Abstract
The first trend in China’s new wave cinema portrayed the gloomy silence, as well as the restless feeling of repression in the post-Tiananmen era. The three movies presented in this chapter are the key texts that show the silence, sound and fury of the time; yet, they harbor very different connotations regarding the respective cultural-political visions. Beijing Bastards (1993) focuses on Beijing youngsters experiencing the conflicts between dreams and realities, delivering a strong sense of confusion and misgiving. While it shows the silence of repressed life, Weekend Lover (1995) is more indicative of the sound of the cultural scene with the subject concerns of rebellion, violence, sex, anti-establishmentarianism, narcissism and self-indulgence. By contrast, behind the unapologetic hedonism and melancholic sorrow of Summer Palace (2006) is a sense of fury, a gesture of repudiating reflection, which conceals the birth of a bourgeois subjectivity/identity among the ruins of historical trauma.
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Wang, X. (2018). The Arrival of Chinese Post-socialism: Silence, Sound and Fury. In: Ideology and Utopia in China's New Wave Cinema. Chinese Literature and Culture in the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91140-3_2
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