The Cinema of Jia Zhangke : Realism and Memory in Chinese Film (World Cinema)

Mello, Cecília

Bloomsbury Academic（2022/02発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 320 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781350293427
• DDC分類 791.430233092

Full Description

Shorlisted for the BAFTSS 2020 Award for Best Monograph

Starting out as an independent filmmaker, and despite his films being subjected to censorship in his native China, Jia Zhangke has become the country's leading film director internationally. Seen as one of world cinema's foremost auteurs, he has played a crucial role in documenting and reflecting upon China's era of intense transformations since the 1990s..

Cecília Mello provides in-depth analysis of Jia's unique body of work, from his early films Xiao Wu and Platform, to experimental quasi-documentary 24 City and the audacious Mountains May Depart. Mello suggests that Jia's particular expression of the realist mode is shaped by the aesthetics of other Chinese artistic traditions, allowing Jia to unearth memories both personal and collective, still lingering within the ever-changing landscapes of contemporary China. Mello's groundbreaking study opens a door into Chinese cinema and culture, addressing the nature of the so-called 'impure' cinematographic art and the complex representation of China through the ages.

Foreword by Walter Salles and with a new preface by the author.

Contents

1. 'Introduction: Jia Zhangke, Realism, Memory and Impurity'
2. 'The Walls of China: Between Ephemerality and Permanence'
3. 'Ping Yao's City Walls: On-Location Filming and the Weight of History'
4. 'Pop Music's Sonic Memories'
5. 'Landscape Painting, Chinese Philosophy and the Aesthetic Innovation of Still Life'
6. 'Opera, Wuxia and China's Imagined Civilization'
7. 'Painterly Still Lives and Photographic Poses: Stillness and the Moving Image'
8. 'Garden Heterotopias and the Memory of Space'
9. 'I Wish I Knew's Cinephilic Journeys (an afterword on intertextuality)'
10. Bibliography