The Whole World Worries There Won't Be Good Movies Anymore. People at the Shanghai Film Festival Said So Too, but No One Had an Answer

How did this happen?

On June 25, the Shanghai International Film Festival gave its Golden Goblet for Best Film to Pauwi Na (《三轮浮生》), a Filipino film about a family of five trying to make a living in the city. It also signaled that this year's festival was drawing to a close.

A year earlier, people at this same festival still believed that before long China's box office would pass North America's, the largest film market in the world. And they believed that anyone who entered the market at the right moment stood to make a fortune.

In one year, the mood changed. "At this festival we've become calmer, more rational — or at least more even-tempered," said Ren Zhonglun, president of Shanghai Film Group, a vice chairman of the Shanghai Film Festival's organizing committee and one of its three executive vice chairmen.

Many in the film industry were frustrated, even pessimistic. The mood came from the numbers: China's box office grew just 3.7% in 2016, and revenue fell in several months of the year; output per cinema dropped 17.9%, and output per screen dropped by about 20%.

Film quality fell across the board too. The number of domestic films scoring above 7 on Douban fell from 21 in 2015 to 15. Monitoring by the film-data firm Fanying also showed that audiences liked and accepted domestic films less in 2016. It was a disappointing year for Chinese cinema.

This year's Shanghai Film Festival opened on June 17. Just before that, the whole culture and entertainment business had been through a shock. Several WeChat official accounts covering celebrity gossip, including one called Serious Gossip, were shut down; audio and video content on AcFun and Weibo was cleaned up; over the past year, reports of film and TV works being pulled from platforms were common, and even the critics' score on Maoyan Movies was switched off for a time.

Those involved either said nothing, or issued statements and tightened oversight.

Meanwhile the global film market was doing no better. Hollywood was making more and more blockbusters sold on sequels and visual effects, and audiences were growing more and more tired of them. Hollywood went this way because sequels with a built-in fan base lower the risk; in the end the formula drove people out of the theaters.

There are no good movies left anywhere in the world. That became the thing people worried about most, and the thing filmmakers talked about most at this year's Shanghai Film Festival.

Craftsmanship, supply-side reform, genre film — these topics replaced capital, the internet and big data, the words that had set the agenda for the festival's forums in earlier years.

The film scholar Dai Jinhua said, "That Chinese cinema has come to the point where we're discussing craftsmanship at the main forum of the Shanghai Film Festival — I think what we're really discussing is the bottom line."

And yet even on a question of bottom lines, the market looked lost, with concepts and opinions colliding endlessly. As for an answer, it did not look as though anyone had worked it out.

The internet has been here for years. Why are we still arguing over whether it's good or bad for film?

As early as 2014, Bona Film Group's blunt-spoken CEO Yu Dong said that film companies would end up working for BAT — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.

In 2017, Yu still saw the internet as the film industry's biggest enemy. "Internet capital is pulling the film industry fast toward the small screen. Web movies will top 3,000 titles this year, while theatrical films number only 700. A sea of video is bound to eat into the time audiences spend watching."

In China, web movies are crudely made, and plenty of them are pornographic or knockoffs. One optimistic view holds that this is merely the early stage of culture and entertainment products born on the internet. Once the form matures, it could turn out like Amazon and Netflix, making work that can genuinely win over the Oscars.

The US has already seen this. Elizabeth Frank, executive vice president of AMC Theatres, the chain Wanda bought, said, "We — movie theaters — really have no way to compete with these online platforms for audiences."

For that to happen, the precondition is a free market and looser control. With enough competition, the good separates from the bad.

There is another reason. Because the internet's capacity keeps expanding without limit — much like the DVD shelves at Walmart years ago — it will always need films of every kind to fill it. Art films are the biggest beneficiaries. Kaili Blues, well received last year, took in more than 20 million yuan from paid views on iQiyi, while its theatrical box office was only a little over 6 million. Freed from the constraints of the movie theater, art films actually earned more money and reached more people.

In that sense, the internet is disrupting the movie theater, not the film industry.

Dai Jinhua defends the big screen. In her view the theater, as a way of presenting a film, has a value of its own: "Everything the theater brings with it — the demands it makes on a film's length, the fact that we have to leave home, go out on the street, buy a ticket and walk in — all of it makes up the charm of the film art we know. Once we lose the theater, we lose film. At that point you can declare cinema dead."

