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Date
Time
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
Venue
Virtual event

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Discourses of "realism" have been crucial to Chinese cinema since its beginning in the early 20th century, but what exactly is "realism"?

Instead of having one steady meaning, realism gets redefined periodically in response to historical changes and in a dialectical relationship with various sorts of conventions – either by conforming to the conventions of a particular conception of realism or by claiming a break with all conventions to force a new confrontation with the real. The historical dialectics of realism and convention in mainland Chinese film history is the topic of the recent book Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age (2022). 

In this talk, Professor Jason McGrath discusses the progression from critical realism to socialist realism to socialist formalism to post-socialist realism by means of this tension between realism and convention.

Image credit: Zhang Kaiyv via Unsplash

Recording

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Jason McGrath is a Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and the graduate program in Moving Image, Media, and Sound Studies. 

He earned his BA from the University of Texas at Austin and his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford University Press, 2008) and Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

Chair: Dr Xiaoning Lu, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, SOAS University of London.

Registration

This event is taking place online via Zoom. Registration is required. 

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