Portraits de femmes dans la Chine des réformes : une analyse des films de Li Yu et Ning Ying

Abstract

This paper starts from the new feminine ideal that comes from dominant discourses in the reform
era in China, as noted by Harriet Evans (Evans 1997), in order to study what are the possible disruptions of this ideal within discourses, especially in cinema. Thus we will study three films by two
women filmmakers: Fish and Elephant (2001), Lost in Beijing (2007) by Li Yu, and Perpetual Motion
(2005) by Ning Ying. These films all portray unusual figures of women in the Chinese cinematic
industry: lesbians, migrant workers, and 女强人 nüqiangren from the business and cultural elite in
Beijing. Each in their own way, these female characters unsettle this feminine ideal in respectively
the following themes: marriage, maternity and adultery. Through both a screenplay and formal analysis, the author argues that these films are part of a feminist cinema, a women’s cinema as
Alison Butler defines it: as a minor cinema that is produced within a dominant context but that
stands for a marginalized group, here women (Butler 2002).