The book Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age, by Jason McGrath, is now available not just in paperback, hardcover, and ebook but also in an open-access online Manifold edition that includes well over one hundred extra features, including color versions of many of the book’s figures, extra figures beyond the sixty in the print edition, and more than eighty video clips showing all the film scenes discussed at any length in the book. The open-access edition will be available through academic publishing databases such as JSTOR and Project MUSE and also can be accessed directly at https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/chinese-film. This is thanks to a Towards an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) grant from the University of Minnesota Libraries and College of Liberal Arts and the work of the University of Minnesota Press. The Manifold edition makes the book available to students and scholars throughout the world at no cost.
Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age is a history of mainland Chinese fiction film focusing on the various claims for cinematic realism made over a century of cinema in China. It describes a historical dialectics of realism and convention, in which realisms define themselves both through and in opposition to conventions of various sorts, whether those of indigenous Chinese drama, classical Hollywood cinema, melodrama, socialist realism, neorealism, or contemporary blockbuster cinema. The book not only traces a historical narrative of Chinese film history but also contributes to the theory of cinematic realism by parsing the differences between ontological, perceptual, fictional, social, prescriptive, and apophatic conceptions of realism as they played out in specific landmark films over the Republican, Maoist, and post-socialist eras.
Jason McGrath <jmcgrath@umn.edu>