A Companion to Chinese Cinema

Yingjin Zhang

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781444330298
• eBook ISBN: 9781444355970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A Companion to Chinese Cinema is a collection of original essays written by experts in a range of disciplines that provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution and current state of Chinese cinema.

• Represents the most comprehensive coverage of Chinese cinema to date
• Applies a multidisciplinary approach that maps the expanding field of Chinese cinema in bold and definitive ways
• Draws attention to previously neglected areas such as diasporic filmmaking, independent documentary, film styles and techniques, queer aesthetics, star studies, film and other arts or media
• Features several chapters that explore China's new market economy, government policy, and industry practice, placing the intricate relationship between film and politics in a historical and international context
• Includes overviews of Chinese film studies in Chinese and English publications

1

General Introduction

Yingjin Zhang

At the time when the world had just entered the new millennium, I ventured to track the exciting development of Chinese cinema through its “box-office boom and academic investment” (Y. Zhang 2002: 16–18). Ten years down the road, Chinese cinema has continued its extraordinary expansion in all aspects, very much like the red-hot Chinese economy, which became the world’s second largest when China’s GDP (US$1.33 trillion) surpassed Japan’s (US$1.28 trillion) in the second quarter of 2010 (Time 2010). Yet, even before the awe-inspiring ceremonies at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, masterminded by the world-renowned Chinese film director Zhang Yimou (b. 1950), were televised live to captivated audiences globally (Curtin 2010: 118), a series of impressive achievements in Chinese cinema had already occurred. In terms of box office in the United States, two successful Chinese art films from the early 1990s could barely compare to two Chinese blockbusters a decade later: on the one hand, The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993) was screened in 113 US theaters and grossed US$6.9 million, while Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993) opened in three theaters only but grossed $5.2 million; on the other hand, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) was screened in 2,027 theaters and grossed $128.1 million, while Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002) was screened in 2,175 theaters and grossed $53.7 million (Rosen 2010: 47). In terms of box office in China, the 2009 top-grossing domestic film, The Founding of a Republic (Han Sanping, Huang Jianxin, 2009), reached RMB 415 million (or approximately US$6.1 million) (Yin 2010: 6), representing an increase of 9.9 times over that of the record RMB 42 million set by Big Shot’s Funeral (Feng Xiaogang, 2001) (Y. Zhang 2010c: 135).¹ Indeed, compared with 88 domestic films and RMB 840 million total box office in 2001 (Y. Zhang 2010a: 172), the 2009 statistics – 456 domestic feature productions and RMB 6,206 million total box office (Yin 2010: 5) – indicate a growth of 5.2 times and 7.4 times, respectively, thereby consolidating a decade-long unprecedented boom (for the latest statistics, see Rosen’s tables in Chapter 11). Equally impressive is the academic investment in Chinese film studies, as colleges in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America have quickly expanded course offerings in China-related disciplinary and area studies. The Journal of Chinese Cinemas, a refereed periodical devoted exclusively to this growing field, was inaugurated in the United Kingdom in 2007, academic publishers have increased the number of new books in Chinese film studies, and innumerable panels, workshops, symposia, and conferences on Chinese cinema are held around the world every year.²

Launched at an appropriate time, therefore, A Companion to Chinese Cinema seeks to map the expanding field of Chinese cinema in a bold and definitive way. Given its generous length of thirty chapters, the volume offers sufficient depth and breadth to engage a variety of theories, methods, debates, and issues in a fast-developing academic field and to shape the intellectual conversation around key subjects in Chinese cinema and Chinese film studies. To maximize its mapping potential, the volume is designed to be as much prospective in nature (i.e., to start a discussion moving forward) as it is retrospective and reflective (i.e., to trace the history and state of the field). This introduction, as a starter, sets the stage for interactive conversations among chapters included here and publications elsewhere by briefly identifying a few highlights in Chinese film studies in English, delineating the structure of the present volume’s coverage, summarizing major contributions from our individual chapters, relating divergent and convergent points among different contributors, and briefly mentioning several areas and topics worthy of additional research.³

