About the Book
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched.
This innovative collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture features contributions from an international community of scholars, critics, and practitioners. Taken together, their perspectives make a compelling case that the past decade has witnessed a radical transformation of conventional notions of cinema. Following China's accession to the WTO in 2001, personal and collective experiences of changing social conditions have added new dimensions to the increasingly diverse Sinophone media landscape, and provided a novel complement to the existing edifice of blockbusters, documentaries, and auteur culture. The numerous 'iGeneration' productions and practices examined in this volume include 3D and IMAX films, experimental documentaries, animation, visual aides-mémoires, and works of pirated pastiche. Together, they bear witness to the emergence of a new Chinese cinema characterized by digital and, trans-media representational strategies, the blurring of private/public distinctions, and dynamic reinterpretations of the very notion of 'cinema' itself.
Table of Contents:
Foreword, Chris Berry
Acknowledgements
Notes on Transliteration
INTRODUCTION: China's iGeneration Cinema, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, Luke Vulpiani
PART I. New Technologies
CHAPTER 1
Tianqi YU “Toward a Communicative Practice: Female First-Person Documentary in Twenty-first Century China”
CHAPTER 2
Paola VOCI “Quasi-Documentary, Cellflix, and Web Spoofs: Chinese Movies' Other Visual Pleasures"
CHAPTER 3
Weihua WU “Individuality, State Discourse, and Visual Representation: The Imagination and Practices of the iGeneration in Chinese Animation”
CHAPTER 4
Bingfeng DONG “Cinema of Exhibition: Film in Chinese Contemporary Art”
PART II. Aesthetics
CHAPTER 5
Luke VULPIANI “Goodbye to the Grim Real, Hello to What Comes Next: The Moment of Passage from the Sixth Generation to the iGeneration”
CHAPTER 6
Ling ZHANG “Digitizing City Symphony, Stabilizing the Shadow of Time: Montage and Temporal-Spatial Construction in San Yuan Li”
CHAPTER 7
Dan GAO “From Pirate to Kino-eye: A Genealogical Tale of Film Re-Distribution in China”
CHAPTER 8
Keith B. WAGNER “Xue Jianqiang as Reckless Documentarian: Underdevelopment and Juvenile Crime in post-WTO China”
PART III. Social Engagement
CHAPTER 9
Yiman WANG “Of Animals and Men: Toward A Theory of Docu-ani-mentary”
CHAPTER 10
Ying QIAN “Working with Rubble: Montage, Tweets, and the Reconstruction of an Activist Cinema”
CHAPTER 11
Jia TAN “Provincializing the Chinese Mediascape: Cantonese Digital Activism in Southern China”
PART IV. Platforms and Politics
CHAPTER 12
Jeesoon HONG with Matthew D. JOHNSON “Shanghai Expo and Screen-Spaces: Big Screens and New Collectivity”
CHAPTER 13
Ma RAN “Regarding the Grassroots Chinese Independent Film Festivals: Regional Assemblage and Abnormal Film Networking”
CHAPTER 14
Matthew D. JOHNSON “Wu Wenguang and the NGO Aesthetic”
CHAPTER 15
Xiaomei CHEN “The Cinematic Deng Xiaoping: Reform or Restoration?”
PART V: Online Audiences
CHAPTER 16
Ralph PARFECT “You Must Believe There is Such a Person in This World”: Internet Contention of Zhang Yimou's Sexual Storytelling in Under the Hawthorn Tree/Shanzhashu Zhi Lian”
CHAPTER 17
Xiao LIU “From the Glaring Sun to the Flying Bullets: The Dilemma of Elliptical Memories in “post-” Era Chinese Cinema”
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Matthew D. Johnson is Assistant Professor of East Asian History at Grinnell College, US. As a doctoral student at the University of California, San Diego he conducted one of the first oral histories of China's early socialist film industry. His scholarly writing focuses on the history of the motion picture in China; documentary cinema and practice; public cultural service and security; and U.S.-China transnational relations. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas.
Keith B. Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies and Social Theory in the Graduate School of Film and Digital Media at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea. Before moving to Asia, he completed his M.Phil degree at the University of Cambridge and his PhD at King's College London. He is the co-editor of Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (2011) and is completing a manuscript based on his dissertation entitled Living with Uncertainty: Precarious Labor in Global Cinema.
Kiki Tianqi Yu is a filmmaker and Lecturer in Film at the University of the West of Scotland, UK. She publishes on first person documentary, Chinese documentary, camera activism, amateur cinema culture, and cinematic memory in Studies in Documentary Film, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, among others. Yu is the author of 'My' Self On Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in 21st century China (2018). As a filmmaker, her film works include Photographing Shenzhen (2007), Memory of Home (2009) and the recent feature length documentary film China's van Gogh (2016).
Luke Vulpiani is a PhD candidate at King's College London under the supervision of Dr Viktor Fan. He has a 1st Class BA Degree in Film Studies from The University of Warwick and a MA in Chinese Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research focuses on aesthetic theory, Chinese film and the relationship between film and philosophy, psychoanalysis and politics.
Review :
China's iGeneration successfully satisfies the reader's curiosity about China – a worldupcoming nation, and demonstrates the transformation and development of Chinese Cinema from different perspectives through essays written by both Chinese and non- Chinese writers … All in all, the strength of China's iGeneration is in its careful introduction of the uniqueness of Chinese culture for those who have not been exposed to such concepts before. At the same time, it expresses the authors' deep understanding and knowledge of fastchanging dynamics in Chinese cinema culture. We all know that China is the world's second-largest economy, with a rich and unique culture and historical background. Now China's iGeneration presents the 'new' generation through its cinematic point of view and provides readers with a fresh perspective on this great nation.
… these essays successfully achieve the aim of 'mapping out where this moving image culture exists within the context of China's individualizing, consumption-oriented, urban and technologically mutable post-WTO society' (1), and the book will certainly engender further research in this rich and evolving subject area.
China's iGeneration boldly projects a new cinema of dispersion for the era of neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics and elaborates its implications both for a historiographical move beyond China's Sixth or Urban Generation and for a paradigm shift from film studies to screen studies. Refreshing and provocative, the collection breaks new ground in rethinking issues such as digital activism, personal documentary, NGO aesthetics, video piracy, unofficial exhibition, and online reception.
Filmgoers around the world marvel at the achievements of China's Fifth and Sixth Generations, lauded at major film festivals for their enormous contributions to international film aesthetics. However, as this anthology makes abundantly clear, a new generation of motion picture artists/activists now make their mark on global digital culture using the latest technologies (such as mobile phone cameras) and exploring screen spaces far beyond the multiplex (through social media and other platforms). The “i” in the book's title-in humble lower case (less self-absorbed than the “me” generation elsewhere)-speaks to a new sense of the individual as the Internet, iPhones, and iPads transform post-WTO Chinese society. China's iGeneration serves as the essential guide to this emerging digital landscape providing robust new scholarship highlighting the Chinese contribution to its creation.
This volume of essays on the culture of the moving image in contemporary China strikes bold new ground in how we conceptualise "cinema", both in China and elsewhere. Moving away from notions of film dominated by the box office and the big screen, these consistently fascinating essays – written by both established and emerging scholars – argue collectively for what they call a "cinema of dispersion": an understanding of film for the digital epoch which acknowledges that cinematic culture is as mobile and mutable as the people who make and watch it.
