Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abstracts
- List of contributors
- 1 Making publics, making places
- 2 The elasticity of the public sphere: Expansion, contraction and ‘other’ media
- 3 ‘Imagine if our cities talked to us’: Questions about the making of ‘responsive’ places and urban publics
- 4 Picturing placelessness: Online graphic narratives and Australia's refugee detention centres
- 5 Reclaiming heritage for UNESCO: Discursive practices and community building in northern Italy
- 6 Find your Adelaide: Digital placemaking with Adelaide City Explorer
- 7 Chinese films and the sense of place: Beijing as ‘Thirdspace’ from In the Heat of the Sun to Mr Six
- 8 Social media and news media: Building new publics or fragmenting audiences?
- 9 The use of Chinese social media by foreign embassies: How ‘generative technologies’ are offering opportunities for modern diplomacy
- 10 An opinion leader and the making of a city on China's Sina Weibo
- 11 Public audiencing: Using Twitter to study audience engagement with characters and actors
- 12 Overcoming the tyranny of distance? High speed broadband and the significance of place
7 - Chinese films and the sense of place: Beijing as ‘Thirdspace’ from In the Heat of the Sun to Mr Six
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abstracts
- List of contributors
- 1 Making publics, making places
- 2 The elasticity of the public sphere: Expansion, contraction and ‘other’ media
- 3 ‘Imagine if our cities talked to us’: Questions about the making of ‘responsive’ places and urban publics
- 4 Picturing placelessness: Online graphic narratives and Australia's refugee detention centres
- 5 Reclaiming heritage for UNESCO: Discursive practices and community building in northern Italy
- 6 Find your Adelaide: Digital placemaking with Adelaide City Explorer
- 7 Chinese films and the sense of place: Beijing as ‘Thirdspace’ from In the Heat of the Sun to Mr Six
- 8 Social media and news media: Building new publics or fragmenting audiences?
- 9 The use of Chinese social media by foreign embassies: How ‘generative technologies’ are offering opportunities for modern diplomacy
- 10 An opinion leader and the making of a city on China's Sina Weibo
- 11 Public audiencing: Using Twitter to study audience engagement with characters and actors
- 12 Overcoming the tyranny of distance? High speed broadband and the significance of place
Summary
This chapter explores contemporary films set in Beijing, to examine how the city's protagonists are contextualised within the architecture and landscape of China's state capital, and how the city is spatially depicted and imagined amidst a time of immense technological change. Our investigation of Mr Six (Lao Paoer, directed by Guan Hu, 2015), illustrates how citybased films shape perceptions of a city beyond the glamourised images of technocratic metropoles designed to stimulate tourism found in international blockbusters such as Skyfall (directed by Sam Mendes, 2012). This chapter draws from Edward W Soja's discussions on the trialectical relation between space, social relations and history — particularly the ‘Thirdspace’ (based on Lefebvre's Production of Space), which combines material, physical and mental or cognitive spaces into a conceptual site that includes ‘the knowable and the unimaginable and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary’ (Soja 1996, p. 56). Mr Six serves as a postscript to an earlier Beijing-based film about disaffected youth, In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang can lan de rizi, directed by Jiang Wen, 1994), enabling us to see how the cinematic view of the city has changed in the intervening decades.
The eponymous Mr Six (a.k.a. Zhang Xuejun, played by famed director and sometime actor Feng Xiaogang, who also appears in the earlier film as the central figure's teacher, the hapless Mr Hu) is a former youth gang member, now a revered fixture in his local community, well respected for his grassroots approach to justice. When his wayward son goes missing, presumed kidnapped, Mr Six wanders the streets and alleyways of Beijing looking for him. When he locates his son, Mr Six becomes entangled in a generational struggle between an organised group of wealthy young upstarts and his own band of ageing gang members.
Amidst a background of poverty, crime, corruption and violence a dystopian view emerges in Mr Six, where technologies (mostly mobile phones and the internet) permeate everyday life, but offer little respite from the harsh realities of the city. The constant street-level activities reflect Michel de Certeau's (1984) concept of walking as an effective way of conducting space practice, where walkers resist the rules and orders imposed by city planners, governments or other institutional bodies.
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- Information
- Making Publics, Making Places , pp. 111 - 128Publisher: The University of Adelaide PressPrint publication year: 2016