Global Chinese Cinema

Global Chinese Cinema PDF Author: Gary D. Rawnsley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135281483
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
The film Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou and released in 2002, is widely regarded as the first globally successful indigenous Chinese blockbuster. A big expensive film with multiple stars, spectacular scenery, and astonishing action sequences, it touched on key questions of Chinese culture, nation and politics, and was both a domestic sensation and an international hit. This book explores the reasons for the film’s popularity with its audiences, discussing the factors which so resonated with those who watched the film. It examines questions such as Chinese national unity, the search for cultural identity and role models from China’s illustrious pre-communist past, and the portrayal of political and aesthetic values, and attitudes to gender, sex, love, and violence which are relatively new to China. The book demonstrates how the film, and China’s growing film industry more generally, have in fact very strong international connections, with Western as well as Chinese financing, stars recruited from the East Asian region more widely, and extensive interactions between Hollywood and Asian artists and technicians. Overall, the book provides fascinating insights into recent developments in Chinese society, popular culture and cultural production.

Global Chinese Cinema

Global Chinese Cinema PDF Author: Gary D. Rawnsley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135281483
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 471

Get Book Here

Book Description
The film Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou and released in 2002, is widely regarded as the first globally successful indigenous Chinese blockbuster. A big expensive film with multiple stars, spectacular scenery, and astonishing action sequences, it touched on key questions of Chinese culture, nation and politics, and was both a domestic sensation and an international hit. This book explores the reasons for the film’s popularity with its audiences, discussing the factors which so resonated with those who watched the film. It examines questions such as Chinese national unity, the search for cultural identity and role models from China’s illustrious pre-communist past, and the portrayal of political and aesthetic values, and attitudes to gender, sex, love, and violence which are relatively new to China. The book demonstrates how the film, and China’s growing film industry more generally, have in fact very strong international connections, with Western as well as Chinese financing, stars recruited from the East Asian region more widely, and extensive interactions between Hollywood and Asian artists and technicians. Overall, the book provides fascinating insights into recent developments in Chinese society, popular culture and cultural production.

China’s Encounter with Global Hollywood

China’s Encounter with Global Hollywood PDF Author: Wendy Su
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813167094
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In recent years, the film industry in the People's Republic of China has found itself among the top three most prolific in the world. When the Chinese government introduced a new revenue-sharing system in 1994, the nation's total movie output skyrocketed with gross box-office receipts totaling billions of yuan. This newfound success, however, has been built on an alternately competitive and collaborative relationship between the ascendant global power of China and the popular culture juggernaut of America. In China's Encounter with Global Hollywood, Wendy Su examines the intertwining relationships among the Chinese state, global Hollywood, and the Chinese film industry while analyzing the causes and consequences of the rapid growth of the nation's domestic film production. She demonstrates how the Chinese state has consolidated power by negotiating foreign interest in the lucrative Chinese market while advancing its cultural industries. Su also reveals how mainland Chinese and Hong Kong filmmakers have navigated the often-incompatible requirements of marketization and state censorship. This timely analysis demonstrates how China has cannily used global capital to modernize its own film industry and now stands poised to step clear of Hollywood's shadow. The country's debates—on- and offscreen—over cultural change, market-based economic reforms, and artistic freedom illuminate China's ongoing efforts to build a modern national identity.

Global Chinese Cinema

Global Chinese Cinema PDF Author: Gary D. Rawnsley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135281491
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Director Zhang Yimou's film Hero, released in 2002, is widely regarded as the first globally successful indigenous Chinese blockbuster, touching on key questions of Chinese culture, nation and politics. This book explores the reasons for the film’s popularity with its audiences, and provides fascinating insights into recent developments in Chinese society, popular culture and cultural production.

The Chinese Cinema Book

The Chinese Cinema Book PDF Author: Song Hwee Lim
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1911239546
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
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.

Transnational Chinese Cinemas

Transnational Chinese Cinemas PDF Author: Sheldon H. Lu
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824818456
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
Zhang Yimou's first film, Red Sorghum, took the Golden Bear Award in 1988 at the Berlin International Film Festival. Since then Chinese films have continued to arrest worldwide attention and capture major film awards, winning an international following that continues to grow. Transnational Chinese Cinemas spans nearly the entire length of twentieth-century Chinese film history. The volume traces the evolution of Chinese national cinema, and demonstrates that gender identity has been central to its formation. Femininity, masculinity and sexuality have been an integral part of the filmic discourses of modernity, nationhood, and history. This volume represents the most comprehensive, wide-ranging, and up-to-date study of China's major cinematic traditions. It is an indispensable source book for modern Chinese and Asian history, politics, literature, and culture.

