Coda

Abstract

The expansiveness of Wong Kar-wai's approach to intertextuality, citation, and borrowing, along with the dense cross-cultural, cross-medial matrix in which his films are situated suggest another angle on the director's position within the tradition of art cinema. Likewise, the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang also illustrates the reverberations of postmodernism in the arena of art cinema, a development that complicates the view of these directors as realists based on their reliance upon the long take. The idea of a cinema of time finds a further resonance in contemporary Chinese cinema beyond the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wong Kar-wai. One notable figure who engages a similar problematic of temporal form and historicity is Jia Zhangke, one of the leading directors of the PRC's Sixth Generation. Jia's films assume a critical view of the official discourse of progress and market reform shaping China's new era.