Sentimental Fabulations Contemporary Chinese Films Attachment In The Age Of Global Visibility Rey Chow by Rey Chow 9780231133326, 0231133324 instant download after payment.

What is the sentimental? How can we understand it by way of the visual & narrative modes of signification specific to cinema and through the manners of social interaction & collective imagining specific to a particular culture in transition? What can the sentimental tell us about the precarious foundations of human coexistence in this age of globalization?

Rey Chow explores these questions through nine contemporary Chinese directors (Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Ann Hui, Peter Chan, Wayne Wang, Ang Lee, Li Yang, & Tsai Ming-liang) whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema. 

Approaching their works from multiple perspectives, including the question of origins, nostalgia, the everyday, feminine "psychic interiority," commodification, biopolitics, migration, education, homosexuality, kinship, & incest, & concluding with an account of the Chinese films' epistemic affinity with the Hollywood blockbuster Brokeback Mountain, Chow proposes that the sentimental is a discursive constellation traversing affect, time, identity, & social mores, a constellation whose contours tends to morph under different historical circumstances & in different genres & media. 

In contemporary Chinese films, she argues, the sentimental consistently takes the form not of revolution but of compromise, not of radical departure but of moderation, endurance, & accommodation. By naming these films sentimental fabulations—screen artifacts of cultural becoming with irreducible aesthetic, conceptual, & speculative logics of their own—Chow presents Chinese cinema first & foremost as an invitation to the pleasures & challenges of critical thinking.