'Chinese Film' by Jason McGrath
Chinese Film isn’t a history of Chinese film. It’s an exploration of an idea about that nation’s film history. According to author Jason McGrath, “realism” has been consistent throughout—and the primary aesthetic—of Chinese films from the silent years through the 21st century.
But of course, realism isn’t the same as reality, no matter how “realistic” a filmmaker tries to be. And therein lies one of the ways Chinese Film becomes interesting, stimulating even. McGrath undertakes a sustained summary of the problem of “realism” and representation in the arts.
For modernizing Chinese in the early 20th century, realism was associated with progress—with science and technology, the instruments of Western power. They hoped to adopt those instruments in order to regain China’s status as a sovereign state, using foreign means to free their nation from the control of foreigners. Their millennia-old artistic allegories didn’t seem up to the task. The Chinese intelligentsia echoed Westerners who extolled film’s unique power to deliver the shock of the real—visually, temporarily, and later, audibly. Photography and film were deemed to possess a special relationship with reality, despite the obvious ability of photographers and filmmakers to filter, alter or manipulate their representations of the “real.”
And then there are the profound philosophical questions well handled in McGrath’s account. Reality really exists, and representational art of any kind, film included, is in a dialectical relation with it. Artists striving for “realism” are confronted by cultural conventions of representation and are also inevitably under pressure from what is really out there. Despite the seemingly arbitrary symbols that serve as signposts, humans are “in a never-ending and never entirely successful, effort to account for the wonder and the agony of the real,” McGrath writes.
As a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, McGrath is in a better position to cogently analyze the aesthetics, ideologies and assumptions behind Chinese film than the so-called cultural studies academics whose unreadable gibberish dominates too many academic publications on cinema and mass media. McGrath closely examines a raft of representational films from the war-ravaged 1930s through the Maoist era and beyond to today, giving fair assessment even to films usually dismissed by Western observers as mere propaganda.
Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age is published by University of Minnesota Press.
