Director Zheng Dasheng Says What Makes Him Most Anxious Is "Not Knowing" — and Not Knowing Can Kill You | Interviews No. 12

"No lesson has ever been learned from history — that is the one lesson history teaches."

In February 2014, when director Zheng Dasheng received a new book from Writers Publishing House — Selected Stories of Jia Dashan — he had no idea it would become the starting point for his next film.

Jia Dashan's name became widely known in early 2014, when Guangming Daily republished in full an old essay Xi Jinping had written in 1998, "Remembering Dashan". Over the course of that year, three publishers brought out collections of Jia's stories; the belly band read, "the novelist who brought President Xi to tears three times."

In 1964, Jia Dashan was sent as an "educated youth" to a village in Zhengding, Hebei. He went from performing kuaiban — rhythmic clapper storytelling — at the production brigade's clubhouse to teaching at the village school, then transferred to the county cultural center. His stories are full of the villages and peasants of that era, with plain titles like "The Flower Market" and "Writing Spring Couplets."

Leafing through Jia's book, Zheng Dasheng came to the ending of one story. A production-team leader, dutifully searching every commune member who walks out of the peanut field, notices that his eight-year-old daughter's mouth is moving and slaps her without hesitation. A peanut is lodged in her windpipe. She dies — and that scene later became the core of Zheng's film Village Rhapsody.

In June 2017, Village Rhapsody had a preview screening at the Shanghai Film Museum.

Village Rhapsody is set in 1982, in a small Hebei village on the eve of the household-responsibility land reform. To celebrate the coming redistribution, the village party secretary arranges for an old opera to be staged again at New Year. As the village rehearses Beating the Princess, everyone is also eyeing "Nine and a Half Mu," a prime plot of land occupied by the village madman. As the two threads — the rehearsal and the redistribution — intertwine, the historical tragedy behind the madman's madness comes into view.

To Zheng Dasheng, the period is only a backdrop.

Zheng Dasheng is the grandson of the theater and film director Huang Zuolin and the son of the director Huang Shuqin. Both his parents worked at what was then the Shanghai Film Studio. He was born in the Year of the Monkey, so his family named him Dasheng — "Great Sage," the Monkey King's title. Before he turned five, his parents were placed under isolation and investigation, and he was raised by his grandparents in Tianjin. After that, his mother took him to a "May Seventh" cadre school. In Interviews with Chinese Independent Filmmakers, he recalled that at the cadre school's nursery the woman who looked after the children was Wang Danfeng, and the children's favorite "show" was watching the military propaganda team denounce Zhao Dan.

In 2000, Zheng Dasheng made his first film, Atao, about the friendship between a city girl named Yilan, who in the late 1970s travels to the mountains to visit her mother, who had been sent down to the countryside, and a Tujia girl named Atao. He later explained: "I never set out to make a children's film, still less a story about a little girl. What I wanted to film was the cadre schools."

That debut went on to win the Jury's Special Award at the 8th Shanghai International TV Festival and the top prize at the first Lily Awards for Outstanding Television Films. "Television films" are the ones we often see on CCTV-6 — shot on digital, running a little shorter than theatrical releases.

In 1991 he went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a master's degree, and while studying did a great deal of avant-garde film experimentation. In "A Solitary Filmmaker's Confession," an essay published in the magazine Avant-Garde Today in 2004, he wrote: "I started experimenting with a shot at eight frames, found that too slow, cut it to six frames, still too slow, cut further — four frames, three frames, two frames, the limit for splicing 16mm — until finally it became a hysterical flicker, almost a bombardment of the retina... In a panning shot, the first section would be the positive image from the work print, the middle would continue with the negative image from the film stock, and the last section would return to the positive — several such shots strung together into one passage, checked and compared against each other again and again."

He returned to China in 1995. His first job that came close to filmmaking was as writer-director of the multimedia CD-ROM Ancient Chinese Art.

In 2000, CCTV's Movie Channel launched its in-house television-film program, and Zheng Dasheng, still shooting music videos at the time, became a director. China's film market was in a slump, and he figured television films must be like the non-mainstream films he had seen on American public television; if he was set on directing, this might be one way to do it.

He even read low budgets as an opportunity to experiment. "I could only go back to square one, live through the crude beginnings of cinema myself, and let my own rawness grow in step with the medium's rawness... Knowing that money and technology would not be the limit, that there was always another way; knowing that any accidental technical mistake could be seized on and turned into a deliberate rhetorical device."

