This innovative collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture features contributions from an international community of scholars, critics, and practitioners. Taken together, their perspectives make a compelling case that the past decade has witnessed a radical transformation of conventional notions of cinema. Following China's accession to the WTO in 2001, personal and collective experiences of changing social conditions have added new dimensions to the increasingly diverse Sinophone media landscape, and provided a novel complement to the existing edifice of blockbusters, documentaries, and auteur culture. The numerous 'iGeneration' productions and practices examined in this volume include 3D and IMAX films, experimental documentaries, animation, visual aides-mémoires, and works of pirated pastiche. Together, they bear witness to the emergence of a new Chinese cinema characterized by digital and, trans-media representational strategies, the blurring of private/public distinctions, and dynamic reinterpretations of the very notion of 'cinema' itself.
Matthew D. Johnson is Assistant Professor of East Asian History at Grinnell College, US. As a doctoral student at the University of California, San Diego he conducted one of the first oral histories of China's early socialist film industry. His scholarly writing focuses on the history of the motion picture in China; documentary cinema and practice; public cultural service and security; and U.S.-China transnational relations. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas.
Keith B. Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies and Social Theory in the Graduate School of Film and Digital Media at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea. Before moving to Asia, he completed his M.Phil degree at the University of Cambridge and his PhD at King's College London. He is the co-editor of
Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (2011) and is completing a manuscript based on his dissertation entitled
Living with Uncertainty: Precarious Labor in Global Cinema.
Tianqi Yu is a filmmaker, and Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of Nottingham, China campus (Ningbo). She received an MPhil in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD from the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, the University of Westminster. Her research focuses on documentary, amateur cinema, Chinese cinema and visual arts. Yu is completing her monograph
'My' Self On Camera - First Person Documentary Practice in Twenty-first Century China (Edinburgh University Press). As a filmmaker, her works include
Photographing Shenzhen (2007, Discovery), and
Memory of Home (2009, collected by DSLCollection). Yu is also a member of the editorial board of the
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Luke Vulpiani is a PhD candidate at King's College London under the supervision of Dr Viktor Fan. He has a 1st Class BA Degree in Film Studies from The University of Warwick and a MA in Chinese Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research focuses on aesthetic theory, Chinese film and the relationship between film and philosophy, psychoanalysis and politics.
