In the growing field of Chinese film studies, Yiman Wang's Remaking Chinese Cinema is unique in that it tracks cultural flows through cinematic remakes and complicates our understanding of geopolitics, transculturation, and globalization. Wang states clearly that “the situation-based comparative approach” guides her entire book (p. 17). She resorts to Benjamin's differentiation between Nachleben (afterlife) and Urgeschichte (prehistory) and contends: “the remake not only bears and brings forth a secret film embedded in its predecessor, but also potentially bares and undermines the predecessor's ideological premise and structural principle” (p. 13). The remake, in this sense, functions as a prism through which we can reexamine a century-long history of Chinese cinema.
Chapter 1, “The Goddess: Tracking the ‘Unknown Woman’ from Hollywood through Shanghai to Hong Kong,” compares three maternal melodramas, Stella Dallas (1925) from Hollywood, The Goddess (1934) from Shanghai, and Rouge Tears (1938) from Hong Kong. Wang enumerates a series of bifurcations, such as the sweet home versus the joyless street, transcendent motherhood versus abject female sexuality, xieyi (evocative sketch) versus gongbi (detailed elaboration), and Ruan Lingyu's naturalized performance versus Hu Die's corporeal rendition that marks her surplus body as an dangerous supplement, which “deconstructs Ruan's quiescent aesthetics” (p. 38). In Wang's reading, the “happy” ending in Rouge Tears “demystifies the utopic thrust as essentially elitist patriarchal ideology that promotes male subjectivity, upward mobility, and male responsibility for nation building” (p. 44).
Chapter 2, “Family Resemblance, Class Conflicts: Re-version of the Sisterhood Singsong Drama,” addresses the musical genre and treats “updating” as a special type of remaking. Using “re-version” to emphasize continuous transformation and localization (p. 49), Wang elaborates gender and class inequalities in Sister Flowers (1933) from Shanghai and traces their refiguration from “a prourban, nonleftist perspective” (p. 61) in a Hong Kong remake, The Sister Flowers from the South (1939). The celebration of urban modernity is intensified in another Hong Kong production, The Happy Reunion (1962), whereas Stage Sisters (1964), produced in post-revolutionary Shanghai, illustrates the rigid political divide that historically resulted in the eradication of individual voices.
Chapter 3, “The Love Parade Goes on: ‘Western-Costume Cantonese Opera Film’ and the Foreignizing Remake,” examines the fantasy genre. Wang identifies Lubitsch's “internal foreigner” perspective in The Love Parade (1929) and finds Venuti's notion of “foreignizing translation” productive in reading Xue Juexian's and Ma Shizeng's adaptions in Cantonese opera of the 1930s and a Hong Kong film remake, My Kingdom for a Husband (1957). Wang describes such “remakes” as a contact zone or “trans” state, where “the foreign perspective does not become domesticated into willy-nilly hybridity, nor does the local/regional Self erased and completely colonized by the foreign Other” (pp. 83–84). She prefers a dual vision, whereby the incongruity of “looking foreign, sounding local” may engage Cantonese “audiences who are already constantly experiencing split interests and desires as a result of diasporic movements” (p. 109).
Chapter 4, “Mr. Phantom Goes to the East: History and Its Afterlife from Hollywood to Shanghai and Hong Kong,” investigates the horror genre. Wang delineates a shift of focus from the visual image in The Phantom of the Opera (1925) from Hollywood to acoustic experience in Song at Midnight (1937), a Shanghai remake whose emphasis on politics is replaced by the imperative of art and romance in The Phantom Lover (1995), a pre-handover Hong Kong remake. Wang sees these remakes, each in its own way, as representing “subaltern remaking” that subverts the predecessor film(s) and creatively renegotiates the student-teacher power relations (p. 114). By teasing out “these layers of dubbing, doubling, ventriloquism, splitting, and remediation” (p. 123), Wang argues that the 1995 Hong Kong remake fulfills and revitalizes the original and “positions itself alternatively as the rebellious student or the sophisticated teacher vis-à-vis China—the Other that is increasingly intertwined with the Self” (p. 138).
In “Conclusion: Mr. Undercover Goes Global,” Wang interrogates contemporary Hollywood remakes of Asian film hits and its absorption of Chinese elements and thus reasons: “If . . . Shanghai and Hong Kong's remaking of Hollywood and of each other (consciously or not) figure forth (in a utopian, anticipatory, and provisionary manner) location-specific, subaltern, and peripheral subject positions, then, logically, we may expect Hollywood's remaking of East Asian cinema to similarly refashion Hollywood and reposition American subjectivity (hegemonic as it may remain)” (pp. 156–57). She locates the evidence of such refashioning in Tarantino's reverse mimicry from the center and Scorsese's provincialization of Hollywood in The Departed (2006), an Oscar-winning remake of Infernal Affairs I (2002) from Hong Kong.
Remaking Chinese Cinema is a perceptive, exemplary analysis of cross-border cinematic cultural flows and timely directs attention to an underexplored area of Asian studies and film studies. It reconfirms the importance of Chinese cinema “as a ‘trans’ port or a revolving prism through which the global and the local, the Self and the Other, the past and the future are doubly exposed, mutually reinflected, and thereby reciprocally constitutive” (p. 164).
