THE REY CHOW READER

Where Is the Movie About Me? In the academic study of cinema, this is one of the most commonly encountered questions in recent years. Versions of it include some of the following: Where in this discipline am I? How come I am not represented? What does it mean for me and my group to be unseen? What does it mean for me and my group to be seen in this manner—what has been left out? These questions of becoming visible pertain, of course, to the prevalence of the politics of identification, to the relation between representational forms and their articulation of subjective histories and locations. It is one reason the study of cinema, like the study of literature and history, has become increasingly caught up in the study of group cultures: every group (be it defined by nationality, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or disability), it seems, produces a local variant of the universal that is cinema, requiring critics to engage with the specificities of particular collectivities even as they talk about the generalities of the filmic apparatus. According to one report, for instance, at the Society of Cinema Studies Annual Conference of 1998, “nearly half the over four hundred papers (read from morning to night in nine rooms) treated the politics of representing ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.”¹ Western film studies, as Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams write, is currently faced with its own “impending dissolution … in … transnational theorization.”² How did this state of affairs arise? How might we approach it not simply empirically, by way of numerical classifications, but also theoretically, by probing visibility as a problematic, to which film, because of its palpably visual modes of signification, may serve as a privileged point of entry?

Transnational theorization was, in fact, already an acute part of the reflections of non-Western authors on film experiences during the 1900s, 1910s and 1920s. When contemplating the effects of the filmic spectacle, for instance, Lu Xun and Tanizaki Junichiro, writing self-consciously as Chinese and Japanese nationals, readily raised questions of what it meant to be—and to be visible as—Chinese and Japanese in the modern world. The visual immediacy of Chinese and Japanese figures and faces, conveyed on the screen as they had never been before, was experienced by these authors not only as scientific advancement but simultaneously as a type of racially marked signification— specifically, as representations in which their own cultures appeared inferior and disadvantaged vis-à-vis a newly global, mediatized gaze ³

In light of these early reflections— reflections that are, strictly speaking, part of the history of film but which have hitherto been relegated to the margins of the West—the current preoccupation with group identities in film studies is perhaps only a belated reenactment of a longstanding set of issues pertaining to the fraught relationship between film and cultural identity. This book, which examines some Chinese films from the period of the late 1980s to the early 2000s, will be an approach to some of these issues.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A WESTERN DISCIPLINE

When film captured the critical attention of European theorists in the early twentieth century, it did not do so in terms of what we now call identity politics. Instead, it was film’s novelty as a technological invention, capable of reproducing the world with a likeness hitherto unimaginable, that fascinated cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Ernst Bloch. Unlike photography, on which film and the early theorization of film depended, cinema brought with it the capacity for replicating motion in the visual spectacle. But as the motion picture ushered in a new kind of realism that substantially expanded on that of still photographic mimesis, it also demanded a thorough reconceptualization of the bases on which representation had worked for centuries. In this regard, few studies could rival Benjamin’s oft-cited essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) in its grasp of the challenge posed by film to classical Western aesthetics. Along with his work on Charles Baudelaire’s lyric poetry, this essay defines that challenge in terms of what Benjamin calls the decline of the aura, the sum of the unique features of works of art that is rooted in the time and place of the works’ original creation.⁴ For Benjamin, film’s thorough permeation by technology, a permeation that led to its modes of apparent visual transparency, meant that a new kind of sociological attitude, one that associates representation more with reproducibility than with irreplaceability, would henceforth shape the expectations about representation: the repeatable copy, rather than the singular original, would now be the key. Benjamin viewed this fundamental iconoclasm (or irreverence toward the sacredness of the original) as a form of emancipation. No longer bound to specific times, places, and histories, the technically reproducible filmic image is now ubiquitously available, secularized, and thus democratized.

