China on Screen: Cinema and Nation

Film and Culture Series

by Chris Berry, Mary Ann Farquhar Ph.D.

In China on Screen , Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, leaders in the field of Chinese film studies, explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, Berry and Farquhar analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the abandonment of "national cinema" as an analytic tool and propose "cinema and the national" as a more productive framework. With this approach, they show how movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora construct and contest different ideas of Chinese nation―as empire, republic, or ethnicity, and complicated by gender, class, style, transnationalism, and more. Among the issues and themes covered are the tension between operatic and realist modes, male and female star images, transnational production and circulation of Chinese films, the image of the good foreigner―all related to different ways of imagining nation. Comprehensive and provocative, China on Screen is a crucial work of film analysis.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

313 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2006

About the author

Chris Berry is the Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. In the 1980s, he worked for China Film Import and Export Corporation in Beijing, and his academic research is grounded in work on Chinese cinema and other Chinese screen-based media, as well as neighboring countries. He is especially interested in queer screen cultures in East Asia; mediatized public space in East Asian cities; and national and transnational screen cultures in East Asia.

Reviews

[Chet]

I forget who first made the quip but it's true: whenever an academic is writing about some aspect of the cultures of the developing world and then claims the goal of "deconstructing", "problematizing", "reconsidering" or "queering" that chosen cultural aspect, what wizened readers should put in the given verb's place is "conquering", "dominating", or "exploiting" and then the true meaning of the text will become clear. China and contemporary Chinese culture are the clearest examples of this. Every academic in the US is funded by the military industrial complex, and when a country dares to defy the latter the way China has, you bet the lackey scribes of modern empire are going to be clacking away at their word processors, looking to "problematize" this dynamic in any way they can. This book is a perfect example of that relationship, in this case applied to Chinese film.

All the Judith Butler citations aside, this jibber jabber is really that simple.