China on Screen

Cinema and Nation

Christopher Berry, Mary Ann Farquhar

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780231510301
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In China on Screen, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, leaders in the field of Chinese film studies, explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, Berry and Farquhar analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the abandonment of "national cinema" as an analytic tool and propose "cinema and the national" as a more productive framework. With this approach, they show how movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora construct and contest different ideas of Chinese nation—as empire, republic, or ethnicity, and complicated by gender, class, style, transnationalism, and more. Among the issues and themes covered are the tension between operatic and realist modes, male and female star images, transnational production and circulation of Chinese films, the image of the good foreigner—all related to different ways of imagining nation. Comprehensive and provocative, China on Screen is a crucial work of film analysis.

1

Introduction: Cinema and the National

JACKIE CHAN’S 1994 global breakthrough film Rumble in the Bronx is a dislocating experience in more ways than one. This is not just because of the gravity-defying action, or because Jackie is far from his familiar Hong Kong. Set in New York but shot in Vancouver, the film shows a Rocky Mountain backdrop looming between skyscrapers where suburban flatlands should be. The film also marks a watershed in Chan’s efforts to transform himself from Hong Kong star to global superstar and his character from local cop to transnational cop. Funded by a mix of Hong Kong, Canadian, and American companies, Rumble in the Bronx is an eminently transnational film. In its North American release version, it cannot even be classified using the currently fashionable term for films from different Chinese places, “Chinese-language film” (huayu dianying):¹ not only are the settings and locations far from China but all the dialogue is in English.² Indeed, one fan claims Rumble in the Bronx for the United States when he complains that, “From the very start you will realize that this film seems to be trying to set a record for worst dubbing in a supposedly ‘American’ film.”³

While it might seem a stretch to imagine even the North American release version of Rumble in the Bronx is an American film, Rumble in the Bronx certainly illustrates how futile it can be to try and pin some films down to a single national cinema. However, although Rumble in the Bronx demands to be understood as a transnational film, the national in the transnational is still vital to any account of its specificity. It says something both about the importance of the American market to Chan and the aspirations of Hong Kong’s would-be migrants in the run-up to China’s 1997 takeover that Chan’s character, Keung, visits the United States (rather than Nigeria or China, for example).

Even though Jackie Chan successfully vaulted to global stardom in the wake of Rumble in the Bronx, his cultural and ethnic Chineseness and his Hong Kong identity remain—not only recognized by fans but also as significant elements that he exploits for the jokes, action, and narratives of his films. In Rush Hour (1998), Chan’s first commercially successful Hollywood film, his cop persona is again assertively from Hong Kong, as he saves the PRC (People’s Republic of China) consul’s daughter in Los Angeles from Hong Kong gangsters with the help of a maverick black LAPD sidekick. As will be discussed in chapter 6, Rush Hour blends regional, cultural, and political Chinese nationalism. This Hollywood movie proclaims both Hong Kong Chinese and blacks as outsiders, who nevertheless save the day for the great and good: the USA, the PRC, and Hong Kong as well as the consul, the FBI, the LAPD, and even China’s archaeological heritage, on display in Los Angeles after being saved from a corrupt, British colonial administrator in league with Hong Kong triads.

This book examines some of the many and complex ways the national shapes and appears in Chinese films. Our core argument is twofold. First, the national informs almost every aspect of the Chinese cinematic image and narrative repertoire. Therefore, Chinese films—whether from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the diaspora, or understood as transnational—cannot be understood without reference to the national, and what are now retrospectively recognized as different Chinese cinematic traditions have played a crucial role in shaping and promulgating various depictions of the national and national identity. Second, as the challenge of locating Rumble in the Bronx and Rush Hour demonstrates, the national in Chinese cinema cannot be studied adequately using the old national cinemas approach, which took the national for granted as something known. Instead, we approach the national as contested and construed in different ways. It therefore needs to be understood within an analytic approach that focuses on cinema and the national as a framework within which to consider a range of questions and issues about the national.

