Book Review for JAS

Book Review by Journal of Asian Studies, Nov. 2004, Vol. 63, No.4, pp.1119-1200

Chinese Cinema during the Era of Reform: The Ingenuity of the System. Ying ZHU. Praeger Publishers, 2003. 248 pp. $64.95 (hardcover).

Ying Zhu’s book is a timely publication as the scholarship on “the Chinese cinema” rapidly proliferates and spills over in so many directions that the concept itself can no longer be used independently of a full range of factors that critics have brought to bear on the subject. Aware of this proliferation, the author prefers to speak of “the Chinese cinema” as a problem or crisis as she expands the scope of critical inquiry into the films by such celebrated directors as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Tian Zhuangzhuang. Comprehensive in its treatment of the subject matter, the book is well researched, and goes beyond the scholarships of such critics as Chris Berry, Nick Brown, Rey Chow, Shuiqin Cui, Paul Clark, Sheldon Lu, Xudong Zhang, to form a singular critical paradigm of globalization both as restraint and opportunity ®¢ within which to rethink the Chinese cinema. Zhu’s analysis of Chinese (national) cinema both as a culture and economy opens important channels of communication between economic reform and cultural production, between popular entertainment and intellectual heritage, between technology and cultural politics, and between local traditions and global markets. Stepping beyond conventional film criticism, which grows stale with worn-out cultural and ideological posturing, Ying Zhu recalibrates our critical consciousness by introducing such data as box-office revenues and production costs. These insights equips the reader with statistical knowledge of the ways in which capitalist economics has made inroads into the Chinese film industry and significantly shaped the thinking of a new generation of film artists who strive to strike a balance between their aesthetic principles and the populist demands for entertainment; between their intellectual preoccupations with national identity and the economic pressures of the film industry to survive financially. The author argues that China’s transformation in the mid 1980s from a planned state economy to a free market economy has changed almost everything we think we know about film in China. The reader is fortunate to have a first-hand and intimate account of how cultural, intellectual and political issues are mediated through film to arrive at the state of Chinese cinema as we find it today. The author knows the ins and outs of the collective struggle of the Chinese film community to master the forces of the market in order to stay in business beyond the pale of socialism. Well informed by current cultural theories in the West, Zhu is able to share her insights into China’s film industry during the past two decades in a way that is interesting to not only film scholars and specialists but also those generalists looking for ways to engage modern Chinese culture of the last century. In Zhu’s encyclopedic treatment of the topic, we see a rare synthesis of knowledge and understanding: knowledge of cultural and political theories that, for the time being, provide stable and meaningful frameworks for the notion of a national cinema, and an understanding of the specifics in the history of Chinese cinema both as a culture and economy, with a set of ever-changing cultural praxis. Her views of the Chinese cinema not only creates new critical spaces for interpretive possibilities of existing films of the fifth generation but also helps the reader anticipate what is yet to come. As promised by the book’s title, the reader comes away with a sense of amazement of the ingenuity of the system," of how the ideas of New Wave flowed into those the period of Post-New Wave that followed; how art film, classical film, and populist film competed for supremacy in the last century, and of how a global economy stimulated artistic developments of filmmakers in the living process known as Òthe Chinese cinema. Having been acquainted with the a set of interlocking relationships among film economy, film production, film art, film criticism, and film history, the reader is left to marvel at the bewildering mosaic of post-modernism in its truest and most dynamic forms.

Rujie Wang The College of Wooster Chinese 1189 Beall Avenue Wooster Ohio 44691 [email protected] Chinese Cinema during the Era of Reform: The Ingenuity of the System. Ying ZHU.