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New Chinese Ecocinema and Ethics of Environmental Imagination
Organizer: Jiayan Mi, The College of New Jersey
Chair: Xinmin Liu, University of Pittsburgh
Discussant: Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, University of California at Davis
Since the economic boom in post-Mao-Deng and late socialist era, China is now facing an unprecedented environmental crisis and eco-catastrophes. Although new Chinese cinema has showed a consistent attention to this grave ecological deterioration, scholarly study of this ecological consciousness in Chinese films is largely neglected. To call up its contemporary urgency and its theoretical significance, our panel raises the concept of “Chinese ecocinema” as a new paradigm for investigating how new Chinese cinema engages with China’s environmental and ecological issues in a global-ecological context of capital flow and imagination of place. By drawing on contemporary environmental theories and ecocriticsm and with its regional diversity and broad filmography, our panelists will critically examine how the changing environment (natural and constructed) shapes post-socialist cultural and political identity in contemporary China.
Xinmin Liu’s paper examines the ironical reversal between ecological damages and human well-being and challenges the ethics of environmental abuse and injustice the market-driven economy has inflicted on human dwelling. To alternate a more healthy ethics of social ordering, he highlights in several films the emotive drama as the last sanctuary of human and communal values. Jing Nie’s paper focuses on the impact of spatial demolition and rise of new urban environment on human relationships in some Beijing films. She investigates how cultural memory of space shapes both interpersonal and national identities. Hongbing Zhang’s paper studies the post-mortem identity (theme-parked nature) and ecological resistance in Jiazhang Ke’s films. He finds that Jiazhang Ke’s cinematic critique of social labor in a ruined environment is edged on a simulated space of ambivalence and discontents. Finally, by focusing on water as a site of contesting signification, Jiayan Mi’s paper addresses the cultural, psychological and political pathology in the debilitating environment in some important Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese movies. His discussion of water as a symptom will offer unique perspectives on ambient habitat and viral politics.
Staking an Ethical Imperative: the Emotive Bent in Chinese “Ecocinema”
Xinmin Liu, University of Pittsburgh
Facing the furious wrecking machines of global development, what environmentalism (a.k.a green ideology) today needs most critically is a head-on challenge on ethical grounds, i.e., that sacrificing humane ecologies for market-driven gains is nothing short of a moral failing and a political liability. So what geographical and ecological dynamics can we rely on to ethically indict the ravaging of human communities and ecological environs worldwide? How can we take the green revolution above and beyond mere “green-washing” of the concerned public, treating damages and ruins just in terms of health hazards? Can ecological wellness be tied to the building of alternative social ordering?
One vital issue that welds human survival to ecological balance is a cosmopolitan ethics derived from the notion of dwelling which in turn harks back to the ancient Chinese idea of Tian ren he yi, a holistic blending of human living with ecological particularities. What brought about this harmony is a synthetic enmeshing of social relationships, communal values and traditional ceremonials and rites in varying geographical locales. My paper intends to focus on the emotive dramas that drive the storylines in such films as Nuan (Huo Jianqi), Riding Alone for a Thousand Miles (Zhang Yimou) and Keke Xili: the Mountain Patrol (Lu Chuan), to explore how narratives of career-seeking, ethical redemption, family reunion and business ventures, usually originating from China’s urban centers and the more developed West, are disrupted, diverted and totally resisted by the surprising, the improvised and often the inscrutable particulars shown through the nexus of human relations and ecological peculiarities presented in these films, and to trace out and affirm how human feelings usually turn out to be the last mooring to which are anchored the rudderless pursuits of human greed and ruin.
A City of Disappearance
Jing Nie, University of California at Davis
The dramatically changing cityscape in Beijing and the tidal influx of migrants have been transforming many aspects of the city dwellers’ lived experience. The newly emerged city space is one decorated with numerous skyscrapers and associated primarily with advanced technologies. The conventional intimate communal sense of neighborhood embedded in small lane or hutong life is gradually replaced by the prevalent modern virus of indifference, isolation, and virtuality. Marketization, though successfully reforms the inertial planned economy, exerts its monstrous force in areas of culture, ethics, values and human relationships. This chaotic urban climate of novelties, desperation, isolation, and disillusion throws the once stereotyped steady identity of the city residences into an ecological crisis.