In retrospect, it is important to note the kind of emphasis critics such as Benjamin placed on the cinematic spectacle. This is a kind of emphasis we no longer seem to encounter in contemporary cinema studies. For the critics of Benjamin’s era, film’s faithful yet promiscuous realism—it records everything accurately yet also indiscriminately—announced the triumph of the camera’s eye over human vision. The origins of cinema, they understood, are implicated in a kind of inhumanism even as cinema serves the utilitarian end of telling human stories. This inhumanism, rooted in the sophistication, efficiency, and perfection of the machine, was seen in overwhelmingly positive terms in the early twentieth century. By expanding and extending the possibilities of capturing movement, registering color, enlarging, speeding up, or slowing down the transitory moments of life, and rewinding time past, cinema was regarded first and foremost as an advancement, an overcoming of the limitations inherent in human perception. As in the theorizations and practices of early Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Lev Kuleshev, in Benjamin’s thinking, the cinematic was a power to transform what is visible—to enhance, multiply, and diversify its dimensions. Cinema was the apparatus that enabled the emergence of what he called the optical unconscious—the surfacing of the optical that had hitherto been unconscious, on the one hand, and the surfacing of the unconscious in optical form, on the other.

These relatively early theorizations of the cinematic spectacle had to account in some rudimentary way for spectators’ responses. And yet, although early cinema was closely affined with representational realism, it was, as Tom Gunning writes, not necessarily accompanied by the stability of viewer position: “the appearance of animated images, while frequently invoking accuracy and the methods of science, also provoked effects of astonishment and uncanny wonder. Innovations in realist representation did not necessarily anchor viewers in a stable and reassuring situation. Rather, this obsession with animation, with super-lifelike imagery, carries a profound ambivalence and even a sense of disorientation.”⁵

Again, it is necessary to remember how such spectatorial ambivalence and disorientation were theorized at the time when cinema was seen, by European theorists at least, predominantly as a type of scientific and technological progress. Even though the audience was in the picture, as it were, its lack of stability (or uniformity) tended to be configured in terms of a general epochal experience rather than by way of specific histories of reception. For this reason, perhaps, Benjamin made ample use of the notion of shock, the high modernist sensibility he identified with montage and traced back to the artistic work of Baudelaire and the analytic work of Sigmund Freud (among others). While other critics saw cinematic shock in more existential-aesthetic terms, as the product of the abruptness, intensity, and ephemerality of fleeting moments,⁶ for Benjamin, shock had a determinedly political significance. As is evident in his discussion of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater, in which the equivalent of cinematic montage could be located in the theatrical tableau (the moment in which ongoing gestures and movements are interrupted and suspended by the entry of an outsider in such a way as to become a frozen and thus quotable spectacle), Benjamin relied for some of his most suggestive insights on a capacity for defamiliarization (that is, for unsettling habitual perception) often associated with aesthetic form,⁷ a capacity to which he then attributed the purpose of critical reflection. (His notion of the dialectic image in the unfinished Arcades Project arguably belongs as well in this repertoire of visual figures for mobilizing historical change.)⁸ It was by engaging with film as shock—a quality of the cinematic spectacle that, by extension, he assimilated to the spectators’ general response—that Benjamin wrote of film as a forward-looking medium.⁹ He was, of course, deeply aware of the political danger that this entailed—by the 1930s film just as easily lent itself to manipulation by the Nazis and the Fascists for propaganda purposes—but his emphasis remained a utopian one, whereby the cinema stood for liberatory and transformative possibilities.

By contrast, André Bazin, writing in France in the 1950s, was not drawn to the elusive and shocking effects of the cinematic spectacle but instead theorized the filmic image in terms of its ontology, its function as a preserve of time: “photography … embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption… . [In film,] for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.”¹⁰ If film was in an earlier era associated with time as progress, Bazin’s theoretical emphasis was decidedly different. The cinema was by his time no longer a novelty but more a mundane fact of mass culture, and the political potentiality of cinematic shock that energized theorists in the 1930s had given way in Bazin’s writings to phenomenologically oriented reflections, which were, paradoxically, also about the arrest and suspension of time. But whereas for Benjamin the filmic image as halted time provided an impetus for historical action, for Bazin it signaled rather retrospection, the act of looking back at something that no longer exists. The hopefulness and futurism of the earlier film theorizations were now superseded by a kind of nostalgia, one that results from the completion of processes. Accordingly, because time has fossilized in the cinematic spectacle, time is also redeemed there.¹¹

