Contemporary Chinese Cinema Research Articles

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. Rey Chow

Review(s) of: Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility, by Rey Chow. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xvi + 263 pp. US$69.50/ 45.00 (hardcover), US$22.50/ 14.50 (paperback).

Sentimental fabulations, contemporary Chinese films: attachment in the age of global visibility

Preface and AcknowledgmentsNote on TranscriptionsIntroductionPart I: Remembrance of Things Past1 The Seductions of Homecoming: Temptress Moon and the Question of Origins2 Nostalgia of the New Wave: Romance, Domesticity,a nd the Longing for Oneness in Happy Together3 The Everyday in The Road Home and In the Mood for Love: From the Legacy of Socialism to the Potency of YuanPart II: Migrants' Lore, Women's Options4 Autumn Hearts: Filming Feminine Psychic Interiority in Song of the Exile5 By Way of Mass Commodities: Love in Comrades, Almost a Love Story6 All Chinese Families are Alike: Biopolitics in Eat a Bowl of Tea and The Wedding BanquetPart III: Picturing the Life to Come...7

A Study on the Nationalism of Contemporary Chinese Films -Focus on the historic martial arts trilogy of Zhang Yimou-

A Study on the Nationalism of Contemporary Chinese Films -Focus on the historic martial arts trilogy of Zhang Yimou-

China Art by Phone: Mobile Movies

Jia ZhangKe's film Platform gives crystalline shape to a generation in a group of youth gathered around a tape-recorder in Fenyang city. The tape itself had come from Guangzhou and before that, presumably, from across the border with Hong Kong. Perhaps a Cantonese filtering, a local expression of Western and brand-name product that, viewed positively, marks the largest and most sweeping educational drive in China's history, the distribution and assimilation of fashion, DVDs, CDs, video, and design. This article seeks to know empirically the conditions that lay the groundwork for this educational drive, focusing on social transformation and the impact of digital technologies on theory, approach, practice, consumption. Clearly, mobility is important in this process of social transformation. Platform gives us images of the mobility of people, things, and ideas. This article also looks at the effects of the transport of people, things, and ideas and explores the cultural dimensions of social transformation. The article asks: What is mobility for artists and media producers? What are the urbanistic interconnections that emerge from an engagement with public space? These questions are explored around the social and cultural terrain of the mobile phone. The article considers the virtual public space of the mobile telephone now opening to cultural producers and consumers. In what way does the mobile telephone, as an instrument for dialogue, a marketing device, and a promotional tool, affect our perception of public space? This article examines several initiatives that bring the mobile phone and cultural production together. One of these is titled “Focus: This Moment,” a program of eight short films by eight contemporary Chinese film directors made for mobile phone and Internet distribution. Another is “Connect to Art,” initiated by Nokia in September 2004 in Helsinki, continued in Monaco in December 2004, and then furthered again in Shanghai in May 2006 with the unveiling of four works by Chinese contemporary artists: Ai Weiwei, Yang Fudong, Zhang Peili, and Feng Mengbo. The article considers how mobile phone movies modify and enrich our understanding of cinema. This is thus an enquiry into the impact of digital technology on the mature film industry. Furthermore, the article asks how public space is enfolded in multiple contextual discourses that create the mobility and interface of the mobile phone.

The Death of Heroes in China

This article examines Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou's first forays into the martial arts/action genre, against the shifting cultural landscape in contemporary China. It first offers a sketch of the development of the Fifth Generation filmmakers and Zhang Yimou's career trajectory in relation to the latest development in the cultural politics of contemporary Chinese cinema as a guide to the contextual structures which frame the examination of the two films. The article then goes on to a detailed reading of Hero and House of Flying Daggers. The author believes that drawing upon issues both internal and external to the “text” of the films yields new insights into the relationship between Chinese artists and the Party in terms of rebellion, co-option, and resubmission. The reading of the films leads to the conclusion that the films embody acts of change as well as continuity with the Fifth Generation and Zhang's career development, thus extending existing views on the relationship between filmmakers and the Party.

