Abstract
This chapter examines two Chinese “puzzle films” directed by Leste Chen: The Great Hypnotist (2014) and Battle of Memories (2017). Both films subscribe to an international mode of complex storytelling, conjuring narrative surprise and suspense by manipulating the most basic of the viewer’s filmic expectations. The chapter not only demonstrates how Chen’s puzzle films exploit genre conventions and normative viewing activities in pursuit of complex effects, but also argues that Chen finds ingenious ways to circumvent the PRC’s rigorous censorship regulations, yielding genre films that are both narrationally complex and politically subversive.
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Notes
- 1.
Bono Lee, for instance, contends that China’s film industry denies Hong Kong filmmakers “the fertile ground of creative freedom that they experienced in 1990s Hong Kong” (Lee 2012, 191), while Zhou Yuxing asserts that mainland censorship “creates an unfavourable environment for cultural creativity” (Zhou 2015, 239). Cognate claims abound within the literature. I provide an overview and critique of the standard perspective in Bettinson (2020).
- 2.
SAPPRFT was abolished in 2018, whereupon the Communist Party’s publicity department acquired regulatory control of the mainland’s film releases.
- 3.
- 4.
Echoing Berliner, Stephen Teo (2012, 293) observes: “The banning of the wuxia genre in the Chinese cinema [in the 1930s] stunted the genre’s development in the Chinese film industry in Shanghai”. Of the 1930s Hollywood gangster film, Thomas Shatz (1981, 40) suggests that “external pressures”—notably government censorship—“disrupted the genre’s internal evolution”.
- 5.
See Todorov (1975). The locus classicus of fantastic literature is Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898).
- 6.
For deictic gaze theory and cinema, see Chapter 2 in Persson (2003).
- 7.
The Great Hypnotist spins a variation on this POV schema later in the plot. Insisting that she can see ghosts lingering just yards away, Ren exhorts Xu to look in their direction. The narration furnishes a two-shot showing Ren and Xu looking at the camera; in other words, the scene ostensibly furnishes a ghost’s POV. Leste Chen tantalises the viewer with the imminent prospect of a reverse-angle shot from Ren or Xu’s optical perspective, which could thereby corroborate or discredit Ren’s claim…but again the narration teasingly denies the viewer a disambiguating vantage point.
- 8.
For critic Yvonne Teh (2014, 33), The Great Hypnotist “is derivative of other films, notably The Sixth Sense”. In Variety, Maggie Lee (2014b) asserts that the film “blatantly steals from The Sixth Sense”, while Edmund Lee (2014a) notes that “The Great Hypnotist bears more than a passing resemblance” to M. Night Shyamalan’s film. Another critic contends that The Great Hypnotist “suffers heavily from Shyamalan Syndrome” (Anonymous 2019). Indeed, Xu’s profound fear of water gestures towards another Shyamalan intertext, Unbreakable (2000), whose idiosyncratic hero develops aquaphobia.
- 9.
Chen opts against quoting, for instance, Shyamalan’s gruesome image of a teenage boy whose skull has been ravaged by a shotgun blast.
- 10.
Among the many examples enumerated by J. P. Telotte (1990) are The Stranger (1946), The Big Clock (1948), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
- 11.
For a lively discussion of these pervasive motifs in 1940s noir, see Bordwell (2017). Contemporary puzzle films also employ hypnotism as an alibi to dive into the murk of characters’ unconscious minds; see, for instance, Trance (2013) and Stir of Echoes (1999).
- 12.
Interview with Soi Cheang, 31 March 2008; and Bey Logan, 26 March 2016.
- 13.
Ostensibly, then, Chen is obliged to attenuate the seductiveness of the femme fatale archetype. Yet, as the plot twist reveals, Ren is seductive, not sexually but psychologically: wielding hypnosis as a form of seduction, she masterfully brings Xu under her thrall.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
The lyric comes from “You Must Love Me”, written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
- 17.
A more proximate intertext is Hong Kong ghost thriller Inner Senses (2002). Leslie Cheung’s psychiatrist, a nonbeliever in the supernatural, tries to cure a female patient who “sees dead people”. Unlike Xu, however, this psychiatrist scoffs at hypnosis as a therapeutic method. Plainly inspired by The Sixth Sense, Inner Senses springs a late-arriving twist that discloses its male hero’s deep-rooted amnesia and overwhelming self-denial. Given their shared reference point, Inner Senses and The Great Hypnotist naturally display some cosmetic affinities, chiefly at the plot level.
- 18.
I explore the plight of Hong Kong filmmakers navigating the PRC co-production system in Bettinson (2020).
- 19.
The two screenplays are credited to Leste Chen and Peng Ren (aka Ryan Ren).
- 20.
Following China’s vaunted moon landing in January 2019—a lunar mission bound up with national self-esteem—the mainland film industry launched a string of domestic science fiction blockbusters including The Wandering Earth (2019) and Shanghai Fortress (2019). As in Battle of Memories, these films enlist a host of tactics to pacify the Bei**g censors. In The Wandering Earth—widely heralded as China’s first science fiction blockbuster—the threat to humanity is cosmic rather than institutional, emerging from without rather than from within (the band of heroes must divert the Earth from a collision course with Jupiter). In no sense, then, is national cataclysm due to a malfunction of Chinese Communism. Dystopia afflicts the globe in toto, hence is not attributable to China alone. Time travel is nowhere invoked, while the genre’s customary embrace of pseudoscience is largely subdued (the filmmakers recruited scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to consult on plot details). In all, the film is politically innocuous, and valorises a Confucian ethic of teamwork above go-getting individualism. By such strategies, China’s film industry seeks to cultivate a tradition of mainland sci-fi extravaganzas to challenge Hollywood counterparts such as Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014), and The Martian (2015), all of which proved hugely popular at the mainland box office.
- 21.
See, for instance, Adlakha (2017).
- 22.
Interview with Nansun Shi, 23 March 2016.
- 23.
In one hypnotically induced flashback, Ren materialises as an unseen witness and observes her younger self.
- 24.
For a representative view, see Anonymous (2019).
- 25.
The mainland film industry’s uptake of Hollywood-style puzzle film narration is symptomatic of a wider industrial shift towards commercialisation, a shift initiated in the mid-1990s and intensified following China’s admission to the World Trade Organisation in 2001. The commercial success of Hollywood imports, China’s own rapidly expanding film market, and the concomitant spread of multiplex theatres throughout the mainland, has prompted the domestic industry to emulate (and to some extent compete with) Hollywood’s high-concept mode of production. Nevertheless, domestic filmmakers must still operate under the purview, and within the parameters, of the PRC’s censoring authority.
- 26.
For further discussion, see Bettinson (2016).
- 27.
The Great Hypnotist ranked 38th in the PRC’s box office chart of 2014, grossing US$44 million, while Battle of Memories reached 51st in the 2017 chart, with domestic revenues of US$43 million.
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Bettinson, G. (2020). Chinese Censorship, Genre Mediation, and the Puzzle Films of Leste Chen. In: Feng, L., Aston, J. (eds) Renegotiating Film Genres in East Asian Cinemas and Beyond. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55077-6_7
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