Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution

by Berry; Chris

• ISBN13: 9780415947862
• ISBN10: 0415947863
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-06-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book seeks to determine whether the cycle of films produced after the Fall of the Gang of Four in the People's Republic of China in 1976 and representing events during the Cultural Revolution decade of 1966 to 1976 constitutes a major break with the classical mainland Chinese cinema that had been dominant in that country after 1949. It is widely acknowledged in scholarship about China that Chinese society and culture now is qualitatively different from the heyday of socialism, both in terms of a decline in central control and loss of faith in the socialist vision. Chris Berry understands this new culture as postsocialist, and therefore asks if these films constitute the earliest sustained manifestations of postsocialist cinema.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Toward a Postsocialist Cinema?	1	(26)
Writing on Blank Paper: The Classical Cinema before 1976 as a Didactic Paradigm	27	(50)
Entering Forbidden Zones and Exposing Wounds: Rewriting Socialist History	77	(24)
Postsocialism and the Decline of the Hero	101	(14)
A Family Affair: Separation and Subjectivity	115	(20)
Ending it All: Bitter Love	135	(20)
Afterword: Foreigner Within, Foreigner Without	155	(6)
Notes	161	(30)
Bibliography	191	(16)
Filmography	207	(2)
Appendix	209	(36)
Index	245