Polylocality, Revisited: Toward a Theory of Solidarity in Relation to Sinophone Filmmaking

In his book Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, Yingjin Zhang proposes polylocality as a theoretical framework to perceive Chinese cinema within a cross border and worldly network. Through polylocality, Zhang argues that cinema designates the relationality among differentiated positions across places, which challenges the concept of transnational cinema that predominantly underscores the spatial relationship between cinema and the world. The act of mobilization, migration, and nomadicity in the process of filmmaking also innovates (un-)wanted mutuality, intimacy, and reciprocity, with or without plan. In this paper, I argue that the framework of polylocality bears the potentiality to open the process of documentary filmmaking as a solitary practice, both on and off screen, through a close reading of Havana Divas, a documentary featuring two Cantonese opera divas living in Cuba. I contend that the field of transpacific studies, breaking through from the national imagination in the concept of (trans-)national cinema, reinforces Zhang's theory of polylocality and sheds light on the film practice that involves the mutual mobilization of both the filmmaker and the subject.