1: INTRODUCTION
National cinema and China
‘NATIONAL’ CINEMA
At the start of the new millennium, the publication of another volume on national cinema may seem ironic for several reasons. First, in the age of globalization, operations of multinational corporations have increasingly criss-crossed and sometimes entirely obscured or bypassed national borders, while local, regional and transnational forces continue to undermine the legitimacy of any nation-state (Miyoshi 1993). Second, in response to the sweeping power of the ‘global popular’ (During 1997), media and cultural studies have looked to post-coloniality, postmodernity and transnationality for new conceptual frameworks, and any focus on a single national cinema appears rather narrow or even dated. Third, in the wake of new technological development, cinema itself is said to have entered its ‘late’ stage, and the current academic interest in early cinema and late cinema thus place in an unfavorable light a project that considers the entire history of a national cinema.
Admittedly, in regard to China, the national cinema paradigm seems utterly inadequate. China today consists of three territories: (1) The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the mainland; (2) Hong Kong, formerly a British colony but since July 1997 a special administrative region of the PRC; (3) The Republic of China (ROC) controlled for decades by the Nationalists (KMT) but since 2000 ruled by the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Taiwan. The history of these territories further complicates the ‘national’ situation. The identification of mainland China as ‘Communist’ can only date back to 1949, the end of the KMT rule there. Similarly, the KMT control of Taiwan started only in 1945, at the end of half a century of Japanese occupation of the island (also known as ‘Formosa’, a term originated by Portuguese seafarers). For some, the history of the separation of film industries in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan ‘has formed quite distinctive national cinemas within each territory’ (Yeh 1998: 74). Such territorial concerns have occasioned a similar designation of national cinema status for Hong Kong and Taiwan. As Stephen Crofts notes, ‘In Hong Kong, the national cinema outsells Hollywood by a factor of four to one’ (1993: 55–6); Douglas Kellner believes that ‘the New Taiwan Cinema has produced an impressive succession of films comprising a distinctive national cinema’ (1998: 101).
A closer scrutiny of Crofts’ typology of national cinemas can help us locate its inadequacy vis-à-vis China. In 1993, he distinguished the following seven varieties (51–7). The first is European-model art cinema, characterized by art-house exhibition, state subsidy, a cultural mode of production, psychological characterization, narrational ambiguity and objective verisimilitude. The second is Third Cinema, distinct from the author’s cinema and marked by its political oppositionality. The third is Third World and European commercial cinema, populist in nature and reliant on such genres as the thriller, comedy and soft-core pornography. The fourth are cinemas that ignore Hollywood, such as those in Hong Kong and India, with large domestic markets and stable export markets. The fifth are cinemas that imitate Hollywood, as in several Anglophone countries, but with limited success. The sixth are totalitarian cinemas, as in fascist Germany and Italy, Communist China and the former Soviet bloc. The seventh are regional or ethnic cinemas, produced by ethnic or linguistic minorities, as in Quebec, Canada. In 1998, Crofts revised his typology and offered eight varieties along with a chart to illustrate them by way of a vertical axis defined by such terms as ‘industrial’, ‘cultural’, ‘political’ and a horizontal axis reflecting the mode of production as regulated or controlled by the state. The newly added variety is United States cinema (including its medium-budget ‘independent’ films), and the list goes in a new sequence according to each cinema’s relative place in relation to different modes of production: (1) United States cinema; (2) Asian commercial successes; (3) other entertainment cinemas in Europe and the Third World; (4) totalitarian cinemas; (5) art cinemas; (6) international co-productions; (7) Third Cinemas; and (8) sub-state cinemas (Crofts 1998: 389–90). Crofts’ inclusion of the United States notwithstanding, his proposal – based on his conviction that nations and states have been drifting apart in recent decades – ‘to write of states and nation-state cinemas rather than nations and national cinemas’ (1998: 386) deserves careful evaluation in the case of Chinese cinema.
