The embattled city: Aesthetic imagery and political agencies in the late twentieth-century Chinese screenscape.

摘要

This dissertation studies the cinematic city through an analysis of a group of films produced in the People's Republic of China in the heyday of the late 20th-century reforms. It ventures to define what the city represented and examines how the screenscape correspondingly illustrated the complex political and cultural scenarios of the fin-de-siecle PRC. This study delineates how the Chinese city manifests both a hope and a threat, how this terra incognita functions as an immense laboratory experimenting with different propositions and ideas. A long history of pro-village ideology ushers in ever-lasting battles over the Chinese political, social, cultural, and economic landscape. The open-door policy of the late 1970s enlivened the city and brought about a renewed urban vitality. The city thus becomes the major node of the state's and the individual's interactions with other societies and cultures around the globe. The structures of local identity, social class, and practices of consumption have all been shaped in the interplay between local and global trends, developments, and images.; This study argues that urban embattlement today resides in both physical and human geography. It has been doubly pertinent to the reception and representation of the city as a bounded physical reality and as a process engaging the entire society. It reflects an insertion of Western values in Chinese states of mind, designates a new phase of the city-countryside transformation and reconfiguration, and disturbs and impedes definition and discourse in meaning production in the new era.; As depicted in the chosen films, urban embattlement is not a chaotic phenomenon. Rather it is an ambiguous hybridization of the traditional and the modern and of the home and the world. It is also embedded in the theorization and production of aesthetic imagery on the screen. This dissertation concludes that the embattled city contextualizes an unprecedented and palpable correlation of socialism-plus-capitalism and modernism-plus-postmodernism. This cinema-city nexus epitomizes the specific complexities of China's political, cultural, and economic atmosphere especially in the age of post-Maoism. The image of urban embattlement also nestles the filmmakers' ambivalent attitudes toward the rupture and dislocation of culture and tradition and their critical imagination of practice and politics at this new historical juncture.