Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema

ISBN-13: 9780748692330 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 256 str.

Qi Wang

Opis

Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema provides a historically informed examination of independent moving image works made between 1990 and 2010 in China. Showcasing an evolving personal mode of narrating memory, documenting reality, and inscribing subjectivity in over sixteen selected works that range from narrative film and documentary to experimental video and digital media (even including a multimedia avant-garde play), this book presents a provocative portrait of the independent filmmakers as a peculiarly pained yet active group of historical subjects of the transitional, post-socialist era. Through a connected investigation of cultural and cinematic concepts including historical consciousness, personal memory, narrative, performance, subjectivity, spatiality, and the body, Wang weaves a critical narrative of the formation of a unique post-socialist cultural consciousness that enables independent cinema and media to become a highly significant and effective conduit for historical thinking in contemporary China.
Covering directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Meng Jinghui, Wang Bing, Wang Guangli, Duan Jinchuan, Cui Zi'en, Shi Tou, and Tang Danhong, this book is essential reading for all students and scholars in Chinese film.

Spis treści

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Understanding Postsocialism on a Personal Scale; Two Siblings or Generational Subjects of Chinese Postsocialism; The Forsaken Generation and Historical Consciousness; Material, Structure and Methodology Part I From the Past: Subjectivity, Memory and Narrative 1 Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject; Subjectivity and Spatiality in Yangbanxi and 1980s Cinema; A Ship on a River: The Historical Space in Night Rain in Bashan; The Figure of a Forsaken Child; The Forsaken Generation: Take It Personally and Historically 2 For a Narration of One’s Own; Wilful Chance and Futile Subjects in To Live and Farewell, My Concubine; To Figure New Subjects: Independent Cinema and Personal Filmmaking; Self-narrative I: I Love XXX and a Radical Recollection of History; Self-narrative II: Fractured and Fragmented In the Heat of the Sun; The Delirium of a Fool: Narrative Excess and the Subject’s Alter Ego; Self-portraits of New Cinematic Subjects out of the Dirt of History Part II In the Present: Camera, Documentary and Performance 3 Surface and Edge: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye; Jia Zhangke: A Subjective Metanarrative Vision; Platform: Cinematic Space and Multivalent Subject Positions; Superficial Time: Writing on the Wall; Superficial Space: Debris, Wanderers and Vehicles; Lou Ye: Dwelling on the Edge of the Camera 4 Personal Documentary; Chinese Verité and Duan Jinchuan’s Invisible Gaze; Personal Documentary; I Graduated: Subject-ing the Past to the Present; West of the Tracks: Subject-ing the Present to History 5 Performing Bodies in Experimental and Digital Media; Nightingale, Not the Only Voice: A Performance of Inter-subjectivity; Shi Tou: Women, Bodies and Herself; Cui Zi’en: Embodying Realities and Performing Identities; Play with the Body of History: Experimental and Digital Media Conclusion: China’s Luckless but Hopeful Angels of History Notes Selected Filmography and Bibliography Index