Stanley Kwan's 80-minute Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema, an examination of films from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China strictly from the point of view of gender and explicitly from the highly personal and autobiographical vantage point of an openly gay director.
An exciting and comprehensive survey of Chinese cinema. Dividing his survey into half a dozen chapters dealing with such topics as "Absence of the Father," "Feminine and Masculine, Face and Body," father figures, elder-brother figures who become father surrogates, and transvestites and transsexuals, Kwan may give short shrift to mother figures--apart from his own mother, whose very moving comments conclude the film. But he nevertheless succeeds at describing the contours of a wide-ranging film history and the changes in culture that inform that history.
Kwan introduces an array of relatively unknown figures (Includin Maxu Weibang, a "uniquely perverse" horror specialist who worked in the Shanghai studios in the 30s) and also provides absorbing commentary by and about, among others, Hong Kong action director Chang Cheh and his disciple John Woo; Hong Kong directors Wong Kar-wai and Allen Fong; Taiwanese directors Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee, and Tsai Ming-liang (most of them speaking about their fathers or children and how these relationships inflect their films); older mainland directors such as Xie Jin; and actor Leslie Cheung (critiquing some of his own pictures). Kwan interviews heterosexual directors Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark, and Zhang Yuan (a maverick mainland independent) about their sexual attitudes--and charges Chen's Farewell My Concubine with homophobia, particularly in relation to the Lilian Lee novel it's based on--and in the process bears intelligent witness not only to the changes in sexual sensibility and family values taking place across the Chinese-speaking world, but also to the range and vitality of the recent filmmaking that reflects these changes.
