Xie Jin, 84, a veteran director in modern Chinese cinema known for tackling the country’s ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution, was found dead early Saturday in his hotel room in the eastern Chinese city of Shangyu, where he was attending the 100th anniversary of his middle school, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
The cause of his death remained unclear, Xinhua said in a report late Saturday.
With a six-decade career, Xie was a predecessor of the so-called “Fifth Generation” of Chinese directors famous in the West such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige.
He is best known for a trio of films about victims of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, when millions of people suspected of opposing the Communist government were persecuted. Senior arts figures had opposed the release of the films, “The Legend of Tianyun Mountain” (1980), “The Herdsman” (1982) and “Hibiscus Town” (1986). Some critics accused them of damaging the image of the Chinese Communist Party, Xie said in a 2002 interview.
The director said he made the films because “the tragedies we experience impelled me to speak out.”
“We cannot bear to think that similar things might happen to us again, and that’s why we have to show what happened to the public. We have to let people know what we experienced,” Xie said.
Xie himself was targeted during the Cultural Revolution. His 1964 film “Stage Sisters” was attacked because it “advocated the reconciliation of social classes.”
Xie’s parents committed suicide amid the political pressure. His mother jumped off a building, and his father overdosed on sleeping pills — and he had to collect their bodies himself. Xie was also denounced at a rally attended by more than 100,000 people.
Top young Chinese director Jia Zhangke said Sunday that it was still risky for Xie to make films about the period in the 1980s, when China had started to open up and implement economic reforms.
“He was very bold, he had a rebellious spirit for that time,” said Jia, whose movies were also once banned.
Ken Ogata, 71, a versatile and prolific leading man in Japanese films and on Japanese television who also appeared in movies directed by Peter Greenaway and Paul Schrader, died Oct. 5 in Tokyo. He was 71.
The Mainichi newspapers of Japan said the cause was liver cancer, citing Ogata’s family as the source.
On Sept. 30 Ogata appeared at a news conference to publicize a new television series on which he plays an aging doctor. Japanese news reports said he showed no sign of illness. The series, “Kaze no Garden” (“Garden of the Wind”), was first broadcast four days after his death.
A favorite of director Shohei Imamura, who cast him in five films, Ogata made his name in the West playing a brutal serial killer in Imamura’s 1979 film “Vengeance Is Mine,” in which he vacillated between two emotional poles, impassivity and rage.
A second Imamura film, “The Ballad of Narayama” (1983), in which he played a man who, according to his village’s harsh tradition, must leave his aging mother to die on a nearby mountain, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. For his performance, Ogata won the Japanese equivalent of the Oscar.
His best-known performance in an English-language film was as a calligrapher in “The Pillow Book” (1996), directed by Greenaway. The film, a lushly erotic work, is about a young woman who takes sensuous pleasure from having her skin written on.
