Download or read book China Into Film written by Jerome Silbergeld and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1984, Chinese cinema has been the most dramatic entry onto the international film scene. China into Film is the first book to look at contemporary Chinese cinema as a visual art and to illustrate the ways in which it has been shaped by centuries of Chinese tradition. Jerome Silbergeld looks at the significance of gender roles, the strategies of film-makers in coping with state censorship, the translation of novels into films, the continuing attachment of film-makers to melodrama, and cinematic critiques of Maoism and post-Maoist culture. Abundantly illustrated with Chinese paintings as well as scenes from such internationally acclaimed films as Yellow Earth, Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine, China into Film reveals a cinematic form at once excitingly new and deeply imbedded in traditional Chinese visual culture.
Download or read book DV Made China written by Zhen Zhang and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-05-31 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1990s post-Reform China, a growing number of people armed with video cameras poured out upon the Chinese landscape to both observe and contribute to the social changes then underway. Happening upon the crucial platform of an older independent film movement, this digital turn has given us a "DV China" that includes film and media communities across different social strata and disenfranchised groups, including ethnic and religious minorities and LGBTQ communities. DV-Made China takes stock of these phenomena by surveying the social and cultural landscape of grassroots and alternative cinema practices after the digital turn around the beginning of the new century. The volume shows how Chinese independent, amateur, and activist filmmakers energize the tension between old and new media, performance and representation, fiction and non-fiction, art and politics, China and the world. Essays by scholars in cinema and media studies, anthropology, history, Asian and Tibetan studies bring innovative interdisciplinary methodologies to critically expand upon existing scholarship on contemporary Chinese independent documentary. Their inquiries then extend to narrative feature, activist video, animation, and other digital hybrids. At every turn, the book confronts digital ironies: On the one hand, its portability facilitates forms of radically private film production and audience habits of small-screen consumption. Yet it also simultaneously links up makers and consumers, curators and censors allowing for speedier circulation, more discussion, and quicker formations of public political and aesthetic discourses. DV-Made China introduces new frameworks in a Chinese setting that range from aesthetics to ethical activism, from digital shooting and editing techniques to the politics of film circulation in festivals and online. Politics, the authors urge, travels along paths of aesthetic excitement, and aesthetic choices, conversely, always bear ethical consequences. The films, their makers, their audiences and their distributional pathways all harbor implications for social change that are closely intertwined with the fate of media culture in the new century of a world that both contains and is influenced by China.
Download or read book Chinese Film Classics 1922 1949 written by Christopher G. Rea and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Chinese Film Classics, 1922–1949 is an essential guide to the first golden age of Chinese cinema. Offering detailed introductions to fourteen films, this study highlights the creative achievements of Chinese filmmakers in the decades leading up to 1949, when the Communists won the civil war and began nationalizing cultural industries. Christopher Rea reveals the uniqueness and complexity of Republican China’s cinematic masterworks, from the comedies and melodramas of the silent era to the talkies and musicals of the 1930s and 1940s. Each chapter appraises the artistry of a single film, highlighting its outstanding formal elements, from cinematography to editing to sound design. Examples include the slapstick gags of Laborer’s Love (1922), Ruan Lingyu’s star turn in Goddess (1934), Zhou Xuan’s mesmerizing performance in Street Angels (1937), Eileen Chang’s urbane comedy of manners Long Live the Missus! (1947), the wartime epic Spring River Flows East (1947), and Fei Mu’s acclaimed work of cinematic lyricism, Spring in a Small Town (1948). Rea shares new insights and archival discoveries about famous films, while explaining their significance in relation to politics, society, and global cinema. Lavishly illustrated and featuring extensive guides to further viewings and readings, Chinese Film Classics, 1922–1949 offers an accessible tour of China’s early contributions to the cinematic arts.
