City Image

China's urbanization process beginning in the 1980s led to rapid social change. People's fate, as well as their values, state of mind, and law of survival is in the turbulent transition and change.City films with reflections on urban culture and the profound experience of city life give much thought to the growth of cities and urban residents' living conditions and emotional needs from different perspectives. Sharing transition suffering, confusion and happiness as well as eager with people going through the transformation, city films try to understand,face and explain the reality.Contemporary China's urban films'relationship to urban reality is that of ainteraction and imagination, the transition of the Chinese society contribute a lot to the development of the urban films, and the development of Chinese urban films reflects China's socialization / modernization process. Chinese urban films are like a microcosm of the Chinese contemporary history. They are rich texts to decode and understand modern China, whether the city space they provide or life styles they reveal reflect the bitterness and hardership, expectation and hope the ordinary people in cities encoutered when striving for social progress, and contain a variety of social themes during modernization.Studying the Chinese urban films of the 1980s and the 1990s,this paper tries to use all kinds of effective methods of cultural criticism to interpret film directors and versions of the Chinese urban films from different angles, to make deep analysis of the ideological significance of various cultural phenomenoa, to organize the multiple efforts behind the phenomena, and to pry into how urban realities construct city image, and how city image reproduce the and culture of cities. The paper study the relationship between the textual imaginations and social realities as well as the cultural meaning the relationship contains, hence provide a meaningful cultural map,which, according to me, is a necessary and valuable academic work.The paper is divided into four parts. Chapter I is an introduction,which mainly analyzes the interaction of China's urbanization process and the Chinese city film production, discuss city films, frame the object of study, and make a brief assessment of the situation of the urban study and Chinese urban films that preavail the intelligentsia using the definition of urban literature, as well as other critics as reference.Finally, this paper elaborates the text reading and research methods on the symptoms and the value of the title selected.Chapter II is a profile of the development of the Chinese city films.The paper looked back on the early part of the urban films and the urban films made after the founding of the People's Republic of China in order to give premise to the discourse on the city films after the 1980s.Section 1 points out that early films take a two-spot structure of "city - village", using traditional rural values to look at cities, thus descring cities as "hotbed of crime" and "a place of degeneration".Crime bom together with cities is the main recount strategy and basic value tropism of early Chinese movies describing cities like shanghai. Reasonable explanation is given of the reason why early films resisted and criticized cities and were attached to the country. Then this section makes analysis of the opposition between the city and the country and the fixed narration in the left-wing movies and points out that in these movies the creators look into cities taking the macroscopic perspective of race and class. Thus the degenerate and amoral image of cities becomes a basic premise and a fixed narration in the left-wing movies.Section 2 points out since the founding of the People's Republic to the new period, era of wars still had an effect on the social environment and the collective cultural mind. The long-held idea of encircling the cities from the countryside dominate people then. The opposition between cities and the country was taken as the difference between two systems of ideology. The country is the base of rebuilding cities. Hence, in the movie, the city is overtaken and suppressed, drowned in the political concept and is taken as an object to be reformed. Section 3 elabrates the historical context of the Chinese city movies after the 1980s and a description is made for the whole basin of the creation of city movies according to four stages.Chapter III takes city movie creations of the the fifth generation directors as a research object, analyzes the rise and evolution of the city modern consciousness in the fifth generation movie and is concerned about the work ot representative of the fifth generation directors - Huangjianxin Xiagang, and Zhouxiaowen.Section 1 looks back on the development of city movies in the new period, points out "city consciousness" in the fifth generation city movies, comparing to the fourth generation is not simply praising or lessening urban civilization, but comes to be aware of city as token of premise to modern civilization and the various evils of modern civilization itself, and tris to probe from the perspective of humanistic care into the reality of city making people feel opressed, and the unkown secrets of urban residents' soul.Section 2 is an analysis of the fifth generation city films and creations of Zhang zeming and Sun zhou as addition to and