Journal of Chinese Cinemas最新文献

{"title":"Pema Tseden and the Tibetan road movie: space and identity beyond the ‘minority nationality film’","authors":"C. Berry","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2016.1167334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2016.1167334","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the films of Pema Tseden (པད་མ་ཚེ་བརྟན།), known in Mandarin as Wanma Caidan (万玛才旦), as road movies. The essay considers the use of the road movie genre as a response to the eclipse of the old ‘minority nationalities’ shaoshu minzu (少数民族) category of filmmaking in China, and the rise of the market economy under Chinese neoliberalism. Pema's films feature male protagonists on repeated journeys to and from certain points, or circular journeys, within the Amdo (ཨ༌མདོ) region of the larger Tibetan cultural territory where Pema grew up. The ‘classic’ 1960s American road movie was considered to be a statement of alienation from American society. While remaining true to the genre's focus on interrogation of the relationship between society and self and entirely within Tibetan cultural territory and with almost no sign of Han Chinese people, Pema's films can be understood as asking how Tibetans should respond to the cultural crises brought about by modernization. Furthermore, as they circulate not only in Tibet but across China and through the international film circuit, because they do not offer ready answers, Pema's films also open up to different understandings of Tibet and being Tibetan.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"10 1","pages":"105 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2016.1167334","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60002381","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":"Chinese-language film or Chinese cinema? Review of an ongoing debate in the Chinese mainland","authors":"Shaoyi Sun","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2016.1139803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2016.1139803","url":null,"abstract":"Ever since it is first introduced and then gradually adopted by many in the field of Chinese cinema studies, the term ‘Chinese-language film’ (huayu dianying) has been always contentious, not only because it tends to prioritize language’s role in defining a cinema, thus relegates the ‘Chinese’ films that speak non-Han languages to a negligible place, but also because critics and scholars in the field come from divergent political and cultural backgrounds and thus tend not to share the same view of what constitute ‘China’ and ‘Chinese.’ In one of the earliest publications that propagated the term, Ping-Hui Liao used the phrase ‘huawen dianying’ instead of ‘huayu dianying’ in his long introduction to discuss the collection of essays that critically examine the acclaimed films from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, including such classics as Yellow Earth, The Story of Qiu Ju, King of Children, Farewell My Concubine, Ruan Lingyu, The Terrorizers, A Brighter Summer Day and Banana Paradise. Despite this, as a less controversial term that encompasses the films produced not only in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, but also in Singapore and other Chinese diasporas, ‘Chinese-language film’ has been gradually accepted by scholars and critics of Chinese cinema from around the world. This is evidenced in both Chinese and English publications, chief among them Discourses on Contemporary Chinese-Language Film (edited by Tado Lee. Taipei, Taiwan: China Times Press, 1996), Legends of the Three Places: Two Decades of Chinese-Language Film (edited by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, et al. Taipei, Taiwan: Taiwan Film Institute, 1999), Ten Directors of Chinese-Language Film (edited by Yuanying Yang. Hangzhou, Zhejiang: Zhejiang Photographic Press, 2000) and Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (edited by Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2005). But it turns out that the above consensus, reached around the turn of the century and shared by many in the field regardless of their place of origin, is fragile at best. Controversies and debates surrounding the term ‘Chinese-language film’ have struck back with a vengeance during its post-centennial years. Partly due to the frequent academic exchanges between mainland China-based scholars and scholars of Chinese-language film from the United States and the United Kingdom (strangely more often than their counterparts based in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore), these debates have centered on whether the use of ‘Chinese-language film’ is a reflection of Western ‘centralism’ or Americentrism","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"10 1","pages":"61 - 66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2016.1139803","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60001800","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":"Sound design","authors":"Timmy Chih-ting Chen","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2016.1142729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2016.1142729","url":null,"abstract":"cinema and use it as a resource of soft power cannot fully utilize it precisely because of this ability. Free speech restrictions and censorship not only reduce the creative output of Chinese filmmakers but also raise credibility issues for foreigners disinclined to confuse cinematic truth with political reality. Audiences may willfully suspend their disbelief for a few hours and enjoy the Chinese film, but as long as there is a contradiction between the two spheres, film’s soft power capacity is likely to remain dormant.