In spite of his critics, Bazin’s understanding of the cinematic image as time past does not mean that his film theory is by necessity politically regressive or conservative. Indeed, his grasp of the filmic image as (always already) implicated in retro-action enabled Bazin to analyze astutely how it was exploited in the Soviet Union for a political purpose different from that of capitalist Hollywood.¹² Describing the propaganda films in which Joseph Stalin always appeared not only as a military genius and an infallible leader but also as an avuncular, neighborly friend, filled with personal warmth and eagerness to help the common people, Bazin observed that the cinematic spectacle had become, in the hands of the Soviet filmmakers, a completed reality—a perfect image against which the real-life Stalin must henceforth measure himself. Although Stalin was still alive, Bazin wrote, it was as though he had already been rendered dead; beside his own glowing image, he could henceforth only live nostalgically, attempting in vain to become like himself over and over again. The real-life Stalin had become a somewhat inferior version of the Stalin image. Interestingly, in this cynical but perceptive account of Soviet propaganda, the theory of the cinematic image offered by Bazin was derived not so much from its effect of shock, potential for change, or hope for the future as from its effect of stability, permanence, and immobilization. The cinematic image here takes on the status of a monumentalized time, which compels one to look retroactively at something better, larger, and more glorious that no longer is. The remarkable lesson offered by Bazin is that, as much as the futurity imputed to the cinematic image, nostalgia, too, can be a profoundly political message; it, too, can inspire action.

These continental European negotiations with temporality as implied in the cinematic image, negotiations that tended, in a classical manner, to concentrate on film’s representational relation to the external world it captured, shifted to a different plane as film gained status as an academic subject in Britain and the United States in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. As a field of intellectual inquiry that sought institutional legitimation, film had to elaborate its own set of disciplinary specificities. At one level, it was, of course, possible to continue with the more abstract theorizations of the cinematic spectacle: as semiotics acquired critical purchase, film was accordingly rendered as a type of signification. Christian Metz’s works, notably Language and Cinema and Film Language, led the way for the kind of inquiry that asks if film could indeed be seen as a kind of language in the Saussurean sense and, even if not, what its governing logic might be.¹³ The point of Metz’s project was to configure the perceptual possibility of a structuration, a network of permutations, that had a materiality all its own, a materiality that meanwhile was not to be confused with the vulgar materiality of the flesh. From Benjamin’s and Bazin’s adherence to the visual spectacle, then, with Metz and his followers, theorization moved rigorously into film’s internal principles for generating and organizing meanings. As such theorization became increasingly idealist and rationalist, film critics, including Metz himself (in The Imaginary Signifier),¹⁴ eventually found themselves returning to psychoanalysis as a remedial means of gauging the more intractable but undeniable issues of human fantasy and desire, and with them the politics of sexuality, to compensate for what had been typically left out of the semiotic explication.¹⁵ In retrospect, it is tempting to see semiotics and psychoanalysis as the two inward turns—and disciplining moments—symptomatic of a process in which the study of film itself was caught up in its own identity formation. Be it through the labor of the filmic signifier or the labor of subjectivities interpellated around the cinematic apparatus, film studies was seeking its mirroring, so to speak, by the profession at large.

This is the juncture at which the old question of time, at one point debated in terms that were more or less exclusively focused on the cinematic image per se, splintered. Time could no longer be grasped in the abstract, as the future or the past, but demanded to be understood in relation to the mental, cultural, and historical processes by which the seemingly self-evident cinematic image was produced in the first place. Accordingly, the givenness of the cinematic image was increasingly displaced onto the politics of spectatorship. In the Anglo-American studies of film in the 1970s and 1980s, such as those being published in the influential British journal Screen, the continental European focus on the cinematic image was steadily supplemented, and supplanted, by modes of inquiry that were concurrently informed by Marxist, structuralist and poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic writings (the master figures being Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser). But it was feminist film theory, described by Dudley Andrew as “the first and most telling Anglo-American cinema studies initiative,”¹⁶ that brought about a thorough redesign of the European focus.

