Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922–1938 by Huang Xuelei, and: Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951–1979 by Zhuoyi Wang

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922–1938 by Huang Xuelei, and: Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951–1979 by Zhuoyi Wang Xiangyang Cindy Chen (bio) Huang Xuelei. Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922–1938. Leiden: Brill, 2014. xvi, 381 pp. Hardback $181.00, isbn 978-90-04-27933-9. Zhuoyi Wang. Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xii, 274 pp. Hardback $95.00, isbn 978-1-137-37873-6. The lacuna of Chinese film scholarship was quickly filled with the rise of the so-called fifth generation directors, who, with their daring and iconoclastic work, have attracted fans and film critics alike. The succeeding sixth generation and the independent film movement have accelerated the study of Chinese cinema, enabling its incorporation into the curriculum of contemporary Chinese universities, with their critical social, political, and ideological agendas. In tandem with these developments, Chinese film events showcasing a director’s work or theme films have been held across many countries, eliciting enthusiastic discussion and euphoric celebration in film studies, Chinese studies, and area studies circles. The deepening and expansion of Chinese film studies have facilitated the discovery of a paucity of approaches—dominated primarily by textual analysis, the limited coverage of spans (primarily contemporary Chinese films, and the singularity of films studied), and the tendency to focus on established directors and their works or ideologically provocative films. Such proclivities cannot provide us with a [End Page 50] nuanced and comprehensive picture of Chinese cinema. A diversity of approaches has cropped up: textual analysis being complemented with contextual sources, the turn to pre-1980s or Republican-era films, the taking up of understudied period cinema, the unbiased coverage of works studied (either by period or by director), and the inclusion of good and trashy films alike as objects of study. Two recent books, Huang Xuelei’s Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922–1938 (hereafter Shanghai Filmmaking) and Zhuoyi Wang’s Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951–1979 (hereafter Revolutionary Cycles), conform to some or all of the above-mentioned diversifying characteristics. Approaching two successive periods, respectively, they represent Shanghai filmmaking and PRC film production as starkly different cinemas with PRC filmmaking eventually succeeding in merging the two and nationalizing the film industry. By focusing on an important film company of the period, Mingxing Film Company, Huang Xuelei’s Shanghai Filmmaking traces current transnational and glocal studies to early Chinese cinema through mining the rhizomatic strands of connections film has with other forces, for instance, journalism, print, theater, and literature in their national and transnational contexts. One of the early forerunner film companies, Mingxing Film Company produced many important directors, film personnel, and major works that have had a huge impact on later Chinese filmmaking. Covering a relatively understudied period in Chinese cinema by means of a forked approach consisting of the meticulous study of the company’s production personnel and the films it produced, Shanghai Filmmaking investigates the medley “lines of flight” the important personnel have, leading to their specific propensities, particular styles, and favored themes in terms of film directors. Fleshing out Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s culture industry theory in the case of Mingxing, Huang Xuelei analyzes carefully the company’s operation, its structure, and its crucial decision makers with a cornucopia of their own connections and idiosyncrasies. Ian Jarvie’s sociological study facilitates her careful probe into the role of film through quadruple dissection—from the aspect of filmmakers, audience, the films themselves, and film reviews, for which Xuelei goes through numerous journals, newspapers, and periodicals published throughout the world. For that end, she also went out of her way to tease out the nationalistic, sensational literature, and transcultural discourses shaping the production of Mingxing films. Compared to the vernacular modernism model of early Chinese cinema with which scholars argue for cinema’s sensory impact attendant on the advent of modernity,1 Xuelei is prone to delineating the company’s everyday operation, saturated with print, media, and interpersonal relations. She eventuates in collaging a sedimented panorama of the Ming-xing Film Company in the vast maelstrom of Shanghai people’s life and...