American and Chinese-Language Cinemas

Examining Cultural Flows

Lisa Funnell, Man-Fung Yip

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415731829
• eBook ISBN: 9781317910244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media Studies

Critics frequently describe the influence of "America," through Hollywood and other cultural industries, as a form of cultural imperialism. This unidirectional model of interaction does not address, however, the counter-flows of Chinese-language films into the American film market or the influence of Chinese filmmakers, film stars, and aesthetics in Hollywood.

The aim of this collection is to (re)consider the complex dynamics of transnational cultural flows between American and Chinese-language film industries. The goal is to bring a more historical perspective to the subject, focusing as much on the Hollywood influence on early Shanghai or postwar Hong Kong films as on the intensifying flows between American and Chinese-language cinemas in recent decades. Contributors emphasize the processes of appropriation and reception involved in transnational cultural practices, examining film production, distribution, and reception.

Section III
Marketing, Exhibition, Reception

8 Cinema, Propaganda, and Networks of Experience

Exhibiting Chongqing Cinema in New York

Weihong Bao and Nathaniel Brennan

The recent rise in transnational film studies has brought forth several key issues in need of critical consideration. The predominant focus on global Hollywood, given the American film industry’s worldwide hegemony from the 1920s onwards, has eclipsed attention to other forms of transnational cinema and historical counter-flows such as fascist and leftist cinema, art and experimental cinema, educational and military cinema, travelogues, and home movies. Underlying this emphasis on Hollywood’s global reach and its diverse local inflections is the logic of capital, which tends to privilege commercial cinema. The outflow of Hollywood cinema is posited as a given right and an autonomous process without questioning the institutional and discursive practices that frame such flows.¹ The logic of capital similarly serves to rigidify the distinction between national and transnational cinema, often posed as diametric oppositions evolving around value-laden binaries such as containment versus excess, purity versus hybridity, homogeneity versus heterogeneity, stasis versus movement, hegemony versus counter- hegemony. The national is often seen as a series of institutional and ideological obstacles to the legitimacy and necessity of unfettered global circulation, the ideological and material underpinnings of which are rarely tackled. Contributing to the myth of the free flow of cinema across borders is the translatability and circularity of aesthetic form in terms of genre, style, and mode of spectatorial address.

Yet the relationship between national and transnational cinema, and their binary association of respective values, needs to be interrogated with historical and critical rigor. Sabine Hake adds a third key term, the international, and argues that these three notions need to be understood not so much in their categorical distinction but in their historically mutual articulations. German cinema from the silent era onwards, for instance, “has always been international and transnational,” while the emphasis on the national in public discourses functioned as both “a defensive response” to Hollywood’s dominance and “a strategic distraction” from the routine practices of import and export of films, co-productions, and cross-cultural exchange that sustained the continuous flourishing of German cinema (Hake 113, 115). Hake makes a provocative case for Third Reich cinema as the second-largest transnational cinema after Hollywood; despite its state-controlled operations, it tapped into multi-ethnic stardom, the transnational appeal of popular genres such as the musical, and an extensive exhibition and distribution network throughout Central Europe for its wide reach. Such historical instances force us to reflect on how the category of the transnational functions as a discursive construct similar to that of the national and the international, and to rethink the paradigms of film scholarship, which serve competing interests with both innovative and normative effects.²

It remains to be answered, then, whether transnational cinema should be seen as an emphatic or a critical category, as value laden or value neutral, as a historical reference or a theoretical paradigm. To address these questions, we have chosen the exhibition of wartime Chongqing cinema in New York City as a case study that challenges us to rethink the entwinement between the transnational and the national in film history and its complex political trappings. Chongqing cinema during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) provides a unique case of state cinema and propaganda that was simultaneously national, international, and transnational. Placed in a global context, its hybrid lineage of commercial, military, and educational cinema, along with its mixed legacies of left-wing and authoritarian politics, reveals new significance. The case of Chongqing cinema’s international story also raises questions of flow and counter-flow. To what extent does counter-flow reproduce the same logic, imagery, and industrial strategies in export, distribution, and exhibition, and to what extent does it provide an alternative? How do such cinematic counter-flows contribute to local/national/transnational film culture(s), local concerns, regional identity, and imaginations? To what extent do such counter-flows function as a political discourse, and to what extent are they subject to their own political ideologies?

To draw a more nuanced picture of transnational flows and counterflows, we will explore a site-oriented approach complemented by an attention to the transpacific. Following Zhang Yingjin (Screening 39–41) and James Hay (216), we consider film practices as site specific but relating to other sites in terms of film production and consumption as well as discursive and institutional constructions. Such an approach will help us pay due attention to the historical complexity and specificity of local film practices not to be dissolved in a global network. To map out the relationality of individual sites, we will turn to the transpacific as a space of shared interest and contention or, as Yunte Huang puts it, as plural and uneven contact zones, both productive and deadly (5). We have chosen a comparative perspective with connections across the Pacific, bridging two site-specific studies by tracing the actual travel of Chongqing cinema abroad, more specifically to New York City. Instead of reimagining the transpacific as the counterpart to the transnational as an international free trade zone of ideas, images, and goods, we connect two distinct points and trace their locally specific geopolitics that help us better understand the spatial and ideological continuum across the Pacific.

