Abstract
Ideology and Utopia in China’s New Wave Cinema is an incisive examination of the dialectical interplay between Chinese Sixth Wave Cinema and the context from which it springs and that it mirrors - China’s embrace of globalisation in the 1990s and the consequent social-political and economic transformations.
Two layers are interwoven in the fabric of this book, which is substantively and methodologically grounded in Marxism. The first layer describes society’s economic structure entrenched by the ‘Chinese state’s decision to welcome the Western market and to import its model in order to reconstruct a market economy’. Wang is openly critical of these processes, arguing that the Chinese government ‘has often unabashedly followed the neoliberal tenets of the ‘Washington consensus’ in violation of the socialist doctrine; resulting in large-scale privatisations, massive deregulation, rampant marketization, with dire economic and social consequences’. The second layer pertains to the societal superstructure (including its politics, morality and culture) in which China’s Sixth Wave Cinema is also embedded. In line with the Marxist understanding, Wang examines the extent by which its cinematic output has also been conditioned and overdetermined by the economic base.
The movement’s central characteristics are extrapolated through a juxtaposition with other Chinese, regional and Western cinematic movements. It is contrasted with China’s mainstream visual culture from the same period which is described as ‘less and less concerned with understanding Chinese culture and history’, but also from its predecessor – the Fifth Generation which placed stress on ‘cultural myths and national identity’. Instead, due to its aspiration to European art films, the Chinese New Wave has been labelled variously as ‘cinema of the underground’ or ‘the avant-garde’. Although appreciative of its idiosyncratic novelties (qualitatively different styles, content and narrative architectonics), Wang theorises the New Wave as neither a consistent set of stylistic features, nor as a group of theoretically likeminded directors and scriptwriters. Instead, he considers it as a trend which testifies to the relationship between film practice and social reality: ‘both the Italian neorealism and the Chinese New Wave explore the living conditions of the poor and the lower-working class; portray marginalised people and their un(der)represented mundane activities and lifestyles, with non-professional performances used to achieve a realistic effect’.
In order to elucidate the kind of social reality which Chinese Sixth Wave Cinema is ‘transcribing, projecting and articulating’, Wang embarks upon a meticulous hermeneutical analysis of 12 films, (produced between 1993–2012), deemed to be representative of the movement’s different phases. In Chapter 2, Beijing Bastards (1993) and Weekend Lover (1995) are depicted as ‘illustrative of the symptoms of post-socialism’, including nihilism, cynicism and disillusion that have ‘begun to dominate Chinese society’. Summer Palace (2006) is characterised as “an account on the birth of an egocentric, bourgeois subjectivity which is alien to the People’s Republic’. Chapter 3 is dedicated to films which illustrate the lives of China’s so-called ‘new poor’, who have been ‘relentlessly left behind by the current political-economic structure, which consolidates existing class hierarchy’. The lives of migrant-peasants and white-collar workers are shown through the analysis of Blind Shaft (2003) and Pirated Copy 2004 respectively. Chapter 4 explores the development of the Chinese middle class through the visual representation of its taste, habitus and cultural distinctions. Green Tea (2003) is depicted as ‘an extended commentary on the spiritual emptiness of the Chinese middle class life’; The Contract (2006) illustrates the societal changes exemplified in the re-emergence of prostitution (‘wiped out in Mao’s era’) under capitalism. Chapter 5 looks at the New Wave’s record of the Maoist era, by analysing two films:
Globalization and its Chinese discontents
In this journey through Chinese New Wave Cinema, Wang acts as an interpreter of Chinese contemporary symbolism. This is particularly valuable in view of the unidirectional tendency of Western-centric globalisation as a result of which Western symbols are universally recognisable across the world including China, but the same cannot be said the other way around. The subtitle of the book, Globalization and Its Chinese Discontents, alluding to both Freud’s ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ and Stiglitz’s ‘Globalization and Its Discontents’, is indicative of the Chinese assimilation of Western cultural and social references. Moreover, throughout the text, mentions of Hollywood films abound, illustrating its influence on New Wave Cinema and its Chinese audiences (for instance, Wang mentions that The Contract (2006), is considered to be the Chinese version of ‘Pretty Woman’).
