Celluloid China Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society Harry H. Kuoshu November 2002 paper, 0-8093-2456-3, $30.00s cloth, 0-8093-2455-5, $50.00s 416 pages, 5 illus., 6 x 9 Film Studies   Celluloid China: Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society by Harry H. Kuoshu is an introduction to the cinema of mainland China from the early 1930s to the early 1990s.    Emphasizing both film contexts and film texts, this study invites Chinese film scholars and students to a broad cinematic analysis that includes investigations of cultural, cross-cultural, intellectual, social, ethnic, and political issues. This unique text also illustrates how a film can provide distinctive insights into artistic fashion, social taste, ideological tension, cultural geography, and historical moments. Such a holistic evaluation allows for a better understanding of both the genesis of a special kind of film art from the People’s Republic of China and the culture and society exemplified in those films.   The fifteen films include: Two Stage Sisters; Hibiscus Town; Farewell My Concubine; Street Angel; Three Women; Human, Woman, Demon; Judou; Girl from Hunan; Sacrificed Youth; Horse Thief; Yellow Earth; Old Well; Red Sorghum; Black Cannon Incident; and Good Morning, Beijing.   Kuoshu organizes these films into five sections: History in and out of Melodrama: Glory, Guilt and Fantasy; Speaking for the Other: Changing Allegorical Roles for Women; Cinema Exotica: Ethnic Minorities as the PRC’s “Internal Other”; The Chinese Western: Roots Hidden in the Yellow Earth; and New City Films: Beyond-Yellow-Earth Experiences of Postsocialism.    Discussions of each film have an introduction, passages from the director’s own notes whenever available, and a scholarly article. Discussion questions are found in an appendix. Within its complete bibliography, the book also features a suggested reading list for Chinese film classes.    Celluloid China: Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society is the first book to provide such an exhaustive study of the art and cultural context of Chinese cinema.   Harry H. Kuoshu, aka Haixin Xu, is an assistant professor of cinema studies and modern languages at Northeastern University, where he teaches Chinese film, culture, and language. In addition to articles on cinema and Chinese studies appearing in Asian Cinema, Modern Drama, American Journal of Chinese Studies, and Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, he is the author of Lightness of Being in China: Adaptation and Discursive Figuration in Cinema and Theater.

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