Self-Screening As Ethnography

Development of contemporary Chinese cinema has not been smooth since the reform and opening up. On one hand, it seeks for culture renaissance but lost its enlightenment ideality along the way. On the other hand, Chinese cinema has made the development strategy in its modernization drive. Though these different states, Chinese cinema has given rise to its most important transformation during trans-century. This dissertation aims at presenting a poetics study on the transformation of the contemporary Chinese cinema throughout the recent20years time period. This will break into two phases. The first phase, the "mirror stage", covers from1990to2001, while the second phase of "self-construction stage" runs from2002to2010.This dissertation falls into two parts, the first focuses on the external examination of the Chinese cinema while the second on the internal. Methodology that runs through these arrangements is in such that the paper gets its perspective of anthropological poetics to observe on how the popular Chinese film shaping the national culture. In other words, this dissertation is an attempt to produce an anthropological aspect of modern China through visual image of Chinese society, cultural history and daily culture in motion. This is a theoretical discussion of "self-ethnography" through contemporary Chinese cinema, and the visual cultural production in China during trans-century is leading to a cultural phenomenology of "story destruction"First part of the dissertation mainly focuses on media criticism as a starting point. The external examination emphasizes on the overall background of the trans-century Chinese cinema’s medium-semiotic studies. The transformation between the new and old semiotic systems sharpens the" Chinese-ness" issue by placing it in the globalization context. Visual cultural production in the21st century has removed limitation on technique and material, while technologized visual production and strong national economies at the same time have created a stage for a strong media discourse that never happened before. As a whole, all aspects have come to help building a common national image to shape a New-Chinese culture and to gain ethnical identify. This translation between cultures not only highlighted the new semiotics system, it also deepens the conflict and confluence between elite culture and mass culture.Based on the first part of analytical medium-semiotic studies, second part of the paper extends to internal examination of contemporary Chinese cinema, mainly on poetics criticism. Using perspective of the film narratology, this portion of the observation begins with questioning and reconstructing the narrative authority in our everyday life. For the investigation of narration in the trans-century Chinese cinema, it comes down to the confluent point between aestheticization of everyday life and aesthetics of everyday life. In short, this is an issue concerning "semiotic-narration" which is an epistemological problem. Therefore, the challenge in front of us is to answer this very question, how is it possible that the visibility (and also invisibility) of the Chinese cinema in our everyday life led us to the ethnic identify and even narcissistic.The effort of this dissertation is to critically point out the urgent problems of contemporary Chinese cinema, and it is not a mere attempt for a new theory of film. Based on the semiotics and narrative studies of Chinese cinema, the paper is concerning the re-consideration of human existence. The modernized transformation of contemporary Chinese cinema upgraded itself from technologized visual production to "invisible violence", and that is in fact "story destruction". This velvety gigantic matter (das Riesenhafte) not just gave rise to the consumer culture; it also created the economical value system for elitism. This trend shapes the national culture as what mass-man wanted willingly. Therefore, my attempt in this dissertation is a criticism of film as a transcription between cultures and media, forcing us to rethink the modernity of New-Chinese culture and ethnical identity that we are always looking for.