Polylocality, Revisited: Toward a Theory of Solidarity in Relation to Sinophone Filmmaking

Abstract

In his book Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, Yingjin Zhang proposes polylocality as a theoretical framework to perceive Chinese cinema within a cross border and worldly network. Through polylocality, Zhang argues that cinema designates the relationality among differentiated positions across places, which challenges the concept of transnational cinema that predominantly underscores the spatial relationship between cinema and the world. The act of mobilization, migration, and nomadicity in the process of filmmaking also innovates (un-)wanted mutuality, intimacy, and reciprocity, with or without plan. In this paper, I argue that the framework of polylocality bears the potentiality to open the process of documentary filmmaking as a solitary practice, both on and off screen, through a close reading of Havana Divas, a documentary featuring two Cantonese opera divas living in Cuba. I contend that the field of transpacific studies, breaking through from the national imagination in the concept of (trans-)national cinema, reinforces Zhang’s theory of polylocality and sheds light on the film practice that involves the mutual mobilization of both the filmmaker and the subject.

Notes

1 Due to the subject matter of this article, the Sinophone filmmaking here complies with the definition of Sinophone brought by Sheldon Lu Hsiao-peng, which includes the action of film production in Mainland China. See Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics, 162–63.

2 Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 4.

3 In the Introduction to Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, Zhang enlists theoretical works from Yi-Fu Tuan (vis-à-vis the continuum of scale regardless of the change of location), Jing Wang (in relation to the contested production of scales between state-controlled and private media), Carolyn Carter (regarding multiple attachments happening to highly mobile groups), David Goodman (focusing on translocality as a status of being identified with more than one location), to Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein (who expand the definition of the translocality to observe the circulation of capital, ideas, styles, and modes of communication). See Tuan, Space and Place, 149; J. Wang, ed., Locating China, 1–30; Oakes and Schein, eds., Translocal China, 1–2.

4 Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 9–10.

5 Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 12.

6 The current endeavor on theorizing national cinema includes the “critical transnationalism” model from Will Higbee and Hong Hwee Lim, and a taxonomy based on the process of production, distribution, reception from Matte Hjort. Though seeing the limitation of transnational cinema, Dudley Andrew proposes five phases on the ever-changing dynamics of world cinema (cosmopolitan phase, the national phase, the federated phase, the world cinema phase, and the global phase) in sync with the global geopolitics from 1896 until now. See Higbee and Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema,” 10; Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism,” 14; Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag,” 60.

7 Here Zhang employs film scholar Tom O’Regan’s term “dispersed” to describe the heterogenous character of Chinese cinema due to the unstable geopolitics and change of regimes in China. See O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, 5; Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 20.

8 Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 19–20.

9 Chow, The Age of the World Target, 79.

10 Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 13.

11 Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” 66.

12 Stam, World Literature, Transnational Cinema, Global Media, 239.

13 Kim, “Asia-Latin America as Method,” 101.

14 MacDougal, The Corporeal Image, 3.

15 Jackson, Minima Ethnographica, 6.

16 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible, 267.

17 Butler, “Solidarity/Susceptibility,” 11.

18 Thede, “Havana Divas.”

19 Butler, “Solidarity/Susceptibility,” 13.

20 Havana Divas, directed by Louisa Wei.

21 Cuban Chinese, directed by Pok Chi Lau.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wentao Ma

Wentao Ma is a fourth-year PhD student in Cultural Studies at the Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego. His research interests are in the theory and culture of care in media practices. Wentao also serves as a translator between English and Chinese and his translation has been published by a number of journals, such as Journal of Chinese Cinemas and Contemporary Cinema 当代电影. In addition to his academic career, he is also dedicated to film curation and has worked at San Diego Asian Film Festival and CineCina Film Festival in New York.