A famed auteur has announced plans to dip his toes into the film industry infrastructure and should be applauded for blazing the trail.
Beijing wants to be a magnet for vibrant arts. But art-house films can hardly find a place that can be called their own. MOMA Broadway Cinematheque, about 15 minutes northeast of the Dongzhimen hub, is about the only place in town where movies high on art and low on mass appeal are consistently highlighted.
Jia Zhangke is determined to change that.
The auteur of such seminal works as Xiao Wu and Still Life recently announced on his micro blog that he is scouting for a location to build an art-house cinema. Well, he has a grand plan to build 100 of these venues nationwide, but he is starting with one in the capital city. "I looked around the east part of town. Hope to better serve the needs of art-loving youths," he tweeted on March 11.
Specifically, Jia's movie house will have 100 seats and he won't have the pressure of paying rent and can show whatever he wants because he will own it. Other filmmakers like He Ping and Wang Xiaoshuai chimed in and wished him luck.
It is something of a wonder that a metropolis of 20 million people does not have a place to showcase movies that do not include car chases or massive explosions. For one thing, MOMA Broadway also relies on a big slate of so-called blockbusters to fill its seats. For another, one cannot really fault the exhibitors for having a tunnel vision on profits.
They have created an industry phenomenon called "one-day tour", meaning a new release is given a screening for one day, and if it does not gain traction during that short window it will be yanked. And very often, the time of day reserved for such art fare is the early show. Movies without a sizeable marketing budget or a starry cast are often relegated to this dead-end slot, amounting to a quick euthanasia.
In 2006, Jia's Still Life happened to crash into Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower with its release date. Having a foreboding of doom, Jia lashed out at the market dominance of those mindless costume epics that left little room for the survival of his socially conscious and Golden Lion-winning elegy for the migrants of Yangtze River.
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