China on Screen : Cinema and Nation

by Berry, Chris

• ISBN13: 9780231137072
• ISBN10: 0231137079
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-04-01
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

In China on Screen, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, leaders in the field of Chinese film studies, explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, Berry and Farquhar analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the abandonment of "national cinema" as an analytic tool and propose "cinema and the national" as a more productive framework. With this approach, they show how movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora construct and contest different ideas of Chinese nation -- as empire, republic, or ethnicity, and complicated by gender, class, style, transnationalism, and more. Among the issues and themes covered are the tension between operatic and realist modes, male and female star images, transnational production and circulation of Chinese films, the image of the good foreigner -- all related to different ways of imagining nation. Comprehensive and provocative, China on Screen is a crucial work of film analysis.

Author Biography

Chris Berry is professor of film and television studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London Mary Farquhar is professor of Asian Studies at Griffith University

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
A Note on Translation and Romanization	xiii
Introduction: Cinema and the National	1	(16)
Time and the National: History, Historiology, Haunting	17	(30)
Operatic Modes: Opera Film, Martial Arts, and Cultural Nationalism	47	(28)
Realist Modes: Melodrama, Modernity, and Home	75	(33)
How Should a Chinese Woman Look? Woman and Nation	108	(27)
How Should Chinese Men Act? Ordering the Nation	135	(34)
Where Do You Draw the Line? Ethnicity in Chinese Cinemas	169	(26)
The National in the Transnational	195	(28)
Chronology	223	(10)
Notes	233	(32)
European-language Bibliography	265	(22)
Chinese-language Bibliography	287	(6)
Film List	293	(8)
Index	301