Mapping landscapes: urban space in contemporary Chinese neo-noir

Abstract

My thesis concentrates on the representation of urban space in contemporary Chinese neo-noir, to examine the tension between spatiality in film noir and urbanism in the twenty-first century China, as well as exploring the social symptoms of the Chinese post-socialist cultural context. My research defines contemporary Chinese neo-noir as a crime thriller film phenomenon that presents crime cases with the visual elements of film noir, showing oppressed protagonists’ desires, anxieties, and disorientation, expressing moral ambivalence, pessimism, cynicism, and fatalism in the post-socialist cultural context. Simultaneously, I argue that contemporary Chinese neo-noir also forms a dual value system in relation to the PRC mainstream ideology about The Chinese Dream. On the one side, Chinese neo-noir sits between commercial genre and art-house cinema, reflecting the insecure vicissitudes, anxiety, and darkness of the urban space through its noirish outlook and storytelling. It metaphorizes the alienation, disenchantment, and disillusion versus the mainstream values about The Chinese Dream, wherein the appeal of this film phenomenon lies for the film cinephiles, critics and researchers. On the other hand, cultural conflict in the storytelling of Chinese neo-noir also eases the sharp tension between social classes in the actual Chinese society since the reform era, through a superficially peaceful ending and the release of audiences’ emotion, as well as resolving the dramatic opposition between rebellious independent filmmakers and government censorship, by means of following the commercial modes of the crime detective genre.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Louis Bayman: orcid.org/0000-0002-4780-2057

ORCID for Shelley Cobb: orcid.org/0000-0003-1153-8482

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