Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers

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Columbia University Press, 2005 - Performing Arts - 568 pages
"I always compare filmmaking to cooking. Shooting is like buying the groceries. You buy all kinds of ingredients and the better ingredients you get, the better chance you have of making the movie you want."--Ang Lee, from Speaking in Images

Speaking in Images offers an engaging and rare collection of interviews with the directors who have changed the face of Chinese and international cinema. Michael Berry's discussions with such directors as Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Zhang Yimou (Hero), Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine), Stanley Kwan (Lan Yu), Tsai Ming-Liang (Vive l'Amour), Edward Yang (Yi Yi), and Hou Hsiao-hsien (Flowers of Shanghai) offer an eclectic and comprehensive portrait of contemporary Chinese cinema.

In interviews that capture each filmmaker's unique vision, the subjects discuss their formative years, the ideas and influences that shaped their work, film aesthetics, battles with censors and studios, the mingling of commercial and art film, and the future of Chinese cinema in a transnational context. Berry's introduction to the collection provides an overview of Chinese cinema in the second half of the twentieth century, placing the directors and their work in a wider historical and cultural context.

 

Contents

Speaking in Images
1
Six Decades of Cinematic Innovation
21
Stealing Horses and Flying Kites
51
Historical Revolution and Cinematic Rebellion
83
Flying Colors
109
Working up a Sweat in a Celluloid Sauna
143
Banned in China
163
Capturing a Transforming Reality
183
Freedom in Film
325
Trapped in the Past
363
Shooting from the Margins
399
Living Through Films
423
From Spectral Nostalgia to Corporeal Desire
441
Hong Kong Independent
459
Pioneering PanAsian Cinema
485
The Last of the Chinese
509

The Future of Chinese Cinema?
209
Words and Images
235
Luckily Unlucky
273
Writing Taiwan in the Shadows
297
NOTES
543
BIBLIOGRAPHY
557
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Michael Berry is professor of Chinese Literature at UCLA. He is the author of A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2011) and Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (Columbia University Press, 2005).

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