The title of this collection, Chinese-Language Film, proposes a linguistically based category through which to consider a block of films, directors, and styles. This grouping obviously works against the notion of national cinema, but it also works against a transnational ethnic identification that would include, for example, films about Chinese life in the United States, Europe, South America, or other locales if those films’ predominant language is English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or any language that is not Chinese. Given that language specificity and its implications are often ignored in many fields—under the utopian desire, perhaps, for transparency and easy communication, or the less utopian presumption that everyone should function in English—I find it a useful way of thinking about film. Like all categories, however, it has its own inherent limits, both absolutely and as an organizing tool for Chinese-Language Film’s particular set of essays.

Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh have included a staggering sixteen chapters divided into three sections, as well as a “mapping the field” introduction that lays out the value and problems of using language as an organizing concept. They convincingly argue that there is no consistent meaning associated with the use of a certain language. It can be used to organize groups hierarchically, with a clear and dominant language at the top—corresponding to that of the nation-state—and others laid out below. Dialects and multiple languages can also, however, cement regionalism and indicate ambivalence about the nation-state. A third example is that of recent martial arts films, in which all kinds of Chinese language combine to project an overarching feeling of Chineseness.

A few chapters highlight the multiple deployments of languages in the films, thereby aligning their approach to these films with this language theme. Working with three senses of the postcolonial—historical, political, and psychological—Darrell W. Davis analyzes Wu Nienzhi’s Dou-san: A Borrowed Life (1994), adding his own fourth sense of time and place, which reads history through space rather than the other way around. The character Dou-san, who grew up in colonized Taiwan, refuses to relinquish his Japanese sense of cultural and linguistic identity, even under pressure from those who regard it to be an incorrect postcolonial stance. This complex vision of postcoloniality, Davis argues, is a corrective to analysis that does not recognize the web of language, desire, and simple cultural habit that colonization produces. According to Gina Marchetti, Eric Khoo’s Mee Pok Man (1995) and Twelve Stories (1997) set Singapore’s modern, global, hygienic face against its poverty, sex trade, and political oppression. Language changes often signify social meanings as Khoo’s characters switch between Mandarin, Singlish, and Cantonese. From my perspective, Khoo’s emphasis on the severely disadvantaged could be a denial of the possibility of a truly polyglot, multicultural society, while Wu’s focus on someone whose ethnicity is “correct” but whose cultural and linguistic background make him a political liability is, perhaps, a critique of the narrow, ahistorical, and unrealistic exclusivity of rigid political/social demands that emerge during periods of radical change.

Several authors discuss the treacherous process of self-placement, as directors attempt to position themselves vis-à-vis state authorities, the international film community, their local viewers, and other groups. One primary form of positioning is the more-or-less clear marking of one’s films as art cinema. As David Bordwell points out in his essay on transcultural spaces, art cinema has its own formal characteristics, namely a “flatness” that comes from presenting depth as a series of parallel planes and avoiding diagonals that direct our vision into the background. Thematically, Bordwell notes, art cinema highlights eroticism and often makes use of children; in both theme and style, it reacts against the Hollywood continuity system. We also could think of art cinema as one of a number of strategies that produces a cultural class of (broadly speaking) intellectuals, who recognize themselves as those whose understanding and appreciation of the human dilemma in all its density is subtler than that of the population at large. This group exists across the globe, forming an intellectual community of self-identified sophisticated viewers.

Several directors in this study ally themselves with this formal and thematic tradition. Marchetti points out that by representing angst and alienation in society’s underdogs, Khoo places himself within world art cinema. Shuqin Cui’s survey of independent directors in contemporary China discusses how they carve out a fragile spot between foreign and domestic recognition, state restrictions, and independent support. Their common point, according to Cui, is that they want to tell their story from their own perspective, with limited regulations or ideological manipulation. These directors—Zhang Yuan, Jiang Wen, and others—reject the allegorical histories of the Fifth Generation, in the way that Khoo takes up the plight of those on the fringe of urban life. Three themes pervade their films: the artist-self, non-allegorical sexuality, and coming-of-age, each of which they use to write their own histories. I wonder if it is the immediately recognizable aesthetics and thematics of art cinema that make their myths of freedom and authenticity so powerful to an intellectual audience.

