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Contemporary Art Cinema Culture in China
by Xiang Fan
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Book Presentation:
How do contemporary Chinese audiences access art cinema? What are the alternative channels for the distribution and exhibition of art cinema in China? How is Chinese art cinema changing with the booming of internet media and commodity culture in the 21st century?
To answer these questions, Xiang Fan explores the dynamic networks of art cinema in China in the 21st century, highlighting the cultural practices of intermediaries such as independent programmers, internet critics, and fan translators. Offering insights gleaned from original ethnographic research, Fan reveals how these intermediary practitioners think about cinema, negotiate judgement and appreciation, construct a discourse of value and taste, and most importantly, constitute a coordinated and interrelated network for the sharing of art cinema. She argues that although their motivation was derived from a cinephilia seeking to forge an alternative mode of distribution and reception, the 'new' cinema culture they have produced simultaneously negotiates a subtly complicit relationship with authoritative and market forces. In doing so, she offers an original interdisciplinary perspective on contemporary art cinema culture in Chinese society.
About the Author:
Mark Gallagher is co-editor, with Yiman Wang, of Bloomsbury's Global East Asian Screen Cultures series and co-editor, with Chi-Yun Shin, of East Asian Film Noir (2015). He is the author of Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (2018), Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood (2013) and Action Figures: Men, Action Films and Contemporary Adventure Narratives (2006).Yiman Wang is Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (2013). She is a NEH (National Endowment forHumanities) awardee in 2019-20. She has guest edited a special issue for Feminist Media Histories on Asian feminist media (2019), and has published numerous articles in journals and edited volumes on the topics of Chinese cinema studies, independent documentary, star studies, ecocinema, race gender and early cinema, film remakes and adaptation.
Press Reviews:
"Xiang Fan's exemplary ethnography lifts the lid on China's cinephile culture, caught between the market economy and one-party state, to reveal the venue operators, amateur critics, and fansubbers whose dedication and determination makes it survive – and often even thrive." ―Chris Berry, King's College London, UK
"Contemporary Art Cinema Culture in China challenges the mainstream/independent dichotomy in Chinese film studies scholarship; it offers a much-needed non-Western perspective on the global discourse of art cinema. Shifting the research focus from the film text to the audience, from institutions to individuals, and from production to circulation, exhibition and consumption, the book champions a welcome sociological and ethnographic approach to the study of film culture." ―Hongwei Bao, author of Queer Media in China
"In her absorbing study of contemporary Chinese art cinema's distribution, exhibition, and consumption, Xiang Fan reveals, though interviews and participant observation, how a range of institutions and intermediaries-from film programmers to fan subbers and from internet critics to pirate DVD vendors-help shape this emerging film culture." ―Luke Robinson, University of Sussex, UK
See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic
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