present awareness of the humanities. It points out the early fifth generation films are not to focus on material side of city life, neither do the films blame urban life as a decadent way of the pursuit of material and is the opposite to the purity of villages. Instead, the films focus on the typical persons surrounded by modern civilization. The search for their own location in the city, their analysis of the relationship between their bosom and the city, and the resulting counfusion and their dissociative feeling they suffered are presented.Section 3 is a special research of Huang Jixin's urban films. The first part is a group analysis of the small potatoes in Huang's films, pointing out what is valuable of Huang's films is that they pay attention to reality have the depth of humanity. The following part is analysis of the change of intellectuals in the films, which depicts that intellectuals tend to seek the same identity of he mass of the commons, giving up their role of independent criticism. The last point is about the cultural contradictions Huang jianxin shows as a torchbearer when faced with the Chinese urban reality.Sector 4 is a combined discussion about Zhou Xiaowen and Xia Gang's movies. By analysis of the Price of Craziness, the section says Zhou focus on the "crazy" aspect of cities (this section the author also decode the image fable in Qing Chun Wu Hui) while Xia Gang pays his attention to the fine aspect of city life, the cities and people living in them are in harmony with each other. Xia Gang, on the other hand, described cities as warm cities and realized the movies' function to soothe by editing Wang Shuo's novel. However, cities in Xia Gang's late movies changed to some degree, which shows the complexity of directors' creation.Chapter IV is mainly about creatios of the sixth generation directors as "the generation of city", showing the "intertextuality" relationship between the sixth generation city films and the urban realities.The first section makes a general analysis of the six generation directors, analyzing their growth, social context, the film posture as well as the survival strategy of rebelling the "fifth generation", resulting in their common creation characteristic of focusing the mass using marginalisation.The second section is a case analysis of Wang xiaoshuai's creation of city films. First, this section explored lives of the people at the foot of the city, and pointes out these people are eager to take part in modern urban life, however, once their life style is in conflict with how the urban works, they will be throw away and become centrifugal persons, they are destined to drift. The second part is a detailed analysis of Beijing Bicycle, pointing out how difficult it is for xiaojian to integrate himself with the city.The third section carries on a case analysis of Lou ye's city movies. Lou ye describes Shang hai from a unique aspect in his movie. In the Weekend Lover, not imbued with the traditional spirit, the cultural young men's loss, as well as their cultural rebellion against the social realities responding to stumili correspond to urban younth's anxiety, and loneliness in the 1990s. In Suzhou River, instead of a tremendous Shanghai, Lou ye presents us with a relatively comprehensive Shanghai, subverting Shanghai as a legendary city with his sorrowful memory of the city. The Purple Butterfly is about the urban old dream of the 1930s. It conveys the uncertainty of urban life and the spiritual oppression it brought to individuals in an imaginary way. In the movie, Lou ye tries to recognize the history , expressing his view of and attitudes to the present life.The fourth section investigates Jia Zhangke's small town movies, pointing out Jia presents the survival state of the border individuals (Xiao Wu, Cui Mingliang) who lived in small or middle-sized cities and who experienced the difficult and painful reform in a documentary way. He deals with individual experience, yet what he directs is the history, the society and the nations. And then he reveals that with globalization, small cities are mixed with depression and dreams, urge to develop and panic about loss. Jia's movies are a vivid description of people's anxiety in developing China, showing the special historical and cultural meaning of small town movies.The conclusion part analyzes the the anti- city tendency and the future of city movies. It points out that although they experienced the change of history and ideology, the creators of city films remain influced by agricultural civilization in cultural mentality. City movies sure are urbanized in form, but in spirit, they express the same doubt, rebellion and criticizm to modern urbanization; moreover, the last part indicates that city movies of the 1980s and the 1990s obtained great attention since they echo the changes of social ideology caused by the progress of urbanization, while the social ideology is undergoing changes and the present subject matters of city movies are restricted by ideologies, the set theme and what the subject matters imply come to lose its social effects and charm. Therefore, as urban life is becoming more and more complex and the conflicts are concentrating, it is a major task before film workers how to reflect over the past with humanistic care and then write new city stories, and turn out movies with more historic depth.