Another example is Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose famous long-takes and immobile camera inspired a debate in Taiwan, explains Yueh. Hou’s attachment to art film style—which he developed after he learned of new approaches from the U.S.-returned Edward Yang—brought him strong negative attention when he directed City of Sadness (1989), which according to critics lost its political punch because of its stylistic indirectness. Although Flowers of Shanghai (1998)—with its use of fades, close distance between camera and character, and moving camera—was regarded as a change of style, Yueh argues that in fact the poetics are identifiably those common to Hou’s films, and the concubines are variations on Hou’s obsession with human survival. This film is, Yueh implies, the culmination of Hou’s aesthetics, and shows the “claustrophobic circularity” of its logic. Perhaps Hou’s early critics are right, and his devotion to art cinema—which reached its apogee in this film—has become so indirect that it now evokes a static “time whose historical possibilities remain unopened” (182). Hou’s trademark City of Sadness has produced not only its own wave of reaction, but also another direction in art cinema. According to Meiling Wu, the current Taiwan New Cinema directors veered away from the historical, nostalgic, and sad films of the past, instead emphasizing the alienating urbanism of everyday contemporary life, initiating a period of “postsadness.” In his films, Tsai Ming-liang shows how people have been wrenched from the family unit and now function as atomized units, while director Lin Cheng-sheng focuses on accidental crossings, displacement, and replacement. Both direct films about the ordinary—often Taiwanese—urban dweller.

Emphasis on alienation and the urban underclass has become a powerful force within Chinese-language art cinema. It is in the “ruins” of post-Mao China, Xiaoping Lin claims, where director Jia Zhangke stakes his claim, showing how the loss of Mao’s authority has produced a lawless, lost generation. Xiaoshan Going Home (1995), Xiao Wu (1998), Platform (2000), and Unknown Pleasures (2002) all revolve around the spiritual disquiet that comes out of the new capitalist culture; each use a semi-documentary style to comment on the unappealing gender relationships, abusive work environments, and bankrupt familial traditions that are part of this context. Chu Yiu Wai locates another strand of alternative film in post-1997 Hongkong, where a seemingly inauthentic local imaginary in films such as City of Glass (Mabel Cheung, 1998) or Made in Hongkong (Fruit Chan, 1997) present a Chineseness that contrasts with the “global as economic” vision of Chow Yun Fat or Jackie Chan in Hollywood. Paradoxically, in these films non-Hongkong actors often are used even though the thematic focus is on local culture and history, thereby questioning the notion of authenticity and showing the global in the local, which in turn becomes a more complex cultural space.

Because many films cannot be clearly categorized as art cinema or popular entertainment, it may be useful to consider those concepts as the poles of a spectrum with many tangents. Wong Kar-wai’s films, for example, often appeal to a varied audience. Thomas Y.T. Luk’s contribution investigates novels turned into films, particularly Liu Yichang’s novel Têtê Bêche as made into Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000). Stating that the novel and film, set in 1960s Hongkong, share a sense of nostalgia, Luk argues that they identify and project the melancholy aesthetics of classical Chinese poetry. Yet Liu’s portrayal of desire in the novel is turned into a poetic depiction of forbidden love in the film, transforming a more simple, self-indulgent, personal nostalgia into both a monument of an aestheticized past and a query about the future of the city. In another example, the performance of actress Yang Hui-shan reveals an amorphous placing that dances across any imaginary boundary of art and entertainment. While analyzing Jade Love (1984), Kuei-mei, A Woman (1985), and This Love of Mine (1986)—Shiao-ying Shen argues that Yang’s acting consistently speaks for a kind of feminine writing, or female desire. This concern is illustrated by her projected emphasis on the female body, which in various films foregrounds itself as it gains and loses weight, twitches, is tense, stares directly at the camera, and so on. Shen shows that this focus is also evident in Sylvia Chang’s Siao Yu (1995), which subtly concerns itself with female transformation, without focusing on the usual culprits of sexual autonomy or realization. Finally, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which appealed to a wide range of non-Chinese viewers but did not impress Chinese audiences, also throws a wrench into any rigid classification system. As Sheldon Lu argues, film paradigms of the national, transnational, and global here show their shaky foundation. Lu points out that, in general, funding, distribution, reception, and many other aspects of film make it difficult to fit within those categories, as well as others such as “diaspora cinema” and “Third Cinema.”

The global appeal of martial arts films has opened a door through which several contributors to this volume investigate large themes of modernity and globalization. In her historicizing research on early martial arts films, Zhang Zhen works with Walter Benjamin’s idea of flight. Early martial arts magic spirit (wuxia shenguai) film not only tried to create the experience of flying, Zhang argues, but also used flight as a dialectical trope to blast their way into modernity. The question of whether flying bodies were science or magic was much debated during the late 1920s martial arts boom, which met in 1931 with censorship from the Nationalists, who failed to see any modernity in the genre. Perhaps Nationalist opposition was an important move that through the organization of the relatively new form of film established the class nature of modern moral culture.

