In the growing field of Chinese film studies, Yiman Wang's Remaking Chinese Cinema is unique in that it tracks cultural flows through cinematic remakes and complicates our understanding of geopolitics, transculturation, and globalization. Wang states clearly that “the situation-based comparative approach” guides her entire book (p. 17). She resorts to Benjamin's differentiation between Nachleben (afterlife) and Urgeschichte (prehistory) and contends: “the remake not only bears and brings forth a secret film embedded in its predecessor, but also potentially bares and undermines the predecessor's ideological premise and structural principle” (p. 13). The remake, in this sense, functions as a prism through which we can reexamine a century-long history of Chinese cinema.
Chapter 1, “The Goddess: Tracking the ‘Unknown Woman’ from Hollywood through Shanghai to Hong Kong,” compares three maternal melodramas, Stella Dallas (1925) from Hollywood, The Goddess (1934) from Shanghai, and Rouge Tears (1938) from Hong Kong. Wang enumerates...
