What is the sentimental? How can we understand it by way of the visual
and narrative modes of signification specific to cinema and through
the manners of social interaction and collective imagining specific to a
particular culture in transition? What can the sentimental tell us about
the precarious foundations of human coexistence in this age of
globalization?
Rey Chow explores these questions through nine contemporary Chinese
directors (Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Ann Hui, Peter Chan,
Wayne Wang, Ang Lee, Li Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang) whose accomplishments
have become historic events in world cinema. Approaching their works
from multiple perspectives, including the question of origins,
nostalgia, the everyday, feminine "psychic interiority,"
commodification, biopolitics, migration, education, homosexuality,
kinship, and incest, and concluding with an account of the Chinese
films' epistemic affinity with the Hollywood blockbuster Brokeback
Mountain, Chow proposes that the sentimental is a discursive
constellation traversing affect, time, identity, and social mores, a
constellation whose contours tends to morph under different historical
circumstances and in different genres and media. In contemporary Chinese
films, she argues, the sentimental consistently takes the form not of
revolution but of compromise, not of radical departure but of
moderation, endurance, and accommodation. By naming these films
sentimental fabulations--screen artifacts of cultural becoming with
irreducible aesthetic, conceptual, and speculative logics of their
own--Chow presents Chinese cinema first and foremost as an invitation to
the pleasures and challenges of critical thinking.
