Journal of Chinese Cinemas最新文献

{"title":"Dubbese fu: The kung fu wave and the aesthetics of imperfect lip synchronization","authors":"Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2018.1522803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1522803","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Dubbese fu recuperates the dismissal of the ‘poorly dubbed’ English-language voice tracks in the Hong Kong kung fu films that became globally popular and profitable starting in 1973 as a position that improperly valorizes only the perfect lip synchronization version of the audiovisual contract. Instead of one, there is a total of three possibilities with Italy representing a looser version and the films of Hong Kong’s kung fu wave representing the imperfect version. The internationalization strategy adopted by Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest identified the necessity of voice dubbings into the target market’s language, which in the case of the United States, required English dubbings since the goal was to become appealing to mainstream rather than art cinema audiences. The history of English dubbing studios in Hong Kong, the key individuals who made it happen, and the working conditions of the dubbing process are recreated to uncover how imperfect lip synchronization became a new aesthetic norm.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"12 1","pages":"219 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2018.1522803","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49504380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comedy mutations: a dialogue","authors":"Xinyu Dong, J. Rosenbaum","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2018.1475971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475971","url":null,"abstract":"Xinyu Dong (XD): Jonathan, you and I are both cinephiles. Much of our conversation over the years has been about our favorite films and directors, and we nudge each other to watch or re-watch new releases and rediscovered classics. Now that we’re co-editing this special issue on comedy, I wonder, what are some of the most amusing moments for you in the Chinese-language films that you’ve seen? I ask about these cinephiliac moments because when a comic scene works, it tends to be highly memorable. And often what we find amusing can tell us a lot about the film as a whole: how it plays with comic conventions, how it addresses its audience, how it ages over time. Jonathan Rosenbaum (JR): I was especially amused by the point-of-view shots from inside an ATM in Peter Chan’s 1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story (a particular favorite of mine), because of the whole idea of what we look like from the vantage point of our money – or, more specifically, what Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai, both mainlanders who meet one another in Hong Kong and try to ‘make it’ there, look like to the ups and downs of their cash balances that epitomize much of their struggle. XD: Interesting that you picked this sweet little running gag in an unassuming romantic comedy. I say ‘unassuming’ because not only rom-com is always knowingly light, but this film makes unpretentiousness its virtue. Comrade, this is almost a love story, but wait a minute, let me check my ATM... ATM is the tragicomedy here. No wonder the film has aged so well. It’s a classic now. I also recall a favorite moment in there, when Leon Lai restlessly switches between several long lines at the local McDonald’s and promptly deposits himself at the counter when Maggie Cheung starts a new line. A well-choreographed ‘meet-cute’. But it also reminds me of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp at the employment office in A Dog’s Life (1918) – whereas the Tramp always loses to his more alert (or muscular) fellow tramps, Leon Lai has better luck as a mainlander in Hong Kong, better trained to be opportunistic with long lines. Of course, Peter Chan didn’t have to see Chaplin to come up with this gag, even though he might have while studying at the UCLA film school. He has an eye for comic situations found on the street, and the gag works because it taps into our everyday experience. Like your ATM example, this one keeps me amused when I wait in long lines... With all these gags found on the street, so to speak, Chan keeps the first part of Comrade lighthearted and funny, a ‘migrant comedy’ in the tradition of the ‘rube comedies’ in early cinema.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"12 1","pages":"187 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475971","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48369442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Black comedy films in postsocialist China: Case study of Ning Hao's Crazy series","authors":"Hui Liu","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2018.1475969","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475969","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Black comedy films are works that use humor to potentially challenge normalized social perceptions, affects and practices by inducing uneasy amusement and emotional release from taboos, traumas, crises and other subjects usually deemed serious by a given society. This article attempts to contextualize Ning Hao's Crazy series – films that initiated a ‘black comedy fever’ in the mainland Chinese market in the 2000s – with reference to China's postsocialist condition and to analyze the films’ coping strategies for dealing with contesting sociocultural forces. I argue that as consumer-oriented black comedies, Ning's films negotiate between the imperatives of the market, the state and society through commodification and carnivalization of both mainstream and non-mainstream sociocultural phenomena, providing a self-reflexive parody of popular film genres and other commercial cultural forms.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"12 1","pages":"158 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475969","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47488210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Taiwanese comedies under the shadow of the Chinese market","authors":"J. Udden","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2018.1475970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475970","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Comedy is arguably the most local of genres. Tropical Fish (1995) is a Taiwanese comedy that made no effort to disguise its local flavour, and was largely unseen outside of Taiwan. Recent Taiwanese comedies such as You Are the Apple of My Eye (2011), The Wonderful Wedding (2015) and Our Times (2015) have achieved not only success in Taiwan, but also unprecedented box office in the mainland Chinese market. Compared to Tropical Fish, all three films also seemingly tone down the local flavour to varying degrees. This is due to the irresistible pull of recent opportunities posed by the astronomical growth of the mainland Chinese market. This paper will analyze the economic forces that have resulted in changes in Taiwanese comedies themselves while at the same time showing that there are varying textual strategies for dealing with the ‘local’ flavour in this new economic climate where the booming Chinese market now has become a major consideration.