This chapter will follow the travel of films and film culture from interwar Shanghai (1918–37) to wartime Chongqing (1938–45) and then to New York (1937–45). We will first consider Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, where a nascent national cinema emerged in parallel to and in reaction against Hollywood’s popular appeal and economic dominance. As the SinoJapanese War broke out in 1937, a distinct film culture emerged following the inland migration of the Nationalist government and part of the film industry to Chongqing. If the Shanghai film scene instances a more familiar case of flow and counter-flow evolving around the axis of Hollywood cinema, the transformation of film culture in the wartime capital of Chongqing and the plural lineages of Chongqing propaganda cinema went quite beyond the parameters of Hollywood and other global commercial cinemas. Finally, arriving in New York, Chongqing cinema entered a heterogeneous film and cultural scene that tested the ambition and design of Chongqing’s propagandists and filmmakers in their quest for a transnational cinema. The flow of Chongqing cinema to New York is by no means the only story of wartime Chinese cinema, given the multiple constituents, linguistic diversity, and geopolitical divisions within the country during the war. Nor is it about Chongqing cinema alone, for it highlights a forgotten fragment of American film history and helps to provincialize “the standard model of Hollywood cultural imperialism” and to reconstruct its fragmented and multi-layered nature (Brennan 124). What it represents, then, are the fortuitous meetings and missed encounters that punctuate the very process of global flows and counter-flows.

Shanghai

In cinema’s early decades, China, like many parts of the world, provided a market for a wide variety of international cinema, shifting from European (especially French) to American dominance in the 1910s. Because of the physical and economic devastation wrought on the film industries of Europe, the American film industry was able to establish near-worldwide control at the same time that it was consolidating into the oligopolistic Hollywood studio system.³ Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, American cinema constituted up to 90 percent of the films exhibited in a dozen or so Chinese treaty ports, with an average of 400 films exported to China on an annual basis (Xiao, “Hollywood” 46).⁴ Hollywood’s presence, though largely limited to the major cities, was strongly felt in terms of supply (film prints and raw stock), prominence in exhibition venues, and unequal terms for boxoffice profits, as well as the abundance of imageries championing American goods, sensibilities, and cultural values.

Such dominance, however, did not go uncontested. Recent scholarship has started to account for the uneven and mediated reception of Hollywood and other international cinemas in China. Xiao Zhiwei, for example, points out how Hollywood’s impact was subject to the fluctuations of China’s political and economic situation and the unpredictability of regional policies and reception. Hollywood films underwent myriad practices of cultural translation not only in the realm of reception—intentional and accidental mistranslations of titles and inter-titles, commercial and political reframings oriented towards the Chinese and local contexts—but also in the realm of production. Chinese film productions actively refashioned Hollywood genres, aesthetics, and messages through creative copying, creating cinematic bricolages that drew on popular narratives and performance traditions as well as new literature.⁵

Parallel to the partial success of Hollywood in Chinese metropolitan centers, a domestic film industry flourished beginning in the early 1920s, emulating and competing against Hollywood and other international cinemas, sometimes pitting Hollywood against other foreign films, especially given the increasingly politicized film scene of the 1930s, when Soviet and European cinemas were treated as an audacious political and artistic vanguard in contrast to Hollywood’s banal and purely commercial product.⁶ The introduction of synchronized sound in the late 1920s also posed a new challenge to Hollywood and other foreign films owing to the cost of sound film production and projection and the demand for translation of dialogue, giving the Chinese film industry an opportunity to develop its domestic and regional audiences.

In a nutshell, international cinema—Hollywood and beyond—has always been part of Chinese film history, while a national film industry developed in emulation of and resistance to foreign films through cultural rhetoric, business strategies, and aesthetic formulations. Through creative copying, public protest, and active control in the film production process, cultural intermediaries such as exhibitors, censorship agencies, and cultural elites, along with political forces with various interests, participated in the mutual articulation between national and international cinema.⁷

Chongqing

If this trajectory of interwar film culture in China resonated with international film history to some extent, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War presented a rather different scenario. The war split China into at least five geopolitical zones under Japanese, British-American, British, Nationalist, and communist regimes, each cultivating a distinct film culture centered respectively in Manchuria, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chongqing, and Yan’an. While the wartime film cultures in Manchuria, Shanghai, and Hong Kong have started to gain critical attention, the story of Chongqing cinema has yet to come to the foreground, posing a particular methodological challenge in its distinct constellation of filmmaking and film culture.⁸ Unlike the mass entertainment-oriented film industry in prewar Shanghai, wartime Chongqing cinema inherited a mixed legacy of commercial, military, and educational cinema that had different sources of funding, institutional structure, and social orientations.⁹ The three studios in Chongqing—the Central Film Studio (Zhongdian), the China Motion Picture Corporation (Zhongzhi), and the Educational Studio (Zhongjiao, established in 1940)—were all affiliated with the state under the direction, respectively, of the Central Information Bureau, the Political Department of the Military Commission, and the Ministry of Education. The Central Film Studio and the China Motion Picture Corporation originated from two prewar military filming groups, devoted to newsreel and documentary production and traveling film projection, in Nanjing and Hankou under the Nationalist Party (Jiang 70; Zheng 51). In their wartime expansion and retreat inland, both studios absorbed a substantial number of filmmakers and dramatists from the commercial film industry and dramatic stage. The Educational Studio, on the other hand, solidified the thread of educational cinema that had emerged in China in the late 1910s and gained cultural recognition in the 1930s, culminating in the Ministry of Education’s sponsorship of film production and itinerant film exhibition in the hinterlands beginning in 1935. In addition to these three studios, Jinling University, a Christian missionary university pioneering audio-visual education since the early 1920s, relocated to Chengdu and developed comprehensive education programs in film engineering, production, and traveling projection. These state studios and cultural institutions, with military and educational origins and experience with documentary production and traveling exhibitions, changed the nature and outcome of film production and exhibition in wartime Chongqing. Their collaboration with filmmakers from the commercial industry, however, was a conflict-ridden process. Negotiating different t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Examining Cultural Flows
• Section I Style, Narrative, Form
• Section II Genre
• Section III Marketing, Exhibition, Reception
• Section IV Performance, Identity, Representation
• Contributors
• Index