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. By Rey Chow. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xii, 263 pp. $69.50 (cloth), $22.50 (paper).

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Chinese Documentaries: from Dogma to Polyphony * Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema

These two books demonstrate that English scholarship of Chinese cinema has grown considerably since the late 1980s. While Yinchi Chu's book attempts to fill a gap by bringing the history of Chinese documentaries to western academic attention and foregrounding the interconnectedness of film and television industries in contemporary China, Gary Xu's book, by focusing on individual directors and select films, aims at an in-depth exploration of the production and circulation of Chinese images in the age of globalization. The two scholars share a conviction that the political economy of the global market has made a deep impact on Chinese media industries, but they have adopted markedly different approaches: Chu proceeds with caution and relies on a description of historical development and a summary of existing scholarship, whereas Xu favours theoretical reflections and critiques both cultural and academic productions. Chu prefers the phrase ‘documentary cinema’ to ‘documentary film’ in Chinese Documentaries...

Adapting Shakespeare from Western Drama to Chinese Opera

Two hundred and forty years after his death, Shakespeare was introduced to China. It was in 1856 that the British missionary William Muirhead mentioned the Bard of Avon in his Chinese translation of British history. In 1878, the first Chinese ambassador in Britain, Guo Song-tao, saw a performance of a Shakespeare play at the Lyceum Theatre in London. He was very impressed and recorded this in his diary.1 Today, the Chinese people can not only read Shakespeare in English and Chinese, but can also enjoy his plays on stage. There are two major performative modes in which Shakespeare appears in China. Each of them has about one hundred years of history. One is Huaju or ‘spoken drama', influenced by Western drama; the other is Xiqu or ‘Chinese opera', based on the indigenous theatre. Adapting Shakespeare into Huaju is easier because the transfer takes place within the same art: however, adapting it into Chinese opera is much more complicated because they are entirely unrelated. In spite of this, since the early twentieth century Chinese practitioners have been brave enough to meet the challenge. So far, there are more than twenty indigenous operas in different genres that have been adapted from Shakespeare. Parallel to that, Shakespeare's plays were also adapted into Chinese stage drama (Huaju). Li Ruru, scholar of Chinese theatre, has discussed these attempts in her book Staging Shakespeare in China.2 Though there exists an early silent film adaptation made in 1931, two years ago the first contemporary Chinese film adaptations from Shakespeare were realised: The Banquet and Prince of the Himalayas, both of which are based on Hamlet (I have analysed them in my recent book Shakespeare's Images).3 Whether as operas or theatre plays or films, these adaptations are the subject of continuous debate. Shakespeare in Southern Africa Vol. 20 2008: pp. 1-11

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility (review)

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility (review)

Madness and Disability in Contemporary Chinese Film

This article draws on recent research in the medical humanities to analyze two contemporary Chinese films: Zhang Yuan's Sons (1996) and Zhou Xiaowen's The Common People (1998). By portraying psychic and physical anguish in ways that refuse to divorce biology from culture, such films offer rare moral dialogues on biomedical issues and contribute a cross-cultural perspective invaluable to the task of responding to illness and suffering.

Chinese Cinema: Exposures, Research, and Change

Continuous Transnational Exposures: A Brief Personal Account. In the winter of 1984, an energetic MFA student at UCLA, Mishka Chen, made some duplicate copies of contemporary Chinese films on videocassettes for his schoolmate. He was one of the earliest production graduate students at UCLA. Not only did he show a superior knowledge of who’s who in official culture, he was active in getting movies from the cultural section of the Chinese embassy in San Francisco that consistently supplied overseas Chinese student associations with new movies coming out from China.

History, Memory, Nostalgia: Rewriting Socialism in Chinese Cinema and Television Drama

This study will focus on a cluster of new films and television dramas that revisit and rewrite the history of Chinese socialism from a different point of view in light of the capitalist frenzy of commercialism and commodification in contemporary post-socialist China. It seems that it is only possible after some 20 years, after the historical wounds and traumas have been largely healed, that a new critical distance can be reached in regard to the past. Socialism during the 1950s-1970s conveniently signifies the values and ideals that are putatively absent today—idealism, egalitarianism, self-sacrifice, and innocence. The critique of the present consumer society thus comes in the form of nostalgia for the past in contemporary Chinese cinema.

