Film: Director

Ai Xiaoming 艾晓明

“Ai Xiaoming on Vimeo.” Vimeo.

Chang, Tieh-Chih and Ying Qian. “Ai Xiaoming the Camera Citizen: Interview.” New Left Review 72 (Nov.-Dec. 2011).

Chen, Thomas. “Ai Xiaoming and the Quarantine Counter-Diary.” The Los Angeles Review of Books (March 12, 2021).

“Interview with Ai Xiaoming.” Global Feminisms Project. Deep Blue.

Peng, Yurong and Judith Pernin. “‘My Work Constitutes a Form of Participatory Action’: An Interview with Ai Xiaoming.” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 58-65.

Thornham, Sue. “The Importance of Memory: An Interview with Ai Xiaoming.” In Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong, eds., Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices. Maidenhead, England: Open University Press, 2008, 178-88.

Bi Gan 毕赣

Chan, Andrew. “Lucid Dreams: A Conversation with Bi Gan.” Criterion (April 15, 2019).

Hoberman, J. “Love Anomie: J. Hoberman on Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Artforum 57, 7 (March 2019): 65-66.

Williams, Blake. “Apt Pupil: Bi Gan on Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Cinema-Scope 75 (2018)

Xiao, Jiwei. “Creating a Cinema of Dream and Memory: An Interview with Bi Gan.” Cineaste (Summer 2019).

Xiao, Jiwei and Dudley Andrew. “Poetics and Periphery: The Journey of Kaili Blues.” Cineaste (Summer 2019).

Bu Wancang 卜万苍

Harris, Kristine. “Ombres Chinoises: Splits Screens and Parallel Lives in Love and Duty.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 39-61

Lei, Bi-qi Beatrice. “Paradox of Chinese Nationalism: Two Gentlemen of Verona in Silent Film.” In Bi-qi Beatrice Lei and Ching-Hsi Perng, eds., Shakespeare in Culture. Taiwan: National Tawiwang University Press, 2012, 251-284.

Cao Fei 曹斐

Bannister, Laura. “In Conversation: Cao Fei on Fakes, Facsimiles and Factory Work.” Museum 7.

Berry, Chris. “Images of Urban China in Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises.” China Information 29, 2 (2015): 201-25. Rpt. in Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang, eds., Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China Urbanized Interface. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 209-36.

[Abstract: This article examines the moving image works of Chinese artist Cao Fei as a response to China’s rapid urbanization and the transformation of its existing urban spaces which are no longer shaped by socialism but instead by what this article considers as China’s engagement with neo-liberalism, including and facilitated by globalization. The urban sprawl of the Pearl River Delta inspired Rem Koolhaas’s writings on the ‘generic city’, which he celebrates precisely for its blandness. Cao herself is from Guangzhou. Yet, in works such as RMB City, Haze and Fog, Whose Utopia, and Hip Hop: Guangzhou, Cao creates what she calls ‘magical metropolises’. This article asks what kind of responses Cao’s ‘magical’ works are to contemporary Chinese urbanization. As part of the answer to this question, it applies four hermeneutic frameworks to analyse the works themselves. The findings from each of those frameworks indicate that Cao’s work not only reflects the current Chinese urban condition, but also participates and intervenes in it in various ways.]

Chau, Angie. “‘An Archivist’s Fantasy Gone Mad’: The Age of Exhibition in Cao Fei’s Posthuman Trilogy.” Concentric 43, 2 (Sept. 2017): 221–247.

Fok, Silvia. “Micro-narratives in Contemporary Chinese Art: A Case Study of Cao Fei’s Pearl River Delta Anti-heroes.” Asian Studies Review 35, 4 (2011).

[Abstract: This paper investigates the representation of micro-narratives in contemporary Chinese art by examining the multi-layered narratives in Cao Fei’s Pearl River Delta Anti-heroesperformed at the opening of the 2^nd Guangzhou Triennial in 2005. I consider Cao’s work as a hyper-realistic portrayal of the micro-narratives of the Pearl River Delta region in a mediated form highly influenced by the media, entertainment industry and popular culture of the region and Hong Kong. Theatricality, kitsch and the distinctive local essence of South China are revealed in the form of a TV soap opera and the use of colloquial Cantonese throughout the performance, along with occasional Putonghua or Mandarin. Language as a signifier of cultural politics has been deployed as an indispensable tool to empower the region within the broader body politic of the People’s Republic of China.]

