Introduction Mapping the Field of Chinese-Language Cinema

COPYRIGHT NOTICE Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, eds./Chinese-Language Film is published by University of Hawai‘i Press and copyrighted, © 2005, by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. chapter number sheldon h. lu and emilie yueh-yu yeh Introduction Mapping the Field of Chinese-Language Cinema Language and Film This collection of essays covers the cinematic traditions of mainland China, Tai- wan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora from the beginning of Chinese film history to the present moment. In compiling a highly selective “film historiog- raphy,”as it were, we editors face once again the dilemma of choice and inclusion—namely, what constitutes “Chinese cinema” or “Chinese-language cinema.”As we attempt to come to terms with an ever-evolving phenomenon and a developing subject of investigation, we provisionally define Chinese-language films as films that use predominantly Chinese dialects and are made in mainland China, Taiwan,Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora, as well as those pro- duced through transnational collaborations with other film industries. Sometimes Chinese-language cinema is synonymous with Chinese cinema if national boundary and language coincide, for instance, in the case of a Mandarin- language film made and released in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Yet, at other times, Chinese-language cinema is not equivalent to Chinese cinema if the Chinese-language film is made outside the sovereign Chinese nation-state —for example, in Hollywood, Singapore, or elsewhere. Here language spills over the territorial fixity of the nation-state, and such a situation casts doubt on neat and easy assumptions about the isomorphism of geography, culture, nation, 2:sheldon h. lu and emilie yueh-yu yeh identity, and citizenship. There are also transnational Chinese-language films that are not made in and by the Chinese state. Rather, they are funded by a vari- ety of external sources and mainly circulate in international film markets. Thus, Chinese-language cinema is a more comprehensive term that covers all the local, national, regional, transnational, diasporic, and global cinemas relating to the Chinese language. The nonequivalence and asymmetry between language and nation bespeaks continuity and unity as well as rupture and fragmentation in the body politic and cultural affiliations among ethnic Chinese in the modern world. At this juncture, it is helpful to revisit Benedict Anderson’s seminal formula- tion of the idea of nationhood as an “imagined community.”Anderson empha- sizes the importance of language in the origin and spread of nationalism. For him, “print-languages laid the bases for national consciousness.”1 If print-languages played a crucial role in the formative period of nationalism historically, the importance of the cinema in the maintenance and reinvention of nationhood can- not be underestimated since the beginning of the twentieth century. Nation- hood/nationalism must be perpetually reinvented as time goes by long after its original historical formation. Although the modern nation-state is territorially fixed, the “element of artifact, invention and social engineering” is of paramount importance in nation-building.2 Cinema has increasingly participated in the “birth of a nation.” The historical formation of nation-states in Western Europe predates the appearance of the cinema at the turn of the twentieth century. Hence the importance of print-languages (novels, newspapers) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In many other parts of the world, however, the establishment of the modern nation-state is roughly concurrent with the development of cinema— for example, in the case of the founding of the Republic of China, in 1912. And numerous nations in Africa and Asia gained independence many decades after the appearance of the cinema. For Ousmane Sembene, his film is a “night school” (école du soir) to educate the illiterate masses in Africa. In the socialist Mao era, the Chinese state regularly dispatches projectionists to screen films in remote villages where movie theaters do not exist. In such a fashion, film culture is spread far beyond the boundaries of metropolises such as Shanghai, and is effectively used to both entertain and educate the masses in the socialist nation-building project. In the present age of global media, people watch films and television as much as, if not more than, they read novels and newspapers. The questions of both film as language and language(s) in film must be re- viewed more carefully. First, film itself is a special symbolic language, a semiotic system, a vehicle of representation, and an audiovisual technology.3 As such, film preserves, renews, and creates a sense of nationhood as an imaginary unity through introduction :3 an artful combination of images, symbols, sound, and performance. The nation- state is thus performed, staged, represented, and narrated afresh in a film