A quick glance over select English publications from the past three decades helps us outline the contours of the developing field of Chinese film studies, although readers should pursue Chapter 26 for Chris Berry’s mapping of the field in terms of language, readership, and discipline. First, at a time when Chinese cinema had just started to attract increasing attention abroad, in the first edition of Perspectives on Chinese Cinema Chris Berry (1985: i) rightly emphasized the urgent need for “a multidisciplinary approach” and anticipated that “Chinese cinema can be productively studied from a number of angles.”⁴ Second, while keeping a similar multidisciplinary emphasis, in New Chinese Cinemas (1994) Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchak, and Esther Yau extended the parameters of Chinese cinema to include Hong Kong and Taiwan and justified this extension by pluralizing Chinese cinemas. Third, retaining the plural form of designation, Sheldon Lu in Transnational Chinese Cinemas (1997) foregrounded transnationalism as a new framework that goes beyond national cinemas, and the impact of transnationalism is visible in the subsequent scholarship (e.g., Berry and Farquhar 2006). Fourth, in Chinese-Language Film (2005) Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yeh have chosen “Chinese-language film” as a more inclusive term that can accommodate films from Chinese territories other than mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; its equivalent in Chinese, huayu dianying, has likewise gained more traction in Chinese scholarship, as Chen Xihe observes in Chapter 25. Finally, with Chinese Ecocinema (2009), Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi demonstrate that Chinese cinema has a larger role to play in China studies and film studies because cinema is a vital force in renegotiating fractured relationships among nature, history, technology, and culture.

The slight variation in the titles of the above-mentioned anthologies reveals that naming the object of our study has been contentious. In the current English discourse, “Chinese cinema(s),” “Chinese-language cinema,” and “Sinophone cinema” are three principal contenders, each carrying its own ideological baggage and each working toward an explicit aim of deterritorialization or reterritorialization. First, the reconceptualization of the national in Chinese cinema as various geographically grounded and “socially, politically, and historically specific projects” (Berry 1998: 132) has undermined the foundational myth of consensus and homogeneity in the national cinema paradigm, and many scholars have accepted that “Chinese cinema” covers Chinese-language films – as well as films with mixed Chinese and other languages – from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places overseas (Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America). The heterogeneity recognized by this wide coverage has sometimes resulted in a plural designation of “Chinese cinemas,” as captured in the two titles mentioned above (Browne et al. 1994; S. Lu 1997) and more recently in the title of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas.⁵ What is important here is that in reconceptualizing Chinese cinema, the Chineseness is seen as dispersed “historically, politically, territorially, culturally, ethnically, and linguisticially” (Y. Zhang 2004a: 3), thus keeping all kinds of Chineseness open to contention and reconfiguration. Precious due to its open horizons, “Chinese cinema” is preferred in this volume to the other two terms, which seem to be restricted either linguistically or territorially.

Second, in an effort to loosen its grounding in the territorial nation-state, “Chinese-language cinema” highlights the diversity of languages and dialects in Chinese cinema, as already evident in such terms as “Cantonese cinema” (yueyu pian), “Mandarin cinema” (guoyu pian), and “Taiwanese-dialect cinema” (taiyu pian).⁶ Perhaps functioning better in Chinese, where Zhongguo dianying (Chinese cinema) carries a residual emphasis on the nation-state (guo), huayu dianying (Chinese-language cinema) extends to include films produced by Chinese diasporas “outside the sovereign Chinese nation-state – for example, Hollywood, Singapore, or elsewhere” (Lu and Yeh 2005: 1). Moreover, “Chinese-language cinema” also foregrounds the heterogeneity internal to a territory by tracking dialects and other accented practices (S. Lu 2007: 150–63). Yet, the fact that Sheldon Lu has switched from “Chinese cinemas” (1997) to “Chinese-language film” (2005) and back to “Chinese ecocinema” (2009) proves that the difference between “Chinese cinema(s)” and “Chinese- language film” is not substantial after all.

Third, albeit equally predicated on the politics of language, Shu-mei Shih (2007: 4) refutes what she perceives as the centripetal force in “Chinese-language cinema” and defines “the Sinophone” as one that refers to “a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness,” the former exemplified by Taiwan and the latter by Hong Kong. While Shih’s reterritorialized method of positioning the Sinophone against China in a counter-hegemonic fashion has left many questions unresolved (Y. Zhang 2010a: 20–1), her attempt to map out a vast – albeit scattered and fragmented – space of cultural productions in the Chinese language or by the ethnic Chinese around the world bespeaks the complicated geopolitics of Chinese cinema from its early years to the present day. Indeed, Yiman Wang shows in Chapter 29 precisely such a geographic dispersal in certain phases of Chinese film history, from early cinema to globalization.

My brief discussion above illustrates that critical anthologies have played a crucial role in moving the field of Chinese film studies forward thanks to their productive format of expanded coverage and multi-author collaboration. This volume aims to continue that fine tradition. Apart from this general introduction, 29 originally written chapters collected here are divided into five parts: (1) history and geography, (2) industry and institution, (3) genre and representation, (4) arts and media, and (5) issues and debates. As representative of the interdisciplinary nature of the field, our thirty contributors come from film and media studies, literary and cultural studies, history, political science, and art history, and they have adopted a variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches to given subjects. However, it is crucial to remember from the outset that the volume does not claim to have exhausted every aspect of Chinese cinema, nor does it cover all relevant subjects in its five parts. Each chapter represents its author’s take on a particular topic, but taken as a whole the volume promises to provide an inspirational introduction to the rich materials Chinese cinema has offered to the world.

