ABSTRACT
Contemporary Chinese cinema entered a special period of development in 1990s. The mid-to late 1980s was a time when the third, fourth, and fifth generations of Chinese directors were like stars shining brightly in the sky, the most thriving era of Chinese film history since the 1930s. By the 1990s, however, those directors had lost their sheen or altered their style. The third generation of Chinese filmmakers was most active from the 1950s to the 1990s. The rhetorical aesthetics we pursue regard artistic work as a field of discourse in society and link its discursive practices to power relations. The method looks not only at the symbols and their textual interplay, but also at the connection of text to its effects and the functions it generates in society. Etiologically, rhetoric refers to the skill of effectively deploying phraseology when speaking and writing as well as how such discourse effectively influences, or has an effect on, moving or persuading, the public.
