1st Edition
Ecology and Chinese-Language Cinema Reimagining a Field
This edited collection explores new developments in the burgeoning field of Chinese ecocinema, examining a variety of works from local productions to global market films, spanning the Maoist era to the present.
The ten chapters examine films with ecological significance in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, including documentaries, feature films, blockbusters and independent productions. Covering not only well-known works, such as Under the Dome, Wolf Totem, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracts, and Mermaid, this book also provides analysis of less well-known but critically important works, such as Anchorage Prohibited, Luzon, and Three Flower/Tri-Color. The unique perspectives this book provides, along with the comprehensive engagement with existing Chinese and English scholarship, not only extend the scope of the growing field of ecocinematic studies, but also seeks to reform the means through which Chinese-language eco-films are understood in the years to come.
Ecology and Chinese-Language Ecocinema will be of huge interest to students and scholars in the fields of Chinese cinema, environmental studies, media and communication studies.
Introduction: Revisiting the Field of Chinese Ecocinema, Haomin Gong
Part 1: Eco-Documentaries and Eco-Festivals
1. Mapping Taiwanese Ecodocumentary Landscape: Politics of Aesthetics and Environmental Ethics in Taiwanese Ecodocumentaries, Kuei-fen Chiu
2. Nature in the City: A Study of Hong Kong Independent Eco-Cinema and Eco-Film Festival, Winnie L. M. Yee
Part 2: Contemporary Ecologies
3. Three Ecologies of Cinema, Migration, and the Sea: Anchorage Prohibited and Luzon, Elizebath Wijaya
4. Tracing Extraction in Contemporary Chinese Cinema: Tie Xi Qu and the politics of the resource image, Pietari Kääpä
5. Chai Jing’s Under the Dome: A Multimedia Documentary in the Digital Age, Shuqin Cui
Part 3: Humans and Animals
6. Global Animal Capital and Animal Garbage: Documentary Redemption and Hope, Chia-ju Chang
7. Transcendence and Transgression: Reading Wolf Totem as Environmental World Literature/Cinema? Haomin Gong
8. Fabulating Animals-Human Affinity: Towards an Ethics of Care in Monster Hunt and Mermaid, Fiona Yuk-wa Law
Part 4: Landscape and Nation
9. Sinification by Greening: Politics, Nature, and Ethnic Borderlands in Maoist Ecocinema, Cheng Li
10. No Man’s Land: Eco-Western in Contemporary Chinese Cinema, Kun Qian
Biography
Sheldon Lu is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis, USA. He is the author, editor and co-editor of a dozen books in English and Chinese, including Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge (2009, co-editor with Jiayan Mi).
Haomin Gong is Associate Professor of Chinese at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is the author of Uneven Modernity: Literature, Film, and Intellectual Discourse in Postsocialist China (2012) and Reconfiguring Class, Gender, Ethnicity and Ethics in Chinese Internet Culture (2017).
