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This book examines the Chinese presence in Hollywood cinema, focusing on the proliferation of Hollywood and Hollywood-inflected films featuring ethnic Chinese stars such as Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li, Chow Yun-fat, and Jackie Chan, in works directed by the likes of John Woo, Wayne Wang, Wong Kar-wai, and Zhang Yimou. It analyzes how these Chinese cinemas have ridden the wave of Hollywood appeal, which is part of Chinese cinema's contemporary transnationalization. It also reveals three main streams of cinematic traditions and discourses that intertwine to create the present cultural climate: firstly, Hollywood's adventurism within the Chinese cinematic traditions; secondly, the racist structures of classic and contemporary Hollywood stereotypes of the Chinese; and thirdly, the Asian-American cinematic response of survival and intervention.

This chapter discusses Chinese cinema from after the Tian'anmen Incident of 1989 until 1996, shortly before Feng began directing and creating New Year films. The period from 1989 to 1996 marked the unexpected rise of “main melody” films, a move by the Communist Party to tighten and control ideology in China after the political turmoil of 1989. Although this form of film fell into disfavor among the Party and film leaders, these entertainment films were revived to distract Chinese from the memory of the Tian'anmen Incident as new economic reforms were being forwarded by the Party. The reforms within China were also extended in the film industry, leading to the profit imperatives of film studious and reduction of subsidies from the government. As a result, private and semi-private companies were legitimized to attract investors and talent from outside the state-owned film sector. It was during this period that Feng Xioagang, a neophyte filmmaker, entered the film industry as a scriptwriter, later to become a director. Apart from discussing the changes in Chinese cinema, Chapter 3 also discusses the formative years of Feng's career, from 1991, when he directed his first film, up until 1996, when he directed three TV dramas and a film—an achievement that sparked the interest of the world. During this period, Feng was collaborating with Wang Shou and was heavily influenced by Shou's cynical writing style. In the chapter, a detailed analysis of Feng's directorial debut, Gone Forever with My Love, is provided that reveals Feng's style of incorporating hidden social commentary and attention to the relatively “small characters”—a style that have pervaded his subsequent works.

This book focuses on the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wong Kar-wai, directors who have not only propelled Chinese cinema into the international spotlight in recent years, but also crafted a distinctive idiom, a cinema of time, across the realms of national and transnational film culture. The following chapters show the significance of this cinema of time as a response to the historical ruptures and political upheavals of modern Chinese history; a representational politics implicating questions of historiography, national identity, gender, and sexuality; and an active engagement with and reinvention of the modernist legacy of art cinema in response to globalization and shifting conceptions of narrativity in a post-classical film culture.

Feng Xiaogang is regarded as the most successful commercial film director since the middle of the 1990s. His films were so popular that they even surpassed imported Hollywood blockbusters at the box office. Critics applauded him for being able to make profitable films, but he was not generally respected as a film director. Some of the critics characterized Feng's film as lacking depth, sincerity, and passion. His films were seen as mechanisms that manipulate audiences to generate and maximize profits. Feng was criticized as not aiming for the best, but aiming for the most profitable. However, a closer look at his films reveals that they are far from mindless escapist productions of a dream factory. Feng's films instead were reflections of the changing socio-political context of Chinese cinema since the mid-1990s and the nation-wide growth of popular cinema wherein the once politically infused cinema that was intended as political propaganda or for international audiences became cinema that addressed the domestic needs of the audiences. This introduction provides an overview of Feng Xiaogang's career. It traces Feng's humble beginnings from being a director with little professional training in scriptwriting and film directing to his growth as one of China's most influential directors. In this section are narratives of how Feng dealt with independent production, censorship, financial difficulties, and competition. Following the chronicle of Feng's rise to being one of China's most influential film directors are reviews of his cinema culled from both English and Chinese publications. This introduction also provides the methodology and the general structure of this study.

The introduction advances a theoretical framework for interpreting how New Chinese Cinema auteurs shoot on-location as a mode of “place making,” the experiencing and imaging of rural shooting locations as places. Drawing from poststructural cultural geography, production culture studies, environmental psychology, and critical tourism studies, I demonstrate how production environments are more than blank canvases, but places where cultural meanings are being continually contested. As cultural elites, auteurs make coherent disorienting social changes by engaging in production as lived experiences of nation building, homecoming, and cultural salvage. The rural is thus a stage for auteurs to perform their aspirations for social activism, while location shooting constitutes an embodied and performative practice through which auteurs make meaningful sense of their ever-shifting and often precarious roles of authorship. Consequently, images and representations of the rural in the resulting films cannot simply be classified as signifying one cultural logic or another. Rather, they bear traces of the institutional politics, social tensions, and geopolitical ambivalences negotiated by auteurs during production, thus confounding distinctions between the ideologically complicit and subversive, a reductive binary too often mobilized by scholars when periodizing Chinese and Taiwanese film histories.

