Entertainment, Empowerment, and Education in Big Shot’s Funeral

Among contemporary Chinese film directors, Feng Xiaogang occupies a somewhat awkward place. As the first mainland film director whose box-office numbers officially exceeded one billion yuan as of January 2009, he is the indisputable box-office king, outperforming the internationally renowned art-house auteurs such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige in the domestic film market by a wide margin. Feng’s unprecedented commercial success as a film director is directly and specifically linked to the enduring mass appeal of hesuipian (New Year’s celebration film), a cinematic genre inspired by industry practices in Hollywood and Hong Kong, and relatively new to the Chinese audience at the close of the 20th Century.