Cultural Studies And The Interpretation Of The Chinese Contemporary Film Culture

Chinese cinema, as Dai Jinhua describes, "is a subject which is symptomatic, representative, extremely meaningful and ambiguous as well in the cultural map of the 1990s." Therefore it suits well to be the subject of Chinese cultural study of the 1990s. This thesis is intended to approach Chinese cinema in the 1990s, one of the most intriguing modem cultural phenomena, from various perspectives like cultural identity, cultural misreading, cultural interpretation, etc., based on theories of postcolonialsm, Third World culture and reception theory and to sketch the outline of contemporary Chinese cinema in the background of globalization and localization. The overall Chinese cinema today has participated in the international trend of globalization and localization and witnessed the emergence of many sophisticated cinematic phenomena among which Zhang Yimou's movies have distinguished themselves to be the most note-worthy one. The co-existence and interaction of globalization and localization have shown its influence in terms of the technology, production, distribution and aesthetics and philosophy of his movies, which contribute to his success in both domestic and international market. At the same time, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige's movies also respectively resort to different cultural strategies based on their different perceptions of world cinema and culture. Moreover behind all this objective cultural trend and subjective cultural strategies is the complicated theoretical depth for us to delve into from theperspective of scholarly investigation and insight of world theoretical development, the attempt of interpreting contemporary Chinese filmic texts with Zhang's and Chen's work as representatives through postcolonialism and Third World cultural theory and analyzing the reception of and response towards contemporary Chinese films through cultural interpretation will to a great extent broaden the vision of film study and refresh our understanding of it.