Keeping the Flame of Chinese Cinema Alive in Alhambra : Film: Wu Tian-ming’s career was derailed by last year’s events at Tian An Men Square, but until he can return home he’s trying to work here.

Less than a year ago, Wu Tian-ming seemed secure in his position as the director of the Xian Film Studio, the most progressive and internationally honored filmmaking unit in China. He was also a well-regarded film director. Today, he lives in straitened financial circumstances in a shabby Alhambra apartment, trying to pick up the pieces of a life shattered by the Tian An Men Square massacre.

Wu Tian-ming has been in Alhambra since December, having completed a four-month stint teaching Chinese at UC Davis.

“Even if I have more teaching opportunities, I’m not a teacher or professor or a lecturer,” he said through his friend and interpreter Chen Mai, a film historian and visiting professor of cinema at USC. “If I can’t make films I feel my heart will stop beating, because films are my life--the root of my existence.

“Ever since I was a child I have loved films. I have been in the film industry for almost 30 years, and if I stop filmmaking, it’s almost like taking the life out of me. But I realize there are lots of differences between making a film in the United States and in China. Here, the first consideration is how much money is it going to cost and how much money is it going to make. It’s a real challenge for a Chinese film director in the American scene.”

Anyone acquainted with Wu, a stocky man of 50 blessed with a sturdy sense of humor, cannot doubt that he is equal to the challenge. As a child in the Shanxi Province, Wu so loved the theater that he did anything he was allowed to do for the local acting troupe. At 19, he sold the cotton shoes sewn by his mother so that he could buy three tickets to see three successive screenings of Dovzhenko’s “Poem of the Sea” in an unheated theater in mid-winter.

Setbacks are nothing new to Wu: his father, a county government official and dedicated Communist, died shortly after serving a prison term during the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, Wu, who had begun as an actor at the Xian Film Studio in 1960, was accepted at the Beijing Film Academy, but because of the Cultural Revolution was unable to commence his directing course until 1974.

Not until 1982 did he have a solo directing credit, “River Without Buoys,” a beautifully structured film of deceptive calm, a journey into the past as three men, traveling by raft down the Pushui River in Xian, share their experiences of the Cultural Revolution. The film played Los Angeles in 1985.

In the wake of China’s Cultural Revolution, the state studio in Xian won worldwide acclaim for such films as Zhang Yimou’s “Red Sorghum,” a lush, lyrical rural epic culminating with the Japanese invasion; Huang Jianxin’s “The Black Cannon Incident,” a controversial attack on old-line paranoid bureaucratic mentality; Tian Zhuangzhuang’s “Horse Thief,” an astoundingly beautiful and austere film set in Tibet in the 1920s, and Wu’s own “Old Well,” a stirring plea to Chinese communities to learn to help themselves rather than hope that the central government will someday come to their rescue.

At the time of the Tian An Men Square crisis, Wu was in the United States as a visiting scholar. He has now been separated from his family for nearly a year. Even so, he views his situation as temporary, although he has begun the arduous task of learning English and attempting to resume his directing career. With the encouragement of Chen Mai, a specialist in American cinema, and also Robert Rosen, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Wu is seeking backing for three different projects.

The first and most important is “Lotus,” an adaptation of a novel by Hualing Nieh, whom Wu met at a cultural symposium in San Francisco last year. It is the story of a woman born in the fateful year of 1949 to a Chinese mother and an American journalist father, who survives the Cultural Revolution to come to terms with herself at last in Iowa, where her father was born and where she enters graduate school.

Another project is based on an actual incident in which a Chinese student shot an American on American soil--”I want to explore why and how he did it and the consequences,” explained Wu--and another about an American pilot shot down during World War II in the Yunan Province of China, where there are more Southeast Asians than there are Chinese.

Even though Wu tries to see an American film every day, he realizes he cannot make a “real” American film--just as, he says, Spielberg and Coppola couldn’t make a real Chinese picture. “If we would try to reverse our roles, we would all sink,” said Wu with a laugh. “I must make films on the relationship between China and America. I’m convinced that I can make a film about America as seen through Chinese eyes.”

Although Wu cannot say how long he will stay in America, he said firmly, “I shall return home. I must return to make films where my roots are. In the meantime the study of American films is essential to understand why they are so overwhelmingly influential. For our part, the Chinese film has been tied up by lots of political restrictions, but recently they have had the chance to fly out over the world.

“As for what happened in China during the summer of 1989 I feel very shocked and saddened. I was thinking that our ancestors must have offended heaven that we Chinese should deserve such a doomed fate. We cannot seem to escape this fate. What happened was very unfortunate, but maybe it was inevitable in the course of history.

“My only hope is that we can retrieve the confidence we have had for the past 10 years and face reality. I think this is the hope of all Chinese. I hope the Chinese film does not regress because of what happened in 1989. We had just gotten started in the world cinema. We are so far away from competing in the world market that we cannot afford a regression, a cutback. It would be the greatest tragedy for Chinese films.”