Gender imaginations in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Wuxia world

Positions

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 441-471

  Cai, Rong ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247651260     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-13-2-441     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Naysayers sometimes faced harsh backlashes. See, for example, Charlotte Raven, "Crashing Bore, Wooden Drama," Guardian, January 16, 2001, film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,422986,00.html
2. and the response from Anna Chen, "Crouching Tiger, Not Very Well Hidden Prejudices," Guardian, January 19, 2001, film.guardian.co.uk/ features/featurepages/0,3604,424523,00.html
3. Raven's review generated so much outrage that Ian Katz, the Guardian editor in charge of the column in which the review appeared, published an open letter, addressing it, "Dear (angry) reader." A copy of the letter can be viewed at www.dimsum.co.uk/article.php?sid=173 (accessed September 9, 2003)
4. See Grace Leung and Joseph Chen, "The Hong Kong Cinema and Its Overseas Market: A Historical Review, 1950-1995," in Fifty Years of Electric Shadows, ed. Law Kar and Stephen Teo (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1997)
5. David Bordwell, "Once upon a Time in the West; Enough to Make a Strong Man Weep: John Woo," in Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 82-114
6. For discussions of Hollywood's absorption of Hong Kong action cinema, see also Sheldon H. Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 122-26
7. Yvonne Tasker attributes the appearance of the fighting heroine in black action films to American companies' attempts to capitalize on the success of Hong Kong action movies with black audiences. The critic also points out that the influence of Hong Kong martial arts films was behind the action heroine in Hollywood films in the 1970s and the 1980s. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), 21-26, and the rest of the chapter
8. On the Western reception of Hong Kong martial arts movies, see David Desser, "The Kung Fu Craze: Hong Kong Cinema's First American Reception," in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, ed. Poshek Fu and David Desser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 19-43
9. According to Fu and Desser, the art-house success of King Hu's Touch of Zen (1975) eventually led to a renaissance of martial arts films overseas in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Fu and Desser, introduction to The Cinema of Hong Kong, 3-4
10. See also Bordwell, "Once upon a Time in the West," in Planet Hong Kong, 82-97
11. See also Bordwell's "Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity," in At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, ed. Esther C. M. Yau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 73-93
12. Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity, 137-38
13. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), 177-78
14. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 11
15. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992), 123
16. Bad Object-Choices, How Do I Look: Queer Film and Video (Seattle: Bay, 1991)
17. bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996)
18. "The Last 'Special Issue' on Race?" special issue, Screen 29, no. 4 (1988)
19. Rey Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 9-27
20. See, for example, Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, and Janice R. Welsch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)
21. E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997)
22. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was adapted from volume four of the He-Tie (crane-iron) pentalogy, a novel of the same title, by Wang Dulu (1909-77)
23. Stephen Teo, for example, sees both the central role of women in the film and the fight scenes in the inn and the bamboo forest as Lee's tribute to King Hu, the master of Hong Kong martial arts cinema. Teo, "Love and Swords: The Dialectics of Martial Arts Romance," www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/ 11/crouching.html (accessed June 13, 2001)
24. In his study of the warrior figure in Chinese literature, James Liu identifies the knightly virtues as altruism, justice, individual freedom, personal loyalty, courage, truthfulness and mutual faith, honor and fame, generosity and contempt for wealth. Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 7
25. Verina Glaessner identifies vengeance as a hallmark of the genre. Glaessner, Kung Fu: Cinema of Vengeance (London: Lorrimer, 1974)
26. Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant, 85. Liu provides a translation of the story "The Maiden of Yue" on the same page
27. "Hung-hsien chuan" ("The Story of Hongxian"), in E. D. Edwards, Chinese Prose Literature of the Tang Period (AD 618-906), vol. 2, (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1938), 123-27
28. "Yinniang the Swords Woman," in Chi-chen Wang, trans., Traditional Chinese Tales (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 98-103
29. Victoria Cass, Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies, and Geishas of the Ming (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999)
30. "Ts'ui Shen-ssu's Wife," in Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant, 96-97
31. Lienä zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women), compiled by the scholar Liu Xiang (77-76 BC) in the early Han period (206 BC-AD 9), includes life stories of many women in antiquity who mutilated their bodies in the name of chastity. Liu Xiang, Lienü zhuan (Taipei: Sibu Beiyao, 1966). Since the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), the imperial government has encouraged female self-destruction by constructing monumental arches honoring chaste widows and offering financial incentives to their families
32. Under imperial law, a woman's relationship to her husband was that of a junior to a senior. False accusation of the husband was punishable by death in the Ming period (1368-1644). In Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing times, if a husband killed his wife by accident, it was not considered a crime; but if the husband was the victim of an accident for which his wife could be blamed, the woman would inevitably be sentenced to death. See Ch'ü T'ung-Tsu, Law and Society in Traditional China (Paris: Mouton, 1965), 102-10
