Comparing Chinese and Western Cinema - A Brief Window

I’m always seeking out new perspectives and styles when I’m watching movies, so I’m particularly interested in work from directors who are from other countries. They’re always markedly different in some way from typical American films, whether there be a more casual perspective on things like nudity and violence, or simply a different form of storytelling. And for this review, I’m going to do a comparative of films from one specific country – China.

First, some ground rules…

- I have to compare critically acclaimed Chinese cinema, so all of these films have more than 80% on Rotten Tomatoes

- No, they're not going to all be wuxia/martial arts films. That's boring.

- No Ang Lee movies (he received his filmmaking education and made most of his films in America, so that kind of doesn’t count)

- I’m counting Taiwanese and Hong Kong films as well, so debate that in the comments as much as you like

- I was unable to find any old Hong Kong John Woo films for free online, so I can’t include those (gorammit)

Now, let’s begin with the first Mandarin-language movie I ever watched…

The Assassin (刺客聶隱娘) – Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien

What a bizarre way to start examining the filmmaking of another culture – watching an arthouse film by a relative outsider to mainstream cinema that’s mainly acclaimed by French people. But that doesn’t matter that much.

The thing that intrigued me the most was an interview I found with Hou and The Guardian, where he stated that “I only make movies for myself”. That kind of perspective was initially so weird to me – doesn’t every filmmaker make whatever the heck that they wanted to make?

But when I looked at Western filmmaking, I realised that many production companies prevent directors from making whatever they want by limiting their creative freedom, or by forcing them to stick by a traditional filmmaking structure. Otherwise, they immediately get savaged by a hostile atmosphere of critics and rejected by other studios. Even relatively independent movies like Annihilation had director Alex Garland wrestling with the studio over his vision vs. commercial appeal. Therefore, seeing a filmmaker like Hou Hsiao-Hsien (or Nicolas Winding Refn, who makes similar statements about being a pornographer who makes films that he wants to see) getting to immediately spill all of their thoughts on their canvas of choice is a surprisingly unique thing in cinema.

Then again, I didn’t like this movie that much anyway. I think that Hou was trying to go for a sort of dance-like or painterly movement with his performers, but ultimately it came across as very emotionally distant. That’s a theme I’ll return to – filmmakers wanting to make their movies look like physical art, or a dance. American filmmakers (even arthouse ones) try to make the film seem natural and flowing, while Chinese filmmakers try to block their films more like a dance.

Another thing I noticed that came up a lot with these movies was the attitude towards exposition (particularly this movie and the next two). Characters simply sit around and talk about things that the audience doesn’t know yet, rather than create an interesting scenario where the information is given naturally. This happens in American films too (the Star Wars prequels did it a lot by simply having characters sit around and talk), but typically it’s in movies which are lazy or considered poor quality, not in acclaimed arthouse films like these.

Given the very visual nature of The Assassin and other Chinese movies, this seems very odd that the one thing that they use dialogue for in this film is also the one thing that you probably shouldn’t use that much dialogue for. Perhaps it’s just the subtitles, but it’s bizarre regardless and distracting.

Right then, moving on to a much lighter movie from the guy that made Dragonball: Evolution…

The Mermaid (美人鱼) – Directed by Stephen Chow

Watching The Mermaid was utterly fascinating (as my review will probably help fill you in on). It was like a Bollywood movie stopped by a McDonalds next to Beijing’s Parliament.

Comparing it to American comedy is really not easy, as there are barely any Western movies like The Mermaid. That kind of throwing-logic-to-the-wind, cartoony humour takes a lot more money in America than China, as looking at the Internet Movie Database of American films, American films have 5 times as many crew members and facility requirements.

I’d compare it at most to some of the absurdist French comedies I’ve seen like Little Nicholas (in that every scene seems to have been made by an alien), or Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge as those films similarly tried to have this larger-than-life/Bollywood appeal that audiences could clap along to. Even so, those are minute and rare examples, and I’m hand-waving a lot here in whether they can be comparable to The Mermaid.

Tonally and story-wise, it’s very different to The Assassin, but I can note some superficial similarities between the two films. Oddly enough, both of these movies share exposition with the audience quite poorly, where the character just sits down and starts spelling out stuff for the audience even through other character already know this. And they both have the exact same font of opening and closing credits, despite being completely different stylistically.

That’s all the commonality I can draw between them. I really can’t say that much about The Mermaid, because it’s such a tonal outlier in the 5 that I chose.

Now, moving on to the first Chinese movie I saw that I actually really liked…

Shadow (影) – Directed by Zhang Yimou

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find Hero, House of Flying Daggers or even Zhang Yimou’s earlier works like Ju Dou, so I went with arguably his most obscure film outside of China (and his most recent), Shadow. And it was effing excellent.

Now, Zhang has directed Hollywood movies before with his 2016 box-office flop The Great Wall starring Matt Damon. But his actual style of direction is very non-Hollywood, much more suited to lower-budget movies and maybe even theatre. His films often have the common ideals of incredibly acrobatic choreography and vivid colour schemes, even his bad ones like The Great Wall.

Shadow continues that trend with a visual style that’s reminiscent of both washed out ancient Chinese paintings and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City. The palette is muted with the costumes and environments being shades of grey, black and white, but human faces and red blood are left coloured, creating truly striking images. And that acrobatic choreography continues from his previous works and is even tied directly into character development instead of just being flashy for flash’s sake.