Zhang, Linda C. “The Animated Worlds of Piercing I, iMirror, and RMB City: Decoding Postsocialist Reality through Virtual Spaces.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 2 (June 2019): 147-63.

Zhang, Ling. “Digitizing City Symphony, Stabilizing the Shadow of Time: Montage and Temporal– Spatial Construction in San Yuan Li.” In Matthew Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds., China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-first Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 105-24.

Evans Chan 陳耀成

Berry, Michael. “Evans Chan: The Last of the Chinese.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 508-42.

Evans Chan Website

Marchetti, Gina. “Transnational Cinema, Hybrid Identities and the Films of Evans Chan.” Postmodern Culture 8, 2 (1998).

—–. “Documentary and Democracy: An Interview with Evans Chan.” Asian Cinema 33, 2 (2022): 257-75.

Rodriguez, Hector. “Homelessness and Self-Disclosure: Evans Chan’s ‘Minor’ Cinema.” Cinemaya 54/55 (Winter/Spring 2002): 20-25.

Williams, Tony. “Crossings: A Transnational Cinematic Text.” Asian Cinema 11, 2 (Fall/Winter 2000): 67-75. [on Evans Chan’s Crossings]

—–, “Issues of Decolonization: Two Essay Documentaries by Evans Chan.” Asian Cinema 18, 1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 177-201.

—–, ed. Postcolonialism, Diaspora, and Alternative Histories: The Cinema of Evans Chan. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2015.

[Abstract: offers the first comprehensive survey of the cinema of Evans Chan, a New York–based playwright, author, and filmmaker whose acclaimed films include To Liv(e), The Map of Sex and Love, and Datong. In this collection of essays on Chan’s documentary and feature films seven experts on cultural and film studies examine the unique blending of fictional representation, historical investigation, and critical essayism that characterize Chan’s oeuvre. They discuss how Chan’s work brings out the contradictory nature of the distant and recent past through his exploration of Hong Kong’s rapid transformation before and after reunification with China in 1997. The volume concludes with an interview with Evans Chan on his work to date and includes two DVDs containing five of his most important films. Essays by Tony Williams, Amy Lee, Hector Rodriguez, Kenneth Chan, Gina Marchetti, Michael Ingham, and Stacilee Ford]

Wong, Tak-wai, ed. Evans Chanís TO LIV(E): Screenplay and Essays. HK: University of Hong Kong, Department of Comparative Literature, 1996.

Fruit Chan 陳果

Berry, Michael. “Fruit Chan: Hong Kong Independent.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 458-83.

Bachner, Andrea. 2018. “From China to Hong Kong with Horror: Transcultural Consumption in Fruit Chan’s Dumplings.” Interventions (May).

Cheung, Esther. “Durian, Durian: Defamiliarisation of the ‘Real.'” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave, 2008, 90-97.

—–. Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2009.

Chong, Woei Lien, “Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung: Two Chinese Highlights at the 2001 International Rotterdam Film Festival.” China Information 15, 1 (2001):166-196.

Choy, Howard Y. F. “Linguistic Identity in Fruit Chan’s 1997 Trilogy.” In David Gallagher, ed., World Cinema and the Visual Arts. London: Anthem Press, 2012, 89-98.

Dissanayake, Wimal. “The Class Imaginary in Fruit Chan’s Films.” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007).

Gan, Wendy. Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. [HKUP blurb]

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Chromatic Expression in Contemporary Chinese Language Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 3 (2012): 211-231. [deals in part with Dumplings]

Huber, Christoph. “Curious About Crap: Fruit Chan’s Public Toilet (2002).” Senses of Cinema 24 (Jan/Feb 2003).

Khiun, Liew Kai. “Fracturing, Fixing, and Healing Bodies in the Films of Fruit Chan.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 6, 3 (2009): 209-225.

[Abstract: This article explores the treatment of the issues of disability and healing in the films of Hong Kong’s independent filmmaker, Fruit Chan, between the years 1997 and 2004. These films include: Made in Hong Kong, Little Cheung, Longest Summer, Hollywood Hong-Kong, Durian Durian, Public Toilet and Dumplings. Distinguished by his efforts to forefront subaltern subjects in the city, Chan’s films highlight the complexities of the relationship between social marginality and disability, as well as the medical market and healing cultures. By contrasting diverse forms of healing in his highly hybridized and transnational vernacular medical marketplace, Chan’s films are instrumental in displaying the underlying tensions of bio-politics on screen.]

