chinese cinema and transnational six film studies yingjin zhang Since the late 1980s, scholars have become more and more aware that the national cinema paradigm does not adequately respond to contemporary issues in film studies and film practices. Admittedly, even the concept of “national cinema” itself has proven to be far from unproblematic, and many scholars have advocated a shift from national cinema to “the national” of a cinema—a shift that allows for diversity and flexibility rather than unity and fixity, as previously conceived. However, as the forces of transna tion - alism assume increasing magnitude in the era of globalization, the national a; Newman, Kathleen E., Jan 10, 2009, World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives š as a new critical concept continues to be unstable, and its conceptual space is constantly criss-crossed by other discourses and practices variously described as “international,” “multinational,” “postnational,” “para n a - tional” and, last but not least, “transnational.” This chapter attempts to reconceptualize Chinese cinema in relation to © Durovicová, Nata Taylor and Francis, Florence, ISBN: 9780203882795 the shifting problematics of national cinema and transnational film studies, in both theoretical and historical contexts. In terms of theory, we can no longer pretend to ignore glaring gaps and blind spots in film history previously covered up or glossed over by the national cinema paradigm. In terms of history, we must revisit the existing framework of film historiography and reevaluate certain disjunctures or ruptures in a century of Chinese film production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption. This combined theoretical-historical perspective seeks to better comprehend Chinese cinema at a juncture when it has evidently outgrown the national cinema parameters and has emerged as a significant force in world cinema in the era of globalization and transnationalism. reproblematizing national cinema Since the late 1980s, critics of national cinema in the West (which here yingjin zhang includes Australia, Europe, and North America) have identified a number of problems in previous film scholarship and have worked toward a paradigmatic shift from unity (a myth of national consensus) to diversity (several cinemas within a nation-state), from self-identity (a cinema defined against Hollywood) to self-othering (a nation’s internal heterogeneity), from text (auteurist studies) to context (cultural history, political economy), from elitist (great intellectual minds) to popular (mass audience), from production (studio-centered) to financing, distribution, and exhibition (process-oriented). In a seminal book on French cinema that subsequently launched an influential national cinemas series from Routledge in the mid-1990s, Susan Hayward questions two standard film historiographical approaches, those of the “great” auteurs and of film movements. For her, both approaches pay narrow attention to “moments of exception and not the ‘global’ picture” and place a national cinema in “the province of high art” rather than popular culture,1 thereby necessitating a synchronic and diachronic filling of the gaps between select auteurs and movements. Indeed, Gerald Mast, one of the early proponents of the auteurist approach, had this comparison to offer in the mid-1970s: “Just as the history of the novel is, to some extent, a catalogue of important novels and the history of drama a catalogue of important plays, the history of film as an art revolves around important films.”2 For Mast, film art is undoubtedly the most reliable textual source from which a scholar is entitled to study what he calls “the great film minds” in the history of cinema. Not surprisingly, at a time when auteurism prevailed in film studies, the emphasis on “great” a; Newman, Kathleen E., Jan 10, 2009, World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives š auteurs came hand in hand with the emphasis on “pivotal” film movements, 124 the latter seeking to identify like-minded auteurs in groups, generations, and nations. As Andrew Higson observes of British film history, a select series of relatively self-contained quality film movements are recognized and assigned the responsibility of “carrying forward the banner of 3 © Durovicová, Nata Taylor and Francis, Florence, ISBN: 9780203882795 national cinema.” On a larger scale, writes Stephen Crofts, “such cinema ‘movements’ occupy a key position in conventional histories of world cinema, whose historiography is not only nationalist but also elitist in its search for the ‘best’ films.”4 Both auteur and movement approaches prevalent in national cinema studies involve a selective appropriation of history and tradition—what Higson calls “the myth of consensus”—as well as significant degrees of amnesia or pretended ignorance of other contemporaneous types of identity and belonging, “which have always criss-crossed the body of the nation, and which often cross national boundaries too.”5 To supplement the typical strategy of a self-identity defined against Hollywood or another national cinema, Higson recommends an inward-looking process, whereby a national film studies transnational cinema and chinese cinema is conceptualized in relation to the existing national, political, economic, and cultural identities and traditions.6 Writing of Australian cinema, Tom O’Regan urges national cinema scholars to take on “multiple and diverse points of view” because, for him, “[n]ational writing is that critical practice which thoroughly establishes and routinely works through the heteroclite nature of cinema.”7 Higson’s and O’Regan’s attempts at internally “othering” national cinemas bear the imprints of the multiculturalism debate during the 1990s, but an outstanding result of the shift from unity to diversity is a critical realization that, even within a nation-state, “there is no single cinema that is the national cinema, but several [national cinemas].”8 This paradigmatic shift is most evident in Crofts’ taxonomy, from seven categories of national cinema in 1993 to eight varieties of nation-state cinema production in 1997. Albeit still in need of further elaboration, Crofts’ new proposal “to write of states and nation-state cinemas rather than nations and national cinemas” foregrounds a recent consensus regarding the sheer heterogeneity and incommensurability among nations, states, and national cinemas.9 To quote O’Regan: “At some time or other most national cinemas are not coterminous with their nation states.”10 The recent shift to diversity and heterogeneity has benefited directly from a gradual expansion of the field of critical investigation beyond textual exegesis. As early as 1985, Steve McIntyre called for redirecting attention away from concern for exact theoretical explication of progressiveness (or whatever) supposedly immanent in texts, towards a historically and culturally specific analysis . of production and consumption, 11 a; Newman, Kathleen E., Jan 10, 2009, World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives audience composition, problems of reference, and so forth. š 125 Higson followed in 1989 with an argument that the parameters of a national cinema should be drawn at the site of consumption as much as at © Durovicová, Nata Taylor and Francis, Florence, ISBN: 9780203882795 the site of production of films; an argument, in other words, that focuses on the activity of national audiences and the conditions under which they make sense of and use the films they watch.12 Crofts concurred in 1993 with a recommendation that “Study of any national cinema should include distribution and exhibition as well as production within the nation-state.”13 The new emphasis on exhibition and consumption has engendered new visions as well as new problematics. Pierre Sorlin, for instance, rewrites the history of Italian national cinema in terms of generations of filmgoers, but the undeniable fact that, historically, a national audience watches domestic and foreign films has provoked a debate on what exactly counts as “national” in film consumption.14 John Hill warns against Higson’s argument in his essay, “The Issue of National Cinema and British Film Production,” in which he states that “The problem . is that it appears to lead to the conclusion yingjin zhang that Hollywood films are in fact a part of the British national cinema because these are the films which are primarily used and consumed by British national audiences.”15 What Hill wants to preserve in the exhibition sector of a national cinema, then, is an unambiguous distinction between national (or domestic) productions and those from Hollywood or other national cinemas.16 Obviously, recent attempts at problematizing national cinema have fundamentally destabilized—if not yet collapsed—this bounded, highly territorialized concept, making it impossible to function as an essentialist, unitary, all-encompassing category of analysis. “National cinemas,” O’Regan suggests, “are identified as a relational term—a set of processes rather than an essence,”17 and this shift of emphasis from essence to process explains the increasing frequency in the use of “the national” in national cinema studies. Hayward, for one, draws attention to this mutually enforcing process: “cinema speaks the national and the national speaks of the cinema.” Being “relational” in a continuum stretching from the local to the regional and global (more on this continuum later), the national has found in cinema a powerful means of enunciation, but inevitably, such enunciations change in response to evolving socio-political and cultural processes. Two key