Pandemic project / CCTV-6 interstitial music / nostalgia again
During the pandemic, I watched nearly every feature film made in China between 1986 and 1992.
This range was chosen for reasons I don’t recall. The dates do correspond to some studio system reforms. This is the period when the audience was evaporating. The state studios were underfunded and desperate. This is not considered a golden age of cinema.
I liked that most of the films released in this period never received much critical treatment in any language. I could say whatever I wanted about them without second-guessing myself. There was nothing to reference.
I watched around a thousand films, or checked them off the list because I had seen them before.
Inexpensive access to all of these films is a testament to the Chinese-language internet’s unlimited nostalgia and limited respect for copyright.
I have seen all but eight or nine of the pictures from that period listed in Donald J. Marion's The Chinese Filmography. The exceptions are films that were never approved for screening in China and never screened overseas, films that I suspect were announced and marketed but never produced or released, and a few films that seem to have been lost.
I devoted my full attention to most of them. I watched some of them multiple times. Some received minimal attention.
I made some discoveries. I had never seen Li Shaohong’s early pictures, like the vicious, nihilistic Silver Snake Murders (1988), Bloody Morning (1990), a rural epic based on a Gabriel García Márquez story, or the suppressed Blush (1994). These are now important to me.
Beyond Ermo (1994) I was not familiar with Zhou Xiaowen’s oeuvre, which tends toward the cynical, angry, and erotic. I could not figure out why there was no critical celebration of No Regrets (1991), with Zhang Fengyi as a troubled Vietnam veteran and single father, falling in love with a former frontline nurse played by Shi Lan. I was rocked by Rush of Youth (1992), his ultraconservative, ultraviolent postsocialist thriller, in which a young singer played by Shi Lan sells out her boyfriend (Chang Rong, a Zhou favorite plays the role) for a meal of Kentucky Fried Chicken after he saves her from an attempted rape by her producer. I am still fascinated by the groundbreaking rape-revenge fantasy Obsession (1988).
I saw for the first time Guang Chunlan's joyous musicals about Xinjiang under Reform and Opening, Changchun Film Studios Hong Kong gangster ripoffs, the mindbending The Lonely Ghost in the Dark Mansion (1989) (the first horror movie shot since the '40s, the first film given a short-lived restricted rating), the flood of patriotic biopics funded after 1989, Inner Mongolia Film Studio's bizarre Hello, Bikini! (1989) (the swimwear could be shown for the first time on screen in a movie about a bodybuilding competition), a very young Ning Jing in Voyeur Video (1992), the didactic and dramatic Red and White (1987), a trilogy of Jia Pingwa films, Han Xingyuan's odes to Guangzhou, Yunnan Minority Film Studio's pictures about ethnic minorities fighting opium traffickers in the 1930s, AIDS Patient (1988), the twisted anti-pornography horror Evil by Moonlight (1991), which ends with a famous author having a heart attack after inadvertently hiring his own daughter as a prostitute (she was corrupted by reading of his more obscene writing)…
I had mundane reasons for undertaking this project, if it can even be granted that title.
I wanted to entertain myself. It was an alternative to ending the night flicking down the infinite scroll of streaming websites. It was a diversion.
I was unhappy. I was used to traveling to China several times a year. I wanted to be there. I didn’t want to forget the language.
I was nostalgic—not for the country itself, but for a set of specific experiences. I will tell you what they are.
I am sitting on an overstuffed faux leather couch. My bare feet are on the cold, polished floor. I am in Nanjing. This is a furnished rental. White walls. An air conditioning unit towering in the corner like a bodyguard. A sliding door to the balcony. Dust collecting. I smoke one cigarette after another. CCTV-6 is on.
I am in my apartment in Pao’ai. The apartment block was built on a landfill. It shakes every time a truck drives by. Except for a old television and a bed with no mattress, there is no furniture. CCTV-6 is on.
Now this is Guangzhou on a lazy afternoon, with a typhoon approaching. CCTV-6 is on.
These movies from the late 1980s and early 1990s are what CCTV-6 plays in the afternoon. Maybe they don’t anymore. I wouldn’t know. It keeps enough of an audience to sell yogurt and milk powder.
I can hear that interstitial music. I can hear it in my memory, but sometimes the bootleggers will include it, too.
Listen to it on a loop.