Home> Archive> 2022> Volume 12 Number 2 ( May. 2022)
IJSSH 2022 Vol.12(2): 92-97 ISSN: 2010-3646
doi: 10.18178/ijssh.2022.V12.1072

Screening the Poetic Space: XIE Jin, Collective Memory, and the ‘Air’ of Chinese Epic Cinema　

Yiming Chen

Abstract—Chinese cinematics derive from the aesthetic traditions of classical Chinese theatre—given that China’s first film Dinjun Mountain (1905) was itself a filmed sequence of Peking Opera performance, ‘theatricality’ has become a vital concept contributing to our understanding of the Chinese cinematics. In what ways are the aesthetic traditions of classical Chinese theatre re-coded into the visual language of cinema? What cultural significance would such a relocation of the theatrical into the cinematic register? Whereas stage performance, in the context of classical Chinese theatre, entails a specific set of ritualistic connotations, how would it be translated into the aesthetic politics of cinema? In an attempt to answer these questions, this essay interrogates into the ways through which the manifestations of classical theatrical elements are highlighted in Chinese epic films produced during the post-Cultural Revolution era of the 1980s: The Herdsman (1982), Hibiscus Town (1987). By examining the aforementioned films’ investment in the recreation of a theatrical imagination of space and nature on the silver screen, this essay argues that contemporary Chinese cinema’s incorporation of an array of classical theatrical elements has illustrated the filmmakers’ elaborate reconceptualization of “epic cinema” in post-Cultural Revolution China. From a broader perspective, this attempt to theorize Chinese films’ aestheticized imagination of the Chinese landscape would not only broaden contemporary academia’s understanding of the relationship between cinema and theatre, but also remind us of the changes that are often associated with the formulation of a modern Chinese identity.

Index Terms—Aesthetics, epic cinema, public trauma, memory.

Yiming Chen is with Communication University of China, Beijing, China (e-mail: cym9801@163.com).

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Cite: Yiming Chen, "Screening the Poetic Space: XIE Jin, Collective Memory, and the ‘Air’ of Chinese Epic Cinema," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 92-97, 2022.


Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

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