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"You should have plugged it up."
Tianqing to Judou (in fudou)
The allegorical content in many of Zhang Yimou's films has frequently been acknowledged: gruesome past standing in for repressive present; feudal-era subjugation of women mirroring oppression not only of their Communist-era counterparts but of Chinese citizens in general in the post-Maoist People's Republic.1 What has largely been overlooked is how metaphor in a major work such as fudou (1989) can be extended to Zhang's own life experiences, particularly his controversial romantic liaison with the film's star, Gong Li, and his contentious political relations with the Mainland Chinese regime.2 Judou, from this perspective, can be regarded as an intensely personal text. This is not to deny the film's symptomatic or historically contingent meanings or to favor a "self-indulgent, narrowly auteurist reading. It is, however, to acknowledge that the biographical and the ideological intersect in fudou to an inordinate degree. The tale of doomed lovers who meet in a dye mill, a setting uncannily evocative of a film studio/processing lab, is redolent of the circumstances surrounding Zhang's own struggles with the Communist regime, struggles that are readily transcribable onto those of the Chinese people as a whole.
The dye mill, where the lovers' carnal passions are aroused and where they meet their tragic fate, is the key trope in the film. By folding this symbol of the cinematic apparatus back into the biographically informed narrative, and by imbricating its technological sense of "cinematic machine" with its psychoanalytic inflection of "mental machine," this essay will examine the ways in which cinema generally, and specifically in relation to the life and work of Zhang Yimou, can been seen as enabling yet also frustrating desire on both the personal and political levels.
Any attempt to link the "self" of the filmmaker with the political ramifications of his work demands, almost by definition, some form of auteurist approach. I am fully aware of the pitfalls, from a poststructuralist standpoint, of such an approach: the tendency to isolate and overestimate individual elements in a collaborative medium; the privileging of artist's intention over social and political forces.3 To minimize these limitations, I will employ a nuanced auteurism drawn from a notion of Jenny Kwok Wah Lau's (derived from Paul Ricoeur), of...