The Chinese director Feng Xiaogang, best known for his commercial comedies, yesterday gave an indication of what audiences can expect from his biggest, darkest, and most political movie yet.
At the Shanghai International Film Festival, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Feng showed the trailer (see below) for his $33 million “Remembering 1942,” his epic account of the wartime famine in Henan Province, in the North China Plain, that is believed to have left between three and five million people dead.
Eighteen years in gestation, the movie stars Feng’s wife Xu Fan, Zhang Hanyu, Zhang Guoli, and the American actors Tim Robbins and Adrien Brody. Robbins plays a Catholic priest and Brody is the journalist and historian Theodore H. White, whose eyewitness accounts in Time magazine broke the news of the tragedy in the West.
Henan’s poor harvests of 1940 and 1941 had led to food reserves being used up. Drought caused the failure of the 1942 wheat crop, and what wheat was produced was taken by the tax collectors. Wrote White in his and Annalee Jacoby’s 1946 best-seller “Thunder Out of China”:
“The government in county after county was demanding of the peasant more actual poundage of grain than he had raised on his acres. No excuses were allowed: peasants who were eating elm bark and dried leaves had to haul their last sack of seed grain to the tax collector’s office. Peasants who were so weak they could barely walk had to collect fodder for the army’s horses, fodder that was more nourishing than the filth they were cramming into their own mouths.”
The resulting starvation was catastrophic. White and a British journalist traveled across the province by train, witnessing endless processions of refugees. In small towns, White observed, “There were corpses on the road. A girl of no more than seventeen, slim and pretty, lay on the damp earth, her lips blue with death; her eyes were open and the rain fell on them. People chipped at bark, pounded it by the roadside for food; vendors sold leaves at a dollar a bundle. A dog digging at a mound was exposing a human body. Ghostlike men were skimming the stagnant pools to eat the green slime of the waters.”
The film was adapted by Feng and Liu Zhenyun from Liu’s 1993 novel “The Memory of 1942.” Liu, a native of Henan, and Feng had attempted to launch the project twice previously. Despite ballooning costs, it was eventually financed by the Huayi Brothers Media Corporation, which had originally sought to make it.
"I realized that [“Remembering 1942”) was my third encounter living in 1942 in my lifetime," Brody told The Playlist in March. "'The Thin Red Line,' 'The Pianist' for the European front, and now China. So stepping into those shoes again, and reliving that look and feel in a new movie, it's a strange phenomenon. It's another life, but you know it, and it becomes more intimate for you, even though the characters are different, and the circumstances are different.”
Of White, Brody said, "He had a profound effect, creating awareness of this tragedy, and then he was later condemned as a Communist back in the States. But he wasn't even a Communist. He just studied Chinese culture. But he made a major effort to shed a light on the government's lack of accountability in providing relief to the refugees. He did a good thing."