Jing Yang, Min Jiao & Jin Zhang

ABSTRACT

The rapid development of Chinese cinema in the twenty-first century has witnessed a blossoming of genre films with frequent references to Hollywood. The Great Wall (2016), the monster blockbuster by the Fifth Generation auteur Zhang Yimou, tells a peculiar story of a westerner helping the valiant army to defeat the ravenous hordes of Tao Tie and save humans from annihilation in medieval China. Compared to the western cinematic tradition in which monsters incarnate popular concern of the impacts of techno-scientific development, the Chinese film bestows the ancient monster with allegorical meaning of greediness. The bending of Hollywood genres into the Chinese context illuminates the intricate dynamics between the local and the global in cross-cultural encounter. By tracing the development of monster films and the changing notions of modernity in Chinese historiography, the paper examines the re-invention of Hollywood vernaculars in The Great Wall to construct an alternative vision of modernity.

KEYWORDS

Hollywood, Chinese cinema, monster film, genre adaptation, alternative modernity

From: Cultural Studies 2020 34 (4)

Editor: Wang Yi