Book Description
The Chinese cinemas--including mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong--have been the most internationally popular and successful non-Western cinemas for almost two decades now. In recent years, they have generated a vigorous and thriving field of interpretation and criticism. Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes is an anthology of 25 fresh and original readings of individual Chinese films. Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the diaspora are all included, and historical coverage ranges from the 1930s to the present. Film titles covered include Farewell My Concubine, Chungking Express, Flowers of Shanghai, The Goddess, Bullet in the Head, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Crows and Sparrows, Yi Yi, and many more. As well as globally famous films, the anthology also introduces a number of Chinese classics that are less well known internationally and deserve more attention.
The essays are concise, accessible, rich, and on the cutting edge of current research. Each one outlines existing writing on the film, and then presents an original perspective. All are designed for classroom use, scholarly research, and to appeal to the general reader with an interest in Chinese film.
Book Description
Perspectives of Chinese Cinema is a revised and much expanded edition of a pioneering work, bringing together the best of contemporary critical writing on Chinese cinema from an international range of distinguished contributors. It offers a broad and revealing view of Chinese cinema past and present, with particular emphasis on films of the new wave, "Fifth Generation" directors such as Yellow Earth and Red Sorghum, and on the political and economic struggles they face.
Book Description
Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema is a comprehensive study of Chinese-language films at the turn of the millennium. Emphasizing the transnational nature of contemporary Chinese cinema, it provides close readings of most of the important films of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and explores the interactions and transactions among these films and between Chinese cinema and Hollywood. General readers, film enthusiasts, and critics will all benefit from Gary Xu's discussion of popular films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Kung Fu Hustle, Devils on the Doorstep, Suzhou River, Beijing Bicycle, Millennium Mambo, Goodbye Dragon Inn, and Hollywood Hong Kong.
Customer Reviews:
A comprehensive examination of transnational Chinese-language films.......2007-04-10
Associate professor of Chinese, comparative literature, cinema studies, and criticism Gary Xu applies knowledge gained from his working relationship with filmmakers in Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema, a comprehensive examination of transnational Chinese-language films of the turn of the millennium. Sinascape applies its sharp-eyed focus to spotting trends and interpreting aspects in Chinese cinema, and uses examples of popular Chinese movies to illustrate its points, but should not be confused with a grand catalog of Chinese films. Movies dissected at length in the essays include "Hero, House of Flying Daggers", "Devils on the Doorstep", "My Camera Doesn't Lie", "Kung Fu Hustle", "Goodbye, Dragon Inn", "Millennium Mambo", and "Hollywood Hong Kong". Occasional black-and-white photographs, a bibliography, and an index round out this guide recommended for cinema students and philosophically inclined fans of Chinese cinema.
Book Description
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Chinese filmmakers produced a great number of films portraying male homosexuality. Prominent examples include the interracial New York couple in The Wedding Banquet, the flâneurs sojourning from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires in Happy Together, the cross-dressing opera queen in Farewell My Concubine, and the queer oeuvre of Tsai Ming-liang and Stanley Kwan. Celluloid Comrades offers a cogent analytical introduction to the representation of male homosexuality in Chinese cinemas within the last decade. It posits that representations of male homosexuality in Chinese film have been polyphonic and multifarious, posing a challenge to monolithic and essentialized constructions of both "Chineseness" and "homosexuality." Given the artistic achievement and popularity of the films discussed here, the position of "celluloid comrades" can no longer be ignored within both transnational Chinese and global queer cinemas. The book also challenges readers to reconceptualize these works in relation to global issues such as homosexuality and gay and lesbian politics, and their interaction with local conditions, agents, and audiences.
Tracing the engendering conditions within the film industries of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Song Hwee Lim argues that the emergence of Chinese cinemas in the international scene since the 1980s created a public sphere in which representations of marginal sexualities could flourish in its interstices. Examining the politics of representation in the age of multiculturalism through debates about the films, Lim calls for a rethinking of the limits and hegemony of gay liberationist discourse prevalent in current scholarship and film criticism. He provides in-depth analyses of key films and auteurs, reading them within contexts as varied as premodern, transgender practice in Chinese theater to postmodern, diasporic forms of sexualities.
Celluloid Comrades is situated at the crossroads of gender and sexuality studies, film and cinema studies, and Chinese studies. Informed by cultural and postcolonial studies and critical theory, this acutely observed and theoretically sophisticated work will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students as well as general readers looking for a deeper understanding of contemporary Chinese cultural politics, cinematic representations, and queer culture.
Book Description
Since 1984, Chinese cinema has been the most dramatic entry onto the international film scene. China into Film is the first book to look at contemporary Chinese cinema as a visual art and to illustrate the ways in which it has been shaped by centuries of Chinese tradition. Jerome Silbergeld looks at the significance of gender roles, the strategies of film-makers in coping with state censorship, the translation of novels into films, the continuing attachment of film-makers to melodrama, and cinematic critiques of Maoism and post-Maoist culture.Abundantly illustrated with Chinese paintings as well as scenes from such internationally acclaimed films as Yellow Earth, Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine, China into Film reveals a cinematic form at once excitingly new and deeply imbedded in traditional Chinese visual culture.
