Deadline: 15 February 2011
New Generation Chinese Cinema: Commodities of Exchange
King’s College London May 26th and 27th 2011
Chinese film from the new millennium represents a dynamic yet highly fragmented range of filmic practices, apt for a country of 1.3 billion people. Increasingly, many of the experiences captured in millennial Chinese film have echoed the rapid economic and social changes brought about under the fundamental reorientation of China’s economy based on a neoliberal model. As a process that is, in the words of Wang Hui, not yet complete, the marketisation and commodification of Chinese society through the 1980s and 1990s left a film culture marked by the rise of commercial and independent film practices, exemplified by the New Documentary Movement in the 1990s, the Urban/Sixth Generation, as well as the new wave of DV filmmaking producing work at the beginning of the 2000s. At the same time, as Yingjin Zhang points out, “As national cinema, Chinese cinema is both fluctuating and unfinished.” Taking market forces and national aspects of culture as two of our central themes, it now appears Chinese film needs a new conceptual placeholder to explain the diverse array of films produced in the mainland at a time when independent films have proliferated to unprecedented levels and box office revenues have risen rapidly.
This conference seeks to draw together the disparate threads of Chinese film from the last ten years as they are exchanged within local and global networks, by theorizing the following: commercial Chinese blockbusters to regionalist films; ethnographic documentaries to DV works made by a growing body of amateur filmmakers that utilise the latest digital technologies. Out of a changing post-socialist state, unheralded filmmakers have found the opportunity to forge a praxis that expresses the thought of a society under the commodity form. Highlighting the uniqueness and the importance of the films coming out of China in this stage of neoliberal globalization, this conference aims to demonstrate the continued importance of film as a key means through which social change is experienced and expressed.
The following categories and others suggested paper topics will be given full consideration:
+Hybridity and DV filmmaking
+Transnationalism, neo-nationalism, independent/regionalist imaginaries
+Marginal subjectivities and peripheral subjects
+Shorts, Animation, Neo-avant-garde filmmaking
+Generational Taxonomy (Fifth, Sixth, Seventh?)—an outmoded concept? +Urban reform and gentrification
+Chinese horror cinema +Blockbuster, Leitmotif (zhuxuanlu) films +First Person Documentaries
+Low-budget Biopics +Chinese-language cinema verses nation-state cinema +Eco-cinema and the PRC +Cosmopolitanism and China
Please send abstracts not exceeding 250 words, accompanied by a brief biographical sketch to the email address below. Submissions from early career scholars and PhD candidates are strongly encouraged. The deadline for submissions is January 21st 2011. Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged via email and participants will be informed of the committee's decision by February 15th 2011.
Registration will begin in late February. Please send paper topics to: keith.wagner@kcl.ac.uk
More information here.
New Generation Chinese Cinema: Commodities of Exchange
King’s College London May 26th and 27th 2011
Chinese film from the new millennium represents a dynamic yet highly fragmented range of filmic practices, apt for a country of 1.3 billion people. Increasingly, many of the experiences captured in millennial Chinese film have echoed the rapid economic and social changes brought about under the fundamental reorientation of China’s economy based on a neoliberal model. As a process that is, in the words of Wang Hui, not yet complete, the marketisation and commodification of Chinese society through the 1980s and 1990s left a film culture marked by the rise of commercial and independent film practices, exemplified by the New Documentary Movement in the 1990s, the Urban/Sixth Generation, as well as the new wave of DV filmmaking producing work at the beginning of the 2000s. At the same time, as Yingjin Zhang points out, “As national cinema, Chinese cinema is both fluctuating and unfinished.” Taking market forces and national aspects of culture as two of our central themes, it now appears Chinese film needs a new conceptual placeholder to explain the diverse array of films produced in the mainland at a time when independent films have proliferated to unprecedented levels and box office revenues have risen rapidly.
This conference seeks to draw together the disparate threads of Chinese film from the last ten years as they are exchanged within local and global networks, by theorizing the following: commercial Chinese blockbusters to regionalist films; ethnographic documentaries to DV works made by a growing body of amateur filmmakers that utilise the latest digital technologies. Out of a changing post-socialist state, unheralded filmmakers have found the opportunity to forge a praxis that expresses the thought of a society under the commodity form. Highlighting the uniqueness and the importance of the films coming out of China in this stage of neoliberal globalization, this conference aims to demonstrate the continued importance of film as a key means through which social change is experienced and expressed.
The following categories and others suggested paper topics will be given full consideration:
+Hybridity and DV filmmaking
+Transnationalism, neo-nationalism, independent/regionalist imaginaries
+Marginal subjectivities and peripheral subjects
+Shorts, Animation, Neo-avant-garde filmmaking
+Generational Taxonomy (Fifth, Sixth, Seventh?)—an outmoded concept? +Urban reform and gentrification
+Chinese horror cinema +Blockbuster, Leitmotif (zhuxuanlu) films +First Person Documentaries
+Low-budget Biopics +Chinese-language cinema verses nation-state cinema +Eco-cinema and the PRC +Cosmopolitanism and China
Please send abstracts not exceeding 250 words, accompanied by a brief biographical sketch to the email address below. Submissions from early career scholars and PhD candidates are strongly encouraged. The deadline for submissions is January 21st 2011. Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged via email and participants will be informed of the committee's decision by February 15th 2011.
Registration will begin in late February. Please send paper topics to: keith.wagner@kcl.ac.uk
More information here.
