Chinese Cinema During the Era of Reform

Chinese Cinema During the Era of Reform
Author: Ying Zhu
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2003-08-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Ying Zhu's study examines the institutional as well as the stylistic transitions of Chinese cinema, from pedagogy to art to commerce, focusing on the key film reform measures as well as the metamorphosis of Chinese 5th generation films from art film narration.

Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema

Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema
Author: Ying Zhu
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9622091768

"Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen have brought together some of the leading scholars and critics of Chinese cinema to rethink the political mutations, market manifestations, and artistic innovations that have punctuated a century of Chinese screen memories. From animation to documentary, history of the industry to cinematic attempts to recreate history, propaganda to piracy, the influx of Hollywood imports to Chinese-style blockbusters, Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema presents a fresh set of critical approaches to the field that should be required reading for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the past, present, and future of one of the most vibrant and dynamic film industries in the world."-Michael Berry, author, Jia Zhangke's "Hometown Trilogy" and A History of Pain "An excellent collection of articles that together offer a superb introduction to contemporary Chinese film studies."-Richard Pena, Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center "This is one of the most important, comprehensive, and profoundly important books about Chinese cinema. As correctly pointed out by the editors of the volume, understanding of the emerging film industry in China requires a systematic examination of arts, politics, and commerce of Chinese cinema. By organizing the inquiry of the Chinese film industry around its local and global market, politics, and film art, the authors place the current transformation of Chinese cinema within a large framework. The book has set a new standard for research on Chinese cinema. It is a must-read for students of arts, culture, and politics in China."-Tianjian Shi, Duke University Art politics, and commerce are intertwined everywhere, but in China the interplay is explicit, intimate, and elemental, and nowhere more so than in the film industry. Understanding this interplay in the era of market reform and globalization is essential to understanding mainland Chinese cinema. This interdisciplinary book provides a comprehensive reappraisal of Chinese cinema, surveying the evolution of film production and consumption in mainland China as a product of shifting relations between art, politics, and commerce. Within these arenas, each of the twelve chapters treats a particular history, development, genre, filmmaker or generation of filmmakers, adding up to a distinctively comprehensive rendering of Chinese cinema. The book illuminates China's changing stat-society relations, the trajectory of marketization and globalization, the effects of China's start historical shifts, Hollywood's role, the role of nationalism, and related themes of interest to scholars of Asian studies, cinema and media studies, political science, sociology comparative literature and Chinese language. Ying Zhu is professor of cinema studies in the Department of Media Culture and co-coordinator of the Modern China Studies Program at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Stanley Rosen is director of the East Asian Studies Center and a professor of political science at the University of Southern California.

Building a New China in Cinema

Building a New China in Cinema
Author: Laikwan Pang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2002
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780742509467

Building a New China in Cinema introduces English readers for the first time to one of the most exciting left-wing cinema traditions in the world. This unique book explores the history, ideology, and aesthetics of China's left-wing cinema movement, a quixotic film culture that was as political as commercial, as militant as sensationalist. Originating in the 1930s, it marked the first systematic intellectual involvement in Chinese cinema. In this era of turmoil and idealism, the movement's films were characterized by fantasies of heroism intertwined with the inescapable spell of impotency, thus exposing the contradictions of the filmmakers' underlying ideology as their political and artistic agendas alternately fought against or catered to the taste and viewing habits of a popular audience. Political cinema became a commercially successful industry, resulting in a film culture that has never been replicated. Drawing on detailed archival research, Pang demonstrates that this cinema movement was a product of the era's social, economic, and political discourses. The author offers a close analysis of many rarely seen films, richly illustrated with over eighty stills collected from the Beijing Film Archive. With its original conceptual approach and rich use of primary sources, this book will be of interest not only to scholars and fans of Chinese cinema but to those who study the relationship between cinema and modernity.

Projecting A Nation

Projecting A Nation
Author: Jubin Hu
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2003-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9789622096103

This is the first major work on pre-1949 Chinese cinema in English. As such, it represents a major contribution to existing discussions of both Chinese cinema and national cinema, and is an indispensible basic resource for scholars interested in Chinese film history. The book analyses the wide variety of conceptions of "Chinese national cinema" between the early years of the 20th century and 1949, and contrasts these to conceptions of national cinema in Europe and China. After years of exhausting primary historical research, the author has been able to bring to light sources hitherto not widely available. The author argues that questions and debates about the status and meaning of the "national" in "Chinese national cinema" are central to any consideration of cinema during this period, and addresses the issue of Chinese nationalism as part of a complex history of cinema within the early modern Chinese nation.

Chinese Cinema

Chinese Cinema
Author: Paul Clark
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1987
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521326384

China's IGeneration

China's IGeneration
Author: Matthew D. Johnson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2014-05-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1623565952

This innovative collection of essays on post-WTO Chinese cinema features contributions from an international community of scholars in the fields of media and film studies, comparative literature, and history. The iGeneration describes a post-cinematic, post-reform era phenomenon in China where the production, distribution and consumption of films increasingly take a digital form and the flow of images parallels that of capital. By calling attention to a wide range of agendas since 2001 - nation-building, market diffusion, cultural capital, self-understanding, regional deviance, social justice - as well as functions e.g. state didacticism, commodified leisure, personal expression, virtual surveillance, worldly connoisseurship - iGeneration offers Chinese moving image culture at its most diverse. From experimental documentaries to 3-D films, animation and video art, to visual aides-memoires and piracy films, the essays in China's iGeneration offers novel interpretations of how "cinema" and "generation" have been redefined.

The Chinese Film Industry in the Reform Era

The Chinese Film Industry in the Reform Era
Author: Seio Nakajima
Publisher:
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2007
Genre:
ISBN: 9780549171065

In sociology of culture, this dissertation tackles the question of how to analyze the relationship between the meanings and characteristics of cultural products and the industrial system and organization of production, distribution, and exhibition. I argue that the relation between the nature of cultural products and the industrial system is mediated by the changing, but continuing existence of censorship and restrictions on certain types of films as well as positive sanctions on the production of politically-legitimate films (what is called "main-melody films" or political "propaganda" films). I analyze how the interaction between different types of film text and the industrial context results in such distinctive organizational strategies as product diversification (i.e., produce political films to secure political legitimacy, commercial films to ensure economic viability, and art-house films to claim artistic autonomy) and product specialization (i.e., rely on the subsidies provided by the state for the production of political films in order to survive the increasingly competitive market environment in the Reform era).

Ecology and Chinese-Language Cinema

Ecology and Chinese-Language Cinema
Author: Sheldon H. Lu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2019-10-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000697878

This edited collection explores new developments in the burgeoning field of Chinese ecocinema, examining a variety of works from local productions to global market films, spanning the Maoist era to the present. The ten chapters examine films with ecological significance in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, including documentaries, feature films, blockbusters and independent productions. Covering not only well-known works, such as Under the Dome, Wolf Totem, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracts, and Mermaid, this book also provides analysis of less well-known but critically important works, such as Anchorage Prohibited, Luzon, and Three Flower/Tri-Color. The unique perspectives this book provides, along with the comprehensive engagement with existing Chinese and English scholarship, not only extend the scope of the growing field of ecocinematic studies, but also seeks to reform the means through which Chinese-language eco-films are understood in the years to come. Ecology and Chinese-Language Ecocinema will be of huge interest to students and scholars in the fields of Chinese cinema, environmental studies, media and communication studies.