each time. Second, the issue of language or languages in film is particularly significant. Chinese-language users, along with Chinese-language films, cover vast net- works, stretching from mainland China to Taiwan,which wavers between a nation- state and a “renegade province,”to the special administrative regions (SARs) of postcolonial Hong Kong and Macau, the independent city-state Singapore, large Chinese populations in Southeast Asia (Malaysia and so forth), Asian-American communities in the United States, and Chinese immigrants throughout the en- tire world. If language is in part what lends unity to the Chinese nation-state and more broadly to a sense of Chineseness among the diasporic populations, it is also a force fraught with tension and contention. As we know, Mandarin, the Beijing dialect (guoyu, or putonghua), has been designated as the official language and dialect by the state (both the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China), but numerous Chinese dialects are spoken by Chinese nationals inside China as well as by immigrants outside China. The different dialects constitute distinct speech genres, as it were, and exist in a state of polyglossia. Sometimes they engage in Bakhtinian dialogic exchanges in a lively, noisy, and yet peaceful atmosphere;4 but oftentimes they fail to achieve the desired effect of rational, in- tersubjective, communicative speech acts in a Habermasian fashion.5 Both past history and contemporary cultural production have continuously testified to the linguistic hierarchy and social discrimination embedded in Chinese cinema and society. Remember the banning of Cantonese-language films under the Na- tionalist Party (Guomindang) in the Republican era for the sake of national and linguistic unity. Or recall the depiction of reverse discrimination in recent Hong Kong films, for instance, Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Tian mimi, 1997) by Peter Chan, where Mandarin speakers are stigmatized in Hong Kong society. Or in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (Huayang nianhua, 2000), the Shang- hainese dialect evokes a warm nostalgia for a close-knit linguistic community consisting of émigrés living in Hong Kong in a bygone era. The use of local dialects (Sichuanese, northern Shaanxi dialect, and so forth) in numerous mainland films, especially the country films, aims at achieving multiple ends: co- medic effects of defamiliarization and refamiliarization, regional flavor, and, no less important, the ever-expanding and changing definition of China and the Chinese people. Dialects and accents create both intimacy and distance on- screen for the characters in the film as well as offscreen among the audience. In such a manner, filmic discourse attempts to articulate again and again a national self-definition in relation to the linguistic, dialectal, ethnic, and religious others. The adoption of particular languages, dialects, and idiolects in film belongs to 4:sheldon h. lu and emilie yueh-yu yeh Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Zhou (Tony Leung Chiu- wai), both modern yet old- fashioned, communicate in In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong, 2000). the procedures of inclusion and exclusion in the imagining of a national community. Hence, Chinese language is at once a centrifugal and centripetal force in the nation-building process. In the least, language helps forge a fluid, deterritorial- ized, pan-Chinese identity among Chinese speakers across national boundaries. Chinese-language film, or “Sinophone film,”is yet to be distinguished from varieties of postcolonial cinemas—for instance, Francophone cinema, or Anglo- phone cinema. The scattering of Chinese-language speakers around the globe is by and large not the result of the historical colonization of indigenous peoples of the Southern hemisphere and the consequent imposition of colonizers’ languages on them, as in the case of the former colonies of France.6 Nor is the Chinese language in the position of a hegemonic language, the lingua franca of international business, world politics, tourism, as in the case of English in contemporary time. To a great extent, Chinese-language cinema is the result of the migra- tion of Chinese-dialect speakers around the world. This is not to say that China was historically exempt from imperialism and colonialism and is currently free from their aftereffects. Part of China proper, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau were indeed embroiled in those merciless processes. English, Portuguese, and Japanese were instituted as official languages at the geographic peripheries of China—in the islands of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, respectively, in var- ious historical periods. The point to be made here is that speakers of Chinese di- introduction :5 alects around the world have been mostly ethnic Chinese rather than indigenous peoples who were forced or inculcated to speak the language of external colonizers.

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