33. For discussions of female martial arts stars, see, for example, Bey Logan, "Fighting Females: The Far East's Favorite Females of Fury," in Hong Kong Action Cinema (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1996), 153-71
34. Glaessner, "Lady Kung Fu: Angela Mao," in Kung Fu: Cinema of Vengeance, 73-82
35. The objective narration is different from the point-of-view shot in that in the point-of-view shot the camera assumes the position of a character to show us what that character sees. See Edward Branigan, "The Point-of-View Shot," in Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (New York: Mouton, 1984), 103-21
36. In a newly published study, Kam Louie identifies the dyad wen-wu (cultural attainmentmartial valor) as the axis in the Chinese conceptualization of masculinity. Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). In the book's jacket illustration - a portrait of Confucius by the artist Wu Daozi (c. 750) - the ancient sage, the ultimate representative of wen, has a sword tucked under his arm
37. James Liu suggests that the rise of the biaoju profession, which provided armed escorts to protect travelers and merchant caravans against highway robbery, may have been responsible for the decline of knight-errantry in the Qing period. The practice of biaoju significantly changed the knight-errant's relationship to law and order, turning the warriors into "guardians of the law instead of law-breakers." Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant, 53
38. John A. Lent, foreword to City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema, ed. Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover (London: Verso, 1999), ix
39. Cass, Dangerous Women, 94-97
40. see also Judith T Zeitlin, "Embodying the Disembodied: Representations of Ghosts and the Feminine," in Writing Women in Late Imperial China, ed. Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 242-63
41. Woei Lien Chong, "Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Fruit Chan's Little Cheung: Two Chinese Highlights at the 2001 International Rotterdam Film Festival," China Information 15 (2001): 171
42. Claire Johnston, "Femininity and the Masquerade: Anne of the Indies," in Jacques Tourneur, ed. Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1975), 40
43. Paul Sutton, "La Femme Nikita: Violent Woman or Amenable Spectacle?" in Film Studies: Women in Contemporary World Cinema, ed. Alexandra Heidi Karriker (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 91-100
44. Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 201-2
45. Teo suggests that society's changing attitudes toward women and homosexuals, female impersonation in the Chinese theatrical tradition, and the stereotyping of eunuchs all played a part in Hong Kong's fascination with the gender-bending motif in the 1990s. See also Bhaskar Sarkar, "Hong Kong Hysteria: Martial Arts Takes from a Mutating World," in Yau, At Full Speed, 169-70
46. Teo, Hong Kong Cinema, 200-201
47. Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 50
48. For discussions of the nature of the spectator, see "The Spectatrix," ed. Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane, special issue, Camera Obscura, nos. 20/21 (1989)
49. See also Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1994), 193-209
50. For an anthology on various aspects of the global/local interactions in cross-cultural productions and consumptions, see Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996)
51. Mark Landler, "Lee's Tiger, Celebrated Everywhere but at Home," New York Times, February 27, 2001. According to Landler, this figure puts Crouching Tiger way behind the Hollywood import Mission Impossible 2 and a local comedy, Needing You, by Johnny To
52. See the comments on filmcritics.org.hk/crouchingtiger/review.html (accessed August 12, 2003)
53. Landler, "Lee's Tiger, Celebrated Everywhere but at Home."
54. "HK Underwhelmed by Tiger Phenomenon," news.Ichinastar.com/ news.shtml?1=english& a=express&p=1048022 (accessed August 12, 2003)
55. Other viewers shared this opinion. See reviews by Landler and Steve Rose. "The film is so slow, it's like grandma telling stories." Steve Rose, Guardian, February 13, 2001, film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120, 437326,00.html (accessed April 22, 2005)
56. Logan, Hong Kong Action Cinema, 177
57. Hu Ke, "The Influence of Hong Kong Cinema on Mainland China (1980-1996)," in Fifty Years of Electric Shadows, 171-78
58. An Pingqiu and Zhang Peiheng, Zhongguo jingshu daguan (An Overview of Banned Books in China) (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenhua Chubanshe, 1990)
59. Liu Damu, "From Chivalric Fiction to Martial Arts Film," in A Study of the Hong Kong Swordplay Film (1945-1980) (Hong Kong: Urban Council of Hong Kong, 1981), 47-62
60. Yu Mo-wan, "Swords, Chivalry and Palm Power: A Brief Survey of the Cantonese Martial Arts Cinema, 1938-1970," in A Study of the Hong Kong Swordplay Film (1945-1980), 99
61. When Beijing University granted Jin Yong, one of the most prominent writers of the genre, an honorary professorship in 1994, it created a great deal of commotion in the scholarly community. For a discussion on the debate over popular fiction in the May Fourth period, see Chen Pingyuan, "Literature High and Low: 'Popular Fiction' in Twentieth-Century China," in The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China, ed. Michel Hockx (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 113-33
62. For discussions of the reception of transnational cinema in mainland China and Zhang Yimou's films, see, for example, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, "National Cinema, Cultural Critique, Transnational Capital: The Films of Zhang Yimou," in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 105-36
63. Tonglin Lu, "The Zhang Yimou Model," chap. 5 in Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China, part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
64. Lu, "National Cinema, Cultural Critique, Transnational Capital," 107-13
65. See Rey Chow's critique of cross-cultural interpretative politics in the criticism of Zhang Yimou in her book Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), chap. 4, esp. 152-72
66. See also Yingjin Zhang's discussion of transnational cultural politics in contemporary Chinese cinema in "Chinese Cinema and Transmational Politics: Rethinking Film Festivals, Film Productions, and Film Studies," in Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002), 15-41