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It looks like an experimental arrangement devised by a sociologist.
A city crossed by a river.
On one side of the river: an entertainment district with bars, hotels and arcades;
"Cotton Club" flashes in neon.
Directly opposite: a high bunker-like warehouse, ugly concrete, broken windows;
the antithesis of the amusement mile.
The surveillance device hovers in the sky: a zeppelin.
No Foucault, no Luhmann, but reality in 1937. The city: Shanghai.
The river: the Suzhou.
The glamor shore: the international concession, an extraterritorial area in the middle of China that the western colonial powers had pressed from the weak empire.
The warehouse: attacked by the Japanese invading army, defended by Chinese soldiers.
There are rules like in a computer game.
The Japanese could hit the warehouse with grenades, but are not allowed to because there is a gas tank nearby;
an explosion would also destroy the concession and turn foreign countries against Japan.
So there is only one thing left: close combat.
The concession's “luxury Chinese” watch the battle close by
Source: Cooking Films
“The 800” is the world's most successful movie of the past year, which of course also has to do with the pandemic-related absence of US blockbusters.
The film is a triangle of crazy relationships of looks.
The concession residents in the fine yarn look with morbid fascination at the dying that is happening live 50 meters away.
Their fireworks mix with the machine gun fire from over there.
The soldiers in the magazine look back, a little wistfully, but proud of the death-defying spectacle they offer.
And up in the airship, the "white devils" from Europe and America stare blasely down at the bloody spectacle that the "slit eyes" on the ground offer them.
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The 800 in the depot (in reality there were only a good 400, they puffed up their strength to deter the attackers) are the stuff of legends.
Like the brave defenders of the Texan Fort Alamo against the Mexican attackers or the heroic inhabitants of Kolberg during the siege by Napoleon.
The commander of the 800 upright, Xie Jinyuan, is in every Chinese history book.
He had already become a film hero twice, in a first version of the "800" in 1938 while the war was still raging, and in 1976 in a version made in Taiwan.
Now the People's Republic is complaining about it.
"The 800" by Guan Hu, who is developing into a state director, is a song of praise for Red Chinese patriotism.
"If all the Chinese were so brave, they would never have been attacked," stated a woman with a fur necklace on the amusement side.
"It is an honor to serve your country," one soldier declaimed.
"Our whole country will remember your exploits," said a government emissary, Xie Jinyuan.
"Your men are the only true Chinese." And finally, like an unshakable axiom of history: "The Chinese state will never go under."
This sentence falls on the flat roof of the warehouse in the most jolly scene of the entire film.
A young woman swam across the Suzhou (the only woman who played a role) at risk of death and brought a flag of the Republic, a blue coat of arms on a red cloth.
Many hands are now erecting a mast with it, as a sign of continued resistance, and the reporters on the other side capture the moment and send the signal out into the world.
Then a Japanese plane comes and mows the flag holders.
The symbol threatens to fall, but - and now a close-up - a bloody hand stops the fall, many hands come to the rescue and raise the flag again.
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It's the same mechanisms we've seen in US war films for 50 years.
An imperturbable John Wayne leader, a purifying coward, self-sacrificing commoners who jump into clusters of enemy soldiers with explosive belts.
As soon as the flag flutters, a solitary horn sounds, as Hollywood loves it in solemn moments.
The vocabulary is bursting with “fatherland” and “honor” and is undiluted state propaganda.
On the verge of chauvinism
“The 800” balances on the border with chauvinism, the exaggeration of patriotism, which reviles other nations, but holds back somewhat when drawing the Japanese;
once the commanders face each other in no man's land (on horses!) and chatter about "a battle between us two men".
The film is primarily an inner-Chinese affair that is supposed to unite its viewers behind the “China First” policy of the Communist Party, since the country is surrounded by enemies, the Japanese and the decadent West that dines in a zeppelin and looks down on a divided country .
The moral of the story is that in the end the long indifferent Chinese civilians stand by their beleaguered compatriots.
House warfare in "The 800"
Source: Cooking Films
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The unifying factor is the army because, as we are told, “it protects the country”.
However, this is also where the dialectical pitfalls of the film lie, because everyone knows that they just couldn't do that, that the Japanese defeated them.
In addition, the heroic 524th Regiment did not belong to Mao Tse-tung's People's Liberation Army, but to the troops of his bitter rival Chiang Kai-shek, who fled to Taiwan after his defeat in the civil war (where, not by chance, the previous Xie Jinyuan film was made ).
How highly sensitive the topic is, Guan Hu learned at the latest when his film was cashed in 24 hours before the premiere at the Shanghai Festival - even though it had gone through all the censors.
Allegedly, a group of party scholars criticized the portrayal of Chiang's army;
her spokesman complained that the "oppression in their ranks" and the "crimes of their officers" did not occur.
“The 800” disappeared into a black box for a year and only reappeared last August, 13 minutes shorter.
It became the most successful movie of 2020, the first from China, albeit due to the pandemic.
Still, it's a signal.
The effects are Hollywood-level
“The 800” is not only the beneficiary of the deliberately fanned Chinese patriotism.
It is also a terrific spectacle for the big screen, but can only be seen in Germany as an on-demand video.
Special effects and battle choreography can easily compete with Hollywood, they also come for the most part from Western specialists - still.
China's film industry would be on the cusp of global success if it could shake off political indoctrination with its woodcut-like characters and formulaic messages.
Now, in July, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party is approaching.
The party is reported to have urged leading directors of China to create propaganda works.
Guan Hu is currently working on The Revolutionary, which is about Li Dazhao, one of the party founders.
From the perspective of ordinary people, it is intended to show the "inextinguishable revolutionary fire and high ambitions" that have burned in this country for a century.
From February 11th at Koch Video
This text is from WELT AM SONNTAG. We will be happy to deliver them to your home on a regular basis.
Source: Welt am Sonntag