Chris Berry & Mary Farquhar,
China on Screen: Cinema and Nation.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0 231 13707 9
336pp
US$26.00 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press)

In recent decades Chinese movies such as those produced by Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Ang Lee have won acclaim in the international cinema arena and the study of ‘Chinese film’ has rapidly become a popular field in academic cinema studies and features in curricula for film studies around the world.

But what exactly is “Chinese film”? China on Screen: Cinema and Nation by veteran film critics Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar is the latest and the most comprehensive volume in a series of recent books examining the nature of ‘Chinese film’. The problem with defining ‘Chinese film’ is that it transcends national boundaries to incorporate Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the diaspora. Also some of the most acclaimed examples are produced with foreign investment for mainly Western audiences. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, in an earlier study of this issue eschewed the notion of Chinese cinema in favour of ‘transnational Chinese cinemas’ (Transnational Chinese Cinemas, University of Hawaii Press, 1997). The term ‘transnational’ Figures in much subsequent literature on Chinese film, for example, Yingjin Zhang’s Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002).

In this volume, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar put the nation firmly on the agenda in Chinese cinema studies. They argue that in spite of the transnational character of Chinese language film as a production across East Asia and the diaspora, Chinese films consistently engage with ideas of the nation and cannot be understood without reference to nationally-informed narratives and imagery. Their view of ‘the nation’ however is far removed from the somewhat essentialized Chinese nation of earlier studies but one subject to continued construction and contestation. Informed by the work of Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler, the authors offer an analytic framework based on a dynamic and contested notion of the Chinese nation rather than a superordinate Chinese cultural order transcending national boundaries.

The book is divided into eight chapters, each covering a significant topic within the twentieth century history of Chinese film and relating to the central issue of the national. The text can thus be read at the simplest level as a mainly chronological history of Chinese twentieth-century cinema. However, the chronological account underlies a sophisticated discussion of topics on a range of important themes: films capturing historical moments and past traumas; the transformation of traditional performing arts such as opera into martial arts or operatic films; the adoption of realist modes centred around domestic drama; shifting constructions of Chinese women as representations of the idealised nation; changing notions of masculinity, particularly from an East-West perspective; and ‘minority’ ethnicity within the Chinese-speaking polity. Key films from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are analysed in some detail.

For this reader, one of the most interesting chapters is the final one, ‘The National in the Transnational’. Here the authors engage with the vexed question of how to interpret Chinese films that win awards in the West and are, in some cases, more appreciated by Western film-goers than by Chinese populations. Some film scholars critique those who present ‘negative’ images of China to present stereotypical images of Chinese backwardness and poverty to titillate Western audiences (one such critic is Yingjin Zhang). The other issue is the large-scale opening of the Chinese film industry to Hollywood cinema to the great disadvantage of the native film industry. Berry and Farquhar argue rather that a more complex notion of agency and resistance needs to be invoked here. They demonstrate how hybrid East-West masculinities have emerged in the films of Bruce Lee, one that entirely supersedes the effeminate ‘sick man of Asia’ image of the past. Further, certain Chinese film producers are appropriating Hollywood techniques to good effect to create their own blockbusters (Zhang Yimou’s Hero).

Within each chapter detailed discussion of each film is enlivened with photos of film shots, brief synopses of films under discussion, and relevant contextual information. At the same time, the authors consistently engage both with scholarly debate about the national in Chinese cinema and with broader perspectives drawn from the study of international cinema. The pedagogical value of this sort of approach, which both informs and stimulates, will be evident to educators in film studies. For this reason China on Screen is surely destined to become a set text in courses for international cinema around the world. The volume includes detailed footnotes and bibliography, a useful timeline of Chinese films placed within the context of twentieth century Chinese history and a comprehensive index. Written in a clear and engrossing style, China on Screen is both a sophisticated contribution to debate about the ‘national’ quality of Chinese cinema and an indispensable text for the teaching and study of Chinese film.

Anne McLaren,
Asia Institute, University of Melbourne.

Created on: Thursday, 23 November 2006