Description
Book SynopsisFrom her early film studies to her most recent critiques of contemporary pop culture, Chinese Cinema Culture: A Scene in the Fog presents Dai Jinhua's multiple theoretical moves toward writing difference into the Euro-American discourses current in China today; it is an account of both her interrogation of mainstream Western theories and her eventual flight from them. She searches for a theoretical strategy that enables her to narrate critically the intellectual and gendered film history and culture of the post-Mao and post-Deng eras without sacrificing it to the orientalizing gaze of the West. Her work demonstrates brilliant insights into China's cinema tradition that is inseparable from both the political legacy of Maoism and current postcolonial order of cultural knowledge. This book includes 11 essays organized in three parts and one dialogue on Chinese cinema culture as the afterword.
Trade Review“Owing to Dai Jinhua’s pioneering work since the 1990s, complex Chinese social and cultural realities that found no references in contemporary histories have become subject to description, criticism, and analysis through film studies.
Chinese Cinema Culture: A Scene in the Fog crowns her achievements, especially in terms of methodological originality. Besides her role in shaping cinema studies in China, her works have also been used as textbooks in other countries.” —Hong Zicheng, Professor of Chinese Literature at Peking University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments – Part One: Between the Reels – Severed Bridge: The Art of the Sons’ Generation – A Scene in the Fog: Reading the Sixth Generation Films – Subject Structure and Modes of Viewing: Films by the Fourth Generation Directors at the Turn of the 1970s and 1980s – Part Two: Ashes of Time – The Roar of Silence: Under the Facade of Urbanness: Chinese Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s – Encountering "The Other": Notes on the Theory of "Third World Literature" – Rift Valley: Glory and Downthrows in the Post-1989 Art Cinema – Ermo: A Modern-Day Allegory Created by a Fifth Generation Director – The Piano in a Factory: Class, or in the Name of the Father – Part Three: Half the Sky – Gender and Narration: Women in Contemporary Chinese Film – "Human, Woman, Demon": A Woman’s Predicament – Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Films: Pursuing and Escaping History – Appendix: The Isle of Yesterday—Film, Scholarship, and Me – Index.