Kleinhans, Chuck. “Serving the People–Dumplings.” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007).

Lu, Tonglin. “Fruit Chan’s Dumplings–New ‘Diary of a Madman’ in Post-Mao Global Capitalism.” The China Journal 10, 2 (2010).

[Abstract: This essay examines Fruit Chan’s 2004 horror film Dumplings, which uses cannibalism as a metaphor for Chinese tradition. In this respect, the film has inherited Lu Xun’s criticism of Chinese tradition in his “Diary of a Madman” at the beginning of the 20th century. This tradition, however, has been changed radically through the modernization process. Dumplings presents contemporary Chinese culture as a hybrid combination, which has been transformed not only by Maoist legacy but also by the powerful influence of global capitalism.]

Tong, Chris. “Toward a Hong Kong Ecocinema: The Dis-appearance of Nature iin Three Films by Fruit Chan.” In In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 171-94.

Udden, James . “On the Shoulders of Giants: Tsai Ming-liang, Jia Zhangke, Fruit Chan and the Struggles of Second Generation Auteurism.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 158-66.

Wong, Aida Yuen. “Three Films about Food by Fruit Chan: Allegories of Hong Kong-China Relations after 1997.” Asian Cinema 16, 2 (Fall/Witner 2005): 229-41.

Xu, Gary G. “Hollywod Hong Kong, Hollywood Hong Kong, and the Cinematic Mode of Production.” In Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 133-49.

Jackie Chan 成龍

Chan, Kenneth. “Mimicry as Failure: Jackie Chan in Hollywood.” Asian Cinema 15, 2 (Fall/Winter 2004): 84-97.

Fore, Steve. “Jackie Chan and the Cultural Dynamics of Global Entertainment.” In Sheldon Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

—–. “Life Imitates Entertainment: Home and Dislocation in the Films of Jackie Chan.” In Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 115-42.

Szeto, Kin-Yan. “Jackie Chan’s Cosmopolitical Consciousness and Comic Displacement.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, 2 (Fall 2008): 229-260. Rpt. as “Jackie Chan and the Politics of Comic Displacement.” In Szeto, The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan in Hollywood. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011, 113-43.

Teng, Sue-Feng. “From Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan-The Kungfu Film Carries On.” Sinorama (Jun. 1996): 28-35.

Peter Chan (Chen Kexin) 陳可辛

Chow, Rey. “By way of Mass Commodities: Love in Comrades, Almost a Love Story.” In Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. NY: Columbia, UP, 2007.

Stokes, Lisa Odham. Peter Ho-sun Chan’s He’s a Woman, She’s a Man. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2009.

[Abstract: This raucous, gender-stretching comedy follows the disruptions of a glamorous Hong Kong music couple’s tumultuous romance by an “ordinary” fan’s noisy arrival in their lives. With great comic story development, the film confronts social stereotypes of masculine females, male anxieties about homosexuality, and the limits of male femininity. The book offers important background on comedic narrative structure in Cantonese opera and other traditional sources that have influenced Hong Kong cinema.]

Stuckey, Andrew. “The World Out There: Spectacle and Exposure in Perhaps Love.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 1 (2014): 17-36

[Abstract: Despite achieving significant success at the box office, academic considerations of Peter Ho-sun Chan’s 2005 musical, Perhaps Love, have mostly focused on it as an example of pan-Asian film production and marketing. This article, in contrast, offers a close reading that explores Perhaps Love’s engagement with musical film genre conventions, principally the tension created between spectacle and integration, and places this in the context of other recent examples of the musical genre, especially Moulin Rouge! The metacinematic features of the film-within-a-film structure that Perhaps Love adopts, likewise, highlight performance and self-promotion/exposure that are also prominent characteristics of the musical genre. Finally, this article considers gender relations in the musical, noting Perhaps Love’s modification of generic conventions in its refusal to consummate the romantic relationship as well as the differing fates of the male and female protagonists.]

Sylvia Chang 張艾嘉

Zhang, Zhen. “Migrating Hearts: The Cultural Geography of Sylvia Chang’s Melodrama.” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 88-110.

Chen Guofu 陳果夫

Chen, Robert Ru-Shou. “‘This Isn’t Real!’: Spatialized Narration and (In)visible Special Effects in Double Vision.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 108-15.

