When I heard people talk about their childhood or their past in great, funny and vivid details, I either get jealous or furiously depressed: I feel I have been treated a bad deal in my share of the capacity of brain cell because sometimes I cannot even figure out whether what I 'remember' was the sheer fiction fuelled by imagination or a combination of fiction and truth. When I hear the questions such as what was my earliest memory, I honestly do not have a clue. I have some vague memories of my childhood living in a mountainous area where the air was fresh, life was gay, and there was a river full of stones right behind my house, but then I cannot work out if the images was in fact constructed the stories from my parents, literature, or really derived from own experience, pure and simple.
But when I watched the Italian film 'Rome, an Open City' and read that the film contains possibly the 'cruelest torture scene' in cinema, I heard myself saying that is Euro centric - because a childhood secret tells me otherwise.
I cannot figure out how old I was, but for a long while, I was seriously worried that if my secret - a recurrent dream - was exposed, I would become a shame and be disowned by my family, my school and anybody else that I know.
That secret of my childhood involved me betraying the top secrets of the 'Party' (inevitably in those days, the Communist Party) in order to save my pitiful self from being tortured to death by the 'enemy' (i.e., the Nationalist Party), and when I woke up from such nightmares, I would usually be very ashamed of myself and wonder why a daughter of a proud Communist was such a coward in front of fire, bullets, or simply all tools of torture. I wanted to behave like those martyrs in films who would rather die than risking the lives of their comrades or undermining the 'great revolutionary cause'.
For a long long time I could not work out what was wrong with me. I kept this recurring dream to myself until I started to read books on psychology and realise it might have a lot to do with the films that I had been exposed to in my childhood. And indeed when I was researching on Chinese cinema some years ago, a figure suggested that when China was first opened up in the late 1978 to 1979, there was a huge surge in the audience number. In fact the figure was a staggering 2.19 billion or something like that which has never been outnumbered. The reason for such a record? Simple: television was just a department of the radio station and the ownership of television was nominal. And there was no other forms of entertainment. So going to the cinema was the main recreation of the whole population who had until that point been starved of films for more than 12 years. The fact that film tickets were cheap and usually handed out free was also a major factor.
However the 'golden year' of cinema had nothing to do with the boom of film making. The films available at that time were predominantly products of the '17 years', namely from 1949 to 1966 - the period between Communist Party first took power and before the Cultural Revolution was launched. And although film scholars would nostalgically described that period as a time of relative freedom for the 'cultural workers', film was used by the ruling party - following Lenin's claim that 'film of all art is the most important' for propaganda, to educate mass the revolutionary past and propagate revolutionary ideas and agendas. And to play safe, the most popular genre was to relate the history of how the Communist Party 'drove away the Anglo-American Imperialists and its running dogs - the Nationalist Party' in the three decades of endless civil wars and 'anti-Japanese Invasion War'. And in such films, the Communists are nearly all immaculate: they do not just look the part in being incredibly handsome and well dressed, but also are 'made of steel that never melt under fire'.
My memory might have played a trick on me, but I do remember going to cinema a lot with my family and that I would usually come out from the cinema and not being able to follow the discussions of my classmates after we were taken to the cinema. But scenes of torture were visual and did not require high intelligence for a 12 year old to understand and these must have triggered those nightmares in which I always begged or cried: 'please don't torture me. Tell me what you want and I will tell all'.
I have been asked how I developed the passion for cinema, has it anything to do with such experience. My answer was of course not. But some events that happened around that same time might have sown the seeds of this passion. Like the mentor in Cinema Paradise, my next door neighbour of many years was an army projectionist. And because my apartment was one of the 'biggest' (for lack of furniture rather than its actual size, and my parents' hospitality), every now and then, my neighbour (who would usually snored at my apartment after lunch) would show films in my apartment - with neighbours cramming into the 200 square feet room, some in the 'stall' on the cold bench or floor, some in the 'circle' on my parents bed. Films being shown include the epic 'From a Slave to General', 'Maple Tree Valley', the singing and dancing 'Five Golden Flowers', 'Liu Shan Jie', 'Ah Si Ma' etc... It was one of the highlights of our lives - not just because of the entertainment, but also because my home would become the centre of the whole block which housed around five households on each of the four floors. Because there was only one projector, half way through, we would have to take a break when the projectionist changed the reels. Sometimes at lunch time, I would spot him mending the broken films at their sewing machine doubled as a worktop and sometimes I could not help but to pick up one of those cut out pieces and kept them in my treasure book so that I could show off to my classmates at school! Until now, I don't think I appreciated what an effort he must have made to keep it from my family from knowing such a shady side of my character!
