The Mysterious Other: Postpolitifcs in Chinese film (Chen Xiaoming)

in Postmodernism and China

"The multifarious functions of political codes constitute a peculiar narratological ambience in which chinese film is produced, circulated, watched, and interpreted. Such a manipulation of political codes can be labeled 'postpolitics' in Chinese film, where everything is political and nothing is political at one and the same time. Politics is everywhere, and yet it subverts itself at any moment."

Chen starts with the fifth generation, which emerged at a moment when revolutionary discourse still policed all cultural activities with its institutional power but lacked an effective system of ideology and representation. The Fifth generation with revolutionary myth as subject matter but employs a plethora of unconventional techniques such as fragmented narration, abrupt long shots that intersect close-ups and long scenes with muffled off-camera sound effects. Grand images, objects frozen by tedious long shots. The aesthetic form compresses the revolutionary myth to the most abstract level and rewrites it through the formalist language of the camera.Concomitant with root searching literature,and discussions about the global issue of cultural identity,culture was construed as a counterculture phenomenon of the "way of life," repressed libido. Politics, intertwined with this "culture" that is regarded as part of essential identity, serves as the very identity of China.

The fifth generation when came to international market severed politics from China's social and historical practices and turned politics into the cultural fountain to quench the western thirst for a mystified China. Creative appropriation of political symbols.

The tension between existing institutional power and the dysfunctional representational framework within the revolutionary discourse has created a great deal of contradiction in the cultural arena. Displacement of and discrepancy between signifier and signified, purpose and effect, imagination and real. The much inflated political discourse in film constructs only an illusory politics that sustains itself by reproducing, over and over,its imagined reality as a hyperreality. The always already reproduced political reality.

displacement idealism, heroism ----- comedy parody-travesty irony, black humor