In her groundbreaking essay of 1975, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey turned the question of the cinematic image (and its implications of time) into a story, one that, she revealed, was far from being sexually neutral or innocent¹⁷Rather than treating the cinematic image as a single entity, Mulvey approached it in a deconstructive move, in which what seems visually obvious and unified is taken apart by the reintroduction of narrative. The part of the narrative that determines how specific images are looked at while remaining itself hidden and invisible, Mulvey called the gaze. Most critically, Mulvey gave the temporal differential between image and gaze the name of patriarchy, so that, in the case of classical Hollywood melodrama at least, she charged, masculinist scopophilia underwrote the imperative of gazing, while women were cast, as a result, as passive, fetishized objects, as beautiful images to be looked at. Mulvey was formidably direct about her goal: “It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.”¹⁸ As Maggie Humm puts it, “Mulvey’s essay marked a huge conceptual leap in film theory: a jump from the ungendered and formalistic analyses of semiotics to the understanding that film viewing always involves gendered identities.”¹⁹ By arguing that cinema is irreducibly structured by (hetero) sexual difference, Mulvey succeeded in doing something that her fellow male critics were uninterested in doing—prying the filmic image open and away from its hitherto spontaneous, reified status and reinserting in it the drama of the ongoing cultural struggle between men and women, the drama of narrative coercions and ideological interpellations.

In its justifiable distrust of the cinematic image as deceptive and usurpatory and in its courageous effort to forge a politics that would prevent the woman spectator from completely collapsing, at her own peril, into the cinematic image of femininity produced by men, was feminist film theory, in spite of itself, an unwitting ally to an intellectual tradition that is, to borrow a term from Martin Jay’s study of modern French theory, iconophobic?²⁰I tend to think so, but it is necessary to add that this iconophobia was a theoretically and institutionally productive one²¹ (Among other things, it posed a crucial question within the politics of film production: how could one make a differently narrativized kind of film?) It was precisely its momentum of negativity, manifested in the belief that the cinematic image has somehow repressed something existing beyond it, that became the characteristic force with which the study of film has since then spread—first to English departments, in which film is often accepted as a kind of pop culture; then to foreign language and literature departments, in which film becomes yet another method of learning about other cultures; and finally to the currently fashionable discussions, in social science as well as humanities programs across the university, of so-called global media.

Feminist film theory, in other words, inaugurated the institutional dissemination of cinema studies in the Anglo-American world with something akin to what Michel Foucault, in his work on the history of sexuality in the West, called the repressive hypothesis, whereby the conceptualization of what is repressive— together with its investment in lack and castration—is reinforced simultaneously by the incessant generation and proliferation of discourses about what is supposedly repressed²² (It was no mere coincidence that the political weapon on which Mulvey relied for attacking phallocentrism was Freudian psychoanalysis.)²³But what was unique—and remarkable—in this instance was the articulation of the repressive hypothesis to the visual field, an articulation wherein the visually full (presence and plenitude of the) cinematic image has become itself the very evidence/sign of repression and lack.

IMAGE, TIME, IDENTITY: TRAJECTORIES OF BECOMING VISIBLE

Because it was underwritten with the push of the repressive hypothesis, the paradigm shift within the cinematic visual field toward the study of narrativity and ideology led to consequences that have gone considerably beyond (the Western parameters of) film studies. Such a paradigm shift harked back to the heightened sense of group self-consciousness already felt by non-Western writers such as Lu Xun and Tanizaki about film technology in the early twentieth century and logically made way, in academia, for the study of differences dispersed along multiple lines of inquiry. In the decades since Mulvey’s essay was first published,²⁴ film and cultural critics have been extending the implications of her work (often in simplified terms) by devoting themselves to problematizing the naturalness of the cinematic image. Rather than being on the image itself, its magic, or its tendency toward monumentalization, the focus in theorizing and analyzing film has increasingly been on identifying and critiquing the multiple narrative and ideological processes that go into the image’s production. Bill Nichols sums up this general trend succinctly: “The visual is no longer a means of verifying the certainty of facts pertaining to an objective, external world and truths about this world conveyed linguistically. The visual now constitutes the terrain of subjective experience as the locus of knowledge, and power.”²⁵ Whereas feminist critics, following Mulvey, elaborate and refine women-centered modes of interrogating patriarchy, other critics, equipped with other types of social queries, would complicate the differential between gaze and image in terms of class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexual preference in order to expose the repressive effects of dominant modes of visuality and identification. (Think, for instance, of the numerous critiques in postcolonial studies of orientalist representations.) Concurrently, they also theorize the ambiguities inherent in various forms of spectatorship and, by implication, in various forms of seeing and subjectivity²⁶

In these collective endeavors to destroy the pleasure of the beautiful image, what has happened to the problematic of time? At one level, time is infinitely diversified and relativized: as every group of spectators comes forward with its demands, interrogations, and political agendas, one can no longer speak of the image as such but must become willing to subject the image to processes of re-viewing, reimaging, and reassembling. This is perhaps one reason there are so many publications on filmmaking and film reception in different cultures (Brazilian, Chinese, French, German, Hong Kong, Indian, Iranian, Israeli, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish, just to name some commonly encountered examples). At the same time, in this culturally pluralized way of theorizing the filmic image, one cannot help feeling that a certain predictability has set in and that, despite their local differences, the theoretical moves made by different cultural groups vis-à-vis the cinematic image often share a similar kind of critical prerogative. Borrowing again from Nichols, we may describe this prerogative in this manner:

The rise of distinct cultures to a condition of visibility accompanies a radical shift away from democratic ideals of universalism (equality under the law for all regardless of gender, color, sexual orientation and so on) toward a particularism that insists on equality precisely in relation to differences of gender, color, sexual orientation and the like.²⁷

“Differences of gender, color, sexual orientation and the like,” it follows, all generate research agendas, competition for institutional space and funding, and self- reproductive mechanisms such as publications and the training and placing of students. The questions of identity politics with which I began this discussion are therefore, arguably, some of the temporal outcomes of the proliferating and disseminating mechanisms that characterize the repressive hypothesis as it has been mobilized around the cinematic visual field.

In this light, the ambivalent logics exemplified by feminist film theory from the very beginning may be seen as constitutive, perhaps paradigmatic, of the process of a subordinated group’s rise to visibility. When feminist film theory alerted us to the cinematically fetishized status of women, its apparent iconophobia shared important affinities with the moral charge that accompanied Western political activisms of the 1960s and early 1970s, with their demands for an end to imperialism and military violence and for the granting of civil rights to disenfranchised populations. At the same time, like the mass protests so self-consciously staged during that era, feminist film theory was delivering another message. This was the message that the politics of gender and sexuality (together with the politics of race, class, and ethnicity) was, in fact, none other than the politics of commodified media spectacles, a politics constituted by the demonstrative forces of public display.²⁸ Indeed, the determination with which feminist critics sought to subvert the widespread “false” representations of women—by actively competing for the right to transform, possess, and manage the visual field; to fabricate women’s images; to broadcast women’s stories—suggested that the dynamics of late capitalist simulacra was assuming center stage. The mechanically and then electronically produced images; the instantly transmitted, spectacular “reality” shows: these were henceforth going to be the actual, ubiquitous political battleground.

The attempt to anchor one’s identity definitively in what Mulvey called to-be-looked-at-ness (on the screen as well as off) is, in view of this history, a newly fetishistic practice in an exponentially expanding and accelerating virtual field of global visibility. (This is, I believe, one reason that those who traditionally would have concentrated on the study of prose fiction have been migrating steadily toward the study of film and visual cultures.)²⁹ Moreover, this fetishistic practice and its countless simulacra—in so many varieties of “Look at me! Look at us!”—are no longer confined to the realm of gender politics but also repeated and reproduced widely across the disciplines, in which the morally impassioned rebuke of images always goes hand in hand with the massive production and circulation of more images—be those images about classes, races, nations, or persons of different sexual orientations.

Pursued in close relation to a controversial visual medium, feminist film theory since Mulvey hence reveals (in a handy manner) something crucial about the condition of visibility in general. In the course of feminist critique, the immediately present, visible object—the image of woman in classical Hollywood narrative cinema—is delimited or bracketed in an intervention that, notably, cannot abandon the visible as such but instead moves it into a different frame (women’s world). This move makes it possible to include that which has hitherto remained invisible and thereby to reinvent the very terms of the relation between the visible and the invisible. In this process, however, becoming visible is no longer simply a matter of becoming visible in the visual sense (as an image or object) but also a matter of participating in a discursive politics of (re)configuring the relation between center and margins, a politics in which what is visible may be a key but not the exclusive determinant. There is, in other words, a visibility of visibility—a visibility that is the condition of possibility for what becomes visible, that may derive a certain intelligibility from the latter but cannot be simply reduced to it. It is to this other, epistemic sense of visibility—of visibility as the structuration of knowability—that Gilles Deleuze alerts us in his fascinating study of Foucault. As Deleuze writes in different passages, “Visibilities are not to be confused with elements that are visible or more generally perceptible, such as qualities, things, objects, compounds of objects… . Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms that would show up under light, but rather forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer”; “Visibilities are neither the acts of a seeing subject nor the data of a visual meaning”; “Visibilities are not defined by sight but are complexes of actions and passions, actions and reactions, multisensorial complexes, which emerge into the light of day.”³⁰

