As it turns out, I was wrong to have claimed earlier that "I am Cuba" was the only communist propaganda piece worth a damn: having now seen "Hero", I must wholeheartedly agree with those reviewers who call it an extended apologia for Communist Party rule, its gorgeous cinematics and the wonderful performances of the main actors notwithstanding. No more glorious epic has one ever found on theater screens promoting as dubious a message - that the claims of individuals mean nothing at all when compared to the goal of unity, even if by the sword. If this is the sort of thing which is drilled into them day-in day-out, I can well see why so many young Chinese believe so strongly in the need to reclaim Taiwan by force.
Am I suggesting that people shouldn't watch this movie? Not at all - I heartily recommend the viewing of what will surely go down as a landmark in cinematography. All I'm suggesting is that one watch the movie in the same critical spirit that one might watch Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" or Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin", soaking in the visual poetry while never letting oneself be suckered by it into wondering if the underlying message might not have some validity to it. Not once does the movie raise the possibility that there are other ways to achieve peace amongst men than by unifying them under a tyrannic government - and as tyrants come, the Qin Emperor with his legalist philosophy was one of the most brutal rulers on record, second only to Mao Zedong himself in the harshness with which he treated his Chinese subjects.
The great irony of it all is that had ambitious men like the Qin Emperor never succeeded in uniting China's early states "all under heaven", with the attendant power of all-powerful rulers to stifle any potentially unsettling scholarship or attempts at foreign exploration, it might well have been China's civilization that prevailed globally in the end, rather than that of the many squabbling Western states which always had room for each others' troublemakers provided they had useful ideas to offer to advance their rivalries.
Geography would suggest otherwise. The northern Chinese plain is just too flat and contiguous and self-contained. Eventually, it'd be dominated by a single state, and that state would have had the power to expand into southern China. The Qin had the distinction of being the first, but they were far from the only dynasty to bring all of China under their rule.
Historically, disunity has not been a guarantee of scientific or cultural progress per se. India was plenty disunified for most of its history. Whatever it was that caused Western Europe to leap ahead of the rest of the world in the last millenium, I'm afraid it can't be explained so easily.
Posted by: Mycroft | February 02, 2005 at 01:52 PM
Like all art, Hero is amenable to a wide range of interpretation. I went into it already having read about this 'fascist' interpretation posed by someone in the blogosphere but it seemed to me that it could just as well have been amenable to a pro 'rule of law' vs Hobbesian anarchy interpretation (feudalism can degenerate into Hobbesnian anarchy too). The fascist interpretation more easily comes to mind given the country it was made in and the obvious political connotations.
Posted by: Jason Soon | February 02, 2005 at 02:24 PM
"Geography would suggest otherwise. The northern Chinese plain is just too flat and contiguous and self-contained. Eventually, it'd be dominated by a single state, and that state would have had the power to expand into southern China. The Qin had the distinction of being the first, but they were far from the only dynasty to bring all of China under their rule."
I'm not talking about whether it was an inevitability that China would be united or not, but whether it was a good thing for Chinese civilization in the long run.
"Historically, disunity has not been a guarantee of scientific or cultural progress per se. India was plenty disunified for most of its history. Whatever it was that caused Western Europe to leap ahead of the rest of the world in the last millenium, I'm afraid it can't be explained so easily."
China's own history goes against your thesis. Chinese intellectual thinking was at its most diverse and robust precisely in the Warring States period.
"it seemed to me that it could just as well have been amenable to a pro 'rule of law' vs Hobbesian anarchy interpretation (feudalism can degenerate into Hobbesnian anarchy too)."
I find that hard to swallow, given the highly selective view of history it offered - it showed no trace of the wanton massacres of entire communities and prisoners of war or persecution of intellectuals that made Chin Shi Huangdi so hated - as well as the epilogue quoting heavily from Machiavelli about how good ends justify the most wicked means.
"The fascist interpretation more easily comes to mind given the country it was made in and the obvious political connotations."
Well, the overt political support given to the movie by the Communist Party, from approbation by top officials to the volunteering of PLA soldiers as extras, suggests that this reading is far and away the most likely one. The CCP wouldn't have hesitated a single moment to ban the production if it smelt the trace of subversion in it - instead it celebrated it as what good moviemaking was about.
Posted by: Abiola Lapite | February 02, 2005 at 03:30 PM
You haven't seen a Communist propagandist film until you have seen "Shaolin Kung Fu," a hilarious 1994 documentary starring Jet Li (it's almost as bad as one of those absurd footages from North Korea that try to show how amazing its soldiers are and how beautiful its women are)! It makes you appreciate the subtleties of "Hero" is. If you want a Chinese equivalent of "Triumph of the Will," I would say this is it.
Posted by: Kenji | February 03, 2005 at 01:53 AM
I remember reading zhang zimou's tribute to kurosawa a couple years back:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/990823/kurosawa1.html
including this paragraph:
"Just a few weeks ago, I was having a discussion with my crew on an action film we are making. We conceived a scene in which several people told their stories from different perspectives, and we realized, "Hey, that's Rashomon." I counsel my colleagues to resist the temptation to imitate Kurosawa blindly; it is impossible to surpass him. But such a strong and lingering impact on filmmakers is very hard to resist."
I was a little bit dissapointed of what became of that idea.
Posted by: Shai | February 03, 2005 at 04:55 AM
Nice entry Abiola, I agree with you entirely. Actually I wrote a review of this movie back in 2003 when I got to see a pirated version of it out of China:
http://muninn.net/blog/2003/05/hero.html
I think you will see I had similar views and in keeping with Shai's comment, I made some mention of Kurosawa's Rashomon and Kagemusha.
Posted by: Muninn | April 13, 2005 at 04:29 AM