China's IGeneration

Book excerpt: This innovative collection of essays on post-WTO Chinese cinema features contributions from an international community of scholars in the fields of media and film studies, comparative literature, and history. The iGeneration describes a post-cinematic, post-reform era phenomenon in China where the production, distribution and consumption of films increasingly take a digital form and the flow of images parallels that of capital. By calling attention to a wide range of agendas since 2001 - nation-building, market diffusion, cultural capital, self-understanding, regional deviance, social justice - as well as functions e.g. state didacticism, commodified leisure, personal expression, virtual surveillance, worldly connoisseurship - iGeneration offers Chinese moving image culture at its most diverse. From experimental documentaries to 3-D films, animation and video art, to visual aides-memoires and piracy films, the essays in China's iGeneration offers novel interpretations of how "cinema" and "generation" have been redefined.