The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century [Paperback]

Zhang Zhen (Editor), Jason McGrath (Contributor), Chris Berry (Contributor), Sheldon H. Lu (Contributor), Yinjing Zhang (Contributor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0822340747 | ISBN-13: 978-0822340744 | Publication Date: March 28, 2007

Since the early 1990s, while mainland China’s state-owned movie studios have struggled with financial and ideological constraints, an exciting alternative cinema has developed. Dubbed the “Urban Generation,” this new cinema is driven by young filmmakers who emerged in the shadow of the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. What unites diverse directors under the “Urban Generation” rubric is their creative engagement with the wrenching economic and social transformations underway in China. Urban Generation filmmakers are vanguard interpreters of the confusion and anxiety triggered by the massive urbanization of contemporary China. This collection brings together some of the most recent original research on this emerging cinema and its relationship to Chinese society.

The contributors analyze the historical and social conditions that gave rise to the Urban Generation, its aesthetic innovation, and its ambivalent relationship to China’s mainstream film industry and the international film market. Focusing attention on the Urban Generation’s sense of social urgency, its documentary impulses, and its representations of gender and sexuality, the contributors highlight the characters who populate this new urban cinema—ordinary and marginalized city dwellers including aimless bohemians, petty thieves, prostitutes, postal workers, taxi drivers, migrant workers—and the fact that these “floating urban subjects” are often portrayed by non-professional actors. Some essays concentrate on specific films (such as Shower and Suzhou River) or filmmakers (including Jia Zhangke and Zhang Yuan), while others survey broader concerns. Together the thirteen essays in this collection give a multifaceted account of a significant, ongoing cinematic and cultural phenomenon.

Contributors. Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Shuqin Cui, Linda Chiu-han Lai, Charles Leary, Sheldon H. Lu, Jason McGrath, Augusta Palmer, Bérénice Reynaud, Yaohua Shi, Yingjin Zhang, Zhang Zhen, Xueping Zhong

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An essential addition to contemporary Chinese film studies, this provocative collection of essays effectively describes the significant breaks that the most recent generations of filmmakers and media artists in the PRC have made both with the tradition of Chinese filmmaking and with the acclaimed, influential ‘Fifth Generation’ that preceded them.”—Richard Peña, Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Professor of Film Studies, Columbia University

“Until the early 1990s, China struggled with modernity, with one step back for every step forward. But it produced a brilliant new cinema that attracted world attention, a national cinema skeptical of China’s ability to change. Since then, China has boomed, skyrocketed upward on the world scene like its new urban skyscrapers, traded in much of its ‘Chineseness’ for a leading role in an emerging global culture, and produced a new generation of independent, forward-looking ‘urban cinema.’ Including thirteen essays about film and film culture in today’s China, this is the first volume to bring the newest Chinese cinema to life. It deserves to be read and then re-read.”—Jerome Silbergeld, author of China into Film and Hitchcock with a Chinese Face

About the Author

Zhang Zhen is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. She is the author of An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937.

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (March 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822340747
• ISBN-13: 978-0822340744
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #129,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars insight into a new China, February 10, 2008

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This review is from: The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Paperback)

As China develops, this book is a good account of how Chinese cinema is documenting the many changes occurring in its society. While the movies carefully avoid "sensitive" political issues, they explore the human aspects of how people cope with massive and frequent changes. Some themes explored are common to any society.

From a reading of the book, the backdrop to many of the recent movies is the industrialisation and urbanisation of the large cities. The films also show the different types of characters (some shady) inhabiting, at least in the popular fictional imagination, the urban scene.

For the non-Chinese reader, the book offers insight into a new China.