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Women in Chinese Visual Culture as Directors and Actress-Scriptwriters
Organizer: Lingzhen Wang, Brown University
Chair and Discussant: Haiping Yan, UCLA
Chinese women have actively participated in the production of visual culture in modern China. This panel centers on women’s roles as directors and actress-screenwriters in making films and television shows. It explores the complex relationships among female authorship/performance, dominant discourses, and cinematic representation in different historical periods and stresses women’s visual practice as an important force in (re)configuring gender, nation, market, and self.
Wang Yiman studies three actress-screenwriters in the 1920s and 30s, Yang Naimei, Ai Xia, and Hu Ping. Instead of viewing writing as an action that naturally grants agency to women, Wang analyses women’s complex negotiations between writing and acting in a specific historical context. Lingzhen Wang focuses on a well known director, Dong Kena, in socialist China. Although women’s films functioned mostly as propaganda at the time, Wang argues, through analyzing the narrative form of one of Dong’s films, that some films also articulate irresolvable contradictions among socialist policy, gender, and representation. Zhong Xueping centers on Hu Mei’s directing career, which has changed from making women-oriented films to directing emperor’s dramas on television in post-Mao China. Zhong explores the changing gender and cultural politics in Hu’s case and examines the political implication of Hu’s choice of making what is not “women-centered.” Cui Shuqin argues for the emergence of films made from women’s perspectives in contemporary China. She discusses recent films directed by Ning Ying, Li Yu, Ma Liwen, and Xu Jinglei, illustrating how these films challenge their contemporary visual culture and gender condition with alternative visions.
Writing Women on the Silent Screen– 1920s to 30s Shanghai Actress-Writers and the Death of “New Woman”
Yiman Wang, University of California, Santa Cruz
Women scriptwriters in early cinema are conventionally seen as pioneering figures who dared to explore domains beyond acting, thereby exercising their authorship that is considered more effective in shaping the film industry. This general belief fails to examine the specific conditions of women writing and acting.
This presentation concentrates on three 1920s to 30s Chinese actresses who wrote scripts that were filmed with themselves as the leading ladies. They are Yang Naimei (1904 – 1960), Ai Xia (1912 – 1934) and Hu Ping (1910 -- ?). The films in question were A Wondrous Woman (1928), A Modern Girl (1933) and Tragedy of the Sisters (1933).
Whereas the films are no longer existent, the remaining film stills, print documentations and the actress-writers’ non-fictional writings invite us to examine these modern actress-writers’ tales of modern female sensibility. Studying these print as well as visual “traces,” I explore the ways in which the “modern working girl” image (as an actress-writer) became visible, desirable, problematized, contained and disavowed as a result of three interacting aspects: 1) the historical convention of female writing vs. acting; 2) the actress-writers’ physical enactment of the “modern working girl” image on and off the screen; 3) the multifarious political discourses and what I call the mise-en-abyme “dead new woman” phenomenon.
I argue that writing does not necessarily endow the actress with more agency in the filmmaking process; on the contrary, the actress who doubles as a writer could be taking refuge in writing, thereby tuning down her transgressive presence as an actress/performer.
Enunciating Difference in Making Socialist Mainstream Films: A Critical Re-viewing of Dong Kena’s Small Grass on the Kunlun Mountains
Lingzhen Wang, Brown University
Chinese women film directors emerged as a small group 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. Aspiring to achieve the socialist ideal in their cinematic practice, Chinese women directors of the time made films that mostly conform to the socialist ideology and gender policy.
Rather than dismissing women’s films in socialist China as merely propagandistic, however, I will, in this paper, explore the formal features and sub-themes of those films and reveal a much more complex picture of negotiations done by women directors in representing revolutionary history, new society, and gendered self. I will specifically examine the personal narrative and subjective visual techniques deployed by the famous woman director, Dong Kena, in her most well-known film, Small Grass on the Kunlun Mountains (1962), to illustrate how multiple-level contradictions are sustained throughout the film under the explicit, conformist theme of the film. In addition, some sub-themes of the film such as gender difference and female bonding also diverge from the major political goal of both the film and the era.
From Army Nurse to “Emperor Dramas”: Gender, Cultural, and Political Implications of a Woman Director’s Career
Xueping Zhong, Tufts University
This paper examines the directing career of Hu Mei, a well-known woman director in contemporary China. In the last 20 years, she has gone from directing women-oriented films, such as Army Nurse, to directing some of the most well-known emperor dramas on television. How do we understand her crossing over from film to television as a woman director? How do we understand her choice in pulling away from women’s issues and in actively participating in popular culture’s reconstruction of national myths? This paper addresses these questions within the larger context of the post-Mao and post-women’s liberation China and explores the ways in which Hu Mei’s directing career manifests the changing gender and cultural politics within. By re-reading (especially) the ending of Army Nurse, this paper argues that the dilemma in the woman protagonist’s choice continues to be echoed, albeit in different ways, in the post-women’s liberation context. But the paper also argues that what is more important is to understand why, like the protagonist, Hu Mei, the director, ends up choosing that which is not “woman-centered.”
Rethinking Women's Films in Contemporary China
Shuqin Cui, Bowdoin College
Women’s cinema in China remains marginal in terms of film production and critical discussion. Previous studies have been limited to a few female directors and their works. Recently, female directors have made films against the pressures of commercial forces and ideological restrictions that call for a reconsideration of the subject. If early film productions by women directors evinced a female consciousness, recent works demonstrate the emergence of films clearly made from a woman’s perspective. This paper examines how woman as the subject of film narrative as well as filmmaking challenges China’s contemporary visual culture and gender conditions with alternative discourses.
I will discuss how Ning Ying’s Perpetual Motion subverts existing conventions of female images and image-making, how Li Yu’s Fish and Elephant presents a homosexual relationship from a queer perspective, and how Ma Liwen’s You and Me and Xu Jingle’s Me and Dad insert a daughter’s discourse into gender relations as well as generational conflict. While critics have been quick to label them as directors of women’s films, the filmmakers have also engaged in commercial productions to ensure a position in mainstream visual culture. My paper is an inquiry into the practices and problems of woman’s cinema in China.