National trauma, global allegory: reconstruction of collective memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite

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.