Feng Xiaogang’s haunted utopia, Chinese modernity, and carnivalesque social critique in the era of Xi Jinping

Abstract

ABTRACT This paper seeks to illustrate how Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang constructs and delivers social commentaries in his New Year comedies The Dream Factory (1997) and Personal Tailor (2013). These two films are unique in terms of narrative strategy compared to his other New Year films. Both films turn on the premise of temporarily granting people’s wildest wishes, out of which arise multi-layered utopian and dystopian elements that I connect to Feng having made these two films shortly after his realist films were censored. Exploring these two films, I argue that Feng employs the carnivalesque as an alternative narrative strategy to perform subversive resistance, to counter monolithic and hegemonic discourses of Chinese modernity, and to expose social issues in the context of China’s tightening of censorship restrictions. A comparative study of these two films reveals their value as visual records of Chinese modernity over the course of a decade and as important facilitators or mediators of societal self-critique.