The House Next Door

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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First, I want to acknowledge that this is the first—and perhaps only—Shooting Down Pictures blog entry dedicated to a Chinese film, a fact that at first seems baffling given my passion for Chinese cinema (not to mention the fact that I’m heavily involved in a pioneering effort to bring more Chinese cinema to the U.S.). But this blog is dedicated to exploring the titles on the They Shoot Pictures 1000 Greatest Films list that I haven’t yet seen, and of the 20 films from China/Hong Kong/Taiwan on the list, this is the only one that qualifies.

It’s also worth noting that I watched this film the same week that I read a breakthrough in-depth article on Jia Zhangke by Evan Ossnos in The New Yorker, the leading figure of the so-called Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers from the Beijing Film Academy. It’s an article that, in my opinion, marks a decisive shift in mainstream American attention away from the Fifth Generation and towards the Sixth Generation (a much-delayed shift, I must say, and one I find all the more amusing since I’m currently focused on what one might call the post-Generation—or de-Generation?—of Chinese filmmakers). There are 13 productions from Mainland China and Hong Kong listed in the They Shoot Pictures 1000 Greatest Films, of which five titles are from the vaunted Fifth Generation of Beijing Film Academy directors, and all belong to just two names: Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Too bad there isn’t room for other great Fifth Generation works, such as Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Horse Thief and The Blue Kite or Jiang Wens’ In the Heat of the Sun, much less numerous Sixth Generation titles by Jia Zhangke, Ning Ying (On the Beat), Zhang Yuan (Sons) and the like.

I bring up the issue of Fifth, Sixth and post-Generation Chinese cinema because it informed my viewing of King of the Children, the first Fifth Generation film I’ve seen in a few years (I don’t include anything Zhang or Chen have done in the 2000s as they’re working in quite a different aesthetic environment than what they did in the ’80s and ’90s.) In some ways, the highly politicized realism of post-Fifth Generation films have done their work on my eyes, because it was difficult for me to get into the world of the film as an authentic place and time. It’s amazing to think that King of the Children was once considered part of a breakthrough movement to bring the “real” China to the screen, in opposition to the whitewashed, propagandizing cinema of an idealized China that was the norm (and still is, though in a more sophisticated form). In its own way King of the Children idealizes the rural peasantry, lensing the dirt-poor environment in lush, romantic hues.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.