Abstract: This study is a reflective argument on Shanghai cinema studies that so many Chinese cinema researchers have views on now a days. It is a disjunctive work that explains the conceptual ambiguity of “Shanghai cinema” and insists on making new methodology on it. At first, it explains the general relationship of metropolis and cinema after segmentalizing the Shanghai cinema to Shanghai and cinema. At the position of metropolis, it doesn’t think that cinema is only text, but emphasize the necessity of the stream that texts flows. At the position of cinema, it has a tendency that makes efforts to analyze of urban images the texts represents. It can prove the proposition that cinema is the only thing can approach the visible essence of metropolis by Walter Benjamin. So, it can link metropolis to cinema more softly. It is also an important concern about the time when and the way how the naming, “Shanghai cinema” appeared. In fact, it was not used despite 1930’s when the periods films were producted most prosperously in Shanghai. Instead, there was a national naming, “Chinese cinema”. The appearance of rough form as “Shanghai cinema” after 1937, it was the beginning periods that Shanghai lost the absolute status in Chines cinema. After 1949, Shanghai disappeared totally in Chinese cinema history, but after 1990’s it has selected in the series of local attempts for reconstructing Shanghai as a new metropolis. It has the intimate relations between desire of local metropolis and cinema, and I called it is the “summon of nostalgia”: the desire to restore Shanghai in 1930’s. After segmentalizing Shanghai and cinema, the possibility that a few modifiers can be restored between two opens. Then, we can reconnect those relation more softly, and observe the three associations at least between them: films on Shanghai, Shanghai in films/films in Shanghai, and Cinema culture in Shanghai. They can be each rearranged urban studies, cinema studies, and cultural studies. The studies on Shanghai cinema has to permeate and color those methodologies at least.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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