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1 Sinophone Cinemas

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3 Sinophone Cinemas Edited by Audrey Yue The University of Melbourne, Australia and Olivia Khoo Monash University, Australia

4 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 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 First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , 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 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 ISBN (ebook) DOI / 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.

5 Contents List of Figures Foreword: The Sinophone Redistribution of the Audible Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Notes on Chinese Names and Film Titles vii viii xii xiii 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

6 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

7 List of Figures 3.1 A long shot exposing the visual illusion that both exaggerates and harmonizes regional differences Singapore s folk artist offering a one-man show in the subway Jia Zhangke s The World (2004) Wei Te-sheng s Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (2011) Yangtze Cinema Stairwell, 3 February Margaret Leng Tan performing John Cage s Victor and Charlee The young and dangerous sex idol now has a receding hairline ,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 Frail, ordinary, oppressed Leung King-cheung in the neoliberal workplace Chen Kuan Tai (left), Bruce Leung (right), old kungfu masters in Gallants New kungfu talents played by Cantonese-American rapper MC Jin (left) and PRC actor Li Hai-tao (right) Global sports syndicate investor played by Chan Wai Man (the man in suit, centre) 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 A typically British location memories of the pub in Blue Funnel Meeting amongst Chinese in Blue Funnel 178 vii

8 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 Chineselanguage 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 admirably 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 Chinacentrism 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

9 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 undifferentiated 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, inaugurates 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 multidirectional, 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. As can be seen so far, the engagement with Sinophone cinema in this volume is accomplished partly through the pivot of geographical difference, both physical and symbolic, referencing spaces outside

10 x Foreword China and on the margins of China and Chineseness in their national, subnational, and transnational configurations. It does so powerfully, still, also through the pivots of language (linguistic and visual) and sound (all aspects of the audible), that is, the phonic aspects of the Sinophone. A multiplicity of languages in dialogic interaction, unruly sounds of everyday life, and aspects of film sound design such as music and voice, together contribute to the audible in Sinophone cinema. I think it is in the discussion of the audioscape of Sinophone cinema that the work of this book moves beyond a politics of recognition to a politics of redistribution. Allison Groppe and Olivia Khoo tell us here, for instance, while Singaporean cinema may be categorized as a national cinema, it does not respect the isomorphism of national language and national culture nor does it respect even the official multilingualism propagated by the state. Instead, what we hear is an explosion of multiple Sinitic languages in intense interaction with each other and with other non-sinitic languages. Beyond the four official languages of English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil, we may also hear Singlish, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hainanese, Hakka, Hockchew or Arabic in a given film. Singaporean cinema is Sinophone to the extent that it utilizes Sinitic languages and a large variety at that, but it is also Anglophone or Malayphone, as the Sinophone seldom, if ever, exists in isolation. This is not the compartmentalized version of multilingualism, as is typical of multiculturalism in most places of the world, but one that is far more disorderly, lively, and therefore also more real. If film has traditionally registered linguistic differences via accents and subtitles, or disregarded these differences through dubbing, Singaporean cinema shows the incredible concentration and high density of multilingualism behaving in unpredictable ways. Both Olivia Khoo and Song Hwee Lim argue for the necessity to shift attention to the auditory, the aural and the sonic in Sinophone cinema, not merely in terms of actual dialogues heard in the films but also all aspects of film sound in voice, tone and accent, about which much remains to be explored. Being recognized and allowed entry into the realm of representation may be the first step that Sinophone cinema studies takes to intervene in mainstream cinema studies, but it is in the intervention into the audible that, as I implied earlier, is perhaps the most radical. French philosopher Jacques Ranciere (2011) has considered power politics in terms of what he calls the distribution of the sensible : what can be apprehended by the senses are ordered in such a way as to condition what and how individuals do, say and see. To Ranciere, art and aesthetics

11 Foreword xi have an important role to play in politics because they have the capacity to re-distribute the sensible. The radical audioscape of Sinophone cinema, in all its audible differences and multiplicities, challenges the ways in which national communities are understood (heard, seen, etc.), and it is therefore transformative and possibly productive of not only a different common world but also a different people, which would be the ultimate aim of politics for Ranciere (2011, p. 14). What we understand through our sense of hearing Sinophone cinema, in conjunction with the other senses, intervenes into the distribution of the sensible and can thus fundamentally alter our way of viewing the world. This altering is the work of redistribution, beyond recognition, which I call here the Sinophone redistribution of the audible. Shu-mei Shih Dept. Comparative Literature UCLA

12 Acknowledgements We would like to thank Shu-mei Shih for her generosity and support of this project. We would also like to thank all of the contributors for their hard work and dedication in meeting tight publication timelines. Felicity Plester and Chris Penfold at Palgrave Macmillan provided valuable editorial advice. Song Hwee Lim kindly gave permission to reprint earlier versions of Sheldon Lu and Mirana Szeto s chapters from Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6.1 and 6.2, We would also like to thank Xin Gu for her research assistance at very short notice, the Research Unit in Public Cultures at the University of Melbourne and the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University for funding support, and Helen Hok-Sze Leung and Ho Tam for the book cover image. Finally, we thank Sandra Schneiderman, Olivia Pang and Sebastian Khoo for their ongoing support and forbearance. xii

