Critical Interventions. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. xii, 264 pp. (Figures.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3836-2.
Naomi Greene has written a thoughtful and accessible study of “representations of China found in American films” over the course of a century, looking specifically at “images and myths regarding China” (1). As a film studies scholar, Greene deftly integrates various elements of visual representation and historical analysis. Her work expands the rapidly growing body of scholarship in American Orientalism and the cultural Cold War in Asia. Greene’s central argument is that myths and images of China swing in pendulum-like fashion between positive and negative extremes. On the positive side, “China is regarded as an ancient and wise civilization,” and portrayals of Chinese people and culture in Hollywood are connected to beautiful landscapes, venerable sages, and noble traditions. But the underside of such nobility is a more troubling world of “Oriental despots, of Genghis Khan and his marauding hordes, of strange practices and barbaric tortures” (3). While times have changed, many of the images have not. Greene sees current anxiety about China’s rise as an economic power as reprising earlier preoccupations articulated by American missionaries, merchants, and politicians.
Despite significant diversity in the type of cinematic stories that are told about China, when the pendulum swings it does so, Greene convincingly argues, in a repeatedly bifurcated style, saying more about constructions of the American self and other, than China or the Chinese. And, while there are historical periods when such divisions seem to fade or disappear, they can, upon closer analysis, be seen in reconstituted albeit more muted forms. The divide between self and other plays out in both macro and micro contexts and, Greene claims, “reflects and fuels, at the individual level, the distinction between two countries, the United States and China” (12). Limiting her study to analysis of films about China rather than Chinese Americans or Chinese immigrants, Greene reminds us that both groups were, nonetheless, affected by stereotypes and representations on screen (14).
The first three chapters offer a nice fleshing out of issues related to early-twentieth-century films. I particularly appreciated Greene’s discussion of The Bitter Tea of General Yen, The Cat’s-Paw, and The Good Earth. Many scholars have written about both Pearl S. Buck’s wildly popular book and film, but Greene manages to provide a fresh perspective through her discussion of the marginalization of ethnically Chinese/Asian actors and the Caucasian performers who played Chinese characters in yellowface.
The second half of the book is particularly engaging. Chapter 4, “The Cold War in Three Acts,” weaves film analysis with a textured discussion of Sino-US relations, broad transpacific historical tensions, and links between cultural production and anti-Communist sentiment. It illustrates how attitudes about Chinese culture have, despite significant change in China, stayed frozen in time on screen. Audiences today have inherited staid stereotypes and do little to resist them. Chapter 5, “The World Splits in Two,” seems to jump rather abruptly to the 1990s but then meanders between late- and mid-twentieth-century films in a way that prepares the reader to see how past and present are always already in conversation with each other in Hollywood. The political landscape in both China and the US are juxtaposed against each other in considering several late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century films, including Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet. However, even as she keeps several plates in the air, Greene never loses sight of the self/other split and the reprising of themes from earlier eras. We are, thus, prepared for a full-on encounter with postmodernity and its trenchant Sinophobia and American neocolonialism as the book winds its way to a conclusion. But for all of its caution about the ways in which Americans continue to see themselves, and a “hollowed-out” China when they go to the movies, Greene teases out differences and divergences from the historical norm by considering a range of films from the “new” families of Ang Lee, to the revisionist westerns Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights and to animated blockbusters such as Mulan and Kung Fu Panda.
While the focus of the book is, of course, Hollywood, because Greene uses the term “American” film in her subtitle, this reviewer wondered how an already strong study might have been improved by introducing films from Canada, or considering how recent co-productions with a PRC, Taiwanese, or Hong Kong connection would have been in conversation with other films in her archive. After all, Ang Lee, like many ethnically Chinese/Sinophone filmmakers, is simultaneously claimed by various nations when he wins awards, and many of the most established Hollywood studios are, actually, transnational in their production, marketing, and distribution efforts. For all of her care with the integration of films and historical context one wishes for a bit more commentary on how national myths are in conversation with postnational/transnational flows in an age of globalization. But perhaps such themes would have watered down the sorts of clear theoretical/conceptual lines Greene chose to draw.
Greene’s book is that rare gem that will be of use in graduate film studies courses as well as in undergraduate teaching in various departments. But it would be equally interesting to a keen general reader with a desire to think beyond the binaries that are all too apparent as one looks at representations of China currently in the news.
Stacilee Ford
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
pp. 424-425