The Study Of Jianzhong Huang’s Creative Style

Although the film theory has entered a diversified study background, the main trend study of contemporary directors has locked the directors within an extremely limited ‘scope’, this so-called ‘scope’ is so much alike the visual effects of movies, it is closely guarded even though it seems frameless – prize-winning, box-office, controversy, innovation … these ‘qualifications’ have put some directors in the center of the study, some been separated from the study, others been put into the “gray area” which is in between.Director of this thesis to discuss – Jianzhong Huang, is now in the ‘gray area’ of the present film theory: you can find in any book related Chinese film history that the name Jianzhong Huang is flickering below the title ‘Leader of the Fourth Generation Directors’. If you continue looking for the appraisals of Jianzhong Huang’s art work, you will find a curve that has ups and downs but continues spreading. This curve is just like the path that Chinese movie is walking on – it’s controversial but never-ending. In his career as a director in more than four decades, his film works has walked between mainstream and marginal, art and commerce, national and worldwide, Despite the long time of his creation, the big difference of appraisals, the wide of types involved. However, the study was limited to about Jianzhong Huang’s interviews and analysis of individual works, there is no systematic, comprehensive study.During the period of Jianzhong Huang’s directing creation, China has transformed from planned economy to market economy, Chinese movie is constantly searching the value of presence in art, politics, and commerce. It can be said that it is an important period for the development of Chinese film and television art. Director Jianzhong Huang’s experience, the characteristics that his works have presented, and the directing style, has been important to characterize this period’s Chinese film culture, and even affects the development of Chinese film culture to some extent. Therefore, doing a systematic study of formation, development, value, and meaning of directing style of Jianzhong Huang, can be an important enlightenment of today’s film and TV’s creation and theory.This thesis is based on the author’s personal experience of creation and observation for 87 days as a “trainee assistant director” on the filming site of director Jianzhong Huang’s TV work “The Eight Fairies”, and the semi-structured interview that the author had held with director Jianzhong Huang which lasted 3 days. The main study subject of this thesis is Jianzhong Huang’s film and TV works, on the base of careful text reading, using philosophy, aesthetics, narratology, identity, feminism as tools, having a systematic four-dimension creation of topics, languages of seeing and hearing, narrative methods, characterization) analysis of director Jianzhong Huang’s style of creation. Furthermore, this thesis will discuss about the aesthetic value and historical significance of Jianzhong Huang’s directing style, in order to provide some beneficial inspiration and reference for contemporary directing creation.This thesis mainly consists of five parts:The introduction parts includes the subject, background, and journals reviewed of the topic. Secondly the reflection of the study’s significance, thoughts of the thesis, and methods of study. At last, the highlight of innovation.The first chapter mainly explains the concept of ‘director creating style’, also makes clear the four dimensions of director creating style.The second, third, fourth, fifth chapters starts from the four dimensions of study of director style respectively, using text parsing as main method, to grasp the characteristics of form and content in particular director creation Jianzhong Huang presented, and the causes of these characteristics, which are the emphases of the thesis. The reason is, it’s the formation and development of these characteristics that show Jianzhong Huang’s creating style eventually. Each chapter of this part is consisted of concept definition, text parsing, and cause analysis.The second chapter grasp the characteristics of Jianzhong Huang’s topic selection from the angle of creative theme: focus on ‘humanity’, and try from different angles in the creation, reflect multiply of humanity problems. This chapter mainly start from the realistic significance of the topic, combined with western and eastern philosophy, social and culture discussions of ‘humanity’ problems, placing it in a nationality, mythology, feminism, and sex context, to start analysis of specific creations.The third chapter interprets Jianzhong Huang’s using of film artistic techniques from the angle of audio and visual language, in which use semiotics, film linguistics and other theories, discusses special languages and methods in Jianzhong Huang’s directing creation, found that he takes traditional Chinese culture quite seriously, his work languages are soaked traditional Chinese culture, aesthetic feature ‘impressionistic’.The fourth chapter mainly use narratology and related theory, interprets Jianzhong Huang’s deep reflection of social issues in his works from the angle of narrative methods, and ‘poetic’ reflect method: experience culture and nationality issues using means of metaphor and discrete narrative.The fifth chapter combines the analysis of character shaping in Jianzhong Huang’s works and Gilles Louis Réné Deleuze’s generative theory, desire theory, discovered that the characters mostly have ‘noble souls’ in Jianzhong Huang’s works. As a male director who cares about female destiny and living environment, Jianzhong Huang has broken and questioned mainstream gender principle in a certain extend, exploded the oppression of women from patriarchy, modern capitalism economy system, nationality, history and other grand treatises, and the initiative and subjectivity that women had shown when facing oppression.The sixth chapter will have a overall perspective and thinking of Jianzhong Huang’s creative style: through the four dimensions of directing style, we found that the features these four dimensions shown have strong internal connections, even though they have different focuses. What are these connections? How did they occur? What are the values and meanings of them? This chapter mainly answers above questions.In conclusion and discussion part, the author tries to make a possibly objective statement of Jianzhong Huang’s contribution and deficiency. Meanwhile has a discussion of implications for Chinese directing creation in the new context that Jianzhong Huang’s directing creative experiences had given, from the view of development of modern Chinese film industry.