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Violence ceases to be viewed as dangerous and harmful behavior that should be restrained. Instead, it has become a type of entertainment with its own aesthetic value. Chinese big movie directors are fond of and good at portraying violence through extremely beautiful and eye-catching images. They have perfectly integrated "beauty" and "violence." They distort violence by painting it in attractive scenes that people want to taste and enjoy.
Zhang Yimou and other big movie directors like to repeatedly fix the camera -- and the eyes of the audience -- on scenes full of blood, flesh and dead bodies. In addition, they like to film violent scenes in beautiful mountains or wide prairies or deserts. Zhang Yimou's first big movie, "Hero" -- which was China's first big domestic hit -- basically set the standard for the beautification of violence. To put it more precisely, it is a perfectly beautiful depiction of violent behavior. This practice was faithfully carried on in Zhang's later movie, "House of Flying Daggers" as well as Director Feng Xiaogang's movie, "The Banquet."
Watching this kind of scene numbs people's normal feelings, creating what we may call "aesthetic fatigue." A French scholar, analyzing the impact of the violence during the French Revolution, said that people's feelings were so numb after seeing the guillotine used repeatedly, that they lost their sense of fear. At that time, mothers took their children to see the executioner just like today's mothers take their children to a puppet show.
In one well-known scene in "Hero," for example, the head of the Qin state -- who was actually an assassin from the state of Zhao -- and three other assassins named Long Sky, Flying Snow, and Broken Sword, engage in a fight using real and virtual images. In another scene, Flying Snow and Broken Sword's maid had a life-and-death fight in a forest full of flying yellow leaves. In the movie "House of Flying Daggers," there was a scene of fighters chasing and killing each other in a bamboo wood and another scene where two police chiefs had a long and weird fight from summer to winter.
Zhang Yimou and other big movie directors like to film fights in carefully chosen beautiful natural environments. They also like to highlight the ritualistic visual effects. Moreover, the pictures are accompanied by beautiful and graceful music, in order to highlight the principle of integrating extreme violence and extreme beauty. Here, violence is demonstrated as outstanding martial arts performances and competitions. In these films, human life has become more or less unimportant. The flesh and blood of human beings become props for entertaining.
Achieving ornamental effects and visual stimulation are the highest goals of these violent dramas. According to photographer Cheng Xiaodong, the chase scene and killing in a pit in the movie "Curse of the Golden Flower" was intended to create a visual climax. He said this was the most dangerous task he had ever done in his movie career. Nearly 30 people slid down 1,300-foot ropes in this scene. Even the most experienced directors of "flying" in Hong Kong had never filmed so many people at such a great height before. In addition, the stage construction was risky. If a "flying" person fell he would lose his life. Cheng said this five-minute scene cost over 3 million yuan (around US$400,000.) Unfortunately, this chasing and killing scene doesn't seem to be worth this much money. It merely shows off technological skills and creates a frightening atmosphere.
To conclude, this practice of depicting violence as beautiful is creating a distorted taste in entertainment and an addiction to blood and violence among viewers. It can also encourage violent behavior off the screen. Most fighting scenes have neither moral nor immoral meaning. They are basically martial arts performances, such as the opening scene in "House of Flying Daggers" where the young sister puts on an extremely beautiful performance fighting two police chiefs.
Nevertheless, when a scene involves the deaths of a large number of people, or the mass slaughter between nations, ethnic groups and communities, the lack of morality and ambivalent attitude toward justice and evil may have serious social and cultural consequences. Even so, the big movie directors care only about their perfect beauty.
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(Tao Dongfeng is a professor in the Chinese Department of Capital Normal University in Beijing. He is also editor-in-chief of the scholarly periodical "Culture Research." This article is translated and edited from the Chinese. ©Copyright Tao Dongfeng.)