13 Notes on Contributors Yifen Beus received her PhD in comparative literature from Indiana University and currently teaches in the International Cultural Studies Department at Brigham Young University. Hawaii. Her research interests include reflexivity, intertextuality and storytelling in cinema and aesthetics in literary studies and visual arts. Felicia Chan is Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include cross-cultural, diasporic and multilingual cinema, and film festival cultures. She has published in several journals and edited volumes, including Chinese Films in Focus I & II (ed. Chris Berry, 2003, 2009) and Theorizing World Cinema (ed. Lucia Nagib et al., 2012). She is also co-editor of Genre in Asian Film and Television: New Approaches (2011) and is currently working on a monograph on cosmopolitan cinema. Jennifer Feeley is an assistant professor of modern Chinese literature and film in the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Iowa. She is completing a manuscript on gender and confessional poetics in post-mao China and is at work on a second project that explores the intersection among gender, the fantastic and youth culture in transnational Chinese cinema and media. She has written on Chinese-language film and literature for publications such as the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese and is co-editing an anthology entitled Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema. Alison Groppe is an assistant professor of Chinese at the University of Oregon. Her areas of research and publication include modern and contemporary Sinophone and Chinese literature, film and popular culture. Her book, Sinophone Malaysian Literature: Not Made in China was published by Cambria Press in Olivia Khoo is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Australia. She is the author of The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity (2007), co-editor (with Sean Metzger) of Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (2009) and co-author (with Belinda Smaill and Audrey Yue) of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (2013). xiii

14 xiv Notes on Contributors Song Hwee Lim is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawaii Press, 2006) and Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness (University of Hawaii Press, 2014). He is also co-editor of Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (Wallflower Press, 2006) and The Chinese Cinema Book (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and founding editor of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. Sheldon Lu (Ph. D in Comparative Literature, Indiana University at Bloomington) has been Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Davis since He is the author, editor, and co-editor of many books, including From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (1994), Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, and Gender (1997), China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (2001), Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (2005), Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (2007), Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge (2009) and The Lyric Poetry of Lin Bicheng (2011). His research interests include East West comparative poetics, Chinese film and visual culture, world cinema, and classical as well as modern Chinese literature. Shu-mei Shih is Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA. She is the author of Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, which inaugurated the field of Sinophone studies, and co-editor (with Chienhsin Tsai and Brian Bernards) of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. Mirana May Szeto earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA and is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She writes on coloniality and critical theory, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan cinema and literature, urban cultural and spatial politics, as well as cultural policy and movements, in journals such as Interventions and Concentric, and volumes such as Neoliberalism and Global Cinema, Hong Kong Screenscapes, Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. She has completed a manuscript, Radical Itch: Critical Theory and Its Discontents in Colonial Cultural Politics, and is writing a monograph, Decolonizing Neoliberalism: Learning from Hong Kong. Yiman Wang is Assistant Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California Santa Cruz. She is author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (2013).

15 Notes on Contributors xv Her articles have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Journal of Film and Video, Literature/Film Quarterly, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Chinese Films in Focus (ed. Chris Berry, 2003, 2008), Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s ed. Patrice Petro, 2010), The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (ed. Chris Berry, Lü Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel, 2010), Cinema at the City s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia (ed. Yomi Braester and James Tweedie, 2010), and Engendering Cinema: Chinese Women Filmmakers Inside and Outside China (ed. Lingzhen Wang, 2011). Andy Willis is a reader in Film Studies at the University of Salford. He is the co-author, with Peter Buse and Nuria Triana Toribio, of The Cinema of Alex de la Iglesia (2007), the editor of Film Stars: Hollywood and Beyond (2004) and co-editor, with Antonio Lazaro Reboll, of Spanish Popular Cinema (2004). He is currently co-editing, with Wing-Fai Leung, a volume on East Asian film stars for Palgrave. Audrey Yue is Associate Professor in Screen and Cultural Studies at The University of Melbourne, Australia. Her recent publications include Ann Hui s Song of the Exile (2010), Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures (2012) and Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (2013).

16 Notes on Chinese Names and Film Titles The spelling of famous Chinese names follows how they are commonly spelled or known in the media, instead of the standard Chinese pinyin, or the standard citation form. For example, Li An ( ) has been well known as Ang Lee, while Zhou Renfa ( ) is commonly known as Chow Yun Fat, and Jia Zhangke ( / ) is the standard spelling in the Chinese pinyin system. Film titles mentioned in chapters will be in English, while their original Chinese titles will be noted in the filmography in either simplified or traditional characters respective of their countries/regions of production. xvi