Sinascape

Sinascape PDF Author: Gary G. Xu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742554504
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema is a comprehensive study of Chinese-language films at the turn of the millennium. Emphasizing the transnational nature of contemporary Chinese cinema, it provides close readings of most of the important films of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and explores the interactions and transactions among these films and between Chinese cinema and Hollywood. General readers, film enthusiasts, and critics will all benefit from Gary Xu's discussion of popular films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Kung Fu Hustle, Devils on the Doorstep, Suzhou River, Beijing Bicycle, Millennium Mambo, Goodbye Dragon Inn, and Hollywood Hong Kong.

East Asian Cinemas

East Asian Cinemas PDF Author: V. Lee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230307183
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This book is an original volume of essays that sheds new and critical light on current and emerging filmmaking trends and practices in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. A timely and important contribution to existing scholarship in the field.

Remaking Chinese Cinema

Remaking Chinese Cinema PDF Author: Yiman Wang
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888139169
Category : Film remakes
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
From melodrama to Cantonese opera, from silents to 3D animated film, Remaking Chinese Cinema traces cross-Pacific film remaking over the last eight decades. Through the refractive prism of Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Yiman Wang revolutionizes our understanding of Chinese cinema as national cinema. Against the diffusion model of national cinema spreading from a central point—Shanghai in the Chinese case—she argues for a multilocal process of co-constitution and reconstitution. In this spirit, Wang analyzes how southern Chinese cinema (huanan dianying) morphed into Hong Kong cinema through transregional and trans-national interactions that also produced a vision of Chinese cinema. Among the book’s highlights are a rereading of The Goddess—one of the best-known silent Chinese films in the West—from the perspective of its wartime Mandarin-Cantonese remake; the excavation of a hybrid genre (the Western costume Cantonese opera film) inspired by Hollywood’s fantasy films of the 1930s and produced in Hong Kong well into the mid-twentieth century; and a rumination on Hollywood’s remake of Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs and the wholesale incorporation of “Chinese elements” in Kung Fu Panda 2. Positing a structural analogy between the utopic vision, the national cinema, and the location-specific collective subject position, the author traces their shared urge to infinitesimally approach, but never fully and finitely reach, a projected goal. This energy precipitates the ongoing processes of cross-Pacific film remaking, which constitute a crucial site for imagining and enacting (without absolving) issues of national and regional border politics. These issues unfold in relation to global formations such as colonialism, Cold War ideology, and postcolonial, postsocialist globalization. As such, Remaking Chinese Cinema contributes to the ongoing debate on (trans-)national cinema from the unique perspective of century-long border-crossing film remaking.

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films PDF Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231133333
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
What is the sentimental and how can we understand it through the cinema of a particular culture in an age of globalisation? Chow explores these questions by examining nine contemporary Chinese directors whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema.

Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas

Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas PDF Author: Hsiu-Chuang Deppman
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824885678
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Two of the most stylized shots in cinema—the close-up and the long shot—embody distinct attractions. The iconicity of the close-up magnifies the affective power of faces and elevates film to the discourse of art. The depth of the long shot, in contrast, indexes the facts of life and reinforces our faith in reality. Each configures the relation between image and distance that expands the viewer’s power to see, feel, and conceive. To understand why a director prefers one type of shot over the other then is to explore more than aesthetics: It uncovers significant assumptions about film as an art of intervention or organic representation. Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas is the first book to compare these two shots within the cultural, historical, and cinematic traditions that produced them. In particular, the global revival of Confucian studies and the transnational appeal of feminism in the 1980s marked a new turn in the composite cultural education of Chinese directors whose shot selections can be seen as not only stylistic expressions, but ethical choices responding to established norms about self-restraint, ritualism, propriety, and female agency. Each of the films discussed—Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew, and Wei Desheng’s Cape No. 7— represents a watershed in Chinese cinemas that redefines the evolving relations among film, politics, and ethics. Together these works provide a comprehensive picture of how directors contextualize close-ups and long shots in ways that make them interpretable across many films as bellwethers of social change.