ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

part I|58 pages

Textual constructions and industrial contexts

chapter 2|16 pages

Internationalising memory

Traumatic histories and the PRC's quest to win an Oscar

chapter 3|16 pages

Once upon a time in China and America

Transnational storytelling and the recent films of Peter Chan

chapter 4|16 pages

Mediating trauma

The Nanjing Massacre, City of Life and Death, and affect as soft power

part II|38 pages

Shifting foci

chapter 5|13 pages

The uncertainty principle

Reframing independent film in twenty-first century Chinese cinema

chapter 6|12 pages

Crossing Hennessy, Big Blue Lake and Flowing Stories

Re-centring the local in recent Hong Kong cinema

chapter 7|11 pages

Blurred lines?

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

part III|34 pages

Woman in the frame

chapter 8|10 pages

First, Not Only

Writing Chinese women's film authorship

chapter 10|7 pages

The grain of jade

Woman, repression and Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town

part IV|40 pages

International perspectives

chapter 11|16 pages

Michelangelo Antonioni's Chung Kuo – Cina (1972)

A moment of ‘explicitation’

chapter 12|8 pages

The Melbourne Controversy

Jia Zhangke and the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival

chapter 13|14 pages

A chinese diasporic festival film in the making?

The interesting case of Ann Hui's A Simple Life