Self-adaptation and Intermediality: A Study of Contemporary Chinese Litterateur-filmmakers

By situating these self-adaptation films in Chinese film history, I demonstrate how film language continues and mutates in this post Sixth-Generation cohort, and identify a new epistemology embedded in their cinematic aesthetics for comprehending Chinese reality in an era characterized by increasingly strict ideological control, dominance of mass entertainment and a temporality of stagnation. The first chapter showcases the shared adaptation strategy of the cohort, and the polyphonic quality generated and intensified in the process of self-adaptation.

In contrast to conventional adaptations that typically adapt a single literary work into a film, these litterateur-filmmakers combine their various short stories, novellas or poems in one film, providing a dialogic field among literary characters with individual world views transferred from multiple literary works bearing different motifs. Informed by Irina O. Rajewsky’s intermedial theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s foundational theory of dialogism, I examine how the litterateur-filmmakers innovatively appropriate their own literary texts and employ medium specificity to imbue their self-adaptation films with the aesthetics of polyphony and open-ended connotations.

I further demonstrate that intermedial polyphony constitutes an aesthetic response to the tightening ideology of the monolithic narrative.</strong></p><p>Filmic integration of traditional Chinese theatre has exerted cultural and aesthetic influences on Chinese filmmaking for generations. The second chapter examines how the convention of theatricality rooted in early Chinese cinema has been reflected and developed in the work of contemporary litterateur-filmmakers.

With attention to the aspects of composition, performance, action design and use of props, I illustrate how cinematic elements interact with writing styles and literary motifs of identity and locality. Situating this theatrical tinge in the broader social context of commercialization and globalization, I also explore how litterateur-filmmakers construct, through the aesthetics of theatricality, a cultural identity that is both literarily mediated and locally grounded.

Drawing upon the aesthetic tendencies and literary conventions of decadence, the third and final chapter reframes decadence as a dialectic between decay and regeneration to examine how litterateur-filmmakers generate a momentum of aesthetic renewal through their exploration of contemporary sites of decadence — from the apocalyptic waste land, the lyrical tactility of local ruins to the fin-de-siecle reimagination of Republican-era martial arts worlds.

Highlighting the historicity and fluidity of the concept of decadence, this chapter argues that decadence serves as a critical lens for observing, understanding, and articulating the “structure of feeling” of late-2010s China, which calls for a new episteme of reality beyond the established framework of post socialism.</p>