Chinese Cinemas and Global Modernity

Abstract

This trio presentation will situate the complexities of contemporary Chinese cinemas within the spaces of global capitalism. Our approaches resonate with each other as we explore recent Chinese films and their images of demolition, ruins, memory, women, and sexuality. With these investigations we have identified a rich repertoire of visual cultural responses to China’s unprecedented transformations within global modernity. China’s traumatic history, removed from the burial ground of national myth and official culture, gains a new life in recent cultural commodities. The past cannot stay the same when its lifeblood depends upon the recasting of individual and collective memories in the global marketplace. Dr. Esther Yau will focus on the reworking of psychoanalysis and memory culture in Chinese transnational films by attending to the phenomenon of persistent sights and stories of trauma. The film titles include Yim Ho’s THE DAY THE SUN TURNED COLD (1994), Wang Xiaoshuai’s SHANGHAI DREAMS (2005), and Lu Chuan’s recent NANING NANJING (2009). To follow up with the discussion of cultural memories, Dr. Esther Cheung will examine how an emergent structure of feeling, cast through lenses of realism as well as rooted in historicized sensibility and local knowledge, is associated with the on-going processes of destruction and construction in the Chinese cities. In the alienated space of global capitalism, images of demolition and ruins from Chinese cinemas hinge on the possibility of engaging with the changing world through an ethics and aesthetics of the personal and the authentic. Films for discussion include Fruit Chan’s LITTLE CHEUNG (1999) as well as Jia Zhangke’s XIAO WU (1998) and STILL LIFE (2006). Dealing with the relation between gender and neo-liberalism, Dr. Gina Marchetti will discuss the ways in which images of Chinese women and their sexuality have changed in transnational Chinese screen culture since the People's Republic of China's admission to the WTO in 2001. As the dismantling of the socialist 'iron rice bowl' accelerates and China's inflated economy brings the booms and the busts of global capitalism to post-Mao China, filmmakers have responded to the way in which gender plays a role in these enormous political, economic, and social changes. Works to be considered include Ann Hui’s THE POSTMODERN LIFE OF MY AUNT (2006) and Ning Ying’s PERPETUAL MOTION (2005).