Did Indian filmmakers steal from Kurosawa? They didn't need to; they were working in the world's largest movie industry (largest in number of pictures produced - 700 a year) and in a tradition harking back to the first Indian talkie. That 1931 film, "Alam Ara", contained a dozen song-and-dance numbers; so do most Indian movies today. Far from the art-house caviar of Satyajit Ray's, these films are take-out curry: delirious melodramas italicized by frenetic cooch. In the hands of a master mesmerist like Mani Rathnam (best work: the 1987 gangster saga "Nayakan"), they are truly something to sing about. But India's industry is driven by stars and genres, not auteurs. The all-time box-office champ, Mikul S. Anand's 1992 "Khuda Gawah" ("God Is My Witness"), is a two-generation tale of Afghan horsemen with terrible secrets, bandits with cellular phones, a princess who goes nearly mad with love, car chases, shoot-outs, surrealistic production numbers - passion at a pitch that Wagner wouldn't have dared.
India, like the U.S., is propelled by the box office. In Asia it usually takes a dictatorship to subsidize the art film. Filipino cinema had a lot more verve in the early '80s, when angry directors like Lino Brocka wriggled under Imelda Marcos' shoe heel, than it does today in the sunlight of constitutional republicanism. Working in chains can give filmmakers a sacred, subversive mission; working in freedom often only offers them a deal.
And when a regime invites its best-known
émigrés back, it can invite trouble. In
France, where he had lived for many years, Tran Anh Hung
made "The Scent of Green Papaya", a lovely memory film of
life in Saigon before the Americans arrived. Pleased with
the international publicity his film received, the
Vietnamese government asked Tran to make a movie in his
homeland. The result, "Cyclo", was a sex- and
violence-filled excoriation of gangsterized Vietnam. Tran's
rancid rebuke to his appalled sponsors was gritty
filmmaking, very bad manners.
The People's Republic of China need not import its malcontents; it has raised, trained, financed and punished them. In 1984 Chen Kaige's "Yellow Earth", photographed by Zhang Yimou, announced the arrival of a brilliant generation of directors shaped and scarred by the Cultural Revolution. Chen, Zhang and their colleagues have since fought to tell stories critical of the regime and with great dramatic and pictorial appeal. Their films (Zhang's "Raise the Red Lantern", Chen's "Farewell My Concubine", Tian Zhuangzhuang's "The Blue Kite", among many beautiful works) have played to acclaim around the world, but are often censored or banned at home. As Chen has ruefully noted, "I am a Chinese director who has to make Chinese films for the international market."
There are two ways to infiltrate that market. One is to make "regional" and "artistic" films, whose measured pace and rural setting give them the romance of the unknown; the films of Ray, Kurosawa and Ozu, Chen and Zhang, and Taiwan's minimalist master Hou Hsaio-hsien intoxicated Western viewers with the very foreignness of their folkways. The other strategy is to try to beat Hollywood at its own game with homegrown stars and lots of grunting action. If these films don't break the U.S. stranglehold, they can at least attract pan-Asian moviegoers by offering them American-style stories with actors who look, reassuringly, like members of the family.
Hong Kong has successfully taken the second road; its kung fu adventures and broad comedies dominate Southeast Asia and have a video cult following around the world. But even Hong Kong filmmakers are given to nose-thumbing gestures at the Hollywood megalith. In Tsui Hark's 1993 epic, "Once upon a Time in China III", the turn-of-the-century hero Wong Fei-hung (played by martial-arts star Jet Li) is shown a primitive movie camera and asked to perform a little kung fu in front of it. He does so, with grave, lightning grace. But when he learns that the camera belongs to a foreigner, he executes a scissors kick and smashes the thing to pieces. You show 'em, Fei-hung, the Pacific Rim audience must have said. No imperialism in our movies!