Why is the national so central to Chinese cinemas? Put simply, ideas about the national and the modern territorial nation-state as we know them today arrived along with the warships that forced “free trade” on China in the mid-nineteenth-century opium wars. Both the national and the modern territorial nation-state were part of a Western package called modernity, as was cinema, which followed hot on their heels. Like elsewhere, when Chinese grasped the enormity of the imperialist threat they realized that they would have to take from the West in order to resist the West. The nation-state was a key element to be adopted, because this modern form of collective agency was fundamental both to participation as a nation-state in the “international” order established by the imperialists and to mobilizing resistance.⁴

However, as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto pointedly indicates, scholars are less sure about how to study cinema and the national than they used to be: “Writing about national cinemas used to be an easy task: film critics believed all they had to do was to construct a linear historical narrative describing a development of a cinema within a particular national boundary whose unity and coherence seemed to be beyond all doubt.”⁵ Once, it might have been possible to produce a list of elements composing something called “traditional Chinese culture” or “Chinese national culture,” or even some characteristics constituting “Chineseness.” Then we could have tried to see how these things were “expressed” or “reflected” in Chinese cinema as a unified and coherent Chinese national identity with corresponding distinctly Chinese cinematic conventions. This would then constitute a “national cinema.”

In this era of global capital flows, multiculturalism, increasing migration, and the World Wide Web, it is clear that the national cinemas approach with its premise of distinct and separate national cultures would be fraught anywhere. But in the Chinese case, its difficulty is particularly evident. Today, “China” accommodates a multitude of spoken languages, minority nationalities, former colonies, and religious affiliations. Until 1991, it designated a territory claimed by two state powers: the People’s Republic of China with its capital in Beijing and the Republic of China currently based on Taiwan. Even when President Lee Teng-hui of the Republic of China made reforms in 1991 removing the Republic’s claim to the territory governed by the mainland, it was still stated that, “the ROC government recognized the fact that two equal political entitles exist in two independent areas of one country.”⁶ A glance at the Chronology at the back of this book shows that China has been through numerous territorial reconfigurations over the last century-and-a-half, and has spawned a global diaspora.

With these circumstances in mind, how do we need to rethink the cinema’s connection to the national and ways of studying it? This introduction attempts to answer this question. On the basis of our exploration of the issues discussed below, we argue for the abandonment of the national cinemas approach and its replacement with a larger analytic framework of cinema and the national. Instead of taking the national for granted as something known and unproblematic—as the older national cinemas model tended to—our larger analytic framework puts the problem of what the national is—how it is constructed, maintained, and challenged—at the center. Within that larger framework, the particular focus of this book is on cinematic texts and national identity. But we hope this book can serve as both an embodiment of our larger argument and a demonstration of the kind of studies that can come out of such a shift.

Although it may sound odd at first, the transnational may be a good place to start the quest to understand what it means to speak of cinema and the national as an analytic framework. As if taking a lead from Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto’s critique, Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu begins his introduction to Transnational Chinese Cinemas by characterizing the anthology as “a collective rethinking of the national/transnational interface in Chinese film history and in film studies.”⁷ He goes on to trace how the cinema in China has developed within a transnational context. As in most of the world, it arrived in the late nineteenth century as a foreign thing. When Chinese began making films, they were heavily conscious that the Chinese market was dominated by foreign film, and increasingly they saw the cinema as an important tool for promoting patriotic resistance to Western and Japanese domination of China. Following the establishment of the People’s Republic, most foreign film was excluded and an effort was made to “sinicize” the cinema. Meanwhile, the cinemas of Taiwan and Hong Kong came to depend on diasporic Chinese audiences. Most recently, Chinese cinemas have participated in the forces of globalization through coproductions and the work of émigrés in Hollywood. With this history in mind, Lu concludes, “The study of national cinemas must then transform into transnational film studies.”⁸

This is a very suggestive insight. The essays in Lu’s anthology focus on the transnational dimension of transnational film studies. But to use this insight as a way into our project, we need to ask where the national is in transnational Chinese cinemas and in transnational film studies. This question can be addressed by spinning a number of questions out of Lu’s comment.

What does “transnational” mean and what is at stake in placing the study of Chinese cinema and the national within a transnational framework?

The term transnational is usually used loosely to refer to phenomena that exceed the boundaries of any single national territory. However, there is a tension around the term, which stems from its relation to the idea of “globalization.” In many uses, “transnationalism is a process of global consolidation” and transnational phenomena are understood simply as products of the globalizing process.⁹ For example, while the multinational corporation is headquartered in one country and operates in many, “a truly transnational corporation … is adrift and mobile, ready to settle anywhere and exploit any state including its own, as long as the affiliation serves its own interest.”¹⁰

In contrast, other writers use “transnational” to oppose the rhetoric of universality and homogenization implied in the term globalization. For them, the “transnational” is more grounded. It suggests that phenomena exceeding the national also need to be specified in terms of the particular places and times in which they operate, the particular people they affect, and the particular ways they are constituted and maintained.¹¹