Deppman, Hsiu-Chuang. “The Cinema of Disillusionment: Chen Guofu, Cai Mingliang, and Taiwan’s Second New Wave.” positions: east asia cultures critique 17, 2 (2009): 435-54.

[Abstract: This essay is a study of Chen Guofu and Cai Mingliang, two prominent Taiwan directors whose work in the 1980s helped shape the Second New Wave movement. More recently, Chen’s 1998 The Personals and Cai’s 2002 What Time Is It There? broke new ground by developing controlled realist styles into an aesthetics of “disillusioned cinema”: a postmodern urban genre that simultaneously derides personal fantasies of sexual love and political fantasies of nation building. Both films use the formulas of romance to highlight the illusions and alienations of contemporary love, of individual pleasures disintegrating communal bonds. On a more symbolic level, they banish male authority into the netherworld and deconstruct patriarchal structures, some of which can be associated with the oppression of “first-world” cultural imperialism. Such thematic and allegorical topics are presented through a variety of styles–including play-within-the-play, repetitions of plot and motif, and symbolic mise-en-sc?ne–with Cai, in particular, testing the possibilities of antinarrative. Both directors also use a gendered filmic language to illustrate Taiwan’s “third-world” deconstruction of the classical Hollywood narrative and to echo the crises of a new democracy.]

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “The Personals: Backward Glances, Knowing Looks and the Voyeur Film.” In Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 175-81.

Kaldis, Nick. “Monogamorphous Desires, Faltering Forms: Structure, Content, and Contradictions in The Personals (Zhenghun Qishi) (Taiwan, 1998).” Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring 2004): 37-56.

Kraicer, Shelly. “The Personals” (review). Chinesecinemas.org.

Chen Kaige 陈凯歌

An, Jingfu. “The Pain of a Half Taoist: Taoist Principles, Chinese Landscape Painting and King of the Children.” In Linda Erlich and David Desser, eds.,Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994, 117-26.

Berry, Chris and Mary Ann Farquhar. “Post-Socialist Stategies: An Analysis of Yellow Earth and Black Cannon Incident.” In Linda Erlich and David Desser, eds., Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994, 81-116.

—–. “Farewell My Concubine: At What Price Success?” Cinemaya 20 (1993): 20-22.

Berry, Michael. “Chen Kaige: Historical Revolution and Cinematic Rebellion.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 82-107.

Braester, Yomi. “Farewell My Concubine: National Myth and City Memories.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 89-96. Rpt. in Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave, 2008, 106-113.

Chen, Kaige, Wan Zhi, Tony Rayns. King of the Children and the New Chinese Cinema. London: Faber and Faber, 1989. [includes script of the film in English translation]

Chen, Kaige. “Breaking the Circle: The Cinema and Cultural Change in China.” Cineaste 18, 3 (1990): 28-32.

Chen, Ming-May Jessie and Mazharul Haque. Representation of the Cultural Revolution in Chinese Films by the Fifth Generation Filmmakers: Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Tian Zhuangzhuang. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007.

Chen, Pauline. “History Lessons.” Film Comment (March-April 1994): 85-87. [Farewell My Concubine]

Chen, Ya-chen 陳雅湞, ed. Ba wang bie ji: tongzhi yuedu yu kua wenhua duihua 霸王別姬：同志閱讀與跨文化對話 (Farewell My Concubine: Same-Sex Readings and Cross-Cultural Dialogues). Chia-i, Taiwan: Nanhua daxue, 2004. [Nan Hua University Press’s Official Website of the Book]

Cheng, W. K. “Imagining the People: Yellow Earth and the Enigma of Nationalist Consciousness.” The China Review 2, 2 (Fall 2002): 37–63.

[Abstract: This paper is an attempt to adumbrate how the modern experience of the demands of nationalist imagination has exerted profound, contorting effects on Chinese consciousness in a burdened state of mind. We take as our analytical vehicle a deliberate juxtaposition of two supposedly inter-referencing texts: Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth and his contemporary reminiscence of the film project. Rather than the apparent thematic unity of these two texts, we find instead a complex of incongruity and discordance that is impelled by the tension between what we call the folklorist and visionary impulses. These impulses produce competing and coexisting instances of authenticity that are, in the final analysis, only possible because they are authorized by the totalizing weight of nationalist yearning.]

Cheshire, Godfrey. “The Long Way Home.” Film Comment (July-August 1992): 36-39.

