Ideology And Utopia In Chinas New Wave Cinema

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.

In Postsocialist Conditions: Idea and History in China’s “Independent Cinema,” 1988-2008, WANG Xiaoping offers a comprehensive survey and trenchant critique of China’s “Independent Cinema” by the sixth-generation auteurs.

Combining anatomies of textual examples with broader contextual considerations related with the social, political and economic developments of post-Mao China, Xiaoping Wang intends to explore newly emerging social and cultural trends in contemporary China, and find the truth content of Chinese society and culture in the age of global capitalism. Through in-depth textual analyses covering a variety of media, ranging from fiction, poetry, film to theoretical works as well as cultural phenomena which mirror social and cultural occurrences and reflect the present ideological proclivities of the Chinese society, this study offers timely interpretations of China in the age of globalization, its political inclinations, social fashions and cultural tendencies, and provides thought-provoking messages of China’s socio-economic and political reality.

This revised and updated new edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of cinema in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as to disaporic and transnational Chinese film-making, from the beginnings of cinema to the present day. Chapters by leading international scholars are grouped in thematic sections addressing key historical periods, film movements, genres, stars and auteurs, and the industrial and technological contexts of cinema in Greater China.

Jia Zhangke is praised as “the most internationally prominent and celebrated figure of the Six-Generation of Chinese filmmakers”. This book provides an examination the content and forms of Jia’s featured films and analyzes their merits and faults. Jia’s films often narrate the lives of ordinary Chinese people against the backdrop of the political-economic changes. The author conducts an in-depth analysis of how this change have ferociously impinged upon the characters’ living conditions since China integrated itself with the world economy in the high tide of accelerated globalization since the 1970s. The author focuses on discussing the “politics of dignity” expressed by Jia’s allegorical renditions to explore the director’s political unconsciousness and cultural-political notions. This book maps ten of Jia Zhangke’s films onto three major themes: Jia’s filmmaking and China in the market society; truth claims and political unconscious; “post-socialist modernity” in the age of globalization. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese film studies, as well as other disciplines, such as political science, sociology, anthropology, etc.

This book examines Chinese films made and shown abroad roughly between the 1920s and the 2020s, from the beginning of the international exchange of the Chinese national film industry to the emergence of the concept of soft power. The periodisation of Chinese cinema(s) does not necessarily match the political periods: on the one hand, the technical development of the film industry and the organisation of translation in China, and on the other hand, official relations with China and translation policies abroad impose different constraints on the circulation of Chinese films. This volume deals with the distribution and translation of films from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora. To this end, the contributors address various issues related to the circulation and distribution of Chinese films, including co- productions, agents of exchange, and modes of translation. The approach is a mixture of socio- cultural and translational methods. The data collected provides, for the first time, a quantitative overview of the circulation of Chinese films in a dozen foreign countries. The book will greatly interest scholars and students of Chinese cinema, translation studies, and China studies.

The questions of subjectivity and the literary style of realism, as manifested in Hu Feng’s theoretical writings and Lu Ling’s fictional writings, occupy a unique position in modern China. By looking more closely into the theoretical and fictional texts and the social-historical subtext, and through a re-examination of the issue of subjectivity and individualism, this book argues that individualism should not be treated as an ahistorical value-system, but understood within changing historical contexts; subjectivity should not be treated as an issue of personal choice, but as class-based and derived from collective community. To differentiate different subjectivities and the diversified foci of individualism in differing historical periods, Xiaoping Wang finds we need to explore the intellectuals’ cultural-political strategy by situating them in the particular historical conjuncture and in the particular cultural fields. With this hermeneutical practice, the politics of recognition and the politics of style are mutually illuminated.

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.

"Combining anatomies of textual examples with broader contextual considerations related with the social, political and economic developments of post-Mao China, Xiaoping Wang intends to explore newly emerging social and cultural trends in contemporary China, and find the truth content of Chinese society and culture in the age of global capitalism. Through in-depth textual analyses covering a variety of media, ranging from fiction, poetry, film to theoretical works as well as cultural phenomena which mirror social and cultural occurrences and reflect the present ideological proclivities of the Chinese society, this study offers timely interpretations of China in the age of globalization, its political inclinations, social fashions and cultural tendencies, and provides thought-provoking messages of China's socio-economic and political reality"--

In Contending for the "Chinese Modern", Xiaoping Wang studies the writing of fiction in 1940s China. It makes critical reappraisements of some famed Chinese writers, and sheds fresh lights on the theoretical issues pertaining to the problematic of plural modernities.