Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema

Chow situates contemporary Chinese film within the broad context of Chinese history and culture, giving readers a glimpse of the unique shared identity that characterizes the current crop of outstanding filmmakers, such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou.

Placing modern Chinese film within the broader context of Chinese history and culture, this study argues that the cinema in China belongs to a firm tradition of visual arts that has for many years been suppressed. It analyzes the emotional response to social, political and economic deprivations.

"A rich and powerful work that provides both a dazzling synthesis of contemporary cultural theory and at the same time an exemplary critique of Chinese cinema. It is a book to be read and re-read and is thus highly recommended because it is more than a film book. It engages directly with the problems Chinese culture faces in a changing world." - China Information

Rey Chow is the author, most recently, of Ethics After Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading.