This week will focus on the rise of local film industry and productions of local blockbusters. Taking Feng Xiaogang’s New Year films and Zhang Yimou’s martial art cinema as examples, it will discuss how local blockbusters construct national identity and create national sentiments. It will also discuss new forms of main-melody films such as the recent Youth, My Country, My People, Forever Young, and Youth, and the first successful blockbuster sci-fi Wandering Earth (2019).

Screening: Youth, dir. Feng Xiaogang, 2017

Link: 

Suggested viewing: The Wandering Earth, dir. Fan Guo/Frant Gwo, 2019 (On Netflix)

Reading:

Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh & Darrell William Davis (2008) “Re-nationalizing China's film industry: case study on the China Film Group and film marketization”, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2:1, 37-51, DOI: 10.1386/jcc.2.1.37_1

Zhu, Ying. “New Year Film as Chinese Blockbuster: From Feng Xiaogang’s Contemporary Urban Comedy to Zhang Yimou’s Period Drama” in Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema, edited by Ying Zhu, Stanley Rosen, Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

Additional reading:

Rosen, Stanley. “Film and Society in China: The Logic of the Market”, in A Companion to Chinese Cinema, edited by Yingjing Zhang, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Lu, Yi. “ The malling of the movies: Film exhibition reforms, multiplexes, and film consumption in the new millennium in urban China”, in Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 10:3, 205-227, 2016. DOI: 10.1080/17508061.2016.1163883