Chinese Ecocinema: in the Age of Environmental Challenge

384 Pages·2009·9.57 MB·English

by  Sheldon H. Lu & Jiayan Mi

Hong Kong University Press
14/F Hing Wai Centre
7 Tin Wan Praya Road
Aberdeen
Hong Kong
© Hong Kong University Press 2009
Hardback ISBN 978-962-209-085-9
Paperback ISBN 978-962-209-086-6
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Printed and bound by Caritas Printing Training Centre, Hong Kong, China
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
List of Contributors xi
Introduction. Cinema, Ecology, Modernity 1
Sheldon H. Lu
Part I. Hydro-Politics: Water, River, and National Trauma 15
1. Framing Ambient Unheimlich: Ecoggedon, Ecological Unconscious, 17
and Water Pathology in New Chinese Cinema
Jiayan Mi
2. Gorgeous Three Gorges at Last Sight: Cinematic Remembrance and 39
the Dialectic of Modernization
Sheldon H. Lu
3. Submerged Ecology and Depth Psychology in Wushan yunyu: 57
Aesthetic Insight into National Development
Nick Kaldis

4. Floating Consciousness: The Cinematic Confluence of Ecological 73
Aesthetics in Suzhou River
Andrew Hageman
vi Contents
Part II. Eco-Aesthetics, Heteroscape, and Manufactured Landscape 93
5. The Idea-Image: Conceptualizing Landscape in Recent Martial Arts 95
Movies
Mary Farquhar
6. Façades: The New Beijing and the Unsettled Ecology of Jia 113
Zhangke’s The World
Jerome Silbergeld
7. Ruins and Grassroots: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontents in the 129
Age of Globalization
Hongbing Zhang
Part III. Urban Space in Production and Disappearance 155
8. Of Humans and Nature in Documentary: The Logic of Capital in 157
West of the Tracks and Blind Shaft
Ban Wang
9. Toward a Hong Kong Ecocinema: The Dis-appearance of “Nature” 171
in Three Films by Fruit Chan
Chris Tong
10. A City of Disappearance: Trauma, Displacement, and Spectral 195
Cityscape in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
Jing Nie
Part IV. Bioethics, Non-Anthropocentrism, and Green Sovereignty 215

11. In the Face of Developmental Ruins: Place Attachment and Its 217
Ethical Claims
Xinmin Liu

12. Ning Hao’s Incense: A Curious Tale of Earthly Buddhism 235
Xiaoping Lin
13. Putting Back the Animals: Woman-Animal Meme in Contemporary 255
Taiwanese Ecofeminist Imagination
Chia-ju Chang
Contents vii
14. “Reconstructing the God-Fearing Community”: Filming Tibet in the 271
Twenty-First Century
Donghui He
Notes 289
Chinese Glossary 325
Filmography
329
Bibliography
333
Index
353

Acknowledgments
This book originated from a panel on “New Chinese Ecocinema and Ethics of
Environmental Imagination” that we organized for the annual convention of the
Association for Asian Studies in Boston, March 2007. However, the conceptualization
of the details and the final materialization of the project as a whole result from
the cooperation of many individuals and span distant geographies: from the niches
of eco-habitats of northern California, through the immense reach of Australasia,
to the spaces of cosmopolitan Hong Kong. The trans-Pacific and trans-Oceanic
nature of this book has been particularly helpful in broadening the scope of our
vision. As co-editors, we thank all the contributors for taking time out of their busy
schedules to join us in this collaborative work. We are especially grateful to the
publishers of Hong Kong University Press: Colin Day and Michael Duckworth,
and to our project editor Dawn Lau. Their interest, support, and professionalism
are very much appreciated. We have also learned a great deal from two rounds of
constructive reviews of the book manuscript by anonymous reviewers of Hong
Kong University Press.
Sheldon H. Lu would like to dedicate this book to his son, Michael, born in the
productive Year of Ox, the same year as the book’s publication date. Michael will
plough the field and harvest the fruits of labor in due time.
Jiayan Mi would like to thank the Committee on the Support of Scholarly
Activity at The College of New Jersey for the award of 2008–2009 SOSA, and
the dean of Culture and Society, who offered him a mini-research grant for
revising and editing the manuscript. He also would like to dedicate this book to his
daughter Coco Mi, a little green guard whose buzzwords are: turn off the lights/
save the Earth.
An early version of Chapter 3 by Nick Kaldis appeared as “National
Development and Individual Trauma in Wushan yunyu (In Expectation),” in The
China Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall 2004): 165–191. An early version of Chapter 8 by
Ban Wang appeared as “Documentary as Haunting of the Real: The Logic of Capital