ABSTRACT
If there is one thing that rivals the importance of the 1989 Tiananmen protests as a watershed in global, Western understandings of China, it would have to be the international success of mainland Chinese film, from the now-classic “fifth generation” films onwards. It is as if these celluloid representations were a welcome herald of good tidings; having sloughed off the grey-blue dreariness of the Mao years, China was finally on the right, modern and liberal-artistic path.1 From Maoism to the market to M.O.M.A. Indeed, after the “Tank Man” of 1989, the predominant image of China in the Western mind would have to be not a televisual but a cinematic one, from close-ups of Gong Li or Zhang Ziyi to the spectacular imagery of a Zhang Yimou, from his early work to the opening ceremony of the 2008 summer Olympics (itself a cinematic tour de force). The “discovery” of Chinese film was an event and sea-change in Western attention to modern Chinese culture that still lives on in the international reputations of directors Chen Kaige and Zhang, as well as the ascent of so-called “Sixth Generation” directors like Jia Zhangke or Wang Xiaoshuai.2 Clearly the P.R.C.’s cultural production still encounters a number of orientalist and other market-driven expectations – above all else the real Chinese artist must depict suffering, totalitarianism, and “the human spirit” – but it has never been as globally successful (popular) as today. Thus a Chinese artist – albeit an exile with little critical acclaim – has finally won a Nobel Prize.3 From at least the mid-1990s, mainland Chinese culture and especially its art-house films have been global, transnational commodities and “flows.” When one factors in the larger field of greater China or Chinese language cinema in particular, then we can see the veritable explosion of Chinese culture globally, well beyond the Olympics spectacle. What the rise of Chinese language film studies points us to is – for my present purposes – the question of institutionalization, and specifically the knowledge of mainland China that it produces and reproduces. My argument here is that as the field has developed it has borrowed from and reproduced an area studies-based, orientalist and Cold War-inflected discourse about modern China. It is as if film studies needed – since we are after all dealing with “the Other” in a sense that does not apply to, say, French cinema – a certain amount of historical and allegedly objective detail to serve as a necessary interpretive framework, backdrop, or context for the study of the new Chinese
cinema. But in assuming or reaching out for this it never interrogated the fields of Chinese history and politics proper. Despite or perhaps because of its attention to world/other/third cinema, film studies has not had a postcolonial moment. This importation from area studies has happened despite the more theoretical, reflexive, and “progressive” aspects of the field as compared to the conventional social sciences. In short, as a discipline film studies certainly interrogates and unpacks those celluloid artworks by drawing on numerous sources of theory, but – even when it does venture outside film history, film aesthetics, and so-called “film culture” – it rarely interrogates its own sources of information and context either pertaining to China or to the U.S.-West. The film field’s more or less direct, un-problematized “borrowing” of Cold War/orientalist statements and knowledge about the P.R.C. from other, largely empiricist disciplines or the larger intellectual-political culture speaks to what Foucault called regularity in dispersion: that discourses are produced across a range of sites; knowledges are always multiply constituted, not hermetically sealed, and it is paradoxically this dispersion that gives them their strength and unity and that constitutes a discursive formation like orientalism in Said’s sense. An exclusive focus on the film text and purported viewing experience – as opposed to a more considered contextualization – narrows the social field of vision. In the rush to develop a “transnational” Chinese language cinema studies, we not only need to guard against the notion of a singular “cultural China” (or “Chineseness”) but also against losing sight of the asymmetries and dense relations of (normative) power that necessarily subtend films’ institutionalization and reception.4 More simply, we need to interrogate the knowledge of China that the films as well as ourselves draw on and produce. That place is bewitched by Cold War orientalist thinking. Whereas the film field has productively broached the question of the orientalism within Chinese films themselves, it has yet to adequately address this type of question about itself. While the alleged orientalism of the fifth generation films was an initial aspect of their contentious reception within China and abroad, this fundamental aspect of their Western, global reception and context has yet to be adequately developed within Chinese film and cultural studies.5 But as its institutionalization proceeds apace – there is now, for example, a Journal of Chinese Cinemas – it is perhaps the ideal time to interrogate the production not of images but of knowledge within the field. As Zhang Yingjin has argued in regard to Zhang Yimou’s work, the “seductive power of signification” in his films – including their ability to be appropriated by orientalist discourse and desire – “relates more to the Western than to the Chinese audience” (222). But audience here also means the space of film scholars and their works, and not simply the ordinary film-goer. In other words, if there is a visual basis to Sinological-orientalism – and there surely is – it lies not simply in images themselves as much as in their academic and institutional reception, as well as the larger discourses that subtend this process. And there can be no denying the importance, even the dominance, of film studies within the larger China field, especially in regard to the humanities and “soft” social sciences. Curricula, syllabi, and journals worldwide are far more likely to contain analyses of Chinese films – usually seen as
more or less an open window into Chinese reality – than of, say, Chinese literature, intellectual or political history, ethnographies and oral histories, and so forth. This of course has something to do with the “universal” but undeniably more accessible nature of film language as opposed to Chinese language proper, and as opposed to reading books. But it is decidedly dangerous and one-sided. In what follows I will make the case for such a wide-ranging and subtle Sinological-orientalist discourse, and I will seek to counter it by alternative readings of four important films and their systematic other-messages about the complexity and positivity of the Chinese revolution and its post-1949 trajectory: Li Wenhua’s Breaking With Old Ideas, Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, Zhang Yimou’s To Live, and Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun. First, however, to establish the presence of this discourse and to show the imbrication of area and film studies, and of Sinological-orientalism and film more generally, I want to examine what is perhaps the most critically acclaimed, influential, and controversial Western documentary on the P.R.C., namely Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon’s Tiananmen film The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995). This will then set the stage for an examination of some of the foundational films – and film studies – of the “new” cinema. My emphasis on earlier films and earlier scholarship may seem anachronistic to some, but I think it is nonetheless important to focus on these early, pioneering works and texts for historical reasons, and because they can show us the formation of that Sinological discourse and – in my against-thegrain readings – some of what it leaves out or misreads.
