, to see if you have full access to this publication.
Book Titles No access
China on Film
A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy
Authors:
Publisher:
2011
Summary
Leading scholar Paul G. Pickowicz traces the dynamic history of Chinese filmmaking and discusses its course of development from the early days to the present. Moving decade by decade, he explores such key themes as the ever-shifting definitions of modern marriage in 1920s silent features, East-West cultural conflict in the movies of the 1930s, the strong appeal of the powerful melodramatic mode of the 1930s and 1940s, the polarizing political controversies surrounding Chinese filmmaking under the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the 1940s, and the critical role of cinema during the bloody civil war of the late 1940s. Pickowicz then considers the challenging Mao years, including chapters on legendary screen personalities who tried but failed to adjust to the new socialist order in the 1950s, celebrities who made the sort of artistic and political accommodations that would keep them in the spotlight in the post-revolutionary era, and insider film professionals of the early 1960s who actively resisted the most extreme forms of Maoist cultural production. The book concludes with explorations of the highly cathartic films of the early post-Mao era, edgy postsocialist movies that appeared on the eve of the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, the relevance of the Eastern European “velvet prison” cultural production model, and the rise of underground and independent filmmaking beginning in the 1990s.
Throughout its long history of film production, China has been embroiled in a seemingly unending series of wars, revolutions, and jarring social transformations. Despite daunting censorship obstacles, Chinese filmmakers have found ingenious ways of taking political stands and weighing in—for better or worse—on the most explosive social, cultural, and economic issues of the day. Exploring the often gut-wrenching controversies generated by their work, Pickowicz offers a unique and perceptive window on Chinese culture and society.
Keywords
Search publication
Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2011
ISBN-Print
978-1-4422-1178-0
ISBN-Online
978-1-4422-1180-3
Publisher
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
366
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Acknowledgments No access
Introduction. The Sorrows and Joys of Chinese Filmmaking: Political and Personal Contexts No access Pages 1 - 18
Chapter 1. Shanghai Twenties: Early Chinese Cinematic Explorations of the Modern Marriage No access Pages 19 - 42
Chapter 2. The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Films of the 1930s No access Pages 43 - 72
Chapter 3. Melodramatic Representation and the May Fourth Tradition of Chinese Cinema No access Pages 73 - 100
Chapter 4. Never-Ending Controversies: The Case of Remorse in Shanghai and Occupation-Era Chinese Filmmaking No access Pages 101 - 120
Chapter 5. Victory as Defeat: Postwar Visualizations of China’s War of Resistance No access Pages 121 - 156
Chapter 6. Acting Like Revolutionaries: Shi Hui, the Wenhua Studio, and Private-Sector Filmmaking, 1949–1952 No access Pages 157 - 188
Chapter 7. Zheng Junli, Complicity, and the Cultural History of Socialist China, 1949–1976 No access Pages 189 - 212
Chapter 8. The Limits of Cultural Thaw: Chinese Cinema in the Early 1960s No access Pages 213 - 250
Chapter 9. Popular Cinema and Political Thought in Early Post-Mao China: Reflections on Official Pronouncements, Film, and the Film Audience No access Pages 251 - 270
Chapter 10. On the Eve of Tiananmen: Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism No access Pages 271 - 300
Chapter 11. Velvet Prisons and the Political Economy of Chinese Filmmaking in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s No access Pages 301 - 324
Chapter 12. Social and Political Dynamics of Underground Filmmaking in Early Twenty-First-Century China No access Pages 325 - 344
Additional Work on Chinese Cinema by Paul G. Pickowicz No access Pages 345 - 346
