Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation

The focus of Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu's book Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation is how Chinese filmmakers and artists have responded to an increasingly transnational environment for Chinese film by returning to the nation—in his words, how “the national has managed to reinvent itself within the transnational” (3). Lu's book joins recent work by Ying Zhu and Aynne Kokas on the interaction between the Chinese film market and the global film industry and Chris Berry's recent articles on the emergence of the Chinese nationalist blockbuster.1 Looking beyond China, Lu's book complements Joseph Jonghyun Jeon's work on how the Korean film industries have been shaped by globalization.2 Naturally, Envisioning the Nation also serves as a continuation of Lu's own substantial contribution to the study of transnational Chinese cinemas, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity.3 If that book addressed the advent of global postmodernity in China in the last decade of the twentieth century, Envisioning the Nation returns a quarter century later to examine how Chinese national cinema has both sandbagged against this tide of globalization and ridden that same tide out to sea.Lu's introduction lays out the ironies of globalization for Chinese film—the coexistence of, on one hand, Hollywood-style nationalistic “blockbusters” and, on the other hand, independent film and high art that documents the social injustice and environmental degradation globalization creates. Lu also notes the parallel challenge transnationalism has posed to his own field of Chinese-language cinema, as critics have pointed out how that framing of the field implicitly supports mainland hegemony. Lu's response is to adopt a framework of “Greater China” cinema that accommodates transnational and resistant currents within Chinese-language film but nevertheless has as its center of gravity the mainland—a compromise unlikely to satisfy those wishing Lu would acknowledge, as Ien Ang once put it, that one might say no to Chineseness.4Lu's introductory claims about globalization are less a binding argument for the book than a common theme; all of the chapters of this book can stand alone, and indeed, versions of all the chapters except chapters 1 and 6 have been previously published elsewhere. The first section of the book focuses on relatively mainstream fiction film. Chapter 1 traces an arc from Hollywood's attempts to represent China on screen to recent attempts by domestic cinema to promote the national identity favored by the state. The chapter culminates in an analysis of the racial and gender politics of China Peacekeeping Forces (dir. Ning Haiqiang, 2018), in which virile male Chinese peacekeepers fight for global security alongside vulnerable and potentially devious female Russian aid workers. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between representations of female sex workers in Chinese-language film and the concepts of mobility and modernity, from the immobile nineteenth-century courtesans of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flowers of Shanghai (1998) to the border-crossing sex workers of Fruit Chan's turn-of-the-millennium Hong Kong films. Chapter 3 contrasts “two dominant strategies in the reorientations of the contemporary Hong Kong film industry”: filmmakers like Peter Chan and Stephen Chow, who “capitalize on the huge market of mainland China” and films like Ten Years, which “stubbornly hold onto the local and resist the national” (94). The development of the former strategy is paralleled by the shifting characterization of male Chinese protagonists who look for love abroad in the films of the 1990s and find it on the mainland in the films of the 2010s. Chapter 4 analyzes Jia Zhangke's postsocialist men, who, he argues, are “befuddled by an array of models and ideals of masculinity: the old-style socialist worker, the gangster in Hong Kong popular culture, and the capitalist ideology of individual entrepreneurship” (112).Jia Zhangke's art house cinema serves as a transition into the second section of the book, which follows the themes of globalization, national identity, and masculinity into less mainstream media: independent documentary, ballet, architecture, and visual art. The fifth chapter articulates this distinction between “mainstream” cinema and the arthouse film and independent documentary Lu calls peripheral cinema, as it exists at the periphery of the “officially sanctioned mainstream cinema” that is the “center of power” in mainland China (117). In chapter 6, Lu contrasts socialist-era ballets, in which the representation of Chinese women served as a flashpoint for Sino-Soviet tensions, with the representation of Russian women in contemporary popular Chinese media, in which the “Chinese male national is the active spectator and the foreign female body is being looked at and objectified” (152). Chapter 7 analyzes Beijing's monumental structures, public artworks, and urban renewal projects produced for the 2008 Olympics as examples of a “globalization of space” that projects “an image of China's openness to the outside world” (158) that encounters local resistance, as captured in documentaries by filmmakers like Shi Runjiu. Chapter 8 examines how “political pop” artists adapt Chinese propaganda poster traditions and the global iconography of Coca-Cola to appeal to a global market. At the same time, artists such as Ou Ning and Zhang Dali and the documentary filmmakers behind The Verse of Us and Plastic China highlight the labor exploitation and environmental degradation that sustains this globalization. A brief conclusion looks at the resurgence of propaganda blockbusters, the complexities of Hollywood coproductions, and the dissident films of Ai Weiwei in the context of growing US-PRC tensions. Lu presents a nuanced view of the media environment of postsocialist China where, along with the extremes of propaganda and dissidence, there exists a “broad spectrum of artworks and individual voices expressing varying degrees of conformity, contestation, negotiation, and negation vis-à-vis the establishment” (204).Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation provides an enviably comprehensive picture of that broad spectrum, but I often found myself wishing that Lu curtailed the scope in favor of a greater granularity. According to Lu's own description of Contemporary Chinese Cinema, his book covers “feature film . . . documentary film, TV drama, photography, painting, installation, architecture, urban design, performance, as well as a small amount of literary works as needed background material” (26). With that global (or, really, universal) scope, careful analysis can lose out to sweeping breadth. Chapter 1, for example, is a scant thirteen pages, and in those thirteen pages, Lu mentions seven films in passing and discusses ten films at greater length. Even the longest discussion of a film (China Peacekeeping Forces) in this chapter is a mere five pages long. This economy perhaps explains why Lu's analyses almost always focus exclusively on the text itself and only very seldom describe the concrete details of film production, film viewing situations, or viewer response. Generally speaking, this book would benefit from greater engagement with contemporary film theory—the only non-China-related film scholarship Lu cites is by Dudley Andrew, Mary Ann Doane, and Laura Mulvey. Lu's focus on questions of gender and masculinity is welcome, but a greater engagement with contemporary film theory might allow Lu to expand beyond simply noting that heroes are male and women are objectified to provide a more nuanced picture of how film industry structures, scopic regimes, and filmgoing practices shape gender in China. While I take issue with the analytical acuity of this book, Lu's comprehensive scope and clear, approachable style make chapters of this book ideal to assign to undergraduates as introductions to various topics in contemporary Chinese culture and film. Lu's book would serve as a handy primer for the problematics of globalization in contemporary China—and, hopefully, would inspire students to delve even further into those issues.

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