Author Description

"The three films comprising director Jia Zhangke's 'Hometown Trilogy'--Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000) and Unknown Pleasures (2002)--represent key contributions to the cinema of contemporary China. The films, which are set in Jia's home province of Shanxi, highlight the plight of marginalised individuals--singers, dancers, pickpockets, prostitutes and drifters--as they struggle to navigate through the radically transforming terrain of contemporary China... Michael Berry's in-depth study of the three films considers them as an ambitious attempt to re-examine the transformation and fate of provincial China--its places and people--as it is caught up in a whirlwind of sweeping social, cultural and economic change. At the heart of the book lies a series of close readings of each of the three films; through which Berry teases out their central narrative themes, highlighting Jia's use of editing, cinematic language and mise en scène. He pays special attention to the place of intertextuality in Jia's oeuvre, as well as the central themes of destruction and change, stagnation and movement, political verses popular culture, and, of course, the ceaseless search for home."--Page 4 of cover.