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Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Edited by SHELDON H. Lu and EMILIE YUEH-YU YEH. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. vii, 413 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $29.00 (paper).
This volume mainly consists of essays whose earlier versions appeared in the Chinese cinema double issue of Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Divided into three parts (historiography, periodization, trends; poetics, directors, styles; and politics, nationhood, globalization), the volume inherits the triptych structure of Sheldon H. Lu's first edited collection, Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (University of Hawai'i Press, 1997). Not surprisingly, this volume again covers a wide range of topics pertaining to Chinese-language cinema or "Sinophone film" (p. 4).
A new development, which is also a unique contribution of this volume, lies in its inclusion of diasporic Chinese filmmaking in the United States and Singapore-an endeavor to "establish connections and linkages in the Chinese-speaking world beyond the political borderlines of the modern nation-state" (p. 10). The "Chinese language" (dialects as well as Mandarin Chinese) that defines the selected films, therefore, is not simply a linguistic qualification; more important, it indicates a complex linguistic politics that colludes, contests, and negotiates the nation-state borderlines through variant cinematic deployment. There are five ways of understanding the complicated relationship between language and the nation-state, as well as identity...