Part I: History and Geography

“Part I: History and Geography” contains seven chapters, three of them focused on the mainland and two others each on Hong Kong and Taiwan. This division of labor highlights the centrality of political geography in Chinese cinema, which is as much a transnational, transregional, and translocal cinema as it is a national cinema (Y. Zhang 2011). Indeed, the cross-border flows of ideas and images were already underway in early Chinese cinema, as Zhang Zhen documents in Chapter 2, “Transplanting Melodrama: Observations on the Emergence of Early Chinese Narrative Film.” Using the newly discovered extant fragments of Poet from the Sea (Hou Yao, 1927) as a springboard, Zhang acknowledges the multiplicity and mutual imbrication of centers and peripheries as well as modernities and subjectivities in the founding phase of Chinese film history. She deliberately re-anchors the recent scholarly debate on melodrama’s global appeal vis-à-vis cultural identity in the context of the melodrama film’s emergence in China during the 1920s–1930s. Following Cai Guorong’s twofold differentiation of the wenyi genre, which overlaps in thematic and stylistic parameters with the conventional Western melodrama film, into those concerned with family ethics and those with romances, Zhang argues that Hou Yao (1903–42) best represents the “artistic” wenyi film centered on romantic love, in distinction with early “family ethics” melodrama films geared ostensibly toward kinship, communal sentiments, plebian tastes, and market demands, best exemplified by the works of Zheng Zhengqiu (1889–1935). Furthermore, by situating the wenyi film in the changing Chinese political environment of the 1910s–1920s, Zhang demonstrates that Hou’s Poet from the Sea stands as a testimony to the cultural and ideological transition that affected both the literary and film scenes, and thus represents a lament for the incomplete project of the May Fourth enlightenment. With references to the D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) fever in 1920s Shanghai as part of the broad transnational “melodramatic imagination,” Zhang concludes that Chinese filmmakers succeeded in translating and adapting Euro-American sources, along with Chinese literary and theatrical traditions, in the contradiction-ridden context of China’s new culture movement and Shanghai’s semicolonial modernity.

Zhang Zhen’s deliberation on early Chinese cinema favors a cultural history approach she first adopted in her book on pre-1937 Chinese cinema (Z. Zhang 2005), which is distinguished, among others, by a focused historical perspective (the 1920s in this case), attention to the materiality of cultural production (the archive, print culture), sensitivity to intertextuality and cross-mediality (e.g., film, literature, theater) in a transnational context, and eagerness for theoretical intervention (e.g., melodrama and modernity). Her concentration on melodrama through the case study of Hou Yao’s 1920s oeuvres prepares us for Stephen Teo’s study of genre and nation in Chapter 15. Regrettably, space limitations have prevented us from including another chapter to deal with the 1930s–1940s, although the interested reader is advised to pursue existing scholarship on these vibrant periods (J. Hu 2000; Pang 2002; Fu 2003; Y. Zhang 2008), from which a large number of films have become available for viewing in video format. In terms of film historiography, however, the postwar period (i.e., 1945–49) still awaits book-length treatment in English.

Instead of concentrating on a particular decade and a key genre as Zhang Zhen does, Paul Clark leads us through important events and representative works during three tremulous decades in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Chapter 3, “Artists, Cadres and Audiences: Chinese Socialist Cinema, 1949–1978.” He starts with the transition years when most filmmakers’ careers crossed the 1949 divide. It is through issuing new rules and staging nationwide mass campaigns that the Communist regime experimented, modified, abandoned, or even reversed the new directions it set (e.g., the Hundred Flowers). Nonetheless, the socialist period gradually brought up a new corps of studios and filmmakers, as well as new cadres and audiences, especially those in the vast countryside serviced by mobile projection teams. Mao Zedong’s new aesthetic standard of combining revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism saw fruition in the revolutionary “model play” (yangbanxi) films during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), and the ensuing period of aftermath and recovery prepared for the emergence of an entirely new generation in the 1980s. Coming from an expert on socialist China, Clark’s historical narrative offers a concise overview, but its limited references to English scholarship other than his own (Clark 1987, 2005) points to the paucity of critical attention to socialist cinema, although the situation has changed with a special issue on the 1950s of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, which includes the author’s new work on film audiences (Clark 2011).

