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347 Chapter 14· Narrative Images of the Historical Passion Those Other Women—On the Alterity in the New Wave of Chinese Cinema· Yi Zheng The self-conscious New Wave of Chinese cinema begins with a resituation of what C. T. Hsia, in his study of modern Chinese literature,1 calls the modern Chinese “obsession with China,” an obsession recurrent in modern Chinese literary, social, and political thought, which begins with that traumatic moment in “our” modernity, when, as Benedict Anderson observes: “So, as European imperialism smashed its insouciant way around the globe, other civilizations found themselves traumatically confronted by pluralisms which annihilated their sacred genealogies. The Middle Kingdom’s marginalization to the Far East is emblematic of this process.”2 It is an obsession burdened with the traumatic modern Chinese history, with a “pregazing”—“the givenness of subjectivity,” which “is already part of the process of cross-cultural interpellation that is at work in the larger realm of modern history.”3 These cinematic new waves and re-presentations emerge as belated but conscious attempts at a self-recasting that is a response to and a critique of that earlier trauma and the “Chinese” own subsequent entanglement with it, including the initial moment of encounter with the imperial West and the later “Cultural Revolution” as various stages of a Chinese modernity. These filmic practices, as self-reimaging, however, are more than what Rey Chow diagnoses via Freud as the fetishizing gaze, nor are they a belated longing for the lost empire. In Primitive Passions, which is an extended reformulation of the practice of self-gazing/display, the “autoethnography” in the Chinese New Cinema, and a critical assessment of its attendant crosscultural inquiries, Chow looks at the formalisms of the production of the Fifth-Generation Chinese filmmakers as masculinist cultural critics. She suggests that in these new waves, the “primitive passions” of the masculinist, imperialist (in their nostalgia for a primitive Chinese empire) modern Chinese intellectuals are redeemed in their formal construction of “the primacy 348 Yi Zheng of to-be-looked-at–ness,” in their reimaging of the countryside, the longago , and the woman as a Third-Worldly modus operandi in the increasingly “transparent” transnational market economy.4 I agree with Chow that such “primitive passions” are “fantasies of an origin”5 but suggest that they are evoked, first of all, as self-scrutiny, a critique of their own complicity and their endless failed attempts to redress the wound of their modern dismemberment at a moment of cultural crisis. In these self-gazings, their complicity is seen not only in their inevitable acceptance of their “othered” modernity , the irreversibility of history, and their impotence as the structured other but also in their shattered “sacred genealogies.” Their critique is also a cultural critique of their very own genealogy. Their gaze begins with the burden of a historical awareness of the nonplace of modern China and its own undoing. In their reimaging, modern China comes to be, contrary to Kristeva’s observation, with the very complexes of “our” modernity6—the permanent imprints of the shattering of its sacred genealogy in its first traumatic encounter with the modernizing West, and its very own “lack”—its always already lost, corrupted Chineseness. It is with a shared pregazing as such that the New Wave is hailed as a “medical discourse,”7 a cure for or an antithesis to the shattered cultural body. As a continuation of the modern Chinese “obsession with China,” this new wave marks a turning, a negation of various past attempts, and a will to shake off “the shackles of tradition” and discard “historical burdens.” “Pounded and bent by strong anxiety and a clear sense of social responsibility ,”8 these self-consciously new filmmakers joined the search for roots that surged in China in the early and middle 1980s as a cultural meditation upon the implications and possibilities of a “national” striving for remodernization and have taken it to greater “depth.” Most of the New Wave films are set in an imagined faraway, long-ago place where a naked but “Chinese” existence, that which is outside and other than the defunct traditions of the lost empire, still is. The effort of these new filmmakers is described by themselves and many Chinese film critics as a cultural introspection, a gaze back/inward that reimages a primordial China, not without the shackles of tradition or the complexes of the encroaching modern history but at least with a retained native vitality to counteract them. Since it...

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