Benzi Zhang

The Chinese University of Hong Kong
bzhang@cuhk.edu.hk

 

Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.

 

It eludes no scholar’s observation that in recent years the interest in Chinese cinema has increased dramatically. Among recent attempts to offer a theoretical approach to contemporary Chinese films, Rey Chow’s study counts as one of the most extensive and insightful contributions. Wide-ranging in its scope, Chow’s award-winning book addresses itself to a variety of critical, cultural, and aesthetic concerns of contemporary Chinese cinema. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this closely argued and valuable study seeks to examine the significance of technologized visuality for China in relation to discourses of anthropology, cultural studies, post-colonial theory, and women’s studies. A literary scholar by training, Chow reads Chinese films as cultural texts, and in many places, relates the problematics of visuality to literary issues. One of the major topics that she brings up in Part 1, “Visuality, Modernity, and Primitive Passions,” is the relationship between “the discourse of technologized visuality” and modern Chinese literature (5). Beginning with the story of how Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, was motivated into a writing career by his encounter with a “visual spectacle” in the mid-1900s, Chow goes on to explain in detail how “the sign of literature” is related to the visuality of China’s modern anxiety. Lu Xun’s conversion to writing, according to Chow, results from his “intuitive apprehension of the fascistic power of the technologized spectacle” (35). Viewing film as “a new kind of discourse in the postcolonial ‘third world'” (5), Chow also examines “the relationship between visuality and power, a relationship that is critical in the postcolonial non-West” (6). Drawing upon Western philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, on the one hand, and postcolonial theoreticians like Edward Said and Timothy Mitchell, on the other, Chow explicates the significance of the visual sign, which is different from yet related to the “older” literary sign, for China’s modernity, arguing that “the film’s careful visual structure signals the successful dismantling of the older sign” and therefore functions as a “revolutionary mode” whereby not only “the repressions and brutalities of society are consciously ethnographized,” but also, at the same time, the “practices of ‘primitive’ cultures” are fetishized against a background of “the harsh social realities of modernized metropolises” (26).

 

The chapters that follow the story of Lu Xun are devoted to the issue of “primitive passions” in Chinese cinema and culture. Although theoretically dense, Chow’s well-documented study of the “multiple strands of primitive passions” is clear and thought-provoking. The “primitive” in Chow’s discussion stands for something “phantasmagoric,” “ex-otic,” “unthinkable,” or an “original something that has been lost” (22). Phantasmagoria of the primitive appears at the time of “cultural crisis” when the old sign system of writing is being “dislocated” by the discourse of technologized visuality. As a figure for the origin that “was there prior to our present existence,” the primitive, which expresses a kind of nostalgia that is inclined to view the encroachment of the modern on an ancient culture, has become the “fabrication of a pre that occurs in the time of the post” (22). Chow’s discussion of primitive passions, reinforced by her frequent references to postcolonial theory, provides a new perspective upon twentieth-century Chinese culture which, in Chow’s opinion, is “caught between the forces of ‘first world’ imperialism and ‘third world’ nationalism” (23), and which demands reconsideration of the paradoxical relation between China and the West. “If Chinese culture is ‘primitive’ in the pejorative sense of being ‘backward’ (being stuck in an earlier stage of ‘culture’ and thus closer to ‘nature’) when compared to the West,” Chow explains, “it is also ‘primitive’ in the meliorative sense of being an ancient culture (it was there first, before many Western nations)” (23). Chow’s perceptive observations on the primitive suggest interesting lines of investigation into the distinctive features of Chinese culture in relation to postcolonial politics. In an ironic sense, what we see in China’s anxiety for modernization is a paradoxical primitive passion on the part of China’s modern filmmakers and opinion-makers alike who perceive China as both “victim” and “empire.” And this paradox of primitivism, according to Chow, is characteristic of modern Chinese intellectuals’ “obsession with China” (23). Making excellent use of a range of Chinese films produced from the early 1930s to the late 1980s, Chow illustrates the historical development of obsessive primitivism in Chinese cinema. With modern film technology, as Chow demonstrates, contemporary Chinese cinema continues the “uncanny ethnographic attempt to narrate a ‘noble savagery’ that is believed to have preserved the older and more authentic treasures of the culture, in ways as yet uncorrupted by modernity” (74).