Chiang, Chih-Yun. “Representing Chineseness in Globalized Cultural Production: Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine.” China Media Research 7, 1 (2011): 101-111.

Chong, Woei Lien, “Chen Kaige’s ‘Farewell to My Concubine’: Some Personal Musings.” China Information (Supplement) 9, 1 (Summer 1994): 41-47.

Chong, Woei Lien. “Le mystique de la nature dans le cinema chinois” (Nature mysticism in Chinese cinema). In Critique Internationale, Paris: Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI) (July 2003): 48-58. [English translation of this essay made available by the author to MCLC Resource Center]

Chow, Rey. “Silent is the Ancient Plain: Music, Filmmaking and the Conception of Reform in China’s New Cinema.” Discourse 12, 2 (1990): 82-109. Rpt. in Chow, Primitive Passsions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. NY: Columbia UP, 1995.

—–. “Male Narcissism and National Culture: Subjectivity in Chen Kaige’s King of the Children.” In Ellen Widmer and David Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993, 327-59.

—–. “The Seduction of Homecoming: Place, Authenticity, and Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon.” Narrative 6, 1 (January 1998): 3-17. Rpt. in Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Cross-Cultural Readings of Chineseness: Narratives, Images, and Interpretations of the 1990s. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 2000, 8-26. Rpt. in Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. NY: Columbia, UP, 2007.

Clark, Paul. “‘Passion, Courage, Commitment’: Chen Kaige’s Later Films.” In Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2005, 146-63.

Cui, Shuqin. “Subjected Body and Gendered Identity: Female Impersonation in Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine.” In Cui, Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003, 150-66.

Donald, Stephanie. “Landscape and Agency: Yellow Earth and the Demon Lover.” Theory, Culture and Society 14, 1 (1997): 97-112.

The Emperor and the Assassin Website (Sony Classics)

Farquhar, Mary Ann. “The ‘Hidden’ Gender in Yellow Earth.” Screen 33, 2 (Summer 1992).

Fu, Jin. “Reflections on the Film Forever Enthralled (Mei Lanfang). Tr. Anne Rebull. The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 476-85.

Gong, Haomin. “A World without Enemies: Revenge, Sacrifice, and Redemption in Chen Kaige’s Adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Review 43 (2021): 69-84.

Hong, Lanxing. “Farewell My Concubine.” (movie reviews) Beijing Review 36, 26 (June 28, 1993): 29

Huashuo Huang tudi 话说黄土地 (Talking about Yellow Earth). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1986.

Jaivin, Linda. “Who Owns Chen Kaige?” Quadrant (Aug. 1987): 15-17.

Kaplan, Ann. “Reading Formations and Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine.” In Sheldon Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

Larson, Wendy. “The Concubine and the Figure of History: Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine.” In Sheldon Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997; also published as “Bawang bieji: Ji yu lishi xingxiang,” Qingxiang (1997); also in Harry Kuoshu, ed., Chinese Film, ed. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000.

—–. “Duanwu Goes Home: Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon and the Politics of Homecoming.” In Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Cross-Cultural Readings of Chineseness: Narratives, Images, and Interpretations of the 1990s. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 2000, 27-52.

Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah. “‘Farewell My Concubine’: History, Melodrama, and Ideology in Contemporary Pan-Chinese Cinema.” Film Quarterly 49, 1 (Fall, 1995).

Lee, Haiyan. “The Charisma of Power and the Military Sublime in Tiananmen Square.”Journal of Asian Studies 70, 2 (May 2011): 397–424. [Deals in part with Chen Kaige’s 1985 film The Big Parade.]

Leung, Helen Hok-Sze. “Yellow Earth: Hesitant Apprenticeship and Bitter Agency.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 191-97. Rpt in Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 258-64.

Li, H.C. “Color, Character, and Culture: On Yellow Earth, Black Canon Incident, and Red Sorghum.” Modern Chinese Literature 5, 1 (Spring 1989): 91-119.

Lim, Song Hwee. “The Uses of Femininity: Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine and Zhang Yuan’s East Palace, West Palace.” In Lim, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2006, 69-98.

Lu, Alvin. “Chen Kaige: Chinese Film Director.” Film Comment (Sept-Oct. 1997).

Lu, Tonglin. “Continuity and Subversion: Chen Kaige, Yellow Earth, Big Parade, King of the Children.” Lu, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 25-57.

