Aftershock (2010) — Feng Xiaogang
“Aftershock” is one of those showcase films made to impress and leave a clear message, though it’s uncertain who’s it made for: earthquake victims or the Communist Party.
That is because, despite depicting the 1976’s earthquake victims’ struggle on the IMAX screens in extremely emotional ways, this historical disaster drama does the same to glorify the Party and its heroes. As a matter of fact, “Aftershock” was the first IMAX film made outside of the US — a presage of the now established Chinese craving for producing mass entertainment to international audiences. Director Feng Xiaogang was a first, also, to prove that Chinese blockbusters could ouster Hollywood ones, with his 1997’s “The Dream Factory”. Since then, he’s gained fame for making big-seller films, from blockbusters like “Aftershock” to period dramas, and therefore became one of the best known names in China’s cinema industry.
His directing skills, though, didn’t seem that much worried with technique or artistic aesthetics. To illustrate the story of a family torn apart by the 1976’s Tangshan earthquake, he’s made use of extreme long-shots that remember, well, Hollywood’s very own disaster films, such as “2012” or “The Day After Tomorrow”, guaranteeing that audiences would be shocked when explicitly watching a whole wall crush a man’s body or naked people searching the debris for their relatives with their bare hands. And it was the overdramatic explicit terms of his work that separated it from the American ones. From the soundtrack to the actors desperate performance, Xiaogang was resolved to make the audience cry at every opportunity, although it was indeed a sad and dramatic almost fantastic tale of a family reunion after years of being apart due to chance.
The year is 1976 and Yuanni (Xu Fan) is a married mom who lives in simple but happy ways with her family. One day, a destructive earthquake hits the city she lives in, Tangshan, and in that one day she loses her husband and is forced to choose between her daughter, Den (Zhang Jingchu), and her son, Da (Li Chen), when the two of them are about to be crushed by a huge wall — ‘Sophie’s Choice’ style. She ends up saying her son’s name and is told that she should save him and leave her daughter, who everyone presumed dead, before it was too late. But, of course, she wasn’t dead and the Chinese Army takes the little girl under its wings to make sure she, and all the other children who survived the disaster, had a good life. Yuanni is adopted by a kind and caring military couple and Den is raised by his single mother who never stopped praying for and thinking about her deceased family. As it was to be expected, the two become successful adults and reunite by chance as volunteers for the rescue teams of another huge earthquake at Sichuan in 2008.
The story might be predictable and all, but it is an interesting perspective to historical events that actually were very impacting to China. The 1974 Tangshan earthquake symbolized a milestone in Chinese politics, as the country was about to begin its political and economical shift towards a more market-oriented economy, with the undermine of Mao’s dominance. Great natural disasters are often seen as signs of great changes to come by Chinese popular knowledge. And things did indeed change after that. China modernized itself, which is noticeable in the movie’s visual comparison of old Tangshan, destroyed Tangshan and the new glassed-windowed Tangshan. It was as if the wrecks were all part of a bad dream. But nature is unforgiving and in 2008, two years before the release of “Aftershock”, another colossal disaster shook the ground below Sichuan province. This time, though, the government was heavily criticized for how he responded to the event and for how responsible it was for the number of fatal victims. There were terribly massive child losses as the schools’s structure wasn’t enough to take in the earthquake’s power. Their walls must’ve given in as easily as the walls fell in the imagined 1976’s Tangshan of the film. Was the story made in the context of the 2008’s disaster, maybe Yuanni would be unable to save any of her children. One of the more fervorous critics of the Central Party actions and decisions was the artist Ai Wei Wei, who started his own counting of the victims, since he didn’t believe in the government’s death poll. As a result of his very publicized criticism through his blog or his works — as observed in this link — the Communist Party very boldly sent guards after him and even his mother.
After one realizes even half of the capacity of the Party and its relentlessness to have things only in its own way, the film’s bias is not surprising anymore. The whole cinema and mediatic industry in general is controlled by the State and goes through harsh censorship, which I believe to have been one of the causes for the loss of critical sparkle of recent Chinese films, if compared to the 90s’ Zhang Yimou’s phase. Zhang Yimou actually has been working very closely with the government, ever since he created that spectacular Olympics opening at the Bird Nest. Weird, because his films have even got to the point of being banned from China in the past… Anyway, that doesn’t mean China suffered a decrease in film production, quite the opposite. It’s estimated that soon China’s film market will surpass the American one, which is and has been the biggest since forever. And if one considers the quantity of investment and funds running from China to Hollywood it’s clear its intent of guaranteeing a position in the entertainment global industry, since its soft power is strangely smaller than Japan or South Korea’s. I will definitely discuss more thoroughly the impacts of a strong filmmaking China, but additional and essential information can be found in this Time magazine article.
To sum it all up, “Aftershock” is an emotional — even if bearing the ridiculous — and interesting state propaganda film because it shows how paramount the 1976 Tangshan earthquake was and how it could’ve affected regular families’ lives in a matter of seconds.