 

Primitive passions are informed as well as complicated by the issue of gender–or rather engendered–representation. In her brief review of Goddess, a silent film made in 1934, Chow associates the primitive with the oppressed woman. One of the points that Chow attempts to make is that the primitive is not necessarily to be found only in backward, pre-modern regions, but is also to be located in industrialized metropolises such as Shanghai where the rapid development of industry and technologization can intensify “our awareness of how primitivism, as the imaginary foundation of industrialized modernity, is crucial to cultural production” (24). As a fascinating drama, Goddess, with the visual power that the new film technology provides, presents a subtle story about a young woman who prostitutes herself in order to support her son’s education. Against a backdrop of modern Shanghai in the early twentieth century, the film illustrates how the spectacularized body of woman “functions as a fetish for the sexuality”–the primitive–“that a ‘civilized’ society represses” (24). What Chow tries to show in her discussion of Goddess is the “affinity” rather than the contrariety between “innovativeness of film” and “primitive passions” (25). This film, which spectacularizes the primitive in the image of the oppressed woman, “articulates this epochal fascination with the primitive in ways that are possible only with the new technology of visuality” (25-26). The tradition of using women as symbols for the primitive, according to Chow, has been revived and developed by contemporary Chinese directors such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Although sharing the same primitive passions, contemporary Chinese directors exhibit different notions of primitives/women and experiment with various visual representations. In Chen’s films, which tend to be symbolic, the primitive “is incorporeal–the real primitive is the ‘goddess’ who cannot be seen or represented and who has no place in this world” (47). What Chen’s films present is the “invisible” cultural tradition that has been buried deep in the past and disembodied as the “absence”; and audiences are encouraged to see through the visualized corporeality to grasp an incorporeal cultural experience. Zhang’s films, different from Chen’s, appeal to the immediacy of experience by drawing audiences’ attention to the image itself, rather than to what is hidden behind it. In Chow’s words, “Zhang’s primitive, also woman, is what can be exhibited. The woman’s body becomes the living ethnographic museum that, while putting ‘Chinese culture’ on display, is at the same time the witness to a different kind of origin” (47).

 

In a sense, contemporary Chinese films are “phoenixes from the ashes” of the crisis of representation that existed in Chinese cinema after the Cultural Revolution. When China re-opened its door to the West in the 1980s, new modes of self-representation were desperately needed. Viewed from a broad perspective, contemporary Chinese cinema can be seen as embodying an autoethnographic attempt to present “China” anew before the West and, therefore, it provides an opportunity to re-examine China’s cultural identity in relation to Western pre-conceptions. As Chow asserts, a third-world nation’s cultural identity is often an overdetermined discourse that has been constructed from the Western perspective. In the case of Chinese cultural identity, Western sinologists and anthropologists have played an important role in setting up an Orientalist epistemological frame in which the intellectual locus of ideological control does not lie inside but outside China. For a long time, the third-world cultures come to be represented by virtue of the first world interpreters who have the privilege as well as the authority over their research subjects/objects. In her discussion of film as (auto)ethnography, Chow, regarding film studies as “an opportunity to rethink other modes of discourse in the twentieth century” (26), presents some important observations on the issue of representation and interpretation between cultures. Reading film as ethnography, as it were, demands an interdisciplinary approach that embraces not only the anthropological methodology and theory, but also a cross-cultural resistance “against the active imposition on the relations between West and non-West of an old epistemological hierarchy” (27). Historically, this “epistemological hierarchy” was established by Western anthropologists who, while studying the primitive cultures of third-world nations, imposed consciously or unconsciously a Western conceptual system upon their “primitive texts.” In terms of visuality, the West tends to see other cultures as “an endless exhibition” in which everything is arranged and interpreted from a Western point of view. What Chow attempts to achieve in her book is to take an anthropological approach to Chinese cinema without falling into the trap of a Western conceptual system. Chow opines that “film–especially film from and about a ‘third world’ culture–changes the traditional divide between observer and observed, analysis and phenomena, master discourse and native informant, and hence ‘first world’ and ‘third world'” (28). In the autoethnographic discourse of Chinese cinema, we find a new subversive and challenging “exhibition,” which is not set by the West, but by the Orient itself, which is conscious of the Western gaze and thus attempts to make use of this gaze for economic, political, or other purposes. “After demonstrating the bloodiness of the Western instruments of vision and visuality,” Chow questions, “how do we discuss what happens when the East uses these instruments to fantasize itself and the world?” (13). In Chow’s opinion, “since ‘the other’ has always already been classical anthropology’s mise-en-scène, this necessary dialogue between anthropology and film cannot simply be sought in the institutionally othered space of an oppositional stance toward ‘alternative’ or ‘third’ cinema,” but rather “in the shared, common visual spaces of our postcolonial, postmodern world” (28). In other words, “when the conventional epistemological division between ‘third world’ and ‘first world’ breaks down,” “the mediatized image of an ‘other’ becomes an index to primitive passions not only in the West but in China as well” (28).

