PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Cecília Mello is Professor in Film Studies at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She has written previously on Jia Zhangke in book chapters and articles, and she is the co-editor, with Lúcia Nagib, of Realism and the Audiovisual Media (2009).
The tone is serious and scholarly, and the author approaches her subject as if nothing could be as important in a world in which the liberal arts have been almost abandoned ... Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE * Cecilia Mello's study of Jia Zhangke, China's leading independent director, brilliantly counterbalances the impulses towards realism and intermediality she finds in Zhangke's work. Its foreword by Walter Salles backs up Salles's and Mello's claim that Zhangke is the most important world film director of the twenty-first century so far, and Mello's thorough knowledge and understanding of Chinese cultures of this period underpins the book's location of memory between the realist impulse and the impure multilayeredness of Zhangke's films. -- BAFTSS Awards judges Over the course of the past 25 years, there has been no better cinematic chronicle of China's dramatic transformation than the films of Jia Zhangke... Cecilia Mello digs deep into Jia's body of work, unveiling a rich tapestry of intermingling songs, landscapes, textures, and intertexts. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding how Jia Zhangke's films work. -- Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies, UCLA, USA Cecilia Mello's refined analysis not only unravels Jia Zhangke's poetics of cinema as a complex aesthetic of in- betweenness contemplating a world in inevitable transience and change, but also proposes an amazingly nuanced intermedial approach that illuminates from different vantage points the deep imbrication of art and life, memory and palpable reality. -- Agnes Petho, Professor of Film Studies, Sapientia University, Romania Cecilia Mello's book is a breakthrough. It clears the mists around Jia Zhangke's famously impure realism, showing how it is shot through with Chinese aesthetics drawn from wuxia martial arts, Chinese opera performance, gardening, painting, and more. -- Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies, King's College London, UK
