Research Proposal for Hopkins-Nanjing Center Fellowship
Lingzhen Wang
Brown University
Gender Behind the Camera:
Female Authorship and Visual Modernity in Twentieth Century China
Chinese women directors have actively participated in the production of modern visual culture, making many influential films in both the socialist and post-socialist periods, and contributing directly to imaginary constructions of social and personal identities and transformations of film language. This book project centers on films produced by Chinese women directors in the second half of the twentieth century, and explores the complex relationships among female authorship, history, and visual modernity. It stresses gender as a historical concept and highlights women’s visual practice as an important force in reconfiguring gender, nation, and self in modern China. As cinematic image, Chinese woman has long been one of the central analytical categories in the study of Chinese film; as producers and directors, however, Chinese women have yet to receive adequate scholarly attention both in and outside of China. By linking the practice of Chinese women directors to the history of visual modernity in modern China, this study will draw critical attention to a significant though neglected body of films, revising the existing scholarship on Chinese film and visual culture that has mostly focused on male producers.
Up to now, no book length and systematic study has been conducted on this subject. Chris Berry introduced Chinese women’s cinema into English academia in 1988 by publishing his interviews with three 1980s women directors. Since then a few other scholars (E. Ann Kaplan, Barbara Koenig Quart, Yingjin Zhang, Shuqin Cui, etc.) have published sporadically on women directors of the 1980s and 90s. More articles on women directors have been published in Chinese in the 1990s, but most of them, like the scholarship in English, center on only a few of the best known contemporary women directors and tend to promote essential female difference as the criterion in defining women’s cinema. My project continues these initial forays into the subject of women directors, but places more emphasis on the historical significations and negotiations women directors have made in their participation in different historical modes of film production in modern China. Women’s cinema, like the concept of gender, should be historically grounded and studied.
My research, therefore, also questions and revises the prevalent western feminist approaches to women directors and visual culture that center on binary models of “sexual difference.” In most Western countries, feminist perspectives on film and women’s cinematic practice developed in the context of the women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and focused on the dualisms posed by “sexual difference.” In the Chinese context, though, movies containing feminist ideas date back to the 1930s, produced by male left-wing artists as part of their struggle to build a new nation and proletarian class (Laikwan Pang). More importantly, the first small group of Chinese women directors arose in the early 1950s after the Chinese Communist Party assumed power in mainland China. State sponsorship and institutional support were critical for women who chose to direct; to a large extent, the entrance of Chinese women into film production was a result of the new state’s socialist rhetoric that claimed absolute equality between men and women, although film production as a whole was still dominated by men. A history of women directors within Chinese film production helps us better understand how gender itself is differently (re)defined in different contexts and how the meaning of visual culture is produced by dynamic interactions among different historical forces. The project, therefore, interrogates the exclusive perspective of sexual difference in existing feminist visual theories and develops new strategies for studying gender, history, and visual culture.
As a visual language, cinematic representation contains a pronounced imaginary /mirroring dimension, manifesting unconscious desire (of its external and internal subjects) along with conscious reflection and construction. My research will draw on film semiotics, psychoanalysis, and theories of authorship to study the transformations of film language in modern China, and to analyze relationships among visual images, potential cinematic transgressions, and the gender of the producer. Cinematic sound effects, narrative voice (overs), and flashbacks, the major cinematic techniques deployed by contemporary Chinese women directors, will also be featured in my research.
My book will be divided into three historical periods—the socialist era (1950s), the post-socialist reform era (the late 1970s-1980s), and the market era (1990s- 2002)—and will consist of six chapters. In the introduction, I will delineate a historical trajectory of Chinese women directors in the second half of the twentieth century, map an interactive and historically informed theoretical framework and methodology, and discuss the significance of bringing female authorship into scholarship on visual culture and modernity. In the second chapter, I will focus on the first generation of Chinese women directors in the 1950s and 60s, examining several canonical socialist films made by Wang Ping, Dong Kena, and Wang Shaoyan and exploring complicated relationships among state policy, revolutionary history, socialist realism, gender reconfiguration, and women’s cinema. I will also address certain issues arising in current scholarship that dismisses women’s films in socialist China as merely propagandistic. In the third chapter, I will study the subjective mode of cinematic representation first practiced by women directors like Zhang Nuanxin and Hu Mei in the early post-socialist era. I will examine both the generation of a new cinematic language that de-emphasized elements of social drama, and the expression of a new historical self that centered on subjective perspective, inner voice (over), and suppressed emotion and memory. Despite their recognized departure from the previous mode of socialist realism, these directors’ relationship to socialist ideology and early post-Mao state policy is not a simple one and will be discussed in detail as well. In the fourth chapter, I will focus on women directors like Jiang Shusen, Ji Wenyan, and Huang Shuqin in the 1980s. The chapter will illustrate how these directors continued the tradition established by China’s first generation of women directors, helping shape a new national (male) model figure in the era of reform and endorsing an androgynous ideal for Chinese women. I will also show how their mode of production, still adhering to social realism, inevitably limited or constrained some of their new perspectives and voices. In the fifth chapter, I will turn to the market era, introducing different reconfigurations of gender, visual culture, and authorship. I will discuss films by Li Shaohong and Wang Junzheng, who adopted the commercial mode of film production in the late 1980s and 1990s, and examine the role of women directors in fashioning new images of women and stories for entertainment and public consumption. In the sixth chapter, I will discuss alternative and independent films made possible by the market’s diversification of cultural production and women directors’ persistent exploration of self, emotion, and society. I will focus on two feminist films by Huang Shuqin, Wang Junzheng, and Ma Xiaoying, analyzing the senses of female frustration or loss in the three movies, and further exploring the tension and conflicts between women, feminism, the market, and the existing social and symbolic order in modern China.
