Yingjin Zhang's new work on space and Chinese cinema characteristically combines theoretical insights with well-informed critical analysis of contemporary Chinese cinematic production, distribution, and reception, creating new horizons for understanding Chinese cinema in a globalizing age and new trajectories for delineating its history in location.
As the “Introduction” states, Zhang's aim in theorizing the concept of “polylocality” is not simply to capture representations of space and place in Chinese cinema, although he does highlight their importance. Rather Zhang builds on “recent development in human geography and social theory” (p. 1) to elaborate the possibilities of space-based understanding of cinema in particular, and of cultural production and consumption in general. In fact, this book can be seen as a development of Zhang's continuing interest in space in modern and contemporary Chinese culture, from The City in Chinese Literature and Film (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996) to Chinese National Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2004) in which the national is redefined as multiple in its spatial construction. In the present study Zhang moves to focus on space as production and process, extending the cultural theories of space of Lefebvre and Massey. “Polylocality” thus encapsulates structures of imagination, sites of production and consumption that are “multiple, coeval and relational,” calling attention to ‘multidirectional flows” and “historical contingencies” (p. 1). It represents “a multitude of ‘stories-so-far’” (p. 1) which encompass theoretical discourses, cinematic imaginations, and technical productions and circulations of these through spaces and places at different geographical scales, with an emphasis on what Zhang calls the realm of the experiential and everyday life.
The book's five central chapters (bracketed by an “Introduction” and “Conclusion”) each represent one segment of these “stories-so-far”. Chapter 2, “Space of Scholarship,” includes academic scholarship as one site of the globalized production and circulation of contemporary Chinese cinema. It delineates the shift from the national to the transnational in film studies as the prelude to a proposal to examine Chinese cinema “in terms of a multiplicity of projects in polylocality” (p. 21). The chapter can be read as a disciplinary-historical elaboration of Zhang's main theoretical construct. It continues Zhang's engagement with the spatial turn in Chinese film studies and provides a carefully delineated account of what it has accomplished so far. But most importantly it sets out a program of modalities, conceptual shifts, and fields of vision in a move to study Chinese cinema as transcultural visuality in a reconceived field of comparative film studies beyond transnationalism.
Chapter 3, “Space of Production,” examines postsocialist Chinese cinema since the 1990s, against the backdrop of China's rapid economic and social transformation. Zhang posits the changes in cinematic form, modes of production, and circulation not simply as developments in time (for instance through generations of auteurs), but as re-alignments in the representational space caused by a new juxtaposition of politics, capital, art, and the margins betwixt and between. In this new “topography of production and reception” (p. 43) predicated on the “market” (p. 45), Zhang is most concerned with the space of marginality. By this he mostly refers to the emergent underground and independent filmmaking and consumption in Mainland China and at international film festivals. This allows Zhang to concentrate on the “sixth-generation” filmmakers as the most significant representatives of the possibilities and limitations of cultural production at the margins. It also leads to a discussion of the individual works of its leading members in Chapter 4, “Space of Polylocality,” where he studies them as urban filmmakers who persistently remap the postsocialist Chinese city.
Chapter 5, “Space of Subjectivity,” focuses on independent documentary making and reception as a culture of marginality par excellence. By examining independent documentary makers' engagement with “modalities of truth” (p. 108) simultaneously enabled and constrained by different scales (domestic and international), Zhang explores the complications of seeking alternatives in the artistic, cultural, and social margins of the transnational market and national (artistic) politics. Chapter 6, “Space of Performance,” ends the stories-so-far with a discussion of the return of Chinese independent filmmaking to “audience, amateurism, and activism” (p. 138). Zhang suggests here that a certain cinematic and cultural democracy can be achieved if “piracy” in film production and consumption is re-visioned for its potential to unleash a popular performative impulse. This can take “digital performativity” (p. 144) as agency out of the box of the underground few to the many. The “Conclusion” adds to the array of Zhang's stories by an overview of the developments in Chinese cinema in the twenty-first century.
Zhang's theorization of “polylocality” and his insightful and informative study of Chinese cinema as composite and changing spaces of production and circulation certainly open up new directions in Chinese film and cultural studies. But the book's concentration on marginality both serves its aim to highlight alternative cultural agency and detracts from its thesis of postsocialist Chinese cinema as a multiplicity of projects. To really argue for the latter, that is, to bring home the notion of polylocality, one perhaps needs to forego the idea of the national and concentrate instead on the simultaneously multiple geographical places of production and circulation.
