The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

The Cinema of Jia Zhangke
Author: Cecília Mello
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2019-07-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350121703

Shorlisted for the BAFTSS 2020 Award for Best Monograph Despite his films being subjected to censorship and denigration in his native China, Jia Zhangke has become the country's leading independent film director internationally. Seen as one of world cinema's foremost auteurs, he has played a crucial role in documenting and reflecting upon China's era of intense transformations since the 1990s. Cecília Mello provides in-depth analysis of Jia's unique body of work, from his early films Xiao Wu and Platform, to experimental quasi-documentary 24 City and the audacious Mountains May Depart. Mello suggests that Jia's particular expression of the realist mode is shaped by the aesthetics of other Chinese artistic traditions, allowing Jia to unearth memories both personal and collective, still lingering within the ever-changing landscapes of contemporary China. Mello's groundbreaking study opens a door into Chinese cinema and culture, addressing the nature of the so-called 'impure' cinematographic art and the complex representation of China through the ages. Foreword by Walter Salles

The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement

The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement
Author: Chris Berry
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9888028510

The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement is a groundbreaking project unveiling recent documentary film work that has transformed visual culture in China, and brought new immediacy along with a broader base of participation to Chinese media. As a foundational text, this volume provides a much-needed introduction to the topic of Chinese documentary film, the signature mode of contemporary Chinese visual culture. These essays examine how documentary filmmakers have opened up a unique new space of social commentary and critique in an era of rapid social changes amid globalization and marketization. The essays cover topics ranging from cruelty in documentary to the representation of Beijing; gay, lesbian and queer documentary; sound in documentary; the exhibition context in China; authorial intervention and subjectivity; and the distinctive "on the spot" aesthetics of contemporary Chinese documentary. This volume will be critical reading for scholars in disciplines ranging from film and media studies to Chinese studies and Asian studies.

Post-realism as an Alternative Aesthetics in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

Post-realism as an Alternative Aesthetics in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
Author: Ting Luo
Publisher:
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2014
Genre: Motion pictures
ISBN:

This thesis is motivated by the considerable number of Sixth-Generation films that emerged in Chinese cinema after 1989. These films, which break the borders of cinematic realism, seem to contradict the prevalent scholarship on Sixth-Generation filmmakers in which their cinematic practices are incorporated into a range of frameworks derived from realism. In this thesis, I conceptualize this alternative aesthetics as "post-realism",an aesthetic product of the complexity of post-socialist China and an artistic response to the dramatic transformation of Chinese society. The thesis begins with the examination of realism in the context of Chinese cinema. A historical review shows that the discourse of realism had been constantly ideologised from the 1930s to 1976 and then has experienced a countervailing trend of depoliticisation from the end of 1970s. Sixth-Generation filmmakers now associate realism with individual vision and subjective perception of the transformed reality. This sets the ground for the emergence of post-realist aesthetics characterized by its emphasis on artifice. The thesis then goes on to identify a thread of the alternative aesthetics of non-realism in early Chinese cinema. The revival of non-realist aesthetics in some films in the New Era can be seen as a prelude to the emergence of post-realism in the 1990s. Employing multi-layered methods of trans-textual analysis, close reading and a social-context approach, the main body of this thesis is a textual analysis of selected films from diverse aspects. The first is the unreliable narrative shared by Jiang Wen's In the Heat of the Sun and Lou Ye's Suzhou River. Both Wang Quan'an's Lunar Eclipse and Zhang Yuan's Green Tea place the solidity of a coherent, stable and identifiable female identity into question. The heightened symbolic cinematic space in Jia Zhangke's The World, the defamiliarizing effect caused by some surreal elements in his Still Life; and Jia's playing with the documentary genre through - the integration of fiction and documentary in 24 City will be examined. Through the close reading of these films, I also seek to delineate the inner landscape of post-socialist Chinese society in a fast-changing era.

Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film

Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film
Author: G. Andrew Stuckey
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2018-08-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9888390813

Depictions within a movie of either filmmaking or film watching are hardly novel, but the dramatic expansion of the reach of the metacinematic into contemporary Chinese cinemas is nothing short of remarkable. To G. Andrew Stuckey, the prevalence of metacinematic features forms the basis of a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. Such a discourse, in turn, outlines the boundaries of the possible for film in China as aesthetic or sociopolitical practice. Metacinema also draws our attention to the presence of the audience, people actively responding to a film. In elucidating the affective responses elicited by the metacinematic mode in the viewers, Stuckey argues that metacinema reflects ways of being in the world that audiences may take up for themselves. The films studied in this book are drawn across the full spectrum of Chinese films made in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the 1990s and 2000s, from award-winning conceptual art films to popular crowd pleasers, blockbusters to low-budget productions, and documentary-style social realist exposé projects to studio assembly-line investments. The recurrence of the metacinematic across this broad range of works is indicative of its relevance to Chinese films today, and the analysis of these diverse examples allows us to gauge the cultural, social, and aesthetic implications of Chinese cinemas as a whole. “Stuckey surveys a broad swath of contemporary Chinese cinema, from popular blockbusters to elite art films, around the theme of metacinema, yielding new insights into both previously neglected films and those already acknowledged as contemporary classics. The result is a fascinating dive into the growing and diversifying cinema culture of China today.” —Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota “Stuckey’s brilliant work, Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film, offers insightful close analyses of films by key directors from the PRC (Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Jia Zhangke, and Li Yu), Hong Kong (Peter Chan), and Taiwan (Tsai Ming-liang). This clearly written book is essential reading for scholars and students of Chinese cinemas. Stuckey’s study of genre and metacinema makes it a must-read for anyone interested in cinema.” —Michelle Bloom, University of California, Riverside

The Urban Generation

The Urban Generation
Author: Zhen Zhang
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2007-03-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780822340744

DIVAn anthology that explores film works by the "urban generation,"--filmmakers who operate outside of "mainstream" (officially sanctioned) Chinese cinema -- whose impact has been enormous./div

Chinese Film

Chinese Film
Author: Jason McGrath
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2023-01-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1452968586

A tour de force chronicling the development of realism in Chinese cinema The history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Be it the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, each Chinese cinematic era has necessitated its own form in conversation with broader trends in politics and culture. In Chinese Film, Jason McGrath tells this fascinating story by tracing the varied claims to cinematic realism made by Chinese filmmakers, officials, critics, and scholars. Understanding realism as a historical dynamic that is both enabled and mitigated by aesthetic conventions of the day, he analyzes it across six different types of claims: ontological, perceptual, fictional, social, prescriptive, and apophatic. Through this method, McGrath makes major claims not just about Chinese cinema but also about realism as an aesthetic form that negotiates between cultural conventions and the ever-evolving real. He comes to envision it as more than just a cinematic question, showing how the struggle for realism is central to the Chinese struggle for modernity itself.

Chinese Film Theory

Chinese Film Theory
Author: Xia Hong
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 245
Release: 1990-05-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0313367337

This is the first collection of translations of Chinese film theory to be published in English. By using translations rather than summaries, as other works have done, Chinese Film Theory provides readers with an introduction to the issues current in China's film circles. It includes eighteen chapters written by a broad range of writers--from well established scholars to young people at the beginning of their involvement in film in China. This collection indicates a trend away from the study of external qualities of film and toward a study of the film itself. The volume has been carefully organized so that major issues are interrelated; thus, the book comprises an ongoing debate of film theory issues, progressing from earlier to most recent issues, following the debate concerning the relationship of film to literary arts, and looking at the debate over the relationship of film to culture. The book concludes that for the time being, debate has virtually ended because of the political situation in China. This book is an important new source to anyone interested in film studies, film theory, or Chinese studies.

My Self on Camera

My Self on Camera
Author: Kiki Tianqi Yu
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2018-11-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0748698221

'My' Self on Camera is the first book to explore first person narrative documentary in China's post-Mao era. Since the emergence of the individual as an ever more important social figure in China, this mode of independent filmmaking and cultural practice has become increasingly significant. Combining the approach of cultural ethnography, interviews, and textual analysis of selected films, this study examines the motivations, key aesthetic features and ethical tensions of presenting the self on camera, as well as the socio-political, cultural and technical conditions surrounding its practice. This book problematises how the sense of self and subjectivities are understood in contemporary China, and provides illuminating new insights on the changing notion of the individual through cinema.