(Global) Sense and (Local) Sensibility: Poetics/Politics of Reading Film as (Auto)Ethnography

It eludes no scholar’s observation that in recent years the interest in Chinese cinema has increased dramatically. Among recent attempts to offer a theoretical approach to contemporary Chinese films, Rey Chow’s study counts as one of the most extensive and insightful contributions. Wide-ranging in its scope, Chow’s award-winning book addresses itself to a variety of critical, cultural, and aesthetic concerns of contemporary Chinese cinema. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this closely argued and valuable study seeks to examine the significance of technologized visuality for China in relation to discourses of anthropology, cultural studies, post-colonial theory, and women’s studies. A literary scholar by training, Chow reads Chinese films as cultural texts, and in many places, relates the problematics of visuality to literary issues. One of the major topics that she brings up in Part 1, “Visuality, Modernity, and Primitive Passions,” is the relationship between “the discourse of technologized visuality” and modern Chinese literature (5). Beginning with the story of how Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, was motivated into a writing career by his encounter with a “visual spectacle” in the mid-1900s, Chow goes on to explain in detail how “the sign of literature” is related to the visuality of China’s modern anxiety. Lu Xun’s conversion to writing, according to Chow, results from his “intuitive apprehension of the fascistic power of the technologized spectacle” (35). Viewing film as “a new kind of discourse in the postcolonial ‘third world’” (5), Chow also examines “the relationship between visuality and power, a relationship that is critical in the postcolonial non-West” (6). Drawing upon Western philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, on the one hand, and postcolonial theoreticians like Edward Said and Timothy Mitchell, on the other, Chow explicates the significance of the visual sign, which is different from yet related to the “older” literary sign, for China’s modernity, arguing that “the film’s careful visual structure signals the successful dismantling of the older sign” and therefore functions as a “revolutionary mode” whereby not only “the repressions and brutalities of society are consciously ethnographized,” but also, at the same time, the “practices of ‘primitive’ cultures” are fetishized against a background of “the harsh social realities of modernized metropolises” (26).

The chapters that follow the story of Lu Xun are devoted to the issue of “primitive passions” in Chinese cinema and culture. Although theoretically dense, Chow’s well-documented study of the “multiple strands of primitive passions” is clear and thought-provoking. The “primitive” in Chow’s discussion stands for something “phantasmagoric,” “ex-otic,” “unthinkable,” or an “original something that has been lost” (22). Phantasmagoria of the primitive appears at the time of “cultural crisis” when the old sign system of writing is being “dislocated” by the discourse of technologized visuality. As a figure for the origin that “was there prior to our present existence,” the primitive, which expresses a kind of nostalgia that is inclined to view the encroachment of the modern on an ancient culture, has become the “fabrication of a pre that occurs in the time of the post” (22). Chow’s discussion of primitive passions, reinforced by her frequent references to postcolonial theory, provides a new perspective upon twentieth-century Chinese culture which, in Chow’s opinion, is “caught between the forces of ‘first world’ imperialism and ‘third world’ nationalism” (23), and which demands reconsideration of the paradoxical relation between China and the West. “If Chinese culture is ‘primitive’ in the pejorative sense of being ‘backward’ (being stuck in an earlier stage of ‘culture’ and thus closer to ‘nature’) when compared to the West,” Chow explains, “it is also ‘primitive’ in the meliorative sense of being an ancient culture (it was there first, before many Western nations)” (23). Chow’s perceptive observations on the primitive suggest interesting lines of investigation into the distinctive features of Chinese culture in relation to postcolonial politics. In an ironic sense, what we see in China’s anxiety for modernization is...