during the 1950s and 60s, when political beliefs that were proper one year might be deemed counterrevolutionary the next. It is a troubling climate, where nothing is certain, and the greatest difficulty of growing up lies in determining what is proper behavior and what is likely to get you taken away for "reform."
Tian Zhuangzhuang, a charter member of China's politically beleaguered, so-called Fifth Generation of Directors (along with Ju Dou's Zhang Yimou), made this harrowing but sensitive film about the gradual disintegration of an entire family targeted by Mao's political reformation movements of the '50s and '60s. Beginning in the spring of 1953, Lin Shaolong, a librarian, and Chen Shujuan, a teacher, marry, have a son named Tietou, and bring together relatives and friends into an instant, inviting community.
The best recent films from China - Farewell My Concubine, Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou - invariably run into censorship problems on their own turf. China even tried to withdraw Ju Dou from Academy Awards competition after it had been nominated for best foreign film.
But few of these films have been as openly and effectively persecuted as The Blue Kite, a quietly damning account of political and personal tragedies in Beijing in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of it is told from the point of view of Tietou, a child who observes the gradual disintegration of his family as the Cultural Revolution approaches.
I don't know if there really is an ancient Chinese curse that says, "May you live in interesting times," but after seeing "The Blue Kite" I can certainly understand the feeling behind it. During a period which has given us one great Chinese film after another, here is one of the most extraordinary, a sweep of modern Chinese history seen through the eyes of a single family.
When the Chinese authorities first viewed Tian Zhuangzhuang's "The Blue Kite," they were distressed by what they referred to as its "political leanings" and banned it from exhibition in China. Now that the 1992 film has finally come to America, it is easy to see why.
National Trauma, Global Allegory: reconstruction
of collective memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite
by Xudong Zhang
Abstract: "In this paper the author examines the ideological use of history in ‘International Film Festival Films’ from Mainland China in the early 1990s. The author observes that films like Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite, and Zhang Yimou’s To Live all share the post-revolutionary assumption and seek to deconstruct the ‘grand-narrative’ of social revolution and idealism by constructing a counter-narrative of national trauma and traumatized individual life. By analyzing the filmic text of The Blue Kite, the author argues that, instead of exploring the complexity of social change and everyday life of the Chinese twentieth century, the former Fifth Generation auteurs resorted to a visual ontology or mythology of the present, which in turn invents its past as a melodrama of ‘human nature’ or ‘art as such’. The reason why moments of those films remain compelling, as the author argues, is not because of the new metaphysics and ahistorical conclusions at the superficial level, but lies in the fact that the visual and narrative logic of the ‘new cinematic language’ (as a result of the aesthetic–political upheaval of the Chinese 1980s) resists the formula of ‘healing’ and captures the irreducible complexity of a world of life (i.e. Mao’s China) despite the ideological tendency of the global 1990s."
The Wooden Man's Bride.; Farewell My
Concubine.; The Blue Kite.; To Live.
by Zhiwei Xiao
Excerpt: "International attention has been brought to Chinese cinema primarily through the films of a group of elite directors referred to in China as "The Fifth Generation." Directors such as Chen Kaige, Huang Jianxin, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Zhang Yimou have been called, variously, "xianfeng daoyan" (vanguard director), "zheli daoyan" (philosophical director), or "yishu dianying daoyan" (art film director). These terms of designation suggest the distance and difference between their works and those of mainstream popular film production in China."
Actor/Actress Info: