China's iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century

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Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Kiki Tianqi Yu, Luke Vulpiani
Bloomsbury Publishing USA, May 29, 2014 - Performing Arts - 368 pages
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

This innovative collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture features contributions from an international community of scholars, critics, and practitioners. Taken together, their perspectives make a compelling case that the past decade has witnessed a radical transformation of conventional notions of cinema. Following China's accession to the WTO in 2001, personal and collective experiences of changing social conditions have added new dimensions to the increasingly diverse Sinophone media landscape, and provided a novel complement to the existing edifice of blockbusters, documentaries, and auteur culture. The numerous 'iGeneration' productions and practices examined in this volume include 3D and IMAX films, experimental documentaries, animation, visual aides-mémoires, and works of pirated pastiche. Together, they bear witness to the emergence of a new Chinese cinema characterized by digital and, trans-media representational strategies, the blurring of private/public distinctions, and dynamic reinterpretations of the very notion of 'cinema' itself.
 

Contents

Female FirstPerson Documentary
23
Chinese Movies Other
45
Film in Chinese Contemporary
73
The Moment
89
Montage
105
A Genealogical Tale of Film ReDistribution
125
Underdevelopment
147
Towards a Theory of Docuanimentary Yiman Wang
167
Cantonese Digital Activism
197
Interpreting ScreenSpaces at the Shanghai Expo and Beyond Jeesoon Hong
215
Modes
235
Scripting a Leader or a Traitor? Xiaomei Chen
283
Contending
301
Aesthetics and Memory in
321
Notes on Contributors
337
Copyright

Montage Tweets and the Reconstruction of
181

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About the author (2014)

Matthew D. Johnson is Assistant Professor of East Asian History at Grinnell College, US. As a doctoral student at the University of California, San Diego he conducted one of the first oral histories of China's early socialist film industry. His scholarly writing focuses on the history of the motion picture in China; documentary cinema and practice; public cultural service and security; and U.S.-China transnational relations. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

Keith B. Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies and Social Theory in the Graduate School of Film and Digital Media at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea. Before moving to Asia, he completed his M.Phil degree at the University of Cambridge and his PhD at King's College London. He is the co-editor of Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (2011) and is completing a manuscript based on his dissertation entitled Living with Uncertainty: Precarious Labor in Global Cinema.

Kiki Tianqi Yu is a filmmaker and Lecturer in Film at the University of the West of Scotland, UK. She publishes on first person documentary, Chinese documentary, camera activism, amateur cinema culture, and cinematic memory in Studies in Documentary Film, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, among others. Yu is the author of 'My' Self On Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in 21st century China (2018). As a filmmaker, her film works include Photographing Shenzhen (2007), Memory of Home (2009) and the recent feature length documentary film China's van Gogh (2016).

Luke Vulpiani is a PhD candidate at King's College London under the supervision of Dr Viktor Fan. He has a 1st Class BA Degree in Film Studies from The University of Warwick and a MA in Chinese Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research focuses on aesthetic theory, Chinese film and the relationship between film and philosophy, psychoanalysis and politics.

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