Alter-Centring Sinophone Cinema

Abstract

The notion of ‘national cinema’ has been subjected to critical interrogation and reformulation since the 1980s, partially triggered by the transnational and regional turn in film studies, coupled with the evolving discourses of globalization and localization.1 Unsurprisingly, therefore, the ‘Chinese’ in ‘Chinese cinema’ has been stripped of its self-explanatory status (which has never actually existed since its inception in the early twentieth century) and subjected to rigorous demystification and deconstruction. As Sheldon Lu (2012) argues, the deconstructionist reformulation of Chinese cinema has given rise to three new paradigms — transnational Chinese cinemas, Chinese-language cinema, and Sinophone cinema — that critique the ‘national’ model from different perspectives.2