Chromatic expressionism in contemporary Chinese-language cinema

Abstract

This article begins by asking why colour has ignited only limited interest in the field of Chinese film studies, and it uses the critical reception of China's first colour film — Fei Mu's Shengsi hen/Remorse at Death (1948) — as a condensed case study. An analysis of scholarly responses to Fei Mu's film, the article argues, suggests that colour as a critical category in Chinese-language cinemas has vanished at the intersection of two persistent biases in the discipline: a certain reluctance to research Chinese film history in technological terms; and the early dominance of the cinema-as-realist-paradigm across the field, which led to a lengthy neglect of colour as an independent aesthetic property. The article goes on to argue that the vibrant use of colour in much recent Chinese-language auteur cinema — dubbed ‘chromatic expressionism’ here — merits more attention. In particular, the article suggests that colour can pose an intense provocation to the long-standing notion that the cinema-as-spectacle exists in a dichotomous relationship with the cinema-as-storytelling. The article explores this idea through a close reading of Fruit Chan's Jiaozi/Dumplings (2004), focusing on the film's vivid use of saturated complementary colours.

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