Starting with Atao, Zheng Dasheng deliberately used complicated camera setups and cinematography. In later films like The Death of Wang Bo and Antiques, budgets were tight, but he always tried to convey the kind of yijing — mood, atmosphere — that ordinary television films rarely attempted. More than a decade later, a viewer came across The Death of Wang Bo on Douban and left a short comment: "Watched this one afternoon on the Movie Channel — it looks so crude now, but as a kid I really thought it was the best mainland Chinese film I'd ever seen."

Zheng gradually worked out that of the 120 films the Movie Channel turned out every year, a small share was always set aside for "art films" and "experimental films," and that what he had to do was land inside that very, very small share every time. He said: "A personal crevice inside the system — that too is a kind of Chinese characteristic."

Looking for that crevice, Zheng Dasheng made all sorts of films. Over nearly 20 years he made television films, documentaries, small-theater Kunqu opera, stage plays, Yue opera and Peking opera films. In 2010 he was commissioned to create Harmonious China, the theme film for the China Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo. That eight-minute short was the most expensive production of his career.

Even so, he had to experiment. "This was a task assigned by the state, but that doesn't mean there was no room to move. At the very least I had to keep it from becoming generic political propaganda — I could turn it into a cultural message rather than a political one." Harmonious China ended up an ultra-wide, giant-screen short in a hand-painted ink-wash style.

In 2013, Writers Publishing House planned a series of projects turning works from its literary back catalog into films, and approached Zheng Dasheng. He chose to adapt the veteran Tianjin writer Lin Xi, making The Idler of Tianjin and City in Peril. The publisher then also commissioned him to film Mao Dun's Eclipse trilogy. Financed jointly by Writers Publishing House and the Movie Channel, the trilogy became five films of about 90 minutes each, shown on the Movie Channel and at small film salons.

The budgets were extremely low, but the response after the screenings was good. That gave both the publisher and Zheng Dasheng confidence. In 2014, he received the publisher's new book, Selected Stories of Jia Dashan.

By then Zheng Dasheng had grown more and more convinced that films have a kind of destiny. He kept coming back to words like "luck" and "timing." "No film is naturally meant to be made."

But adapting Jia Dashan's stories went unusually smoothly. Baicheng Yingxiang, a private film investment company, had worked with Writers Publishing House before, and with early-stage funding in place they spent 18 months on the screenplay. The film then secured investment from Shanghai Film Group and Shenzhen Film Studio.

Zheng Dasheng could finally make a film the normal way. They spent a great deal of time scouting locations and casting in Hebei and Shanxi; to get the effect of non-professional performances, the crew auditioned nine folk opera troupes that travel the Taihang Mountains.

The crew even planted its own peanut field — weeding, fertilizing, watering, hiring eight farming households, and spending a full six months and more on it.

The depleted countryside no longer has big, labor-hungry peanut fields. Zheng Dasheng realized that from exactly the moment in time Village Rhapsody depicts, the countryside had already been changed beyond recognition. Other details found while scouting were disorienting: the village committee's loudspeakers were still the best way to reach villagers, and the microphones at the broadcast stations still had red cloth strips tied to them, left over from the past.

Zheng Dasheng speaks slowly, as if picking each word with care. During the interview he often fell into long silences, his thick eyebrows perfectly still. The one moment of strong feeling came when he said that what he has always wanted to film was never history itself; asked what he really wanted to film, he answered only, "I can't say..."

He writes in traditional characters, and in conversation he likes phrases you rarely hear in speech, such as wu sheng ye wan ("I was born too late") and jiquan xiangwen ("the crowing of roosters and barking of dogs carry from village to village") — yet because he speaks so slowly, it doesn't sound strange.

During casting for Village Rhapsody, the owner of a local hotel recommended his cousin to the crew. At the 31st China Golden Rooster Awards, she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Three years later, when Village Rhapsody screened, Zhang Huijuan, who played Xiaofen, had become a kindergarten teacher in Shijiazhuang. Before they parted, Zheng Dasheng told her, seriously, "Taking part in a film shoot when you're young really is an interesting experience, but don't build a dream of cinema out of it."

In December, Village Rhapsody will screen in more than 200 cities across China through the on-demand screening platform Daxiang Dianying.

