ABSTRACT
Zhang Jingwen. Aesthetic Features of Chinese Wuxia Films – Qualifying scientific work on the rights of a manuscript.
Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in specialty 021 «Audiovisual Art and Production». – I. K. Karpenko-Kary Kyiv National University of Theater, Cinema and Television. Kyiv, 2023.
The relevance of the study. Chinese martial arts films, which emerged at an early stage of the development of cinema in China as filming scenes from Peking opera and flourished in silent cinema as adaptations of fantasy adventure novels about kung fu masters, have come a long way. From low-budget costume action movies that attracted only Chinese audiences, they have turned into extremely expensive production projects that are being screened worldwide with great success, have high ratings, and receive critical acclaim and prizes at international festivals and prestigious film academy competitions.
Wuxia films have become an important component of Chinese culture, as they exist not as separate film texts or screen genres, but as a coherent ideological and artistic movement that claims to play a significant role in the presentation of Chinese civilization, connected to it by ancient and contemporary imagery and themes. For contemporary martial arts films, the form becomes secondary, and the national spirit and flavor come to the fore. Unlike some of its Western counterparts in the form of purely entertaining blockbuster action movies, the wuxia genre conveys the deep code of the Chinese mentality: the stages of its development and ideological content are inextricably linked to the complex history of China, its imagery and visual design derive from the centuries-old traditions of national painting and theater, and the characters' motivation is determined by Confucian ethics and Buddhist-Daoist beliefs.
It is difficult to overestimate the influence of the wuxia genre on the development of world cinema. From colonial exoticism and local entertainment, wuxia films have progressed to global recognition. They have become a subject of study, a material for borrowing the original film language, a unique aesthetics of the screen world built on a mixture of fantasy and realistic principles. While integrating into the global cultural space, the genre still retains its identity. Despite the obvious influence of technologies and artistic norms developed by the European and American film industries, Chinese martial arts films resist the total copying of foreign ideas and images. After all, it was such outstanding masters of cinema from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark, Ronnie Yu, Wong Kar-wai, Ang Lee, and others who enriched the treasury of world cinema with unsurpassed masterpieces that have become the standard of the genre. In this regard, it is extremely important to find the answer to how Chinese cinema manages to preserve its own uniqueness in the era of total globalization and cultural mixing. Therefore, the artistic merits of martial arts films, the ethical code of martial honor, and the ideals of the struggle for justice, dignity, and national affirmation presented in them make it important and relevant to study the aesthetic features of Wuxia films.
The scientific novelty of the results obtained is that the dissertation is the first to provide a comprehensive art historical analysis of the aesthetic features of Chinese wuxia films, with an emphasis on their national nature, genre evolution, and adaptation to modern technological formats. The scientific novelty is that for the first time a large number of foreign studies on Chinese martial arts films have been collected, abstracted, and presented to the Ukrainian scientific community; the issues of genre branching and the formation of a system of wuxia subgenres have been highlighted; the specifics of the drama and imagery of the wuxia genre (characters, conventions of the game world, common plot elements, visual style, action choreography, etc;) the ways of distribution of Chinese martial arts films, the influence of aesthetics and film production technology on world cinema were identified; the prospects for the development of the wuxia genre as transmedia projects, the introduction of martial arts themes into other technological formats of screen arts – video games, virtual reality, 3D, etс were investigated. The coverage of the stages of the emergence, development and transformation of the wuxia genre was further developed, as well as the study of the Taoist-Confucian and Chan Buddhist origins of the philosophy and ideology of films about martial arts masters.
Research results. The dissertation contains a comprehensive art historical analysis of the aesthetic features of Chinese wuxia films with an emphasis on their national nature, genre evolution, and adaptation to modern technological formats.
