Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century.

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Lupke, Christopher

• This is a review of the collection of essays The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, edited by Zhen Zhang. This is an excellent volume of essays that focus mainly on the filmmakers who came after the so-called Fifth Generation in China, most of whom are based in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, hence the title "The Urban Generation." The essays are wide in scope and don't come together as a whole with complete ease, which is a general tendency of volumes that emerge out of a conference, as this one did. Nevertheless, the editor did an admirable job of organizing the essays into some fundamental themes and wrote an outstanding introductory essay in addition to her own within the collection. Additionally, many of the scholars represent the best of filmstudies with respect to China in our current era. It's a volume with many important treatments of film and is a resource for all scholars. It also would make an excellent companion volume to a course on post-Fifth Generation cinema.

• Date created

  2008-01-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers; Sixth Generation Chinese filmmakers;
  • dopplegänger; time-image; cinéma vérité; postsocialism as a structure of feelings;
  • flâneur; urban generation; "on the scene"; "on the spot"; leitmotif; "main melody"; illustrated lecture;
  • Zhang Zhen;
  • Yingjin Zhang; Jason McGrath; Shuqin Cui; Bérénice Reynaud; Xueping Zhong; Augusta Palmer; Chris Berry; Sheldon Lu; Yomi Braester; Linda Lai; Yaohua Shi;
  • Deleuze, Bazin, Boym, Benjamin; De Certeau; Abbas; Kracauer.

• Type of Item

  Review

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-k5t3-zh50

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International