Rural geographies and the New Chinese Cinemas
Imaging progressive places in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind and Jia Zhangke’s Platform
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21725161 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dennis Lo (0009-0008-8525-5438, ISNI: 000000012179395X James Madison University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 131-150 |
| Publication date | 2020-09-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Cinemas Journal of Contemporary Film (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1474-2756 • E-ISSN: 2040-0578 |
| Publisher | Intellect (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1386/ncin_00013_1 |
| OpenAlex | W3133892646 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 3 |
The New Chinese Cinemas were unprecedented in critiquing official narratives of progress through dramatic location-shot images of rural Taiwan and China. Much more than standing in as a picturesque backdrop, the rural was a site of complex ideological contestations. Yet, existing scholarship overlooks the richness of rural representations, reductively interpreting rural films as works of nostalgia and cultural salvage. Through a comparative analysis of representations of landscape, travel and visual perception in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind () and Jia Zhangke’s Platform (), this article brings into focus the important but largely ignored roles that Hou and Jia have played in envisioning new frameworks for thinking about rural geographies. Drawing from Doreen Massey’s notion of the ‘progressive place’, I investigate how Jiufen and Fenyang – the films’ shooting locations – are stages upon which the directors experimented with imaging and imagining communities. Jiufen is represented in Dust as a porous interface between the urban and rural, a metonym for the film’s representation of Taiwan as a contact zone with China. Platform , by contrast, fashions an image of Fenyang as a non-place, a microcosm of China as it undergoes unchecked neo-liberal development. Significantly, these films went beyond revising rural imaginaries on-screen, to making a material impact on Jiufen and Fenyang by transforming them into landmarks of global film tourism. This work demonstrates how Hou and Jia responded to disorienting social changes not by resisting, but by tactically embracing the blurring of divides between the urban and rural, and local and global
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · China · Ideology · Literature · Media studies · Movie theater · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Spectacle · Tourism · Visual arts · Asian Culture and Media Studies · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Gender Studies · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2020 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |