Background
CHEN, KAIGE was born on 12 August 1954 in Beijing.
陈凯歌
CHEN, KAIGE was born on 12 August 1954 in Beijing.
Studied at Beijing Cinema College.
At the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d’Or was shared between Jane Campions The Piano and Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine. One understood the urge to pay attention to Chen. China in the time of his first films as a director had seen one more movement in the symphony of turmoil. Chen’s movies had faced censorship and graver threats to the director’s liberty. Further, he was a central figure in the very promising new wave of Chinese films, along with Zhang Yimou, who photographed Yellow Earth and The Big Parade. In addition, Chen Kaige had set out to make movies that address the periodic assaults on its own culture and hope, the convulsion of modern China.
He has never lacked courage, and in Farewell My Concubine he had mounted an epic-picture, a Chinese response to The Last Emperor. (Chen acted in that picture and he seems impressed not just by its scale, but by the theme of refined spirits who are battered bv history or fate.)
That said, the Palme d’Or to Farewell seemed a gesture of generosity. It has a fine eye, a vivid way with actors (Leslie Cheung, Zliang Fengyi, and Cong Li), and that dramatic sense of color that is most striking now in China. But, for its length, the picture is monotonous and evasive. The characters are not truly revealed (compared with The Piano) and the pattern of history’s unkindness is eventually simpleminded. We do not learn enough about the inner life—as if that vital territory was still unfamiliar in China.
Temptress Moon and The Emperor and the Assassin seem to me further assertions of the same talent—spectacular, genuinely energetic- films, still full of excitement for the medium—yet overlong, unduly complicated (or even incoherent) and not really anxious to go beyond the limits of genre. The Emperor and the Assassin was said to be the most lavish film ever made in China, set in the fourth century B.C., with Gong Li again (no one’s complaining) as the concubine who links the worlds of court and crime. Temptress Moon, set in Shanghai in the twenties, seemed better and more urgent just because it was an attempt to see the roots of China’s modern history. Chen does the epic style too easily. He is better on character when taking on modem times. But, plainly, the epic is more comfortable and likely more profitable for the Chinese film authorities.