Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the land of the Cartesians: From comparative reception to cultural comparison
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Kuang-Neng Liu
Abstract
This analysis deals mainly with the reception of the film within and beyond the culture within which it originated, along the lines of Hans Robert Jauss's ‘Aesthetics of Reception.’ On the one hand, this ‘Wu-xia’ genre film, which is very popular in Chinese culture, set off a national and nationalistic fever in Taiwan, all the while stirring up controversies in the Chinese-speaking world. On the other hand, this same film that was quite foreign to Western culture nonetheless had a commercial success without precedent in France, all the while also inciting equally vehement contradictory reactions, for reasons totally alien to movie audiences from Chinese culture.
Our analysis, which is centered on what in Chinese is called ‘qing-gong’ or, in a more or less scientific language, ‘the art of weightlessness,’ will attempt to get to the crux of these two systems of reference on which Chinese and French viewers depend. An examination and comparison of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix will lead us to the problem of the fabrication of the image of the perfect, supreme or even divine Superior Being, in both the Chinese and Western cultures.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Looking behind the symbol: Mythic algebra, numbers, and the illusion of linear sequence
- Role conflict as an interactional resource in the multimodal emergence of expert identity
- Symbols in dialogical structure of semiotics
- The interpretation of verbo-pictorial images in billboards and store banners in Jordanian society: An experimental study
- Identity, freedom, and answerability in the global world: A semiotic approach
- Signification and alterity in Emmanuel Lévinas
- Semiosis in cognitive systems
- A view on denotation in photography
- Xenology as phenomenological semiotics
- Fashion as communication: A semiotic analysis of fashion on ‘Sex and the City’
- Memes versus signs: On the use of meaning concepts about nature and culture
- Media literacy and semiotics: Toward a future taxonomy of meaning
- Multiscale textual semiotic analysis
- Deconstructing Grimm's laws reveals the unrecognized foot and leg symbolism in Indo-European lexicons
- A semiotic approach to the pathology of literary Décadence
- Complex systems in Renaissance and Postmodern texts: Aesthetic and epistemological consequences
- ‘To give an imagination to the listeners’: The neglected poetics of Navajo ideophony
- Hjelmslev's semiotic model of language: An exegesis
- Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the land of the Cartesians: From comparative reception to cultural comparison
- Quelques parcours artistiques contemporains comme illustration du mouvement de la semiosis : Compte rendu d'Interpréter l'art contemporain de Nicole Everaert-Desmedt