Download or read book China on Screen written by Chris Berry and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In China on Screen, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, leaders in the field of Chinese film studies, explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, Berry and Farquhar analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the abandonment of "national cinema" as an analytic tool and propose "cinema and the national" as a more productive framework. With this approach, they show how movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora construct and contest different ideas of Chinese nation--as empire, republic, or ethnicity, and complicated by gender, class, style, transnationalism, and more. Among the issues and themes covered are the tension between operatic and realist modes, male and female star images, transnational production and circulation of Chinese films, the image of the good foreigner--all related to different ways of imagining nation. Comprehensive and provocative, China on Screen is a crucial work of film analysis.
Download or read book Cinema Off Screen written by Chenshu Zhou and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Drawing on original archival research, interviews, and audience recollections, Cinema Off Screen decenters the filmic text and offers a study of institutional operations and lived experiences. Chenshu Zhou details how the screening space, media technology, and the human body mediate encounters with cinema in ways that have not been fully recognized, opening new conceptual avenues for rethinking the ever-changing institution of cinema.
Download or read book The Old Shanghai A Z written by Paul French and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This richly anecdotal guide to every street in Shanghai details many landmarks and stories associated with its best-known avenues. A definitive index to the street names of Shanghai, some of which have disappeared or been removed, allows historians, researchers, tourists, and the just plain curious to navigate the city in its pre-1949 incarnations, through the former International Settlement, French Concession, and External Roads area with a detailed map and alphabetical entry for every road. The book is lavishly illustrated with old advertising, images, and postcards of the streets and businesses, the bars and nightclubs, the people and characters of old Shanghai bringing alive the city in its previous heyday as the Pearl of the Orient.The Old Shanghai A-Zshould become the standard reference work as well as being an easy-to-use guide for researchers and visitors looking to recapture the glamour and uniqueness of old Shanghai. Paul Frenchis an analyst and writer who has worked in Shanghai for many years as a founder of Access Asia. His books includeCarl Crow: A Tough Old China HandandThrough the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from Opium War to Mao.
Download or read book From Underground to Independent written by Paul Pickowicz and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book presents a critical introduction to the cultural and political dimensions of contemporary Chinese cinema. Leading Western and Chinese scholars trace the changing dynamics of Chinese film culture since the early 1990s as it moves away from underground and toward independence in the new century. Yet as the rich case studies illustrate, the sheer variety of alternative film culture itself provides sufficient opportunities for different--at times contradictory--configurations of cinematic products. Drawing on vigorous interdisciplinary scholarship, the book investigates the objects of its study from various methodological perspectives, ranging from historical and literary to sociological and ethnographic. In addition to offering critical readings of specific texts, this book explores alternative film culture through personal interviews, on-site observations, and media interrogations, from traditional print media to the visual media of film, television, and video, including the new digital media of the Internet. The contributors also consider the flourishing independent documentary filmmaking scene, highlighting a crucial part of alternative film that has been previously obscured by an almost exclusive attention on the fifth- and sixth-generation directors of fictional movies. With its fresh and knowledgeable analysis of Chinese underground and independent filmmaking, this book will be essential reading for all those interested in a society caught between socialism and global currents. Contributions by: Chris Berry, Jim Cheng, Valerie Jaffee, Matthew David Johnson, Tonglin Lu, Chen Mo, Seio Nakajima, Paul G. Pickowicz, Zhiwei Xiao, and Yingjin Zhang.