Although he does not mention Taiwan, it is worthwhile contemplating where Crofts may place Taiwan in his chart of national cinemas. The first possibility is to treat Taiwan as an example of ‘Asian commercial successes’. This was indeed the case when Taiwan cinema did well domestically and in Southeast Asia in the 1960s (Lent 1990: 65; F. Lu 1998: 125–78). But this ‘commercial mode’ of production that ignores Hollywood is no longer in practice in Taiwan, for the sheer absence of a stable domestic market invalidates any attempt to construct a national cinema ‘industry’ in Taiwan nowadays. The second possibility is to treat Taiwan as an example of ‘art cinema’, which makes sense to a certain extent as Taiwan films have continued to win prestigious awards at international film festivals since the late 1980s. But a troubling question is that many such award-winning films are international co-productions and thus transnational in nature, and once again the national here becomes problematic. The third possibility is to treat Taiwan cinema as a kind of ‘totalitarian cinema’, which is true for the majority of propaganda or ‘policy films’ (zhengce pian) from the state-run studios in the 1960s and 1970s (R. Huang 1994b). Yet, after the disintegration of the studio system, this ‘political mode’ of production is now a distant memory. The fourth possibility is to treat Taiwan films as an example of ‘Third Cinema’, distinguished by a radical oppositionality to the state on the one hand and to cultural and economic imperialism on the other. Buddha Bless America (Taiping tianguo, dir. Wu Nien-chen [Wu Nianzhen], 1996) is just one of very few such examples, which problematizes identity and identification in the era of postcoloniality (T. Lu 2002: 191–205).
Like Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China also challenge Crofts’ paradigm. Although he explicitly qualifies Hong Kong as a ‘nation-state cinema’, how could Crofts ever explain that up to July 1997 Hong Kong remained a British colony and specifically lacked nation-state status? Further, how would he reconcile the fact that even after Hong Kong officially became a special administrative region of China in July 1997, the Taiwan government still classified Hong Kong films as ‘guopian’ (literally, ‘national films’)?1 Similarly, Crofts solicits more questions when he twice mentions China’s fifth generation in his 1993 typology. First, it is a kind of ‘exile’ filmmaking (included under Third Cinema) boosted by international funding but often ‘banned’ at home; second, it is ‘political art cinema’ peripheral to the core production of totalitarian cinema (1993: 54–7). Indeed, fifth generation films prove difficult to be pigeonholed in Crofts’ typology because of a fundamental mutation. This group started as the state-subsidized production of an ideologically subversive ‘art cinema’ in the mid-1980s and has mutated to the internationally (or intra-nationally) funded co-production of ‘ethnographic cinema’ of ‘authentic’ Chinese culture and history since the early 1990s (Y. Zhang 2002: 220–51). Furthermore, where should we place the ‘underground’ filmmaking of China’s sixth generation in the national cinema paradigm? Many of these films are not so much ‘banned’ in China as considered ‘illegal’ by the authorities because they did not wait for official approval for exhibition at international film festivals (Cui 2001). Ironically, the rumored ‘banned’ status often adds to the political capital of these films, which often win sympathy, prizes and future financial backing in the West and are acclaimed as ‘truthful’ depictions of contemporary Chinese life (Y. Zhang 2004).
Obviously, Chinese cinema does not sit easily in Crofts’, or any national cinema paradigm, although I should clarify that the Chinese case as elaborated here is not meant to deny the validity of national cinema in many other countries. Here, I am tempted to follow Tom O’Regan and declare that Chinese cinema, like Australian cinema, ‘is a messy affair’, not the least because Chinese cinema is ‘fundamentally dispersed’ (1996: 2) – historically, politically, territorially, culturally, ethnically and linguistically. The messy state of Chinese cinema means that the question of the ‘national’ will not go away if we substitute ‘national cinema’ with ‘nation-state cinema’. Indeed, the association with the nation-state is precisely what makes the term ‘Chinese cinema’ problematic.
‘Chinese’ cinema
Recently, the very term ‘Chinese’ has been put under intense interrogation, if not always ‘under erasure’ (Chow 1998: 24). Is ‘Chinese’ in ‘Chinese cinema’ meant as an ethnic, cultural, linguistic, political or territorial marker? If so, ‘Chinese cinema’ itself turns out to be a problematic designation. In ethnic terms, mainland China consists of the majority Han people and fifty-six officially classified national minorities, while Taiwan claims a long history of aboriginal peoples (shandi ren, literally ‘mountain folks’), and Hong Kong has a multiracial, multi-ethnic population. In cultural terms, although most Chinese may choose to identify themselves with a civilization thousands of years old, in reality they are aware of regional differences such as those existing between northerners and southerners in the mainland, or mainlanders (waisheng ren) and islanders in Taiwan. Perhaps the most striking difference is the widespread, diverse, often mutually unintelligible dialects all over China. Thus, in linguistic terms, Mandarin cinema (guoyu pian) stands in opposition to Cantonese cinema in Hong Kong and to Taiwanese-dialect film (Taiyu pian) in Taiwan. In political terms, furthermore, ideological and institutional differences in the governments of mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan after 1949 have left indelible marks on film productions from what are often referred to as three Chinas.