Compared with the socialist period, the past three decades of Chinese cinema have received much more scholarly attention (X. Zhang 1997; S. Lu 2002; Y. Zhang 2002, 2010a; Y. Zhu 2003; Berry 2004a; Pickowicz and Zhang 2006; Z. Zhang 2007b; McGrath 2008b). In Chapter 4, “Directors, Aesthetics, Genres: Chinese Postsocialist Cinema, 1979–2010,” I first delineate the parameters of postsocialism and highlight the concept of simultaneous continuities and discontinuities that mark this period of seismic changes. I can then take time to review three interrelated areas – directors, aesthetics, and genres – and tackle problems engendered by a generational lineup, the significance of avant-garde experiment and international reception, the complication of genre repackaging, and the changing functions of cinema in the age of globalization. I argue that, convenient as it is, dividing directors into generations does little justice to the complexity and heterogeneity of Chinese film history, that several generations share their moments of experimental filmmaking at different historical junctures, and that the principal function of cinema in postsocialist China has switched from aesthetics and education in the late 1970s through 1980s to entertainment in the 2000s. A revisit to two critical debates on Xie Jin’s film model and entertainment cinema, respectively, in the second half of the 1980s, together with a comparison of selective market statistics, foregrounds how much Chinese cinema and film criticism have changed in the past three decades.

Leaving mainland China, Robert Chi takes us back in history by resituating Hong Kong cinema in a framework larger than that of mainland-centered Chinese national cinema. In Chapter 5, “Hong Kong Cinema before 1980,” Chi pursues a theoretical approach by which one may focus on geography instead of history, on places, regions, and orientations instead of periods. From the geographic perspective, the size and location of Hong Kong are revealed to have exerted a deep impact on its film industry from the very beginning, cultivating a constitutive role of extraterritoriality and a fundamental orientation toward regional networking. History and geography cannot exist without each other, Chi argues; hence particular orientations privilege particular historical narratives for Hong Kong, with nationalism to the north, (de)colonization to the south, modernization to the east, and empire to the west. Seen in this context, Chi suggests, Hong Kong cinema was more a part of Southeast Asia than of China in its early decades. Moreover, just as we may reconceptualize a center as a point through which things pass rather than as a point of origin or arrival, so we can appreciate a place where things like tropes, genres, talent, technology, and capital pass through, recombining and metamorphosing in the process. The outcome of such conceptualization is a decisive shift from the nation to the region, and the meditation on space and cinema enables Chi to map out a whole region with Hong Kong as a new kind of center. To be sure, national factors are still part of the picture, but they manifest themselves differently in various “geo-corporate” models, as those represented by Lai Man-wai (Li Minwei, 1892–1953) and the Shaw Brothers, all locked in the dynamics of border-crossing activities.

In Chapter 6, “The Hong Kong New Wave,” Gina Marchetti offers a fresh look at a much-discussed film movement in Hong Kong (E. Yau 2001; Cheuk 2008) by differentiating connotations between “new wave” and “new cinema” in world cinema and connecting the “new” to a new generation who uses new technologies to achieve new effects in largely nontraditional ways. The emphasis on the new leads Marchetti to rediscover King Hu (Hu Jinquan, 1931–97, active in the 1960s) and Tang Shu-shuen (Tang Shuxuan, b. 1941, active in the 1970s) as two notable predecessors to the Hong Kong New Wave, and her profiles of representative directors (e.g., Allen Fong [Fang Yuping, b. 1947], Ann Hui [Xu Anhua, b. 1947]) and their “performing women” on and off screen (e.g., Maggie Cheung [Zhang Manyu, b. 1964], Anita Mui [Mei Yanfang, 1963–2003]) add nuances to shared concerns from two waves of an evolving movement. For Marchetti, the martial arts genre gives the new wave an opportunity to explore complex issues such as androgyny (via Brigitte Lin [Lin Qingxia, b. 1954]) and queer sensibility (via Leslie Cheung [Zhang Guorong, 1956–2003]), and the current return of the real in confronting Hong Kong local conditions has revived a distinguished tradition in Cantonese cinema. Overall, Marchetti demonstrates that Hong Kong cinema is at once local, translocal, and global, as best exemplified by Wong Kar-wai (Wang Jiawei, b. 1958), and her analysis dovetails with some observations from our other contributors on star performance (Sabrina Yu in Chapter 12), women’s cinema (Lingzhen Wang in Chapter 17), and queer sexuality (Helen Leung in Chapter 28).

Heading out to Taiwan, James Wicks adopts a different approach than Marchett...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• 1 General Introduction
• Part I: History and Geography
• Part II: Industry and Institution
• Part III: Genre and Representation
• Part IV: Arts and Media
• Part V: Issues and Debates
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index