"Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen have brought together some of the leading scholars and critics of Chinese cinema to rethink the political mutations, market manifestations, and artistic innovations that have punctuated a century of Chinese screen memories. From animation to documentary, history of the industry to cinematic attempts to recreate history, propaganda to piracy, the influx of Hollywood imports to Chinese-style blockbusters, Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema presents a fresh set of critical approaches to the field that should be required reading for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the past, present, and future of one of the most vibrant and dynamic film industries in the world."-Michael Berry, author, Jia Zhangke's "Hometown Trilogy" and A History of Pain "An excellent collection of articles that together offer a superb introduction to contemporary Chinese film studies."-Richard Pena, Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center "This is one of the most important, comprehensive, and profoundly important books about Chinese cinema. As correctly pointed out by the editors of the volume, understanding of the emerging film industry in China requires a systematic examination of arts, politics, and commerce of Chinese cinema. By organizing the inquiry of the Chinese film industry around its local and global market, politics, and film art, the authors place the current transformation of Chinese cinema within a large framework. The book has set a new standard for research on Chinese cinema. It is a must-read for students of arts, culture, and politics in China."-Tianjian Shi, Duke University Art politics, and commerce are intertwined everywhere, but in China the interplay is explicit, intimate, and elemental, and nowhere more so than in the film industry. Understanding this interplay in the era of market reform and globalization is essential to understanding mainland Chinese cinema. This interdisciplinary book provides a comprehensive reappraisal of Chinese cinema, surveying the evolution of film production and consumption in mainland China as a product of shifting relations between art, politics, and commerce. Within these arenas, each of the twelve chapters treats a particular history, development, genre, filmmaker or generation of filmmakers, adding up to a distinctively comprehensive rendering of Chinese cinema. The book illuminates China's changing stat-society relations, the trajectory of marketization and globalization, the effects of China's start historical shifts, Hollywood's role, the role of nationalism, and related themes of interest to scholars of Asian studies, cinema and media studies, political science, sociology comparative literature and Chinese language. Ying Zhu is professor of cinema studies in the Department of Media Culture and co-coordinator of the Modern China Studies Program at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Stanley Rosen is director of the East Asian Studies Center and a professor of political science at the University of Southern California.

Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni published the manifesto “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” helping to set the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the productive ways in which theory understands the relationship between cinema, politics, and art. In Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, Nico Baumbach revisits the much-maligned tradition of seventies film theory to reconsider: What does it mean to call cinema political? In this concise and provocative book, Baumbach argues that we need a new philosophical approach that sees cinema as both a mode of thought and a form of politics. Through close readings of the writings on cinema by the contemporary continental philosophers Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, he asks us to rethink both the legacy of ideology critique and Deleuzian film-philosophy. He explores how cinema can condition philosophy through its own means, challenging received ideas about what is seeable, sayable, and doable. Cinema/Politics/Philosophy offers fundamental new ways to think about cinema as thought, art, and politics.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Roger Ebert wrote the foreword to this collection of 35 in-depth interviews with the world's leading filmmakers and critics, from Fonda to Fassbinder, from Canby to Costa-Gavras, from Sarris to Sayles. Cineaste, America's leading magazine on the art and politics of the cinema, has become known for its in-depth interviews with filmmakers and film critics of international stature. The best of these interviews are now collected in this volume. The interviews: Constantin Costa-Gavras, Glauber Rocha, Miguel Littin, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ousmane Sembene, Elio Petri, Dusan Makavejev; Gillo Pontecorvo; Alain Tanner, Jane Fonda, Francesco Rosi, Lina Wertmuller, Roberto Rossellini, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Gordon Parks, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Howard Lawson, Paul Schrader, Agnes Varda, Bertrand Tavernier, Andrew Sarris, Bruce Gilbert, Jorge Semprun, Vincent Canby, John Berger, Andrzej Wajda, John Sayles, Krzysztof Zanussi, Molly Haskell, Budd Schulberg, Satyajit Ray. The unique value of these interviews will be the comments by the filmmakers on the crucial artistic and political decisions confronted in the making of their films, many of which have become classics of their kind. The filmmakers and critics talk about their own development, films which influenced their work, and the continuing controversies and alternative approaches in filmmaking. They take on their critics and their own previous positions with a clarity and forcefulness to be expected from some of the leading practitioners of their art. The interviews are introduced with a foreword by Roger Ebert, television commentator and critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Mr. Ebert discusses the relation of art and politics and some of the common perspectives which unite filmmakers of different cultures and of diverse artistic and political temperaments. Among the subjects of these wide-ranging talks are: the choice between popular and experimental forms of narrative; the filmmaker's responsibility to society; blacks and women in the movies; the rise of third world filmmaking; Hollywood's left and progressives; the conditions of filmmaking in different societies; the challenges of independent production; different forms of censorship, from the U.S. to Poland; trends in criticism and auteur theory to feminism; the power of the reviewer.

Authority year zero : on Germany year zero -- The image that waits : on Satantango -- The end of authority, the end of democracy : on woman on the beach -- Force, hope, and death : on medium cool -- Coda : political modernism and the possibility for action.

Following the recent success of Taiwanese film directors, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwanese film is raising its profile in contemporary cinema. This collection presents an exciting and ambitious foray into the cultural politics of contemporary Taiwan film that goes beyond the auterist mode, the nation-state argument and vestiges of the New Cinema. Cinema Taiwan considers the complex problems of popularity, conflicts between transnational capital and local practice, non-fiction and independent filmmaking as emerging modes of address, and new possibilities of forging vibrant film cultures embedded in national (identity) politics, gender/sexuality and community activism. Insightful and challenging, the essays in this collection will attract attention to a globally significant field of cultural production and will appeal to readers from the areas of film studies, cultural studies and Chinese culture and society.

This book utilizes philosophical tools to build up a framework for the classification, analysis and assessment of political cinema. The author first maps the category of political cinema, clarifying what it means for a film to be ‘political’, and then analyzes the relation between the value of a film as a political film and its value as art. Through philosophical enquiry, Angelo Emanuele Cioffi builds up a framework that could be of use in art-critical practice and that can help with the classification and assessment of political films. Grounded in analytic philosophy of art and cognitivist film theory, with insights from political science, political philosophy, epistemology and cognitive science, the book presents a unique analysis of the relation between films and the ‘political’. This theory is tested with detailed case studies, and the author uses specific films as examples of the applicability and explanatory power of this theoretical framework. As such, this book will be of interest not just to film studies, film theory and political philosophy scholars, but to anyone with an interest in political film, aesthetic practice and philosophy of art.