Craziness And Carnival In Neo Noir Chinese Cinema

Craziness and Carnival in Neo-Noir Chinese Cinema offers an in-depth discussion of the "stone phenomenon" in Chinese film production and cinematic discourses triggered by the extraordinary success of the 2006 low-budget film, Crazy Stone. Surveying the nuanced implications of the film noir genre, Harry Kuoshu argues that global neo noir maintains a mediascape of references, borrowings, and re-workings and explores various social and cultural issues that constitute this Chinese episode of neo noir. Combining literary explorations of carnival, postmodernism, and post-socialism, Kuoshu advocates for neo noir as a cultural phenomenon that connects filmmakers, film critics, and film audiences rather than an industrial genre. Harry H. Kuoshu is Herring Endowed Chair in Asian Studies and Film Studies at Furman University, USA, where he teaches courses on Chinese film, literature, culture and language. In addition to scholarly articles, he is the author of Lightness of Being in China (1999), Celluloid China (2002), and Metro Movies: Cinematic Urbanism in Post-Mao China (2011).

Craziness and Carnival in Neo-Noir Chinese Cinema offers an in-depth discussion of the “stone phenomenon” in Chinese film production and cinematic discourses triggered by the extraordinary success of the 2006 low-budget film, Crazy Stone. Surveying the nuanced implications of the film noir genre, Harry Kuoshu argues that global neo noir maintains a mediascape of references, borrowings, and re-workings and explores various social and cultural issues that constitute this Chinese episode of neo noir. Combining literary explorations of carnival, postmodernism, and post-socialism, Kuoshu advocates for neo noir as a cultural phenomenon that connects filmmakers, film critics, and film audiences rather than an industrial genre.

This book examines Chinese film in the twenty-first century. Organized around the themes "movements," "genres," and "intermedia," it reflects on how Chinese cinema has changed, adapted, and evolved over past decades and prognosticates as to its future trajectories. It considers how established film genres in China have adapted and transformed themselves, and discusses current shifts in documentary filmmaking, the ethos and practices of "grassroots intellectual" independent filmmakers, and the adaption of foreign film genres to serve the ideological and political needs of the present. It also explores how film is drawing on the socio-historical and political contexts of the past to create new cinematic discourses and the ways film is providing a voice to previously marginalised ethnic groups. In addition, the book analyses the influences of past aesthetic traditions on the creative and artistic expressions of twenty-first-century films and cinema’s relation to other media forms, including folktales, moving image installations, architecture, and painting. Throughout, the book assesses how Chinese films have been conceptualized, examined, and communicated domestically and abroad and emphasizes the importance of new directions in Chinese film, thus highlighting the plurality, vitality, and hybridity of Chinese cinema in the twenty-first century.

In the 1980s, a new type of central character emerged in contemporary Chinese films - angry and alienated youth. Filmmakers treated youth as a separate category and showed them in urban situations behaving in unconventional and socially rebellious ways. Young Rebels in Contemporary Chinese Cinema looks for evidence in films that exemplify this trend.

From 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.

Greatly revises and expands the 1984 first edition of Volume one of the astute and elegant five-volume reference to the world's most significant films and filmmakers. One hundred new films have been added, bringing the total to 650, arranged in crisp, clean entries on large 81/2x11"pages, and illustrated with luminous stills. In addition to complete production credits, cast lists, and excellent select bibliographies, each entry includes an expository essay by a significant critic, the essays being models of thoughtful, unpretentious scholarship and love of film. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR