Dai Jinhua is Professor of Chinese Literature and Languages at Peking University. She is an eminent film critic and scholar and a public intellectual with a critical voice. Dai has published numerous books in Chinese on film, culture, and politics. Her English-language books include Cinema and Desire (2002) and After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History (2018).

Acknowledgments - Part One: Between the Reels - Severed Bridge: The Art of the Sons' Generation - A Scene in the Fog: Reading the Sixth Generation Films - Subject Structure and Modes of Viewing: Films by the Fourth Generation Directors at the Turn of the 1970s and 1980s - Part Two: Ashes of Time - The Roar of Silence: Under the Facade of Urbanness: Chinese Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s - Encountering "The Other": Notes on the Theory of "Third World Literature" - Rift Valley: Glory and Downthrows in the Post-1989 Art Cinema - Ermo: A Modern-Day Allegory Created by a Fifth Generation Director - The Piano in a Factory: Class, or in the Name of the Father - Part Three: Half the Sky - Gender and Narration: Women in Contemporary Chinese Film - "Human, Woman, Demon": A Woman's Predicament - Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Films: Pursuing and Escaping History - Appendix: The Isle of Yesterday-Film, Scholarship, and Me - Index.