Shock
and Immersion: The Complex Aesthetic Experience of Chinese New Mainstream Film
Lu Xiaofang
Author information+
the Center for Literary Theory and Aesthetics of Shandong University
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About authors:
Lu Xiaofang, Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Literary Theory and Aesthetics of Shandong University, is the associate editor of the journal of Shandong Social Sciences. Her research interest is literary and art theory.
The new mainstream cinema in China, instead of providing a simple mixture or hybrid
of artistic styles and genres, advocates that audiovisual spectacles created by film
technologies should “break into” the established experience of
audiences and their customary protective mechanism of consciousness so as to
produce a psychological strike. Meanwhile, new mainstream cinema also creates
an aesthetic experience, through which the audience are drawn deeply into the film
thanks to their surrealistic sensory and emotional engagement. The surrealistic
sensory experience brings “shock” to the audience, while emotional
identification results in “immersion”. Provided with such aesthetic effects, the
new mainstream film, aspiring to spread positive energy through the holistic conceptualization
of the state and nation, also finds the greatest denominator among all aesthetic
characteristics—thus aesthetic values of universal significance—to unite the
broadest cinematic audience. Through fusion of genres as well as intersection
between the unreal and the real, it ultimately provides the audience with
complex experience that collapses their established and obstinate conceptualizations.
Lu Xiaofang.
Shock
and Immersion: The Complex Aesthetic Experience of Chinese New Mainstream Film[J]. Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 2021, 41(4): 168-177