Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts ed. by Lingzhen Wang (review)

Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts engages with crucial issues in feminist studies: female subjectivity, gender representation, the creation of women’s cinema, and the question of authorship. The study encompasses the changing social, ideological, cultural, and cinematic forces in China and across borders in the host countries of diasporic Chinese communities. Well versed in Western feminist theories and criticism, the contributors test their applicability to Chinese circumstances. They seek as well to reconfigure specificity through “discovering” neglected female directors, reevaluating women’s roles and their involvement in different aspects of the film industry and exploring the cultural and aesthetic identities of Chinese women’s cinema in transnational contexts. The publication’s chapters read against the grain in light of the demands of a collective socialist film industry, or juxtaposed with the study of contemporaneous male directors to stress their different articulations. It provides a timely addition to the scholarship on women’s cinema in the burgeoning field of Chinese film studies and offers a commendable attempt to critically assess women’s misunderstood, neglected, or underappreciated roles and unrealized possibilities.

The anthology seeks to contextualize Chinese women’s cinema by focusing on the forces that give rise to or constrain their production, by explicating the formal and aesthetic identity of a director’s oeuvre, and by applying Western feminist film theories and criticism. To that end, the contributors assess the constraining factors for female directors in socialist and post-socialist Chinese cinema, predisposing it to certain trends or emphases. The book also aims to illuminate the colonial, cross-national, and cross-cultural transactions reorienting the production of women filmmakers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and diasporic Chinese communities. The collection seeks to reclaim women’s space and articulated perspectives from a male-centered cinema and historiography, scrutinizing their specific concerns, practices, and proclivities, and examining their conformity to or differences from Western feminist theories and practices. Indeed, the volume investigates quite exhaustively the factors that have determined the degree of control Chinese women filmmakers have over their productions.

One of the feminist claims made about socialist cinema may be found, for instance, in the film directed by Dong Kena, Small Grass Grows on the Kunlun Mountain (1962), which, Lingzhen Wang argues, incorporates feminist possibilities in opposition to the conformity sought by socialist cinema. Through the use of such devices as a subjective camera, female voice-over and voice-off, flashbacks, and long takes, Lingzhen Wang locates feminist concerns that have escaped the radar of the demands of a socialist cinema. This claim for feminist prospects in socialist cinema contrasts with Xingyang Li’s study of women filmmakers who, he argues, inject into their work the voice of female consciousness among a multiplicity of voices. Films such as Forever Young (1983) and Human, Woman, Demon (1987), he argues, incorporate official ideology and the reigning cultural discourse of consumerism, along with a voice representing female consciousness—for instance, the explicit concern with women’s dilemma trapped between career and family in Human, Woman, Demon. There are also instances where Shuqin Cui finds implied feminist possibilities not consciously articulated by the filmmaker. This, she argues, confounds any presumed correspondence between textual representation and authorial intent, particularly since the filmmaker is engaged with the issue of homosexuality. As the anthology makes clear, Chinese women work under patriarchal values within a state cinema inhibiting their fully fledged development and due recognition. Even though they straddle multiple roles and have delivered brilliant work across generic and transnational frameworks, they have been neglected in a virtually exclusive male-centered filmmaking world, being assessed in a historiography where the parameters have been laid down according to male cinematic values.

Therefore, the situation of women in contemporary Chinese cinema is not so optimistic, as Gina Marchetti argues. In contrast to most contributors’ claimed improvement of women’s status and image from socialist to post-socialist cinema is...