A Study On The Inheritance And Transformation Of North American Chinese Directors’ Expression Of Cultural Identity

Modernity,cultural diversity and globalisation have become the keywords after the millennium.Their coordinated operation has accelerated the large-scale movement and exchange of population and culture around the world,resulted in constant cultural conflicts and loss of identity.The crisis of identity has been manifested in many cultural fields.This paper will take film as the research object,selecting the family-themed films made by Chinese directors who are active in North Amercian,to explore the evolution of their cultural identity between different generations.This paper is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is the Introduction,introducing the motivation and significance of carrying out the research,as well as the commonalities and differences of cultural identity’s expression between the two generations of North American Chinese directors in family-themed films.In the second chapter,by sorting out the previous generation of Chinese directors’ works,it is pointed out that they all have expressed cultural differences in oriental images and identity confusion through family conflicts.Then focusing on family-themed films and choosing Ang Lee’s films as the representative to analyze his expression of cultural identity.To conclude that,traditional culture had a profound impact on Ang Lee’s early identity construction,but in later works he begins to emphasize the consciousnes of individual existence.After combing through the works of the new generation of North American Chinese directors and making comparsions with the previous gengeration,it shows that the new generation has played down their involvement in expressing cultural differences and highlight the personal values.Then selecting Chloé Zhao as the object,to analyze the cultural identity shown in her four works mainly based on the family background,and discuss her characteristics of changing from cultural identity to identity consciousness.On the basis of the above two chapters,the fourth chapter discusses the inheritance and transformation of cultural identity of Lee and Chloé from “nationalism” to “cosmopolitanism”.Through the analysis of the diversified,individualized and subjective characteristics of cultural identity under the background of globalization,it summarizes the trend of the cultural identity’s construction of the new generation.The fifth chapter is the Conclusion,summarizing the core point of view discussed in this paper,that is,the key to the inheritance and transformation of the identity consciousness and cultural identity of two generations of Chinese directors lies in the transition and change from expressing the loss of culture in a foreign environment to explaining the universal survival dilemma of all mankind.