Chris Berry (ed),
Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes.
London: British Film Institute, 2003.
ISBN: 0851709869 (pb) £16.99
ISBN: 0851709850 (hb) £55.00
240pp
(Review copy supplied by BFI publishing)
At the end of his introduction to this anthology, Chris Berry writes: “I hope that readers will be as excited by the variety of the essays and freshness of their perspectives as I am” (7). The book does just that. It delivers its promise, and readers are indeed excited by the wonderful product. In 1991, BFI’s publication of Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, edited by Chris Berry, laid much of the groundwork for the study of Chinese Cinema in the West. If that anthology signals the beginning and creation of a field of inquiry, the newer perspectives of Chinese Films in Focus published 12 years later by BFI marks the full flourish of Chinese Cinema studies around the world.
The book is a collection of 25 essays, each of which examines one Chinese-language film. All the essays are brand new and were never published before. The 25 authors hail from all over the world: USA, UK, Australia, Hong Kong, Macau, and Europe. Each essay updates the reader on the existing scholarship of the given film, and at the same time offers a fresh analysis of it. The geographic range of the anthology covers China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. The time period spawns films from the early silent era to the turn of the 21st century. While each essay is decidedly textual in focus, it also situates the film in specific institutional, discursive, generic, socio-political, and theoretical contexts. As a result, the anthology as a whole offers the richest and the most excruciatingly detailed analyses of single film texts we have seen. Some of the authors are well-established figures in the field: Chris Berry, Yingjin Zhang, Rey Chow, Mary Farquhar, and Bérénice Reynaud, while others are emergent junior scholars. Consequently, there is a healthy dialogic presence of familiar voices and new faces. In the coverage of films, there are re-readings of film classics and well-known directors: Goddess, Yellow Earth, Farewell My Concubine, Chungking Express, Hibiscus Town, etc. There are also films that had not received enough critical attention in Western scholarship, such as Wu Ziniu’s Evening Bell and Li Han-hsiang’s Love eterne. In such a manner, the anthology dutifully fulfills the function of producing a flexible and ever-evolving canon in the history of Chinese Cinema for readers, students, and educators. A remarkable feature of the book is that all the essays are uniformly well researched and elegantly written. Both the junior and senior scholars have done a great service to our understanding of Chinese film culture. The last section of the book also provides us with very useful Chinese glossaries of names and film titles. Readers of Chinese would very much appreciate such neat bilingual material.
The 25 films are listed in the alphabetical order of the English translation of their titles. Hence, the first essay starts with B: Black Cannon Incident directed by Huang Jianxin, and the last essay ends with Y: Yi yi directed by Edward Yang. This manner of listing has certain advantages. As Berry convincingly argues, no single approach or label can exhaust the diverse subjects and multiple issues that these films and essays engage. A historical, geographic, or thematic grouping of the essays would necessarily reduce the multifarious orientations even within a single essay. But the reality of life is that most teachers have to be reductive in the classroom and start with some sense of direction for the students. The anthology is a great resource for teachers of Chinese Cinema because it allows them to draw on it in productively different ways. As one teacher of Chinese Cinema, I tend to give the students a sense of history and geography in order to make the job easier for students to comprehend the issues at hand. An alternative grouping of the various illuminating essays could be done in a combination of space and time, the Kantian “categorical imperatives.” It could be like this:
Republic of China
The Goddess (1934)
Crows and Sparrows (1949)
Mainland China
Socialist Cinema in the Mao Era:
The Red Detachment of Women (1960)
Post-Mao New Cinema:
Yellow Earth (1984)
Black Cannon Incident (1985)
Hibiscus Town (1986)
Evening Bell (1987)
Farewell My Concubine (1993)
Ermo (1994)
Not One Less (1999)
New Taiwan Cinema and Beyond
A Time to Live, A Time to Live (1985)
Wedding Banquet (1993)
Vive L’amour (1994)
Flowers of Shanghai (1998)
Yi yi (2000)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Hong Kong
Love eterne (1963)
A Touch of Zen (1971)
Boat People (1982)
A Chinese Ghost Story (1987)
Bullet in the Head (1990)
Centre Stage (1991)
Chungking Express (1994)
Floating Life (1998)
In the Mood for Love (2001)
This is one way to write a syllabus for a survey course on the cinematic traditions of China by re-organizing Berry’s Ur-text. As we know, such grouping could be misleading in cases of transnational productions. Some films can be listed simultaneously under different regions. In this sense, the listing by geographic origin is as helpful as it is faulty and even impossible. But at any rate, the temporal sequence cannot be wrong, and it may become a way of structuring our pedagogic experience. I am sure that some teachers might find other ways of grouping and using the essays, for instance, thematically (love, revolution, migration, etc.), or by auteurs (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, Chen Kaige, Ang Lee, etc.). These different strategies of utilizing the anthology only make one thing clear – this is most comprehensive, useful, up-to-date study of Chinese-language cinema available in English. I enthusiastically recommend it to all people who are interested in Chinese film or film generally. It should be definitely adopted as a textbook for a Chinese-language film class, in toto or in part.
Sheldon Lu
University of California, Davis
Created on: Monday, 6 December 2004 | Last Updated: 6-Dec-04