The Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Realism and Memory in Chinese Film

by Cecília Mello, Lúcia Nagib (Editor), Julian Ross (Editor)

Overview

Shorlisted for the BAFTSS 2020 Award for Best Monograph

Starting out as an independent filmmaker, and despite his films being subjected to censorship in his native China, Jia Zhangke has become the country's leading film director internationally. Seen as one of world cinema's foremost auteurs, he has played a crucial role in documenting and reflecting upon China's era of intense transformations since the 1990s..

Cecília Mello provides in-depth analysis of Jia's unique body of work, from his early films Xiao Wu and Platform, to experimental quasi-documentary 24 City and the audacious Mountains May Depart. Mello suggests that Jia's particular expression of the realist mode is shaped by the aesthetics of other Chinese artistic traditions, allowing Jia to unearth memories both personal and collective, still lingering within the ever-changing landscapes of contemporary China. Mello's groundbreaking study opens a door into Chinese cinema and culture, addressing the nature of the so-called 'impure' cinematographic art and the complex representation of China through the ages.

Foreword by Walter Salles and with a new preface by the author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350293427
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/24/2022
Series:	World Cinema
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.24(w) x 9.36(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Lúcia Nagib is Professor of Film and Director of the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC) at the University of Reading. Her research has focused, among other subjects, on polycentric approaches to world cinema, new waves and new cinemas, cinematic realism and intermediality. She is the author of World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (Continuum, 2011), Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (I.B. Tauris, 2007), The Brazilian Film Revival: Interviews with 90 Filmmakers of the 90s (Editora 34, 2002), Born of the Ashes: The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima's Films (Edusp, 1995), Around the Japanese Nouvelle Vague (Editora da Unicamp, 1993) and Werner Herzog: Film as Reality (EstaçãoLiberdade, 1991). She is the editor of Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (with Anne Jerslev, 2013), Theorizing World Cinema (with Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, I.B. Tauris, 2011), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (with Cecília Mello, Palgrave, 2009), The New Brazilian Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2003), Master Mizoguchi (Navegar, 1990) and Ozu (Marco Zero, 1990).

Julian Ross is a University Lecturer at the Centre for the Arts in Society.

Table of Contents

List of figures x

2022 Preface xii

Foreword Walter Salles xiv

Acknowledgements xviii

Note on transliteration xx

1 Introduction: Jia Zhangke, realism, impurity and memory 1

2 The walls of China: Between ephemerality and permanence 29

3 Pingyao's city walls: On-location filming and the weight of history 59

4 Pop music's sonic memories 81

5 Landscape painting, Chinese philosophy and the aesthetic innovation of Still Life 113

6 Opera, wuxia and China's imagined civilization 145

7 Painterly still lifes and photographic poses 175

8 Garden heterotopias and the memory of space 201

9 I Wish I Knew's cinephilic journeys (an afterword on intertextuality) 225

Appendix I Filmography 238

Appendix II Songography 257

Notes 263

Bibliography 273

Index 293

Editorial Reviews

The tone is serious and scholarly, and the author approaches her subject as if nothing could be as important in a world in which the liberal arts have been almost abandoned … Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.” —CHOICE

“Cecilia Mello's study of Jia Zhangke, China's leading independent director, brilliantly counterbalances the impulses towards realism and intermediality she finds in Zhangke's work. Its foreword by Walter Salles backs up Salles's and Mello's claim that Zhangke is the most important world film director of the twenty-first century so far, and Mello's thorough knowledge and understanding of Chinese cultures of this period underpins the book's location of memory between the realist impulse and the impure multilayeredness of Zhangke's films.” —BAFTSS Awards judges

“Over the course of the past 25 years, there has been no better cinematic chronicle of China's dramatic transformation than the films of Jia Zhangke... Cecília Mello digs deep into Jia's body of work, unveiling a rich tapestry of intermingling songs, landscapes, textures, and intertexts. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding how Jia Zhangke's films work.” —Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies, UCLA, USA

“Cecília Mello's refined analysis not only unravels Jia Zhangke's poetics of cinema as a complex aesthetic of in- betweenness contemplating a world in inevitable transience and change, but also proposes an amazingly nuanced intermedial approach that illuminates from different vantage points the deep imbrication of art and life, memory and palpable reality.” —Ágnes Petho, Professor of Film Studies, Sapientia University, Romania

“Cecília Mello's book is a breakthrough. It clears the mists around Jia Zhangke's famously “impure” realism, showing how it is shot through with Chinese aesthetics drawn from wuxia martial arts, Chinese opera performance, gardening, painting, and more.” —Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies, King's College London, UK

From the Publisher