Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022. vii, 258 pp. (B&W photos.) US$83.00, cloth. ISBN 9789888528530.
Studies of Chinese cinema have long been framed within geopolitical terms. Yet, since the 1930s, filmmakers, critics, and politicians have pointed out that the term “national cinema” has failed to capture the culturolinguistic diversity, contesting political values, and competing identities both within China and between China and the Sinophone. Since then, Chinese cinema as a concept has been further complicated by colonialism, Cold War politics, globalization, and postsocialism, as well as diasporic cultural productions. The 12 essays that are compiled by Jeff Kyong-McClain, Russell Meeuf, and Jing Jing Chang in this edited volume represent a concerted effort to reexamine Chinese cinema as an assemblage of transnational, global, and culturally pluralistic discourses.
In the “Introduction,” Kyong-McClain, Meeuf, and Chang offer a succinct review of the debate on the studies of Chinese cinema as a problematic (2–6). What is at stake for them is not simply how one can redefine Chineseness in relation to the diverse geopolitical formations, but to demonstrate that the cinema is always situated in the intersections of transnational cultural, political, and capital flows (6).
The three essays in the book’s opening section, “Politics and Dissent in Global Contexts,” fully illustrate this point. Belinda Q. He’s “Seeing (through) the Struggle Sessions” offers a historical and cultural comparative study of the cinematographic image of the pidouhui (struggle session) during the revolutionary period (1949–1979): “mass gatherings in which those labelled as class enemies … were accused, shamed, and tormented in public” (19). As there is no reliable archival footage of the pidouhui, contemporary Chinese citizens are often fascinated with recent cinematic reproductions of these events or found footage circulating online. Through her incisive archival research, He traces the found footage’s possible origin to a Soviet film crew that visited China before the China-Soviet split in 1960. Interestingly, this pidouhui was most likely staged to be televised live. And such televisual practice was then re-staged in the French cinematic satire, Les chinois à Paris (Chinese in Paris, Jean Yanne, 1974), as a critique of global Maoism (25–33). Through these global intermedia exchanges, He demonstrates the complexity of how film images are archived, reproduced, and discussed in relation to global politics and historical memories.
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee offers a timely discussion of Hong Kong independent cinema’s representation of the city’s political changes from the UK-China handover in 1997 to the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement in 2014. For Lee, these films demonstrate that under political pressure, independent cinema offers a “little cinematic space without subverting the hegemonic order,” which is the only possible mode of agency filmmakers and activists can create for themselves (55). Meanwhile, in “All of Us Are Part of the Monster,” Man-Fung Yip responds to the criticism that Zhao Liang has inappropriately aestheticized the catastrophic impact of ecological destruction in his film Beixi moshou (Behemoth, 2015) (59). Yip argues that Zhao seeks to achieve not the beautiful, but a form of “toxic sublime”—an overwhelming and perturbing sensation when the sound and image confront the viewers with toxicity’s terrifying splendour (60–73).
The second section of the book, “Audience and Reception in the Transnational Contexts,” examines what it means by transnational sensibilities. For example, Kenny Kwok Kwan Ng demonstrates how leftwing film critics in the 1940s deliberately used the Chinese spectators’ understanding of the Hollywood melodrama to reframe the melodramatic film Yijiang chunshui xiangdongliu (The Spring River Flows East, Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli, 1947) as a form of patriotic realism (80–96). Meanwhile, Xi W. Liu argues that the Chinese aesthetic concept of yijing (state of ideation) allows local affects to resonate with global sensibilities (97). In “Global Network, Ecocinema, and Chinese Contexts,” Wendy Su offers an analysis of how Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 2015 co-production Wolf Totem succeeded by using environmental issue as a token of cultural exchanges (97–128).
The section on “Globalization and Chinese Identities” follows this strand of investigation. In “The Sound of Chinese Urban Cinema,” Lin Feng examines how the re-globalization of Shanghai created an opportunity for the use of Shanghainese in Hong Kong-Mainland co-productions (132–151). Meanwhile, Alison M. Groppe analyzes how the Singaporean director Royston Tan uses the trope and songs of the “wandering songstress” from Mandarin cinema from the 1940s to the 1960s to foster a dialogue between Sinophone cinema (cinema made outside of China but maintains a relationship with it) and the collective memory between China and the Sinophone (152–168). Meanwhile, in “Implicit Sexuality,” Yushi Hou demonstrates how Diao Yi’nan’s neo-noir Bairi yanhuo (Black Coal, Thin Ice, 2014) reconfigures the femme fatale figure to negotiate the masculinity crisis in postsocialist China (168–182).
The book’s final section “Film Markets and Financial Reform” offers in-depth and step-by-step analyses of the interrelationship between the national and the global. First, Shiying Liu offers a historical account of the transformation of the China Film Co., Ltd., from a party-state apparatus for co-productions to a state-owned public corporation (185–203). This serves as a background for Qi Ai’s analysis of Feng Xiaogang’s Dawan (Big Shot’s Funeral, 2001) as an industrial allegory at the time when China-Hollywood co-productions began (204–222). Finally, Katherine Chu’s “Sticks, Not Carrots” offers an updated understanding of Chinese soft power under Xi Jinping’s administration, and how its focus on a state-sanctioned “good narrative” of Chinese global power and prowess has limited its global transportability (223–241).
Chinese Cinema is a thoughtfully designed volume that gives us an updated understanding of Chinese cinema. What impresses me is that these seemingly discreet case studies work together to assemble a comprehensive picture of contemporary Chinese cinema, and each manages to propose a unique research and pedagogical method to help readers understand the relationship between its specific case and the larger picture.
Victor Fan
King’s College London, London