MCLC: Worldly Desires diss review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Worldly Desires diss review
***********************************************************

Source: Dissertation Review (3/3/14):
http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/8022

Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong, Taiwan

Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and
Taiwan, by Brian Hu.
Reviewed by Kristof Van den Troost

Much of the growth in the field of Chinese cinema studies over the last
two decades has been fuelled by a questioning of the category of Chinese
cinema itself. With the national cinema paradigm considered outdated and
inadequate, scholars have explored new ways to understand the film
industries of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as well as the many
transnational connections forged by Chinese filmmakers in an increasingly
globalized world. Despite the wealth of research already produced on this
topic, Brian Hu’s dissertation manages to break new ground, and makes an
important theoretical intervention in the field. But Hu’s contribution
goes further than this. Methodologically, he combines archival research
and close readings of films with less explored avenues of
research—particularly the study of film music, industrial texts, and
audiences. Covering a period of more than sixty years (from the 1950s to
the 2000s), Hu consistently looks at film genres, production cycles, and
stars that have been relatively ignored, in the process offering a fresh
perspective on Hong Kong and Taiwanese film history.

Theoretically, Hu’s starting point is Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar’s call
to turn away from studying “national cinema” to instead study “cinema and
the national”, which allows one to focus on how film texts construct the
nation in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways (Chris Berry and Mary
Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2006). Instead of Berry and Farquhar’s “inward-looking
approach,” however, Hu proposes a “partly outward” one, to explore “how
the cinemas of Hong Kong and Taiwan imagine the rest of the world through
the mobile and culturally-flexible national and ethnic subject” (p. 21).
This cosmopolitan figure, through his/her interactions with the outside
world, is as much one of the ingredients that constitute the national as
the aesthetic traditions and social contexts that are more commonly
focused on. At the same time, this figure allows domestic viewers to feel
they are a part of the outside world.

Rather than simply identifying transnationality as some of the earlier
works on the topic do, Hu is attempting to theorize the “specific
formation of transnationality” that is cosmopolitanism (p. 25), and how
this formation “is able to imagine identity, belonging, and prosperity in
an imminent global future” (p. 26). The “worldly desires” in the title of
the dissertation then refer to the “desires for the world and its
consumable, philosophical, and touristic pleasures” in “marginalized
locales” like Hong Kong and Taiwan, but it is also the “desire to see the
world recognize and desire Hong Kong and Taiwan in return” (p. 28). The
term “worldly” further indicates a more pragmatic understanding of
nationalism, Chineseness, diaspora, and the cosmopolitan: for the
industry, evoking these ideals is a way to make money and expand markets,
and for the audience, playing along with them can deliver social/cultural
capital.

Chronologically organized, the five chapters of the dissertation examine
different historical expressions of the cosmopolitan ideal. Chapter 1
deals with the Mandarin musicals produced in 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong by
the Shaw Brothers邵氏兄弟 and MP&GI studios 國際電影懋業有限公司 (電懋).
Basing his 
argument on the fan magazines and advertising materials of these studios,
as well as on the films themselves, Hu argues that each studio used its
female stars to brand itself as cosmopolitan—a rather daring claim
especially in the case of Shaw Brothers, which most scholars have tended
to depict as promoting the Chinese tradition. In promotional materials,
actresses like Linda Lin Dai 林黛, Grace Chang 葛蘭, Lam Fung 林鳳 and
others 
were shown to fly around the world, to wear the latest fashions, to mingle
with European and American elites, and to quickly pick up cosmopolitan
skills (especially the latest dance styles). By combining these particular
female star images with the upgrading of production facilities, the two
studios were able to portray themselves as in sync with world standards,
and as a result obtained a competitive advantage against smaller studios
that could not afford the significant investments this strategy required
(p. 42). In addition, the branding of female stars as cosmopolitan had its
value in the world film economy, as these stars opened the door to
co-productions with some of the top studios in Asia and around the world
(pp. 67-71).

In Chapter 2, Hu shifts his attention to the male martial artists in the
Shaolin Temple cycle of the 1970s and 1980s. Framing this martial arts
hero as “proto-cosmopolitan” in his mobility, flexibility, and pragmatism,
he aptly highlights how the legend of the burning of Shaolin Temple and
the subsequent dispersal of martial arts heroes in the secular world can
be read as an allegory of a diasporic identity “seeking to harness
Chineseness to succeed in international competition” (p. 30). Given that
the Hong Kong and Taiwan economies took off spectacularly at this time,
and in the process increasingly integrated into the global economy, the
popularity of such a competitive, flexible, and mobile figure should not
be surprising. Hu points out the political dimension to these films in the
1970s, as they celebrated the success of the Chinese diaspora exiled from
the Mainland after the Communist revolution: the films “worked through the
diaspora’s own sense of nationalism and anti-Communism by appealing to the
diaspora’s sense of cultural truth” (p. 100). Later films brought this
allegory to the context of the 1990s and 2000s, but were less overtly
political, showing instead “how Shaolin can make Chinese men (and in some
rare cases, women) participants on a world stage, triumphing in everything
from international martial arts to global sports to world-class cooking”
(p. 87).