McDougall, Bonnie S. “Cross-dressing and the Disappearing Woman in Modern Chinese Fiction, Drama and Film: Reflections on Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine.” China Information 8, 4 (Summer 1994): 42-51.

—–. The Yellow Earth: A Film by Chen Kaige, with a Complete Translation of the Filmscript. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1991. [in addition to a script of the film, contains much information and discussion about the film, its production, and the public and critical responses to it]

Metzger, Sean. “Farewell My Fantasy.” The Journal of Homosexuality 39, 3/4 (2000): 213-32. Rpt. in Andrew Grossman, ed. Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade. NY: Harrington Press, 2000, 213-232.

Qian, Kun. “Love or Hate: The First Emperor on Screen–Three Movies on the Attempted Assassination of the First Emperor Qin Shihuang.” Asian Cinema 20, 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 39-67.

Rafferty, Terrence. “Farewell My Concubine.” (movie review) New Yorker 69, 33 (Oct 11, 1993).

Rayns, Tony. “Life on a String.” Sight and Sound (March 1992): 36-37.

—–. “Ba Wang Bie Ji (Farewell My Concubine).” (movie review) Sight and Sound 4, 1 (Jan, 1994).

—–. “The Narrow Path: Chen Kaige in Conversation with Tony Rayns.” In John Boorman and Walter Donohue, eds. Projection 3: Filmmakers on Filmmaking. London: 1994.

Romney, Jonathan. “Farewell My Concubine” (review). New Statesman & Society 7, 284 (Jan 7, 1994).

Shi, Xiaoling. “Song Liling and Cheng Dieyi: An Orientalized Asian and His Native Informant–Comparing M. Butterfly and Farewell My Concubine.” Asian Cinema 20, 2 (Winter/Fall 2009): 226-40.

Shu, Kei. “Letter to Chen Kaige.” Cinemaya 20 (1993): 18-20.

Silvio, Teri. “Chinese Opera, Global Cinema, and the Ontology of the Person: Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine.” In Jeongwon Joe and Rose Theresa, eds., Between Opera and Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2002, 177-197.

Tam, Kwok-kan and Wimal Dissanayake. “Chen Kaige: Steps Toward a Personal Cinema.” New Chinese Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Tian Ying 天鹰. “Dianying yu shishi zhi jian: Huang tudi de xunxi” 电影与事实之间黄土地的讯息 (Between fact and film: a search for Yellow Earth). Dangdai (May 1985): 82-85.

Together (official website of Chen Kaige’s 2003 film)

Wang, Nashuyuan. “Mapping an Emotional Geography in Fareweill, My Concubine and East Palace, West Palace: Imaginary Queer Space and Beijing Queer Film Festival.” Senses of Cinema 106 (Aug. 2023).

Xia Gan and Qing Yuanliang. “Bawang bieji yu ren zhi changqing” 霸王别姬与人之常情 (Farewell my Concubine and common sense). Jintian 1 (1994): 228-334.

Xiao, Zhiwei. “Farewell My Concubine.” (movie reviews) American Historical Review 100, 4 (Oct, 1995).

Xu, Ben. “Farewell My Concubine and Its Western and Chinese Viewers.” Quarterly Review of Film and Television 16, 2 (1997).

Yau, Esther. “Yellow Earth: Western Analysis and a Non-Western Text” Film Quarterly 41.2 (Winter 1987-88): 22-33. Reprinted in Berry ed. Perspectives on Chinese Film. London: British Film Institute, 1991. 62-79.

“Yellow Earth.” In Barme and Minford, eds. Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience. New York: Noonday Press, 1988.251-69.

Zeng, Hong. “Failure of Root-Searching in Chen Kaige.” In Zeng, Semiotics of Exile in Contemporary Chinese Film. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 123-38.

Zha, Jianying. “Chen Kaige and the Shadows of the Revolution.” Sight and Sound (Feb. 1994): 28-36.

Zhang, Benzi. “Figures of Violence and Tropes of Homophobia: Reading Farewell My Concubine between East and West.” Journal of Popular Culture: Comparative Studies in the World’s Civilizations 33, 2 (1999): 101-109.

—–. “Im/De-position of Cultural Violence: Reading Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine.” In John C. Hawley ed., Post-colonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. 63-70.

Zhang, Jiaxuan. “The Big Parade” (review) Film Quarterly 42, 1 (Fall 1989): 57-59.