Download or read book Early Film Culture in Hong Kong Taiwan and Republican China written by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-02-14 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pathbreaking collection of essays on early Chinese-language cinema
Download or read book Death by China written by Peter Navarro and published by Pearson Prentice Hall. This book was released on 2011-05-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's most populous nation and soon-to-be largest economy is rapidly turning into the planet's most efficient assassin. Unscrupulous Chinese entrepreneurs are flooding world markets with lethal products. China's perverse form of capitalism combines illegal mercantilist and protectionist weapons to pick off American industries, job by job. China's emboldened military is racing towards head-on confrontation with the U.S. Meanwhile, America's executives, politicians, and even academics remain silent about the looming threat. Now, best-selling author and noted economist Peter Navarro meticulously exposes every form of "Death by China," drawing on the latest trends and events to show a relationship spiraling out of control. Death by China reveals how thousands of Chinese cyber dissidents are being imprisoned in "Google Gulags"; how Chinese hackers are escalating coordinated cyberattacks on U.S. defense and America's key businesses; how China's undervalued currency is damaging the U.S., Europe, and the global recovery; why American companies are discovering that the risks of operating in China are even worse than they imagined; how China is promoting nuclear proliferation in its pursuit of oil; and how the media distorts the China story--including a "Hall of Shame" of America's worst China apologists. This book doesn't just catalogue China's abuses: It presents a call to action and a survival guide for a critical juncture in America's history--and the world's. Publisher's note - in this book various quotes and viewpoints are attributed to a 'Ron Vara'. Ron Vara is not an actual person, but rather an alias created by Peter Navarro in order to present his views and opinions.
Download or read book Hollywood Made in China written by Aynne Kokas and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a race to capture new audiences, Hollywood moguls began courting Chinese investors to create branded entertainment on an international scale--from behemoth theme parks to blockbuster films--after China's 2001 World Trade Organization entry. Hollywood Made in China examines this compelling dynamic, where the distinctions between Hollywood's "Dream Factory" and the "Chinese Dream" of global influence become increasingly blurred. What is revealed illuminates how China's influence is transforming the global media industries from the inside out"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy written by Zhen Ni and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-09 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After graduating from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, directors like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou transformed Chinese cinema with Farewell My Concubine, Yellow Earth, Raise the Red Lantern, and other international successes. Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy tells the riveting story of this class of 1982, China’s famous "Fifth Generation" of filmmakers. It is the first insider’s account of this renowned cohort to appear in English. Covering these directors’ formative experiences during China’s tumultuous Cultural Revolution and later at the Beijing Film Academy, Ni Zhen—who was both their screenwriter and teacher—provides unique insights into the origins of the Fifth Generation’s creativity. Drawing on his personal knowledge and interviews conducted especially for this volume, Ni Zhen demonstrates the diversity of the Fifth Generation. He comments on the breadth of styles and themes explored by its members and introduces a range of male and female directors, cinematographers, and production designers famous in China but less well-known internationally. The book contains vivid descriptions of the production processes of two pioneering films—One and Eight and Yellow Earth.
Download or read book Sinascape written by Gary G. Xu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema is a comprehensive study of Chinese-language films at the turn of the millennium. Emphasizing the transnational nature of contemporary Chinese cinema, it provides close readings of most of the important films of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and explores the interactions and transactions among these films and between Chinese cinema and Hollywood. General readers, film enthusiasts, and critics will all benefit from Gary Xu's discussion of popular films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Kung Fu Hustle, Devils on the Doorstep, Suzhou River, Beijing Bicycle, Millennium Mambo, Goodbye Dragon Inn, and Hollywood Hong Kong.
Download or read book An Amorous History of the Silver Screen written by Zhang Zhen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrating the cultural significance of film and its power as a vehicle for social change, this book reveals the intricacies of the cultural movement and explores its connections to other art forms such as photography, drama, and literature.
