| Abstract | This dissertation focuses on how these two leftist cinemas represent and participate in China's ongoing processes of modernization. For both cinemas, modernity is flanked by nationalism and colonialism. My central argument is that, for a nation in crisis, modernity entails reorganization of competing temporalities and spatialities in the realm of cinematic representation . By “temporality” and “spatiality” I mean the cinematic construction of time and space and their materialization in various cinematic processes. While Shanghai's colonial modernity is best seen as the simultaneous multiplicity of competing temporalities, Taiwan's postcolonial modernity manifests itself most vividly in the coexistence of multiple modernities from different colonial pasts. My comparison of these two distinct cinematic areas and periods demonstrates how the cinema is constituted by coloniality and how modernity is imagined and constructed through distinctly cinematic processes, including framings, narrative structures and strategies, and generic themes and devices. Rather than adopting a linear, chronological course, I opt for an organizational principle that attend more closely to both the theoretical and historiographical complexities involved, and the shuttling back and forth between the temporal New and the spatial Now in each cinema. These conceptual foci then serve to link two pairs of chapters pertaining to 1930s Shanghai and New Taiwanese Cinema, respectively. In the temporal section, I show how the forward narrative movement best characterizes 1930s Shanghai Cinema while narrative retrospection is a key feature of New Taiwanese Cinema's backward historiographical movement. In the spatial section, on the other hand, issues of homelessness connect Shanghai's urban cinema films with contemporary Taiwanese cinema's representation of Taipei. The national subject as the refugee in the colonial Shanghai finds its counterpart in figures who are homeless at home in the postcolonial Taipei. The concluding section suggests how my dissertation project helps to deepen our understanding of Chinese cinemas across different temporal and spatial planes. |
