| My dissertation is a cultural history of urban cinema produced in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People's Republic of China at the turn of the millennium. I delineate significant convergences and divergences between the three cinemas in terms of aesthetic form, thematic content, and industrial practice. During the 1990s, increasing economic integration and more permeable borders enabled the formation of a Greater China Cultural Sphere, which began to connect the three regions through the circulation of people and popular culture. The Hong Kong Handover, the consumer revolution on the Mainland, and the continuing ambiguity of Taiwan's relationship to the P.R.C. created shifts in local identities and their relationship to varying concepts of Chineseness. In response to such uncertainty, films from the three regions of Greater China evoke nostalgia for an earlier transnational city, Shanghai, and for the disappearing facets of local urban experience in Taipei, Beijing, and Hong Kong. At the same time, fiction filmmakers in all three regions turned their attention to documenting urban transformation in progress, using both documentary techniques and subject matter. The dissertation integrates analysis of films and their cultural contexts to examine how cinema both reflects and constructs contemporary Chinese urban identities. My interpretation of the intertextual nature of cinematic production examines its intersection with discourses from the visual arts, literature, and popular culture. Industrial practices, including convergences in the film industries of the three regions and the increasing necessity for co-productions, are also examined for their significance in the travel of style and culture. I argue that the three contemporary Chinese cinemas draw on similar traditions, aesthetic techniques and subject matter, yet create culturally distinct films featuring local specificities of language, ideology, and culture. My dissertation posits that tracing the travel of similar aesthetic practices and common thematic concerns through the intersecting realms of Chineseness, the local, the everyday, and the global in cinema creates an important space for the imaginative creation of cultural difference within Greater China, a form of creation which functions on both collective and individual levels. |
