Journal of Chinese Cinemas最新文献

{"title":"Official Chinese film awards and film festivals: History, configuration and transnational legitimation","authors":"Seio Nakajima","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2019.1678498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2019.1678498","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Film awards and film festivals are one of important mechanisms that structure film markets, with awards activities as well as industry-related events. This paper examines government-approved, ‘official’ Chinese film awards such as the Huabiao Awards, the Hundred Flowers Awards and the Golden Rooster Awards, as well as film festivals including Changchun Film Festival, Shanghai International Film Festival and Beijing International Film Festival. I tackle three research questions: (1) How and when did the awards and the festivals come into existence? (2) What is the configuration of different types of awards and festivals? (3) What are different criteria of legitimation of the awards and the festivals? Contrary to the widely shared image of official Chinese film awards and festivals as closed sites of domestic political correctness, I show the dynamism and multiplicity of logics within them. In addition, I situate the awards and festivals in the ongoing context of transnationalisation of Chinese cinema. Analytically, I argue for the utility of ‘field theory’ in sociology to understand the structure and dynamics of official Chinese film awards and film festivals.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"13 1","pages":"228 - 243"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2019.1678498","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43707123","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":"Producing global China: The Great Wall and Hollywood’s cultivation of the PRC’s global vision","authors":"Aynne Kokas","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2019.1678485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2019.1678485","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract China’s economic might in the film industry has transformed representation in Hollywood. This paper examines how the expanded role of the Chinese market, both in terms of audience size and financing, has both reasserted hegemonic Hollywood genre and talent selection and asserted hegemonic Chinese standards. This takes the form of more genre films, more conservative casting in terms of race and gender, and the privileging of mainstream political discourse in both the United States in China. Using the case of Zhang Yimou’s 2016 martial arts monster film, The Great Wall, the article argues that the influence of the Chinese market on mainstream filmmaking reinforces, rather than challenges, the pressures shaping choices of financing, genre, and casting in Hollywood blockbusters.’","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"13 1","pages":"215 - 227"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2019.1678485","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42493458","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 moving image arts, 2015–2017: Observations and reflections","authors":"Bingfeng Dong, Junyuan Feng, Zoe Meng Jiang","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2019.1670420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2019.1670420","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Since 2000, moving image art (yingxiang yishu) has gradually become a common term in the field of Chinese contemporary art. “Moving image art” remains an unstable category instructive of the tension and paradox between different forms and content in discursive practices. Mapping key conferences, publications, institutions and exhibitions, this article examines how the idea of “moving image art” arose, circulated, and acquired legitimacy in different Chinese-speaking areas. Rather than conjuring up moving image arts as yet another autonomous subject of art history, this article understands moving image art as a phenomenon resulted from complex processes of negotiation between the local, the trans-regional and the global, as well as conscious social, technological and cultural realities. From 2015 to 2017, there has been a surge of historical survey exhibition on moving image art in major museums in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, albeit with very different agendas. Rather than providing a linear story of the development of moving image arts, this article takes as its departure point important conferences, exhibitions, institutions that appeared from 2015 to 2017, with the aim to unravel complementing and sometimes competing historiographic attempts.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"13 1","pages":"164 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2019.1670420","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45877501","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":"Chaotic formats","authors":"K. Grube, Zoe Meng Jiang","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2019.1669849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2019.1669849","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"13 1","pages":"109 - 111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2019.1669849","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42891393","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":"Porous circuits: Tsai Ming-liang, Zhao Liang, and Wang Bing at the Venice International Film Festival and the interplay between the festival and the art exhibition circuits","authors":"Elena Pollacchi","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2019.1665239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2019.1665239","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract From the