Painting the City Red traces the role that the visual media have played in the transformation of urban spaces in post-1949 China and post-Chiang Taiwan. Invoking the idea of the “urban contract”—a confluence of government authorities, non-government institutions, and media personalities who collaborate toward the end of creating better functioning cities and better engineered citizens—Yomi Braester demonstrates how Chinese cinema has continuously acted as an intermediary between centers of power in the visual (and actual) construction of new urban spaces. Acknowledging the propagandistic function of film and theater, Braester maintains that such productions are not simply “endless repetitions of dogma” but rather “context-sensitive iterations of contemporary policies” (p. 15). Thus, rather than treating film as a mirror of a given reality, Braester proposes that cinema actually forges the material city and the ideologies that have given rise to it; through the creation of new visual practices, Chinese film promotes a...

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