Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema Gina Marchetti (bio) Shuqin Cui . Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu, University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. xxvi, 304 pp. Hardcover $39.00, ISBN 0-8248-2532-2. As Zhang Yingjin points out in Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002), there has been an exponential growth in the "blooming field" of publications on Chinese cinema in English over the last twenty years (p. 18). In fact, recently, several books (in addition to Zhang's) have appeared that overlap with the project set forth in Cui's Women Through the Lens to look at the relation between gender and nation in Chinese cinema. Like Cui and Zhang, many of these authors build on Rey Chow's Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), and Chow, for her part, adds to previous analyses of gender, sexuality, and the Chinese nation in research conducted by Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, Esther C. M. Yau, Chris Berry, E. Ann Kaplan, Peter Hitchcock, Paul Clark, Ma Ning, and Wang Yuejin, among others. Five recent books that deal most directly with the films Cui also analyzes are Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), Sheila Cornelius (with Ian Haydn Smith), New Chinese Cinema: Challenging Representations (London: Wallflower, 2002), Jerome Silbergeld, China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (London: Reaktion, 1999), Lu Tonglin, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Dai Jinhua, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, ed. Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow (London: Verso, 2002). In scope, Women Through the Lens has most in common with Public Secrets, Public Spaces, since both books deal with a range of narrative-fiction films from the silent era to the present. However, since Cui focuses most of her attention on the post-Mao era, she deals with many of the same films as Lu, Cornelius, and Silbergeld, including Ju dou, Farewell My Concubine, and Army Nurse. Like Dai Jinhua, Cui provides a Lacanian reading of key films from the Fifth Generation, an overview of women filmmakers in China, and a detailed analysis of Huang Shuqin's Woman, Demon, Human.1 Given this bounty of scholarship on women in Chinese film, Women Through the Lens finds its niche as an overview of the existing research seen through the lens of feminist film and literary theory. Because of this approach and model analyses of a few key films, the book provides a very fine introduction to Chinese film for students approaching the topic in a feminist [End Page 129] film criticism course or in a course in which grounding in film theory cannot be assumed but is absolutely necessary for the students. Key concepts frame many of the close analyses in the book so that Cui's investigation of Center Stage could be used to discuss the concept of self-reflexivity and intertextuality, Ju dou to look at point of view and off-screen sound, Farewell My Concubine to examine space and other elements of the mise-en-scène, and Woman, Demon, Human to explore montage. Drawing on the stalwarts of film theory (e.g., Edward Branigan, Leo Braudy, Teresa de Lauretis, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Mary Ann Doane, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Anne Friedberg, Louis Giannetti, Christine Gledhill, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Sarah Kozloff, Annette Kuhn, Christian Metz, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Robert Stam, Gaylyn Studlar, Linda Williams), Cui's work firmly situates itself within film studies as a discipline, and her approach springs principally from this body of research. However, the detailed summary of the work of many of these film theorists, while useful for film students, tends to interrupt the flow of Cui's argument and encumbers the book with information that is tangential to the subject at hand. Also, some of the film theory cited, although...