This dissertation analyzes the genre, narrative, and visual style of the Golden Goblet Award-winning films at the Shanghai International Film Festival, with the aim of elucidating the international status and characteristics of the festival among the ...
This dissertation analyzes the genre, narrative, and visual style of the Golden Goblet Award-winning films at the Shanghai International Film Festival, with the aim of elucidating the international status and characteristics of the festival among the major film festivals in East Asia. The corpus consists of feature-length fiction films that received the Golden Goblet Award between 1993, the year of the festival's inauguration, and 2023. For comparative purposes, the study also examines, over the same period, the top prize winners in the main competition sections of the Busan International Film Festival and the Tokyo International Film Festival.
Chapter 2 sets out a theoretical framework that integrates auteur theory, genre film theory, and theories of global cultural flow. Drawing on auteur theory, it examines directors' styles and worldviews; applying genre film theory, it analyzes the genre conventions and patterns of variation mobilized in the works; and through the lens of global cultural flow theory, it explains the routes of cultural circulation and the interactions between the local and the global that are configured by the three East Asian festivals.
Chapter 3 compares the top prize-winning films of the Shanghai, Busan, and Tokyo festivals from the perspective of auteur theory. Focusing on the composition of the director cohorts, their auteurist styles, and their narrative and audiovisual expression, it analyzes the spectrum of authorship manifested in the prize-winning films of the three festivals and thereby reveals the aesthetic and industrial orientations that the Golden Goblet Award of the Shanghai International Film Festival relatively privileges. Chapter 4 applies genre film theory to compare the genre distribution, preferences in genre selection, and patterns of genre innovation and hybridity across the three festivals' top prize-winning films, in order to clarify what kind of genre strategies the Shanghai International Film Festival adopts in positioning itself between art and industry, and between the local and the global.
Chapter 5 examines, from the perspective of global cultural flow, the ways in which the three festivals' top prize winners participate in international co-production, overseas distribution, critical recognition and awards, and cultural export. On this basis, it assesses the extent to which the Golden Goblet Award has accumulated international influence and symbolic capital within East Asian cultural networks and the global film festival system. Finally, Chapter 6 considers the future trajectories of the three festivals in light of digital transformation, changes in audience composition, and evolving patterns of cooperation and competition among East Asian festivals, and proposes strategic implications for how the Shanghai International Film Festival might strengthen its brand identity and global standing through the Golden Goblet Award.
By undertaking such a comparative analysis, this study goes beyond the examination of individual festivals or individual prize-winning films to offer an integrated perspective on how the three festivals of Shanghai, Busan, and Tokyo have shaped and recalibrated the genre configurations, narrative strategies, visual styles, and cultural circulation structures of East Asian cinema. In particular, by centering on the characteristics of the Golden Goblet Award at the Shanghai International Film Festival, the dissertation helps to partially fill a gap in research on Chinese film festivals and provides foundational material for comparative studies of East Asian film festivals.