Rural-urban Continuum:the Spiritual Space In Contemporary Chinese Films Of New Generation Directors

Since1990s, numerous films characterized by spatial representation of city, town, county, county-level city and prefecture-level city have appeared in Chinese film creation. Such creation tendency continues to exist up to now through various film aesthetic forms. However, in previous times, there were few Chinese films for spatial representation and production concerning "rural-urban continuums" such as towns. This is not just the issue concerning whether "town space" was presented and whether town environment could become the context and living space of protagonists’ activities, but that town space was never represented with so rich sense of space. Meanwhile, regardless considering from the space expression of Chinese film aesthetics or from the social structure of Chinese reality, county images should not equate with "urban films" without differentiation. Hence, based on the relevant theories of film documentary aesthetics, this paper discusses the image representation and discourse production of county space brought by films produced by Chinese directors of the new generation since1990s from a perspective of space production. In this process, this paper also gives consideration to the ecological environment created by directors of the new generation:the film production of capital element and Chinese national condition.The main body of this paper is from the second chapter to the sixth chapter. The structural arrangement of the five chapters is as follows:on the one hand, from a diachronic perspective, it can be regarded as an exploration to the development sequence of Chinese county images--the paper conducts its discussion according to the general order of film creation development:from "the discovery of county space", the reminiscence trend concentrating on "memory space of personal emotion", the observation of realistic questions such as "peasant-workers" and "vulnerable groups","independent filmmaking strives to regard the spatial representation of county space as a advanced creation element and discourse right" to "county space is used as the material of’proposition composition’to represent" in recent years. On the other hand, from a synchronic perspective, the structural arrangement of this paper can be viewed as the aesthetic conclusion and theory arrangement for different forms of county space image representation. Each chapter stands for one distinctive space construction and discourse expression of a specific directing group:the changing hometown space, nostalgic collectivism space, film media space of personal emotion memory, cold bottom space--the "sub level", the broken and torn county region space locating in the edge of rural and urban places and county space rich in sense of place and power structure prominence.The directors focus on the county space in the over30years since the reform and opening up of market-oriented economy when the impacts of modernization and urbanization are the fiercest, and present the visible spatial changes and invisible spiritual space variation of county people in Chinese grass-root society in the form of images. In the specific visible images, directors of the new generation contact the sharpest social contradiction in current China by means of documentary aesthetics, highlight the individual life experience in the grass-root society which is always shaded, and capture the concrete spatial texture of county space. In this process, they adopt creative concepts and skills of documentary aesthetics to profoundly combine the county space with people inside rather than separate people from the space. As for the film itself, it will be perfect to apply documentary aesthetical skills like a full-length shot for the content presentation of county space. It is because only a full-length shot can completely display the texture and true feeling of county space. In fact, a full-length shot can only be fully played in Chinese county space. It is also a powerful discourse resistance to the Chinese rapid modernization and urbanization with "sense of counterfeit" in the dual levels of film contents and film forms.