ABSTRACT
Post-Mao Chinese cinematic modernism, China’s ticket to “modern world cinema”—a polite name for global culture market—came into being through repudiating the socialist-realist studio-theatrical tradition. In historical hindsight, what was considered “new” in the 1980s was only new symbolically and retroactively, because the cinematic language and stylistic innovation practiced by the Fifth Generation filmmakers like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou did not seem to possess much shock value in a technical or merely historical context of world cinema or international modernism. Rather, the new was nearly always measured politically vis-à-vis the pre-existing frames of everyday life, aesthetic taste, value system, and sociomaterial conditions inherited from Mao’s China that had been pronounced old, obsolete, and in need of radical reform. Modernism, in this regard, was evoked, mobilized, and deployed more like a confirmation of universal time defined by the global market, whose economic and political substance and specificities can be grasped with some clarity only in the 1990s when the Chinese moment of high modernism quickly morphed and dispersed into a grab-bag mixture of postmodern variations of assorted local/global genres, from the kung fu movie, TV sitcom, to the uniquely Chinese visual spectaculars such as the 2008 Beijing Olympia Opening Ceremony.
