On The Main Features Of The Field Of China's Film Criticism In The Internet Age

The dawning of the Internet age and the emergence of a new space for film criticism based on the Internet have brought about profound changes on the field of China's film criticism in such terms as discourse modes, text features, identity construction, critical context and critical subjects. This paper aims to center on Pierre Bordieu's field theory, and use methods of media criticism and discourse analysis to give a systematic analysis on such changes.In terms of discourse modes, the boom of the cyber language has reshuffled the code system of everyday Chinese language, and injected strong contemporary elements into the discourse of film criticism, which exerted subversive impact on the modes of discourse for film criticism in China. In terms of text features, verbal violence has become a prominent syndrome of Chinese film criticism in the Internet age, which is fermented by Group Polarization and the hongke phenomenon (crowd hooting), and this is further worsened by a strong tendency of political index inherited from China's history of film criticism. As texts, Chinese film criticism in the age of Internet have attributes as public transcript and hidden transcript, and film criticism on the Internet are mostly perceived as implicit texts by which the criticizing subjects could express their"imagined vengeance". Irony has become the dominant public rhetoric of film criticism texts in the age of Internet, which is exhibited in three main forms including parody, word of play on sensitive words and responsible irony, the latter being the most constructive.In terms of identity construction, the sense of anxiety is a most distinctive feature in the discourse of film criticism in the Internet age. The plight of confusion in seeking a national cultural identity encountered by all subjects of discourse in this globalized Internet age is exemplified by two schools of discourse in China, namely cultural nationalism and vengeful nationalism. Another type of identity construction comes from the imagination of the middle class in the market economy through its self alignment with the commercial society, which is further divided into the tones of "petty bourgeois" and "the bobos". In the meantime, with the widening disparity of social consciousnesses, critical subjects also find their places in the two contradictory camps of the New Left and liberalism which have also penetrated into film criticism, as one film text can be rendered by these two different ideological rhetoric strategies into totally contradictory interpretations based on their different positions. However, the tendency of vulgar liberalism is also rampant in critical discourse.Consumerism has become the prominent language environment of China's film criticism in the Internet age. During this time, film criticism itself is inevitably intertwined with the process of film marketing, providing large amount of visual images for public consumption. And the consumption of fashionable and trendy culture also becomes a leading expectation for the consumption of film criticism. In today's film criticism, there are a lot of fashionable cultural factors to appeal to the readers, which largely shaped the taste of film criticism. In the age of Internet, over-consumed fan culture has also become a driving force for film criticism, a big fan culture, with strong productivity of critical texts, maintains a complex relationship of both confrontation and conspiracy with the film industry. In the meantime, doujin critics and slash critics have also take a conspicuous space in local fan criticism and produced immense critical texts with doujin fan fiction and slash writing's language styles.The evolution of critical subjects in the Internet age has also directly influenced the shaping of the critical field. Since youth has a dominating position in both Internet users and film viewers, film criticism in China is also imprinted with a strong factor of youth culture, and wenyiqingnian, or "literary youth", has become an eye-catching discourse representation. As the new generation of Chinese cinephiles make their collective debut, cinephilia languages have also risen quickly in the field of criticism. Due to the professionalism and passion of cinephilia discourse, it has become the "fa?te" discourse balancing academic film criticism and other kinds of film criticism. With the coming of "blue theories" (western theories) to China, professional critical tools within the academic institution have been widely used by professional critics, represented by audience response criticism, ecocriticism and media criticism. However, with intellectuals losing their vantage height as enlightenment pioneers, and with the shift of the power of discourse due to the Internet and new media, anxiety of aphasia and lack of listeners for professional film criticism have also emerged, therefore, many intellectuals have had systematic reflections on this change and re-examined the functions and roles of intellectual film criticism in the Internet age, and many professional intellectuals have also moved closer to Internet intellectuals to become media intellectuals.The Internet has inflicted fierce impact on the global field of film criticism, and the "rule of the game" of the field of China's film criticism has witnessed drastic changes. From the structure of discourses, power discourse, knowledge discourse and discourse of the Internet and the public have become three main types of discourses in the field of criticism. Among these three, power discourse is comparatively stable, knowledge discourse is drifting toward marginalization and web and public discourses have a visible momentum of becoming the mainstream. At the same time, because China's film criticism field is hard-pressed both by the field of power and the field of economics, it can hardly maintain autonomy. The critical subjects, as players in this field, are engaged in fierce scramble for capital, and in order to adapt to new rules of the field, they are constantly readjusting their own habitus, in particular language habitus.