Chinese Women’s Cinema

by Wang, lingzhen

• ISBN13: 9780231156752
• ISBN10: 0231156758
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-08-01
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

The first of its kind in English, this collection covers twenty one well established and lesser known female filmmakers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. Sixteen scholars illuminate these filmmakers' negotiations of local and global politics, cinematic representation, and issues of gender and sexuality, covering works from the 1920s to the present. Writing from the disciplines of film, Asian, women's, and auteur studies, contributors reclaim the work of Esther Eng, Tang Shu Shuen, Dong Kena, and Sylvia Chang, among others who have transformed Chinese cinematic modernity. This collection creates a unique transcultural, interdisciplinary conversation on authorship, feminist cinema, transnational gender, and cinematic agency and representation. Lingzhen Wang's comprehensive introduction recounts the history and limitations of established feminist film theory, particularly its relationship with female cinematic authorship and agency. She also reviews critiques of classical feminist film theory, along with recent developments in feminist practice, ultimately remapping feminist film discourse within transnational and interdisciplinary contexts. Wang's subsequent redefinition of women's cinema and brief history of women's cinematic practices in modern China encourage the reader to reposition gender and cinema within a transnational feminist configuration, especially in such a way that power and knowledge are reexamined among and across cultures and nation-states.

Author Biography

Lingzhen Wang is associate professor of modem Chinese literature, gender studies, and Chinese film and media at Brown University. She is the author of Personal Matters: Women's Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth Century China and the editor and co-translator of Tears of Sadness: Translation Anthology of Wang Anyi's Autobiographical Works.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Transnational Feminist Reconfiguration of Film Discourse and Women's Cinema	p. 1
Female Authorship Negotiated in different Times, Spaces, and Genres
Socialist Cinema and Female Authorship: Overdetermination and Subjective Revisions in Dong Kena's Small Grass Grows on the Kunlun Mountain (1962)	p. 47
Masochist Men and Normal Women: Tang Shu Shuen and The Arch (1969)	p. 66
Migrating Hearts: The Cultural Geography of Sylvia Chang's Melodrama	p. 88
Gendered Voices: Images and Affect
The Voice of History and the Voice of Women: A Study of Huang Shuqin's Women's Films	p. 113
Post-Taiwan New Cinema Women Directors and Their Films: Auteurs, Images, Language	p. 132
Affect, Memory, and Trauma Past Tense: Hu Mei's Army Nurse (1985) and Xu Jinglei's Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004)	p. 154
The visual Subject and Feminist Cinema
The Encoding of Female Subjectivity: Four Films by China's Fifth-Generation Women Directors	p. 173
From Mao's "Continuous Revolution" to Ning Ying's Perpetual Motion (2005): Sexual Politics, Neoliberalism, and Postmodern China	p. 191
Searching for Female Sexuality and Negotiating with Feminism: Li Yu's Film Trilogy	p. 213
Female Writing, Performance, and Issues af Cinematic Agency
To Write or to Act, That Is the Question: 1920s to 1930s Shanghai Actress-Writers and the Death of the "New Woman"	p. 235
Gender, Genre, and Performance in Eileen Chang's Films: Equivocal Contrasts Across the Print-Screen Divide	p. 255
Chu T'ien-wen and the Sotto Voce of Gendered Expression in the Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien	p. 274
To Become an Auteur: The Cinematic Maneuverings of Xu Jinglei	p. 293
Migration, Diaspora, and Transcultural Practice of Gender and Cinema
In Search of Esther Eng: Border-Crossing Pioneer in Chinese-Language Filmmaking	p. 313
Transpacific Waves in a Global Sea: Mabel Cheung Yuen-Ting's Cinematic Archive	p. 330
Filming One's Way Home: Clara Law's Letters to Oz	p. 347
Filmography	p. 569
Glossary	p. 377
Bibliography	p. 385
Index	p. 411
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