The problematic nature of ‘Chinese’ as a signifier should suffice to demythify ‘Chineseness’ as a pre-given, monolithic and immutable essence. The question to be pursued further is whether we are content with speaking of Chineseness in the plural, as so many kinds of Chinese cinemas and their corresponding Chinesenesses. For Rey Chow, ‘the problem of Chineseness is … not likely to be resolved simply by way of the act of pluralizing’, and ‘the poststructuralist theoretical move of splitting and multiplying a monolithic identity (such as China and Chinese) from within … is by itself inadequate as a method of reading’ (1998: 24). Chow’s warning of the theoretical inadequacy of pluralization notwithstanding, what we have seen since the mid-1990s is the apparent consensus that films from all three Chinas may be covered under the umbrella term ‘Chinese cinema(s)’, with or without the plural form.
The point at issue here is not that ‘Chinese’ will ever be an adequate marker. After all, critics like Yueh-yu Yeh (1998) can suggest no better term to replace ‘Chinese cinema’ than ‘Chinese-language cinema’ (huayu dianying or Zhongwen dianying). Anxiety about the equation of ‘Chinese cinema’ to ‘Zhongguo dianying’ (literally, ‘cinema of the Chinese nation-state’) finds a better articulation in Xiaobing Tang’s explication of the term ‘Chinese literature’ (2000: 347):
The history and vitality of Taiwan and Hong Kong literatures in the twentieth century … make an ever more compelling case that by ‘modern Chinese literature’ we understand not a narrow nation-state institution … nor just one geopolitically bounded literary production, but rather a vast literature written in modern Chinese and interacting with long and uneven literary and cultural traditions – regional as much as national … ‘Chinese literature’ should be usefully broadened to mean ‘Zhongwen wenxue’ (literature in Chinese) and replace a narrowing ‘Zhongguo wenxue’ (literature of China, or even, of the Chinese nation-state).
Ideally, like ‘literature in Chinese’, ‘Chinese-language cinema’ should be a broader term than ‘Chinese cinema’ as the former may include Chinese-language films directed by the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, West Europe and North America. However, ‘Chinese-language cinema’ may also be a narrower term because it is misleading to assume that what binds Chinese cinema together are its common linguistic features. A casual look at Chinese subtitles in many Hong Kong films since the 1980s would convince one that their intentionally hybridized linguistic practice – one that mixes standard written Chinese with invented characters to match spoken Cantonese – is meant precisely to highlight their regional difference and to subvert the myth of a unified, universal and unchanging Chinese script (Kam 1993). A new trend in the late 1990s also challenges an exclusively linguistic definition of Chinese cinema because several ethnic Chinese directors have made English-language films, sometimes with a separate soundtrack in Chinese.
It should be clear by now that a principal source of the anxiety about Zhongguo dianying is the association of guo in Chinese with the ‘nation-state’ or simply ‘state’. But this problem is not as serious in Chinese as in English because, contrary to Crofts’ proposal to envision a ‘state cinema’, we can strategically approach the ‘Chinese’ in ‘Chinese cinema’ in predominantly cultural and historical terms. For this book I prefer to use ‘Chinese national cinema’ to cover all films produced in mainland China (including those prior to 1949), Hong Kong and Taiwan, and instruct the reader to keep in mind all problematics or messiness – theoretical as well as geopolitical – surrounding ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness’. This general and potentially comparative framework of Chinese national cinema enables us to trace the interactions between Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong (all marked by distinctive dialect uses) in early cinema and transnational cinema throughout the twentieth century. It also directs our attention to the remarkable similarities between nationalist state policies (such as film censorship and state subsidy) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime in the mainland and the Kuomingtang (KMT) regime in Taiwan after 1949. Rather than being constantly apprehensive about the unsettling, multi-faceted Chineseness in Chinese national cinema, I believe it is the ‘national’ as historically constructed, circulated and contested in Chinese cinema that demands our in-depth investigation.
THE ‘NATIONAL’ AS CINEMATIC PROJECTS
Here, we must confront another kind of messiness unique to Chinese cinema: the Chinese language does not possess an exact equivalent to the English word ‘nation’. A nation can be translated as both minzu (nation-people) or guojia (nation-state) in Chinese (Y. Zhang 2002: 152–7), and a national cinema thus means more than a nation-state cinema, for it also implies a cinema of, by or for the nation-people. The construction of the national has consequently become an ongoing project of contestation whereby the state and the people compete for the right to speak in the name of the nation.
