Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films

Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility
Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-0-231-13333-3
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 390 g

Reihe: Film and Culture Series

What is the sentimental? How can we understand it by way of the visual and narrative modes of signification specific to cinema and through the manners of social interaction and collective imagining specific to a particular culture in transition? What can the sentimental tell us about the precarious foundations of human coexistence in this age of globalization? Rey Chow explores these questions through nine contemporary Chinese directors (Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Ann Hui, Peter Chan, Wayne Wang, Ang Lee, Li Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang) whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema. Approaching their works from multiple perspectives, including the question of origins, nostalgia, the everyday, feminine "psychic interiority," commodification, biopolitics, migration, education, homosexuality, kinship, and incest, and concluding with an account of the Chinese films' epistemic affinity with the Hollywood blockbuster Brokeback Mountain, Chow proposes that the sentimental is a discursive constellation traversing affect, time, identity, and social mores, a constellation whose contours tends to morph under different historical circumstances and in different genres and media. In contemporary Chinese films, she argues, the sentimental consistently takes the form not of revolution but of compromise, not of radical departure but of moderation, endurance, and accommodation. By naming these films sentimental fabulations& mdash;screen artifacts of cultural becoming with irreducible aesthetic, conceptual, and speculative logics of their own& mdash;Chow presents Chinese cinema first and foremost as an invitation to the pleasures and challenges of critical thinking.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chow, Rey (Duke University)

Chow, Rey

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmtheorie, Filmanalyse
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Einzelne Filmschauspieler, Filmregisseure, Drehbuchautoren

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface and AcknowledgmentsNote on TranscriptionsIntroductionPart I: Remembrance of Things Past1 The Seductions of Homecoming: Temptress Moon and the Question of Origins2 Nostalgia of the New Wave: Romance, Domesticity,a nd the Longing for Oneness in Happy Together3 The Everyday in The Road Home and In the Mood for Love: From the Legacy of Socialism to the Potency of YuanPart II: Migrants' Lore, Women's Options4 Autumn Hearts: Filming Feminine "Psychic Interiority" in Song of the Exile5 By Way of Mass Commodities: Love in Comrades, Almost a Love Story6 All Chinese Families are Alike: Biopolitics in Eat a Bowl of Tea and The Wedding BanquetPart III: Picturing the Life to Come.7

Über Autor(innen)

Rey Chow is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is the author of Woman and Chinese Modernity (Minnesota, 1991), Writing Diaspora (Indiana, 1993), Primitive Passions (Columbia, 1995), Ethics After Idealism (Indiana, 1998), and The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (CUP, 2002).