Western China on Screen: Cinema and Urban Exploration as Thirdspace

Abstract

This thesis examines how films located in western China have represented cities since the 1980s by drawing on spatial theories first proposed by Henri Lefebvre and further developed in Edward Soja’s Thirdspace theory. This thesis is the first comprehensive academic contribution to deal with the affinity between cinema and the cities of western China. By focusing on the cinematic representation of these cities, this thesis breaks the long-standing stereotypes of the region established in the ethnographic films of China’s Fifth Generation directors. It illustrates how cinematic cities in the region appear as enclosed spaces of traditional cultural values, political inertia and capsules of socialist China. This then problematises the glamourised images of the post-socialist, technocratic metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai. Meanwhile, the cinematic cities of China’s west demonstrate that the cities and their inhabitants are open to transformation under discourses of urbanisation and modernisation. This thesis provides insights into the ways that films set in western China reflect the political and ideological power imposed on urban development and the lives of the people in the region. Perceiving cinematic western China as Thirdspace illustrates how the uneven social and economic development of contemporary western China is spatially represented in films. It also shows how cinematic western China becomes a space of resistance in the binary opposition of China’s developing west versus its developed east. Looking into the everyday city spaces inhabited by ordinary citizens and subaltern groups, this thesis adds an alternative urban image—the cinematic Thirdspace of contemporary western China.