The World of Jia Zhangke

The World of Jia Zhangke PDF Author: Jean-Michel Frodon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999468371
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A comparative look at the work of Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke by celebrated critic Jean Michel Frodon. Includes an extensive interview with Jia, essays on each of his films, conversations with his main collaborators, and a selection of his own writings. "--Page 4 of cover.

Jia Zhangke Speaks Out

Jia Zhangke Speaks Out PDF Author: Jia Zhangke
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781626430303
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Jia Zhangke Speaks Out is a collection of writings by China’s most acclaimed film director, Jia Zhangke. The book, originally published in 2009 by Peking University Press, contains Jia’s selections of his own writings on film. While he has given numerous film-specific interviews throughout the years, his own notes on cinema, on his own production, and on Chinese culture are unknown to non-Chinese readers. This collection gives access to the key scenes of his life, films, and meetings with other filmmakers, from Hou Hsiao-hsien to Martin Scorsese. From his point of view, we get an insightful and profoundly original take on China’s film history, its ruptures and failings, as well as on the post-Tiananmen filmmaking industry, with its blockbusters on one side and indie films (like his) on the other.

Jia Zhangke's 'Hometown Trilogy'

Jia Zhangke's 'Hometown Trilogy' PDF Author: Michael Berry
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838716556
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
The three films comprising director Jia Zhangke's 'Hometown Trilogy' - Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000) and Unknown Pleasures(2002) - represent key contributions to the cinema of contemporary China. The films, which are set in Jia's home province of Shanxi, highlight the plight of marginalised individuals – singers, dancers, pickpockets, prostitutes and drifters – as they struggle to navigate through the radically transforming terrain of contemporary China. Xiao Wu tells the story of a small-time pickpocket who faces the breakdown of his relationships with his friends, family and girlfriend. Platform, often considered Jia's most ambitious film, is an epic narrative that bears witness to China's roaring eighties and the radical transformation from socialism to capitalism. Jia's third feature, Unknown Pleasures continues his meditation on China in transition, tracing the story of two delinquent teenagers who live on a diet of saccharine Chinese pop music, karaoke, Pulp Fiction, and Coca-Cola while entertaining pipe dreams of joining the army and becoming small-time gangsters. Michael Berry's in-depth study of the three films considers them as an ambitious attempt to re-examine the transformation and fate of provincial China – its places and people – as it is caught up in a whirlwind of sweeping social, cultural and economic change. At the heart of the book lies a series of close readings of each of the three films; through which Berry teases out their central narrative themes, highlighting Jia's use of editing, cinematic language, and mise en scene. He pays special attention to the place of intertextuality in Jia's oeuvre, as well as the central themes of destruction and change, stagnation and movement, political verses popular culture, and, of course, the ceaseless search for home. Michael Berry is Associate Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2005), and A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008). He is also the translator of several novels, including The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (2008), To Live (2004), Nanjing 1937: A Love Story (2002), and Wild Kids (2000).

Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke

Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke PDF Author: Michael Berry
Publisher: Sinotheory
ISBN: 9781478018124
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume is an extended dialogue between the internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke and film scholar Michael Berry in which Jia offers a comprehensive first-hand account of his life, art, and approach to filmmaking.

Moving Figures

Moving Figures PDF Author: Corey Kai Nelson Schultz
Publisher: Edinburgh Studies in East Asian Film
ISBN: 9781474455121
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since 1979, China has been undergoing a period of immense social and economic change, transitioning from state-run economics to free market capitalism. This book focuses on how the 'Reform Era' has been constructed in the work of the director Jia Zhangke, analysing the archetypal class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual and entrepreneur that are found in his films. Examining how these figures are represented, and how Jia's cinematography creates those 'structures of feeling' that concretise around a particular time and place, the book argues that Jia's cinema should be understood not just as narratives that represent Chinese social transition, but also as an effort to engage the audience's emotional responses through representation, symbolism and the affective experience of specific cinematic tropes. Making an important contribution to scholarship about the Reform Era, and opening up many new areas in the larger fields of Chinese visual culture, cultural studies and the affective qualities of film, this is groundbreaking work about a cinematic culture in a period of profound transformation.

