| Since the 1990 s,the introduction of foreign blockbusters to China’s film market have had a dual influence on the creation and development of Chinese films.On the one hand,it has revived the declining film market and meanwhile caused the survival of domestic films more difficult.On the other hand,it has stimulated filmmakers to make attempts and innovations in film-making technologies and creation of film categorization.With Hollywood magic blockbusters popular across the world,Chinese filmmakers have began to make fantasy films.Just in ten years,fantasy films have occupied the top three places in the box office list of Chinese films in history.Through genre-study methods,this thesis aims to explore the mechanism of occurrence of Chinese magic films and features of the current genre,including their genre evolution and occurrence,and taking western magic films and traditional martial films or films with gods and spirits as model to compare the integration and segmentation between them and Chinese magic films.Firstly,this thesis specifies the basic methods of studies of genre films and definitions of magic genre and fantasy genre in the academic circle,and summarizes magic genre films in contemporary China and current research into them by scholars with the emergence of CG technology as node.In the framework of a basic question whether magic genre films have emerged in China,three major questions of the study of this thesis is specified: Why have magic genre films emerged in contemporary China? How have magic genre films emerged in contemporary China? What are the aesthetic characteristics and genre elements that differentiate Chinese magic genre films from other films?This thesis considers that the emergence of Chinese major genre films is related to the early genre evolution of martial films or films with gods and spirits beginning with Burning the Red Lotus Temple.Therefore,this thesis reviews the emergence and development of martial films and films with gods and spirits in the 1930 s when the commercial competition of Chinese films was fierce,and summarizes their genre features including photographic techniques and narrative patterns.Films with ghosts and monsters had suffered depression for a time after spreading to Hong Kong,until Shaw Brothers Limited revived this genre of films with swordsman films and derived zombie comedies and other sub-genres.In the next trend of Hong Kong films,Xu Ke made A Chinese Fairy Tale,Greek Snake and other films,which drew materials from traditional mythical novels in China.After the film-making current with people going to the north,The Legend of Zu and Di Renjie series were made with a combination of domestic capital and western CG technology.The magic martial style was gradually formed.Genre evolution is just a dimension to study mechanism of occurrence of magic films in contemporary China.This thesis then makes an analysis of the historical backgrounds of the film market in China after the introduction and shock of blockbusters and the needs of film audience to visual wonders in an era of consumption and concludes that fantasy genre films are actually the necessary choice made by film capital and makers and decided by needs of the market and audience under the historical background.However,why do magic genre films outshine others among the fantasy genre films? Why don’t magic genre films which pay the same attention to presenting visual wonders and terror genre films rise and develop? It is closely related to the restriction of Chinese traditional culture and way of thinking and film censorship.Meanwhile,IP adaptation and fans’ cross-medium conversion benefit brought by net literature and games to the film industry in the network age have become a momentum to promote the suddenly rise of magic genre films.According to the idea of this thesis,the magic genre film in contemporary China is both an imported good from the west and an evolving product with native genre.The influence of these two dimensions on it can not be neglected.It is not a pure grafted product or a combined product,but something with many unique aesthetic features formed by the collision between China and the west.In Chapter Four,this thesis mainly studies genre elements of Hollywood magic genre films which are use as model.Then,compared with this model,a comparative study is made in various aspects including the construction of world outlook,themes,source of materials,basic genre elements and inheritance and reconstruction of the chivalrous spirit of magic genre films in contemporary China.The author have found that some features which belongs to works of art in post modernism have begun to emerge when studying eastern and western magic genre films in recent years.In the next part,Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons is use as text to analyze magic genre films with theories of linguistics and communications and this thesis attempts to explore and find unique aesthetic features of magic genre films in the context of postmodernism in contemporary China,which differentiates them from Chinese traditional martial films or films with gods and ghosts.With the challenge of visual spectacularization aesthetics to traditional semiotic system of languages,narrative functions and patterns of magic genre films are changing accordingly to the direction of series connector and exhibitor of magic space wonders,magic monster wonders and action wonders. |
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