Heroism/Terrorism: Empire Building in Contemporary Chinese Films

This article will explore the representations of war and empire building in two selected movies. More specifically, I intend to compare and contrast the different interpretations of the final stage of the Warring States period (453-221 BCE), leading to the first unification of the Chinese Empire under the Qin (221-207 BCE), in the two movies Hero by Zhang Yimou, and The Emperor and the Assassin by Chen Kaige. My principal goal is to examine the foundation myth of Chinese "righteous" Empire in these movies, as well as the ideological connotations concerning this past that the directors attempt to convey to their contemporary audiences.

Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China's Moral Voice (with DVD). By Jerome Silbergeld. [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. 160 pp. £22.95. ISBN 0-295-98417-1.

Jerome Silbergeld introduced an art history approach into Chinese film studies with China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema in 2000. Hitchcock with a Chinese Face goes further. Like an art historian selecting three seemingly disparate paintings and demonstrating their links, Silbergeld chooses a film each from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, but argues that they pursue similar aesthetic and political directions. The result is a virtuoso display of intense textual and inter-textual exegesis, informed by an in-depth knowledge of the pre-modern Chinese arts, contemporary Chinese political culture, and globally circulated Western culture (including Hitchcock). It is also a challenge to the discipline of film studies itself.The three films Silbergeld selects for analysis are Lou Ye's 2000 film from mainland China, Suzhou River (Suzhou he); Yim Ho's 1994 Hong Kong film, The Day the Sun Turned Cold (Tianguo nizi); and the final part of Hou Hsiao Hsien's 1995 Taiwan trilogy, Good Men, Good Women (Hao nan, hao nü,). He acknowledges that the project began as a personal indulgence allowing him to explore further some of his favourite films. However, his engagement with the films leads him to argue that each one, in its own way, deconstructs the commonly circulated idea of a unified Chinese culture, engages powerfully with morality, is narratively complex and anti-commercial, mobilizes a cosmopolitan knowledge of world cinema, and displays an unusual degree of interest in individual psychology and oedipality. The latter elements help to ground the comparisons to Hitchcock (as well as to Hamlet, Dostoevsky, Faulkner and others).

Toward an Ethics of Postvisuality: Some Thoughts on the Recent Work of Zhang Yimou

Taking as its point of departure the unresolved problematic of ethics in poststructuralist theory, this essay approaches ethics from the perspective of mediated visuality in contemporary cultural politics. Noting how the sensitivity to otherness—be it in the form of mass culture, gender, or race—has often been accompanied by iconophobia, a fundamental distrust and rejection of images, the author offers an analysis of the contemporary Chinese film Happy Times, directed by Zhang Yimou, as an instance of a kind of ethical film practice in which a responsible, noniconophobic thinking about visuality and its implications may be traced. In a culture caught between the forces of globalization and its own attempts at modernization, such as contemporary China's, Zhang's work contributes to an ethics of what may be called postvisuality.

The Question of the Nation in Contemporary Chinese Film: An Introduction

The government of the People’s Republic of China is committed to a policy of irredentism with regard to Taiwan, and Taiwan, for its part, seems at best interested in maintaining the status quo and, increasingly over time, more inclined toward all out separation from the Mainland when it comes to matters of State. Yet there is little pondering of this problem in Chinese cultural studies. The four articles in this symposium do not all explicitly address the problem of the nation in Chinese film to the exclusion of other themes, but they do implicitly engage this issue as they endeavor to parse the work of filmmakers from the liang’an sandi of the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Yingjin Zhang

<i>Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema</i>. Yingjin Zhang

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

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...

Book Review: Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

Book Review: Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. By Yingjin Zhang. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 2002. xiii, 433 pp. $35.00.

Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. By Yingjin Zhang. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 2002. xiii, 433 pp. $35.00. - Volume 62 Issue 1