About the Book

This book relocates Chinese independent moviemaking from a film to a visual culture perspective enabling the author to explore the role that other movies (mostly, but not exclusively, popular culture products) play in the making of experimental and non-mainstream visual culture.

Paolo Voci argues that smaller screens, i.e. the DV camera, the computer monitor, the Internet window, and the cellphone display, have created new public spaces where many long-standing divisions between high-brow and low-brow, mainstream and counterculture, conventional and experimental are dissolving and being reinvented. On these smaller screens, moviemakers and their audiences are exploring alternative visual pleasures, still relatively unrestrained by the state-run censorship apparatus, unharnessed by the state-promoted creative industries and unexplored by Chinese film studies scholars.