Chinese and Japanese Female Film Directors : Could They Hold up Half of the Sky?

When looking at the past century of Chinese and Japanese cinema, I find a few intriguing paradoxes concerning woman’s film and female directors. First, in both cinemas and as early as the 1920s, the woman’s film became an important genre—partly thanks to audiences’ eagerness to see female stars; but the early masters of this genre are all male. Second, from the 1950s to the 1980s, Mainland China surpasses Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan greatly in terms of the proportion and position of female directors in the film industry—largely thanks to the Communist enforcement of gender equality; but a majority of works by Mainland Chinese female directors lack any sort of feminine consciousness. Finally, under the influence of Western feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, scholarly concerns and various studies on the works by female directors began in both Chinese-language territories and Japan in the mid-1980s; but in-depth and systematic analyses on these works are still missing. These paradoxes first led me into the study of cases in Mainland China, where the woman’s film has continued for decades. Female directors there have a relatively distinct trajectory, and a remarkable body of works produced from 1984 to 1994 formed a wave of women’s cinema. I then expanded my studies to cases in Hong Kong, where the woman’s film tradition can be traced, and important women directors are usually not studied as a group. The research on cases in Taiwan and Japan turned out to be very difficult, as women directors only seem to emerge by chance or with a particular trend related to their gender. I hope to share my findings in this paper, which includes two parts: the first will introduce important names and tendencies if not trends, and the second will highlight Chinese and Japanese women directors’ contribution to women’s cinema and world cinema at large.