Screening international queer cinema in China

ABSTRACT

Given the restricted number of foreign films which can be officially screened in Mainland China and restrictions on the portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters in visual media, international queer cinema tends to be screened at non-theatrical events such as film festivals, film clubs and café screenings. Building on existing work on Chinese film festival studies, this article draws attention to the wider ecosystem of screening practices in China, which engage with international queer film culture through their choice of films and also their mediations of LGBTQ+ cultures. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how such events navigate language difference through translation, how they engage audiences through discussion or other means, and how they participate in the pink economy. The sorts of negotiation of meaning taking place demonstrate the complexity of transcultural queer cinema practices. The reception of films in translation leads to a notion of queer cinema in China as a cosmopolitan but local activity that contributes to local worldmaking practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation
• screening
• queer cinema
• China
• film festival

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank participants for their time for interviews and discussion. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK [grant number AH/S00209X/1].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Anonymised transcripts of interviews cited are available from the authors on request.

Notes

1. In this sense, we are retranslating the Chinese term ‘tongzhi’, which originally means ‘comrades’ but which has been adopted by the LGBTQ community to refer to itself and which is used in a similar way to the more inclusive versions of ‘queer’.

2. In this way, our research echoes the sites of analysis in Powell’s (2019) work on early ‘gay’ cinema in the U.S.A. Powell investigates a network of sites including mail order, screenings in bars and homes, and screenings in independent cinemas.

3. While there is a thriving, if illicit, online culture around queer cinema in China, this article will not discuss it due to our focus on screening films as a collective (physical) experience. There are clear overlaps between this online culture and the physical events we discuss, but due to the limited space, we cannot explore them in detail here.

4. Before beginning this research, ethical approval was sought and received from the Faculty of Humanities Ethics Committee at the University of Exeter, Application Number 1819–001. Interviewees were given a Participant Information Sheet and this was discussed with them, and they signed a Consent Form for the interview allowing for the use of interview data in publications. For ethnographic activities, due to the fluid nature of the environments, it would be impossible to ask all participants to sign a consent form, as they might enter and leave the site during the observation, and the consent form itself would alter the nature of the event. In such cases, consent was sought from the event organisers. The events we attended were themselves public (though ticketed) events.

5. Most scholars agreed on a date of 2001 (e.g. Yang 2019), though Wang et al. (2019) date it to 2000. It should be noted that some hospitals continue to offer ‘sexual orientation conversion efforts’ (Wang et al. 2019), demonstrating that the medical discourse around homosexuality and bisexuality has not yet achieved a consensus of acceptance.

6. For wider discussion of queer fandom in China, see essays collected in (Lavin and Yang 2017).

7. The situations are different in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where there are also queer film festivals. See Richards (2016) for work on the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Tan (2019) analyses the network of Asian queer film festivals and includes comparison between those in Mainland China and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region.

8. Before the event, we obtained permission to observe the festival from the organisers. We draw here from our fieldwork notes and publicly available data about the festival (from, for example, its website) and we will not name anyone or any corporation not named in that publicly available material.

9. These corporations are not mentioned by name in the series of recaps of events on the Shanghai Pride Film Festival website (https://www.shpride.com/films/?lang=en).

10. Jiang et al. 2014 explore the use of mobile phones as screen time for adolescents in China, but uses the rather vague term ‘playing with mobile phone’ to describe the activity, so it is unclear what people are actually doing with them, i.e. what media they are viewing, reading or playing.

11. This was also visible through the inclusion of a session on translation and subtitling as part of the festival.

12. Shanghai Pride Film Festival was also a member of Asian Pacific Queer Film Festival Association (APQFFA).

13. Shanghai Pride Festival, https://www.shpride.com/2019/06/02/shpff-25/?lang=en

14. And indeed, ShPFF itself has faced since we undertook our fieldwork.

15. This result dominated the search on Baidu and Google when we searched from the UK on 2 December 2019.

16. The status of queer film clubs in China is complicated by the historical existence of government sponsored and supported film discussion groups (Yang 1994), thus giving a precedent to state supported screenings. However, the film screenings we observed were not supported by the Chinese state. Scholars who have worked on amateur and non-theatrical distribution in China include Ran (2014) and Gao (2015), among others.

17. We define arthouse here as non-mainstream, i.e. the sort of film seldom seen at a multiplex, and which may include narrative cinema, documentaries, and experimental or other non-narrative works.

18. We obtained permission from the organisers to observe this public event.

19. Although the program is live streamed, its recordings can be accessed via Shanghai Community Radio’s channel at Bilibili.com as well as YouTube.

20. While the owners of this café gave us permission to use the name in our research, we have chosen to anonymise it.

21. Interview with one of the café’s founders; this interview informs much of the following discussion.

22. Interview with the owners, 2019.

23. We have not been able to address, for example, the internet cultures of queer cinema and their online screening of films. For a discussion of the lesbian fansubbing group Jihua in this context, (see Guo and Evans 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, under grant number AH/S00209X/1.

Notes on contributors

Ting Guo

Ting Guo is Senior Lecturer in Chinese and Translation Studies at the University of Liverpool, UK. She is the author of Surviving in Violent Conflicts (2017). She is Associate Editor of the journal Target.

Jonathan Evans

Jonathan Evans is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. He is the author of The Many Voices of Lydia Davis (2016) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics (2018). He is Deputy Editor of The Journal of Specialised Translation.