Interiorized Feminism and Gendered Nostalgia of The ‘Daughter Generation’ in Ning Ying's Perpetual Motion
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Issue Date
2011-11-07Author
Xiao, Hui Faye
Publisher
Intellect
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, author accepted manuscript
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Show full item recordAbstract
Ning Ying’s 2006 film Wuqiong dong/Perpetual Motion can be regarded as her first attempt to explore the genre of ‘women’s film’. Deviating from her previous neo-realist style, this film seeks to cultivate an alternative cinematic practice through developing a heavy-handed negative aesthetics. Ning Ying interiorizes the filmic exploration of female subjectivity in an enclosed time and space, which is constantly haunted by a spectral aesthetics characterized by audio-visual allusions to loss, grave, ruins and ghosts. However, the film’s radical content and alternative aesthetics are, ironically, packaged in prevailing consumer aesthetics and commodity fetishism on and off the silver screen. All these competing drives and accounts render the film a contested narrative constantly oscillating between avant-garde feminism and domestic melodrama, and between a register of disintegrating sisterhood and a celebrity scandal of adultery. This article examines the discursive and aesthetic innovations, contradictions and limits of Ning Ying’s cinematic feminism.
Description
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The original publication is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jcc.5.3.253_1
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Citation
Xiao, Hui “Interiorized Feminism and Gendered Nostalgia of The ‘Daughter Generation’ in Ning Ying's Perpetual Motion.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5.3 (2011): 253-268. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jcc.5.3.253_1
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