Download or read book Red Carpet written by Erich Schwartzel and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a fascinating book. It will educate you. Schwartzel has done some extraordinary reporting." — The New York Times Book Review “In this highly entertaining but deeply disturbing book, Erich Schwartzel demonstrates the extent of our cultural thrall to China. His depiction of the craven characters, American and Chinese, who have enabled this situation represents a significant feat of investigative journalism. His narrative is about not merely the movie business, but the new world order.” —Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon An eye-opening and deeply reported narrative that details the surprising role of the movie business in the high-stakes contest between the U.S. and China From trade to technology to military might, competition between the United States and China dominates the foreign policy landscape. But this battle for global influence is also playing out in a strange and unexpected arena: the movies. The film industry, Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel explains, is the latest battleground in the tense and complex rivalry between these two world powers. In recent decades, as China has grown into a giant of the international economy, it has become a crucial source of revenue for the American film industry. Hollywood studios are now bending over backward to make movies that will appeal to China’s citizens—and gain approval from severe Communist Party censors. At the same time, and with America’s unwitting help, China has built its own film industry into an essential arm of its plan to export its national agenda to the rest of the world. The competition between these two movie businesses is a Cold War for this century, a clash that determines whether democratic or authoritarian values will be broadcast most powerfully around the world. Red Carpet is packed with memorable characters who have—knowingly or otherwise—played key roles in this tangled industry web: not only A-list stars like Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, and Richard Gere but also eccentric Chinese billionaires, zany expatriate filmmakers, and starlets who disappear from public life without explanation or trace. Schwartzel combines original reporting, political history, and show-biz intrigue in an exhilarating tour of global entertainment, from propaganda film sets in Beijing to the boardrooms of Hollywood studios to the living rooms in Kenya where families decide whether to watch an American or Chinese movie. Alarming, occasionally absurd, and wildly entertaining, Red Carpet will not only alter the way we watch movies but also offer essential new perspective on the power struggle of this century.
Download or read book Feeding the Dragon written by Chris Fenton and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Paced like a thriller, with comparable doses of international intrigue and conflict, Chris Fenton’s bracingly candid business memoir Feeding the Dragon takes readers deep behind the scenes of Hollywood’s shaky foothold in China. Dealing at the highest levels with Chinese government officials and major American brands like Disney, Marvel, and the NBA, the former Olive Garden waiter-turned-entertainment-industry-power-broker disarmed and defied authorities on both sides of the superpower divide to make billions—and history. Thanks to a brisk, page-turning storytelling style and an evenhanded, insider-level perspective decades in the making, Feeding the Dragon manages to be both timeless and timely. Captivating details on Robert Downey Jr., LeBron James, Kurt Cobain, Michael Phelps, and Marvel Universe creative mastermind Kevin Feige (among others) will enthrall average fans and aspiring moguls alike. But the beating narrative heart remains Fenton’s down-to-earth recounting of a headline-making journey. Ultimately, the intrepid exec builds a compelling case for the power of “cultural diplomacy”: mutually-beneficial, soft power-sharing exchanges as a better way forward than the hardliner battle lines being drawn across Beijing, Washington, and Los Angeles. Teeming with urgent insights about unlikely alliances and dangerous misperceptions, Feeding the Dragon is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of the US-China relationship and the bottom-line realities of show business and professional sports today. Even better, it’s a supremely entertaining ride for anyone who simply loves a great story…. Chris often told me about projects and plans off-the-record that I wouldn’t have reported on anyway, because they all seemed wildly improbable. Every single one came true. And now they’re all down on the page.” —Jamie Bryan, Fast Company contributor
Download or read book Hollywood in China written by Ying Zhu and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2022-07-02 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China surpassed North America to become the world ’s largest movie market in 2020. Formerly the focus of exotic fascination in the golden age of Hollywood, today the Chinese are a make-or-break audience for Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. And movies are now an essential part of China’s global “soft power” strategy: a Chinese real estate tycoon, who until recently was the major shareholder of the AMC theater chain, built the world’s largest film production facility. Behind the curtains, as this brilliant new book reveals, movies have become one of the biggest areas of competition between the world’s two remaining superpowers. Will Hollywood be eclipsed by its Chinese counterpart? No author is better positioned to untangle this riddle than Ying Zhu, a leading expert on Chinese film and media. In fascinating vignettes, Hollywood in China unravels the century-long relationship between Hollywood and China for the first time. Blending cultural history, business, and international relations, Hollywood in China charts multiple power dynamics and teases out how competing political and economic interests as well as cultural values are manifested in the art and artifice of filmmaking on a global scale, and with global ramifications. The book is an inside look at the intense business and political maneuvering that is shaping the movies and the U.S.-China relationship itself—revealing a headlines-grabbing conflict that is playing out not only on the high seas, but on the silver screen.
Download or read book China on Film written by Paul G. Pickowicz and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
