Painting the City Red

In "Painting the City Red", Yomi Braester examines the role of the cinema and theatre in debates about urban planning in China from 1949 to the present. He shows how the screen and stage arts propagated and regulated visions of the future city. In transforming the city into a visual subject, films a [...]
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In "Painting the City Red", Yomi Braester examines the role of the cinema and theatre in debates about urban planning in China from 1949 to the present. He shows how the screen and stage arts propagated and regulated visions of the future city. In transforming the city into a visual subject, films and dramas rallied popular support for urbanization policies and later carved out a space for criticism. They weighed in on issues such as building an ideal socialist city, integrating China's metropolises into the globalizing economy, and preserving architectural heritage. Combining extensive archival research, material from interviews with many leading filmmakers and urban planners, and close readings of scripts and images, Braester assesses the stakes in stage and screen productions that address urban development. He discusses in detail the cinematic treatment of specific endeavors and sites, including the promotion of public works and housing projects in Beijing's impoverished Outer City, the spoofing of a glitzy Orange County-themed Beijing suburb, and the vilifying of Shanghai's Nanjing Road as a symbol of bourgeois decadence.He also explores cinema's role in criticizing the gentrification of Beijing's Old City and Taipei's veterans' villages, aggrandizing the monumental Tiananmen Square, and calling for the preservation of the vernacular architecture of courtyard houses. Braester shows that stage plays and films provide insights into the spatial reorganization and historical rewriting of Chinese cities. The cinema has contributed to the imposition of state power, the formation of communities, the struggle for civil society, the establishing of cultural norms, and the emergence of new urban visions.