Authenticity?
21 May 2001
Roz Kaveney writes:
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a good place to consider how artistic traditions can interact on the world stage.
Isaac Leung's piece does raise at least one issue of real importance - that of the difficulty of distinguishing, in discussions of work that deliberately mixes and matches different cultural traditions, a productive and fruitful mixture, and that particularly crass form of misappropriation which we may as well call Disneyfication.
Tan Dun's music, both specifically his score for CTHD and generally his work for concert halls, combines, at its not infrequent best, elements from traditional Chinese and Western musics. What is good about his score for CTHD is that it makes both traditions and the commercial film music that derives from them accessible to all the film's viewers. This strikes me as a worthy aim if we are going to make a world culture in which everyone listens to, and respects, everything.
On this point, Leung's remarks about Tan strike me as facile and slightly cheapening, as well as assuming that somehow it is only possible to remain authentic by avoiding the mainstream altogether.
Western audiences that like the music for CTHD will be that much more likely to explore Tan Dun's other music, and more open to the experience of Chinese music generally. This is clearly a good thing.
I found distinctly worrying the implication that we should worry that Tan Dun speaks Mandarin with a 'slushy' local accent. Are we to escape the tyranny of British heritage movies where only RSP is heard to fall into an equivalent tyranny around proper and non-proper Chinese accents? I pose this question merely to mock - obviously we are not, and yet there is a worrying assumption that, when considering works that draw on a number of traditions, only critics from the more 'foreign' of those traditions are entitled to speak authoritatively. In the late Stephen Potter's 'Lifemanship' books, he advises his readers to listen to such statements and then say 'Ah, but not in the South.'
Works like CTHD are useful bridges between traditions; I also think it a thoroughly enjoyable, viscerally exciting and visually attractive work in itself. It made me go and look at the Chinese popular cinema of fantasy and martial arts and lost love with a much more involved eye - it expanded my taste.
And of course in the process it colonized a local film tradition for the Western dominated international film tradition, and appropriated materials. It did so, though, without closing off avenues of communication. It did not leave us thinking, as Disney's chinoiserie 'Mulan' probably did much of its audience, that conversation was closed, and American ways of seeing had been proved best.
Roz Kaveney is a writer and critic.
Where's the debate?
19 May 2001
Josh Appignanesi writes:
Mr Leung on Crouching Tiger: where's the controversy?
I disagree with the editor's summary - Mr. Leung does not say that Crouching Tiger is all surface, merely that this enjoyable film - which he acknowledges works on many levels - is a painstakingly, perhaps even cynically, constructed one. Yet he does not care to say much more than this, is not prepared to register more than a mild sense of uneasiness with the questions of east/west raised by the film. And perhaps this is the problem. Mr. Leung's analysis, while no doubt largely accurate and full of insight, simply tells us at greater length what we already know: that, at least as far as the west is concerned, Crouching Tiger... is both a commercial and artistic success. In essence, then, he joins the consensus view - that this is a good or even great film, where good or even great films are taken to mean ones that fulfill artistically while kicking arse at the box office. So where's the debate?
Josh Appignanesi is a property magnate.
Insight
21 May 2001
Anthony Barnett writes:
Josh Appignanesi raises the question of what writing is actually for -
To be "full of insight" and tell us what we already know, what more can you ask of a critic? In a way I did learn what I "already knew" when I read Isaac Leung's openEye piece, as Josh Appignanesi says. Only, I could never have put it into words.
Isn't this at least part of the point of good writing about contemporary affairs, that it does not have to debate everything in order to be able to assess and share what it means?
Anthony Barnett is Editor of openDemocracy.
