China on screen : cinema and nation / Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berry, Chris, 1959-

Contributor:

Farquhar, Mary Ann, 1949-

Series:

Film and culture

Film and culture series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--China--History.

Motion pictures.

China.

History.

Physical Description:

xi, 313 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2006]

Summary:

In China on Screen, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, leaders in the field of Chinese film studies, explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, Berry and Farquhar analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the abandonment of "national cinema" as an analytic tool and propose "cinema and the national" as a more productive framework. With this approach, they show how movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora construct and contest different ideas of Chinese nation-as empire, republic, or ethnicity, and complicated by gender, class, style, trans-nationalism, and more. Among the issues and themes covered are the tension between operatic and realist modes, male and female star images, trans-national production and circulation of Chinese films, the image of the good foreigner-all related to different ways of imagining nation. Comprehensive and provocative, China on Screen is a crucial work of film analysis.

Contents:

1 Introduction: Cinema and the National 1

2 Time and the National: History, Historiology, Haunting 17

3 Operatic Modes: Opera Film, Martial Arts, and Cultural Nationalism 47

4 Realist Modes: Melodrama, Modernity, and Home 75

5 How Should a Chinese Woman Look? Woman and Nation 108

6 How Should Chinese Men Act? Ordering the Nation 135

7 Where Do You Draw the Line? Ethnicity in Chinese Cinemas 169

8 The National in the Transnational 195.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [265]-285) and index.

"Chinese-language bibliography": pages [287]-291.

Includes filmography: page [293-299].

ISBN:

0231137060

0231137079

OCLC:

61353166

Publisher Number:

9780231137072