Q: QDaily

Zheng Dasheng: Director

Q: Village Rhapsody shows a complicated relationship between the individual and the collective. How do you see that relationship?

Zheng Dasheng: I was born at the tail end of the 1960s. In my own experience growing up, the shift from belonging to the collective to the awakening of the individual was an extremely important change. The rupture between the individual and the collective was also a major watershed.

From kindergarten through first grade, what we were taught was that I did not belong to my parents — I belonged to the nation. Then came 1976, when I was in first grade, and everything changed at once that year. I was in Tianjin for the earthquake; life and death were right in front of me. One national upheaval after another happened, and I was completely stunned — how could Chairman Mao die?! In 1976, death was a particularly shocking thing. Then through junior high and the adolescence of high school, in the early and mid-1980s, I discovered that I belonged to myself. This wasn't only a change in me. Suddenly there was private ownership; the countryside handed out land to households; cities had self-employed businesspeople and "ten-thousand-yuan households." People's sense of who they were shifted abruptly, everything started to be different, the whole society changed fundamentally — a very important watershed. I can't describe this in a sociological framework; I can only say, from instinct, that the relationship between the individual and the collective is something our generation cannot get around.

A good story engine has to hold up when you push it deeper and dig into it. In the digging, we found that the most interesting thing was the relationship between the crowd and the individual — it isn't simply confrontation or crushing; it isn't that simple. To show that shifting interaction, the land redistribution was probably the best backdrop for telling this story.

Q: The story has a very bleak ending. At bottom, are you disappointed in human nature?

Zheng Dasheng: I can't simply say I'm optimistic or disappointed about human nature — the most important thing is to "know." We shouldn't cheaply pass judgment on other people, praise or blame. During the year and a half we spent on the script, I discussed and re-simulated the characters' situations countless times, putting myself inside each person's view. In every given circumstance, I found I would make the same judgments they did — for instance, I certainly wouldn't marry my daughter off to some arty young man who can't do a lick of real work; if I were the madman's wife, I too would choose my son over my husband without hesitating.

From writing the script through shooting to post-production, my plainest takeaway was this: no one was wrong. This is the tragedy of small people inside a great era. The biggest difference between a tragedy and a misery play is that in a misery play someone is directly to blame, and in a tragedy no one is. We can't cheaply condemn other people's human nature.

Q: While filming, faced with such concrete historical circumstances, did you set out to reflect on the era itself?

Zheng Dasheng: First of all, you still have to "know." If you don't even know, then examining, reflecting, criticizing — none of it is possible. The most basic thing is to know first.

Q: But the process of "knowing" can be very hard, especially when it's being obscured and blocked.

Zheng Dasheng: It isn't easy. You have to spend more time and energy correcting your own common sense — all kinds of common sense, above all the descriptions of history — but that's the least you should do.

Q: Many of your earlier works explore history. Why this particular preference for historical subjects?

Zheng Dasheng: One reason is personal taste; the other is that filming reality has its inconveniences. Filming history is far easier — there's much less you can't touch. If you really dig into present-day circumstances, once you hit a certain geological layer you can't drill any further. Maybe I just haven't found a more advanced way yet.

Q: Do you find history itself fascinating? Or is expressing history not really your core concern?

Zheng Dasheng: Historical material gives me a good distance. What's performed is a story from a particular period, but the period is only a pretext. Because of that distance, you can see many meanings that don't belong to that period alone.

Q: What about present-day subjects — are there any you've thought of filming?

Zheng Dasheng: What we see every day — take social news — shocking stories flood our feeds daily. Nowhere else in the world, only here, now, are such living dramas playing out. Some are absurd, some cruel, some simply beyond imagining. They're far stronger than history, but if you film them shallowly, in rough outline, you're at the very least wasting the material. There are far too many remarkable people and stories that stay hidden.

Q: When you film history, do you worry that the core of the story will be hard to grasp for audiences who didn't live through it?

Zheng Dasheng: Possibly, very possibly, because "not knowing" has already lasted several generations. I'm probably a good deal older than you, but even I only heard about it secondhand — I seem to know, but do I really know? There is too much that goes unmentioned, tacitly "unknown." As long as it isn't spoken of, isn't touched, it truly ceases to exist.