Customer Reviews:
the real thing.......2002-02-05
Maybe the blurry photos in this book tell the whole story about it. They're not nice, crisp, fake publicity photos sold by studios that never appear in the real films. They are blurry because (I guess) they come from real (blurry) Chinese films. No other book about Chinese film does this, but this book is about how Chinese films really look, and why (use a fake photo and how can you write honestly about how "the film" looks?). It is not a fashionable polemic. It is not about technical matters like lighting and film economics. Instead, it is about Chinese culture, Chinese artistic traditions (how new films fits into old visual patterns), and the politics of film makers getting around the Chinese censor. It isn't about the most popular films but uses films that seem best to illustrate important themes. It's not a light read and it's not journalistic film "criticism" -- but it makes you think about the subject and teaches a different way to really understand Chinese cinema and its place in Chinese culture today.
good analyses, poor quality stills.......2001-06-28
The author provides an art historic analysis of some of the most influential films in Chinese cinema between 1984 and 1997. The analyses draw not only from the films themselves but also from both contemporary political contexts and historical treatments of the subject matters. The latter illustrated with traditional arts reproduced in the book.
Despite the author's qualifying statements on his selection of films to cover and that he has not "sought unnecessarily to establish a new canon," I'm nevertheless left wondering why he has chosen not to mention notable films like Zhang Yimou's "To Live" and Tian Zhuangzhuang's "The Blue Kite" when he discusses at great length Chen Kaige's "Farewell My Concubine."
The most annoying part of the book though is the terrible quality of the stills. They are blurry snapshots of paused screens. The book would have been better off without them; the text clearly does not need them. No studio credit was given for any of the screen shots. (For contrast, see Tam and Dissanayake's "New Chinese Cinema," which manages to present sharp frame stills from the studios.)
About time.......2000-07-22
It's about time a book on contemporary chinese cinema with such detail gets published. This book chronicles the growth of the new chinese cinema and how traditional visual arts ,as well as Mao's revolution influenced the filmmakers.Many westerners agree that what makes contemporary chinese films quite powerful are the simplicity of film elements from the story to art direction and cinematography This book clearly describes these co-relations. The visual analysis of the author makes us more appreciative of Zhang yimou's composition or Chen Kaige's films' characters. Even if there are many films about contemporary chinese cinema( and there aren't that many) ,this is the first book cinephiles of Chinese cinema should buy.
Book Description
Yingjin Zhang guides the reader through the development of Chinese film criticism, pointing out that Western critics have studied a comparatively small number of films from a much larger body of work, often with a unidirectional Eurocentric bias. The result has been that the few have influenced the many, perpetuating a cycle of production of films from China that bow to the Western notion of "Chineseness." As a corrective, the author introduces readers to a much larger canon of film and proposes a multidirectional model of film studies, one that allows for a Western reading of Chinese film yet also recognizes Chinese cinema's own voice.
Yingjin Zhang is Professor of Chinese Literature and Film, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies at University of California, San Diego.
Book Description
Global perceptions of China have changed dramatically since the massive student protests that took place in Tian'anmen Square in April 1989. The media spotlight trained on Beijing, and the international uproar over the events of that spring still shape the world's perceptions of the People's Republic and the ways that Chinese people, within and beyond China, see and portray themselves.
In From Tian'anmen to Times Square, leading film scholar Gina Marchetti considers the complex changes in the ways that China and the Chinese have been portrayed in cinema and media arts since the Tian'anmen revolt. Drawing on her interviews with leading contemporary Chinese filmmakers, Marchetti looks at a wide range of work by Chinese and non-Chinese media artists working in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore and on transnational co-productions involving those places. Focusing on the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on global screens, Marchetti traces the momentous political, cultural, social, and economic forces confronting contemporary media artists and filmmakers working within "Greater China."
Average customer rating:
- Wonderful pictures and very informative
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From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China (Harvard Contemporary China Series)
Ellen Widmer , and
David Der-wei Wang
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
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What do the Chinese literature and film inspired by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) have in common with the Chinese literature and film of the May Fourth movement (1918-1930)? This new book demonstrates that these two periods of the highest literary and cinematic creativity in twentieth-century China share several aims: to liberate these narrative arts from previous aesthetic orthodoxies, to draw on foreign sources for inspiration, and to free individuals from social conformity.
Although these consistencies seem readily apparent, with a sharper focus the distinguished contributors to this volume reveal that in many ways discontinuity, not continuity, prevails. Their analysis illuminates the powerful meeting place of language, imagery, and narrative with politics, history, and ideology in twentieth-century China.
