Shuqin Cui. Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema . Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. 248 pages, 304 pages total including filmography, works cited includes both Western and Chinese texts, notes, index.

Cui's study is important because, as she herself notes, while gender and nation are very common subjects in Chinese cinema, scant attention has been paid to how films have used women to signify the creation of the nation-state. She argues that political efforts have feminized the nation of China at the expense of “genuine female subjectivity” (xiii). Cui finds transnational feminism to be especially helpful for the study of early film and the Chinese new cinema from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s (the so-called fifth generation films). Her argument for considering transnational issues in the former era of the Communist Party seems less developed – perhaps due to lack of space in her study – but it is especially topical when discussing international capital flow and markets in the latter era. Three other concepts crucial to her study are narration and narrative (and the ability to distinguish between them), and enunciation.

Numerous studies of Chinese films are content to simply analyze narratives without taking notice of various elements that make film a visual and aural medium. As Cui rightly points out, such a narrow focus is too simplistic. To provide fuller analyses, Cui carefully directs attention to editing, cinematography, point of view, off-screen sound effects, voice-over narration, and mise-en-scène in her extensive readings of six films: Center Stage (1992 dir. Stanley Kwan), Red Detachment of Women (1961 dir. Xie Jin), Ju Dou (1989 dir. Zhang Yimou), Farewell My Concubine (1993 dir. Chen Kaige), Army Nurse (1985 dir. Hu Mei), and Human, Woman, Demon (1987 dir. Huang Shuqin). The importance of the author's extended examination of filmic elements cannot be overstated. These persuasive analyses are integral in supporting her claims. Cui argues that early, socialist, and new wave cinema used female bodies to signify the nation, and national salvation was considered more important than women's equality or emancipation.

Cui begins this four part study with the earliest film production. Her second and third sections examine socialist cinema and the new wave beginning in the 1980s, while the final section examines women's films of the 1980s. The opening chapter on early cinema provides historical background on “foreign shadowplays” and “electric shadows,” and incorporates short studies of the contrasting roles of women characters as oppressed and in need of salvation, or as modern figures in need of followers. Although Cui stressed the importance of filmic elements elsewhere in her book, this chapter's discussion of specific films is organized around plot summaries, perhaps out of necessity due to limitations of chapter length. In a surprising move, instead of using a key early text as an example, she follows this chapter with in-depth analysis of the 1992 film Center Stage (Ruan Lingyu ) , directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Stanley Kwan. Her purpose is to investigate reconstructions of memories, or, in her own words, how this film “remakes the past for the comprehension of the present” (30). She is particularly concerned with using postmodernist readings of Center Stage as fragmented and decentered, which seem to belie feminist readings, to analyze the speaking subjects of both 1930s silent screen star Ruan Lingyu and Maggie Cheung, the Hong Kong star who portrays her.

In chapter 5, “Screening China: National Allegories and International Receptions,” Cui quotes Fredric Jameson's claim that “All third-world texts are . . . ‘national allegories'” and notes the danger that Jameson's theory is a form of “othering” national cinemas. In this argument concerning Jameson's theory, Cui is not alone. She also notes that Western academics have forced the visual language of film into written language. Her detailed analyses of the films themselves, in terms of editing, mise-en-scène, and more, amply demonstrate what is lost when film texts are viewed in this way. Cui quotes from E. Ann Kaplan, who warns about the dangers of cross-cultural analyses, and from Yingjin Zhang, who explains how the academics Chris Berry and Esther Yau have misunderstood certain Chinese films by using Western theories. Zhang suggests the acknowledgement and encouragement of a “dialogic mode” of cross-cultural analysis, in which more dominant theoretical modes interact with other paradigms. Cui not only posits that using Western discourses on non-Western texts may be self-serving for Western academics, but also warns that these texts may be made to only seem “theoretically interesting enough to warrant study” when using this lens (120). In response to criticisms about cross-cultural analysis, Cui suggests a dual approach that focuses on reading filmic aspects and which relies on “Western theoretical concepts” to explain gender topics.

As an example of her approach, in chapter 6, “The Search for Male Masculinity and Sexuality in Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou , ” she reads Ju Dou by focusing on off-screen sound effects, point of view structure, and mise-en-scène elements, and examining the male gaze, female sexuality, and narratives. While Laura Mulvey's theory of the active male gaze and passive female object of the look seems to apply to this film, Cui notes that the social structure within the film turns scopophilic pleasure into both embarrassment and identification with the female character of Ju Dou. According to Cui, male directors, in this case Zhang, make women characters extremely visible but barely audible, regaining masculinity by objectifying the female body. These male directors use women to not only signify male desire but as carriers for male dreams. Additionally, women represent the past. Although Cui's insistence on the director's power to create the mise-en-scène and framing seems slightly overstated since the cinematographer and art directors are also key participants, it may be accurate in Zhang's case, as he began as a cinematographer (a fact Cui fails to mention). She suggests that the international success of the fifth generation, or new wave, films may be self-Orientalizing when incorporating female sexuality. The international attention paid to these films contributes to the neglect of many other mainstream films, particularly women's films.

In her fourth section, she rehearses several cases of Chinese women filmmakers while rejecting Western feminism. She also summarizes the arguments of Li Xiaojian, editor in chief of the first series of women's studies texts, which appeared in 1989. From Li's perspective, it is socialism, not feminism, which led to women's liberation. But Cui counters that a woman's freedom from familial patriarchy and her integration into the nation-state nonetheless continues to deny her a subject position. Cui wishes to put Western feminism and Chinese nationalism into conversation using transnational feminism. In the Chinese context, what the text calls the “nondifference” of women directors means an increasing number of women participating as filmmakers over the century, and Cui discusses works directed by Wang Ping, Ning Ying, Hu Mei, and Huang Shuqin.

In her Postscript, Cui reads other film systems that are concerned with primarily urban settings and issues, beginning with the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s. These include state-sponsored films, commercial ventures, and independent films. She finds that, in many of the former works, images of women continue to be used in what she calls “the ongoing flux of nation and narration.” In these concluding pages, she briefly points to China's recent opening of its film market to Hollywood imports, but she really cannot be expected to provide a fuller study of this phenomenon. In addition to short plot summaries, the filmography helpfully provides film titles in Chinese and English, as well as production studio, principal cast members, director, cinematographer, and screenwriter credits. Her book is highly recommended for those interested in Chinese cinemas, women and gender studies, transnational feminism, and film.