Chinese Cinema Culture

Dai Jinhua is Professor of Chinese Literature and Languages at Peking University. She is an eminent film critic and scholar and a public intellectual with a critical voice. Dai has published numerous books in Chinese on film, culture, and politics. Her English-language books include Cinema and Desire (2002) and After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History (2018).

Acknowledgments – Part One: Between the Reels – Severed Bridge: The Art of the Sons’ Generation – A Scene in the Fog: Reading the Sixth Generation Films – Subject Structure and Modes of Viewing: Films by the Fourth Generation Directors at the Turn of the 1970s and 1980s – Part Two: Ashes of Time – The Roar of Silence: Under the Facade of Urbanness: Chinese Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s – Encountering "The Other": Notes on the Theory of "Third World Literature" – Rift Valley: Glory and Downthrows in the Post-1989 Art Cinema – Ermo: A Modern-Day Allegory Created by a Fifth Generation Director – The Piano in a Factory: Class, or in the Name of the Father – Part Three: Half the Sky – Gender and Narration: Women in Contemporary Chinese Film – "Human, Woman, Demon": A Woman’s Predicament – Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Films: Pursuing and Escaping History – Appendix: The Isle of Yesterday—Film, Scholarship, and Me – Index.

“To put it somewhat dramatically, Dai Jinhua doesn’t contribute to the field, she is the field—at least insofar as Chinese cinema studies go, she is the trailblazer for much of what has been written since the late 1980s. The importance of this collection of translations is that it enables a dialog with film criticism and scholarship outside China studies.”
—Yomi Braester, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington