Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of “Transformation” (Zhuanxing) / Zhang Zhen 1

I. Ideology, Film Practice, and the Market

Rebel without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking / Yingjin Zhang 49

The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic / Jason McGrath 81

Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism / Chris Berry 115

II. The Politics and Poetics of Urban Space

Tear down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Popular Cinema and Avant-Garde Art / Sheldon H. Lu 137

Tracing the City’s Scars: Demolition and the Limits of the Documentary Impulse in the New Urban Cinema / Yomi Braester 161

Scaling the Skyscraper: Images of Cosmopolitan Consumption in Street Angel (1937) and Beautiful New World (1998) / Augusta Palmer 181

Whither the Walker Goes: Spatial Practices and Negative Poetics in 1990s Chinese Urban Cinema / Linda Chiu-Han Lai 205

III. The Production of Desire and Identities

Ning Ying’s Beijing Trilogy: Cinematic Configurations of Age, Class, and Sexuality / Shuqin Cui 241

Zhang Yuan’s Imaginary Cities and the Theatricalization of the Chinese “Bastards” / Bérénice Reynaud 264

Mr. Zhao On and Off the Screen: Male Desire and Its Discontent / Xueping Zhong 295

Maintaining Law and Order in the City: New Tales of the People’s Police / Yaohua Shi 316

Urban Dreamscape, Phantom Sisters, and the Identity of an Emergent Art Cinema / Zhang Zhen 344

Appendix: The Urban Generation Filmmakers (compiled by Charles Leary) 389

Bibliography 411

Contributors 429

Index 431