Journal of Chinese Cinemas最新文献

{"title":"Introduction to special issue on Hong Kong left-wing cinema 1950s-1970s, <i>Journal of Chinese Cinemas</i>","authors":"Tom Cunliffe, Raymond Tsang","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2023.2266249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2023.2266249","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"437 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134975181","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":"Identity dismissed: Hong Kong leftist cinema of the 1950s","authors":"Ching Yau","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2023.2266122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2023.2266122","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThere has been a reconstitution of a ‘local’ identity in opposition to leftist politics in articulating recent pro-democratic activist movements in Hong Kong. In light of this context, this article examines this historical formation through the lens of using Hong Kong leftist cinema of the 1950s, especially productions from the Union Film Studio, as a case study. Through focusing on some key examples from the Hong Kong Cantonese leftist cinema of the 1950s, this paper traces the historical construction of a politicized ethical consciousness in Hong Kong poignant throughout the 1950s but became increasingly marginalized from the mid-1960s on. It argues that the class and gender analysis that post-war filmmakers made of colonial capitalism needs to be re-read in relation to a form of Chinese anti-imperial patriotism heavily marked by traumatized historical feelings from feudal, colonial and wartime experiences, driven by an emotional need for an idealized community through identifying with the underclass and the dispossessed. It proposes a reconsideration of Hong Kong’s cultural and film histories through mapping the development of this politicized film discourse which has inherited the rich tradition of Shanghai leftist cinema while fueled with an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist ethic to effectively respond to the post-war Chinese refugee-dominated society. This article problematizes the often taken-for-granted meanings and values of a Hong Kong ‘local’ identity defined as opposed to those of Mainland China, serving to perpetuate the Cold War binarism, and argues that the successful neoliberalization of Hong Kong from the 1970s on is a result of the collaborative efforts among the PRC ‘extreme left’ during the Cultural Revolution, globalized Cold War forces, KMT cultural-political demands from Taiwan, and British colonial polices, not without irony.Keywords: Sinophone cinemasHong Kong film historyHong Kong local identity and cultural politicsBritish colonial modernityCold War Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 This article is revised from a paper presented at the “Neomoralism Under Neoliberalism International Conference,” held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong in 2014.The paper draft was first translated by Ernest Fung from Chinese, then revised and shortened significantly by Yau Ching for this journal issue. I would like to particularly acknowledge the support from the reviewers whose suggestions and comments have made this paper more sound and coherent. Special thanks to Natalia Chan Lokfung in helping to confirm citations.2 I use “leftist” and “left-wing” inter-changeably in this article. Although they might have different connotations according to context, these terms refer to a community of public cultural workers with pro-socialist identifications and values in the historical context studied in this article. Likewise, “rightist,” “right-leaning” and “right-wing” for the opposite","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134975480","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":"Labour strikes in the dying light of Hong Kong left-wing cinema","authors":"Tom Cunliffe","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2023.2266130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2023.2266130","url":null,"abstract":"The Younger Generation (1971), made at the Hong Kong left-wing studio Great Wall, is a family melodrama that specifically outlines the accumulation imperative by which the industrialist capitalist implements exploitative practices to gain more and more value out of the workers at a factory. This film depicts female factory workers’ solidarity when they decide to pursue collective action and strike in protest against these inhumane working conditions. This essay focuses on how this film negotiates class relations in Hong Kong society, how it resists and critiques the dominant ideology of capitalism in 1970s Hong Kong, gives a voice to those whose voice is rarely heard in commercial cinema and in the power structures that define who has the right to be heard, and finally how it proffers, however mildly, a more positive and optimistic vision. By contextualising the historical conditions within which the film was made, this essay assesses how this film responds to Hong Kong’s colonial capitalist conditions and argues against the critical consensus that the Hong Kong left-wing cinema made during the Cultural Revolution period was all merely communist propaganda. Instead, it looks at how the film identifies the structural inequalities caused by capitalism and articulates the importance of labour struggle to help create a more just world, and as such contributes to global discourses on labour struggle.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134975182","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":"Building the nation on 16mm: Film formats and the institutionalization of cinematic portability in 1930s China","authors":"Hongwei Chen","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2022.2120370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2022.2120370","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the role played by the 16 mm format in shaping ideas of portable projection in 1930s China. Drawing on research into the Chinese educational film movement, I argue for a format-oriented approach to cinema history that tracks heretofore neglected aspects of how the state—as well as non-state actors—exercised power on and through cinema. As a portable format, 16 mm extracted cinema from urbanized film culture while offering its users access to a broader ‘national’ audience. Educators built a mobile 16 mm network connecting schools and mass education sites and formulated a discourse that sought to codify the place of ‘small scale cinema’ in the Chinese nation and in global media hierarchies. Small scale cinema was deeply contradictory. While promising to make cinema broadly accessible to the Chinese masses, 16 mm also restricted that access. While seemingly liberating cinema from the sway of global film culture and China’s treaty-port cosmopolitanism, 16 mm subjected mass education to other patterns of asymmetrical development. By examining how educational cinema was formed at the intersection of global film technologies and local institutional discourses, I formulate an approach to cine-governmentality that shows how the state’s control of cinema worked from the bottom up, as actors on multiple scales negotiated chaotic circulations of films, equipment, and ideas.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"16 1","pages":"40 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46040400","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":"Locating Chinese screens: Introduction to a special issue on film exhibition","authors":"Chenshu Zhou","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2022.2127586","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2022.2127586","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This introduction situates the topic of film exhibition in Chinese and Sinophone cinema studies in relation to the approaches of new cinema history and the crisis of traditional cinematic institutions brought about by digitization and the COVID-19 pandemic. It gives an overview of the contributions by drawing several broad conclusions, highlighting problems of infrastructure, educational cinema, the relationship between what is on and off screen, and the contextualization of film exhibition in cultural history.