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"12 1","pages":"174 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475970","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48556763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Chinese Ghost Story: A Hong Kong comedy film's cult following in Mainland China","authors":"Hongjian Wang","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2018.1475968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475968","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article aims to explain how and why a Hong Kong comedy film, A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), which did not have access to the movie theatres in mainland China, has generated a phenomenal cult following there. It also endeavours to understand the relationship between comedy film and cult film. It approaches these questions by analysing the comic dialectics of and the audience responses to the film. Sorting through fans’ reviews of the film posted on Douban.com, one of the leading interest-based social network sites in mainland China, reveals that it is members of the ‘post-80s’ – the generation born in the 1980s – who constitute the core of the film's cult following, and that they take the film very seriously, deriving from it idealism, rebellion, nostalgia, and social criticism. Informed by theories on comedy film and cult film, I find that the film is comic because of its half-seriousness, expressed in a katastasis of concerns, and that this half-seriousness is also the foundation of its cult following. Comedy film and cult film seem to be natural allies as both work with a sense of detachment and both are at once transgressive and recuperative.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"12 1","pages":"142 - 157"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475968","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44430738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Two fools: Comedy as dialectical tension in mid-century Chinese cinemas","authors":"Evelyn Shih","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2018.1475967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475967","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper will trace the complex lineage of Brother Wang and Brother Liu in Taiwanese cinema, beginning with the emergence of a ‘two fools’ (兩傻) genre in imported cinema from Hollywood and Hong Kong, a category which included classic Laurel and Hardy, late Abbott and Costello, the more contemporary Martin and Lewis, Cantonese song and dance film and Mandarin comedies from Cathay featuring the likes of King Hu, Liu Enjia and Jiang Guangchao. When the two fools genre was adapted in Taiwan, an additional social allegory of mainlander and islander solidarity came to the fore: thin actor Zhong Fucai was a local, while fat actor Li Guanzhang arrived from mainland China after 1949. Their unshakeable solidarity and many shared feasts suggest a utopian dimension to the comedy duo, in which homosocial friendship transcends all differences. The visual iconicity of their bodies sharing the frame and the low quality of sound in taiyupian meant that these films often leaned upon the plasmatic appeal of physical comedy instead of dialogue for comic effect, an aesthetic that would continue to dominate taiyupian comedies until the end of the 1960s.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"12 1","pages":"127 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475967","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49353626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Xinyu Dong, J. Rosenbaum","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2018.1475965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475965","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"12 1","pages":"111 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475965","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49047368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Eulogistic comedy as domestic soft power: Biopolitical self-fashioning in It's My Day Off (1959)","authors":"Yingjin Zhang","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2018.1475966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475966","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Soft power as a concept measures the ability of a nation in obtaining positive outcomes overseas through cultural means, but its core ideas of attraction and credibility are productive in analyzing eulogistic comedy's contradictory functions of propagating official policy and refashioning self-interests in socialist China. It's My Day Off (1959) satisfies official expectations of constructing positive models for viewers to emulate, but it also reveals the technology of self-fashioning as a process under surveillance by the Party and the patriarch. A series of comic situations of missed opportunities foreground the logic of instant public recognitions and deferred libidinal gratification that overdetermines socialist self-fashioning as an endless psychic-somatic mechanism of self-othering. Surprisingly, it is by demonstrating the attraction of altruism that the film may have gained its unintended critical edge in disclosing the panoptic biopolitical condition in a socialist utopia.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"12 1","pages":"113 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475966","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44300117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fish and elephant: Reexamining (in)visibility and claiming queer agency in China's first lesbian film","authors":"Jenn Marie Nunes","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2018.1423818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1423818","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines mainland China's first lesbian film Fish and Elephant (2001) and engages a queer/feminist critique of visibility politics that locates subversive queer female agency in invisibility. Fish and Elephant is generally considered a straightforward critique of the lack of visibility queer women experience in China, illustrating how emerging lesbian discourse is entangled with China's heteronormative and patriarchal social, political, and familial structures. In light of Peggy Phelan's critical feminist reexamination of visibility politics and queer theory's interest in reorganizing the active logic of agency, I argue that Fish and Elephant explicitly makes palpable the presence of visual absence and poses a potentially more legitimizing and suggestive lesbian discourse that is not constructed in reaction to heterosexual discourse. Throughout the film, representation of the queer female is interrupted as the two main characters are not imaged at key moments in the film's narrative. The resulting absence creates a disruptive, haunting presence that activates spaces external to the hegemonic norm, de-centering the male gaze and the normative family unit, and opening up a space full of possibility that points toward as yet unimagined or unrecognizable modes of representation and of being for queer women, all women, in China and elsewhere.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"12 1","pages":"74 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2018.1423818","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45951815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The absent subject of The World","authors":"Dudley Andrew","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2017.1422896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2017.1422896","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Shijie (The World) has responded well to social and political readings because a complex structure supports a most weighty subject, absence. The pre-credit and credit scenes anticipate a search for this elusive ‘subject’, meaning its guiding consciousness and its ultimate topic. A panoply of strategies helps Shijie spread horizontally from its theme park center and troubled lovers to encompass an immense geography and a range of social types. More striking are the film's vertical probes into the void of subjectivity. Two secondary characters, Anna and ‘Lil Sister’, who arrive in Beijing from more traditional situations uncovering The World's hollow core. The full spectacle of life as a theme park demands the moral annihilation of alternative ways of being. Global China offers paltry compensation for its lost souls.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"12 1","pages":"59 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2017.1422896","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47787349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}