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  • China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy by Paul G. Pickowicz
  • Jing Jing Chang (bio)
Paul G. Pickowicz. China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. 376 pp. Hardcover $90.00, isbn 978-1-4422-1178-0.

Here in my hand lies the fruits of Paul Pickowicz’s nearly four decades of dedicated research on Chinese film culture. In China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy, Pickowicz recounts his intimate encounters with the history of Chinese film, culture, and society throughout China’s long twentieth century, not only as a historian but also as a movie lover. Informed by both the personal and political, Pickowicz’s volume provides fresh analytical and conceptual frameworks to the study of the Chinese film industry and culture that are at once humanistic and brave, for they seek to recover human agency within the strict confines of China’s socialist and postsocialist machineries.

Written at various stages in his career, Pickowicz’s engaging study of Chinese filmmaking brings to bear the complexity of the cultural politics of Chinese film as expressions of historical trauma, tools of domestic ideological control as well as the medium of political resistance. The twelve chapters in this volume approach the study of Chinese film history from various perspectives and thematic concerns. Some of the most fascinating chapters include the close textual analysis of the representations of modern marriage in 1920s Shanghai film (chapter 1), the melodramatic mode of film narration (chapter 3), the intricacies between art and politics in the controversies of Occupation cinema (chapter 4) and the survival tactics employed by such artists as Shi Hui (chapter 6) and Zheng Junli (chapter 7) in the new “state socialist system of cultural production” (p. 10).

Indeed, Pickowicz reminds us that the study of Chinese films could offer us rare glimpses into China’s nationalist struggles to survive in the shifting global world order as well as China’s unofficial grassroots politics in the past and present. For instance, the representations of spiritual pollution (jingshen wuran) in Chinese films during the 1930s as Occidentalist caricatures of Western culture were not so [End Page 109] much about Western culture at the time as about China’s critiques of bourgeois liberalization (chapter 2). Either as national allegories of postwar narratives of victory and defeat (chapter 5), or representations of unofficial political thought of Chinese society (chapter 9), Chinese filmmakers have long used films to comment on and critique the political conditions of socialist and postsocialist China.

At the outset, Pickowicz confidently declares, “I prefer optimism” (p. 17). It may be true that, at times, Chinese filmmakers experienced limited freedom in artistic creations, such as during the cultural thaw in the early 1960s (chapter 8). At other times, Chinese filmmakers, similar to their counterparts in socialist Eastern Europe, were mere captives in the velvet prison. Their films were circumscribed by the political economy of party politics, state censorship, and domestic and international market imperatives and were merely tools that reinforced the socialist regime of fear and silence (chapter 11). Pickowicz’s insightful explorations of the courage of Chinese filmmakers to confront their postsocialist condition (chapter 10) and the possibility of resistance within the perennial socialist condition of postsocialist China in the indulgent cinema of the sixth generation’s underground filmmakers (chapter 12) demonstrates his faith in the power of cinema to document and provide an alternative narrative of the human condition beyond the strangle hold of state control.

From the very outset, readers discover that Pickowicz’s scholarly commitment runs much deeper than that of an academic scholar whose interests merely lie in uncovering the historical significance of Chinese film industry to its society. Pickowicz is also an insider, whose expertise on Chinese history and years of experience living in and observing China guide his readers through a journey and adventure of “cultural exchange” (p. 2). At the heart of this book is the question of how Chinese films have addressed the contentious nature of being Chinese in and through the tumultuous twentieth century of China’s contests with itself and with the rest of the world. In...

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