Urban Generation

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.

“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 “The Urban Generation offers a fascinating account. . . . This anthology of original research is essential to readers who aspire to stay updated with Chinese films and Chinese society. Furthermore, in linking textual analysis conceptually and methodologically to the contextual and the intertextual, it should also be interesting to students of film and cultural studies in general.” - Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen de Kloet (China Information) “There is no more stimulating or comprehensive volume on PRC feature filmmaking at the turn of the 21st century.” - Matthew David Johnson (The China Quarterly) “This book is a remarkable achievement deserving a place on the bookshelves of all serious researchers of Chinese film and indeed world cinema. Any student of modern chinese culture can learn much from this important work. . . . Zhang makes a major contribution to Chinese and world film studies and to our broader understanding of twentieth-century Chinese social and cultural history.” - Paul Clarke (China Review International) “This is a magnificently presented work providing an extremely comprehensive and accessible overview of contemporary Chinese cinema. The briefly annotated filmography of the key Urban Generation directors (by Charles Leary) is a most helpful inclusion.” - Peter C. Pugsley (Scope) “Zhang Zhen’s collected volume of essays on recent Chinese films is packed with copious information and penetrating observations and will be of benefit to any one of a number of different sorts of reader.” - Christopher Lupke (China Review)

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of “Transformation” (Zhuanxing) / Zhang Zhen 1I. Ideology, Film Practice, and the Market Rebel without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking / Yingjin Zhang 49The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic / Jason McGrath 81Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism / Chris Berry 115II. The Politics and Poetics of Urban Space Tear down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Popular Cinema and Avant-Garde Art / Sheldon H. Lu 137Tracing the City’s Scars: Demolition and the Limits of the Documentary Impulse in the New Urban Cinema / Yomi Braester 161Scaling the Skyscraper: Images of Cosmopolitan Consumption in Street Angel (1937) and Beautiful New World (1998) / Augusta Palmer 181Whither the Walker Goes: Spatial Practices and Negative Poetics in 1990s Chinese Urban Cinema / Linda Chiu-Han Lai 205III. The Production of Desire and Identities Ning Ying’s Beijing Trilogy: Cinematic Configurations of Age, Class, and Sexuality / Shuqin Cui 241Zhang Yuan’s Imaginary Cities and the Theatricalization of the Chinese “Bastards” / BÉrÉnice Reynaud 264Mr. Zhao On and Off the Screen: Male Desire and Its Discontent / Xueping Zhong 295Maintaining Law and Order in the City: New Tales of the People’s Police / Yaohua Shi 316Urban Dreamscape, Phantom Sisters, and the Identity of an Emergent Art Cinema / Zhang Zhen 344Appendix: The Urban Generation Filmmakers (compiled by Charles Leary) 389Bibliography 411Contributors 429Index 431