摘要:My dissertation explores the representation and articulation of mass culture and everyday life, with a particular concentration on its aural/oral manifestations in contemporary Chinese cinema, media and culture. While much work has been done on Chinese cinema and culture, little has appeared on the signification of "sound", an understudied theme that has been marginalized in the visual-centric scholarship of film and media studies. In my dissertation, I investigate and conceptualize--what I call--a "popular music-polyphonic scenario," embodied by four distinctive cinematic modes and cultural phenomena in China since the mid 1980s: "Northwest Wind," Chinese rock 'n' roll, "Leitmotif," and hip hop. Engaging in the heated discussions on Sino-cinema, transnational mediascape and global popular culture, my project not only seeks to establish a link between them but also to shift critical emphasis from these often discussed imageries to the underexplored arena of sound to call for a more integrated audio-visual experience. Moreover, in an attempt to interrogate the traditional binaries of image/sound, high/low culture, and experimental/commercial film, this project argues for and aims to shed new theoretical light on the connections and crossovers between visual and aural, classic and popular, alternative and mainstream through my close analysis of popular music and polyglottic soundtracks in contemporary Chinese film and media. , To this end, the methodologies I undertake are decidedly multifarious, ranging from close readings of popular music and multilingual soundtracks in relation to specific film texts and the broader socio-historical contexts, to an institutional analysis that tackles the process of planning, producing, and circulation of film on the multiple levels of industry, nation-state, and global market, to an intensive examination of the roles of "spectator-listener" in the context of the simultaneous and intertwined trends towards globalization, nationalization, and localization. The plural and synchronic reading and listening of the cinescape, soundscape, and languagescape, I contend, allow us to see cinema as but one of many voices, aesthetic forms, and media channels, that is evolving concurrently with a wide spectrum of cultural productions such as literary writing, print culture, popular music, and the newly rising force of digital culture in China.
