ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |28 pages

Introduction

Revisiting the field of Chinese ecocinema 1

part I|1 pages

Ecodocumentaries and eco-festivals

chapter 1|17 pages

Mapping Taiwanese ecodocumentary landscape

Politics of aesthetics and environmental ethics in Taiwanese ecodocumentaries

chapter 2|17 pages

Nature in the city

A study of Hong Kong’s independent eco-film festival

part II|1 pages

Contemporary ecologies

chapter 3|16 pages

Three ecologies of cinema, migration, and the sea

Anchorage Prohibited and Luzon

chapter 4|19 pages

Tracing extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema

Tie Xi Qu and the politics of the resource image

chapter 5|16 pages

Chai Jing’s Under the Dome

A multimedia documentary in the digital age

part III|1 pages

Humans and animals

chapter 6|20 pages

Global animal capital and animal garbage

Documentary redemption and hope

chapter 7|25 pages

Transcendence and transgression

Reading Wolf Totem as environmental world literature/cinema?

chapter 8|30 pages

Fabulating animals–human affinity

Towards an ethics of care in Monster Hunt and Mermaid

part IV|1 pages

Landscape and nation

chapter 9|24 pages

Sinification by greening

Politics, nature, and ethnic borderlands in Maoist ecocinema

chapter 10|16 pages

No Man’s Land

Eco-Western in contemporary Chinese cinema