If the mere naming of influences is rarely adequate to the task of accounting for the significance of these directors' work, it nonetheless also reprises and brings into view the tensions between the national and the international, between cultural particularity and universal value, that have subtended the category of art cinema since its beginnings. This chapter argues that the case of Chinese art cinema demands a reassessment of earlier understandings of art cinema, both in light of the transactions between global and regional film cultures taking place at the present juncture and with a sensitivity to the historically fluctuating development of art cinema as an idiom in dialogue and competition with a larger array of narrative practices. This requires a confrontation with the instability of art cinema as a theoretical category—complicating teleological accounts of origins, influence, and stylistic evolution—as this instability is revealed through the estranging lens of Chinese cinema.

This chapter discusses the emergence of Kung fu Sino-chic through Hollywood's appropriation of Chinese action cinema. It first looks at how Jackie Chan works the global/local conjuncture by balancing the cinematic Americanization of his work, especially through the themes of cultural adaptation, appropriation, and acceptance of Asian migrants in the US, while simultaneously building his cosmopolitan appeal to a wide global audience, all through the processes of “mimicry as failure” in The Tuxedo (2002), Shanghai Noon (2000), and Shanghai Knights (2003). It then examines cross-cultural citationality in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2, suggesting that films such as these incorporate and synthesize multiple revenge film traditions from various national and alternative cinemas. It also describes how Tarantino reinvents exploitation aesthetics and represents them as Hollywood blockbusters.

This chapter introduces the situation of Chinese cinema on the eve of the Tian'anmen Incident in 1989. This period was characterized by the emergence of “entertainment films,” early attempts at industry reform, and the first film-rating system designed to regulate film content through legislation. In the discussion, attention is centered on the historical background and implementation and perpetuation of the Communist art policy, which censored the political and ideological rectitude of films.

This chapter examines the scale of the national used to occupy the central attention in film studies and argues that the resulting myth of a unified national cinema in a given nation-state must be demystified. It first reconceptualizes Chinese cinema in relation to the shifting problematics of national cinema and transnational film studies in both the theoretical and historical contexts. It then considers interdisciplinarity in Chinese film studies in the West and how it benefits audience study, along with the thorny issues of piracy and cross-mediality. It also discusses film studies from a different perspective than transnationalism and speculates on what might be gained from comparative film studies, arguing that it is a subfield larger than transnational film studies. The chapter urges scholars to move beyond the national cinema paradigm and to explore the transnational and comparative frameworks of film studies.

This conclusion provides a summary of the cultural and historical significance of Feng Xiaogang's cinema. The dual trends of resistance and cooperation co-existing in Feng's cinema became the distinctive feature of Chinese cinema in the new era. Inspired by the success of Feng's New Year films, more than eight New Year films exhibiting the same style were produced by different directors. Aside from mobilizing other directors, the phenomenon of New Year films also extended into other forms of art such as Chinese theatre and TV drama. While Feng became a powerful force in the transformation of Chinese cinema, he also reflected the trajectory of Chinese cinema through the rise and fall of his filmmaking career. His career reflected the experiences of private film production in China since the 1980s—a period marked by China's film authorities' indecision on how to view the function of cinema, the demand for maximizing profit from production companies, and the challenges of a commercialized film industry.

This chapter examines the mediated cultural encounter between the American serial queen adventure and nüxiapian, a subgenre of Chinese martial arts films. The nüxiapian genre, featuring a female knight errant, first appeared on the 1920s silent screen and had a lasting influence in Chinese cinema. The chapter first provides an overview of the theoretical and historical underpinnings of the word “vernacular” as well as the cultural essentialist aspects of the martial arts films. It then considers the local as the site of irreducible heterogeneity that enabled active and plural modes of cultural translation, resulting in the “vernacular” body of nüxia. In analyzing the interaction between American serial queen films and the Chinese entertainment world of the 1910s and 1920s, the chapter underscores the dual promise of the May Fourth Vernacular Movement and its implication for Chinese cinema. It also highlights the rise of a particular configuration of the female body on Chinese silent films.

This chapter considers Taiwanese-born Hollywood director Ang Lee's position in Asian and world cinema. It first examines the characteristics of Lee's cinema, from globalization and cultural identity to homosexuality, patriarchy, feminism, and family. It then reviews the history of transnational Chinese cinema and Taiwan cinema, along with the characteristics of Taiwan New Cinema. It also evaluates Lee's position in Taiwan New Cinema; the historical context of his Academy Awards for Best Director that he won for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi; his influences as a director; his collaboration with American independent film producer James Schamus; and his miscellaneous projects. The chapter concludes by discussing Lee's place in the deepening relationship between American and Asian cinema.

