Translating the Film Festival into Chinese Cultural Contexts
In the new century, East Asia in general and the PRC in particular have been boom territories for film festivals of all kinds. In the PRC, holding film festivals is part of a general and much wider process of “connecting with the international gauge” (yu shijie jiegui), as the Chinese idiom puts it. This practice entails engaging with various international—more precisely, Western—standards and practices, and it has been part of the process of “reform and opening up” (gage kaifang) adopted since the 1980s.4 Indeed, the very idea of the “film festival” (dianyingjie) is both a foreign cultural model and a relatively recent import. In the PRC, the “film week” (dianyingzhou) was the dominant mode for exchanging films with other “fraternal” socialist countries during the Maoist era and into the 1980s. The film week was also a foreign import, but one made when the “international gauge” the PRC sought to connect to was the socialist one.5 The first “film festival” was launched in Changchun in 1992,6 the same year that Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tour” led to marked acceleration of “reform and opening up.”7 One year later, the SIFF was launched, and it rapidly eclipsed the Changchun event.8 More recently, the first edition of the BJIFF was held in April 2011.9
Analyzed in this volume by Elena Pollacchi, the BJIFF proclaims itself of “international standard, Chinese character, and Beijing style.”10 What are “Chinese character” and “Beijing style,” and what difference do they make to the aspiration to achieve an “international standard”? Such abstractions are difficult to define, but other film festivals held in Beijing certainly operate in ways that are locally distinctive. 2013 was the tenth anniversary of the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF). As Flora Lichaa examines in her chapter here, although modeled on the international film festival, like most other independent events in China, this annual set of film screenings has been heavily constrained, especially under the Xi Jinping regime. In response, it has had to pioneer new exhibition practices, for example, not publicizing its existence widely and screening in private rather than public spaces.11 Turning to more specialized events, the Beijing Queer
Film Festival has been held since 2001 as a biennial event also modeled on similar events elsewhere, and the 2013 edition was held with comparatively less trouble than in the past. Yet, as Hongwei Bao’s chapter here investigates in detail, it has also had to innovate locally in order to survive, for example, by changing venues repeatedly and letting them be known at the last minute.12
If these locally distinctive practices are what “Chinese character” and “Beijing style” mean in practice, how can we analyze this localness and how it is produced? As argued in the introduction to this book, the process can be understood as a form of translation. Each of the festivals mentioned in the previous paragraph has translated a different “international standard” film festival into the Chinese context. However, as indicated from the examples given, adopting foreign things is not simply a case of copying or of submission to foreign standards, because changes occur in the process of translation. Furthermore, these changes should not be thought of as the result of “failures” in translation. In Translingual Practice, Lydia Liu details how modernity as well as the language associated with it was translated from the West into China, often via Tokyo. She argues that this process cannot be seen simply as an imperialist imposition; not only were many Chinese active in the process of translation, but also they did so to resist imperialism and make themselves agents of modernization.13 Elsewhere, I have written further together with Mary Farquhar about this process of apparent submission to international standards as a means of gaining agency.14 Liu’s analysis enables us to understand that translation of film festival models into the Chinese context is an act of appropriation, and that the transformation that occurs in that process is not failure but innovation enabling Chinese to intervene in the local film exhibition culture and participate on the global film festival circuit.
