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1981
Volume 32, Issue 2
  • ISSN: 1059-440X
  • E-ISSN: 2049-6710

Abstract

The face and the close-up have been central to film theory since its early days. If modern visual theories of the face arose in Europe amid urbanization and imperial encounter, in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the political aesthetics of faciality became central to Maoist mass mobilizations of the countryside, in part through collective village film screenings. Bringing together themes of faciality, rurality and anxieties of global encounter, this article considers how the rural has been staged through genres of the face in Chinese cinema and television. Through close readings of the Maoist era , Jia Zhangke’s and Zhao Benshan Media’s series , I consider three distinct deployments of the face in depictions of rural and environmental transformation. Thinking with while also departing from Deleuze’s formulations in and , the article traces an emotively intense face reminiscent of the affection-image, a blank face that operates in part as a time-image and a performative face of what might be called a theatrics-image. Across its readings as a site of affective immediacy, despotic inscription, moral character and social–political manoeuvring, the face offers a multivalent site for political, aesthetic and affective mediation, on- and off-screen.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Award #772436)
This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC), which allows users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the article, as long as the author is attributed and the article is not used for commercial purposes. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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2021-10-01
2025-03-25
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): affect; China; environment; face; faciality; rural; time-image
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