Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

摘要

This long-anticipated edited volume, several years in the making, seeks to expand the field of Chinese-language film studies by defining yet another crop of directors according to the now de rigeur generational logic of mainland filmmaking. As noted in the editor's "Introduction" and acknowledgments, the term "Urban Generation" was originally used to market an eponymous 2001 touring film program featuring directors - many of them "young" career-wise - whose works reflect an active engagement with urban themes, and whose international reputations have largely been overshadowed by the likes of big-name Fifth-Generation talents such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. While acknowledging that, in the process of bringing this volume to press, its interpretive scope has expanded to include "a number of allied or competing filmmakers and their creative engagement with the shared historical moment [of globalization]" (p. 8), the agenda at stake nonetheless remains theorizing the Urban Generation's emergence as "a broad and consequential trend" (p. 9) in mainland feature film production.