 

After laying down theoretical foundations concerning the complex issues of primitive passions and cross-cultural interpretation, Chow goes on to perform the difficult task of reading contemporary Chinese films in an interdisciplinary context of postcolonial, cross-cultural politics. In Part 2, “Some Contemporary Chinese Films,” Chow marshals a wide range of film texts to argue that “contemporary Chinese cinema is fascinating because it problematizes the facile notions of oppositional alterity that have for so long dominated our thinking about the ‘third world'” (57). As we know, since the mid-1980s, Chinese films have enjoyed a phenomenal success in the West, and their success has evoked heated discussions of “Oriental’s orientalism.” These Eastern-flavored films are both criticized for “pandering to the taste of foreign devils” and praised for their defiant spirit in unthinking Eurocentrism. The interpretative conflict, on the one hand, raises some interesting questions about cross-cultural politics of reception, and on the other, reveals a paradoxical correlation between the global and local discourses ironically inscribed and enacted within the technologized visuality of China’s primitive. For Chow, “Chinese films that manage to make their way to audiences in the West are usually characterized, first of all, by visual beauty” (57); this “visual beauty,” however, needs a wide array of unmakings. Chow seems to get most upset by what she views as the naive reading of third-world cinema as “national allegories,” arguing that such readings “cannot sufficiently account for the ‘breaks and heterogeneities’ and ‘multiple polysemia’ of ‘third world’ texts” (57). These “heterogeneities” or “impurity” beneath the surface of exotic alterity is what we must pay attention to today. One “way of defining this impurity,” Chow maintains, “is to say that the ‘ethnicity’ of contemporary Chinese cinema–‘Chineseness’–is already the sign of a cross-cultural commodity fetishism” (59). Chow’s discussion raises a series of interesting yet complicated questions: To what extent, do third-world nations have the opportunity to speak and gaze back not as the “Other”? How shall we construct a new global-local dialectic, as both the first world and the third world are rapidly fragmented and diluted? And as the self-conscious “ethnic” filmmakers start to question and negotiate with the imperial, colonial, and capitalist “master discourse,” who would assume the “authority” to produce appropriate discourse about “otherness” in today’s intellectual world market? Caught between two modes of ideological signification–the West and the Chinese–contemporary Chinese films are situated in an awkward in-between zone of global/local interaction where they are subject to the forces of two ideologies which more often than not conflict with each other. Almost all the films made by the so-called “Fifth Generation” directors (who are the focus of Chow’s study) are produced locally, and their subject matters are mainly based on local stories. However, different from the novelistic versions of the stories that are written solely for the domestic readership within China’s home market, the cinematic versions have been made addressing both Chinese and Western audiences; in some cases, the major intended markets are American-Western countries. Therefore, one of the most important features of these films is the “worldwide orientation,” which distinguishes them from the early local-oriented movies made in China. Chow’s illuminating observation highlights the “sharp distinction between the often grave subject matter and the sensuously pleasing ‘enunciation’ of contemporary Chinese film–a distinction we can describe in terms of a conjoined subalternization and commodification” (57-58). This distinction, ultimately, “points to the economics that enable the distribution and circulation of these films in the West” (58).

 

