Representations - Practice - Spectatorship : A Study of Haptic Relations between Independent Cinema and Market-led Urbanization in contemporary China.

Summary, in English

This text attempts to describe and analyze the haptic relations between non-official, i.e. independent, cinema and market-led urbanization in contemporary China. From the theoretical context of recent scholarship on Visual Culture and film history, it's argued that motion pictures and the Visual are in fact crucial to modernization. Using the theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau the text has explored how (social) space and cinema are linked in a reciprocal visual-spatial production. Based on a fieldwork period and visual studies the cinematic-urban nexus and have been studied from the concepts of representation, practice and spectatorship. That is, the relation between independent cinema's critical and challenging representations and the spectacle of hegemonic economy. The sensory interaction and actual production of independent cinema within marketized (social) space and informal distribution's creation of new types of spectatorship. The text indicates that independent cinema have managed to develop and evolve out of relative marginality to temporally produce an alternative vision and independent space between state and market. However, nothing has indicated that this process is a part of a wider development of civility or civic responsiveness.

• Author: Andreas Tibrand
• Department/s: Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University
• Publishing year: 2007
• Language: English
• Full text: Available as PDF - 3 MB; Download statistics
• Document type: Student publication for Master's degree (one year)
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Keywords: China; production of space; social space; modernization; motion pictures; film; visual culture; everyday life; Social sciences; Samhällsvetenskaper
• Supervisor: Flora Sapio; Maria Henoch