Painting the City Red traces the role that the visual media have played in the transformation of urban spaces in post-1949 China and post-Chiang Taiwan. Invoking the idea of the “urban contract”—a confluence of government authorities, non-government institutions, and media personalities who collaborate toward the end of creating better functioning cities and better engineered citizens—Yomi Braester demonstrates how Chinese cinema has continuously acted as an intermediary between centers of power in the visual (and actual) construction of new urban spaces. Acknowledging the propagandistic function of film and theater, Braester maintains that such productions are not simply “endless repetitions of dogma” but rather “context-sensitive iterations of contemporary policies” (p. 15). Thus, rather than treating film as a mirror of a given reality, Braester proposes that cinema actually forges the material city and the ideologies that have given rise to it; through the creation of new visual practices, Chinese film promotes a vision of how the city should be within the discursive political, economic, and ideological framework of the day.
The book is organized into seven chapters, each of which traces a different filmic chronotope of the Chinese city as it has evolved from Maoist imaginings of the ideal socialist space to competing post-Mao discourses of (re)construction and preservation. Drawing on archival sources, filmic and theatrical scripts, and interviews with filmmakers, policymakers, and urban planners, Braester underscores the metonymic function of the filmed city: both its message and its form reflect the institutional and ideological structure within which it was created. From the “prescriptive chronotope” of Lao She's Dragon Whisker Creek, which posits an idealized vision of the future (socialist) city, through the post-Maoist “preservational chronotope,” which stresses the ephemeral nature of the city and the need to document its various incarnations, and finally to the “post-spatial chronotope,” which eschews the very material space upon which the city has traditionally been founded, Painting the City Red argues for a representation of urbanity that “transcends the boundaries of the site itself” (p. 155).
Braester's study, which tackles over fifty years of history in both the PRC and Taiwan, is indeed ambitious. Not content to limit himself solely to film, Braester also delves into theatrical production and computer-generated visual artwork. While many authors might have gotten bogged down in such a rich, diverse, and expansive source base, Braester's organizational schema allows him to skillfully manage the multiple vicissitudes of Chinese film across both space and time. The one puzzling element in this framework is the lone chapter on Taiwan, which Braester himself admits “stands out” from the rest (p. 192). This chapter, which treats Taipei as a palimpsest of construction, destruction, and reconstruction, is certainly engaging as an independent case study. Nevertheless, the fact that Taiwan's historical trajectory diverged so radically from mainland China's—as with the development of a comparatively relaxed political environment for Taiwanese filmmakers—weakens the author's justification that Taiwanese film provides an instructive comparison to PRC urban history.
Much like previous studies of film and visual culture in post-1949 China, Braester's work also aims to reaffirm the cultural and social functions of viewed images, even in spite of (or perhaps because of) their overtly propagandistic overtones. What sets Braester apart is his foremost concern with portraying the cinema as an exercise of power: one in which the political, economic, and ideological forces at work “predispose” the audience to embracing the unequivocal message of urbanism set forth in the film (p. 5). Braester's belief in the limited agency of the audience leads him to bypass all questions of viewer reception. Since the spectator is understood to be a “regulated subject” rather than an “autonomous entity” (p. 12), Braester pays no mind to the subjective experience of the spectator's gaze throughout the cinematic encounter. Although he is right to question the extent to which audiences are able to create independent understandings of an intended cinematic message, by denying any possibility for subjectivity, Braester is also denying the fact that the filmic experience is inherently a dialectical process between the projected and the viewed image. Without the potential for a subjective reception, the spectator is conveniently and unproblematically reduced to little more than a subservient creature of the state.
On the whole, however, Braester's point remains valid: as a device that mediates between state and non-state actors, visual media play a crucial and often overlooked role in the creation of new forms of urbanism. Any scholar of film, urban studies, and Asian history in general would be well served to read this book.