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"10 1","pages":"34 - 37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2016.1142729","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60002015","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":"Screens","authors":"Hongwei Chen","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2016.1139800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2016.1139800","url":null,"abstract":"dramatize the myriad possibilities of scalar thinking. Scale sheds light on the stakes of contemporary life by calling attention to the standards by which we judge an entity to be significant or meaningful. Are we to view human beings as mere specks of dust in the vast universe? Or, are human beings themselves wondrous galaxies of atoms? Are we to think of the Earth as an insignificant rock in the Milky Way? Or, is the Earth a treasured needle in the galactic haystack? Are we to believe that atoms are the fundamental building blocks of reality? Or, is the universe the ultimate manifestation of existence? Are we to cherish or disregard ‘small’ entities? Are ‘big’ entities to be venerated or feared? Such lines of inquiry show scale to be more a field of contention between worldviews than a keyword with fixed definitions.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"10 1","pages":"26 - 30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2016.1139800","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60001508","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":"Propaganda film","authors":"Matthew D Johnson","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2016.1144704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2016.1144704","url":null,"abstract":"Asia, edited by M. Iwatake, 174 205. Helsinki: Department of World Cultures, University of Helsinki). Given their relative newness, it remains to be seen how much Chinese cinemas have impacted these alternative global networks of thematic festivals, just as it is unclear whether or not alternative festivals over time will come resemble international film festivals more, not less. To wit, when it comes to Chinese cinema and film festivals, there are still more questions than answers out there.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"13 1","pages":"17 - 20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2016.1144704","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60002434","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":"Soft power","authors":"Bruno Lovric","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2016.1139798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2016.1139798","url":null,"abstract":"Hongwei Thorn Chen is a PhD candidate in the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation examines the link between technological media and educational discourse in China and globally from the 1930s to the 1940s. He has presented his work at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference and has been the recipient of the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, which supported his research in China and the United States during the 2014 2015 academic year.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"10 1","pages":"30 - 34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2016.1139798","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60001739","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 state and stakes of Chinese cinemas studies: a roundtable discussion","authors":"C. Berry, Xinyu Dong, Yingjin Zhang, Zhang Zhen, Song Hwee Lim","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2016.1145424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2016.1145424","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"10 1","pages":"67 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2016.1145424","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60002728","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":"Activism","authors":"G. Marchetti","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2016.1144705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2016.1144705","url":null,"abstract":"Activism refers to taking direct action in support of, or in opposition to, a social or political policy. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the roots of the word back to 1915 when Swedish ‘activists’ petitioned for the end of that country’s neutrality in World War I (WWI). However, film activism may predate the use of this nomenclature. Suffragettes, for example, appeared on film as early as 1899, and they continued to agitate for their cause in silent features, such as What 80 Million Women Want (Will Lewis, 1913). Putative understandings of activist films, as opposed to other types of political filmmaking, place them outside journalistic reportage or specific government propaganda programs in the realm of revolutionary movements, reform initiatives and struggles for social justice. Fiction and non-fiction filmmakers around the world take up the camera now more likely digital than not in order to agitate for political or social causes. Others use the motion picture medium to record these movements for posterity as narrative features, documentaries or hybrid forms. The 1919 May Fourth Movement in China nourished a generation of activists advocating for action against Japanese aggression, colonialism, capitalist greed and patriarchal excesses on the silent screen. Many were inspired by the ‘agit-prop’ films made in the Soviet Union by filmmakers, such as Dziga Vertov, V. I. