ON THE HUNTING GROUND (獵場扎撒)
dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1984
Inner Mongolia. 76 min.
In Mongolic dialect & overdubbed Mandarin with English subtitles.
TUESDAY, APRIL 1 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 10 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 13 – 5 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 28 – 7:30 PM
Join us this April at Spectacle for rare screenings of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s groundbreaking and highly controversial early feature, ON THE HUNTING GROUND.
Like many of his “Fifth Generation” contemporaries, Tian came up during a politically and socially volatile period in Chinese history, characterized in part by a state-driven effort to foster an image of an ideal socialist citizenry via its cultural institutions. This effort included the propagation of “national minority films” throughout the 1950s and 60s that sought to portray inter-ethnic fraternity between the ethnic majority Han (comprising upwards of 90% of the country’s population) and minority groups such as Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongols. Often, though, these films pushed an assimilationist agenda that contrasted the “backwardness” of these communities’ traditional customs and practices with the modern benefits of life under Chinese Communist rule.
Decades after these films fell out of fashion, Tian Zhuangzhuang revitalized the concept with two features set roughly within the parameters of the genre, albeit with a radically different approach. The first, ON THE HUNTING GROUND, was filmed in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and features a cast of native, non-professional actors. Ostensibly the film is about a local hunter who is ostracized from his community for violating a generations-old hunting code, but what plot and dialogue there is is sparse. Instead Tian approaches the work as part-minimalist visual experiment and part-ethnography, documenting the relationship between the Mongol peoples, their culture, and their land, irrespective of a state agenda that would seek to reconfigure the region’s physical and social environments for their own ends.
The film was ultimately met with a wave of controversy prior to its release, condemned by state censors and criticized heavily by the Chinese government and cultural traditionalists, and arguably contributing to his eventual blacklisting in 1994. Few cinemas within the country dared to screen the film publicly (supposedly only four prints of it were ever sold), however the work was championed by critics and filmmakers abroad, launching Tian to a level of international prominence contrasting with his perception at home.
“Tian’s work marks a radical break with the aesthetics of earlier generations of Chinese filmmakers. Rather than placing minority peoples within a narrative of liberation accessible to the average Han Chinese viewer, [ON THE HUNTING GROUND] emphasizes the relationship between the land and the people. Long shots and long takes dominate; the landscape overpowers any identification with individual characters; dialogue, which is minimal, goes untranslated; rituals and social relationships remain unexplained. The Mongolian steppes— exotic, violent, harsh, and picturesque— become the visual embodiment of an unfathomable part of the Chinese nation, a marker of the limits of an ethnic identity.
These films are not about the plight of a downtrodden “minority” (although the people presented in Tian’s films are indeed poor and sometimes desperate), rather these are films about the liminality of Chinese ethnicity and, by implication, political authority, within its own borders.”