Feng Xiaogang’s haunted utopia, Chinese modernity, and carnivalesque social critique in the era of Xi Jinping
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21783377 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yi Lü (0000-0001-7614-6661, Texas A&M University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 353-376 |
| Publication date | 2022-07-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Review of Film and Television Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1740-0309 • E-ISSN: 1740-7923 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17400309.2022.2100193 |
| OpenAlex | W4290755008 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 19 |
ABTRACTThis paper seeks to illustrate how Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang constructs and delivers social commentaries in his New Year comedies The Dream Factory (1997) and Personal Tailor (2013). These two films are unique in terms of narrative strategy compared to his other New Year films. Both films turn on the premise of temporarily granting people’s wildest wishes, out of which arise multi-layered utopian and dystopian elements that I connect to Feng having made these two films shortly after his realist films were censored. Exploring these two films, I argue that Feng employs the carnivalesque as an alternative narrative strategy to perform subversive resistance, to counter monolithic and hegemonic discourses of Chinese modernity, and to expose social issues in the context of China’s tightening of censorship restrictions. A comparative study of these two films reveals their value as visual records of Chinese modernity over the course of a decade and as important facilitators or mediators of societal self-critique
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Carnivalesque · Censorship · China · Chinese Dream · Dystopia · Epistemology · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Political science · Premise · Sociology · Utopia · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2025 (2) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |