Abstract
Our epilogue works to draw together many of the dispersed threads weaving throughout Chinese Urban Shi-nema by turning our attention to Ningbo’s new “old district” Nantang: a “visually edible” or selfie-friendly “old street” full of modern restaurants and bars nested inside repurposed simulacral façades of older Chinese buildings. This “Disneyfied” space, which was finished in 2017 near to Ningbo’s new bullet train station, is designed as a key site/sight of Ningbonese cinematicity and another entrepreneurial city-space associated with a broader cultural process of becoming-cinema. We here read this hyperreal consumer district alongside modern transnational examples of Disney and DreamWorks cinema that use a Chinese “recipe” to market their commercial wares to global consumers.
What is the reason for the strange acculturation phenomenon whereby advanced peoples seek out signs extrinsic to their own time or space, and increasingly remote relative to their own cultural system (a phenomenon which is the converse of ‘underdeveloped’ peoples’ attraction to the technological products and signs of the industrial world)?
Baudrillard (2005, p. 79)
Slightly Disneyfied Old Street: If you squint your eyes it is like being in China a hundred years ago. It’s near the train and bus stations so you can check it out as you leave or arrive in Ningbo.
Tripadvisor Review (July 2018)
Chinese culture tends to consider a building old if it resembles something that once stood in its place, even if it itself was only erected yesterday. The ‘real’ past, and the ‘copied’ present are thus inherently entangled.
Anna Greenspan (2014, p. 127)
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Notes
- 1.
For more on the notion of Huallywood, or an aspirational Chinese film industry, see Fleming and Indelicato (2019).
- 2.
Anna Greenspan reports that in 2014 Xintiandi attracted more than 50,000 visitors a day, which adds up to around 170 million a year, which works out as more human traffic than Disneyland (2014, p. 113).
- 3.
- 4.
Especially because such images (unconsciously?) reveal a mimicking of the aspirational “cinematic style of cool clothes, exotic locations” (Brown 2019, p. 248), and here we might add, exotic food and souvenirs styled according to the dictates of an attention hungry semiocapitalist society of hyperreal spectacles.
- 5.
For Iqani and Schroeder, this form of self-portraiture, like no other today, transforms the self-image into a projected commodity or object—facilitated no doubt by the increasingly sophisticated editing options available at the swipe of a thumb.
- 6.
The bill (with an added 500 RMB for the painting) was paid with the groups’ individual smartphones, which communicated with the waiter’s electronic device through QR code—a modern mode of exchange that forces us to rethink in turn the notion of capital and indeed money as forms of “image” that formulate the prolepsis and parallel to the cinema (see e.g. Wurzer in Beller 2006, p. 62; Berardi 2015, n.p.).
- 7.
没有你买不到的, 只有你想不到的.
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Filmography
Kung Fu Panda. Directed by Mark Osbourne and John Stevenson. 2008.
Kung Fu Panda 2. Directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson. 2011.
Kung Fu Panda 3. Alessandro Carloni and Jennifer Yuh Nelson. 2016.
Li fa shi/The Music Box. Directed by Chen Yifei. 2006.
Mulan. Directed by Niki Caro. 2020.
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Fleming, D.H., Harrison, S. (2020). Epilogue: Disneyfied Dreamwork Shi-nema—Tracing a New “Old” Path Through the Inauthentic “Traditional”. In: Chinese Urban Shi-nema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_7
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