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The introduction advances a theoretical framework for interpreting how New Chinese Cinema auteurs shoot on-location as a mode of “place making,” the experiencing and imaging of rural shooting locations as places. Drawing from poststructural cultural geography, production culture studies, environmental psychology, and critical tourism studies, I demonstrate how production environments are more than blank canvases, but places where cultural meanings are being continually contested. As cultural elites, auteurs make coherent disorienting social changes by engaging in production as lived experiences of nation building, homecoming, and cultural salvage. The rural is thus a stage for auteurs to perform their aspirations for social activism, while location shooting constitutes an embodied and performative practice through which auteurs make meaningful sense of their ever-shifting and often precarious roles of authorship. Consequently, images and representations of the rural in the resulting films cannot simply be classified as signifying one cultural logic or another. Rather, they bear traces of the institutional politics, social tensions, and geopolitical ambivalences negotiated by auteurs during production, thus confounding distinctions between the ideologically complicit and subversive, a reductive binary too often mobilized by scholars when periodizing Chinese and Taiwanese film histories.

This chapter examines the scale of the national used to occupy the central attention in film studies and argues that the resulting myth of a unified national cinema in a given nation-state must be demystified. It first reconceptualizes Chinese cinema in relation to the shifting problematics of national cinema and transnational film studies in both the theoretical and historical contexts. It then considers interdisciplinarity in Chinese film studies in the West and how it benefits audience study, along with the thorny issues of piracy and cross-mediality. It also discusses film studies from a different perspective than transnationalism and speculates on what might be gained from comparative film studies, arguing that it is a subfield larger than transnational film studies. The chapter urges scholars to move beyond the national cinema paradigm and to explore the transnational and comparative frameworks of film studies.

This chapter examines the cultural, psychological, and political pathology in certain important mainland Chinese and Taiwanese films, by focusing on water as a site of contested signification. It examines the polysemic figure of water as a poignant articulation of “ambient unheimlich” or the cultural malaise, environmental dysfunctionality, and psychological anxiety emblematical of post-Mao mainland China and post-Miracle Taiwan. Films that engage water as a site of ecological imagination can be clustered into three groups, each addressing a crucial aspect of China's water-borne crisis: (1) shortage/scarcity/drought in Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth (1984), Wu Tianming's Old Well (1986), and Tsai Mingliang's The Wayward Cloud (2005); (2) toxification in Lou Ye's Suzhou River (2000), Tsai Mingliang's The River (1997), and The Hole (1998); and (3) colonization/disruption of water in Zhang Ming's Clouds over Wushan (1996) and Jia Zhangke's Still Life (2006).

A Touch of Zen is one of the essential films of the Chinese-language cinema. It achieved a “double first”: it was the first Chinese-language film to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1975, and the first wuxia (martial chivalry) film to do so at an international film festival. In this detailed and concentrated study, this book shows why it considers A Touch of Zento be an essential film, and why it is Hu's masterpiece and how it is quite unlike other wuxia films that came before or after. It is also historically important in the modern development of the Hong Kong cinema as well as the Taiwan cinema. The book argues that its key significance is its subversive portrait of the female hero, and a concomitant sexual ambiguity infecting both the male and female protagonists.

Jin and his lover Wang Renmei married at Lianhua's 1934 New Year's party. The battle with the censors continued. Director Sun Yu was determined to make an anti-Japanese film and still get it by the KMT censors. The Big Road is considered one of the top hundred Chinese films of all time. Jin's performance and Sun's direction gave both added stature to their reputation. ther pressures added to their already harried life. While the newly married couple was in Nanjing, they learned about the suicide of their acting colleague, Ruan Ling-yu. Political changes would soon make the lives of Jin and his colleagues even more perilous. The United States and European countries were impressed with the new wave of national unity. The Japanese however, read into the move as an obstruction to their “peaceful advance” into China. Militarists in Tokyo began to press for direct action.

The concept “approaching reality” is defined and a connection between it and the Bazinian ontology is established. I also explicate the various terms used in China during this period to frame the critical debates on the cinema and their conceptual implications in a cross-cultural intellectual dialogue.

I examine—in dialogue with Eurpean Marxists and Deleuze—the Marxist film theory in Shanghai in the 1930s and its notion of cinematographic consciousness—an idea that suggests that cinema can sense, feel, think and instill its consciousness to the sentient bodies of the viewers.

I trace the definitions of “approaching reality” back to the critical discussions by two filmmakers in the 1920s, Gu Kenfu and Hou Yao, to open up a comparative space between early Chinese film thinking and Bazanian ontology, and discuss the various problems in comparative studies.

This chapter examines the cinematic representations of Beijing and a persistent engagement with polylocality in hinterland China. More specifically, it considers “cinematic remapping” as a particular mode of urban imaginary that combines motion, emotion, and commotion in an intensified, often visceral representation of temporality, spatiality, locality, inequality, identity, and subjectivity. Focusing on moving images, the chapter explores instances of cinematic remapping that favor street-level views over cartographic surveys, contingent experience over systematic knowledge, and bittersweet local histoires over a grand-scale global history. The chapter first surveys the imaginaries of Beijing in Hollywood history before discussing four Chinese films set in Beijing and released in the new millennium. It also analyzes Jia Zhangke's most recent works as place-based projects grounded in polylocality and critical of the trappings of modernity and globalization.

I study the soft film theory in the 1930s by contextualizing it within the cross-cultural intellectual debate on life and art, and analyse how this aesthetic debate sees the cinema as a biomimetic machine that negotiates the relationship between life, biological life and national life.

I discuss the history and theoretical debates of the Hong Kong Cantoese sound film in the 1930s, an art form that was conflated ontologically with the Cantonese theatre as an art of ideation: a form of “play” that “puts into play” contesting human relationships and political ideas.

This chapter focuses on online documentary practices. It attempts to puts in perspective the uses generated by the independent Chinese documentary movement from the dawn of Internet film forums in the mid-1990s to the microblogs in the late 2000s. Two decades of online practices in this small film milieu reflect the evolution of both web-based platforms and Chinese independent documentary filmmakers. Using detailed examples, it shows that their unofficial cinephilia, emerging from piracy practices, quickly moved towards exchanges reflecting the filmmakers' concerns for recognition of their works and, beyond that, for the sensitive sociopolitical issues dealt with in their films. The popular practice of online document sharing completes and extends their film practices and creates a wider network ranging from film enthusiasts to activists.

After being erased from memory during the Cultural Revolution, the so-called “Emperor of Film”, Jin Yan, reemerged in the main gallery of the National Film Museum to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Chinese film in 2005. Jin Yan's life spanned the most turbulent period in modern Chinese history. Born in Korea during the Japanese occupation, he was taken as a child to China for safety. His story through the years enabled him to survive under the corrupt Republican government of the Guomindang (KMT), the Japanese aggression against Shanghai, World War II, the Chinese Civil War, the victory of the Communists (CCP), the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. Back then, the memory of his childhood and the struggles of the Korean people against their Japanese overlords were to influence him and his career for the rest of his life.