Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2015. ix, 282 pp. (Figures.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5876-3.
Relatively few works in film studies devote attention to sound and music because a huge part of the movie-watching experience is about visual pleasure. Most viewers do not realize the emotional effects of sound and music, which play important roles in creating atmosphere and tension in the cinematic space. Film songs—especially the pop songs we have grown up with—whether they are adopted by films or popularized as original scores written for films, often dominate visuals by their strong emotional impact. They function differently since they also exist outside the cinema and are aired repeatedly in public and private spaces, thereby establishing a direct association with viewers apart from the discourse of a film. In her book, Jean Ma gives the example of Wong Kar-wai’s short music film The Blooming Years (2000), which is edited to Zhou Xuan’s song of the same title with clips from old films (3). This song is played on the soundtrack of Wong’s feature film In the Mood of Love (2000), which bears the same Chinese title as the song. Jean Ma’s book is more than a scholarly exploration of sound and music in Chinese cinema. Referring to existing studies on sound, music, and voice in cinematic traditions, while paying special attention to the configuration of the role of the songstress in Chinese cinema, her analysis also relates to theories in feminist film studies, effects of sound technology in filmmaking, complexity in the visual and/or vocal performance, and actual practices in Shanghai cinema before 1949 and Hong Kong’s Mandarin cinema after 1949.
Reading Ma’s book Sounding the Modern Woman, I found fascinating insights on films featuring Grace Chang: Mambo Girls (1957) and The Wild, Wild Rose (1960) in particular. Jean Ma states that she began research “with a vague notion of starting a book project about the films and songs of the postwar star Grace Chang” (3), and Grace Chang remains the most interesting subject of the book and occupies nearly two chapters of her discussions. Although at more than one point, Ma groups Zhou Xuan, Grace Chang, Chung Ching, Yao Lee, Linda Lin Dai, and Julie Yeh Feng as the major postwar singing actresses, her book does not include any case studies for Linda Lin Dai and Julie Yeh Feng. I can clearly see why Grace Chang’s The Wild, Wild Rose, which incorporates plots from both Bizet’s Carmen and Dumas fils’ Camellia in constructing a femme fatale figure and was written with the consideration of Grace Chang’s ability to sing with different voices corresponding to her multicultural personae, generates a very vigorous reading. Ma successfully makes a case that Grace Chang, who possessed an amazing star power yet was not studied more seriously as the cinema she belonged to—the Mandarin cinema of postwar Hong Kong—“has been largely sidelined by Chinese film historiography” (26).
Jean Ma sets off by taking “the songstress as a starting point for a remapping of Chinese film history against an international horizon” (23), which I do consider a very bold and creative attempt that, if fulfilled, may lead to a very interesting historiography. The book continues to highlight a number of films that are not often studied in detail in other works on Chinese cinema, including Songstress Red Peony (1931), Two Stars in the Milky Way (1931), An All-consuming Love (1947), Song of a Songstress (1948), Songs of the Peach Blossom River (1956), Mambo Girls, and The Wild, Wild Rose, which form a genealogy in their own right. Since, as Ma rightly points out, the image of the “singing women” was wiped out by the “fighting men” after 1970, when kungfu films were on the rise and wenyi (art and literature) films were in decline, the book needs to call on the songstress’s image and voice now only lingering in more recent films like The Rouge (1988), The Hole (1998), In the Mood for Love (2000), Lust, Caution (2007), and, not mentioned by Ma, Shanghai Triad (1999). After a wide survey, Ma decides to focus “on song performance in Mandarin films from the early sound era to postwar Hong Kong and on the performers who worked exclusively in this linguistic realm” (25); this choice marks a significant contribution to the study of Chinese cinema, but also needs further justification. Her chosen repertoire excludes songstresses in Cantonese language films paralleling Shanghai films from 1931 to 1948 and postwar Mandarin films from the 1950s to the 1960s made in Hong Kong, as well as all films adapting the forms of regional operas (including the most well-known Peking Opera, Cantonese Opera, and Huangmei Opera) and chanted storytelling forms (including Tianjin Drum Song and Suzhou Pingtan). Cantonese singer-actress Siu Yin Fei, for instance, plays songstress roles in films like The Blood-Soaked Tomb (沂횡斷腸괼, 1949), South Sea Songstress (莖錡멱큽, 1950), Songstress Red Rose(멱큽紅천밧, 1952) and A Melancholy Melody (멱聲淚緞, 1952), which all refer back or are in line with Shanghai musical films of the 1930s and 1940s. On the one hand, such exclusions keep Ma from remapping Chinese film history. On the other hand, the narrow focus results in a paradox in her study: as Andrew Stuckey summarizes in his review of this book, even though she does stress the differences between Chinese singing (and not always dancing) pictures and Hollywood musicals, her own “historical research consistently points to the ways the Shanghai or Hong Kong industries are responding to, adapting from, and negotiating between Hollywood films (including American music and dance styles) and local cultural and social concerns.” The representation of modernity in Chinese films has always involved the appropriation of Western enlightenment and traditional Chinese values and narratives; and these two traditions do share a conspiracy against women, as is evident in Ma’s analyses.
A major strength of this book is Jean Ma’s attempt to bridge the gap between the songstress persona and the urge to be a modern woman—free, independent, with her own agency and talent revealed. Throughout the book, I found several new contributions to feminist film studies. First, the roles of songstresses are not paralleled by male singer actors in postwar Mandarin films made in Hong Kong, which means that women’s film was not only just one of many genres but the dominant genre at the time. Second, in opera films (like Huangmei, Shaoxing Yue Opera, and Cantonese Opera), as noted by Ma and others, the omniscient narrator is often voiced by a female chorus and both male and female protagonists are played by actresses, and this form of feminine voices is unique in Chinese cinema. Third, with attention to the timbre, expression, and on-and-off screen collaboration of female voices, this book breaks through the practice of textual analysis and spectatorship studies. In this respect, I regard Ma’s book as a significant feminist historical intervention.
S. Louisa Wei
City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR, China
pp. 133-135