The criticism that film is an audio-visual medium but film studies treats it as though it were a purely visual one also holds for writing on Chinese-language cinema. Although other works have focused on music or language use in Chinese-language films, the notable contribution of Ying Xiao's China in the Mix is to analyse how music, language and the visual interact and combine. In other words, it focuses on “the mix.” This approach produces a series of much more complete, rounded and satisfying analyses of major films in the cinema of the People's Republic since the 1980s, situating them in a larger intermedial context.
Xiao's first pair of chapters revisits the now classic Fifth Generation films of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. She shows how films like Chen's Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1985) and Zhang's Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, 1987) need to be understood not only in relation to film cultural movements, but also music culture. Both directors’ early work contributed to and was informed by the Northwest Wind (xibei feng) style of folk song-meets-rock that appeared in the late 1980s as part of the roots-seeking tendency and also in response to the softer imports from the Southeast – Taiwan and Hong Kong. For Chen, the music is combined with strategic deployment of silence as part of a modernist, self-reflexive cinema. Zhang's Red Sorghum is structured around four rousing songs, written before the film was shot, producing a more visceral engagement. Xiao's exploration of the popularity of the music and the iconography from the films also helps to counter the old canard that only foreigners and a few intellectuals consumed Fifth Generation cinema.
The next pair of chapters focuses on 1990s’ urban cinema. In chapter three, rather than confining her focus to Sixth Generation films, Xiao starts from the musical perspective, looking at the rise of rock in China, as embodied in the figure of Cui Jian and the literature of Wang Shuo. In this way, Sixth Generation cinema appears as one part of a wider wave of both anxiety and excitement about the new market-driven society that burst forth in the 1990s. The following chapter shows how crucial popular music is to the now iconic films of Jia Zhangke. For example, Xiao argues that while the camera remains distant and detached in Platform (2000), it is the pop songs that not only anchor the era but also give us access to characters’ emotions.
The fifth chapter focuses on the so-called leitmotif (zhuxuanlü) blockbusters that emerged strongly at the turn of the century. She shows that they were not just a return to socialist propaganda, but a more ambivalent if not actually contradictory response of both the government and the now “marketized” local industry to the challenge of Hollywood imports. They did return to revolutionary history and related nationalistic and socialist stories, but combined these elements with such Hollywood entertainment techniques as casting shedloads of major stars to play historical figures in re-enactments of (not) riveting events like the founding of the Communist Party. Although the account is full and includes attention to sound and film, beyond the term “leitmotif” itself, there is no larger musical cultural dimension to reframe the films as in the earlier chapters.
In contrast, the final chapter is almost all about music. It gives a very thorough and detailed account of the import and development of hip hop music in China. Xiao traces how the genre gradually develops from simply Western connotations to embrace ideas of blackness, with many films using the word hei (black) in their name. These are certainly stereotypes of African American culture as macho and rebellious, but at the same time they become Sinicized. In this chapter, films play a more minor role, and the mix is mostly musical.
Each individual chapter is relatively autonomous. They are all clearly written and give very full accounts that also engage with existing scholarship. As a result, they provide a series of essays that will be most useful for teaching purposes. The important take-away from this book is not only the importance of sound and music to any analysis of an individual film text, but also the necessity of locating films in various larger intermedial frameworks to grasp their full cultural contribution.
Finally, China in the Mix is made more even valuable by the inclusion of a full filmography, glossary of Chinese characters, and bibliography – an apparatus skipped by too many publishers today. I only wish the University press editors had also given the manuscript one more round of proofreading – vernacular appears as “venacular” and so on, all too often.
