Dear Colleagues,
Zhang Yimou is one of the most famous filmmakers of China, as well as one of the most controversial. Long the object of intense discussion and critique in China, Zhang’s approach can express a highly stylized and crafted aesthetics, a documentary, daily-life feel, or a historically rich sense of tragedy and sometimes comedy.Several of Zhang Yimou’s films have won domestic and international awards. Red Sorghum (1987) won the Golden Bear Award, Qiuju Goes to Court (1992) and Not One Less (1999) won the Golden Lion, To Live (1994) won the Grand Prix du Jury, and The Road Home (1999) won the Jury Grand Prix. To Live was banned in China, and Zhang—as well as lead actress Gong Li—was prevented from making films for two years. The debate that has centered on Zhang’s films began right after Red Sorghum came out, and has continued to the present day. Critics branded his work as a self-Orientalizing fantasy that used the trope of a beautiful, vulnerable woman to suggest an inferior position for Chinese culture vis-a-vis the film’s Western viewers. In some films—notably Red Sorghum and Hero (2002), critics found an endorsement of authoritarian politics. These postcolonial and feminist critiques were countered by those who argued that the films broke through socialist isolation, for the first time finding for Chinese film a global audience. Others argued that the films were subtler than critics recognized: embedded within them were complex inquiries into power, display, and authority.
Despite his stature among Chinese film directors, Zhang Yimou has not yet been the subject of a book-length treatment in English. Film professors who teach his films only have access to a relatively small corpus of articles and book chapters published over some twenty-five years.
The new book Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture by Professor Wendy Larson (University of Oregon) is the first attempt to fill the gap by laying out not simply a biographical or empirical study, but a polemical argument that counters some of the critical trends in the interpretation of Zhang’s films. Professor Larson’s book was launched last month at the 2017 AAS conference in Toronto, where she gave a speech about her book at the Cambria Press reception. Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture is part of the Cambria Sinophone World Series, headed by Professor Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania) and the Cambria Contemporary Global Performing Arts Series, headed by Professor John Clum (Duke University).
The following is an interview with Professor Larson about her new book.
Q: Why is Zhang Yimou considered so controversial?
A: There are at least four reasons why Zhang Yimou is so controversial and, in some cases, disliked. The first revolves around a narrative about his films that goes something like this: his early “art” films broke through a stilted socialist aesthetic with a bold fresh style that deeply critiqued cultural and political problems, his middle period films illuminated the lives of commoners, and his later films became commercialized and sold out to the market. The second reason complements the first, with critics arguing that Zhang increasingly fell under the influence of government demands, abandoning his commitment to art and turning into a political hack. The third reevaluates Zhang’s early work from a postcolonial and feminist perspective, finding that Zhang places an abstract “China” in a weak, feminized, self-Orientalizing position from which it appeals to the Western viewer through exotic and sexualized images. The fourth dismisses Zhang as a has-been whose allegorical approach has been replaced by a gritty realism that uncovers the seamy side of contemporary life. Because Zhang was one of the first post-Mao directors to become known in the West, his work is often considered to represent the nation, and is closely watched.
Q: What made you decide to undertake this study on Zhang Yimou?
A: When the controversial film Hero came out, I became interested in the debate on support for authoritarianism within the film. My article on this film—which became a chapter in the book—was my first attempt to broadly conceptualize the notion of culture in post-Mao China. While Hero can support many interpretations, I disagreed with the argument that it was simply an apology for a totalitarian government. I then decided to look more closely at the way in culture was theorized through creative work more generally. I did not plan on focusing solely on Zhang Yimou’s films. However, my last project, From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China, ranged over some seventy years and dipped into history, theories of the mind, literature, and film. I wanted to do a tighter historical and thematic study. After taking a close look at Zhang’s films, I felt that at least half would work for my study.
Q: Why is culture and globalization integral to looking at Zhang Yimou’s work? And conversely, how is Zhang Yimou’s work important to the study of culture and globalization?
A: There are many debates about how culture is changing under globalization—not just the content of regional culture as the information age proffers alternatives, but also the role that culture plays. Populist political movements across the globe are motivated by rapid cultural change and economic dislocation. Expanding tourism has resulted in a strange symbiosis between local populations, which often desperately need the infusion of cash, and foreign visitors, who seek an authentic experience in an environment that increasingly is staged from the get-go. Under these conditions, cultural performance—and not just on the stage—turns into a kind of semi-coerced salesmanship. These soul-sapping structural transformations far transcend easily identified aspects of modernization. They affect the way in which people relate to each other, their sense of time and space, and their subjective experience. Many of Zhang’s films recognize these changes in a nuanced and subtle way. For the second part of your question, I think that Zhang’s films, and the debates about them, can help us evaluate the influence of globalization on culture both generally and in the case of China. The films regard culture not as superficial habit, but as the life-world of a given place. From this angle, Zhang’s films are also a kind of imaginative cultural theory that can help us think through the effects of globalization.
Q: What are some common questions you have faced regarding your research?
