The Chinese Cinema Book

Song Hwee Lim, Julian Ward, Song Hwee Lim, Julian Ward

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781911239536
• eBook ISBN: 9781911239543
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

This revised and updated new edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of cinema in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as to disaporic and transnational Chinese film-making, from the beginnings of cinema to the present day. Chapters by leading international scholars are grouped in thematic sections addressing key historical periods, film movements, genres, stars and auteurs, and the industrial and technological contexts of cinema in Greater China.

Part 1

Territories, trajectories, historiographies

Chapter 1

Transnational Chinese cinema studies

Chris Berry

This chapter examines a doubled object. The term ‘transnational Chinese cinema studies’ designates both a type of cinema and a field of study. The watershed moment in the emergence of the field was the publication in 1997 of Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu’s anthology, Transnational Chinese Cinemas.¹ Almost overnight, it went from being relatively rarely used to becoming perhaps the most commonly used term in Chinese cinema studies as a whole. Despite this wide usage, there has been limited discussion of what ‘transnational Chinese cinema’ means. As a result, it has been used not only widely but also loosely and sometimes in ways that are contradictory. In these circumstances, some have even called for the abandonment of the term altogether.

This chapter traces some of the main usages and key intellectual debates about ‘transnational Chinese cinema’. Those debates include not only questions about what the ‘transnational’ actually means but also whether it represents capitulation to Hollywood or a new form of nationalistic triumphalism in the world of global trade. The chapter will argue that the term has greatest use when more closely defined against alternative terms like ‘international’ and ‘global’. However, this is not because such a definition is straightforward. Rather, it is because, in attempting to counter conceptual sloppiness, such an effort opens the way to a more focused and critical debate that will further develop our understanding of what is at stake when we talk about the transnational in relation to Chinese cinema. In this sense, the ‘transnational’ becomes a method, as Yiman Wang has advocated.²

It is not only in relation to Chinese cinema that the idea of ‘transnational cinema’ remains woolly and ill-defined. In the first issue of Transnational Cinemas, Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim call for a ‘critical transnationalism’, as opposed to the established tendency to deploy the term loosely. Analysing existing usage, they point to three main patterns. The first rejects ‘national cinema’ as a theoretical model that cannot accommodate the movement of films across borders, reception of foreign films and so forth. The second focuses on cultural formations that sustain cinemas that exceed the borders of individual nation-states or operate at a more local level within them; for example, Arab-language cinemas, Chinese-language cinemas, Telugu-language cinema in South India and so on. The third is the focus on diasporic, exilic and other cinemas that challenge ideas of stable national cultural identity.³

Although Higbee and Lim’s article examines transnational cinema studies in general, it is their analysis of the discourse surrounding transnational Chinese cinema in particular that leads them to express a concern. Referring to films like Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), they write, ‘one of the potential weaknesses of the conceptual term “transnational cinema” … [is that] it risks celebrating the supranational flow or transnational exchange of peoples, images and cultures at the expense of the specific cultural, historical or ideological context in which these exchanges take place’.⁴ In the Chinese case, this would refer to those popular (and some academic) writers who see every global box-office record for a Chinese blockbuster as a nationalistic triumph.

When scholarship has gone beyond unreflexive usage, this has not necessarily narrowed down the range of uses. Indeed, in some cases the opposite has happened. For example, a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas was devoted to the topic of the transnational in 2008. The call for papers asked authors to interrogate the term, and the essays were chosen precisely because they not only did that but also pushed the boundaries of what ‘transnational’ could mean.⁵ One essay belongs to Higbee and Lim’s first pattern of practices that do not fit into a national cinema model by examining the archive records on censorship by the British authorities of foreign films imported into Hong Kong during the Cold War era (1950–70).⁶ Also within that first pattern is Yiman Wang’s aforementioned essay that proclaims the transnational as a method and traces how a Lubitsch film gets remade in Shanghai, and then the remake gets remade in Hong Kong.⁷ Zakir Hussein Raju’s essay fits both the second and third patterns discerned by Higbee and Lim by positioning recent Malaysian Chinese films as part of a larger transnational Chinese festival cinema shaped by other transnational Chinese films and addressed to transnational audiences.⁸

However, two essays in the same issue push the envelope even further. Rossella Ferrari proliferates the ‘trans’ by examining how works by Hong Kong art collective Zuni Icosahedron not only cross state borders but also the borders between media to produce transmedial and transtextual lineages.⁹ Finally, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis articulate a vision of the transnational as ‘hyper-national’ by looking at the activities of the government-owned China Film Group, which they interpret as engaged in national consolidation and transnational reach.¹⁰

Figure 1.1 Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002, © Elite Group Enterprises)

As well as referring to an array of different types of film and film-making, the essays in the special issue of Journal of Chinese Cinemas are historically wide-ranging. Others have gone right back to the very beginnings of the cinema. In the introductory essay to his seminal anthology, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu writes that ‘We begin in 1896 because that was the year of the beginning of film consumption and distribution of an essentially transnational nature in China.’¹¹ Here a certain ambiguity can be discerned. For he also notes, ‘The occasion for [Transnational Chinese Cinemas] is the globalization of Chinese cinemas in the international film market.’¹² In the first quotation, Lu takes the scope of the book and the ‘transnational’ back to the beginnings of Chinese cinema. In the second, he notes a connection between transnational cinema and the more recent phenomenon of globalization, but with globalization only classified as a kind of trigger (‘The occasion … ’) for thinking about the transnational.

