Films of Ning Ying: China Unfolding in Miniature (1997)

AMONG THE MORE PLEASANT, IF LESSER KNOWN, developments in recent Chinese film is the emergence of Ning Ying. Her two best known films are For Fun (1993), also known as Looking For Fun, and On The Beat (1995), both of which played at the Toronto Film Festival and have gained some North American circulation. Ning engages closely in both films with the way that men spend their down time, and the groups of men she chooses to evoke in such detail both represent neglected experiences. In terms of Chinese cinema as a whole, these films are unclassifiable, falling between traditions of Women's Cinema and what Paul Pickowicz has identified as postsocialism. They are low-key portraits of urban life in contemporary China, painting it as a society struggling to come to grips with the changes modernity is demanding. For that reason, they are more relevant to everyday Chinese experience than the more politically pronounced films of her better known colleagues like Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige. Indeed, Ning is, along with these three, a member of what is known as the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmaking, which is to say that she graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in the early eighties. But while many of her classmates went on to prolific careers and internationally acclaimed films, Ning has worked her way up the ladder much more slowly. Since leaving the Academy in 1982 she worked in Italy, and eventually served as Bernardo Bertolucci's assistant director on The Last Emperor. She did not make her first feature film until 1990, when she completed Somebody Falls in Love. Further, while Fifth Generation filmmaking has been virtually synonymous with making Chinese censors angry and directors fight for their professional and artistic existence, Ning now finds herself in a fairly comfortable position within the Chinese film industry, having risen to be the head of Beijing Film Academy. This should not be seen as signs of complacency: rather, Ning's work is marked by a quiet but frequently biting social conscience. It is equal parts satire and ethnography, rendered with a cool, slow pace and a resistance to narrative climax that makes it quite distinctive from any Chinese films to have reached the West in some time. FOR FUN Ning's second feature, For Fun, explores the power dynamics that develop within a group of pensioners. This small pack of men spend their days hanging around in the city's park playing Peking opera, purely as a way of passing the time. When one of them learns of an opera competition, the group decides to undertake the significant effort of preparing for it, and becomes comically driven to win. The film is significant for a number of reasons. It evokes the awkward position that pensioners occupy in China, a society whose traditions demand respect for elders but whose actual senior citizens now find their secure place of esteem being eroded by the changes of modernity. We see their day-to-day lives in great detail, and this attention not only gives a distinct voice to an increasingly marginalized experience but also makes for a narrative style that is slow and contemplative. In addition, For Fun serves as an allegory for the power struggles that inevitably result from organizations, or bureaucracies, no matter how small the stakes (didn't Henry Kissinger say something about that?) Structurally, however, For Fun is notable for the detail with which it renders the banal details of the day to day existence of these old codgers. We see a lot of them sitting around, a lot of the rehearsing of their operas, and a lot of their arguments, some of which contribute to the plot as a whole, many of which do not. What Ning is doing here is chronicling the way that men spend the time they have to themselves, and she does it with an extremely keen eye. It should be noted, however, that this kind of interaction is especially important within a Chinese context. Sociologist Fei Xiaotong notes that traditionally in Chinese society, talking, laughing, and showing emotion and affection openly occur only in groups comprised of people of the same sex and age (86). …