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"16 1","pages":"1 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45108576","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":"From teahouse to classroom: Educational screen practice in Republican Shanghai","authors":"Yoshino Sugawara","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2022.2120750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2022.2120750","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Using the concept of ‘educational screen practice,’ this article aims to integrate the history of modern Chinese media—which has been dichotomised into pre-cinema and après-cinema—the history of lantern slides screenings and film screenings, and the history of educational and entertainment films. Lantern slides were brought to China at the end of the nineteenth century, and soon afterward they were used in Western-style schools and other educational institutions as a teaching tool to impart modern knowledge. At the beginning of the twentieth century, showing lantern slides and films became a popular leisure activity for students in new-style schools. At the same time, students studied in Japan began to use lantern slides and films for popular education. By the 1910s, the Jiangsu Educational Association and the Shanghai YMCA made active use of lantern slides and films to popularise the practice of visual screenings. The widespread use of visual media for popular education in the 1910s involved personnel that would emerge a decade later as leaders of the Chinese film industry and created a potential audience for cinema. To oversee educational screen practices more effectively, the Commercial Press and the Star Motion Picture Company operated as media conglomerates that encompassed film and print media and contributed to an ‘industry of enlightenment’ (Leo Ou-fan Lee). Thus, revising Chinese film history in terms of educational screen practices opens up a new horizon in the history of visual culture, connecting the divided histories of cinema and pre-cinema.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"16 1","pages":"9 - 24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47741239","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":"Borders in the film viewing space: Benshi and linguistic territorialization in colonial Taiwan, 1926–1933","authors":"Shu-mei Lin","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2022.2120746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2022.2120746","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Studies on early cinema regard benshi as a figure that introduced and filtered foreign cultures through his narration and performance. Colonial Taiwan developed a benshi culture no less popular than mainland Japan. What makes Taiwanese benshi practices even more exceptional is the complexity and hybridity of the language-scape. By studying benshi in colonial Taiwan, this essay foregrounds the multilingual and multicultural elements that converged in the viewing space. Through investigating the confrontation between the police and the benshi affiliated with Taiwan Cultural Association that was active from 1926 to 1933, this article contends that the language hybridity cracked open a dynamic and provisional public sphere where the benshi contested colonial governance for more freedom of expression and political engagement. Drawing on colonial newspapers, archival records and interviews, I argue that dialects territorialize a provisional public sphere that endowed local film lecturers with limited agency from the total control of the colonial governance. Dialects used by the benshi exercised a dual function: it created cognitive borders in the colonial viewing space to limit colonial intervention on the one hand and carved up a public sphere where the discursively divided communities might be able to reconnect with each other (i.e. China and Taiwan), on the other.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"16 1","pages":"25 - 39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46262621","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":"Internal hypertopias: A trope in the contemporary Chinese postinternet art of the moving image","authors":"Jihoon Kim","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2022.2115869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2022.2115869","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper maps out several contemporary Chinese artists whose work of the moving image, be it installation, on mobile phones, on the app or website, is read as responding to the situation where various screens and their corresponding images or information are connected so deeply as to blur their previously established ontological and cultural boundaries. To this end, I expand Francesco Casetti’s idea of ‘hypertopia’, a new spatial structure in which cinema is unhinged from its traditional place and relocated into other places and platforms, through Hito Steyerl’s assertion on the migration of images and data, into, across, and off screens in the postinternet condition under which the world is perceived as the sum of the images and data themselves. If Casetti’s hypertopia points to cinema’s centrifugal relocation to other spaces than the movie theater, it can be argued that Steyerl’s insight into the postinternet condition concerns the centripetal folding of images and screens, including the cinematic, into a screen, so that it is seen as accommodating them in its inside. Developing this theoretical speculation, I characterize as ‘internal hypertopia’ an aesthetic trope of moving image pieces by such artists as aaajiao (aka Xu Wenkai) and Miao Ying.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"16 1","pages":"92 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48755325","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 television at midnight: Television theory in the People’s Republic of China during the Reform Era","authors":"D. Suher","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2022.2114991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2022.2114991","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45679635","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":"Stereo revolution: Acoustic science and cinematic spaces in socialist China (1949–1966)","authors":"Ling Kang","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2022.2114708","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2022.2114708","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines how the development of acoustic science changed the spatial configuration of movie theaters in China during the period between 1949 and 1966. The application of new acoustic technology not only caused a dramatic restructuring of movie theaters from the building’s material composition to the physical shapes of its walls and ceiling but also made crucial impacts on the conception of spectatorship and the discourse of cinematic realism. Taking the renovation project of Capital Theatre as an example, I show how the new cinematic space produced an immobile and individualized mode of spectatorship through the technological redistribution and management of individual bodies. Moreover, the growing technological capacity enabled technicians and recordists to imagine a different notion of cinematic realism, one that defined the verisimilitude of sonic ‘reality’ not in terms of its proximity to the empirical sound, but as the techno-perceptual effects within the sensory space of the movie theater. Drawing on sources from industry journal articles, construction reports, and academic papers by recordists, engineers, architects, acoustic technicians, etc., this article attempts to raise new problematics on the level of media infrastructure of socialist film and to promote meaningful dialogues with aesthetic, artistic and ideological issues.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"16 1","pages":"58 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48961998","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}