The Introduction situates the transnational new waves of the past half century within the context of economic and cultural globalization. It suggests that a particular mode of art cinema—one organized around mise en scène or the staged interaction of bodies, objects, and space—has become an important mechanism for documenting the material consequences of the expanding global market. That new wave mise en scène concentrates primarily on the visual culture of youth and cities, on an emerging cosmopolitan environment and its prototypical inhabitants. Finally, the Introduction establishes the relationship between this theoretical frame and the specific case studies at the core of the book: the French new wave of the 1950s and 1960s and the new cinemas from Taiwan and mainland China in the 1980s and 1990s.

Chapter 5 follows the migration of the Chinese film industry from Shanghai to Chongqing during the Sino-Japanese War. I examine the impact of the war and the rise of propaganda that initiated both a rethinking of film language and a reorientation of the cinematic medium in terms of simultaneous dissemination and mobile exhibition.

This chapter explores the representation of the city-countryside antithesis in the development of Chinese society in general, and Chinese cinema in particular, in pre- and post-1949 years. It also examines the social changes and the transformation and expansion of Chinese urban spaces in the 1980s. These transformations created greater opportunities for filmmakers to handle the city representation with considerable openness and subjectivity and helped turn the urban scene into a “channel” through which a new generation of screen heroes air their frustrated and rebellious views.

The expansiveness of Wong Kar-wai's approach to intertextuality, citation, and borrowing, along with the dense cross-cultural, cross-medial matrix in which his films are situated suggest another angle on the director's position within the tradition of art cinema. Likewise, the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang also illustrates the reverberations of postmodernism in the arena of art cinema, a development that complicates the view of these directors as realists based on their reliance upon the long take. The idea of a cinema of time finds a further resonance in contemporary Chinese cinema beyond the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wong Kar-wai. One notable figure who engages a similar problematic of temporal form and historicity is Jia Zhangke, one of the leading directors of the PRC's Sixth Generation. Jia's films assume a critical view of the official discourse of progress and market reform shaping China's new era.

This introduction chapter outlines the theoretical framework of the book, and the methodological potential of the act of “screening,” when exploring the interplay between image and idea, politics and culture, film talent and audience in postwar Hong Kong film culture. While concepts of reflecting and viewing imply a unidirectional relationship between film and subject, the author argues that “screening” focuses more on the processes through which cinema contributed to the building of Hong Kong’s postwar community and identity. By using the double meaning of “screening” as both revealing and concealing, the author argues that postwar Hong Kong cinema—which in this book include 1950s and 1960s official documentary films, leftist family melodrama, and youth films— both conceals the anxieties of the British colonial government during the Cold War, and exposes the different narratives constructed by local filmmakers about what it means to be Chinese citizens during the postwar period. This introduction also takes into consideration the importance of postwar Hong Kong audiences, both real and implied, whose spectatorship was negotiated at the intersection colonialist and nationalist “address” and a familial and localized “reception.” This study has implication for the fields of Hong Kong, Chinese cinema, Cold War, and film reception studies.

This chapter considers the recent and unfolding phenomenon of Hollywood's remaking of East Asian popular genres, including horror, romance, and gangster movies from Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. It examines two examples of contemporary Hollywood's absorption of “Chinese elements” in comparison with the innovative film/stage work by Shi-zheng Chen, a diasporic Chinese media artist. The Hollywood examples are (1) Martin Scorsese's remaking of Infernal Affairs I (dir. Andrew Lau, Alan Mak, 2002) into The Departed (2006); and (2) DreamWorks' 3D animation Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011). In comparison and contrast with these mainstream big productions, Shi-zheng Chen's films, Dark Matter (2007) and Disney High School Musical: China (2010), and the stage performance Monkey: Journey to the West (launched in 2007) are more marked by the unsettling “spectre of comparison” and a correlated bifocal perspective. Yet all these examples dramatize issues of identity confusion, collision, erasure, and transformation, which allegorically echo the risk of dedifferentiation, deidentification, and the related opportunity of self-repositioning that all emerge from the processes of remaking and appropriation in the global economy. The Departed and Kung Fu Panda 2 foreground provincialization of Hollywood from the peripheral (in this case Chinese) perspective and redefinition of “Chinese cinema” as a cinema with a wide spectrum of fluctuating “Chinese elements.” These developments lead us to ponder the new role of (diasporic) Chinese film-media workers (as exemplified by Shi-zheng Chen) in the arena of global media production and exchange.

Chapter 1 situates the action-based aesthetic of “fiery films” (1927 to 1931) as a response to Hollywood serialized thrillers mediated by the competition between stage and screen. I complicate the popular scene by looking at how New Heroism, a composite modernist discourse, reframed “fiery films” to foreground “resonance” as a theory of affect for its distinct social and aesthetic agendas.