If we follow Deleuze’s thinking along these lines, the question of anyone’s or any group’s rise to the condition of visibility would turn out to be much more complicated than an attainment of quantifiable image time or even of the empirical status of being represented or seen. Instead, such a question would need to involve a consideration of the less immediately or sensorially detectable elements helping to propel, enhance, or obstruct such visibility in the first place and, even where visibility has occurred, a consideration of the often vacillating relations between the visible and the invisible that may well continue at different levels.

Tied as it is to the problematic of becoming visible (understood in these terms), the fetishization of identity as it is currently found in the study of cinematic images thus tends to proceed with a Janus-faced logic. There are those who, mistaking simple visual presence for (the entirety of) visibility, will always insist on investing artificial images with an anthropomorphic realism—the very thing that the iconoclasm of film, as its early theorists observed, fundamentally undid—and moreover to equate such images with the lives and histories of “real” cultural groups. (“National allegory” readings are one good example of this.) This line of thinking has its productive moments, to be sure, but it is ultimately limited in what it can offer. Meanwhile, for those who remember that what is on the screen are not real people but images, a suspension of such insistence on literal, positivistic identifications can mean a turn, more interestingly, to the specific materialities of image, affect, and fantasy, on the one hand, and the fraught complexities of globalized visibility, on the other.

With respect to the recent Western European and North American fascination with East Asian cinema,³¹ the first question to ask, then, is this: should we try to direct such fascination back at some authentic, continuous Asianness lying beyond the alluring cinematic images, or would it not be more pertinent to see Asianness itself as a commodified and reproducible value, made tantalizingly visible and accessible not only by the filmic genres of the action or martial arts comedy, the love story, and the historical saga but also by an entire network of contemporary media discourses— economic rivalry, exotic cuisine, herbal medicine, spiritual and physical exercise, sex trade, female child adoption, model minority politics, illegal immigration, and so on—that are at once sustained by and contributing to the flows of capital? Part of my goal in this study is to argue that Chinese cinema since the 1980s—a cinema that is often characterized by multinational corporate production and distribution, multinational cast and crew collaboration, international award competition activity, and multicultural, multiethnic reception, as well as being accompanied by a steady stream of English-language publications, written (not infrequently by those who do not speak or read Chinese or consult Chinese-language sources) for an English-reading market—is an inherent part of a contemporary global problematic of becoming visible. As much as belonging in the history of Chinese culture, the films involved should also, I contend, be seen as belonging in the history of Western cinema studies, in the same manner that modern Asia, Africa, and Latin America, properly speaking, belong in the history of modern European studies.³²

DEFINING THE SENTIMENTAL IN RELATION TO CONTEMPORARY CHINESE CINEMA

To the extent that one implicit aim of her criticism of classical Hollywood cinema was to eradicate conventional Western images altogether, Mulvey’s early work can be seen as a British rejoinder to the political aspirations of the French nouvelle vague filmmakers (such as Jean-Luc Godard) and the theorists associated with the French journal Tel quel, who in the 1960s and 1970s mobilized critiques of Western thinking, often by way of looking east, especially to Mao Zedong’s China.³³ Just as Mao and his cohort, following a native revolutionary tradition that began with the May Fourth Movement of 1919, sought to radicalize Chinese society by attacking its most basic social unit—the Chinese family³⁴—so, too, did Anglo-American feminist film theory of the mid-twentieth century leave some of its most pronounced critical marks on melodrama, the film genre that is, arguably, most intimately linked to the middle-class nuclear family and its demands for female self-sacrifice.³⁵ But the Chinese connection, if it may be so called, did not stop at the attempt to deconstruct the family, East or West. As the consequences of Chinese communism began to be questioned by organic intellectuals in China—and as the disasters spawned by Mao’s political idealism (which reached its frenzied heights during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76) became a subject of reflective critique by those who had spent their formative youthful years living under the mainland Chinese regime— Chinese cinema became, for the first time, globally visible. In the astonishing films made by mainland Fifth Generation directors such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and their classmates, as well as by their contemporaries in Hong Kong and Taiwan such as Tsui Hark, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Ann Hui, Ang Lee, Edward Yang, Stanley Kwan, Clara Law, Wong Kar-wai, and Tsai Ming-liang, Chi-nese cinema has since the 1980s become an event with which the entire world has to reckon.³⁶ Appearing first in international film festivals and art house theaters, then gradually in undergraduate curricula across college campuses in the English-speaking world, and finally in mainstream Hollywood productions, China—in the form of films, directors, actors and actresses, cinematographic techniques, and special effects—has helped to revitalize cinematic discourse in the West and made it necessary, once again, for Western intellectuals to come to terms with aspects of what in so many ways still remains an exotic culture.

