China's iGeneration Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century

by Johnson, Matthew D.; Vulpiani, Luke; Wagner, Keith B.; Yu, Kiki Tianqi

• ISBN13: 9781623565954
• ISBN10: 1623565952
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-05-22
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

This innovative collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture features contributions from an international community of scholars, critics, and practitioners. Taken together, their perspectives make a compelling case that the past decade has witnessed a radical transformation of conventional notions of cinema. Following China's accession to the WTO in 2001, personal and collective experiences of changing social conditions have added new dimensions to the increasingly diverse Sinophone media landscape, and provided a novel complement to the existing edifice of blockbusters, documentaries, and auteur culture. The numerous 'iGeneration' productions and practices examined in this volume include 3D and IMAX films, experimental documentaries, animation, visual aides-mémoires, and works of pirated pastiche. Together, they bear witness to the emergence of a new Chinese cinema characterized by digital and, trans-media representational strategies, the blurring of private/public distinctions, and dynamic reinterpretations of the very notion of 'cinema' itself.

Author Biography

Matthew D. Johnson is Assistant Professor of East Asian History at Grinnell College, US. As a doctoral student he conducted one of the first oral histories of China's early socialist film industry, and is currently working on a book-length project titled The Most Important Art: Motion Pictures as Political Communication in Maoist China. He has written on mass media, documentary cinema, and U.S.-China transnational relations, and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

Keith B. Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea. He holds an M.Phil degree from the University of Cambridge and previously taught at London South Bank University and the University of Rhode Island. He is the co-editor (with Jyotsna Kapur) of Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (2011) and is now co-editing a special edition journal on Hollywood and the Financial Crisis.

Kiki Tianqi Yu is a final year PhD candidate at Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, focusing on Chinese first person DV documentary. Her first person film, about her father a documentary photographer, Photographing Shenzhen was commissioned by the Discovery Channel in 2007 and won the Best Documentary and Grand Jury Price at the 2008 Screentest - the UK's National Student Film Festival. In early 2009, she organized Polyphonic China - the first contemporary Chinese independent documentary screening event and seminars in the UK. In 2010 she programmed New Generation, a four-night screening of contemporary Chinese short films at Cinéphilia, West London.

Luke Vulpiani is a PhD candidate at King’s College London under the supervision of Professor Richard Dyer.

Table of Contents

Preface - Chris Berry
Introduction: The iGeneration - Film, Internet and Society in the World's New Superpower --Luke Vulpiani, Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner
Part I. Origins and trends - the market and space of the iGeneration
Chapter 1. In Search of the Next Big Thing: Contemporary Chinese Cinema Under the Pressure for Innovation --Yomi Braester
Chapter 2. The Historical Emergence of the iGeneration: Film Style as Commercial and Technological Imperative --Luke Vulpiani
Chapter 3. Screen/Spectacle/Scroll: Political Significances of New ScreenSpaces in China --Jeesoon Hong
Chapter 4. Provincializing Chinese Media-scape: Recent Digital Filmmaking and Internet Activism in Southern China -- Jia Tan
Chapter 5. The Cinematic Deng Xiaoping: Reform or Restoration? --Xiaomei Chen
Chapter 6. The Rise of the Grassroots Chinese Independent Film Festival -- Ma Ran
Part II. Popular filmmaking
Chapter 7. Bullets in Exchange for Money -- Xiao Liu
Chapter 8. From the Pirate to the Kino-eye: A Genealogical Tale of Chinese Independent Film -- Dan Gao
Chapter 9. Love, Purity and Degeneration: Online Responses to Zhang Yimou's Under the Hawthorn Tree -- Ralph Parfect
Chapter 10. Ghosts Inside: Altericide in the Contemporary Chinese Horror Film -- Aaron McMullan
Chapter 11. Back to Class: Social Stratification in the Films of Jia Zhangke -- Corey Schultz
Part III. Documentary
Chapter 12. Title TBC -- Yiman Wang
Chapter 13. Proletarian Documentary Film -- Jing Tsu
Chapter 14. China's Transnational ‘Cinema of Improvement': Documenting Village Governance, Past and Present -- Matthew D. Johnson
Chapter 15. Delinquency in the Chinese Rust Belt: Crime as the Ordinary in Xue Jianqiang's Three Small Animals (2008) -- Keith B. Wagner
Chapter 16. Chinese First Person Documentary in an Age of Amateur Independent Filmmaking -- Kiki Tianqi Yu
Chapter 17. Film Festivals and the Field of Independent Chinese Documentary Production: The Case of YunFest -- Luke Robinson and Jenny Chio