Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture, in a way an auteur study, investigates the subject of culture in the context of globalization. Wendy Larson's landmark analysis is definitely not a survey of Zhang Yimou as a praised or vilified Chinese film director who often provokes heated debates and discussions domestically and internationally. Rather, Larson delves into nine of Zhang's films, either controversial or understudied, to argue strongly that these films “center on the significance, potential, and limitations” of the cultural in “postsocialist China” (p. 2). The films themselves are explorations into the way culture is working in China when confronted by tremendous pressure from the ongoing rapid changes related to globalization, consumerism, capitalism, and an information society. Larson shifts our attention from “various forms of cultural difference or anything that could be called Chinese culture” to the way in which literature and film can theorize and pinpoint the cultural situation in China, and how culture is structurally working in a globalization context (p. 2).

As is always the case with Larson's work, her research is sustained by astute textual analysis and invigorated by a deep and comprehensive theoretical knowledge. In her introduction, Larson summarizes and evaluates the scholarly debates on Zhang Yimou. She juxtaposes the critics writing in English with the research by scholars based in China—such as Dai Jinhua, Wang Yichuan, and Zhang Yiwu—to suggest the same “strong interest” in Zhang but “different foci” (p. 8). The debates between critics and advocates, in Larson's view, revolve around the “questions of audience and self-display, and of how to interpret the success of Zhang's films in the West” (p. 10). The success of the films can naturally invoke the question of authenticity, embodied in a legitimate position to represent China and its culture. “Culture,” in Larson's description, is epitomized by “our deep sense of the way we live and thrive” (p. 28). Her interpretations of the selected films further clarify the organic mechanism in which culture derives from the past and operates in the present with an eye toward the future.

The nine films, to which the nine individual book chapters are devoted, can be categorized into four sections. The Red Trilogy seeks cultural roots by going back to the mythical past. Qiuju Goes to Court and To Live serve as transitions to the socialist period. Keep Cool (a film that largely has escaped the attention of both the market and academia) and Happy Times move into contemporary city life in postsocialist China. Hero and Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles address Chinese cultural identity within the discourse of transnationalism. Zhang's films, Larson observes, “over time move from an interest in problems inherent in local power structures to a simultaneously metaphysical and practical consideration of sovereignty and subjectivity, from the family despot to the larger political body,” featuring “the inclusion of a global perspective that changes how culture works” (p. 345). In each chapter, Larson provocatively voices her innovative understanding of the film through insightful close reading to render new meaning and significance to the film. Her extensive theoretical sophistication validates and enriches her argument and tightly connects the textual analysis to her overarching notion of culture.

Aligning herself with the late Arif Dirlik, Larson abundantly recognizes that power, in various forms of gender, politics, society, and economy, is crucial in determining cultural function, identity, confidence, and limitation. On the other hand, refusing to subordinate culture to the material, as in a Marxist scheme, enables her to zero in on the mechanism of creative works. For instance, “play within play,” a recurrent aesthetic pattern prevalent in Zhang's films, acts out power relations, and simultaneously explores the aesthetic implication of the performed culture. The sexual performance played by Judou, who bares her bruised body under Tianqing's salacious gaze, elicits sympathy and provokes the male's rescue of the female. In Happy Times, the blind girl Xiao Wu's performance working in front of the well-intentioned laid-off workers nostalgically summons the charm of the socialist residual, but at the same time shines a harsh light upon the disillusion of the socialist utopia in capitalism. Larson concludes with the conflicting mandate embedded in the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony designed by Zhang. Under the overtly essentialized image of Chinese culture in the opening ceremony, as excessively flaunted as in Hero, lies the struggle to present the national cultural on a global stage.

While Larson's study has greatly contributed to the field of cultural studies through its critical analysis of a controversial director's films, it also opens up conversations about studies on gender, the visual, postsocialism, and globalization. Larson adopts a new approach to the study of contemporary China that extends the significance and contribution of this book to a larger scale. Larson's wide-ranging theoretical knowledge and the ambitious articulation of the often slippery idea of culture will attract a large academic readership in cultural studies, Chinese studies, film studies, and history. Her detailed, concrete, and brilliant close readings of the nine films also serve as a rich and useful pedagogical resource for a Chinese film course or a Chinese culture course.