Review of "Chinese National Cinema" by Yingjin Zhang (original) (raw)
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Writing about national cinemas used to be an easy task: film critics believed all they had to do was construct a linear historical narrative describing the development of a cinema within a particular national boundary whose unity and coherence seemed beyond all doubt.-Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, "The Difficulty of Being Radical: The Discipline of Film Studies and the Postcolonial World Order," Japan in the World Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's enumeration of the problematic elements of the national cinema paradigm in film studies is elegant and concise. But one element is missing: national agency. For an underlying assumption of the paradigm is that films from a certain country are somehow the expression of that country, that in some sense the nation authors them. In 1996, a nationalist and anti-American book called China Can Say No took the Chinese book market by storm, 1 reportedly selling out its first print run of 130,000 copies in a matter of weeks. 2 The title implies that the nation called "China" is a collective agency, a conscious being that can speak, in much the same manner that national cinema assumes nations make movies. For many years, this was not so much a theoretically articulated paradigm as implicit and taken for granted. Over the last decade or so, the nation, including the nation in China, has come into focus as an object of critical and theoretical interrogation. 3 Yoshimoto's remark registers the impact of this shift on the national cinema paradigm and also seems to beg the question of what should take its place.
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Transnational Screens, 2019
China’s past status as a semi-colony and historical fragmentation into three main territorial entities has meant that defining what constitutes Chinese cinema(s), or indeed cinematic Chineseness, has always been at the forefront of heated debates surrounding transborder practice, production and conceptualisation. Such deliberations have intensified recently due to intensified efforts to render Chineseness a cultural signifier increasingly implicated with transborder cinematic products designed to compete with Hollywood on the global stage. The introduction to this special issue, entitled ‘Situating “Huallywood:” Histories, Trajectories, and Positionings’ opens up these debates to the field of transnational Chinese cinemas, setting out a range of new questions and perspectives that problematize established understandings of Chinese-Western cinematic relations.