While the global-local and its implications within cultural representation may now appear to be not a dichotomy but a complex dialectical relationship, contributors to this volume find that they are still useful concepts through which to analyze the impressive leap into global prominence of martial arts film. Desser argues that from the mid-1960s in Hongkong, Chineseness is embodied in male martial arts stars such as Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Lee, with reference to a Chinese body of knowledge, a displaced or diasporic body, and a cinematic body of work. Although this trend began with Hongkong’s economic development and increasingly powerful position on the international stage, it resulted in a pan-Asian identification: Jackie Chan stands not for Hongkong, but for Asia. Thus the stars that originally represented Hongkong ironically came to participate in its symbolic erasure. Similarly, Lu claims that through a Daoist sensibility a film such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon also projects an abstract Chineseness that both picks up on the developing transnational martial arts film tradition and exhibits a “push and pull” between the local and global that is a contradiction of globalization. According to Lu, the focus on flexible citizenship seen in global martial arts film—with Jackie Chan as the Hongkong James Bond—was developed over a period of time in Hongkong. Lu traces a historical shift in Hongkong film, related to important political events, from a 1980s China syndrome (corresponding to the Joint Sino-British Declaration in 1984), to a post-1989 persecution complex, to a transnational focus after 1997, when Hongkong became part of China. Examples from each period include Homecoming (Yim Ho, 1984), Farewell China (Clara Law, 1990), and Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997). I could not help but wonder how powerful this trend toward representing flexible citizenship will be: Will the transnational discourse emerging from Hongkong be emulated by those who in their films are (or view themselves as) less likely to address a population with multiple cultural backgrounds or citizenship—for example, Hollywood directors?

If it is important to consider “anti-art cinema” as a viable—if not absolute—concept, then it is also necessary to look at state-sponsored films that more or less clearly aim to produce a certain political or cultural stance. “Mainstream film has come to be the state’s self-legitimation in the cultural realm” (121), states Lu, as he links Zhang Yimou’s Not One Less (1999) to a state tradition of creating exemplary individuals. Zhang capitalizes, Lu argues, on the national allegory of a person stuck in a poor and primitive society who nonetheless stubbornly tries to change things. In the appendix, Lu translates published commentary on the film, both positive and negative; here we see critique of the young school teacher’s motivation of economic gain, and of Zhang Yimou’s recycling of the Old Fool Moves Mountains legend, but also moving testimony to the importance of recognizing those struggling with rural poverty. Is it possible for this film to be both a state product and at the same time an incisive commentary on social conditions, or are its supporters simply deluded?

My discussion leaves for the end two chapters, one by Bordwell and the other by Mary Farquhar and Chris Berry. In his piece, Bordwell argues in favor of more attention to the aesthetics of Chinese film, as opposed to the cultural context. Bordwell is looking for aesthetic patterns that, he believes, can be identified as transcultural. These include, most importantly, the globally recognized Hollywood classical continuity system, the more recent accelerated cut of the 1990s, and the eroticism and diagonal-lacking, “artificial” style of art films. While individual directors may take off or deviate from these continuities, Bordwell insists that their films cannot be analyzed simply in terms of either formal or thematic cultural specificities.

Bordwell’s notion of a standard and deviations made me take another look at the chapter by Farquhar and Berry, who frame their work through the theories of Tom Gunning. According to Gunning, the early “cinema of attractions,” which addresses the spectator aggressively, should be thought of not as a precursor but as an alternative to narrative realism. Like Gunning, Farquhar and Berry seek to uncover an archaeology of Chinese film; and like Gunning, they analyze what they discover—the early example of Chinese shadow opera—not as primitive but as an alternative to the narrative, realistic approaches of the present. Although shadow opera slowly disappeared, Berry and Farquhar argue that its aesthetics—in the Chinese cinema of attractions—continued throughout the twentieth century, especially in revolutionary film and opera film. While at first I wondered whether it would have been possible to develop a theory about shadow opera, revolutionary opera, and spectatorship without Gunning setting the stage, I also saw the potential link between shadow and revolutionary opera that if developed further could provide (in Bordwell’s terms) a significant and illuminating deviation that may even propose a revision to or further development of Gunning’s theory.

Bordwell’s sharp critique and plea for more attention to poetics implicitly stands against the other contributions to Chinese-Language Film, all of which take a more cultural approach to analyzing Chinese film. Yet he asks scholars not only to consider style but also to realize that one cannot make claims on behalf of even the semi-uniqueness of Chinese film styles unless one understands their relationship to aesthetic traditions developed elsewhere—that is, Hollywood and art cinema of the United States and Europe. This proposition has far-reaching implications, as claims for a distinctive Chinese modernity have surfaced regularly over the past thirty years.