Drawing on a wide range of methodologies, from formal analysis to feminist criticism, from deconstruction to cultural critique, the authors demonstrate that the scholarship of modern Chinese literature and film has become integral to contemporary critical discourse. They respond to Eurocentric theories, but their ultimate concern is literature and film in China's unique historical context. The volume illustrates three general issues preoccupying this century's scholars: the conflict of the rural search for roots and the native soil movement versus the new strains of urban exoticism; the diacritics of voice, narrative mode, and intertextuality; and the reintroduction of issues surrounding gender and subjectivity.
Customer Reviews:
Wonderful pictures and very informative.......2000-06-11
Widmer and Wang give a wonderful taste of contemporary film and fiction in this book, which would look good on any coffee table or bookshelf of any film connoisseur. It is also a good insight into the art of film in Communist China. Through it, you gain a better understanding of life and hardship in such a volatile period in China's history through the eye of a lens.
Average customer rating:
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Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the New Era
Manufacturer: Praeger Publishers
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Perspectives of Chinese Cinema
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Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics
ASIN: 027593103X |
Book Description
This is the first collection of translations of Chinese film theory to be published in English. By using translations rather than summaries, as other works have done, Chinese Film Theory provides readers with an introduction to the issues current in China's film circles. It includes eighteen chapters written by a broad range of writers--from well established scholars to young people at the beginning of their involvement in film in China. This collection indicates a trend away from the study of external qualities of film and toward a study of the film itself. The volume has been carefully organized so that major issues are interrelated; thus, the book comprises an ongoing debate of film theory issues, progressing from earlier to most recent issues, following the debate concerning the relationship of film to literary arts, and looking at the debate over the relationship of film to culture. The book concludes that for the time being, debate has virtually ended because of the political situation in China. This book is an important new source to anyone interested in film studies, film theory, or Chinese studies.
Book Description
Includes a DVD with scenes from Suzhou River, The Day the Sun Turned Cold, and Good Men, Good Women
As China and the West grow closer together year by year, Chinese cinema becomes increasingly Westernized and Western interest in Chinese cinema continues to grow. Hitchcock with a Chinese Face examines three recent award-winning films--one from Shanghai, one from Hong Kong, one from Taipei--concerned with the issues of developing globalization and the defense of local identity and culture. Superficially different, these films surprise Western audiences with their sophisticated cinematic skills and the depth of their engagement with Dostoevsky and Freud, Faulkner and Hitchcock. They employ double-characters, multiple identities, and radically nonlinear narrative structures and pay homage to film noir, individualizing psychodynamics never before seen in Chinese cinema and increasing tension between traditional Chinese and modern Western moral values.
Jerome Silbergeld examines Suzhou River (People's Republic of China, 2000), The Day the Sun Turned Cold (Hong Kong, 1994), and Good Men, Good Women (Taiwan, 1995) in greater depth than seen in any previous study of Chinese cinema. An art historian, he explores the visuality of these films in unusual detail, taking account of the film makers' reliance on the metaphoric image in skirting Chinese film censorship. Surprising connections are drawn as Silbergeld's arguments unfold, and his ideas spiral outward in cyclical patterns that are themselves almost cinematic in scope. Witty and insightful, Silbergeld's text relates seemingly disparate elements of three films to create a new perspective on the latest and finest Chinese-language films, on the complexities of life in China's rapidly modernizing culture, and on the universal themes of politics and betrayal, honor and pity.
The book is illustrated entirely with actual frames from films, rather than with the publicity stills used in most publications about Chinese cinema. A DVD accompanies this volume, containing key scenes from each film and a full-color version of each illustration in the book.
Customer Reviews:
Timely study of leading Chinese art films.......2004-09-28
Silbergeld takes the three Chinese films Suzhou River, The Day the Sun Turned Cold, and Good Men to examine how Western film techniques have been brought into Chinese cinema. The films also evidence that Western literary and cultural influences are a part of Chinese cinema. The influence of Freud, Faulkner, and Dostoevsky can be seen in one or more of the films; and, not surprisingly, the cinematic techniques of Hitchcock are seen, as well those of David Lynch and Jean Luc-Godard. "The [Chinese] films are remarkable for their intellectual depth and range, their layered complexity, their emotional sobriety, their appeal to a sophisticated film audience rather than a mass market, their determined critique of contemporary culture...and the resonance of their moral voice." The same could be said for Western art films, which the Chinese films plainly resemble, to the point of imitation in many ways. In a pocket inside the back cover is a CD with scenes from the movies. Silbergeld's selection of only three distinctive, yet in many ways representative films makes for an efficient, yet pithy exposure to the best of Chinese art films; which films are gaining more attention as China's economic and political power grows.
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- Clint: The Life and Legend
- Complete Home Bartender's Guide: 780 Recipes for the Perfect Drink
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- Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader
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