The focus on China in Chinese film studies precludes assumptions about global universality (although certainly not the impact of capitalist “globalization”). However, the issue of homogeneity versus specificity remains crucial to the question of how we might understand the transnational in “transnational Chinese cinemas.” One possibility is that the territorial nation-state and national cinema as sites of Chineseness are being eclipsed by a higher level of unity and coherence, namely a Chinese cultural order that is transnational. This would be the kind of culturalism that supports Western discourses ranging from Orientalism (as critiqued by Edward Said) and Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” to Chinese discourses on Greater China (Da Zhonghua) and Tu Weiming’s “Cultural China.”¹²

The alternative is that the transnational is understood not as a higher order, but as a larger arena connecting differences, so that a variety of regional, national, and local specificities impact upon each other in various types of relationships ranging from synergy to contest. The emphasis in this case is not on dissolving the distinctions between different Chinese cinemas into a larger cultural unity. Instead, it would be on understanding Chinese culture as an open, multiple, contested, and dynamic formation that the cinema participates in. Key to understanding these two different trajectories for the deployment of the “transnational” is the question of what the “national” in the word transnational means. This leads to a second question.

What does the “national” mean?

Understandings of Chinese transnationality as a higher level of coherence above the nation-state reinstate the modern nation under a different name. Whether Chinese or Western in origin and whether praising or critical, they simply deploy culture or ethnicity rather than territorial boundaries as the primary criterion defining the nation. The distinction here is between an ethnic nation and a nation-state. Yet both forms retain the idea of the nation as a coherent unity. This coherent unity is also usually assumed in the concept and study of national cinemas. But it is precisely this understanding of the nation that has come under interrogation in English-language academia over the last twenty years or so, and the directions this critique has taken must guide efforts to transform the study of national cinemas into the study of cinema and the national.

The rethinking of the nation and the national in a general sense has produced a very large body of literature. However, three major outcomes are especially relevant to the arguments in this book. First, the nation-state is not universal and transhistorical, but a socially and historically located form of community with origins in post-Enlightenment Europe; there are other ways of conceiving of the nation or similar large communities. Second, if this form of community appears fixed, unified, and coherent, then that is an effect that is produced by the suppression of internal difference and blurred boundaries. Third, producing this effect of fixity, coherence, and unity depends upon the establishment and recitation of stories and images—the nation exists to some extent because it is narrated.

Before elaborating on these points, the implications of these outcomes must be briefly considered. For those committed to the nation, the idea that the nation is constructed can seem to be an attack on its very existence. And for those opposed to the nation, this can seem to presage its imminent demise. Yet if the metaphor of construction implies potential demolition, it also suggests that new nations can be built and existing nations renovated. In other words, how this more recent discourse on the nation gets used is not immanent to that discourse, but dependent upon social and institutional power relations.

One reason for the frequent assumption that recent thought constitutes an attack on the nation is the title that looms over this entire field: Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson.¹³ In a recent survey of writing on national cinemas, Michael Walsh finds that “of all the theorists of nationalism in the fields of history and political science, Anderson has been the only writer consistently appropriated by those working on issues of the national in film studies.”¹⁴ However, Anderson does not use “imagined” to mean “imaginary,” but to designate those communities too large for their members to meet face-to-face and which therefore must be imagined by them to exist. He also distinguishes between the modern nation-state as one form of imagined community and others, including the dynastic empire. For example, he points out that empires are defined by central points located where the emperor resides, whereas nation-states are defined by territorial boundaries. Those living in empires are subjects with obligations, whereas those living in nation-states are citizens with rights, and so forth.¹⁵ After Anderson’s watershed intervention, the nation no longer appears universal and transhistorical but as a historically and socially located construction. Indeed, if Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are right, our transnational era is already a new age of empire.¹⁶

Anderson’s intervention also demands attention to distinctions all too easily collapsed in the thinking that took the nation for granted and long characterized the national cinemas approach. As well as the distinction between an ethnic or cultural nation and a territorial nation-state made above, there is also the question of the concept of a biologically distinct nation. However, although most cultural nations and nation-states retain links to ideas of race, it is difficult to assert that they are one and the same after the notorious example of the Holocaust and Nazi rule in Germany. This then raises the issue of internal divisions and blurred boundaries of nations, both ethnic and territorial. Although members of nations are (supposedly) constituted as citizens with equal rights and obligations, this individual national identity is complicated by citizens’ affiliations to other local and transnational identity formations, including region, class, race, religion, gender, and sexuality, to name but a few. These issues and the questions and problems arising from them are foreclosed upo...