1st Edition

Chinese Cinemas International Perspectives

Edited By Felicia Chan, Andy Willis Copyright 2016
    202 Pages
    by Routledge

    202 Pages
    by Routledge

    Chinese Cinemas: International Perspectives examines the impact the rapid expansion of Chinese filmmaking in mainland China has had on independent and popular Chinese cinemas both in and outside of China.

    While the large Chinese markets are coveted by Hollywood, the commercial film industry within the People’s Republic of China has undergone rapid expansion since the 1990s. Its own production, distribution and exhibition capacities have increased exponentially in the past 20 years, producing box-office success both domestically and abroad.

    This volume gathers the work of a range of established scholars and newer voices on Chinese cinemas to address questions that interrogate both Chinese films and the place and space of Chinese cinemas within the contemporary global film industries, including the impact on independent filmmaking both within and outside of China; the place of Chinese cinemas produced outside of China; and the significance of new internal and external distribution and exhibition patterns on recent conceptions of Chinese cinemas.

    This is an ideal book for students and researchers interested in Chinese and Asian Cinema, as well as for students studying topics such as World Cinema and Asian Studies.

    Introduction: Chinese Cinemas, International Perspectives

    Felicia Chan and Andy Willis

    Part I: Textual Constructions and Industrial Contexts

    1. The Deconstruction and Intensification of ‘China’, or Primitive Passions in Man of Tai Chi

    Paul Bowman

    2. Internationalising Memory: Traumatic Histories and the PRC’s Quest to Win an Oscar

    A.T. McKenna and Kiki Tianqi Yu

    3. Once Upon a Time in China and America: Transnational Storytelling and the Recent Films of Peter Chan

    Gary Bettinson

    4. Mediating Trauma: The Nanjing Massacre, City of Life and Death, and Affect as Soft Power

    Corey Kai Nelson Schultz

    Part II: Shifting Foci: Global and Local Chinese Cinemas

    5. The Uncertainty Principle: Reframing Independent Film in Twenty-First Century Chinese Cinema

    Eddie Bertozzi

    6. Crossing Hennessy, Big Blue Lake and Flowing Stories: re-centring the local in recent Hong Kong Cinema

    Andy Willis

    7. Blurred lines? The dialectics of the margins and the mainstream in The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993) and Saving Face (Alice Wu, 2004)

    Juliette Ledru

    Part III: Woman in the Frame

    8. First, not only: writing Chinese women’s film authorship

    Felicia Chan

    9. Women Characters, Women’s Cinema and Neo-Liberal Chinese Modernity: Doubled and Split

    Chris Berry

    10. The Grain of Jade: Woman, Repression, and Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town

    Rey Chow

    Part IV: International Perspectives

    11. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo — Cina (1972): A Moment of ‘Explicitation’

    Valentina Vitali

    12. The Melbourne Controversy: Jia Zhangke and the Melbourne International Film Festival 2009

    Robert Hamilton

    13. A Chinese Diasporic Festival Film in the Making?: The Interesting Case of Ann Hui’s A Simple Life

    Ruby Cheung

    Biography

    Felicia Chan is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester researching the construction of national, cultural and cosmopolitan imaginaries in film. She is also co-editor of Genre in Asian Film and Television: New Approaches (2011), founding member of the Chinese Film Forum UK, and author of the forthcoming Cosmopolitan Cinema.

    Andy Willis is a Reader in Film Studies at the University of Salford, Senior Visiting Curator at HOME, Manchester and a founder member of the Chinese Film Forum UK. He is co-author of The Cinema of Alex de la Iglesia (2007), editor of Film Stars: Hollywood and Beyond (2004), co-editor of Spanish Popular Cinema (2004) and of East Asian Film Stars (2014).