Major auteur cinema can be intentionally leveraged to retell national history, fuse religious or mythic frames, and export a philosophical lens (here, a Straussian Chinese view). Such films serve both as domestic meaning‑making and as soft‑power signals when they reframe 20th‑century trajectories and collective memory.
— If state‑adjacent or culturally prominent films recast history through explicit ideological frames, they become a durable instrument of political influence and must be tracked as part of cultural geopolitics and soft‑power strategy.
Tyler Cowen
2026.01.08
100% relevant
Bi Gan’s Resurrection (translated as “Feral/Wild Age”) is described as a retelling of the 20th century from a Straussian Chinese point of view and blends Buddhist and cinematic myth—making it a concrete example of film repackaging history for cultural framing.
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