These two separate but related aspects of Bordwell’s argument are brutal but at least partially valid. Yet I hope he is not suggesting we all simply trace connections to the dominant discourse, or departures from that discourse—we can see from his attempt to do so how limited such an effort would be. Similarly convinced that in literary studies we also need to increase our attention to aesthetic analysis, I cannot help but applaud his interest in poetics. Nonetheless, as I imagine the crushing boredom of pure aesthetic analysis, repeated in article after article, I see the danger in downplaying cultural meaning too much.

In a third attack, Bordwell also harshly criticizes those who pay little attention to the specificities—formal or cultural—of any given work, instead using them as examples of an overarching theory or concern. Indeed, while globalism/localism, diaspora, transnationalism, and flexible citizenship are the current preoccupations, we also find feminine writing, capitalist culture, modernity, and the postcolonial making an appearance within this collection. Here Bordwell puts his finger on a damning reality of our field (meaning both film and literary studies): too many studies use a repetitive global theory, local example structure that over time has become unbearably predictable. Bordwell’s own internal contradiction, and one that may be omnipresent, is that by insisting on an initial recognition—moderated by recognition of variation—of set forms and styles, he also endorses such a model of scholarship. In his own words: “I propose that, for historical reasons, the continuity system has become a transcultural bridgehead” (145). One could also say that for historical reasons, transnationalism, globalism, the diaspora and so on have become thematic transcultural bridgeheads, and thus as the mandatory condition of our contemporary reality should also provide the mandatory framework of our research. When Bordwell protests that although some claim the classical continuity framework may be simply the imposition of a western, Renaissance-based perspective and yet he does not have time to explain why that is incorrect, he basically is telling us that the early bird caught the worm. The implication is that the history he outlines is now the obligatory precondition for global film production.

This contradictory situation is recognized in many areas, and is crystallized in the question of why, when the subaltern speaks, must she or he use the language of the dominant culture. From the perspective of the film critic, it poses some interesting questions about the balance between granting cultural specificity (formal or thematic) pride of place, and recognizing participation in or influence from the dominant discourse. Is there a way to substantially understand the aesthetics of a film as unique without denying its relationship to dominant poetic techniques? Is there a way to bring out the cultural significance of a film without approaching it as a mere example of a well-accepted theory or emphasis? Whether we study the evolution of the fast cut in martial arts film or the relationship between the local and the global in contemporary Hongkong cinema, can we avoid simply evaluating the films against an overarching structure, theory, or style?

Some of the chapters of this volume successfully address the contradictions I outline above. Wai analyzes the question of why some Hongkong directors use foreigners even when they want to project an “authentic” Hongkong identity. Although he does not attend much to style, he asks a specific, concrete question, the answer to which helps us understand the subtle investigation of identity that directors pursue, sometimes with minimal awareness. Marchetti’s piece on Khoo contains illuminating cultural and transcultural depth, while similarly being contained and concrete enough to allow us to see how these concepts are not merely descriptive, abstract terms. In his unraveling of the multiple threads of language, habit, and culture in the film Dou-san, Davis participates in a revision of postcolonial theory while illuminating the historically complex cultural environment of Taiwan. Yueh pays close attention to style, local critique, and transnational meaning in her analysis of Hou Hsiao-hsien and the legacy of sadness.

What these articles and many others in this volume share is some level of specificity and concreteness—a close focus on one or two films, a director, or a theme—as well as an awareness of and contextualization within/against theoretical trends and local criticism. Conceptually, these scholars do not limit their inquiries to either the theoretical or the empirical realm; spatially, they do not locate themselves strictly within the local or the global. Perhaps the notion of distance can best capture the advantages of their approaches. This research shows, I believe, how it is possible to both position oneself close enough to the object of one’s study to bring out debates, meanings, connections, and implications, while at the same time temporarily withdrawing from details and specificities to deeply consider complex contemporary theories and their relevance. Only in this way do the films and cultural debates become a substantial part of “larger” intellectual discussions while retaining their uniqueness.

In a way, then, Bordwell’s multi-faceted critique is well-taken. If we persistently position ourselves far away, viewing every occurrence as nothing more than an example of a global trend or theory, our work becomes both derivative and repetitive, and reproduces existing power relationships. Yet if we ignore the global and theoretical in favor of getting closer and delving deeply into the local, we run the risk of overestimating its originality and misinterpreting its relevance.

As we glance over the range of chapters here, we can see that although the concept of “Chinese-language film” has some cohesion, it is almost as broad as “English-language film.” Thus it is even more important that we make sure we do not become only followers—formally or culturally—and that we do not abandon the multi-lingual research at all levels that encourages our readers to understand and appreciate Chinese-language film in all of its complexity.