ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the topic of women's cinema by examining some recent films by women directors. This chapter discusses Jia Zhangke ()'s cinema as a kind of in-between case, somewhere between the two poles of Lotus and Love Is Not Blind. It also considers other independent and independent-minded films by women directors that are both a women's cinema for today, and manifests the splitting and doubling pattern in Lotus. The chapter focuses on the contemporary pattern of splitting and doubling by tracing a longer lineage of cinematic narratives of women alone in Chinese society, and the cinematic tropes associated with them, as embodied representations of various historically specific modernities. The split structure of the Chinese cinema production institution can be seen as a specific one that has evolved in response to the particular character of Chinese neo-liberalism. The chapter demonstrates that women alone in society tries to get along like the school teacher in Lotus are frequent in Chinese cinema.
