Chinese Ecocinema is presented as the “first book-length study of China's ecosystem through the lens of cinema,” and proposes Ecocinema as “a new research framework.” A comprehensive study has been long overdue as we have seen an increasing interest of both the media and film industries in the environmental debate.

Edited by Sheldon H. Lu, professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Davis, and Jiayan Mi, assistant professor of literature, film and critical theory at the College of New Jersey, this anthology originated from a panel on “New Chinese Ecocinema and Ethics of Environmental Imagination,” held in March 2008 in Boston. The different essays by mainly American-based scholars (with the exception of Mary Farquhar, based in Australia) offer clever insights on Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinema from the 1980s to the present, and relate cinema to wider environmental issues. First, each essay engages in a close analysis of films by prominent filmmakers such as Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Tsai Mingliang, Ang Lee, and by less-renowned directors such as Ning Hao. Secondly, each essay comes to its own unique conclusion after carefully reflecting on film aesthetics, the mechanism of cultural production and representation in light of theoretical perspectives and social/cultural debates that underpin the discourse on ecocinema. In this regard, Sheldon H. Lu refers to “planetarism,” broadening on Masao Miyoshi's use of the term, defined as “the ethical imperative for humanity [that] … ought to be a turn to the planet” (p. 14).

The anthology is divided into four parts, each focusing on a particular aspect of the relation between cinematic production, representation and environment: hydro-politics; eco-aesthetics, nature and manufactured landscape; urban space in production and disappearance; bioethics, non-anthropocentrism. The variety of approaches exhaustively encompasses the different facets of this research framework: each section moves further away from strictly dealing with the filmmakers' response to environmental concerns towards wider debates. Furthermore, it is important to note that these papers succeed in creating a link with the Chinese past and tradition, while dealing with contemporary and recent discourses – references are made to Mao's ideology and Chinese cultural traditions.

The first section deals with the trope of the river as part of the representation of Chinese national trauma and the intervention of Chinese modernity in changing nature. In particular, Sheldon H. Lu's paper focuses on the environmental backlash to the construction of Three Gorges Dam by looking at films like Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Jia Zhangke's Still Life. Of particular interest in this section is Nick Kaldis's reading of Zhang Ming's Rain Clouds over Wushan that links “the politically mandated destruction of the environment” to “the disturbance of subjectivity,” the effect on “one's psycho-sexual identity” (p. 71).

The second part looks at “the representation of natural landscape in Chinese cinema” (p. 11). Mary Farquhar's chapter “The idea-image: conceptualizing landscape in recent martial arts movies” stands out; she revisits tanxia (martial art) movies such as Zhang Yimou's Hero, looking beyond their aesthetics of representation and referring to their environmental ethics. Her film-reading is based upon the Chinese ancient aesthetics concept of “idea-image,” whereby each idea is considered as an image and whereby it is acknowledged that “neither the cinematic structure nor painterly image is real” (p. 100). Farquhar not only cleverly uses this concept to justify the digitalized representation of landscape as part of constructing this “idea-image” illusion, but also emphasizes the active role of the landscape in this kind of films. She moves on to say that these images become “actual images of a land damaged by location shooting” (p. 110) and confronts their environmental implications as well as how they benefited the environmental cause by creating awareness.

In the third section, which is dedicated to urban space in production and disappearance, the debate opens to the effects of globalization and capitalism on the construction of urban spaces. The readings and analyses become increasingly less focused on strictly environmental issues, and other concepts such as space and disappearance are considered. Chris Tong's essay on Hong Kong cinema and the disappearance of nature introduces the idea of ecoscape, defined as “the ongoing discourse on the materiality, spatiality, structures and constructs of natural and cultural phenomena” (p. 179). He re-defines ecocinema as not being focused on “nature” but on “ecospace, a mixture of bodily, urban, and natural spaces” (p. 182). Jing Nie's essay on the cityscapes, on the other hand, refers to Henri Lefebvre's material conception of space.

The fourth and final section further expands the scope of this anthology by drawing on issues of religion and nature (Xiaoping Li), animal tropes and ecofeminist imagination (Chia-ju Chang).

On the whole, this anthology makes a great tool for the study of Chinese cinema, especially the cinema of the last 20 years in Chinese (1980s cinema is slightly overlooked). It thus offers a new perspective that develops current debates connected to globalization and shows how recent Chinese cinema is embedded within social and cultural discourses that are both contemporary and the product of their cultural past.