A: Investigations into culture—what it is, how it works, and how people imagine, perceive, and live it—have produced a voluminous body of scholarship. Studying ideas about culture that have been developed in literary criticism, film theory, cultural studies, and Marxist theory, I carved out a way of thinking about culture that moved away from the China-West binary that often drives such discussions. That was the first challenge. The second was analyzing the films in a way that incrementally developed the emphasis on culture, rather than simply repeating the thesis in each chapter—always a danger in a book revolving around a central argument. However, that turned out not to be too difficult, because each film evolved in a new direction. And of course, one of the biggest questions I have faced is justifying a serious study of Zhang Yimou’s films. Because of the criticisms I outlined above, Zhang is not very popular among intellectuals today, and I have dealt with plenty of eye-rolling and even embarrassment when I mentioned the topic of my study, as if it marked me as hopelessly out of touch. However, new research on Zhang’s films, especially Hero, has made that concern less pressing. For example, Margaret Hillenbrand has compared the film’s use of color with that of Kurosawa; Jason McGrath has analyzed the use of digital multitudes; Feng Lan has explicated the notion of tianxia (all under heaven); and Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley have published a book devoted entirely to Hero.
Q: What are some questions you are often asked about doing research on Zhang Yimou?
There are two questions I often get. This first is, have you met Zhang Yimou? The answer is no. I feel compromised when I personally know the subjects of my study, because I feel that I back away from some of the things I want to say, even if only slightly.
The second question has to do with the quality of his work and my personal affinity for it. I cannot say that I like every film Zhang has directed, and there are a few I actively dislike. But I like enough of his films to say that overall he is a fine director. Zhang has been criticized for sentimentality in several films, for example, in Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. While the sentimentality is there and should not be dismissed, there are many levels of meaning in the film. I want to avoid completely buying into our contemporary academic aestheticism, which tends to value a hip, indie sensibility.
Q: Please tell us about some of the findings you uncovered in your research.
A: Although Zhang has been criticized for flattering Western audiences, I argue that his films do not appease so much as they incorporate within themselves an understanding of how culture is changing under globalization. Performance under coercion, the duplicity of display, and action under constraint appear in many guises and aesthetic forms in Zhang’s film. These topos are interwoven with attention to the formation of subjectivity: how gazing and being gazed upon alters ethics and affect, and how the mind and behavior are formed under duress. Concerns about power relations, as well as modernizing forces in post-socialist China, also figure prominently. The films contribute not only to an in-depth understanding of transformation in China, but also to a broader creative field that examines the relationship between the nation-state and culture under globalization. It is this critical mix of aesthetics, subjectivity, and geo-political positioning—rather than the Orientalism and cultural nationalism that some critics find in Zhang’s films—that became foundational to my argument.
Q: Your study has opened up more possibilities for further research. What are some topic of research you would like to see in the future? And why?
A: I hope my work will support a complex approach to cultural analysis that is informed by theoretical work not only in the West, but also in China. The position of culture, and the way it works, brings up an intriguing and relevant set of concerns for all of us living under globalization. It is heartening to see so many exciting analyses being published today. Modern and contemporary Chinese studies is a robust field that has greatly benefited from interactions with our colleagues in China and their research.
Q: What were some of Zhang Yimou’s films that you liked? And why?
A: The relatively early Qiuju Goes to Court is a fascinating film that is set at a time when China was expanding legal rights. The film moves away from the evil patriarch/vulnerable woman model of the Red Trilogy (Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern), complicating convictions about who is right and who is wrong. Instead, it focuses our attention on the imbrication of culture and politics, or power and daily life. Qiuju convinced me that the actress Gong Li was much more than just a pretty face. In Zhang’s middle period, I am fond of Keep Cool, which did not become well-known either in China or the West. With an undercurrent of hilarity and black humor, the subtle acting of Jiang Wen, Li Baotian, and Qu Ying hit many contemporary nerves. This quirky film explores local, non-elite daily life, looking for clues that it can authenticate a contemporary cultural foundation. In addition to Hero, I also like Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, which features a true cross-cultural experience. Japanese action star Takakura Ken plays a lonely and introverted father who comes to China in a quixotic attempt to connect with his son, who is dying in Japan. Although it seems to be a sentimental story of regret and redemption, Riding Alone weaves in questions about cultural authenticity, the performance of emotions, and the complexity of cultural exchange.
Q: Tell us a fun fact about yourself.
A: I’m a philatelist. I just published a short article called “The Global Mao: Mao Zedong on Chinese and World Stamps,” in the China Clipper, which is the U.S. China Stamp Society journal. I am working on another one on the 1950s and 60s debate in China about stamp collecting—which was considered a bourgeois practice—and socialism. Was it possible to be a stamp collector and a good socialist? If you have Chinese stamps lying around, please consider a donation to my collection.
BOOK DETAILS
Title: Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture
Author: Wendy Larson
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 9781604979756
440 pp. | 2017 | Hardback & E-book
Book Webpage: http://www.cambriapress.com/books/9781604979756.cfm
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. Thank you.
Ben Goodman
Marketing Department
Cambria Press
www.cambriapress.com