Zhang, Xudong. “A Critical Account of Chen Kaige’s King of the Children.” In Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms. Durham: Duke UP, 1997, 282-305.

Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting

Ford, Staci. “Transpacific Waves in a Global Sea: Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting’s Cinematic Archive.” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 330-46.

Zero Chou 周美玲

Chang, Ivy I-chu. “Mourning Love: Queer Performativity and Transformation in Zero Chou’s Spider Lilies and Splendid Float.” In Chang, Taiwan Cinema, Memory, and Modernity. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Pecic, Zoran Lee. “Zero Chou’s Tongzhi Trilogy.” In Pecic, New Queer Sinophone Cinema: Local Histories, Transnational Connections. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 101-38.

—–. Sinophone Queerness and Female Auteurship in Zero Chou’s Drifting Flowers.” IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film 3, 1 (2016): 22-35

[Abstract: This article investigates the third instalment of the Taiwanese director Zero Chou’s tongzhi trilogy. It suggests that her 2009 film Drifting Flowers defies the “global gay” narratives of identity formation whilst remaining rooted in Taiwan’s cultural and geographical space. The article argues that the inter- and intratextual elements in Chou’s cinema position her as a Taiwanese queer auteur whose inclusive queerness points to new directions in not only New Queer Sinophone Cinema but also queer cinema globally.]

Ruth, Jennifer. “Taiwan’s Founding Mothers?: Untold Herstory.” No Man Is an Island (Oct. 11, 2022).

Stephen Chow 周星馳

Chan, Kenneth. “Transforming Tripitika: Toward a (Buddhist) Planetary Ethics in Stephen Chow’s Adaptation of Journey to the West.” In Kenneth Chan and Andrew Stuckey, eds., Sino-Enchantment: The Fantastic in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2021, 223-44.

Chew, Matthew Ming-tak. “Rethinking the Cultural Relations between Hong Kong and China: An Analysis of the Chinese Reception of Stephen Chow’s Films.” Modern China 48, 3 (2022): 785-813.

[Abstract: This is a cultural sociological study of the mainland Chinese reception of the films of Stephen Chow, the popular Hong Kong actor and director. This study’s theoretical objective is to rethink the cultural relations between post-handover Hong Kong and China. Its empirical analysis challenges five major frameworks of studying post-handover Hong Kong culture that interpret Hong Kong–China cultural relations as hegemonic and conflictual. The study’s first substantive section establishes that the Chinese reception of Chow’s films has been very positive and well participated. The second and third sections illustrate that the Chinese scholarly reception of Chow’s films and the Chinese popular audience reception of them stress their counter-hegemonic characteristics. This study’s data include the hundreds of Chinese-language publications on Chow, online sources, and interviews with twenty-four informants.]

Klein, Christina. “Kung Fu Hustle: Transnational Production and the Global Chinese language Film.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, 3 (Sept. 2007): 189-208.

Leung, Wing-fai. “Infernal Affairs and Kung-fu Hustle: Panacea, Placebo, and Hong Kong Cinema.” In Leon Hunt and Wing-fai Leung, eds., East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film. NY: I. B. Taurus, 2008, 71-87.

Qian, Kun. “Pandora’s Box: Time-Image in A Chinese Odyssey and the Becoming of Chinese Cinema.” Asian Cinema 22,1 (Spring/Summer, 2011): 308-28.

Szeto, Kin-Yan. “The Politics of Historiography in Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle.” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007).

Xu, Gang. “The Gongfu of Kung-fu Hustle.” Synoptique 10 (August 2005): 6-9.

—–. “Shaw Brothers’ Old Cinema Excavated: From Kung Fu Hustle to Goodbye, Dragon Inn.” In Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 89-110.

Cui Zi’en 崔子恩

Berry, Chris. “The Sacred, the Profane, and the Domesitc in Cui Zi’en’s Cinema.” positions: east asia cultures critique 12, 1 (Spring 2004): 196-201.

Cui, Zi’en. “The Communist International of Queer Film.” positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 2 (Fall 2010): 417-23.

Ferry, Megan. “Between Realism and Romanticism: Queering Gender Representation in Cui Zi’en’s Night Scene.” In Jason Kuo, ed., Contemporary Chinese Art and Film: Theory Applied and Resisted. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2012, 185-208.

Wang, Qi. “The Ruin Is Already a New Outcome: An Interview with Cui Zi’en.” positions: east asia cultures critique 12, 1 (Spring 2004): 181-94.

