Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema

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Columbia University Press, 1995 - Education - 252 pages

Chow situates contemporary Chinese film within the broad context of Chinese history and culture, giving readers a glimpse of the unique shared identity that characterizes the current crop of outstanding filmmakers, such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou.

 

Contents

Visuality Modernity and Primitive Passions
1
Some Contemporary Chinese Films
53
Digging an Old Well The Labor of Social Fantasy
55
Silent Is the Ancient Plain Music Filmmaking and the Concept of Social Change in the New Chinese Cinema
79
Male Narcissism and National Culture Subjectivity in Chen Kaiges King of the Children
108
The Force of Surfaces Defiance in ZhangYimous Films
142
Film as Ethnography or Translation Between Cultures in the Postcolonial World
173
Notes
203
Index
245
Copyright

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About the author (1995)

Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University and the author of numerous influential books, including several published by Columbia University Press: Primitive Passions; The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism; and Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films. A collection of her writings, The Rey Chow Reader, was edited by Paul Bowman. Her work has appeared in more than ten languages.