The Urban Generation

Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Autor: Zhang, Zhen; McGrath, Jason; Berry, Chris; Lu, Sheldon H.
Editor: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822340539
eISBN Pdf: 9780822390008
Lloc de publicació: Durham , United States
Any de publicació digital: 2007
Mes: Març
Pàgines: 464
DDC: 791.430951/09049
Idioma: Anglés

Descripció

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.

Contributors. Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Shuqin Cui, Linda Chiu-han Lai, Charles Leary, Sheldon H. Lu, Jason McGrath, Augusta Palmer, Bérénice Reynaud, Yaohua Shi, Yingjin Zhang, Zhang Zhen, Xueping Zhong

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of ‘‘Transformation’’
Part I: Ideology, Film Practice, and the Market
Rebel without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking
The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic
Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism
Part II: The Politics and Poetics of Urban Space
Tear down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Popular Cinema and Avant-Garde Art
Tracing the City’s Scars: Demolition and the Limits of the Documentary Impulse in the New Urban Cinema
Scaling the Skyscraper: Images of Cosmopolitan Consumption in Street Angel (1937) and Beautiful New World (1998)
Whither the Walker Goes: Spatial Practices and Negative Poetics in 1990s Chinese Urban Cinema
Part III: The Production Of Desire And Identities
Ning Ying’s Beijing Trilogy: Cinematic Configurations of Age, Class, and Sexuality
Zhang Yuan’s Imaginary Cities and the Theatricalization of the Chinese ‘‘Bastards’’
Mr. Zhao On and Off the Screen: Male Desire and Its Discontent
Maintaining Law and Order in the City: New Tales of the People’s Police
Urban Dreamscape, Phantom Sisters, and the Identity of an Emergent Art Cinema
Appendix. The Urban Generation Filmmakers
Bibliography
Contributors
Index