The subject of women has been crucial to the emergence of transnational Chinese film studies for the past two decades. Surprisingly however, it is only in 2011 that we see a collection addressing the issue in a comprehensive manner. Lingzhen Wang has brought together a substantial set of fine contributions, drawn from both well-established specialists and emerging talents. The book aims to consolidate work done to date on the twin topics of female work in cinema and the female subject of cinema, through attention to the lives and works of 25 key female film-makers. Wang supplies an admirable and erudite introduction, although it is perhaps a little too centred on the American film studies and area-studies concerns that Wang identifies in the US system – to whit that “American studies of ‘non-Western’ women and feminist practice have been relegated to area studies” (p. 2). The mutual alienation of gender and Chinese/Indonesian/Japanese studies from core film studies has indeed been an irritant, but not only in the US (and not quite in the same way perhaps).
The success of this collection lies in its editorial energy and commitment to covering as much of the extensive topic as possible in a single volume, without losing the stated focus on female film-makers. The organization of the book follows a clear and well-orchestrated trajectory: authorship, voices and affect, visual subjectivity and feminism, writing and performance, and diasporic cinema. This last is a flamboyant section which I particularly enjoyed, investigating diverse migratory voices, thus drawing into the discussion an eclectic group of extraordinary women – namely Clara Law, Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting and Esther Eng – who have spanned a century of achievement and cinematic innovation.
In a similar vein, Christopher Lupke's defence of Chu T'ien-wen as a co-author, and perhaps co-auteur, of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's oeuvre is extremely valuable, both in terms of historical veracity, and in illuminating the general point of the book: that female authorship is undervalued in cinema generally and in Chinese language cinemas specifically. As Lupke asks pointedly of Hou's triptych – Dongdong de jiaqi (A Summer at Grandpa's, 1984), Tongnian wangshi (The Time to Live and the Time to Die, 1985), Lianlian fengchen (Dust in the Wind, 1986) – if all three are autobiographical of team members including Hou himself, scriptwriter Wu Nianjen, and Chu, then why is only the narrative based on Chu's life approached so that her girlhood persona is effaced by the character of a small boy? Lupke asks wryly, “Does this paradox hold some of the keys for how the Hou/Chu collaboration works on screen, and does it contain some information about the gender dynamics ongoing in their professional relationship?” (p. 276).
In earlier sections, excellent theorists such as Gina Marchetti and Li Xingyang discuss the pre-eminent mainland film-makers Ning Ying and Huang Shuqin. It is useful to look at these two directors in relation one to another, given that one quite deliberately occupies a gendered subjectivity as a director as well as through the persons of her protagonists. For Huang, the film will get lost if “gender gets lost” (p. 113). Ning Ying, by contrast, made her name with films that emphasized the subtle interactions of the urban milieu. Wu qiong dong (Perpetual Motion) (2005) is, however, an attempt at women's cinema, and, as Marchetti adroitly demonstrates, is a somewhat self-conscious example of postfeminist cinema. The value of the film lies in its attention to older women, and it is perhaps a “coming-of-age” movie for the Reform era's fifth- and sixth-generation film-makers. It also picks up on the intimations in Huang Shuqin's Women, Demon, Human (Ren, gui, qin, 1987) – and indeed in the closing sequences of Hu Mei's Army Nurse (Nüer lou, 1985) (revisited by both E. A. Kaplan and Louise Schein in this volume) – that women's lives do not stop dead at the age of 25!
The crossover from literature to cinema is essayed by Yingjin Zhang in a rather unexpected analysis of Eileen Chang, pointing us to her under-acknowledged screen-writing career, and to her capacity for screen comedy in particular. Zhang argues that scholars are guilty of neglect, preferring “her literary works to her screenplays, and this preference derives from an entrenched prejudice against film” (p. 259). He then asks some very pertinent questions about how scholarship (even quite recent work) identifies commercial film-making as somehow inferior to literary endeavour, with comedies particularly vulnerable to neglect. Without wishing to get too close to an argument between well-informed scholars on this particular matter, whether or not Chang copied Hollywood comedies into a Hong Kong location, it seems fair to agree with Zhang that the business of cinema is complex and sometimes counter-intuitive. Adaptation, generic innovation and boundary crossing are the stuff of cinematic invention, as is commercial necessity. Moreover, Zhang's plea for comedy is an important intervention in the transnational relationship between Hong Kong and mainland cinema histories, whilst his acknowledgment of Chang's capacity for performative effect (including laughter) over a masculinist “epochal monumentality” (p. 271) is well-made.
It is always difficult in a short review to do justice to the many contributors. I apologize therefore for omissions in a book which I admire for encouraging authors to speak their minds so clearly about their subjects. In this vein I would end on a piece by Yau Ching who makes a strong and necessary argument against the problems of misogyny in the cultural industries. Here she uses the example of Hong Kong critic Sek Kei, and his fetishistic reviews of film-maker Tang Shu-Shuen, to identify the several discursive paradigms by which women are cornered and misappropriated by problematic male anxiety. As Yau says (and the description is true of a number of professions, cultural and geo-national zones): “however contradictory is might sound, the woman director is still expected to maintain a certain integrity of ‘being Chinese’, because betraying that identity threatens racial unity and pride, to which the male critic has direct access, has rights to protect, and views as part of his property” (p. 72). I think that says it all.