This argument has always been with us. Back on the business side, the internet has given films more sources of revenue, which lowers their risk. In theory that should encourage the industry to innovate; looking at the past year, no such trend has appeared.

A shortage of skilled professionals is one of the most basic problems

"I've always said China is short by two or three hundred mature directors." That was Wang Changtian, chairman of Enlight Media, and it may be one of the few facts the Chinese film industry agrees on. A week before the Shanghai Film Festival began, someone in the business said to us with a sigh, "There are far too few directors in China who can actually make a film."

The shortage has many causes. The most important may be that China's film industry has a broken lineage.

From the 1950s on, China's film industry was organized around regional studios; Beijing, Shanghai, Changchun, August First and Pearl River were among the most important. "Back in the 1970s and '80s, when the big studios were still around, they had something handed down. On a major project, an experienced older director would bring along young assistants, and the craft passed from one generation to the next," said Ye Ning, vice president of Huayi Brothers.

But as China's film industry declined through the 1980s, these old studios fell into difficulty one after another and never recovered. Keeping the lights on was hard enough, let alone handing anything down. Private companies came into film from distribution and had too little of their own experience in production to take on the work of training people.

That is not to say there is no way up. One route runs through the project-market sessions at the big film festivals: raise money for your film with an idea or a script compelling enough. The other is to scrape together the money, shoot the film first and sell it to a film company afterward. The first route produced Zhang Meng's The Piano in a Factory and Diao Yinan's Black Coal, Thin Ice; the second produced Bi Gan's Kaili Blues and Xin Yukun's The Coffin in the Mountain.

Against a Chinese film market swelling this fast, that is nowhere near enough. There are 700 films a year, and the preparation cycle is longer still; meeting the demand would take at least a thousand mature directors, and that is before anyone considers the quality of the films.

Wang Changtian believes a more mature film-education system is needed to support the training: "Very few schools in China have a film major, and there simply aren't the teachers to open one." Ye Ning envies Luc Besson's studio: "Very modern soundstages, with his company next door, and more important, five schools in the buildings nearby. Students from those schools can go straight onto a set and get their hands on the work, lighting or script supervision."

More companies have started their own programs to support directors. Tencent Pictures recently teamed up with iQiyi and put money behind ten young filmmakers to make web movies and get some practice. At a press conference during the Shanghai Film Festival, Le Vision Pictures unveiled a "young army" of ten Chinese directors.

Wang Changtian is optimistic: "Turning out twenty or thirty a year right now is no problem. I can feel that twenty or thirty directors with a real career ahead of them is no problem. A hundred in five years, two hundred in ten — we'll get there."

A good story, the hardest thing to define, still can't be pinned down

The Taiwanese writer Chang Ta-chun recalled working with the well-known Hong Kong director King Hu.

Hu had circled a line in the script — "For your great kindness, allow me to repay you as a dog or a horse in my next life" — and asked Chang: our story is set at the end of the Spring and Autumn period, so would people then have thought in terms of "the next life"? Centuries before Buddhism reached China, did the idea of "the next life" exist in that era at all?

Chang answered with the story of "tying grass and carrying a ring in the mouth" from the Zuo Zhuan, arguing that the line made sense. Hu came straight back at him: that story, he said, is about having life and agency after death, not about a next life.

It is a detail almost too small to matter, but Chang believes this is exactly the "craftsmanship" filmmakers should bring to a story: only by treating everything with that much care can a film be convincing enough.

In the actual making of a film, the story may be the hardest thing of all to talk about. As Wang Changtian said when asked what makes a good story, "Usually I just refuse to answer that, because there really is no way to answer it."

For filmmakers there is too much here they cannot control. Wang said that in deciding whether to make a film, the most important test is "whether the script is a good read" — and yet many of Enlight's own films have been criticized for bad stories, among them Deng Chao's Devil and Angel (《恶棍天使》) and Timothy Kendall's Hollywood Adventures (《横冲直撞好莱坞》).

Throughout the Shanghai Film Festival, whenever directors, screenwriters or film-company executives spoke about how to create a good story, they said you need cultural confidence, you need to connect with the present moment and with personal reflection. An argument persuasive enough to hold onto never seemed to appear.