Speaking in Images

Speaking in Images PDF Author: Michael Berry
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231133302
Category : Motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 592

Get Book Here

Book Description
Interviews with Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and other Chinese directors about their work & the ways it has impacted both on the film industry in China as well as on the world scene.

Slow Movies

Slow Movies PDF Author: Ira Jaffe
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231169795
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
"In all film there is the desire to capture the motion of life, to refuse immobility," Agnes Varda has noted. But to capture the reality of human experience, cinema must fasten on stillness and inaction as much as motion. Slow Movies investigates movies by acclaimed international directors who in the past three decades have challenged mainstream cinema's reliance on motion and action. More than other realist art cinema, slow movies by Lisandro Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Cristian Mungiu, Alexander Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant and others radically adhere to space-times in which emotion is repressed along with motion; editing and dialogue yield to stasis and contemplation; action surrenders to emptiness if not death.

Media Heterotopias

Media Heterotopias PDF Author: Hye Jean Chung
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822372150
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Media Heterotopias Hye Jean Chung challenges the widespread tendency among audiences and critics to disregard the material conditions of digital film production. Drawing on interviews with directors, producers, special effects supervisors, and other film industry workers, Chung traces how the rhetorical and visual emphasis on seamlessness masks the social, political, and economic realities of global filmmaking and digital labor. In films such as Avatar (2009), Interstellar (2014), and The Host (2006)—which combine live action footage with CGI to create new hybrid environments—filmmaking techniques and "seamless" digital effects allow the globally dispersed labor involved to go unnoticed by audiences. Chung adapts Foucault's notion of heterotopic spaces to foreground this labor and to theorize cinematic space as a textured, multilayered assemblage in which filmmaking occurs in transnational collaborations that depend upon the global movement of bodies, resources, images, and commodities. Acknowledging cinema's increasingly digitized and globalized workflow, Chung reconnects digitally constructed and composited imagery with the reality of production spaces and laboring bodies to highlight the political, social, ethical, and aesthetic stakes in recognizing the materiality of collaborative filmmaking.

The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

The Cinema of Jia Zhangke PDF Author: Cecília Mello
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350121711
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shorlisted for the BAFTSS 2020 Award for Best Monograph Despite his films being subjected to censorship and denigration in his native China, Jia Zhangke has become the country's leading independent film director internationally. Seen as one of world cinema's foremost auteurs, he has played a crucial role in documenting and reflecting upon China's era of intense transformations since the 1990s. Cecília Mello provides in-depth analysis of Jia's unique body of work, from his early films Xiao Wu and Platform, to experimental quasi-documentary 24 City and the audacious Mountains May Depart. Mello suggests that Jia's particular expression of the realist mode is shaped by the aesthetics of other Chinese artistic traditions, allowing Jia to unearth memories both personal and collective, still lingering within the ever-changing landscapes of contemporary China. Mello's groundbreaking study opens a door into Chinese cinema and culture, addressing the nature of the so-called 'impure' cinematographic art and the complex representation of China through the ages. Foreword by Walter Salles

Dekalog 4

Dekalog 4 PDF Author: Kate E. Taylor-Jones
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231501749
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book Here

Book Description
East Asian cinema has become a worldwide phenonemon, and directors such as Park Chan-wook, Wong Kar Wai, and Takashi Miike have become household names. Dekalog 4: On East Asian Filmmakers solicits scholars from Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, North America, and the U.K. to offer unique readings of selected East Asian directors and their works. Directors examined include Zhang Yimou, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Rithy Panh, Kinji Fukasaku, and Jia Zhangke, and the volume includes one of the first surveys of Japanese and Chinese female filmmakers, providing singular insight into East Asian film and the filmmakers that have brought it global recognition.