What does this becoming-visible of contemporary Chinese cinema signify in light of the small history of the discipline of film studies that I eclectically outlined above, including the critical moment of Anglo-American feminist critique? Many things can be said in response to this question,³⁷ but I’d like to foreground something that is central to my readings in some of the chapters to follow. Whereas contemporary cultural theory in the West, including feminist film theory, has thrived on an inextricable linkage (itself a legacy from Bertolt Brecht) between political consciousness raising, on the one hand, and an aesthetic-cum-theoretical avant-gardism,³⁸ on the other, the emergence of Chinese cinema renders this particular linkage a historical—and culturally specific—occurrence rather than a universal or absolute necessity. That is to say, although for left-leaning Western intellectuals since the post–Second World War period, “China” has often stood for a set of political aspirations alternative to the right, when China enters the world picture in the form of a contemporary cinema, it does not necessarily comply with such presumptions. Consciousness raising, contemporary Chinese cinema suggests, does not have to take the route of the avant-garde; conversely, aesthetic and theoretical avant-gardism, so valued in certain academic sectors for purposes of intellectual renewal and regeneration, does not necessarily lead to a progressive or democratic politics. In particular, the persistence of a predominant affective mode,³⁹ a mode I will describe as the sentimental, indicates that contemporary Chinese cinema, even as its contents fully partake of contemporary film and cultural problematics such as explicit sex, women’s lives, gay male relationships, extramarital liaisons, immigrant tragedies and comedies, reproduction, and so forth, simultaneously brings with it fundamental challenges to the cornerstones of Western progressivist theoretical thinking. To engage productively with the global visibility of contemporary Chinese cinema, it is therefore important to work conceptually and speculatively, at a level beyond the (obviously invaluable) documenting and inventorying efforts and the geographical and chronological compartmentalization exercises that currently seem to dominate developments in this fledgling field. To put it bluntly, it is important to aim at goals other than information retrieval and canonization, and other than a monumentalizing of film periods (as tradition) and film directors (as individual talents).

What do I mean, then, by the recurrent sentimental in contemporary Chinese films? It would be helpful to begin with a conventional understanding—namely, of the sentimental as an affective orientation/tendency, one that is often characterized by apparent emotional excess, in the form of exaggerated grief or dejection or a propensity toward shedding tears.⁴⁰ But when examined closely, such emotional excess is only a clue to a much broader range of issues.

In his famous discussion, in 1795–96, of naive and sentimental poetry, the Ger-man-speaking philosopher and writer Friedrich Schiller defined the sentimental as a modern creative attitude marked by a particular self-consciousness of loss. To reiterate Schiller’s statements in simple terms: while the poet who writes “naively” is nature, the poet who writes “sentimentally” seeks nature; the latter’s “feeling for nature is like the feeling of an invalid for health.”⁴¹ The sentimental relation to nature (the condition of simple and sensuous wholeness that, because it is lost, will henceforth become a moral ideal) is, in other words, no longer spontaneous but reflexive—suffused with feelings of longing and characterized by the imaginative infiniteness of thought. What remains instructive in this classic European account is its attempt to understand the sentimental not only as an instance of affect but also as a relation of time: as an affective state triggered by a sense of loss, sentimentalism was, for Schiller, the symptom of the apprehension of an irreversible temporal differentiation or the passing of time. As well, this symptom was mediated by and accessible through aesthetic and cultural form: it was poetry (or “the poetic mood”), which Schiller considered “an independent whole in which all distinctions and all shortcomings vanish,”⁴² that seemed generically appropriate for conveying the moral rigor pertaining to the naive and sentimental as contrastive but deeply bonded spiritual states.

