The urban generation : Chinese cinema and society at the turn of the twenty-first century / Zhang Zhen, editor.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Zhang, Zhen, 1962 July 8-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--China.

Motion pictures.

China.

Cities and towns in motion pictures.

City and town life in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

x, 447 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2007.

Summary:

Since the early 1990s, while mainland China's state-owned movie studios have struggled with financial and ideological constraints, an exciting alternative cinema has developed. Dubbed the "Urban Generation," this new cinema is driven by young filmmakers who emerged in the shadow of the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. What unites diverse directors under the "Urban Generation" rubric is their creative engagement with the wrenching economic and social transformations underway in China. Urban Generation filmmakers are vanguard interpreters of the confusion and anxiety triggered by the massive urbanization of contemporary China. This collection brings together some of the most recent original research on this emerging cinema and its relationship to Chinese society.

The contributors analyze the historical and social conditions that gave rise to the Urban Generation, its aesthetic innovation, and its ambivalent relationship to China's mainstream film industry and the international film market. Focusing attention on the Urban Generation's sense of social urgency, its documentary impulses, and its representations of gender and sexuality, the contributors highlight the characters who populate this new urban cinema-ordinary and marginalized city dwellers including aimless bohemians, petty thieves, prostitutes, postal workers, taxi drivers, migrant workers-and the fact that these "floating urban subjects" are often portrayed by non-professional actors. Some essays concentrate on specific films (such as Shower and Suzhou River) or filmmakers (including Jia Zhangke and Zhang Yuan), while others survey broader concerns. Together the thirteen essays in this collection give a multifaceted account of a significant, ongoing cinematic and cultural phenomenon.

Contents:

Introduction: Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of "Transformation"(Zhuanxing) / Zhang Zhen 1

I Ideology, Film Practice, and the Market

Rebel without a Cause? China's New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking / Yingjin Zhang 49

The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic / Jason McGrath 81

Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism / Chris Berry 115

II The Politics and Poetics of Urban Space

Tear down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Popular Cinema and Avant-Garde Art / Sheldon H. Lu 137

Tracing the City's Scars: Demolition and the Limits of the Documentary Impulse in the New Urban Cinema / Yomi Braester 161

Scaling the Skyscraper: Images of Cosmopolitan Consumption in Street Angel (1937) and Beautiful New World (1998) / Augusta Palmer 181

Whither the Walker Goes: Spatial Practices and Negative Poetics in 1990s Chinese Urban Cinema / Linda Chiu-Han Lai 205

III The Production of Desire and Identities

Ning Ying's Beijing Trilogy: Cinematic Configurations of Age, Class, and Sexuality / Shuqin Cui 241

Zhang Yuan's Imaginary Cities and the Theatricalization of the Chinese "Bastards" / Berenice Reynaud 264

Mr. Zhao On and Off the Screen: Male Desire and Its Discontent / Xueping Zhong 295

Maintaining Law and Order in the City: New Tales of the People's Police / Yaohua Shi 316

Urban Dreamscape, Phantom Sisters, and the Identity of an Emergent Art Cinema / Zhang Zhen 344

Appendix The Urban Generation Filmmakers / Charles Leary) 389.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [411]-427) and index.

ISBN:

9780822340539

0822340534

9780822340744

0822340747

OCLC:

72161854