Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
SENTIMENTAL FABULATIONS, CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FILMS: ATTACHMENT IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL VISIBILITY Rey Chow. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, 304 pp. After the influential Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema established Rey Chow as one of the most original scholars in cinema studies, her second book on Chinese films, Sentimental Fabulations, provides us with a collection of no less ingenious readings of popular and iconoclastic works by such diverse Chinese directors as Zhang Yimou, Wong Kar-wai, Tsai Mingliang, and Ang Lee. Bringing them together under a discursive umbrella by the name of "the sentimental," Chow examines their culturally specific fantasy structures as well as their engagements with the complexities of globalization. Although often equated in common usage with affective excess, the sentimental, translated into Chinese as wenqing zhuyi or "warmsentiment-ism," is redefined by Chow as a mood of endurance and accommodation, "a disposition of making compromises [with] that which is oppressive and unbearable" (18). The Chinese films that dramatize such heart-wrenching situations as poverty, familial conflicts, exile, illness, death, and loneliness, however, tend to affirm and perpetuate "an indomitable collective will" embodied by the patriarchal family, clan, village, or nation. Thus, Chow finds filiality,
Journal of Film and Video – University of Illinois Press
Published: Sep 23, 2009
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.