Abstract
The Crazy Stone phenomenon in China is often described as the black carnival of both the movie goers and the concerned scholars. The filmic and discursive enthusiasm for Crazy Stone has drawn much attention to the carnival theory by M. Bakhtin and the postmodern theoretical attention to mass culture. Surveying the cultural implications of craziness and how Crazy Stone connects with both the global as well as domestic film cultures, the author of this article observes the absence of such concepts as film noir and neo noir in this round of discussion and argues that Crazy Stone discourse and many of the Crazy Stone initiated films constitute an episode of global neo noir. Aided by black humor, neo noir better connects with many concepts frequently surfaced in the Crazy Stone discourse, such as mass culture, carnival as a communal patterning of visual imagination, mediascape for cultural communication through films, a cross-cultural usage of dog images, as well as cynicism.
First Page
102
Last Page
117
Recommended Citation
Harry, H. Kuoshu. 2017. "The Neo-noir Crazy Stone Phenomenon." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 37, (2): pp.102-117. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol37/iss2/17
