Volume 1, Issue 2

Based on a 2000 novella by Cixin Liu with the same title, Frant Gwo’s 2019 film Wandering Earth has been celebrated as China’s first big-budget science fiction film. As a Chinese film with a global theme that simultaneously targets both a domestic and an international audience, accordingly, the work invites a reflection on the relationship between the local and the global—on how we understand the concept of home, and what it might mean to be home in the world. This essay, accordingly, examines three intersecting ways in which Wandering Earth (both the film and the original novella) explores the relationship between home and the world, including the status of the Earth as an ecological system, the planet’s status as a lived environment, as well as a set of contemporary geopolitical discourses about China’s shifting position within the contemporary world order, and particularly its relationship to the Global South.

The development of film art in the People’s Republic of China throughout the past 70 years can be roughly divided into two stages: before and after the reform and opening-up．During this period, Chinese films not only influenced the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres, but they also produced aesthetics with uniquely Chinese characteristics, distinguishing themselves on the world film stage. However, after 70 years of development, Chinese films still have many contradictions and problems, namely: how to deal with the relationships between education and entertainment, plan and market, tradition/China/subjectivity, and modernity/world/diversity. Prejudicial tendencies can be avoided with a dialectical view of these relationships, and a healthy, integrated, and developmental track can be achieved. With this new historical contextualization in mind, to realize the transformation from a big film country to a strong film country, Chinese films should keep pace with the country’s economic and social strategic development, enhancing their quality and making contributions to a culturally advanced country with many high-standard films in the new era.

A revolutionary, film theorist, and screenwriter, Xia Yan (1900–1995) is known as one of the pioneers of Chinese cinema. Xia’s pursuit of a national style and international status for Chinese cinema and his aspirations for the prosperity of the Chinese nation are in line with the basic ideas and goals of the nascent “Chinese School of Film.” In the context of the under-theorized and problematic production practices of current Chinese cinema, it is high time to revisit Xia’s professional and academic contributions to cinematic art, which shed light on the construction of both the “Chinese School of Film” and “shared aesthetics.”

This dialog was conducted between Wu Jing, an actor and a film director, and Jia Leilei, a researcher of the Chinese National Academy of Arts, at Director Wu Jing’s Studio in Beijing on May 18, 2021. This dialog is about Wu Jing’s personal experiences and film concepts including Wu Jing as a martial artist, Wu Jing as an actor and a director; his persistence in pursuing authenticity in filmmaking as well as his life philosophy, all highlighting the chivalry of martial artists both in the film world and real life.

The influence of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic impacted the global film market in 2020. Across the world, the Chinese film market was the first to recover and, as a result, assumed a leading position. This was because the government launched a return-to-work policy, the capital market became more rational, the integration of film companies accelerated, the film industry model trended toward centralization, and market structures underwent deep adjustments. Despite shrinking market space and declining film production during 2020, the industry produced films that remained diverse in genre and subject. Where the “Matthew effect” of accumulated advantage is much more acute in the film industry, a more diverse distribution approach has emerged in the field of new media. With box office returns approaching a ceiling, it has become more urgent to stabilize the quality of top films, enrich and enhance the competitiveness of genre films, and strengthen the theatricality of art films. It also became urgent to improve the film industry system, the product system, the market system, and the box office window system.

In this essay, we revisit our interdisciplinary approach to the “becoming-cinema” of Chinese life and cities in the contemporary era, while critically revisiting our notion of “shi-nema” (which combines the Chinese concept of “shi” (势) with a detoured notion of “cinematicity”) which we forward as a provocative “image for thought” that explodes the concerns of modern film studies. Revisiting our multi-scalar fractal method, on this outing we specifically engage with a nexus of new semiocapitalist images and urban sites/sights that foreground how rapidly the psychogeographic circumstances in post-socialist Chinese cine-cities evolve and mutate. Our essay opens with a fresh film-philosophy conceptualisation of “afterimages”, blending cinematic, city and conceptual varieties before moving on to critically engage with a new constellation of interviews and images drawn from Chinese film, television, streaming platforms, social media and commercial real estate apps.

Current market-led Chinese film production has made huge achievements. Market indicators certainly have their validity. However, the power of the market has been exaggerated so that it controls everything. Because of the disregard of film as an aesthetic object, the content, form and aesthetic sensibility of films have been neglected, preventing creation at a higher level. The loss of multiple cultural identities due to market factors and artistic indifference is hardly sustainable in the long run. In recent years, Chinese films have gradually improved their artistic aesthetics. How to reasonably coordinate the market and the realization of the value of art and culture itself is an urgent problem to be solved. Firstly, Chinese films should have creative imagination; secondly, Chinese films should have the artistic expression of the national core value of heroism; thirdly, Chinese films should have meticulous depictions of people. Under the perspective of aesthetic appreciation, it is a top priority for Chinese films to be more in line with reality and traditional aesthetic culture, and be more characterized in their creation.

