Imagine what literary classics such as George Orwell’s 1984, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago or Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate would have been like had the authors consulted with state censors and bureaucrats before launching their creative efforts.
This is now increasingly happening within the movie industry. Hollywood and other, smaller, bastions of the silver screen are bowing to pressure from China in order to access the world’s second-largest movie market after the US.
As the New York Times reported on Monday, moviemakers seeking access to China’s market have two choices: either avoid subjects that could hurt Beijing’s sensibilities and submit a final product for Beijing’s “approval,” or they co-produce with a Chinese company and do some shooting in China to increase their Chinese appeal.
In both instances, censorship becomes an inevitable component of the final product. So much so, that silence from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) can be construed as an answer. It has become unacceptable for US fighter aircraft to engage in a dogfight with MiGs on film, which Paramount Pictures experienced with its new 3D version of the classic Top Gun. The remake of Red Dawn is another example.
In another example, the Times has reported that filming in China for Iron Man 3 has been taking place under the “watchful eye” of Chinese bureaucrats (so much for executive producers) who were “invited” to the set and asked to provide “advice” on creative content.
This should serve as a serious warning to Taiwanese filmmakers who increasingly cooperate with China on movie productions.
This has long been in the making. When the Taipei Times sat down with Taiwanese producer Will Tiao (刁毓能) in August 2010 to discuss his movie Formosa Betrayed, he already mentioned the risks of growing Chinese influence in Hollywood. Sadly, producers and movie studios do not seem to be as resilient as Tiao expected, and that’s bad news for all of us.
Director Steven Soderbergh of Traffic fame can use all the euphemisms he wants (he likens the participation of Chinese censors to “people’s interpretations” of one’s story), but the more we sacrifice our ideals, or simply good elements of storytelling, on the altar of the Chinese market, the poorer the entertainment industry will become.
As millionaire moviemakers and publishers yield to the great wall of censorship, those few Chinese artists who dare to speak the truth and who stand on the side of justice will feel all the more abandoned, all because of our inexcusable appetite for capital.
The industry already suffers from a near-terminal dearth of freshness and ideas. By prostituting themselves to the SARFT, the Communist Youth League and the Women’s Federation — not to mention wealthy Chinese who make the “right” productions possible — moviemakers risk forsaking all claims to artistic integrity and being purveyors of truth and justice.
Granted, like literature, not every movie must serve a purpose, and productions can be pure entertainment. However, think of the classics, those movies that stay with us. Very few are pure entertainment. In most cases, true classics become so because they speak to something that lies deep inside us all. That is what gives Hollywood its magic, not computer-generated special effects.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday last week, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) wrote: “The KMT must fall for Taiwan to improve.’ Allow me to ask the question again: Is this really true?” It matters not how many times Hsu asks the question, my answer will always be the same: “Yes, the KMT must be toppled for Taiwan to improve.” In the lengthy Facebook post, titled “What were those born in the 1980s guilty of?” Hsu harked back to the idealistic aspirations of the 2014 Sunflower movement before heaping opprobrium on the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP)
The scuffle between Chinese embassy staffers in Fiji and a Taiwanese diplomat at a Republic of China (ROC) Double Ten National Day celebration has turned into a public relations opportunity for the government, Beijing and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Although the incident occurred on Oct. 8, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) downplayed it, only for the story to be picked up by the foreign media, forcing the ministry to respond. The public and opposition parties asked why the government had failed to remonstrate more strongly in the first instance. It is still unclear whether the ministry missed a trick
US President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, former US vice president Joe Biden, are holding their final debate tonight. In their foreign policy debate, China is sure to be a major issue of contention for the two candidates. Here are several questions the moderator should pose to the candidates: For both: In the first televised US presidential debates in 1960, then-Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy and his Republican counterpart, Richard Nixon, were asked whether the US should intervene if communist China attacked Taiwan’s outlying islands of Kinmen and Matsu. Kennedy said no, unless the main island of Taiwan was also attacked.
For most of us, the colorful, otherworldly marinescapes of coral reefs are as remote as the alien landscapes of the moon. We rarely, if ever, experience these underwater wonderlands for ourselves — we are, after all, air-breathing, terrestrial creatures mostly cocooned in cities. It is easy not to notice the perilous state they are in: We have lost 50 percent of coral reefs in the past 20 years and more than 90 percent are expected to die by 2050, a presentation at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Diego, California, earlier this year showed. As the oceans heat further and
RSS