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Post-realism as an Alternative Aesthetics in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

出版	University of Auckland, 2014
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=pE7OoQEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋This thesis is motivated by the considerable number of Sixth-Generation films that emerged in Chinese cinema after 1989. These films, which break the borders of cinematic realism, seem to contradict the prevalent scholarship on Sixth-Generation filmmakers in which their cinematic practices are incorporated into a range of frameworks derived from realism. In this thesis, I conceptualize this alternative aesthetics as "post-realism", an aesthetic product of the complexity of post-socialist China and an artistic response to the dramatic transformation of Chinese society. The thesis begins with the examination of realism in the context of Chinese cinema. A historical review shows that the discourse of realism had been constantly ideologised from the 1930s to 1976 and then has experienced a countervailing trend of depoliticisation from the end of 1970s. Sixth-Generation filmmakers now associate realism with individual vision and subjective perception of the transformed reality. This sets the ground for the emergence of post-realist aesthetics characterized by its emphasis on artifice. The thesis then goes on to identify a thread of the alternative aesthetics of non-realism in early Chinese cinema. The revival of non-realist aesthetics in some films in the New Era can be seen as a prelude to the emergence of post-realism in the 1990s. Employing multi-layered methods of trans-textual analysis, close reading and a social-context approach, the main body of this thesis is a textual analysis of selected films from diverse aspects. The first is the unreliable narrative shared by Jiang Wen's In the Heat of the Sun and Lou Ye's Suzhou River. Both Wang Quan'an's Lunar Eclipse and Zhang Yuan's Green Tea place the solidity of a coherent, stable and identifiable female identity into question. The heightened symbolic cinematic space in Jia Zhangke's The World, the defamiliarizing effect caused by some surreal elements in his Still Life; and Jia's playing with the documentary genre through - the integration of fiction and documentary in 24 City will be examined. Through the close reading of these films, I also seek to delineate the inner landscape of post-socialist Chinese society in a fast-changing era.