On Gu Changwei Movie Image Of Women

In the recent years, consistent endeavor in the exploration and practice of film-making has been made by Gu Changwei, a film director converted from the cameraman. He is in a long term pursuit of uniquely, interestingly, and artistically personal characteristics, emphasizing the originality and profound meaning of films, but also welcoming star effect, promotion via mass media, and fun of films. He is trying to convey the power of shaking tragedy from details full of comic ingredients, implicate the deep thought with modern perspectives about humanity via the stories displaying small characters, and show the sympathy and understanding of people’s inner requirement in a more delicate way via breaking through the simple and coarse criteria of evaluating characters, e.g. good or bad, innocent or evil, beautiful or ugly, and noble or vulgar. In the movies such as’Kong Que’,’Li Chun’, and ’Zui Ai’, the leading characters are all from the lower class in society, however they pursue their faith with a positive and optimistic attitude. The director made a profound thinking about the social reality and the humanity reflected during the social transition through displaying these characters’life in films.This dissertation includes four chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion.The introduction mainly introduces the achievements of Gu in film-making, and the research of his films.The first section in Chapter One concludes the status of Gu in the world of films and the implication of his films brought to aesthetic forms in current film-making, judging the values of Gu’s films from an overall standpoint. The second section describes the main theoretic resources utilized in this dissertation, including values of modernism and criticism on feminist films, and particularly analyzes the suppression of females hidden in some films narrating things in a traditional model and structure, and reveals the phenomena of deprived identification in female subjects by investigating the female characters in films and the structure of contexts in scripts. This section also discusses the development in describing the gender difference and reflecting female characters and their life in Gu’s films through the values of modernism and based on the prospective of criticism on feminist films.Chapter Two explains the cultural meaning of’Kong Que’,’Li Chun’, and’Zui Ai’ and other Gu’s films from the films themselves. The first section discusses the recognition of female identity in Gu’s films and their topics about rethinking the culture. In’Kong Que’, the sister’s story displays a strong aspiration from females in questioning the symbolic sequence and the unfair subsidiary status of female in the men-dominated society, and reveals the reality of the unfairness in gender at that age. Meanwhile, the film narrates a story about two brothers and displays different characters in that disordered time in order to implicate tragic ingredients under individual life and rethink the culture in that time. Second section shows women’s hardship and confusion in making decisions of their life via Wang Cailing’s story in’Li Chun’ and discuss the development of the film in reflecting the concept of gender. The third section interprets the truth of love and rethinks the distortion and suppression of humanity through the analysis of Shang Qinqin and Zhao Qiquan in’Zui Ai’.Chapter Three discusses the innovation of Gu’s films in artistic form based on his films. The first section reviews the vivid image featured in Gu’s films as a result of two factors. First, his film is usually abundant of life prototypes and symbolic meaning, which not only increase the sense of time and also give audiences deeper impression. Second, his mastery in the manipulation of colors shows characters’ blue mood with the gray tone, the obsessive and hopeful mind with the warming orange, vividly expressing the topic in a colorful film. The second section discusses Gu’s crafty manipulation in sound from both the dialects and sound-image effects in films.Chapter Four develops a specific discussion on the characteristics of Gu’s films. The first section analyzes the mixture of comic and tragic ingredients in his films where people feel funny and laugh for those unreasonable and distorted life but will gradually feel angry when the tragic point erupts through the comic camouflage in the end. The second section describes the unique way his film narrates in. Gu exclude narrating from a person who knows everything, however usually from someone in a particular role, letting him/her witness the development of a story. This crafty and variation way makes his film narrate a story with more degrees of freedom. Gu uses a "compound structures" in constructing ’Kong Que’ while employ a natural sequence in developing ’Li Chun’ and ’Zui Ai’. There is no dramatic conflict or strictly linear evolution, however this unique narrative structure enhances the artistic enrichment of the films. Gu is very good at the open-minded closure without imposing his own opinion and perception to audiences. This can increase the uncertainty and characterize his films with some post-modernism.The conclusion reviews the value and meaning of Gu’s films in terms of their artistic achievements by putting them under the background of contemporary culture.