"Landscape" And The Quadruple Construction Of Chinese Film Aesthetics (1984-2018)

"Landscape" is the human experience and imagination of nature,and where ideology is,where culture is.Through the lens,the film director "views" the nature to create landscapes on the screen which provides both aesthetic pleasure and conceptual transcendence.In the history of Chinese films,Fei Mu,King Hu,Ang Lee and other generations of filmmakers have inherited the ancient aesthetic tradition in their film works,highlighting the landscape description.Since 1984,"landscape" has formed an uninterrupted,varied and unique aesthetic and cultural system in Chinese(mainland)films,yet "landscape and film" is still the field that has not yet been developed in film research.This paper makes a reasonable grafting of the it scenery " in Chinese ancient aesthetics onto the western landscape theory,and explores how the landscapes in Chinese mainland films have presented the real Chinese society since 1984,through poetic aesthetics,national memories,myth dispelling,spectacle and materialism,and finally transcending characters and plots,have played a decisive role in the construction of realistic images of China.The thesis mainly consists of four chapters:The first chapter focuses on the "poetic aesthetic" function of the landscape and discusses how it is applied to the construction process of the Chinese film poetics system.The landscape presents two aesthetic forms in Chinese films—"desolated" and"graceful and restrained".The two concepts are based on "sublime" and "beautiful"proposed by Wang Guowei,and also make a movie-conversion of the ancient painting theory.Due to the full involvement of the ancient aesthetics,especially the ancient painting theory,the lens language such as layout,color,field of view,and aspect ratio presents landscape in a more Chinese way.New media and new technologies in today's society are bringing new changes to the landscape in Chinese cinema,including virtual landscapes created by cartoons and CG.Referring to the chapter of "wood,water,stone" in this book Landscape and Memory written by Simon Schama,the second chapter uses the three images of Soil,Mountains and Water as the entrance to deeply analyze how the landscape in Chinese movies completes national memory and historical identity.Starting from the mythology of Nuwa created man with the land and the "Earth Mother" consciousness,the paper marks "land" as the soul of the national memory and constructs the contrastive statements about the "sense of reality" of the film through the historical memory and land fable of the fifth-generation directors,and the realistic dissection and real land of the new generation directors.The Chinese mountain worship in the films still exists between the fifth-generation and the new generation.It has been shown as the fable or the truth in Chen Kaige's King of the Children and Xinyukun's Wrath of Silence.The national fables of Chinese water worship are marked with different national and personal identities in the two eras:Red Firecracker,Green Firecracker repeats the"order" discourse,and Crosscurrent is about a man's hard journey upstream along the Changjiang River.The third chapter takes care of the realistic criticism of landscape in Chinese films.I point out three critical objects:mythology of the modernity,mythology of the will of the state,and the rural "Shangri-la" myth.Huo Jianqi's Portmen in the Mountains emphasizes the ethical and geographic implications of anti-urban and anti-modern,and re-raised the "Shangri-la" complex of ancient Chinese scribes.Lou Ye's Suzhou River tell the stories about disillusionment of modernity myth,continuing the "anti-urban”consciousness that began in the early film during the late 1980s and 1990s.In Jia Zhangke's earlier works,the landscape was "absent" or "e-aestheticization".Still Life finally restored aesthetic value to a certain extent,and used "flowing landscape" to record the total collapse of the will of state myth.But Ash is Purest While artificially removed the presence and criticality of the Three Gorges landscape.While sixth-generation directors are obsessed with the aesthetic ideal of de-aestheticization and politicization,and analysing social reality,the new-generation directors are keen to display the dark side of the Chinese countryside to the audience in the way of witty,and Magic Realism.The fourth chapter analyzes the spectacle and materialism of landscapes in Chinese movies in the society full of industrialism and consumerism.From Hero to Shadow,Zhang Yimou constantly uses the landscape of desire to create "color utopia" and "scene fetishism".Chinese urban films are also making unremitting efforts to carry out landscape production.In the history of commercial evolution of landscape,"cross-localization" has extended it to a global colonization of consumerism.As the important branch of Chinese national films,Tibetan films are undergoing an aesthetic wrestling of "spectacle" and "de-spectacle":oversea Tibetan,non-Tibetan filmmakers and domestic non-Tibetan filmmakers are turning the Tibetan landscape into symbols and spectacles,while the "New Tibetan Films" written and directed by the native Tibetan filmmakers are deliberately evading the Tibetan landscapes,focusing on the distress and redemption faced by the Tibetan people in modern society.