ABSTRACT
Compared with the Fifth Generation’s early oeuvres, recent Chinese art films have seen a more conscious and profound engagement with traditional Chinese aesthetics, where traditional Chinese painting, as a significant aspect of Chinese aesthetics, is thereby frequently integrated into film beyond formal simulation. This chapter aims to analyse the intermedial engagement with traditional Chinese painting in contemporary Chinese arthouse cinema. Focusing on four examples—Seven Days (Xing Jian, 2015), Mr. No Problem (Mei Feng, 2016), I Am Not Madame Bovary (Feng Xiaogang, 2016), and Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Gu Xiaogang, 2019)—the chapter looks at how certain motifs, techniques, and conventions unique in Chinese painting are transformed into a film aesthetics of corresponding composition, lighting, camera movement, and so on. In particular, the cinematic materialisation of essential Chinese painting concepts – such as “artistic conception,” “landscape,” and “literati” – are examined in detail as an attempt to understand the filmmakers’ incorporation of an important Chinese aesthetic principle, namely favouring the expressive over the representational, the practice of which can date back to the so-called literati films during the 1930s–1940s with Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948) as an exemplar. Therefore, within the framework of Chinese studies and film studies, this chapter wishes to address the tendency of intermediality in new Chinese arthouse cinema and demonstrate contemporary Chinese filmmakers’ continuity of and innovation in internalising Chinese aesthetics in film.
