Redefining a new cinema : a textual study of Chinese new-generation films

Abstract

Chinese cinema has developed over decades along a chain of generations shaped by rapid changes in the topography of history, politics, society, culture, and film aesthetics. This generational discourse established and consolidated an ultra-static film system in which filmmaking modes and cinematic language by and large complied with film conventions. A new generation of filmmakers, emerging at the beginning of the 1990s, with audacious experiments and innovations in film production and film language attempted to break through major rules and codes that had been strictly observed in previous Chinese films. Over twenty years of development, the controversial identity of the new-generation films, interacting with the radically changing ideological, social, cultural and filmic discourses in contemporary China, underwent a process of being defined, redefined, shaped, and reshaped. A profound, textual revolution, happening inside these contemporary Chinese films, challenged the convention of readerly text typical of previous Chinese films. This revolution determines these new films’ avant-garde nature and contributes to their position as a new cinema. The film text is the most substantial place where meaning can be preserved, consumed, and produced. Restraining film texts with fixed meaning or opening them to active production of meaning, represent two different qualities of the text – readerly or writerly, in Roland Barthes’ terms. The readerly text is conventional, in which meaning is predictable and prosaic, while the writerly text is revolutionary with openness and freedom. The argument of this thesis is that the new-generation films’ textual complexity, flexibility and changeability signify the rise of the writerly text in Chinese cinema. The thesis is a textual study of the new-generation films, examining five kinds of text - historical and sociocultural, cinematic, narrative, musical, and parodic. The inquiry is inspired and guided by several theoretic frameworks and research methods, including ideological analysis, film studies, narrative theory, popular culture, and postmodern discourse. Close reading and textual analysis are the most important research methods in this study, providing defining evidence of the writerly quality of these films.