What counts as a good movie has itself become a question

From ordinary viewers to professionals, there has never been a coherent standard for what counts as a good movie.

The internet's democratization has sped up the decline of the academic elite. Talk about a film's technique and aesthetics can look feeble beside "I like it, take it or leave it," because the second is simpler to say and comes in far greater numbers. The film-critic system, which rested on traditional media and was never robust in China to begin with, weakened as traditional media collapsed, and grassroots word of mouth from the internet took its place.

When Zhang Yimou's The Great Wall came out, opinion split into two camps at once. One held that as a by-the-numbers monster movie it was competent and reasonably entertaining. The other held that the story was hollow and the logic incoherent, and that Zhang Yimou was still clinging to his mass-calisthenics aesthetics with nothing new to show. The clash between the two over how to define a good movie was plain to see.

Arguments about values are another kind of split. Even a sports film like Dangal could not avoid a debate about feminism. Some argued that the father played by Aamir Khan forced his own ambitions on his two daughters for no good reason, and that the film was promoting an inhumane spirit.

Worth noting: this kind of split did not begin with social media. Wherever different people watch a film there is a private aesthetic response to it, but social media has made voices that once went unheard suddenly loud. There is strength in numbers, and volume has become an important factor in measuring word of mouth — which can blur the regrettable parts of a good film and just as easily cover up the shoddiness of a bad one. Volume itself is neutral. Looking only at the score and not at who is doing the scoring is an extremely crude way to research a market, and today's system for judging films rests to a large degree on exactly that method.

With the standards this blurry, whether a film is domestic — itself one marker of ideology — has also become a factor in how it gets judged. If the internet is pushing film content toward variety, the system for judging films has not grown along with it.

Who's to blame for the lack of good movies?

"Is it that we have so many garbage viewers that we end up with so many garbage movies?" Feng Xiaogang said. "For Chinese cinema to leave audiences feeling that it's garbage everywhere they look, there must be something to do with the huge number of garbage viewers. Isn't that right? If people didn't turn out for these films, the films would have no room to survive, and producers would stop making garbage movies. And yet garbage movies often take huge box office."

At first glance the argument looks right. Switch, from a few years back, might be the proof. The film scored 2.9 on Douban and took more than 300 million yuan, because it drew a crowd curious to see how bad it really was. After that came Tiny Times, attacked as an incoherent, music-video film, which earned 1.8 billion yuan across four installments on the strength of Guo Jingming's deep fan base.

But audiences are not made in a day. The system for judging films described above is one problem; the film industry's amusing-ourselves-to-death bent is another. In China you probably have to add the invisible hand of the market, and ideology.

Dai Jinhua argues: "Our audiences did not grow up normally inside a varied, rich film market. So our audiences are more passively shaped by whatever set of options is put in front of them."

Her other point: "China's film market today is highly monopolized. Screening allocation decides everything."

In the 1990s, domestic film hit a low point, Hollywood blockbusters became the global mainstream, and China's Fifth Generation directors poured enormous time into blockbusters of their own — Zhang Yimou's Hero, Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet, Chen Kaige's The Promise. The blockbuster model has always been criticized for strong pictures and weak narrative; that argument has not stopped since the year Star Wars appeared. And now that Hollywood has moved into sequel mode, the people who once led the way have lost their bearings too.

Judging by China's market in 2016, audiences seem to have moved ahead of the films — the fabled business of voting with their feet.

Fanying's data shows that, driven by the building of new theaters, more and more people who never used to go to the movies are indeed walking in. But the number of heavy moviegoers, those who watch more than 12 films a year, has fallen. Losing that group, the viewers who care most about quality, is the main reason the box office barely grew in 2016. This industry's growth rests on reaching new audiences and building new theaters, and that will reach saturation sooner or later.

Unlike film-score data, this data is hard to argue with. What it shows is not a controversy but a change in the structure of moviegoing. Nor is it regional: it is national, and global.

Think these problems through and you find that talent, standards of judgment, market competition and historical legacy are all locked together, and together they produced today's situation. That is the part that should really worry us.

Cover image: The Piano in a Factory, Brotherhood of Blades