Among China’s internationally acclaimed “Fifth Generation” directors, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou have managed to attract the West’s continuous attention. Different from the locally consumed Chinese movies, their films are much more graphic and photographic so that the power of visuality can provide the opportunity for non-Chinese audiences to naturalize the filmic discourse easily in a cross-cultural context. However, the filmic discourse is at the same time highly figurative, symbolic, and ambivalent; it emphasizes “surface” while suggesting profound and often mysterious depths of ‘Chinese’ culture. In such a hybrid discourse, Chen’s and Zhang’s films can translate and transform unique stories of local culture into globally consumable and marketable experiences. Contextualizing Chen’s and Zhang’s films in the “processes of cross-cultural production,” Chow argues that “the insistence on an original ‘Chinese’ culture is the insistence on a kind of value that is outside alienation, outside the process of value-making” (64). Chow associates “the process of value-making” with what she calls “the labor of social fantasy” that “the Chinese can have part of the West–technology–without changing its own social structure” (73). This “social fantasy” characterizes the “uncanny ethnographic attempt” to present the primitive through the modern film technology. Technology, in a sense, has enabled Chinese filmmakers to translate their local culture into visual products that can be consumed globally. In recent years, almost all Chinese films that have well been received in the West are ethnographic presentations of the remote landscape of China’s primitive. In such films as Yellow Earth and Judou, the audiences are taken to “backward villages in remote mountains” where the primitive–“the older and more authentic treasures of the culture”–is supposed to exist. In these films, as Chow observes, the modern film technology presents not only “visual beauty,” but also, more important, the “other-looking” image of China’s primitive. Chow notes that the primitive has a status of double otherness: It stands for “China’s status as other to the West and the status of the ‘other’ cultures of China’s past and unknown places to China’s ‘present self'” (75). Contemporary Chinese cinema, in Chow’s opinion, reveals a “structure of narcissistic value-writing” that “explains the current interest on the part of Chinese filmmakers to search for China’s ‘own’ others” (65). Films directed by Chen and Zhang, for example, often go back to the materiality of China’s primitive culture to explore the origins of modern China’s problems. Facing a complacent and narcissistic civilization that has produced Confucianism, Taoism and Maoism, one cannot but feel that there must be a historical yet mysterious “origin” inside Chinese culture. Contemporary Chinese films, in a sense, “partake of what we may call a poststructuralist fascination with the constructedness of one’s ‘self’–in this case, with China’s ‘self,’ with China’s origins, with China’s own alterity” (65). The paradox that Chow sees here is that “in the wish to go back to ‘China’ as origin–to revive ‘China’ as the source of original value–the ‘inward turn’ of the nationalist narrative precisely reveals ‘China’ as other-than-itself” (65).

 

In films made by contemporary Chinese directors such as Chen and Zhang, we can find a practice of “self-gazing”–the attempt to see through the surface and to explore what is inscribed/enacted in the mise-en-scène. What these films present, apart from and beyond the exotic surface, is a self-gazing exploration into Chinese culture. This “self-gazing” indicates a modern anxiety to make sense of the obstinate sensibility of Chinese traditional culture by disengaging the symbolic order from the primitive relics and to search for a historical relationship between the Cultural Revolution and something buried deep in Chinese culture. Chen Kaige says, “I’ve always felt that what accounts for the Cultural Revolution is traditional culture itself….The Cultural Revolution repeats, continues, and develops this traditional culture” (qtd. in Chow 92). In this regard, contemporary Chinese cinema inscribes a self-reflexive and self-analytical perspective upon Chinese culture. These films, which present the remote cultural landscape of China, to a certain degree, have “defamiliarized” the primitive “China.” As Chow observes, quoting a native Chinese critic: “To the average urban Chinese, these landscapes are equally alien, remote and ‘other-looking,’ as they presumably appear to a Western gaze” (81). They demand we re-read the hieroglyphs of China’s cultural history and re-examine what kind of impact the misguided forces of an old cultural tradition can make upon modern life. In an age of postcolonial cultural diaspora, Chen’s and Zhang’s self-gazing exploration of Chinese culture is, unfortunately, mistaken for a Westernized gaze, and this superficial cognition generates numerous misunderstandings, which almost exclusively criticizes these directors for “betraying” Chinese culture. Actually, the self-gazing mode interrogates a complicated cultural system by means of a split discourse that both presents and questions what it presents simultaneously. This split discourse, in Scott Nygren’s words, “foregrounds the necessary distorting process of the Imaginary or Other as a means by which difference can be conceived” (182). The interaction between gazing and self-gazing enacts a double writing process in which Chinese traditional culture is both presented and questioned. In Chow’s words, these films have played a “self-anthropologizing” role in their attempt to re-write an auto-ethnographic account of China; and these filmmakers have “taken up the active task of ethnographizing their own culture” (180).

 