perspective of film festival studies and on the basis of my first-hand experience at the Venice Film Festival, this article sheds some light on how the works of Tsai Ming-liang, Zhao Liang, and Wang Bing elucidate the interplay between the art exhibition and film festival circuits. These artist-filmmakers have contributed to and taken advantage of the porosity between the two circuits. Taking the Venice Film Festival as a vantage point of observation, this article discusses how their works have been able to move in and out the festival circuit to reach art exhibition spaces. Against a changing production and exhibition back-drop, they have fruitfully expanded their activities, reached a broader audience and expanded their production and exhibition network. What are the advantages and limitations of such porous systems? What is to be found that facilitates the dissemination of certain works across the two circuits? How do reputation and international prestige – here read as an expansion of Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” – translate into more production and exhibition opportunities? This organic discussion by taking into account the changes in the political economy of film production and exhibition in relation to certain aesthetic features, investigates the contrasting ways in which the festival and art circuits provide their own specific framing, produce different modes of meaning-making and result in quite different audience receptions. Furthermore, some observations on the works of the three artist-filmmakers suggest that festivals have progressively included these “festival and gallery films” in their regular programmes despite the challenges they present. This reinforces the idea of a virtuous circuit of increasing crossovers through which, artist-filmmakers capitalize on the reputation and prestige earned in one of the two circuits and invest it in the other. At the same time, film festivals have to take up new challenges, programming works with unconventional features that can be slower paced and of longer duration compared to what a festival audience is used to.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"13 1","pages":"130 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2019.1665239","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49359919","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":"Automobiles, screens and the Sinosphere","authors":"Elizabeth Parke","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2019.1669848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2019.1669848","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Film scholars writing about the Euro-American context note the strong historical and technical links between films and automobiles. Chinese cinema scholars have traced the relationship between mobile digital video (DV) recording devices and new interdisciplinary approaches to artmaking and filmmaking. However, the literature has yet to examine how this matrix of technologies operates in contemporary moving images produced in the Sinosphere. This article establishes a genealogy from cars-on-screen to screens-in-cars with examples from Jia Zhangke, Guan Hu and Huang Hsin-Yao and the lens-based works of Ai Weiwei and Cao Fei. In contrast, microfilms produced by BMW and Cadillac trade on neoliberal notions of the freedom on the open road, and the name recognition of Sinophone directors and stars to sell automobiles. Theoretically underpinning this work is Friedrich Kittler’s definition of media as techniques of transmission, processing, and archiving of information; moreover, George Seigel’s insights into the forensic qualities of media are read in relation to future evidentiary use of dashcam footage. In sum, the article focuses on mobilized vision enabled by cameras in cars, and demonstrates how these are manifest in the anxieties of fraud, the potentiality for violence, and the need to record the road.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"13 1","pages":"181 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2019.1669848","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47987339","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 animated worlds of Piercing I, iMirror, and RMB City: Decoding postsocialist reality through virtual spaces","authors":"Linda C. Zhang","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2019.1661946","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2019.1661946","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Realist aesthetics has dominated critical discussion of postsocialist Chinese cultural production. This paper argues that contemporary Chinese animated media subverts the logic of realism by enacting virtual spaces, and in turn, hosting abject scenarios of socio-economic marginalization and even fantastic illusions of hyper-consumerism. Liu Jian’s (2010) film Piercing I (刺痛我), depicts the plight of marginalized migrant workers in the big city and creates an absurd, exaggerated, and malnourished vision of a place where human characters lose their lives in a brutal, capitalist world. In contrast, multimedia artist’s Cao Fei’s (2007) virtual documentary, iMirror, joyfully explores digital creation in its colorful illusion of social mobility, following Cao Fei’s avatar as she explores the virtual platform of Second Life – an exploration that continues in her later digital city project, RMB City (2008–2011). Online and in the gallery, iMirror and RMB City invite user engagement and creativity with a hyper-consumerist and dream-like space. Despite their divergent visions, the animated spaces created in these projects provide an interface to decipher the reality of the world in a mediated manner, but they are also marked by an ideological ambivalence towards the experience of alienation in postsocialist urban life.