CineVue: Journey to the West, one of the Four Great Classical Novels in Chinese literature, has been adapted many times for the big screen. The epic vernacular prose that combines the wildest myths, romance and social commentary in different episodes has been a bonanza for inspired story tellers centuries later, as seen in the rendition of four episodes produced by Shaw Brothers Studio, animation feature Havoc in Heaven (1961, 2012) and A Chinese Odyssey (1994) as well as its sequels by Jeffrey Lau (2005) and Stephen Chow (2012) respectively. The ancient tactics of deriving imagination from outrage towards social realities has never been outdated in today’s China. Winner of the Dragons & Tigers Award at the Vancouver Film Festival, Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Luo LI’s Emperor Visits the Hell is one of the latest efforts along this line. The film focuses on the three chapters of the book that prelude why the pilgrimage for sutras begins. In the story, the Dragon King is condemned and punished for whimsically changing the course of nature, while Emperor Shimin LI, although implicated in this case, successfully buys his way back from the Hell. Deadpan humor oozes from every aspect of the film, especially the transposition of the main characters to a contemporary setting where the Dragon King becomes a head gangster, and the Emperor a local boss bureaucrat, and the non-dramatic performance of non-professional actors that makes the whole story look surreally real. Emperor Visits the Hell is one of the most surprising and stylized films in 2012 that has expanded the spectrum of Chinese independent cinema and premiered at New Directors/New Films 2013 in the New York City. Here is an interview with director Luo LI, by guest contributor Xin ZHOU, M.A. Candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R03fWO6_y64[/youtube]XZ: Why were you drawn to these three chapters of the novel, which does not deal with the four main characters but mostly bureaucrats, officials and “emperors” in different trades?
LL: The three chapters are Chapter 9, 10 and 11. There had been various versions of the story long before Journey to the West was written. Journey to the West incorporated this story, which can still stand on its own as an independent piece. I was interested in this story simply because it reveals certain aspects of the complex relationships between power, wealth and morality in the Chinese society.
XZ: Your previous film, River and My Father (2010) was triggered by your father’s letter, and this one is adapted from an ancient novel. Do you have any preference to make films based on pre-existing texts.
LL: I actually do not have any particular preference for making films based on pre-existing text. I was just inspired by these stories that I happened to read. When I was making these two films, I was aware of the process of adaptation. The relationship between the original text and the adapted film version interested me so much that these films sometimes tend to be self-reflexive.
XZ: Following the previous question, there are lots of film scripts, documents, and text being used in this film, maybe you could talk a little about the materiality of the film and the reason for introducing the pre- and post-production into the film, and other materials like the comic book.
LL: This film is based on an ancient story and deals with history. The fictional world in the film is obviously in the present, and it is absurd to see historical figures appear as modern people. I wanted to use the materiality to suggest a sense of authenticity and help create the link between the history and the present. For instance, text often seems to be a more authoritative, and the viewer has to accept its message as a fact. This “matter of fact” tone, of course, is often subverted in the film by anachronism and non-professional acting. I was hoping that watching the film, the viewer could be oscillating between believing in and having doubts about what she/he is seeing. As for the comic book (I prefer to call it the “picture book”), I think it is very cinematic compared to regular comic books because it uses the actual frames from the film. Another reason for using the comic book is purely personal. This type of picture book was very
popular in the 70s and 80s in China. I grew up reading them when I was a kid. I think it is still a very unique form to “watch” or “read” a film and I wanted to incorporate the form in this film.
XZ: You made it clear that this is a fictionalized film at the very beginning, imposing diegetic (music that is imposed into the scene) sound in the driving scene. The narration is much clearer than your previous one, which focuses more on the boundary of documentary and fiction. Why was this shift?
LL: It was actually quite natural for me to make this shift. After Rivers and My Father I wanted to try working on something different, something more straightforward and clearly fictional, with less reflection on the medium itself. I have always wanted to try that, and telling a dramatic story from beginning to end is just as challenging as experimenting with unconventional forms.
XZ: In some parts, you really rely on the words/text to push the narrative, how do you perceive the relationship between the image and the text?
LL: In general, it is not recommended to rely on text or voiceover to explain things in the film. In this film, however, I decided to use text because I thought it could add a new level to the narrative and it could interact with the image. Besides the reasons I have mentioned previously (about how to read a film on a picture book), I think the relationship between the image and the text is very interesting. Image and text can be combined in many ways. A text can appear before or after an action, the effect would be very different.
XZ: Have you realized that this is very male-dominated film? Almost none of the performers are female.
LL: Yes, this is intentional. China is a patriarchal society. The people who control power or wealth or both have been predominantly male for thousands of years. While making this film, I was also interested in borrowing elements from gangster films which are often male-dominated too.
XZ: “Heaven and hell come from the reality,” you said this in the post-screening discussion at MoMA, which is the reason why you put different layers of history into the contemporary China, and unify it into black and white. Can you elaborate a little more on this?
LL: “Heaven” and “Hell” are not religious realms in this film. They are just another two bureaucratic systems attached to the reality, so together they form a bigger system. To fully elaborate on the concepts of heaven and hell in the traditional Chinese culture would be beyond my ability. But I think we often use “heaven” and “hell” in our daily language to describe certain things in reality (in English too). Particularly in Chinese, there are many proverbs and phrases that use the concepts of heaven and hell. These proverbs and phrases were coined long time ago and often refer to specific events in history or legends, but they are still being used everyday now in China. Few living persons have had the experience of being in heaven or hell, but everyone speaks of them as if we knew what it was like in heaven or hell. I guess some of these concepts might have originated from observations of reality. So in the film, sometimes I was trying to suggest that: maybe we are already living in heaven or hell?
XZ: Last question. For me, the fixed shot really fits into the boredom and tiredness of the everyday life of bureaucrat . Is this the reason for this stylistic choice?
LL: This choice, first, has to do with one of the inspirations for the visual style of the film, that is Li Yu and Liu Bo’s photography works. Based on local newspapers’ report, Li Yu and Liu Bo (they are also based in Wuhan), have been making several series of photographs that re-enact absurd scenarios from mundane life. They stage and light the scenes in such a way that the viewer can immediately tell the photographs are not “real” news pictures, but they can reveal some truth that the written news can’t express, or they can question about the news, or make one think about the relationship between text and image. So the fixed shots, like Li Yu and Liu Bo’s works, are a bit like staged dramatic scenes to me. This choice has also to do with the use of the picture book. The film needs to be consistent with the visual style of the picture book. I think it is also with the help of the duration that this type of shots conveys the tedium of officials’ lives.
Luo LI is an independent filmmaker. He was born and grew up in China. He studied film production and completed his MFA in Canada. Li’s works have screened internationally in festivals and galleries including Arsenal (Berlin), Cinematheque Ontario (Toronto), Images Festival (Toronto), Nouveau Cinema International Film and New Media Festival (Montreal), Reyes Hecoles Gallery (Mexico City), BAFICI (Buenos Aires), China Independent Film Festival, and Jeonju International Film Festival, International Film Festival or Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films (New York), and Hong Kong International Film Festival. Visit his website here.
Xin ZHOU is a critic, researcher and curator. He writes film reviews for Artforum’s Chinese Edition and is currently a MA student in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York Univeristy.