This thesis focuses on Lou Ye, a Chinese director who has been regarded as a representative of the sixth-generation filmmakers. Within the 11 feature films that he has made, he shows an intense individual style and his artistic achievements are internationally professionally recognized. Meanwhile, he tends to tell women’s stories with female characters as their first protagonists, which is unusual among Chinese male directors. Most of the existing studies have probed into the aesthetic characteristics and the meaning of the cinematic text of Lou’s films respectively. As an essential element of the auteur study, there is still a shortage of researches on Lou Ye’s films as an aesthetic system. The connection between formal/stylistic features and the cultural values is yet to be demonstrated.

This thesis attempts to answer whether there is a connection between the form/style of Lou Ye’s films and the female consciousness of his texts. It adopts the theoretical framework that combines Bordwell’s poetics of cinema and feminist film theory, using empirical and critical discursive approaches to examine the formal and stylistic features of Lou’s films as well as the female consciousness conveyed through his works and how is it expressed, thus further arguing the inner connections within them.

This thesis argues that:

(1)  The forms and styles in Lou Ye’s films embody the features the free indirect subjectivity proposed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Lou externalizes the perceptions of the characters and thus achieve the subjectivity, enabling the viewers to identify with the on-screen figures.

(2)  The female consciousness in his cinematic text is distinct. There is an overtone of feminism is embodied in most of his titles.

(3)  The stylistic expressions strengthen the female consciousness because they help the viewers to identify with the female characters. But Lou Ye is still inherently deficient in authentically expressing as female due to his own gender identity. It leaves the room for a long and contentious debate over whether his films are feminist or not.