The 2009 hit espionage thriller The Message （Fengsheng 风声） was widely regarded as a milestone in Chinese genre filmmaking in the new millennium. Differing from Socialist espionage films, contemporaneous espionage ...The 2009 hit espionage thriller The Message （Fengsheng 风声） was widely regarded as a milestone in Chinese genre filmmaking in the new millennium. Differing from Socialist espionage films, contemporaneous espionage TV series as well as its literary original, the film is first and foremost characterized by its plenitude of torture scenes. A textual critique on these torture scenes reveals the generic elements from both Socialist revolutionary classics and American horror films. The genre mixing in The Message produces the sensorial pleasure of a body genre film while being safeguarded by its revolutionary packaging. As a specimen of the Chinese private film sector＇s aggressive dual commercial and political campaign, The Message illustrates the strategies of Chinese genre filmmaking and manifests the splitting logic in the Chinese film industry.展开更多
This article is about the movies from Chinese mainland under the production category of minority cinema （shaoshu minzu dianying）, between the years 1940 and 1963. It argues that the taxonomic effort of grouping diff...This article is about the movies from Chinese mainland under the production category of minority cinema （shaoshu minzu dianying）, between the years 1940 and 1963. It argues that the taxonomic effort of grouping different non-Hart ethnicities together into a single category of minority cinema is a sociopolitical attempt to construct, maintain and control the definition of ethnic minorities. It calls into question not what is within the film, but the classificatory practices outside of the film collectively engaged by the government, the film industry, the critics and the mass audience. Moving away from the methods of examining the representation and generic conventions of the cinema other scholarship has employed, this article emphasizes the classification system used during the time of the cinema. By comparing it with a similar classificatory problem in Western national history, using an epistemological perspective, this article criticizes the negative impact inevitably left in rhetorically driven classification systems.展开更多
文摘The 2009 hit espionage thriller The Message （Fengsheng 风声） was widely regarded as a milestone in Chinese genre filmmaking in the new millennium. Differing from Socialist espionage films, contemporaneous espionage TV series as well as its literary original, the film is first and foremost characterized by its plenitude of torture scenes. A textual critique on these torture scenes reveals the generic elements from both Socialist revolutionary classics and American horror films. The genre mixing in The Message produces the sensorial pleasure of a body genre film while being safeguarded by its revolutionary packaging. As a specimen of the Chinese private film sector＇s aggressive dual commercial and political campaign, The Message illustrates the strategies of Chinese genre filmmaking and manifests the splitting logic in the Chinese film industry.
文摘This article is about the movies from Chinese mainland under the production category of minority cinema （shaoshu minzu dianying）, between the years 1940 and 1963. It argues that the taxonomic effort of grouping different non-Hart ethnicities together into a single category of minority cinema is a sociopolitical attempt to construct, maintain and control the definition of ethnic minorities. It calls into question not what is within the film, but the classificatory practices outside of the film collectively engaged by the government, the film industry, the critics and the mass audience. Moving away from the methods of examining the representation and generic conventions of the cinema other scholarship has employed, this article emphasizes the classification system used during the time of the cinema. By comparing it with a similar classificatory problem in Western national history, using an epistemological perspective, this article criticizes the negative impact inevitably left in rhetorically driven classification systems.