How could one caught in the post-socialist era of China deal with the sense of trauma and displacement resulted from the spatial demolition and relocation? The paper will explore how people of different generations and of different classes and origins respond to and cope with the ongoing process of urban reconfiguration and the shifting spatio-temporal dimensions of cultural memory by examining some contemporary Chinese films of Beijing such as Baober in Love (Li Shaohong), Sunflower (Zhang Yang), Beijing Bicycle (Wang Xiaoshuai), and Cell Phone (Feng Xiaogang). The paper argues that the new cityscape of Beijing not only redraws the boundary of interpersonal habitat but also critically reshapes the geo-psychological identity and a hybridized citizenship.
Post-natural Ruins: Public Space and Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontents in the Age of Globalization
Hongbing Zhang, City University of New York
Produced in a historical moment when modernization is experienced more and more as globalization in China, Jia Zhangke’s films have succeeded in managing the disappearance of “nature” (in its traditional sense) from their cinematic world. Rather than indicating a lack of environmental awareness, the managed disappearance, as this proposed presentation argues, must be viewed as a register of a new ecological consciousness that questions the effectiveness of the modernist in-depth model of ecological representation—man versus nature, modern versions of “tianren heyi,” “xiangtu,” “dwelling” and “habitus”—and challenges the utopian aspiration toward inventing an ultimate other (e.g. nature) as a means of resistance against the new historical monster that is called globalization.
What is highlighted in Jia’s films—in narrative movies like Xiao Shan huijia, Xiao Wu, Zhantai, Ren xiaoyao and Shijie and documentaries like Gonggong kongjian—is a public space whose structural point is some ruins in the cinematic world—material fragments from some other tempo-spatialities in modern China and other parts of the globe. Structured on ruins, such a public space is in the meantime deeply penetrated by globalization—via various materials, financial, visual and audio channels. But, in Jia’s characteristic use of long take and medium and long shots, this space is presented not merely as a mise-en-scene against which a character stages his or her enlarged subjectivity. Instead, it is a space of both escape and trap that shapes and dictates the fate of the coming and going characters whose homeless and homebound anxieties, frustrated global aspirations and betrayed illusions of faithfulness and authenticity become Jia’s most visible cinematic discontents in the age of globalization for the living environment of those marginalized people in our midst.
Framing Ambient Umheimliche: Ecoggedon and Water Pathology in New Chinese Cinema
Jiayan Mi, The College of New Jersey
Perhaps the most intense engagement New Chinese Cinema undertakes, beyond the social-political consequences, is with the impact of environment on the difficult formation of Chinese identity and humanity. What informs the films is an acute epistemological critique of the myopic ideology of modernization responsible for environmental degradation and ecological damage, resulting in a grave condition of what I call “ambient umheimliche”—displacement, anomie, estrangement, exile, dysfunctionality, malaise, and claustrophobia. Central to this ecocentric cinema is the foregrounding of water or aquatic environment as a vital trope of symptom, trauma and/or pathogenesis that registers the ecological awareness of the unchecked environmental catastrophe (ecoggedon). Films that focus on this water-borne crisis include Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984), Wu Tianming’s Old Well (1986), Zhang Ming’s Clouds over Wushan (1996), and Taiwanese director Tsai Mingliang’s The River (1997), The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005).
Instead of treating water as a mere representation of its physical status (its absence/drought and its excess/flood), this paper will redress it as a verb, and ask how it works as an ecological practice, a dynamic semiotic that mediates the formation of a complex networks of political, social and cultural identities. By situating this water pathology in a global-ecological context and Hollywood post-apocalyptic water-themed films (Waterworld, A. I. and The Day after Tomorrow), the paper will further examine the polysemic figure of water as a poignant articulation of cultural malaise, environmental dysfunctionality and psychological anxiety emblematical of post-Mao Mainland China and post-Miracle Taiwan. The paper finally argues that beneath these seemingly ecodystopian films lies new Chinese ecocinema’s utopianism of messianic redemption and elevated humanism.