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Sinophone Cinemas This page intentionally left blank Sinophone Cinemas Edited by Audrey Yue The University of Melbourne, Australia and Olivia Khoo Monash University, Australia Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Audrey Yue and Olivia Khoo 2014 Individual chapters © Contributors 2014 Foreword © Shu-mei Shih 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-31119-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-45687-1 ISBN 978-1-137-31120-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137311207 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents List of Figures vii Foreword: The Sinophone Redistribution of the Audible viii Acknowledgements xii Notes on Contributors xiii Notes on Chinese Names and Film Titles xvi Part I Theorizing Sinophone Cinemas 1 Framing Sinophone Cinemas 3 Audrey Yue and Olivia Khoo 2 Genealogies of Four Critical Paradigms in Chinese-Language Film Studies 13 Sheldon H. Lu 3 Alter-Centring Sinophone Cinema 26 Yiman Wang 4 Festivals, Censorship and the Canon: The Makings of Sinophone Cinemas 45 Yifen T. Beus 5 The Voice of the Sinophone 62 Song Hwee Lim 6 Singapore, Sinophone, Nationalism: Sounds of Language in the Films of Tan Pin Pin 77 Olivia Khoo Part II Contemporary Sinophone Cinemas 7 Mandarin Pop Meets Tokyo Jazz: Gender and Popular Youth Culture in Late-1960s Hong Kong Musicals 101 Jennifer Feeley 8 Sinophone Libidinal Economy in the Age of Neoliberalization and Mainlandization: Masculinities in Hong Kong SAR New Wave Cinema 120 Mirana M. Szeto v vi Contents 9 ‘Singlish’ and the Sinophone: Nonstandard (Chinese/ English) Languages in Recent Singaporean Cinema 147 Alison M. Groppe 10 British Chinese Short Films: Challenging the Limits of the Sinophone 169 Felicia Chan and Andy Willis 11 Contemporary Sinophone Cinema: Australia–China Co-Productions 185 Audrey Yue Bibliography 203 Filmography 219 Index 223 List of Figures 3.1 A long shot exposing the visual illusion that both exaggerates and harmonizes regional differences 34 3.2 Singapore’s folk artist offering a one-man show in the subway 40 4.1 Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004) 52 4.2 Wei Te-sheng’s Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (2011) 56 6.1 Yangtze Cinema Stairwell, 3 February 2012 82 6.2 Margaret Leng Tan performing John Cage’s 4Ј33Љ 89 6.3 Victor and Charlee 90 8.1 The young and dangerous sex idol now has a receding hairline 131 8.2,3 The bookstore scene in which Sparrow explains to a kid among his retinue the fallacy of gangster culture, an analysis inspired by Milton Friedman 132 8.4 Frail, ordinary, oppressed Leung King-cheung in the neoliberal workplace 136 8.5 Chen Kuan Tai (left), Bruce Leung (right), old kungfu masters in Gallants 136 8.6 New kungfu talents played by Cantonese-American rapper MC Jin (left) and PRC actor Li Hai-tao (right) 137 8.7 Global sports syndicate investor played by Chan Wai Man (the man in suit, centre) 141 8.8 Soya (left), Szeto (right). Homophobic Szeto is trying to kill the ‘fag’ Soya, who is caring and sensitive to his needs, serving ramen to the hungry Szeto 142 10.1 A typically British location – memories of the pub in Blue Funnel 172 10.2 Meeting amongst Chinese in Blue Funnel 178 vii Foreword: The Sinophone Redistribution of the Audible This volume announces matter-of-factly that works of Sinophone cinema are worthy objects of scholarly attention and proceeds to offer readings and critiques of these works with vigor and rigor. Sinophone cinema as an existential reality has over half a century of history, so is thus not at all new, but it has so far existed under such rubrics as Chinese- language cinema and Chinese diasporic cinema that have circumscribed its full recognition to varying extents. As the co-editors Audrey Yue and Olivia Khoo note, this volume engages with ‘new sites of localization, multilingualism, and difference’ such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Britain and Australia that are not easily contained either by diaspora studies or any other model that implies China as the centre. What this volume accomplishes is finally to engage Sinophone cinema with methods and perspectives that it deserves, without compromising its uniqueness and complexity. At this level, the book does the work of recognition: readers are asked to recognize the significance of Sinophone cinema in and of itself, without the book having to defend the raison-d’être of Sinophone cinema from scratch. If we posit that the first step of any activist scholarship on behalf of minor and minoritized cultures is for them to achieve some sort of recognition through representation, this book accomplishes that admi- rably for select slices of Sinophone cinema. The power and creativity of Sinophone cinema showcased here makes a strong case as to why it deserves recognition denied to it in the past. As we know, this denial has been tendered by a widely shared but seldom revealed China- centrism that implicitly posits Chinese cinema as the major cinema that deserves the most attention or China as the ultimate signified even for diasporic cinema, as well as by the paradigm of national cinema that cannot adequately account for far messier realities of languages and cultures of Sinophone cultures that exist nationally, subnationally, and transnationally. As Jennifer Feeley tells us, Hong Kong musicals from the late 1960s not only projected a Sinophone modernity for Hong Kong audiences, but did so transnationally for Sinophone communities in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and, I will also add, South Korea, while China did not partake of and was not at all the implicit standard for this modernity. In the viii Foreword ix more contemporary context, with Hong Kong’s political and economic integration with China continuing to increase pace and coverage, we witness, as Mirana May Szeto notes, the emergence of radically local Sinophone cinema in Hong Kong that refuse the ‘mainlandization’ norm in China–Hong Kong co-productions and that reject an ‘undif- ferentiated vision of a governing China’. If Hong Kong cinema from the 1960s to the present has vigorously enacted and has had to defend its autonomy, the new co-productions between China and Australia, enabled by the rise of China and the expansion of Chinese capital, inau- gurates a new and uneven regional mediascape where Australia seems to have become China’s ‘junior partner’. In Audrey Yue’s analysis, these co-productions allow for the advent of Sinophone cinema in Australia, but this advent is clouded by a new politics of power. Yiman Wang’s piece shows a greater optimism for these flows as non-linear and multi- directional, arguing both for the Sinophone’s capacity, on a constantly ‘re-collaged map’ of Sinophone cinema, to co-produce the local and de-reify the centre. Sheldon Lu’s piece proposes an encompassing notion of Sinophone cinema, although the question, as in any act of definition, is not so much what the content of that definition is but what kind of work that definition enables or disables. Felicia Chan and Andy Willis, in analyzing Anglophone Chinese British films – films made by Chinese British film-makers and mostly in English – argue, correctly, for the importance of race over language in giving due recognition to this body of work. As American critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw (1991) would have said, however, it is not so much the centrality of one category (race or class or language) that matters here, but rather the complicated workings of their intersection that matter. Again, the Sinophone does not work in isolation; it does not work in one language; it does not work in terms of language alone; it is always in relation. The crucial point is about intersectionality with other languages, with other social and cultural categories, as well as other vectors of difference, oppression, and agency. As feminists (gender), ethnic studies scholars (race), queer studies scholars (sexuality) and Marxists (class) have learned, none of their main vectors of analysis exists in isolation from each other. Add Sinophone or Anglophone or Francophone (language) to these categories, and we need to calibrate the intersections accordingly for a fuller understanding of any cultural or social formation.