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. At the conclusion of the Pacific War, filmmakers migrated from their leftwing roots in Republican era critical realism to government-sanctioned socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism in the People’s Republic, and to ‘healthy’ realism in the Republic of China on Taiwan. With this, films became less ‘activist’ in the original sense and more accurately films ‘about’ political heroes used as propaganda for government programs. However, amateur, underground and sundry oppositional cinematic practices continued, particularly on the margins of the Chinese-speaking world. In the cinema clubs that sprang up in Hong Kong to support small-gauge production, filmmakers took a decidedly political turn in the wake of the 1967 riots. As Ian Aitken and Mike Ingham point out in their research on Hong Kong documentary films (Hong Kong Documentary Film, Edinburgh, 2014), key figures, such as Clifford Choi, Lau Fung-kut, Law Kar, Stephen Teo and Lo King-wah made films in support of specific protest movements, such as the campaign to reclaim the Diaoyu Islands, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. New Wave director Tsui Hark began his filmmaking career at Newsreel in New York (later California and Third","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"10 1","pages":"4 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2016.1144705","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60002510","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":"Chinese film history and historiography","authors":"Yingjin Zhang","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2016.1139802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2016.1139802","url":null,"abstract":"Reflecting on the remarkable rise of Chinese film studies, Paul G. Pickowicz observes that, merely 35 years ago, world-wide scholars knew little about Chinese cinema, yet now ‘scholarly interest in Chinese cinema is on the verge of overtaking or perhaps has already overtaken interest in modern Chinese literature’ (Huang 2014, vii), at least so in English scholarship. A sure sign of the maturity of Chinese film studies is the recent publication of three comprehensive volumes in English that cover various territories, trajectories, and historiographies (Lim and Ward 2011), investigating different aspects of history and geography, industry and institution, arts and media (Zhang 2013), and reevaluate competing interpretations of history, form, and structure (Rojas and Chow 2013). None of these volumes aspires to be a general history of Chinese cinema (as in Zhang 2004), but historiography remains a central organizing principle in all three. Another common feature of these volumes is the endeavor to move beyond the previously dominant national cinema paradigm (as in Hu 2003), which has been increasingly critiqued from the perspectives of polylocality (Zhang 2010, 16 28) and Sinophone cinema (Yue and Khoo 2014). This article represents my latest attempt at tracking the development of Chinese film history and historiography (Zhang 2000). One entrenched habit of film historiography is binary thinking, which has previously instituted the dominance of center over periphery, elite over popular, progressive over conservative, arts over industry, auteurs over institution, classical cinema over early cinema, fiction over documentary, the West over the non-West, and so on. In Chinese film studies, such binary habit is most pronounced in the 1963 official film history (Cheng, Li, and Xing 1963), which constructs a narrative exclusively centered on perceived struggles between the Communist (or Left-wing) versus the Nationalist (or Right-wing). At a subtle level, binary thinking is still operational in the narrativization of film history in terms of Shanghai versus Yan’an (Clark 1987), commercial cinema versus Left-wing cinema (Pang 2002), or Shanghai versus Hong Kong (Fu 2003). To reiterate my earlier call for moving ‘beyond binary imagination’ (Zhang 2008), I seek to map the latest development in Chinese film historiography by reviewing four new books on early Chinese cinema in relation to other recent scholarship in the field. In my view, Huang (2014) and Liao (2015) have both consolidated the global or transnational perspective on Chinese cinema, Bao (2015) has intervened in the emergent exploration of","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"10 1","pages":"38 - 47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2016.1139802","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60001367","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":"Dirty fashion: Ma Ke's fashion ‘Useless’, Jia Zhangke's documentary Useless and cognitive mapping","authors":"Calvin Hui","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2015.1082746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2015.1082746","url":null,"abstract":"This article is part of my project that engages with visual and media cultures – fashion, cinema and documentary – to address Chinese consumer culture in the socialist and post-socialist periods. Focusing on haute couture, consumption and memory, the first part introduces an aspiring fashion designer, Ma Ke, and her latest fashion line, ‘Wuyong’/‘Useless’ (2007). Ma Ke intends to draw attention to the loss of the emotional bond between the maker and the user of clothes in the age of industrialized mass production and consumption. To help fashion recover this lost memory, Ma Ke buries her garment under dirt for a period of time. When the garment is unearthed, she reasons, it will find itself imbued with the imprint of the time and space of the soil. Presented at the Paris Fashion Week in February 2007, Ma Ke's haute couture exhibit ‘Useless’ was intended to be a critique of modern consumer culture. The second part engages with Jia Zhangke's documentary Wuyong/Useless (2007), a trans-media dialogue with Ma Ke's fashion design ‘Useless’. I argue that Jia Zhangke's engagement with Ma Ke's fashion is double-edged: although the director embraces some parts of ‘Useless’, he critiques other parts of her design. In particular, I show how the director introduces a new level of complexity to the artist's anti-fashion and anti-consumption gesture through the use of montage. The last part suggests that Jia Zhangke's documentary can be regarded as an exercise in what Fredric Jameson calls ‘cognitive mapping’, which attempts to capture the complexly mediated relationships between cultural representational form (e.g. fashion and documentary) and social totality within the context of global capitalism.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"9 1","pages":"253 - 270"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2015.1082746","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60001674","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}