Although Schiller’s writings are typically classified under the rubric of German romanticism—he wrote about the sentimental belatedly, at a time when the term had already become pejorative in connotations; his formulation of the sentimental (as the awareness of the loss of spontaneous feeling) was also quite distinct from the views advanced in previous decades, as for instance in mid-eighteenth century England—his emphasis on the reflexive character of the sentimental—that is, the character whereby the mind does not receive any impressions without simultaneously observing its own activity and reflection—was illustrative of the general tenets of the well-established debates in eighteenth-century European moral philosophy and literature about the sentiments.⁴³ Conducted in the vocabulary of sensibility, pity, sympathy, compassion, virtue, refined and delicate feeling, and so forth,⁴⁴ some of these debates have also evolved around what in retrospect might be called a dialectical relationship between sentimentality and its darker underside, as discourses about the philanthropic function of benevolence were shown to be regularly underpinned by a fascination with monstrosity, cruelty, violence, and the pleasures of inflicting pain on others. For some scholars, this dialectical relationship constitutes a definition of humanity that is ridden with ambiguity and puts the European Enlightenment’s presumed (arrival at) rationality into serious question.⁴⁵

In Anglo-American literary and cinematic studies, this rich historical backdrop of intellectual controversies over the unresolved tensions between compassion and cruelty, between altruism and sadism gave way to a type of articulation about the sentiments that links them explicitly with the dynamics of social power struggles. When studied in relation to modern narrative fiction and film melodrama, in particular, the sentimental, which for many still carries derogative meanings such as effeminacy and sensationalist self-indulgence, often becomes a means to focalize issues about the politics of identity. From the novels of Samuel Richardson and Charlotte Brontë to those of Toni Morrison, to the woman-centered narrative films of Hollywood, and to the media representations of nonwhite peoples, sentimentalism has, beginning with feminist revisionist scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, increasingly been analyzed in conjunction with the agency of those (most typically, white middle-class women confined to domesticity) who occupy a marginalized social status and read as an alternative form of power attainment based, ironically, on the emotional cathexes produced by experiences of social deprivation, subordination, and exclusion.⁴⁶ In such reversal of social hierarchy, what used to be considered trivial and weak is accordingly reread as dazzle and strength: the seeming passivity or minoritization of those who are inmates of their environments are thus reconceptualized as possessing a manipulable potentiality that was previously dismissed or ignored. In this manner, sentimentalism, rather than designating the passing of time or the melancholy sensitivity of a lone lyric consciousness, becomes instead a vindicated instrument in (the reinterpretation of) social entanglements, often providing new clues as to who is actually in control.

Although far from being a unitary or unified concept, the sentimental in modern Euro-American humanistic studies clearly occupies a place that has as much to do with the enduringly fraught ethics of human sociality as mediated by art and fiction, be that ethics conceived negatively, in the form of an individual consciousness’s satirical or elegiac longing for an ideal whose attainment is always deferred, or affirmatively, in the form of (collective) identity empowerment and the fight for social justice.⁴⁷ And even where the sentimental reveals itself to be much more intimately entwined with sadism and malevolence than the feeble-minded would prefer, its function in gauging the textures and nuances of a society’s moral duplicity seems indisputable. The pertinent question to be derived from these cross-cultural considerations is not exactly how to apply them to Chinese film or how such “Western theory” does not fit “Chinese reality” but rather the question of a particular discursive relation: how can the symptoms of prominent affective tendencies, as detectable in certain films, be theorized in relation to the foundations and practices of social interaction? With this question in the foreground, the sentimental, instead of being equated with the occurrence of affective excess per se, can more fruitfully be rethought as a discursive constellation—one that traverses affect, time, identity, and social mores, and whose contours tend to shift and morph under different cultural circumstances and likely with different genres, forms, and media.⁴⁸ To this extent, this book could perhaps be seen as participating in a larger trend in recent film studies of a (re)turn to the historical relationship between medium and ontology, a (re)turn that has been triggered in part by digitization’s radical altering and obsoleting of film’s materiality and that has led scholars to rethink the medium-specific and oftentimes somatic, as well as imaginary, effects of cinematic signification itself.⁴⁹ …