Help BuckeyeLink Map Find People Webmail Search Ohio S

MCLC RESOURCE CENTER

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture

JOURNAL REVIEWS WEB PUBS BLOG BIBLIOGRAPHIES VIDEO LECTURES

MARCH 28, 2018

A brief history of women’s filmmaking

by denton.2@osu.edu at 9:21am

Source: WAGIC (3/26/18)

A Brief History of Women’s Film-making in Mainland China

By Lidan Hu

ARCHIVED POSTS
Select Month

CATEGORIES
Architecture/urban planning (111)

Before the founding of the socialist state in 1949, only one woman director Art (292)

was recorded in Chinese film history: Xie Caizhen, who made her single Book reviews (294)

Conference Announcements (720)

film, An Orphan’s Cry(Guchu beisheng), in 1925. Unfortunately this film is no
Culture (232)
longer available to watch. The enforcement of gender equality after 1949 by
Dance (17)
the CCP ensured women’s participation in the film industry. During the 1950s
Diaspora (113)
and 1960s, women directors such as Wang Ping, Wang Shaoyan, Yan Bili and
Education (427)
Dong Kena received institutional endorsement from state film studios and Environment (232)

contributed reputable films that have been granted the honour of classic Film (606)

works of Chinese cinema: The Story of Liubao(Liubao de gushi, dir. Wang Ping, Funding (71)

History (503)
1959), The Eternal Wave (Yongbu xiaoshi de dianbo, dir. Wang Ping, 1959), A
Hong Kong (381)

Job Announcements (313)

Grass on Kunlun Mountain (Kunlun shanxia yike cao, dir. Dong Kena, 1958), Language (131)

and others. Lectures (120)

Literature (1,079)

MCLC (249)
As the first woman director in Socialist China, Wang Ping was designated as
Media (757)
the vice-director of the PLA August 1st Film Studio. She was best known for
Music (95)
her revolutionary films. Her successful career and the emphasis on her gender
New publications (657)
identity in publications seemed to prove that women could direct News in the field (237)
revolutionary films as well as men (or even better). In her recent study of Wang Photography (72)

Ping’s career, Lingzhen Wang brackets her discussion within the framework of Politics (1,694)

Chinese socialist feminism, analysing the neglected dynamics of socialist Programs/Grants (67)

Religion/Philosophy (60)
cinema and gender.
Society (1,013)

Sources (67)
Women directors who emerged after Wang Ping’s generation were mostly
Taiwan (258)
born in the 1940s and educated in film academies in Beijing and Shanghai in
Television (70)
the 1950s and 1960s. Along with other male directors, they are called the Theatre (83)
Fourth Generation. Before managing to make their own films, many of them Translation (404)

had worked for established directors as assistants. Such directors as Lu Uncategorized (87)

Xiaoya and Shi Xiaohua were actresses or had performing experience before
their directing career. In general, this generation of women directors was

influenced by three forces: a knowledge-structure that was constructed

according to the principles of “revolutionary idealism,” a concept of cinema

that was formed with the guidance of established directors who espoused the

tenets of socialist realism, and an aesthetic enlightenment acquired through

study of European cinema.

The Cultural Revolution prevented women directors of the Fourth Generation

from pursuing their film-making careers until the late 1970s. By that time they

were around forty years old. Younger women directors (the Fifth Generation)

who embarked on film-making in the 1980s were mostly educated in the

directing department of Beijing Film Academy. The development of women’s

film-making in these crucial years was contemporaneous with the general

renaissance of Chinese cinema.

Zhang Nuanxin, one of the women directors who were encouraged by the
new political atmosphere in the 1980s, is renowned for her desire to

modernise film language. Her contribution to Chinese cinema contained

double layers of meaning: her call for modernisation formally initiated the

theoretical debates after her article “On the Modernisation of Film Language”

was published; meanwhile, she practised the manifesto in which she

elaborated her suggestions on the modernisation of film language,

emphasising a personal perspective that is strongly associated with female

consciousness. Her first film, The Drive to Win (Sha’ou, 1981), tells a story of a

woman who devotes herself to the honour of her country. Although the film

remains linked to the standard ideology in its call for selfless individual

devotion, the heroine of the film, Sha’ou, demonstrates an unprecedented

degree of agency.

While Zhang Nuanxin made her voice heard in the initial stage of postsocialist

film-making in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of other women

directors were also productive. Lu Xiaoya, Huang Shuqin, Shi Shujun, Shi
Xiaohua, Wang Haowei, Wang Junzheng, Hu Mei, Liu Miaomiao, and Peng

Xiaolian made their first film in this period. Their films provided diversified

pictures of Chinese history, with portrayals of women positioned in varied

contexts: the young student An Ran in Lu Xiaoya’s The Girl in Red (Hongyi

shaonü, 1985); a group of women soldiers in the Second Revolutionary Civil

War in Liu Miaomiao’sWomen on the Long March (Mati shengsui, 1986);

women who struggle for economic independence and freedom to love in

Peng Xiaolian’s Women’s Story (Nüren de gushi, 1987); and women who face

new challenges of balancing career and domestic pressures in Huang

Shuqin’s Woman-Demon-Human (Ren gui qing, 1987).

The prospects for women filmmakers in the 1990s became less optimistic

because of changes in the studio system and the entrenching of

commercialism. The emergence of independent documentary films in the

1990s demonstrated a tendency of filmmakers to reexamine and reconstruct

their individual identities and subjectivities in a new context. Li Hong, with her
documentary Out of Phoenix Bridge (Huidao fenghuang qiao, 1997), provides

pictures of four rural women’s daily life in Beijing as migrant workers.

Embracing a strong empathy for them, Li’s documentary reveals an intimacy

between a woman director and her subjects. In the new millennium, three

women pioneered in personal documentary: Yang Lina, Wang Fen and Tang

Danhong. In their Home Video (Jiating luxiang dai, Yang Lina, 2000), They Are

not the Only Unhappy Couple (Bu kuaile de buzhi yige, Wang Fen, 2000),

and Nightingale, Not the Only Voice (Yeying bushi weiyi de gehou, Tang

Danhong, 2001), the filmmakers direct their DV cameras towards the private

space of family. These films reveal the desire for self-understanding, with

gender playing a crucial role in their point of view in depicting their family

stories. Meanwhile, other women directors, including Xu Jinglei and Li Yu,

tried their hand at making art-house fictional films before seeking the

commercial rewards of the mass market.

Women’s film-making in mainland China has often provided a critical look at

the social, political and economic contexts in which women have been

portrayed and their issues have been discussed. In many films they made,
 women directors and women characters in their films spoke in their own

voices and reflected on their positions in the official narrative of Chinese

history.

Lidan Hu received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Edinburgh in the

UK and is now teaching in the English Department of Sichuan University in

China. Her current research interests include gender and film.

Posted in Film Bookmark the permalink.

← Historian Shen Zhihua ‘Modern Chinese intellectuals are spineless’ →

Leave a Reply
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment

Anti-spam *

Anti-spam word
To prove you are a person (not a spam script), type the words from the following picture or audio file.

Name *

Email *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I
comment.

Post Comment

denton.2@osu.edu
The MCLC Resource Center

Managed and operated by Kirk Denton

If you have trouble accessing this page and need to request an alternate format, contact u@osu.edu

The content of this site is published by the site owner(s) and is not a statement of advice, opinion, or information pertaining to The Ohio State University. Neither text, nor links to other
websites, is reviewed or endorsed by The Ohio State University.

Search the MCLC Resource Center:

Google search

Search

Log in