Chapter 3 begins with the claim that the figure of the overseas student
helped audiences in Greater China cope with the changing place of the
Chinese national in a globalizing world. Here, Hu acknowledges that while
cosmopolitanism is often seen as an end ideal, it is also “an
anxiety-laden process which requires the mediation and sometimes
compromise between competing affiliations of emotional importance” (p.
140). The figure of the overseas student in the 1970s Taiwanese melodramas
is thus not only a source of fascination, but also signals loss. Breaking
down the boundary between entertainment and “Healthy Realist” propaganda
conventionally employed in scholarly writing about this period, Hu argues
that films consistently place overseas students within “a matrix of
family, lover, self, and nation” (p. 141). What unites these films is not
one specific ideological or ethical position, but rather that they all
depict the (re-)integration of the cosmopolitan figure into the nation,
family, or romantic couple as a process characterized by painful
compromises and tearful goodbyes—a depiction Hu defines as “sentimental
romanticism” (p. 142). As in the second chapter about the Shaolin temple
cycle, the focus here is on genre analysis of the “overseas student film”
and the interrelated form of the Chiung Yao瓊瑤 melodrama, both understood
from the angle of cosmopolitanism. Recurring narrative patterns (the
departure and arrival of overseas students), settings (in particular the
use of nature as “romantic space”), and even musical motifs are shown to
be part of the specific mix of cosmopolitanism and nationalism in 1970s
Taiwanese melodramas.

Chapters 4 and 5 move the discussion to the 1990s and 2000s to explore how
Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas imagine a cosmopolitan future in the face
of long-term industrial decline. Chapter 4 deals with the American Born
Chinese (ABC) and mixed-race stars who became an important presence in
Hong Kong and Taiwanese film, TV, and popular music in the mid-1990s and
early 2000s. Unlike the overseas student of the 1970s, the ABC does not
signal loss, but instead is perceived as simply looking and sounding
“different.” Moreover, for many young people Hu talked to, this difference
is not just culturally but also biologically determined (they have
higher-bridged noses, taller frames, etc.), even though genetically they
may not be all that different from their family members in Hong Kong or
Taiwan. The difference they represent is thus similar to that of
mixed-race people. Both groups are often considered as physically
embodying the “best-of-both-worlds”—in other words, they are “naturally
cosmopolitan.” As physical appearance and other “superficial” qualities
are most important in this version of the cosmopolitan, Hu opts in this
chapter to examine star images and draw on the tools of star studies,
offering case studies of pop trio L.A. Boyz’ muscles, Maggie Q’s face,
Terence Yin’s 尹子維 smirk, Janet Hsieh’s 謝怡芬 tan, and Edison Chen’s 陳冠
希 
English. Like the figure of the overseas student in the 1970s, the ABC
star is often represented as an ambiguous figure—“an object of
fascination, adoration, and ultimately, rejection” (p. 223). As Hu
concludes, the overseas Chinese star “becomes a cosmopolitan type (the
‘ABC’) who exudes authenticity but must then be a perpetual outsider, a
cultural and biological mutation, a monstrous child of globalization” (p.
283).

Chapter 5 takes yet another approach to the study of the cosmopolitan.
Using the self-reflexive industrial texts produced by state organs in Hong
Kong and Taiwan, Hu’s ethnographic approach reveals how state
representatives brand their respective cinemas as “cosmopolitan Chinese”
in order to position themselves as the ideal middleman between Mainland
China and the world. They do this by presenting their industries as
technologically cutting edge, multicultural, integrated with the rest of
the world, and in the possession of cheap labor. At the same time, they
play to foreign stereotypes of Mainland China and present the country as
“inflexible, inscrutable, and insular” (p. 314), so that the need for a
middleman seems more pressing. In his concluding chapter, Hu briefly
considers that most “cosmopolitan Chinese” director, Ang Lee 李安, and how
the discourse surrounding him in Taiwan illustrates that cosmopolitanism
remains an ideologically fraught subject. He also offers some thoughts
about the imagination of the cosmopolitan in Mainland China, which in the
Mao era was a Communist-inspired one but has since developed in ways
similar to that in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Especially insightful here is the
observation that “Hong Kong and Taiwan seem to play a similar role for
China that the overseas Chinese played for Hong Kong and Taiwan” (p. 332).

Worldly Desires is impressive for its innovative theoretical framework,
the broad range of sources and films it covers, and its eclectic yet
highly appropriate mix of research methods. Especially noteworthy is Hu’s
effort in discussing largely ignored and often-disparaged film genres, and
to analyze them in deeply insightful ways. As such this dissertation
deserves to be widely read by scholars interested in the cinemas of Hong
Kong and Taiwan, and equally by students of national identity and those
working on the Chinese diaspora.

Kristof Van den Troost
Centre for China Studies
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
k.vandentroost at cuhk.edu.hk

Primary Sources
Hong Kong Film Archive
National Archives of Singapore
International Screen
Southern Screen
Cinemart
Dissertation Information
University of California, Los Angeles. 2011. 384 pp. Primary Advisor: Nick
Browne.