Little Friends: Children's Film and Media Culture in China (Asia/Pacific/Perspectives)

Contributing to the growing debates on children and media worldwide, Little Friends explores the pervasive presence of film culture in the lives of children in China. The book also introduces the work of the little-known Children's Film Studio and the Film Course, a reform-period attempt by Chinese filmmakers and policy leaders to control the media to which schoolchildren were exposed. Stephanie Donald uses expansive firsthand interviews, children's drawings, and film history to tell a compelling cinematic story before it is forgotten in the onrush of globalized culture. She is especially careful to bring in the interests and experiences of children themselves. The book follows the trajectory of contemporary media analysis in privileging the use as well as the content of media. The author's "turn" to the end-user enriches her discussion of media literacy, cultural competencies, and―perhaps especially in the Chinese case―consideration of the desired uses of media in relation to state priorities and social expectations. This is a trend that belongs to an era of digital experimentation and commercial development; in interactive television, streamed news and entertainment, and the multiple, unintended uses of Internet and mobile technologies. Notwithstanding the contemporary context, Donald's arguments consider a range of media deployment that, although not especially new in technological terms, offer new insights into a formalized Chinese media system for children. Scholars and students of Asian and children's film and education will find this unique work a fascinating window into Chinese culture and society and a provocative exploration of media culture.

Politics & Social Sciences

Donald Professor of Film Lincol, Stephanie Hemelryk

Social Sciences

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Cinema produces an imaginary space where audiences can make themselves visible in public, share ideas and criticisms, and establish their identity as part of a transitory but nonetheless satisfying cultural body. Public Secrets, Public Spaces explores the possibility of symbolic public space in the context of Chinese cinema. Focusing especially on women, children, and the dispossessed, Stephanie Donald looks at the ways public space is constructed and occupied, both in the Chinese cultural sphere and in the world of international audiences. Drawing on the debate over civil society, the author argues that traditional concepts of public sphere and civil society are unlikely to apply to contemporary China, yet there may be common elements that do move across and between cultural and political boundaries. Civility is one such element, built up of culturally specific virtues and relationships that form the public secrets of social survival. Public secrets are the unstated common-sense knowledges of everyday life, extraordinary to those who are not initiated into the routines of a particular cultural place and space. In traditional societies public secrets are organized through observable ritual, while in modern societies they are embedded in the cultural discourse of the routine and the everyday. As we see in this provocative book, film offers a rich medium for unearthing these secrets.

Public Secrets, Public Spaces

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

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Books by Donald Professor of Film Lincol, Stephanie Hemelryk