One Hundred Years of Chinese Cinema
A Generational Dialogue
Edited by Haili Kong and John A. Lent
December 2005 | 298 pages
$24.99 (paperback) | ISBN
978-1-910736-63-0
$44.99 (hardback) | ISBN
978-1-910736-64-7
Arguably the first book to take a generational approach to the Chinese cinema, this book offers a broad picture of the evolution of Chinese cinema in its historical context, as well as thorough and insightful analyses of representative films from different generations.
About the Editors
Haili Kong is Associate Professor of Chinese at Swarthmore College. He was the primary organizer of the Chinese Film Festival and the International Symposium on Chinese Film held at Swarthmore College in 2000.
John Lent edits the journal Asian Cinema and chairs both the Asian Cinema Studies Society and the Asian Popular Culture Group of the Popular Culture Society. He has authored over 60 books and co-organized the International Symposium on Chinese Film held at Swarthmore College in 2000.
Contents
CINEMATIC STYLE AND SPACE IN THE 1930S AND 1940S
- Peter Rist: Visual Style in the Silent Films Made by the Lianhua Film Company [United Photoplay Service] in Shanghai: 1931-35
- Shuang Shen: Representing History and the Nation from Afar: The Case of Qing Gong Mi Shi [A Hidden History of the Qing Court].
HISTORICIZED CINEMATIC TEXTS: THE RECONFIGURED PAST AND PRESENT.
- Xiaobing Tang: Rural Women and Social Change in New China Cinema: From Li Shuanguang to Ermo.
- Rebecca Karl: The Burdens of History: Lin Zexu (1959) and The Opium War (1997).
- Zhiwei Xiao and Hong Yin: The Revisionist History in Recent Chinese Films: A Case Study of My 1919.
ZHANG YIMOU’S CHANGING LENS IN THE 1980s AND THE 1990s.
- Haili Kong: Symbolism through Zhang Yimou’s Subversive Lens in His Early Films.
- Xudong Zhang: Cinema of Postsocialism: Zhang Yimou’s Film Production in the Late 1990s.
THE SIXTH GENERATION FILMMAKERS AND BEYOND
- Weijie Song: Transgression, Submission, and the Fantasy of Youth Subculture: The Nostalgic Symptoms of In the Heat of the Sun.
- Shaoyi Sun: In Search of the Erased Half: Suzhou River, Lunar Eclipse, and the Sixth Generation Filmmakers of China.
- Yingjin Zhang: The Global City of the Transnational Imaginary: Disappearance and Reinscription in Chinese Urban Cinema.
INTERVIEWS
- Teach for a While, Direct for a While: An Interview with China’s Xie Fei, conducted by John A. Lent.
- The Past, the Present, and the Future: An Interview with Wu Ziniu, conducted by Haili Kong
- “All Artists Are Narcissistic”: An Interview with Lou Ye, conducted by Shaoyi Sun.
Praise
“This impressively edited collection of excellent essays on Chinese cinema offers a wide range of research coverage, from the cinematographic style of silent film in the early 1930s to the sixth generation products and the theoretical dilemma in the age of globalization. It represents the cutting edge of research on the fascinating issues of cinematic generational distinctions, global capitalism, cultural politics, and nationhood, and is sure to have a major impact on the study of Chinese cinema.”
—Jianmei Liu, University of Maryland
Related products
China and Postsocialist Anthropology applies lessons learned from socialist governance, especially in China, to the realm of social theory. Socialist governance explicitly draws on various aspects of Marxist theory and thus directly illuminates issues as varied as theorizing power, imagining the relationship between continuity and discontinuity in historical process, utilizing the category of “the political” […]
In late 1940, General Vasilii Chuikov was sent by the Soviet government to China to serve as chief military adviser to General Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nationalist government. China was still fighting alone against Japan after more than three years of war. It was Chuikov’s task to oversee the provision of Soviet military aid […]
When Soong Meiling, better known to the world as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, died in October 2003, her life of over a century almost exactly paralleled America’s own century of direct involvement with Asia, which began with the acquisition of the Philippines. Alone among Western Powers, the United States championed an Open Door policy toward China. […]
Taken from journals and letters written during the final decades of the Manchu Empire and the chaotic years of revolution and civil war leading up to the War of Resistance (1937–1945), this is the story of the life and work of the Protestant missionaries who opened their first station in the upper Min River region […]
China’s rise to world power status has changed the shape of the world. The U.S.-China bilateral relationship is arguably already the most important one for both countries and it embraces issues of global and regional security, economic prosperity, and the environment, among many others. If Americans tend to ignore history, Chinese do not. The five […]
The roots of modern Sino-Japanese relations lie in the intense cultural and political exchanges which blossomed in the mid-1850s extending into the late 1920s. Scholarly interest has grown over the last two decades in the interaction between China and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While much of that interest has centered […]