Woman, Demon, Human is director Huang Shuqin's fifth feature film but the first which, by her own testimony, she wholly identified with on a personal level. Defying any conventional scheme of classification based on style or genre, it has been described by the eminent Chinese feminist film critic and scholar Dai Jinhua as the first Chinese film to be made entirely from a woman's perspective, and by others as the first (according to some commentators, almost the only) truly 'feminist' film to have been made in China. Huang Shuqin herself has affirmed Dai Jinhua's view that the film expresses a woman's distinctive subjectivity but denies that she set out to make a specifically 'feminist' film. Although it shares some stylistic features in common with other 'Fourth Generation' Chinese films from the 1980s, notably in its depiction of rural life in provincial China in the early years of the People's Republic, much of the film is wholly original in its conception, especially in the way it combines naturalistic and non-naturalistic ways of story-telling and uses images drawn from childhood memories and subjective fantasy as well as live stage performance to evoke the principal character's internal mental states. Though little known in the West (or by younger Chinese audiences), Woman Demon Human is regarded by many Chinese film scholars as Huang Shuqin's masterpiece and as one of the best Chinese films of the twentieth century.

Huang Shuqin (b. 1939), the daughter of Huang Zuolin, a well-known film and stage director of the 1930s and '40s, graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1964 just before the start of the Cultural Revolution, and consequently her career in film-making did not really begin until the late 1970s. Starting as an assistant to veteran director and political survivor Xie Jin, during the 1980s and '90s Huang Shuqin directed or co-directed nearly a dozen feature films, including her debut film Contemporary People (1981), Forever Young (1983) and The Soul of the Painter (1994), as well as Woman, Demon, Human, but from 1990 onwards she increasingly turned to directing TV drama series, in which capacity she has been very successful.

Although Huang Shuqin greatly admired Pei Yanling both as a woman and as an artist, and accompanied her on tour nearly two years while researching and preparing to direct Woman, Demon, Human, the narrative of the film differs markedly in many respects from Pei Yanling's actual life-story, notably with reference to the events of her childhood. Thus whereas in the film Qiu Yun's mother runs off with her lover, abandoning her husband and daughter, in actuality when her parents split up, Pei Yanling initially lived with her mother before returning to her father nearly 2 years later. Also, in the film, there is no suggestion that Qiu Yun's father ever remarried after her mother's departure, whereas in actuality Pei Yanling's father married another Hebei opera actress while she was still a child. The film's account of Qiu Yun's difficult early years first training to become an opera performer and then struggling to establish herself professionally largely ignores the contemporary political context which seriously interfered with Pei Yanling's artistic development during the late 1950s, while the artistically barren years of the Cultural Revolution are passed over in tactful silence. However, it may be argued that the film's fictionalised account still manages to do justice to Pei Yanling's development as a woman of strong and noble character and to her extraordinary skill and achievements as a performing artist.

Woman, Demon, Human is also very much a product of the mid- to late 1980s, a period in which many younger Chinese artists and intellectuals were being influenced by and experimenting with newly accessible Western ideas, especially psychoanalysis and feminism, and forms part of the searching interrogation of traditional Chinese culture and values, as well as the political legacies of the recent past, undertaken by many writers, artists and film-makers at this time. However, the film's critique of the refusal of traditional patriarchal Chinese culture to allow women full stature as self-determining human beings remains as valid today as in the 1980s, as does its vindication of the demand of exceptional female artists to be taken seriously by an overwhelmingly male cultural establishment, themes which Huang Shuqin was to revisit some years later in The Soul of the Painter (1994).

Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London)