Conclusion

The “Conclusion” considers the interpretations offered in the previous individual chapters as a whole, intertwining those readings in order to propose a way of conceiving future prospects for Chinese film. The process of adopting, adapting, updating, or subverting technologies, tactics, genres, and so on reveals the modes of film’s possible development. Further, the affects generated by viewing films spur future creative acts. And by analogy, we the audience out in the real world are also subject to these affective flows and may engage them, if we so choose, to create new ways of being in the world for ourselves.

Documentarization and Amplified Realism in Jia Zhangke’s Films

Documentary film in the PRC has become an important mode in the palate of Sixth Generation (or urban or independent) filmmaking. The recent prominence of documentary turns on the notion of indexicality and the capacity for film to present reality. Jia Zhangke, probably the most critically acclaimed of Sixth Generation filmmakers, in his film practice, though largely conforming to this long-take, observational documentary style, also brazenly deploys technologies such as nondiegetic music and CGI effects. On the face of it, these tactics may seem to undermine the indexical reality portrayed in Jia’s films, but on further consideration actually augment his historical project of capturing China’s contemporary moment.

Consumption

Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 Goodbye, Dragon Inn depicts a nearly vacant cinema screening King Hu’s martial arts film Dragon Gate Inn (1967) on its last night of business. The film’s composition of the theatre, empty and decaying, marks it as a haunted house, and the few people present as ghosts lingering nostalgically lamenting the theatre’s impending closure. “Consumption,” thus, offers a reading of Goodbye, Dragon Inn attending to the intertextual invocation of Dragon Gate Inn as well as the metacinematic focus of the theatre and its operation through the lens of horror film generic conventions. The ghosts populating the theatre present an alternative temporality that values and seeks to preserve the past. Yet the anomie infecting them, characteristically of Tsai’s films, prevents anything more than a temporary nostalgia that cannot adequately establish the past as a viable temporal mode. In the end, the theatre closes and the ghosts disperse.

Production

Peter Chan’s 2005, Perhaps Love, depicts the filming of a musical film, and serves as a prime example of mise-en-abîme metacinema, or in other words, the metacinema of production. Close reading of the film reveals the circulation of musical genre conventions from Bollywood to Hollywood to Hong Kong and China. Key among these conventions are the display of spectacular images of singing and dancing in combination with dazzling editing speeds reflecting the influence, particularly, of Baz Lurhmann’s Moulin Rouge! Gender relations, always an important focus in musical film, here point to postcolonial formations linking (and distinguishing) mainland China, Hong Kong, and Hollywood, and which, in the end, abandon the female lead.

Introduction

The “Introduction” describes the theoretical and practical understanding of what metacinema is and does in the context of Chinese filmmaking. Metacinema is a kind of textual reflexivity that foregrounds the mechanisms involved in the creation or reception of a film. Consideration of metacinema reveals a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. A key, but often overlooked, metacinematic category is genre: collective semiotic codes adopted, adapted, updated, or subverted that allow another vantage on the ways films influence each other. In the context of Chinese cinemas, this discourse ricochets amongst and between the industries of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC. Further, focus on film audiences within films allows us to theorize the personal and social effects film watching has on viewers. The films provide models for ways of being in the world that characters within the films, and by analogy audiences in the real world, adopt, update, and subvert in their own lives.

Beyond Allegory

Li Yu, one of the few female Chinese film directors, has focused on female characters and issues women face. Lost in Beijing (2007) tells the story of Liu Pingguo, a migrant worker in Beijing who is raped by her boss. When she becomes pregnant, her husband and boss bargain over possession of her and the child she is carrying. She is reduced to a commodity function exchanged for its value in conceiving and bearing a child. Nevertheless, over the course of the film, a Mercedes-Benz serves not only as the basic status symbol for her boss but also a much more ambivalent role as the space of negotiation between the characters in the film. The final images of the film show this car breaking down on a major Beijing street. Simultaneously, Pingguo has left her situation, in an audacious recapitulation of Nora’s departure at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. It is in this symbolic deployment of the car in combination with her escape that the film subtly but provocatively dismantles the patriarchy’s power over Pingguo.

True Lies

“True Lies” focuses on the truth claims inherent in the act of narrating a story. Through linked close readings of Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun (1994) and Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000), we see that the authority of the mostly unseen narrators for each of these films is in no way diminished by their free admissions of making it all up. Instead, it is the affective response elicited by these stories that is their central concern. Moreover, both films dramatize the metacinema of consumption, and thus, mark the affective power of film to move audiences to take up new ways of being in the world.