Description
Book SynopsisShorlisted for the BAFTSS 2020 Award for Best Monograph
Starting out as an independent filmmaker, and despite his films being subjected to censorship in his native China, Jia Zhangke has become the country's leading film director internationally. Seen as one of world cinema's foremost auteurs, he has played a crucial role in documenting and reflecting upon China's era of intense transformations since the 1990s..
Cecília Mello provides in-depth analysis of Jia's unique body of work, from his early films Xiao Wu and Platform, to experimental quasi-documentary 24 City and the audacious Mountains May Depart. Mello suggests that Jia's particular expression of the realist mode is shaped by the aesthetics of other Chinese artistic traditions, allowing Jia to unearth memories both personal and collective, still lingering within the ever-changing landscapes of contemporary China. Mello's groundbreaking study opens a door into Chinese cinema an
Trade Review
The tone is serious and scholarly, and the author approaches her subject as if nothing could be as important in a world in which the liberal arts have been almost abandoned … Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *
Cecilia Mello's study of Jia Zhangke, China's leading independent director, brilliantly counterbalances the impulses towards realism and intermediality she finds in Zhangke's work. Its foreword by Walter Salles backs up Salles's and Mello's claim that Zhangke is the most important world film director of the twenty-first century so far, and Mello's thorough knowledge and understanding of Chinese cultures of this period underpins the book's location of memory between the realist impulse and the impure multilayeredness of Zhangke's films. -- BAFTSS Awards judges
Over the course of the past 25 years, there has been no better cinematic chronicle of China’s dramatic transformation than the films of Jia Zhangke... Cecília Mello digs deep into Jia’s body of work, unveiling a rich tapestry of intermingling songs, landscapes, textures, and intertexts. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding how Jia Zhangke’s films work. -- Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies, UCLA, USA
Cecília Mello’s refined analysis not only unravels Jia Zhangke’s poetics of cinema as a complex aesthetic of in- betweenness contemplating a world in inevitable transience and change, but also proposes an amazingly nuanced intermedial approach that illuminates from different vantage points the deep imbrication of art and life, memory and palpable reality. -- Ágnes Petho, Professor of Film Studies, Sapientia University, Romania
Cecília Mello’s book is a breakthrough. It clears the mists around Jia Zhangke’s famously “impure” realism, showing how it is shot through with Chinese aesthetics drawn from wuxia martial arts, Chinese opera performance, gardening, painting, and more. -- Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies, King’s College London, UK
Table of Contents
1. 'Introduction: Jia Zhangke, Realism, Memory and Impurity' 2. 'The Walls of China: Between Ephemerality and Permanence' 3. 'Ping Yao’s City Walls: On-Location Filming and the Weight of History' 4. 'Pop Music’s Sonic Memories' 5. 'Landscape Painting, Chinese Philosophy and the Aesthetic Innovation of Still Life' 6. 'Opera, Wuxia and China’s Imagined Civilization' 7. 'Painterly Still Lives and Photographic Poses: Stillness and the Moving Image' 8. 'Garden Heterotopias and the Memory of Space' 9. 'I Wish I Knew’s Cinephilic Journeys (an afterword on intertextuality)' 10. Bibliography