Historically, this tension between people and state has resulted in a cyclical or spiral pattern of development in Chinese cinema: from cinemas of the nation-people during the 1920s through to the 1940s (e.g., early cinema and leftist cinema) to cinemas of the nation-state during the 1950s to the 1970s (e.g., socialist realism in mainland China and healthy realism in Taiwan) and back to cinemas of the nation-people during the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., New Chinese Cinema marked by its cultural reflection and New Taiwan Cinema marked by its rewriting of Taiwan history). The increasing interdependence of people and state in both mainland China and Taiwan at the turn of the new millennium thus lends legitimacy to guo/zu (nation/people), a shorthand new coinage originated from Taiwan. But even this new integrative term is built on an inherent split of the two fundamentally incompatible parts, thereby further foregrounding the messiness of the national in Chinese cinema.
I suggest that we take the messiness of Chinese cinema positively, as a sign that producers, filmmakers, exhibitors, state regulators, critics and audiences in different Chinese geopolitical regions and over different periods of time have aspired to different constructions of the national. Given the fundamentally messy and dispersed attributes of Chinese cinema, its enunciation of the national must be examined at multiple levels, historically, typologically and theoretically, all at once.
Theoretically, Chris Berry proposes that we study ‘national agency’ as a missing term in current scholarship on cinema and the national. For him, ‘the nation is not merely an imagined textual object but a historically and socially contingent construction of a form of collective agency’ (1998: 132). His source of inspiration is Judith Butler’s theory of citation and iterability, ‘a flexible conceptual framework that suggests any identity is infinitely plural because it exists only in its infinitely different citations’ (Berry 1998: 146). From there he recommends ‘recasting national cinema as a multiplicity of projects, authored by different individuals, groups, and institutions with various purposes, but bound together by the politics of national agency and collective subjectivity as constructed entities’ (1998: 132).
Yet Berry’s ‘national agency’ is itself an ambiguous term. How do we measure national agency – against regional or local agency, international or transnational forces? On what kind of the ‘national’ does national agency rely – the nation-state or the nation-people? And what is the relationship between individual subjectivity and national agency? Questions like these notwithstanding, I find Berry’s reformulation of national cinema as multiple and heterogeneous projects particularly useful to a study of the national in Chinese cinema. Following Berry, we can entertain a vision of several distinct but equally valid Chinese national cinemas as ‘socially, politically, and historically specific projects contesting each other in the construction of Chinese national agency, which is itself defined in various ways’ (Berry 1998: 132). This vision allows for the possibility that a particular cinematic project of constructing national, regional or other collective agency or identity may exceed the unitary nation-state model, but it does not disqualify the project as belonging to a national cinema at the same time. Films like Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, dir. Chen Kaige, 1984), City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien [Hou Xiaoxian], 1989) and Centre Stage (Ruan Lingyu, dir. Stanley Kwan [Guan Jinpeng], 1992) are just a few examples here. Moreover, the flexibility of this vision enables us not only to reformulate China (or Chineseness) as ‘a discursively produced and socially and historically contingent collective entity’ (Berry 1998: 131), but it also clears the way for strategic allegiance or permutation by means of boundary-crossing, intra-national and intercultural citations of images, themes, motifs, styles, genres and other cinematic or cultural conventions – strategies that historically characterize film production in all three Chinas.
FILM HISTORIOGRAPHY
A historical perspective is paramount to sorting out instances of allegiance and permutation as well as contestation and deconstruction in Chinese cinema. At the same time, we must remember that film history as a mode of inquiry has its own limits. ‘The history of the cinema,’ Gerald Mast asserts, ‘will never be written; we shall simply have to be satisfied with histories of the cinema’ (1976: 298). Histories of Chinese cinema were published as early as the 1920s and 1930s (ZDZ 1996a: 1320–5, 1355–80, 1385–1432), and the 1990s saw a proliferation of such writings in both Chinese and English. Rather than a full-fledged typology of Chinese film historiography (Y. Zhang 2000), I want to briefly differentiate several types of conventional historiography of national cinema here. First, the auteurist historiography is dedicated to the study of a canon of masterpieces, and the historian’s task is to locate outstanding careers, rep...
