Towards a New Cinematic Realism. The Cinema of Wang Bing.

This project aims to create a central position for the contemporary Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing within the discourse of global and Chinese cinemas and within recent critical discussions on realism in film. Wang Bing is celebrated worldwide as the most important documentary filmmaker of the decade, yet his work has still to receive proper academic study. His style is geared towards detailed documentation of people living in the margins of Chinese post-socialist society. It is characterized by long takes that are at once distanced and immersive. My aim is double: to explore the critical significance of Wang's cinema at the level of his specific aesthetic choices and, second, to shed light on Wang's cinema within the context of a perceived critical-realist turn in contemporary cinema. The degree to which Wang puts his faith in the real returns us to Lukács' theorization of the representation of a totality as found in 19th century realist novelists like Tolstoy and Balzac that counters the bodily and psychological alienation under capitalism. In order to understand the return of the real in contemporary art cinema and in Wang's work in particular, I will re-appropriate the concept of 'mapping totality' as it was originally put forward by Marxist theorists like Lukács and Jameson, while at the same time weighing their insights against concrete contemporary artistic practice.

Keywords:CINEMA

Disciplines:Curatorial and related studies, History, Other history and archaeology, Art studies and sciences, Artistic design, Audiovisual art and digital media, Heritage, Music, Theatre and performance, Visual arts, Other arts, Product development, Study of regions

Project type:Collaboration project