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The art of marketing: all things to all men

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-23 09:26

Publicity for films is never to be believed. And in China there is more than the usual reason because a movie can be made in one genre and marketed as another.

Chinese filmmakers are increasingly skillful in the art of telling it not as it is. The purpose can be many-fold: to appease censors, to curry favor with foreign juries and, more than ever, to attract audiences.

Roughly speaking, there are three types of movies in China today: genre movies that are commercial, art movies whose main goal is to win awards, especially European ones, and finally zhuxuanlu, literally "main melody", referring to movies that emphasize positive values endorsed by the government and are possibly funded by the government.

Gao Qunshu's Nick of Time was cited by the 9th Media Awards for Chinese-Language Films as "a main melody film that's actually anti-main melody". It depicts Old Fish, an ordinary cop who is thrust into a situation where he has to defuse a dozen scare bombs until the last one turns out to be real.

Old Fish is not a bomb expert and does not ask for the "honor of sacrifice". In the end, he implores the authorities to give his son a good job in return for his severe injury. These are all subtle deviations from the stereotype of a hero, who is supposed to be totally selfless and courageous.

Ambitious filmmakers even attempt to straddle all three fields. Feng Xiaogang's Assembly is about a Communist soldier who takes on a personal mission to obtain the honor of "martyrs" for his comrades.

On general publicity occasions, it was promoted as "a war movie with state-of-the-art pyrotechnics but (hush, hush) little social content"; to government authorities it played up the heroism of the Communist soldiers; and then to the so-called media elites it took on the facade of an art movie, despite its grand budget, and sold itself as an expression of humanitarianism and even individualism. Surprisingly, all three sides bought the arguments.

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