Crossing Cultures: Investigating Chinese Language Cinemas within and beyond 'the National'

Studies of national cinemas have identified auteur directors as important elements in the building of national cinemas and more especially the projection of national identities. This is partly due to the importance of international film festivals in the distribution and popularization of non-Hollywood cinema to the world and partly because these festivals by their nature privilege the auteur director. This thesis explores this important link between directors and national cinema within a more complex context than has tended to preoccupy studies of national cinema, namely, the individual nation state. The first part of this thesis examines the three distinctive national cinemas that have close but problematic ties/links with each other - Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In this major part of the thesis I explore not only the emergence of auteur directors within the three national cinemas but also problematize the overemphasis of the nation state as a source of identity and meaning by examining the influence of deep-seated cultural factors/philosophies, such as those of Confucianism and Taoism, that can be seen to be shared beyond geographical and political boundaries. I draw on the concept of national cinema (Andrew Higson, 2002) and its integral notions of projecting the nation and in addition I also explore the concept of 'Imagined Community' (Benedict Anderson, 1991). Using textual analysis, I investigate the ways that certain auteur directors project ideas of national identity in these three Chinese language cinemas, paying particular attention to the convergence of cinematic style and traditional philosophies. The final part of the thesis engages with three key auteur directors that emerged in the earlier section of this study ( one from Mainland China, one from Hong Kong and one from Taiwan) and looks at films they have made either in, or for, a transnational context. This final part furthers the investigation of the role of auteur directors and the signification of complex national meanings in contexts beyond that of the nation state. This thesis concludes that authorship can provide new interpretative and explanatory perspectives for reading the national in terms of cultural meanings across geographical and political borders and also in the transnational context