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  • Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films:Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility
  • Jie Guo
Rey Chow. Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films:Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. 263 pp.

Rey Chow's second book-length study on Chinese cinema came out in early 2007, twelve years after the publication of Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). This second book, entitled Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility, examines twelve Chinese-language films, most of which appeared since the 1990s (with the exception of Wayne Wang's 1988 Eat a Bowl of Tea). Chow organizes these films into three sets: while the first group of films is linked by the shared concern with the past and nostalgia, movies in the other two groups are respectively featured by their protagonists' migration and marginalization.

As the title suggests, the aim of this book is to examine contemporary Chinese cinema and the related question of global visibility by focusing on the sentimental, which according to Chow, constitutes "a clue to a much broader range of issues" (15). The sentimental thus serves as the central concept around which the nine major chapters of the book are organized. Starting from the beginning of the study, Chow stresses that the sentimental, which is conventionally understood as "an affective orientation/tendency . . . often characterized by apparent emotional excess" (15), is not only recurrent in contemporary Chinese cinema but is also entangled with the larger social, political, and economic issues emerged in a chaotic age of radical transformation and globalization. The sentimental, when understood against this backdrop and, importantly, when understood in the Chinese context where the term is most often translated as "wenqing zhuyi (warm sentiment-ism)" (17) and is thus marked by a flavor of moderation, is further defined as "an inclination or a disposition toward making compromises and toward making-do with even—and especially—that which is oppressive and unbearable" (18), as "about what keeps and preserves, what holds things together" (18), and as about "a mood of endurance" (18). In particular, the sentimental in the twelve contemporary Chinese films treated here often has to do with a set of diverse but more or less associated themes: the home, home-coming, homelessness, the household, the father, filial piety, domesticity, the kinship family, flight, migration, and interpersonal bonds. In a sense, these themes all point to the question of attachment.

By choosing to focus on these common themes, Chow is able to bring together films that may appear disparate in terms of visual style, narrative technique, setting, political concern, and the "origin" of the director, turning away from some of the familiar ways of categorizing films—for instance, labeling a movie by the "generation" to which its director supposedly belongs (e.g. a "Sixth Generation" film) or by region (e.g. Hong Kong cinema). As Chow herself clearly states, she has "—in a manner that goes against the trends of [End Page 1218] the times—refrained from categorizing the directors and films by geopolitical determinants and particularisms such as 'mainland' Chinese,' 'Hong Kong,' 'Taiwan' and 'Chinese diaspora' cinemas" (24).

In sum, in Chow's reading of the twelve films, while "the sentimental" is only loosely defined and remains open, and in the book there are moments where the reader may have to pause to ponder what exactly Chow means by "the sentimental" and how exactly certain questions she discusses have to do with it, not only are the chapters in general able to hang together through thematic links, but Chow also takes care to make the specific themes that these chapters treat resonant with each other.

While these thematic articulations of sentimentalism are important in themselves, to Chow, paying attention to them is also a means to look at the larger global political-economic condition under which post-Socialist China is experiencing radical and far-reaching transformations—rapid commercialization, transmutations of cultures, migration (which takes place on a transnational level), a sweeping sense of homelessness, and the increasing marginalization of disenfranchised groups in society. In other words, this book does not merely treat of films...

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