Wang provides a careful clarification of the meanings behind Chinese contemporary symbolism featured in New Wave Cinema, which would otherwise remain incomprehensible to audiences outside China. For instance, he helps uncover the symbolism of space: ‘the heroine of a film works as a pianist in a hotel lobby, a space that has a particular resonance in Chinese modernity of the Dengist period’. Elsewhere, he demonstrates the contradiction between a Maoist revolutionary song and the businessmen who are singing it, providing a link between the characters’ current lives and their history as the generation that ‘grew up under Mao’s revolutionary culture’. He also explains the symbolism of coffee as ‘an emblem of fortune and high cultural tastes due to the Chinese desire to follow the western way of life’. Such interpretative devices offer the reader a new layer of understanding, thus providing a rare alleyway into Chinese contemporaneity that would otherwise remain distant and meaningless to audiences unfamiliar with Chinese culture and society.
Ideology and Utopia in China’s new wave cinema
Wang acknowledges the value of New Wave Cinema for documenting a specific time-period by portraying the human consequences of China’s reconfiguration of socio-economic power and its impact on its vast working class. Nonetheless, consistently present throughout the text is his explicit criticism of the ‘failure of Chinese New Wave Cinema to critique mainstream ideology’ and ‘to reflect upon its own historicity and ideology’. He finds some of the directors guilty of their ‘inability to establish organic links between the narratives, the characters and the historical and social subtext’. Others he reproches for their failure to ‘explore the new capitalist logic of profit as the underlying force which over-determines the lives of the characters’.
Wang’s criticisms are based on Marx’s conceptualisation according to which ideology serves ‘to legitimise the dominant material relationships (in China in the era of globalisation)’ and ‘to obfuscate the violence and exploitation that often keep a disempowered group in its place’. By discerning such (often inadvertent) ideological functions of the films, Wang argues that the Chinese New Wave Cinema, imbued by ‘false consciousness’ has itself become an agent of ideology. His analysis is thus often centred on uncovering the directors’ ‘ideological manoeuvres and intents to mystify by displacing the political and historical analysis with ethical judgements and considerations’. Upon dissecting one film he writes: ‘The movie serves an ideological function to purge the oppressors from their sins because it places the responsibility for their destinies not in the exploitation and inhuman management of the capitalist entrepreneur, but in the personal and familial problems, or the moral laxity of the lower class themselves’. Elsewhere he criticises a director for portraying the characters as lazy, instead of showing the social gaps between the haves and the have-nots.
He finds the ‘politics of dignity’ to lie at the root of the ‘false consciousness’ identified amongst directors of the Chinese New Wave. He considers this to be closely linked to Western liberal identity politics which replace the politics of class (redistribution) with the politics of identity (recognition). Moreover, he locates the directors’ ‘elitist’ subjectivities as the reason behind their films’ concern with personal rights (an individual-centred dignity) rather than with the political economy of the (shortage) of dignity – the pro-capitalist exploitation and repression. He explicitly states that such a dependence on the market alongside their political unconscious may have stirred them into an elitist tendency visible in their portrayal of the under-classes. Thus, on a meta-level, he places the ‘first generation of Chinese filmmakers in the era of globalisation’ within the new Chinese ‘middle-class’ and considers their films as representative of the new bourgeois identity. In this vein Wang views their cinematic work as limited due to its succumbing to the ‘fashionable trend of repudiating Marxist thoughts and its methodology of class analysis’. By adding the analysis of the economic over-determinants of directors’ subjectivity (as another instance of the Chinese superstructure), Wang provides an extra layer to his analysis of the multifaceted symptoms of Chinese globalisation. China’s New Wave Cinema, thus becomes both a symptom of globalisation as well as a reflection of its Chinese discontents.
Whilst ideology is conspicuously present throughout, utopia emerges implicitly and intimately, as an upshot of Wang’s own subjectivity. Its mark is apparent throughout: in Wang’s concern with the implications of globalisation on Chinese society, in his frustration with the ‘false consciousness’ of New Wave Directors, in his discernible nostalgia for (the past and future of) Chinese socialism; as well as in his palpable concern with the future of China’s transformation. This book, by acting as a confirmation of the economic over-determinations of culture and society, serves to elicit the possibility of reactivating China’s socialist inheritance in shaping an ‘archeology of China’s future’ beyond the ‘ultimate horizon of capitalism’.
