Asian Cinema - Volume 27, Issue 1, 2016

This article will look closely at a Chinese western, Jiang Wen’s Rang zidan fei/Let the Bullets Fly (2010). It will argue that Jiang’s film continues the tradition of national allegory and cultural critique of 1980s Fifth Generation films, albeit in a more postmodern mode. Incidentally, these 1980s films have in Chinese film criticism also been described as xibu pian (westerns), which was understood as an indigenous type of film that told stories set in China’s hinterlands. Let the Bullets Fly makes the connection of the xibu pian to the American/spaghetti western more explicit, exploiting the allegorical potential of both genres to present Jiang Wen’s personal vision of Chinese society and history, and the role of revolution in both. By doing so, Jiang re-nationalizes the de-nationalized model of the spaghetti western. While Jiang’s adoption of the iconography, settings, character types and plots of the western ends up strengthening the allegorical power of his film and led to widespread speculation about its potentially subversive political messages, his use of the genre in the final analysis also limits the film’s politics.

The social, political and cultural complexity of post-war Hong Kong (1945–1997) produced a highly fragmented, unsystematic, and historically transient mode of critical debate on the cinema. One film scholar, however, Lam Nin-tung (林年同 Lin Niangtong, 1944–1990), tried to systematize the debate and proposed a thoughtprovoking idea: jing you [geng jau 鏡游] or mirroring-drifting. In this article, I argue that Lam’s theory is best understood as an attempt to re-examine the relationship between the subject and the object in cinematic perception, a project motivated by a subjectival crisis embedded within the social, cultural and political complexity of the historical period.

To account for the complex performative and cultural phenomenon of cinematic sex appeal, this article investigates Chinese actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai Leung as a regional and global star, focusing on attributes of his acting that convey sex appeal or have been received as sexy. Leung appears as a popular star in a regional Asian context but as a more rarefied, art-cinema performer internationally. Despite this bifurcated reputation, his sex appeal provides a powerful symbolic currency bankable in local as well as global contexts. Through attention to the elusive category of sex appeal, I identify features of Leung’s acting and stardom that inform his overall career activity.

A number of recent Chinese and French films include frequent images of smoking by young female characters. This observation leads us to consider whether this is merely a conventional genre trope, or whether it is a broader reflection of changes in the ways that filmmakers wish to represent young women in these national cultures. We contend that smoking on-screen can be viewed as a sign of potential change towards empowerment, individualism and increased risk-taking for young women in a globalizing world. Smoking has long been glamorized by filmmakers despite clear research showing that it is a harmful and addictive activity. Its determined use as a prop for the femme fatale, for instance, plays an important and lasting role in the film noir (and neo-noir) aesthetic. We explore the role of risk-taking female protagonists in contemporary Chinese and French films, including Ang Lee’s Se, Jie/Lust, Caution (2007), Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 (2004), Claude Miller’s Thérèse Desqueyroux (2012) and Pierre Salvadori’s Hors de Prix/Priceless (2006). Furthermore, we investigate the gendered aesthetics of on-screen ‘tobacco imagery’ as a narrative device that confirms the convention of female protagonists (including the femme fatale) as a risk taker.

This article is a study of the figure of the modern Chinese prostitute by examining a series of important Chinese-language films. I describe a pattern of increasing mobility on the part of the Chinese prostitute from the turn of the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first century. The spatial expansion of the Chinese prostitute over a long historical time span has to do with the evolving conceptions and realities of the modern Chinese nation state within a global capitalist system. I demarcate successively three times in modern Chinese history and describe the corresponding phases/faces of gender politics as embodied by the figure of the Chinese prostitute.