Ever since its advent in the 1990s, the term “Sixth Generation,” as a postulated label, has so far run the course of three consecutive phases: generation, transformation, and dissipation. In the first phase (1990–2003), the Sixth Generation directors based their films on the authenticity of their individual experiences and significantly altered the structure of cinematic power and aesthetic expression in China. The second phase (2003–2008) witnessed the group’s entry into a period characterized by a “generation-less” narrative drawing closer to mainstream cultural capital, market, and filmic techniques. The market overexploited the label of the Sixth Generation, and its independent identity was corrupted. 2009 and 2010 constituted the third phase in which the Sixth Generation sought all the possibilities for market survival by shooting a wide range of films, from mainstream production to commercial films. Since 2011, the label “Sixth Generation” went through a process of self-dissolution. Nevertheless, these directors once again came together on the platform of new media, transforming their energy through microfilm and continuing to exert social influence directly or indirectly.

This article investigates the similarities between inherent Chinese aesthetic sensibilities and modern cinematic thought and introduces Chinese films’ exploration of oriental film aesthetics during the “seventeen-year period” (1949–1966). It serves to remind us that in seeking to understand the developmental trajectory and driving forces behind Chinese film art, it is important to examine the changes in and contexts of modern Chinese modes of thought—especially artistic thought—so as to reveal the aesthetic sensibilities of modern Chinese films; the true nature of their artistic inheritance; and their foundation and potential for modern transformations. The article makes an original Chinese contribution to the creation of a new film aesthetics for future images in the era of artificial intelligence.

This paper is interested in the cinematic apparatus’s potential to produce affect which defamiliarises the visible presence of star-bodies in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (chunguang zhaxie, 1997), thus invoking non-normative and new modes of thinking about queer identification and representation. By close reading the mise-en-scène of the two Iguazu falls sequences, the on-screen star bodies of Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung are defamiliarized when they produce Gilles Deleuze’s affect and “become-unrecognisable” as on-screen subjects. Through this, the encounters with the Iguazu Falls allow us to queer heteronormative and linear narrative time that is associated with (a movement towards) futurity. This inability to pass judgement, I argue, is the ethics of sexual desire which Happy Together proffers when we understand the body that queers and becomes unrecognisable through productive affective assemblages. Instead, we move through the transsensorial potentials for the cinematic assemblage to rethink modes of queering normativity and to redefine bodies in terms of plurality and multiplicity. To that end, this paper presents a new way of thinking about how film stars, familiar tourist spots and even a classic text like Happy Together may be defamiliarized through productions of affects, new-sensations, to provide more ways of revisiting and regarding the film anew.

Street culture is represented in two mid-2010 Taiwan films, The Kids (Xiaohai, 2015) and Thanatos, Drunk (Zui sheng meng shi 2015), in such stunning and beautiful ways that this essay sets out to etch each of them not only into the annals of Taiwan’s most memorable urban films ever made, but also position them as essential texts within the emergent field of street culture more broadly. Both movies depict physical and ideological boundaries that separate urban spaces from Taiwanese culture at large, and reveal the extent to which their young protagonists are perceived as “abnormal” even as they use street literacy in sophisticated ways to interact with formal actors (such as school teachers and the police) and informal actors (such as hooligans and petty criminals). These two films arguably present the best vantage point to understand the peripheral status of Taiwan’s urban young people who do not conform to hegemonic norms.

As a significant industrial and cultural phenomenon, the rise of new mainstream films and TV dramas in China embodies the inclusion of multiple cultures (mainstream culture, grassroot culture, youth culture, etc.) and the respect for diverse audiences. In particular, such trends bring into focus the youth market and explore the image-based expression of youth culture, subculture and fashion culture. However, this author argues that the production of such films and TV dramas also needs to further pursue market-orientated strategies, sustainable development, and conformity to industrial standards. In short, the production of new mainstream films and TV dramas should not revert to the previous production pattern of mainstream films.

China’s film industry has its historical roots across the four geographical divisions of northern, eastern, western, and southern China. Each of these four film-producing regions has their own characteristics with divergent historical heritages and cultural resources. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) the division of administrative regions included a territorially divided management policy of film enterprises. Such policies promoted the regional development of China’s film industry while simultaneously exacerbated the complex contradictions between and among the clusters produced. In the 1950s, four major state-owned film studios were established in Beijing, Shanghai, and Changchun. Under the planned economy model, films were purchased and sold exclusively by the state through these studios. Since the 1990s, China’s film industry has undergone deep institutional reform, with film distribution and exhibition gradually moving towards the market and private enterprises beginning to actively participate in film production and distribution. The film industry has since begun to actively explore the generative potential of the existing industrial clusters, experimenting with film co-production and cross-regional business operations across the regions. With the goal of constructing a film and television alliance, the film industry has sought to maximize the advantages of different regions to promote the integration of these historically and regionally distinct sectors in an open and tolerant manner, laying the foundation for Chinese films to leapfrog into the global film market.