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"13 1","pages":"147 - 163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2019.1661946","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44851468","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":"Shapeshifting fields: Mao Chenyu’s rural media ecology","authors":"B. Shaffer","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2019.1668584","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2019.1668584","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper examines the recent moving image work of artist, researcher, and rice farmer Mao Chenyu, who has spent over a decade making ethnographically inflected documentary work in his village outside of Yueyang in Hunan Province. With his innovative approaches, which combine the visual idioms of the essay film, found footage collage, autodidactic philosophical reflections, and observational cinema, his work provokes a conceptual reevaluation of rural life and agrarian labor among China’s peasantry. Mao is the founder of Paddy Film Farm, a grassroots operation that serves as both an independent film studio, as well as a cottage industry for the production of organic rice and strong liquor. Through his on-the-ground ethnographic research, he self-identifies as a “native anthropologist,” and explores new modes of knowledge production and experimental storytelling that are displayed in contexts ranging from China’s small circuit of underground film screenings to alternative art spaces and state-sponsored museums. In this paper, I draw on close readings of two of Mao’s films, I Have What? Chinese Peasants War: The Rhetoric to Justice (2014) and Cloud Explosion: Dongting Lake and the Death of Its Symbols (2015); multimedia installations at the 2016 Shanghai Biennial and a recent solo exhibition at A + Contemporary in Shanghai’s M50 Art District; and finally, on an analysis of my own ethnographic research (participant-observation field notes, informal interviews, textual analysis, and curated screenings and discussions) conducted with the artist between Shanghai and Yueyang from 2015 to 2017.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"13 1","pages":"112 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2019.1668584","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45342702","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":"Southeast Asian Film Festival: The site of the Cold War cultural struggle","authors":"E. Poon","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2019.1591749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2019.1591749","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Southeast Asian Film Festival (AFF), which commenced in 1954, was an annual event co-organized by Japanese and Southeast Asian film industries including Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines during the Cold War. Japanese film studio Daiei initiated AFF. Attempts to study AFF focus on the initiator, that is, Japanese cinema. This article contributes to the current scholarship by adding the participant, Hong Kong cinema. It examines the tensions at AFF between Hong Kong and Japanese cinema and further investigates the co-produced film between the two cinemas facilitated by AFF, Yang Kwei-Fei (Mizoguchi Kenji, 1955). The article conceptualizes AFF and the co-production as a site of cultural struggle. Japanese cinema’s attempts to maintain its hegemony in Asia and Hong Kong cinema’s pursuit of becoming an equal member of world-class film industries constituted this site of cultural struggle. Japan’s idea of consolidating Asia under its leadership was extended from wartime to AFF. On the other hand, Hong Kong cinema promoted an apolitical view of film but with a hint of nationalism in which the nation was indefinite. It adopted from Japanese cinema the ‘technologizing-centric’ idea: technology was key to defining its production standards and catching up with the West during the Cold War.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"13 1","pages":"76 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2019.1591749","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46933301","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":"Gained in translation: The reception of foreign cinema in Mao’s China","authors":"Jie Li","doi":"10.1080/17508061.2019.1591747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2019.1591747","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article studies the exhibition and reception of popular foreign titles in the cinematic memories of those who grew up in the Cultural Revolution: Soviet film Lenin in 1918 (1939), North Korean film The Flower Girl (1972), Albanian film Victory Over Death (1967), and Indian film Awara (1951). I argue that, as films crossed national, even continental borders to meet with mass audiences for whom they were never intended, the radically different exhibition and reception contexts helped generate new meanings “gained in translation.” Those heteroglossic “extrinsic meanings” revise David Bordwell’s referential, explicit, implicit and symptomatic meanings. This article will also delve into affective responses, hidden pleasures, and viewer identifications. Studying foreign cinema’s reception in Mao’s China broadens the field of “Chinese cinema studies” to include “cinema in China” with all of its cosmopolitan connections, revises our assessment of the Cultural Revolution, and invites us to reconsider today’s Chinese media ecology in light of its socialist past.","PeriodicalId":43535,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Cinemas","volume":"13 1","pages":"61 - 75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17508061.2019.1591747","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44046090","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}