Lights! Camera! Kaishi!
In Depth Interviews with China's New Generation of Movie Directors
Shaoyi Sun & Li Xun
December 2008 | 300 pages
$24.99 (paperback) | ISBN
978-1-78869-017-1
$44.99 (hardback) | ISBN
978-1-78869-018-8
In Lights! Camera! Kaishi! Sun and Li interview twenty-one young Chinese movie-makers on a variety of challenges facing them as cinema gradually emerges from the PRC’s long-standing censorship restrictions. Assembled by theme, the reader experiences a sense of eavesdropping on an open discussion between with these notable film directors. Includes biographical sketches (with color photos) of each participating director together with their filmographies.
Praise
“Lights! Camera! Kaishi! is much more than a book of thorough and revealing interviews with today’s Chinese film directors. Organized thematically, it is an excellent introduction to the contemporary Chinese film industry in the age of the market economy. From Jia Zhangke, winner of the 2006 Venice Golden Lion for Still Life to super blogger and female director Xu Jinglei, Lights! Camera! Kaishi! introduces a new generation of Chinese film directors to the world.”
—Chris Berry
Professor of Film and TV Studies
Goldsmiths College, University of London
“Lights! Camera! Kaishi! offers a unique perspective on the current Chinese film industry and the efforts of 21 leading young filmmakers to move that industry in a positive direction. By having these directors address a single broad theme in each chapter, we are able to listen as they, in effect, ”talk to each other” about nine of the most pressing issues facing filmmakers and Chinese cinema today. In the course of these interviews we are able to see how these directors differ from each other in personal and professional experiences as well as in their philosophical outlooks. This is an excellent choice as a text for classes in contemporary Chinese cinema and will prove equally valuable for conducting research on the Chinese film industry.”
—Stanley Rosen
Professor of Political Science
University of Southern California
“Lights! Camera! Kaishi! is an insightful study of the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers in mainland China. It contains illuminating interviews with the leading directors and sheds light on a whole range of important issues including: independent cinema; censorship; the film industry; and globalization. With this collaborative work, Sun and Li have made a significant contribution to Chinese film studies and provided us a useful and valuable resource.”
—Sheldon Lu
Professor of Chinese Cinema and Literature
University of California, Davis
Related products
In the 1920s, three adventurous and determined British women missionaries traveled along the traces of China’s old Silk Road to “gossip the Gospel” in the Muslim regions of northwestern China. But as this ground-breaking biography of Mildred Cable and the sisters Eva and Francesca French illustrates, their mission service was only one aspect of these […]
The year 1979 marked turning points in both contemporary Chinese history and Sino-American relations. Deng Xiaoping initiated market reforms and an opening to the global economy which would transform China, with Guangzhou (Canton) at the forefront. Washington and Beijing’s mutual diplomatic recognition triggered an across-the-board expansion of relations between the United States and China. When […]
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 […]
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. […]
The Oriole’s Song is a love story — love of family, of entwined cultures, of life itself — during and after the turmoil of war. This beautiful recollection of an American girlhood in China during World War II is a continual delight with large insights and small moments made exqusite by delicate prose. On May […]
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 […]