The Cultural Identity Writing Of "Hero" Image In Chinese Kung Fu Martial Arts Movies

The cultural globalization in21st century provides opportunities for China in cultural product output area. Meanwhile, sharing resources without the limitation of ethnic, land, cultural, custom and sometimes even ideology has brought great challenges to China because of the misreading of oriental cultural as "spectacle". As the most intuitive and effective method for Chinese cultural outputting, martial arts films has become the most internationally welcomed type of films. Its demonstration of Chinese martial arts, as well as Chinese traditions and customs has erode the barrier between Chinese and western culture. The wide ranges of "Hero" images with different characteristics and personalities of different ages have received extensive attention from domestic and overseas scholars.The construction of national cultural identity in film directly affects the national image and its influence during the process of cultural communicating and orientation in an international scope. Cultural identity presents the political, economic and cultural development of China within different period. Therefore, martial arts films since the60s of last century will be selected as research object. Research of "Hero" images will be conducted through analyzing the plot, character, and connection between film story and reality with sociology, cultural studies and communication theory. These researches aim to analyze the reason of forming specialized cultural identity in different time background. Based on the analysis of the representative "Hero" images, this paper intends to discuss the cultural identity of Chinese citizen during historical periods of different age.This dissertation consists five main part:The introduction chapter analyzes the current status of Chinese martial arts films and Kung Fu movie. As well as investigating the background and significance of the research roughly. The researches about the core concept of the whole paper:"Cultural Identity" has been summarized.The second chapter is concentrating on the "Hero" image of Bruce Lee influenced by western values, the "Master" image of Wong Fei-hong suffering from the conflicts when "the East meet the West" and the more universal humanistic concerned image that Ip Men created. By comparing these different images with case studies, the characteristics in artistic creation have been deeply analyzed and summarized.In the third chapter, the time-based research has concluded the evolvement of "Hero" images in martial arts and Kung Fu film industry. It investigates the internal causes, which lead the images transformed from martial arts heroes reflecting traditional Chinese values, to the composite type "hero" in face of the conflicts between east and west, till the "cultural sharing hero" in the21st century. Furthermore, it explored the relations between Chinese movie industries and Chinese people’s self-examination of their own cultural identity.The last chapter discusses the orientation of Chinese cultural identity in the Chinese and the global film industries primarily. The main content interprets the development of Chinese films through the aspect of cultural identities and additionally, discusses and explores the development of oriental Chinese cultural in the context of globalization.