From this account, it is clear that the potential meanings of ‘transnational cinema’ are many and various. It can be traced back to the beginnings of cinema itself. Or it can be dated from the impact of globalization in the cinema. It can refer to big-budget blockbuster cinema associated with the operations of global corporate capital. Or it can refer to small-budget diasporic and exilic cinema. It can refer to films that challenge national identity, or it can refer to the consumption of foreign films as part of the process of a discourse about what national identity is. Does this upsurge in talking about transnational cinema exist because there has really been an increase in the amount of activity in recent years, making it command our attention? Given that statistics continue to be collected largely on the basis of the territorial nation-state, this is hard to measure. Or does the surge in use of the term mean that the transnational is a conceptual framework, and now that it has been widely adopted many hitherto invisible and neglected phenomena have come into view? For an individual scholar who wishes to use the concept of ‘transnational cinema’ as a research tool these are urgent questions, because the existing unexamined proliferation of the transnational puts it in danger of becoming too contradictory and too similar to many other terms to be useful.

Yingjin Zhang is one of the few scholars to have interrogated the term ‘transnational’ more thoroughly. Facing the proliferation of sometimes conflicting meanings described above, he goes on to question whether it is useful at all:

The term ‘transnational’ remains unsettled primarily because of multiple interpretations of the national in transnationalism. What is emphasized in the term ‘transnational’? If it is the national, then what does this ‘national’ encompass – national culture, language, economy, politics, ethnicity, religion, and/or regionalism? If the emphasis falls on the prefix ‘trans’ (i.e., on cinema’s ability to cross and bring together, if not transcend, different nations, cultures, and languages), then this aspect of transnational film studies is already subsumed by comparative film studies.¹³

Zhang’s argument rightly throws down the gauntlet to transnational cinema studies. No doubt, different scholars will continue to use the term ‘transnational’ in a variety of different and even contradictory ways, often without even bothering to define it. But if he is correct that ‘transnational’ is just a fashionable word with no distinct meaning of its own – no critical leverage as a concept – then there is no reason to hang on to it.

However, can transnational film studies really be subsumed by comparative film studies? The idea of comparative film studies suggests bounded entities that can be held separate from one another for the purposes of comparison. This could take us back all too easily to the idea of cinemas distinguished according to territorial polities – nation-states – with films flowing back and forth as exports and imports. Even understood beyond the nation-state, the comparative does not easily make space for the phenomena that not only cross but straddle and defy borders analysed in the essays mentioned above. For example, how can we make sense of the film festival circuit that is the cultural field supporting Malaysian Chinese cinema within a comparative perspective? How can it accommodate Chinese blockbuster films that put together their cast and crew from different countries, shoot on location, outsource parts of their production such as music and computer-generated effects, and then go on to aim at multiplex audiences around the world?

Yet, Zhang’s argument does alert us to the need to try and develop the transnational as a concept. Although the term ‘transnational’ has been used to refer to many different and sometimes conflicting things in film studies, these different usages all have one thing in common – they originated around the same time as the discourse on globalization was becoming widespread towards the end of the last century. This is different from the situation in economic studies, where globalization as a deeper level of integration follows ‘internationalization (as in the increasing interwovenness of national economies through international trade) and transnationalization (as in the increasing organization of production on a cross-border basis by multi-national organizations)’.¹⁴ But in the case of film studies, the ‘transnational’ tracks or even comes after ‘globalization’ as a popular discourse.

Of course, the debates about what exactly the term ‘globalization’ means are at least as complicated as those concerning the ‘transnational’. However, it is generally thought of as a recent ‘epochal transformation’ characterised by a rollback in the functions and powers of the state, especially concerning the economy, both in what goes on inside its borders and over what crosses those borders. Saskia Sassen calls these changes ‘processes of denationalization’.¹⁵ Within many nation-states, as part of this rollback, state-owned enterprises have been sold to private enterprises. Those states that operate command economies have often stepped back to allow citizens and companies to take the initiative more. Regulations that block or inhibit trade between nation-states are being lowered, enabling those who wish to operate across national borders more straightforwardly and with less need for state approval, as, for example, in various free trade zones and agreements like the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Closer Economic Partnership Agreement between Hong Kong and the mainland People’s Republic. Although arguments proliferate about the reasons for and forms of change in China, the recent history of the post-Mao ‘Reform’ (gaige) era in the People’s Republic can be seen a classic example of these developments.¹⁶ On the cinematic front, the decreased role of direct s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction: The coming of age of Chinese cinema studies
• Part 1 Territories, trajectories, historiographies
• Part 2 Early cinema to 1949
• Part 3 The forgotten period: 1949–80
• Part 4 The new waves
• Part 5 Stars, auteurs and genres
• Part 6 Industry, market and technology
• Afterword: Liquidity of being Rey Chow
• Appendix 1 Book-length studies of Chinese cinema in the English language
• Appendix 2 Chinese names
• Appendix 3 Chinese film titles
• Index
• Imprint