When contemporary Chinese cinema started to stage itself in the global cultural market in recent years, conflicts and confrontations between different ideological interpretations seemed to be inevitable. Quoting E. Ann Kaplan, Chow points out that cross-cultural readings are “‘fraught with dangers.’ One of these dangers is our habit of reading the ‘third world’ in terms of what, from our point of view, it does not have but wants to have” (83). Moreover, there seems to be a “tension between the ‘raw material’ of the filmic text and the ineluctability of the Western analytic ‘technology'” (85). It is both natural and ineluctable that Western audiences–including Western scholars–always “gaze” at Chinese culture from a Western perspective, but the problem is that the “gazee” is not always passive. What Chow tries to show in Part 2 is that Chinese culture, which has been aggrandized by the powerful cinematic apparatus, does not merely appeal to the Western gaze, but more important, it also challenges, questions, and displaces the gaze. In a postcolonial age, when Western audiences go to cinemas to watch films made by the West-conscious Chinese directors with “a technology that is, theoretically speaking, non-Chinese” (87-88), the intercultural power relation between the gazer and the gazee has been changed. In other words, Chinese or third-world cinema may purposely offer what the first world “wants it to have” or wants to see. In such a situation, the relationship between the gazer (first world) and gazee (third world) should be re-examined. In Christian Metz’s psychoanalytical terms, when the whole system of knowledge is provided by the gazee-analysand, the gazee may also become the gazer-analyser, which can generate a counter-discourse to the intended spectatorship. “As in political struggles,” Metz writes, “our only weapons are those of the adversary, as in anthropology, our only source is the native, as in the analytical cure, our only knowledge is that of the analysand, who is also (current French usage tells us so) the analyser [analysant]” (5). In this regard, the films made by contemporary Chinese directors do not simply set up an “exhibition” of an exotic culture, but rather, they open up a new space in cinematic discourse in which different kinds of “gazing” and “gazing-back” are re-negotiated. In Chow’s words, by “showing a ‘China’ that is at once subalternized and exoticized by the West,” contemporary Chinese cinema “amounts to an exhibitionism that returns the gaze of orientalist surveillance” (170).

 

The third and the last part, “Film as Ethnography; or Translation between Cultures in the Postmodern World,” offers a perceptive summary as well as a theoretical extension of what Chow has previously discussed, thus completing this triptych volume in a satisfactory way. One of the most fascinating aspects of this part is her discussion of Chinese filmmakers’ struggle with the politics of “translation” and their experience as cross-cultural translators. “In dazzling colors of their screen,” Chow describes, “the primitive…stands as the naive symbol, the brilliant arcade, through which ‘China’ travels across cultures to unfamiliar audiences. Meanwhile, the ‘original’ that is film, the canonically Western medium, becomes destabilized and permanently infected with the unforgettable ‘ethnic’ (and foreign) images imprinted on it by the Chinese translators” (202). Cultural translation, therefore, is not “a unidirectional, one-way process,” but a mutual delivering action–or to borrow Benjamin’s words, “a ‘liberation’ that is mutual and reciprocal between the ‘original’ and the ‘translation'” (188). The tension produced by the paradoxical relation of both conflict and convergence between globalization and localization is an important feature of postmodern cultural diaspora in which various cultural presences constantly translate themselves. In the last part of her book, Chow attempts to refigure some new models for cultural translation in terms of a global/local dialectic. The issue she raises is how the demand for self-translatable cultural products has increased as a consequence of global/local interaction. In Chow’s opinion, cultural translation suggests a kind of global consciousness that undermines the rigid compartmentalization of cultural consumption. In order to share and exchange in a global market, opinion-makers and filmmakers of different cultures must translate their cultural products into terms that are interculturally accountable. Cultural translation will not lead to dissolution of local cultural difference; on the contrary, it demands vigorous re-examination of the changing mechanism of the international flows of various national and local cultures. This re-examination, as Chow has demonstrated, can help us perceive how “the less powerful (cultures) negotiate the imposition of the agenda of the powerful” (201). By linking filmmaking with translation, Chow emphasizes that contemporary Chinese films are cultural translations, which provide a process that “we must go through in order to arrive–not at the new destination of the truth of an ‘other’ culture but at the weakened foundations of Western metaphysics as well as the disintegrated bases of Eastern tradition” (201). Cultural translation, therefore, informs a paradox of global/local interaction in the postcolonial, post-third-worldist critical moment. In order for Chinese local primitive to be understood and accepted, the Chinese filmmakers and opinion-makers alike must fight their battle over its global sense with the same paradigms/technology. What we can see in the battle is the emergence of a new global-conscious localism in film as well as in scholarship that correlates with the current international racing of cultural re-location, in which the ironic “self-anthropologizing” discourse starts to challenge what Arif Dirlik calls “EuroAmericans’ privilege of interpreting China’s past for the Chinese” (38). In this sense, far from being the art of exotic seduction, contemporary Chinese films are self-staged in the world market as a new form of cultural resistance against the Western hegemonic power in the age of cultural diaspora. The primitives that contemporary Chinese cinema presents, in Chow’s final analysis, are translated and translatable “‘fables’ that cast light on the ‘original’ that is our world’s violence, and they mark the passages that head not toward the ‘original’ that is the West or the East but toward survival in the postcolonial world” (201-02).

Works Cited

 

• Dirlik, Arif. “The Global in the Local.” Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 21-45.
• Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
• Nygren, Scott. “Doubleness and Idiosyncrasy in Cross-Cultural Analysis.” Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged. Eds. Namid Naficy and Teshome H. Gabriel. Langhorne, Pennsylvania: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993. 173-187.