Bai Jingrui (Director)

Born: China, 1931-1997.
Like Li Xing made contemporary dramas, in the 'healthy realism' and Qiong Yao adapted melodrama genres. Unlike Li Xing, he started out not in taiyu pian but in Mandarin language productions.

He went to study in Italy. After he returned to Taiwan, as the first Chinese graduate from Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1963, he was hired by CMPC.

In his first feature, 'Lonely Seventeen' (1967), Bai intended to criticize the stifling lives of youth in the industrialized towns of Taiwan, but CMPC insisted it be a “socially responsible” film and, hence, the happy ending. Bai had to apply a “romantic” treatment to mask his social critique. Here is his complaint about this interference:
"Teenagers in our times are under a lot of stress—from the lack of parental care and rigid training in schools as well. They have to resort to fantasy to seek paradise. Hence all sorts of twisted psychology and weird behaviors. I was going to directly tackle this serious phenomenon but CMPC was afraid that the Communists would use it to attack our government. As an artist, I should have insisted on my original intention, but as a CMPC director, I also needed to understand my responsibility. So I changed the story quite a bit and turned it into a romantic film. Anyone can see that this film has no business being a romance story! No matter how well it has been received, I am not happy with it at all." [From Taiwan a Treasure Island]

He turned to comedy in the immediate years after this. Then later would make 'healthy realism' but with his own touches of modernism and experimentation, e.g. the split-screen techniques in the multi-strand plot of 'Home Sweet Home'. But the messages of filial piety in his films often feel tacked on, a coda inconsistent with the narrative and stylistic excess that dominates the film.

Between 1974 and 1979, an unprecedented boom for Taiwan popular cinema, Bai made a total of eighteen films. Sixteen of these films are romantic melodramas. By the early 1980s, when romance could no longer sustain the industry, Bai Jingrui tried to reinvent his career with the support of Hong Kong–based First Film Enterprise. He made an anti-Communist film, The Coldest Winter in Peking (Huangtian houtu, 1981), which was banned, expectedly, by the Hong Kong government for endangering its “friendly relations with neighboring countries.” In following years Bai appeared to run out of ideas and blindly followed the current fashions (including trying to mimic the style of the New Taiwan Cinema).