Abstract
This chapter functions as an introduction to this mini book, which focuses on the postmodern Crazy Stone phenomenon emerged in recent Chinese cultural and cinematic scenes. It explores the implications of a black carnival to the contemporary Chinese; the resources of being crazy in Chinese culture; the meanings of modernism and postmodernism to the Chinese; the making of darkness in relation to black humor and film noir; the role of laughter, nihilism, and cynicism in producing the sense of darkness; and how a carnival kind of craziness characterizes contemporary Chinese culture and becomes the context of today’s film production, criticism, and reception. The study argues that the Crazy Stone phenomenon is part of the global neo-noir, which is an important topic in film and cultural studies scholarship that has for long missed the China component.
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Notes
- 1.
At the time of its release, The Curse of the Golden Flowers claims to have surpassed Chen Kaige’s The Promise to become the most expensive Chinese film to date. The plot of the film is based on Cao Yu’s 1934 play Thunderstorm. Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet is allegedly an adaption of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A prominent event in 2005 that started the Chinese popular trend of mischievous parody was the uploading of He Ge’s “Yige mantou yinfa de xuean” (“A bloody case all caused by a bun”), a short video to mock Chen Kaige’s film The Promise (Wuji, 2005). The video triggered off heated responses and a whirlwind of downloading.
- 2.
Xinzhao Cultural Transmission Center, the producer of Crazy Necklace , issued a sixteen-page PowerPoint document to explain the market potential of the film (accessed Sept. 11, 2015, at http://wenku.baidu.com/view/142a05360b4c2e3f57276333.html). It claims that Crazy Stone has helped increase the box office income of Chinese films and the year 2009 witnesses a 40 percent rise in income compared with 2008. It assures the investors that the increase will continue in 2010 to guarantee their investment. It claims that they can maintain “the myth of craziness” without the presence of Ning Hao, and they invite investors “to have a journey along with craziness.”
- 3.
See The Analects of Confucius , 13.21. The translation is mine.
- 4.
See Zhuangzi’s chapter of “Mountain Woods.” The translation is mine.
- 5.
See Silbergeld (2004). In an earlier book, I wrote the following comment concerning this topic: “I would suggest that the genre that Vertigo belongs to, film noir , offers clues to further understand this coincidental resemblance of Lou’s film to an earlier masterpiece. As we know, among the fountainheads of the classic period American film noir is Italian neo-realism, a cinematic tradition that graduates of Beijing Film Academy tend to admire. Problem pictures and semi-documentary crime thrillers influenced by Italian neo-realism in the post-War America led to the formation of a cinematic mood of cynicism, darkness and despair, which in turn produced more crime films and melodramas about an urban jungle of crime and corruption” (Kuoshu 2011, 152).
- 6.
In this review, Scott Foundas writes, “The spirits of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain course through Black Coal, Thin Ice , a bleak but powerful, carefully controlled detective thriller in which—as with all the best noirs—there are no real heroes or villains, only various states of compromise.” This passage shows up as a citation for a Chinese review of the film in terms of film noir (Zou Ping 2015).
- 7.
Jia’s pastiche of Pulp Fiction has been widely discussed by reviewers. In A Touch of Sin , an embittered miner, Da Hai, hides in the mine owner’s Maserati, where the owner discovers him and tries to buy him off. The next image is Da Hai’s blood-spattered face in the back seat—as in the famous scene in Pulp Fiction.
- 8.
See Yangcheng wanbao, xinwen zhoukan (Guangzhou Evening Gazette) issue 314, 2003. Quoted in He Lei (2015, 148).
- 9.
Quoted in the Baidu baike (Chinese online encyclopedia) entry for Crazy Stone . Accessed January 20, 2012. http://baike.baidu.com/view/307172.htm
- 10.
Baidu baike (Chinese online encyclopedia) entry for Guy Ritchie. Accessed January 20, 2012. http://baike.baidu.com/view/375209.htm
- 11.
The data of a Chinese web dictionary shows that in most cases these two Chinese phrases, with no distinction, are just directly translated as “cynicism” or to be “cynical.”
- 12.
See Foucault (2012) for the authors and titles of these books. At the time when Foucault delivered his lecture, he had not read the fourth book, which, in English translation, is Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (London: Verso, 1988). This fourth book is Slavoj Zizek’s reference in developing his theory on cynicism in totalitarian ideology.
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Kuoshu, H.H. (2021). Introduction: Crazy Stone Phenomenon and Chinese Neo-noir Comedies. In: Craziness and Carnival in Neo-Noir Chinese Cinema. Chinese Literature and Culture in the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73081-9_1
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