Economy, Emotion, and Ethics in Chinese Cinema

Economy, Emotion, and Ethics in Chinese Cinema
Author: David Leiwei Li
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2016-02-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 131730988X

The First and Second Comings of capitalism are conceptual shorthands used to capture the radical changes in global geopolitics from the Opium War to the end of the Cold War and beyond. Centring the role of capitalism in the Chinese everyday, the framework can be employed to comprehend contemporary Chinese culture in general and, as in this study, Chinese cinema in particular. This book investigates major Chinese-language films from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in order to unpack a hyper-compressed capitalist modernity with distinctive Chinese characteristics. As a dialogue between the film genre as a mediation of microscopic social life, and the narrative of economic development as a macroscopic political abstraction, it engages the two otherwise remotely related worlds, illustrating how the State and the Subject are reconstituted cinematically in late capitalism. A deeply cultural, determinedly historical, and deliberately interdisciplinary study, it approaches "culture" anthropologically, as a way of life emanating from the everyday, and aesthetically, as imaginative forms and creative expressions. Economy, Emotion, and Ethics in Chinese Cinema will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese cinema, cultural studies, Asian studies, and interdisciplinary studies of politics and culture.

Sinascape

Sinascape
Author: Gary G. Xu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2007
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780742554504

Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema is a comprehensive study of Chinese-language films at the turn of the millennium. Emphasizing the transnational nature of contemporary Chinese cinema, it provides close readings of most of the important films of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and explores the interactions and transactions among these films and between Chinese cinema and Hollywood. General readers, film enthusiasts, and critics will all benefit from Gary Xu's discussion of popular films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Kung Fu Hustle, Devils on the Doorstep, Suzhou River, Beijing Bicycle, Millennium Mambo, Goodbye Dragon Inn, and Hollywood Hong Kong.

Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China

Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China
Author: Yingjin Zhang
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2009-10-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0824833376

In this milestone work, prominent China film scholar Yingjin Zhang proposes "polylocality" as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema paradigm, Zhang calls for comparative studies of underdeveloped areas beyond the imperative of transnationalism. The book begins by addressing theories and practices related to space, place, and polylocality in contemporary China before focusing on the space of scholarship and urging scholars to move beyond the current paradigm and explore transnational and comparative film studies. This is followed by a chapter that concentrates on the space of production and surveys the changing landscape of postsocialist filmmaking and the transformation of China’s urban generation of directors. Next is an examination of the space of polylocality and the cinematic mappings of Beijing and a persistent "reel" contact with polylocality in hinterland China. In the fifth chapter Zhang explores the space of subjectivity in independent film and video and contextualizes experiments by young directors with various documentary styles. Chapter 6 calls attention to the space of performance and addresses issues of media and mediation by way of two kinds of playing: the first with documentary as troubling information, the second with piracy as creative intervention. The concluding chapter offers an overview of Chinese cinema in the new century and provides production and reception statistics. Combining inspired critical insights, original observations, and new information, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China is a significant work on current Chinese film and a must-read for film scholars and anyone seriously interested in cinema more generally or contemporary Chinese culture.

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films
Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780231133333

What is the sentimental and how can we understand it through the cinema of a particular culture in an age of globalisation? Chow explores these questions by examining nine contemporary Chinese directors whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema.

Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Cinema

Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Cinema
Author: Xuelin Zhou
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2017-06-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9811043280

This pivot considers key transformations within the Chinese film industry since the country opened its doors to the outside world in the late 1970s, and moved from an ideologically-centred censorship system to one of contestation and cooperation between politics, art and market. Focusing on Zhang Yimou, arguably one of China’s most innovative and controversial filmmakers and directors, the author addresses the challenges faced by contemporary Chinese cinema in the face of Hollywood dominance, notably making genre films in an increasingly globalized context, and the necessary compromises between the local and global, the national and the international. Through a combination of textual analysis and context study, it examines action-oriented films Zhang made as responses to a rapidly changing film market and industry.

Ideology and Utopia in China's New Wave Cinema

Ideology and Utopia in China's New Wave Cinema
Author: Xiaoping Wang
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2018-06-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319911406

Ideology and Utopia in China’s New Wave Cinema investigates the ways in which New Wave filmmakers represent China in this age of neoliberal reform. Analyzing this paradigm shift in independent cinema, this text explores the historicity of the cinematic form and its cultural-political visions. Through a close reading of the narrative strategy of key films in New Wave Cinema, Xiaoping Wang studies the movement’s impact on film, literature, culture and politics.

Transnational Chinese Cinemas

Transnational Chinese Cinemas
Author: Sheldon H. Lu
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 438
Release: 1997-10-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780824818456

Zhang Yimou's first film, Red Sorghum, took the Golden Bear Award in 1988 at the Berlin International Film Festival. Since then Chinese films have continued to arrest worldwide attention and capture major film awards, winning an international following that continues to grow. Transnational Chinese Cinemas spans nearly the entire length of twentieth-century Chinese film history. The volume traces the evolution of Chinese national cinema, and demonstrates that gender identity has been central to its formation. Femininity, masculinity and sexuality have been an integral part of the filmic discourses of modernity, nationhood, and history. This volume represents the most comprehensive, wide-ranging, and up-to-date study of China's major cinematic traditions. It is an indispensable source book for modern Chinese and Asian history, politics, literature, and culture.

China in the Mix

China in the Mix
Author: Ying Xiao
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2017-08-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496812611

Scarce attention has been paid to the dimension of sound and its essential role in constructing image, culture, and identity in Chinese film and media. China in the Mix fills a critical void with the first book on the sound, languages, scenery, media, and culture in post-Socialist China. In this study, Ying Xiao explores fascinating topics, including appropriations of popular folklore in the Chinese new wave of the 1980s; Chinese rock 'n' roll and youth cinema in fin de siècle China; the political-economic impact of free market imperatives and Hollywood pictures on Chinese film industry and filmmaking in the late twentieth century; the reception and adaptation of hip hop; and the emerging role of Internet popular culture and social media in the early twenty-first century. Xiao examines the articulations and representations of mass culture and everyday life, concentrating on their aural/oral manifestations in contemporary Chinese cinema and in a wide spectrum of media and cultural productions. China in the Mix offers the first comprehensive investigation of Chinese film, expressions, and culture from a unique, cohesive acoustic angle and through the prism of global media-cultural exchange. It shows how the complex, evolving uses of sound (popular music, voice-over, silence, noise, and audio mixing) in film and media reflect and engage the important cultural and socio-historical shifts in contemporary China and in the increasingly networked world. Xiao offers an innovative new conception of Chinese film and media and their audiovisual registers in the historiographical frame of China amid the global landscape.

Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics

Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics
Author: Sheldon H. Lu
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2007-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0824861868

This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level. Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China’s belated integration into the capitalist world system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term "postsocialism" and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century.

Zhang Yimou

Zhang Yimou
Author: Wendy Larson
Publisher: Cambria Sinophone World
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781604979756

In this first critical study of films by Zhang Yimou in English, Wendy Larson plumbs the larger field of debate to suggest thought-provoking ways of thinking about the films and their relationship to Chinese culture.