In regard to those two elements in Hollywood movies (distinct colour schemes and acrobatic choreography), they can be surprisingly uncommon. While it is true that movies like Sin City or the masterpiece that is Unbreakable can have bold solid colour choices running throughout as motifs, most American and British movies choose to use lighting techniques, camera movement or use wide shots with the subject centred to make their movies more visually distinct. Choreography-wise, many Western movies aren’t centred around combat that’s intended to be visually alluring, but instead prefer brutal impact.

So it’s an interesting change of pace to see something so alluringly different from Hollywood standards.

When I was watching Shadow, another thing that I began noticing (which I also noted in The Assassin) was that Zhang prefers to use sound effects or diegetic music during a battle sequence rather than a backing score. It makes every sound feel so distinct from one another, gives them a lot more impact, and makes the world feel a lot more natural. While it’s true that there are bits of music here and there, it’s rare to hear it in battle sequences. Considering that Hollywood rarely allows action to play out diegetically without music telling the audience how to feel, this was also an excellent change of pace.

I can’t really note a lot in this movie that I can draw common strands between it and Hollywood. So I’ll just move on to the most recent film in this piece…

A Sun (陽光普照) – Directed by Chung Mong-Hong

Currently Taiwan’s entry for the 2020 Oscars Best International Feature Film (and also making the current 15-film shortlist), A Sun is easily the most down-to-earth movie out of the 5 on this list. It’s the one which if it was an American film, it would show up at the Independent Spirit Awards, collect something for Best Whatever, and not really get any attention from major film gurus or the general public. It’s also my favourite out of the films in this list, a solid A.

I feel that this movie is the 2nd-most Western-style movie out of all of the ones on this list, mainly because it doesn’t either deal with the mannerisms of historical China or feel like a coke trip. It focuses on a regular working-class family in Taipei, and how they deal with the strife of day-to-day life, rather than a Superman or a pampered privileged moron. That kind of dynamic is loved by Western film critics, especially if you look at last year’s Oscars and see 1917, Joker, Jojo Rabbit, Marriage Story and Parasite all focus on normal people dynamics and get a Best Picture nomination.

A Sun is also directed so beautifully, but unlike The Assassin or Shadow, it uses that more Western-style centring of the subject in a wide shot to both fully convey the scale of the situation and to cram in as much beauty as possible. Many Western films use this technique, such as Mad Max: Fury Road (ensuring that the audience aren’t moving their eyes too much and tiring out) and even non-Chinese-nor-Western films like Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite. The Assassin’s and Shadow’s use of solid colour schemes would probably not fit in this movie, given the more realistic interpretation of events, but I find it interesting to point out regardless.

Another thing which makes this movie feel distinctly more Western than its counterparts on this list is the acting and writing dynamic of characters. These guys don’t respect each other deeply or speak politely and methodically like the other films. They’re angry, they’re loud, they’re awkward, they feel a lot like if you walked into the house of a dysfunctional family in the middle of a row. They speak with an emotional flow rather than waiting for a person to finish their sentence. Great Western movies make their characters feel like this.

And now, for the final movie on this list…

Ip Man (葉問) – Directed by Wai-shun Yip

If you love Donnie Yen in everything he appears in (like me), then Ip Man is the movie for you.

I actually wanted to watch Wong Kar-Wai’s take on Ip Man’s incredible story, which is a film from 2013 called The Grandmaster, but I couldn’t get it online without paying for it. Nevertheless, I still really enjoyed Ip Man as an interesting historical exploration and entertaining martial arts film. It’s what I think is, out of the 5 films here, the most Western-style movie, or at least the most Western-inspired movie. That’s because structurally and story-wise, it feels like a grand American sports drama.

Ip Man’s closest American companion has to be the Rocky films, about an underdog man who gets challenged by an immoral bastard and fights for the glory of his neighbourhood. There’s romance, violence and a ton of training montages, along with some truly despicable villains met along the way.

It even essentially has the villain from Rocky IV – a stone cold man in conflict with Ip Man’s country, who kills his friend unintentionally and must break him out of patriotic glory.

But even though Ip Man clearly takes strong influence from the structure of American sports movies, it is also very much at heart a Hong Kong action film. The gliding camerawork and furious choreography, with dust flying off every impact of bullet and bone, has always been intrinsically linked with the works of Hong Kong’s John Woo’s, Wong Kar-Wai’s and Johnnie To’s. The only American films to replicate such style successfully are either obscure VOD’s or The Matrix films, but if Ip Man was influenced by those, it is miniscule at best.

If people were to actually go and analyse general Chinese cinema, Ip Man would be the strongest reference point out of these 5 films, at least within the genre of action movies from Hong Kong. The others on this list stand out even amongst the relatively small scope of their genres, but Ip Man is tied so intrinsically to the identity of martial arts movies and Hong Kong films that it can serve as a great starting point for deeper analysis.

So that was a brief analysis of differences I noticed between 5 Chinese movies and generalized Western cinema. If this was a scientific report, I’d have massive amounts of uncertainty and a section on systematic error that’s about 5 pages long. But it’s not a science report. It’s just my thoughts.

If you have any other Chinese films to recommend, please leave them in the comments below, along with any questions about my thoughts on other factors (or even suggestions for other countries).