BOOK DATA Jason McGrath, Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. $120 cloth; $30 paper. 424 pages.
Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Era delves deeply into the complexities and dynamics of cinematic realism as it has evolved in Chinese film history. Eschewing an ahistorical conceptualization of cinematic realism, Jason McGrath breaks new ground by instead proposing a more historically situated, contextual understanding of realism in Chinese cinema. He proposes six conceptual models—the ontological, the perceptual, the fictional, the social, the prescriptive, and the apophatic—to describe discourses of realism in films from the silent period of the 1920s into the digital era of the 2010s. These categories describe the dialectical relationship between the fictional worlds of Chinese films and social realities in China.
Organized around the intricate associations between various claims...
University of California Press