This "not knowing" can be finished in two generations. Take your parents or your grandparents — they lived through certain things, but who wants to bring that up over dinner at home? It's ordinary human feeling, the Chinese way: the next generation has its own life, she should have a beautiful future, and all that is past — why let it affect the children?

Q: But that's terrifying.

Zheng Dasheng: Exactly. It "doesn't exist," so we don't know. And because we don't know, the next time we run into something similar... There are two famous sayings in the study of history: the first is that all history is contemporary history; the second is that the only lesson of history is that no lesson has ever been learned.

Q: The work you're doing — whatever scale of reality it captures — is at least meant to show something, isn't it?

Zheng Dasheng: I wouldn't call it showing — it's a very, very small peephole, that's all. But I honestly feel that in this headlong, feverish era, nobody has the patience to do the foundational work anymore. Because the most foundational work doesn't sell — at the very least there's no visible benefit right now. If nobody does it, it will simply be gone.

I finally had one chance to make a film the normal way. However a film is supposed to be made, that's how we made it. This film, and the intention behind it, is itself a very foundational piece of work.

Q: With history there's now, on the contrary, a tendency to romanticize it or turn it into a symbol. How do you see that?

Zheng Dasheng: Symbolizing it?... It's probably because things still aren't normal enough — we haven't talked about it or looked at it calmly, so it becomes taboo, and once it's taboo people go "ooh," reading it backward as if there were some hidden meaning, when in fact there isn't.

Q: Apart from the periods you've already filmed, are there particular historical periods that interest you?

Zheng Dasheng: What I care about more is people. If that person, or that group of people, has a story I feel particularly should be told, particularly deserves telling, particularly makes me want to tell it, then the era they live in is just a backdrop board. The picture painted on that board is homework you have to do — you don't tell a story because of the picture of some era. It's the people; it has to be.

Q: Living in this era, do you have worries? Or anxieties?

Zheng Dasheng: Everyone is anxious. For me it's "not knowing" — not knowing can really kill you.

Q: How do you go about knowing, then?

Zheng Dasheng: Whatever channel you can find, you use. As much as possible.

Q: You said you want to rebuild your own common sense. Do you want to spread that to others?

Zheng Dasheng: No, I'm not qualified. First I have to confirm whether the fragments I know are solid, and that alone is already hard to manage. This can't be an easy thing to assert — none of it is that simple.

Q: But might some people, when the facts they "didn't know" come out, become more anxious as a result?

Zheng Dasheng: Not necessarily. More likely they just won't care — all that already happened, it's the business of the last generation, or the one before that, so what does it have to do with me?

Q: What should we do, then? Is there any way to learn as much as we can?

Zheng Dasheng: Read history books, and if you can, getting at fragments of primary documents helps too. And then every family has its own oral history, right? Every household has an important family history, a household history — all of it oral history.

Q: Is that why you went and filmed Mao Dun?

Zheng Dasheng: The BBC keeps finding new ways to film Dickens and never stops reinterpreting Shakespeare; don't the French keep staging Hugo and Balzac? So why is Mao Dun read only by Chinese-literature majors? Literature that builds the psychological structure of a nation's people obviously deserves rereading. Calvino asked why we need to reread the classics. Of course we do! The reason the British are British, the reason the French are French, the reason they are the British and the French they are today — you can't just muddle along knowing nothing about it. This is infrastructure.

Q: People generally think foundational work probably doesn't make money, and its effects are hard to see.

Zheng Dasheng: But if you don't do something because you can't see an immediate benefit, then things will be wretched later on! Other countries care about this a great deal. The so-called classics, the traditions, the things that ought to be handed down — if you don't activate them in new ways, they'll just die where they lie. Why keep activating them over and over? Because we need to know ourselves and establish ourselves, over and over.

Q: If you were given ample resources and nothing holding you back, what would you most want to film?

Zheng Dasheng: ... I can't say.

Q: Were you worried before that Village Rhapsody wouldn't get a release?

Zheng Dasheng: At first I had no sense of how deep the policy-level limits ran — I only had a sense of the limits of an aesthetic, creative stance. But we were very lucky, and in the end it passed. We did revise quite a bit according to the censors' comments, but that genuinely gave me the chance to keep correcting places where the original treatment was too blunt, not refined enough. Our intention was fairly plain to begin with — not high-end, and certainly not lofty — just to tell it, to show it, in the most basic way.

Cover and in-text images: Douban