Chinese Censorship, Genre Mediation, and the Puzzle Films of Leste Chen

Abstract

The censorious film industry of the People's Republic of China (PRC), though mercurial and mutating apace, has elicited a fixed set of critical axioms. According to standard accounts, 1 mainland cinema is inimical to creative free expression. State regulations on screen content, curbing depictions of crooked cops, demonic ghosts, and homosexuals (among sundry other phenomena), severely curtail the filmmaker's choice of subject matter. A second claim holds that Beijing censorship stymies narrative innovation. Since deviation from accepted practice is risky, filmmakers cling to "safe formulas" and cookie-cutter plotting (Anon 2019); moreover, because China has no film rating system, scenarists rely on simplistic narratives easily grasped by viewers of all ages. Then there is the thesis that China's film culture nullifies genre experimentation. As censorship squeezes out certain "vexing" categories (horror, science fiction, violent policiers, ghost tales), filmmakers find themselves confined to a knot of officially sanctioned genres (bombastic main-melody epics, inoffensive youthpics, chaste romances). This chapter aims to redress these entrenched fallacies. Taking as an exemplar Leste Chen Cheng-tao's The Great Hypnotist (PRC, 2014) and Battle of Memories (PRC, 2017), I try to show that film censorshipuntil recently under the aegis of the China Film Bureau and the State Administration of Press, Publications, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) 2neither precludes nor vitiates dynamic storytelling and inventive genre engagement. Far from embracing narrative simplicity, the two Chen films exemplify puzzle film plotting. As per the puzzle-film category, 3 both movies generate a radical play with filmic narration and viewer 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 Seminal studies of this mode of narration include Buckland 2009 andand Kiss and Willemsen 2018. cognition, throwing into disarray the spectator's sense-making procedures. Apt to be violated are the primacy effect (the viewer's durable first impressions about the story world, as cued by the text), the person schema (the viewer's default ascription of humanoid traits to fictive agents), and paradigm scenarios (prototypical situations that orient the viewer to the action).No less typically, puzzle films muster their complex effects by deforming genre norms in unpredictable ways. In all, these fictions seek to engage the viewer in strenuous cognitive effort, arousing the "knowledge emotions" (confusion, curiosity, in...