—–. “Embodied Visions: Chinese Queer Experimental Documentaries by Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en.” positions: asia critique 21, 3 (Summer 2013): 659-81.

Yue, Audrey. “Mobile Intimacies in the Queer Sinophone Films of Cui Zi’en.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 1 (March 2012): 95-.

[Abstract: Queer Sinophone cinema includes queer Chinese cinemas outside of China, and queer Chinese films in China that are beneficiaries of peripheral Chinese and global western queer film markets. Located in the margins of Chinese heteronormativity, queer Sinophone cinema questions the ontology of kinship and new queer subjectivities that are produced by the global reordering of Chinese modernity. This article examines the cinema of China’s foremost gay film-maker, Cui Zi’en, as an example of queer Sinophone cinema. In particular, it analyses two films, Refrain (2006) and The Narrow Path (2004), to critically consider how Cui’s films exploit the discourse of mobile intimacy to reveal gay intimacy as a site of movement between sign, image and constituency; straight and queer men; and ethics of exposure and concealment. As intimate and excentric to Chinese heteronormativity, these films articulate and question how emancipatory and regulatory neo-liberal Chinese gay identities are governed and challenged.]

Zhang, Jie. “Cui Zi’en’s Night Scene and China’s Visual Queer Discourse.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 1 (Spring 2012): 88-111.

Zhu, Ying. “Cui Zi’en.” In David Gerstner, ed., International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture – Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transexual Cultures. London: Routledge: 2006.

Dong Kena 董克娜

Wang, Lingzhen. “Socialist Cinema and Female Authorship: Overdetermination and Subjective Revisions in Dong Kena’s Small Grass Grows on the Kunlun Mountain (1962).” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 47-65.

Fan Lixin 範立欣

Svetvilas, Chuleenan. “Made in China: ‘Last Train Home’ Documents the Life of the Migrant Worker.” International Documentary Association, September 6, 2010. [Extensive interview with Fan Lixin 范立欣]

Wang, Yanjie. “Trauma, Migrant Families, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Last Train Home.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42, 1 (2016): 49-72.

[Abstract: This paper examines the traumatic experience of migrant workers through a reading of Lixin Fan’s award-winning documentary film Last Train Home (2009). I am not primarily concerned, like most trauma-studies-based research, with grand, clearly recognizable catastrophes. I also avoid generalizing about human suffering in the age of global capitalism. I focus rather on post-Socialist China’s more hidden social violence and its traumatizing effect on the quotidian life of migrant workers—a subaltern group on the periphery of society. I argue that the trauma of the marginalized population must be socially and politically contextualized. The first section of the essay investigates the traumatic sense of homelessness suffered by the film’s migrant family. I show how the family members’ loss of home is due to both the alienating capitalist mode of production and the cunning hukou system that turns migrant workers into a perpetually floating population. The second part concentrates on the painful intergenerational chasm. Here I argue that the father-daughter strife is a symptom, not just of the clash between modernity and tradition but of the falsehood maintained by neoliberal discourse. Neoliberal narratives of education and consumption construct fantasies such as that of mobility and freedom, subsuming migrant laborers within the nation’s capitalist economy and trapping them in a prison of unrealizable hopes. The film ultimately exposes and critiques the state-capital alliance that controls and deprives migrant workers through its economic, political and epistemic strategies.]

Fang Jiarui 章家瑞

Wang, Xiaoping. “Presenting an Artificial Dilemma for the Working Class: On the Narrative Strategy of The Road as a ‘National Epic.'” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 4 (2014): 555-74.

Fei Mu 费穆

Daruvala, Susan. “The Aesthetics and Moral Politics of Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, 3 (Sept. 2007): 171-88.

Fan, Victor. “Fey Mou: The Presence of an Absence.” In Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015, 109-52.

Fitzgerald, Carolyn. “Spring in a Small Town: Gazing at Ruins.” Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 205-11.

—–. “Between Forgetting and the Repetitions of Memory: Fei Mu’s Aesthetics of Desolation in Spring in a Small Town.” In Fitzgerald, Fragmenting Modernisms: Chinese Wartime Literature, Art, and Film, 1937-49. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 169-216.

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Chromatic Expression in Contemporary Chinese Language Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 3 (2012): 211-231. [deals in part with Shengsi hen 生死恨 (1948), China’s first color film]

Li, Cheuk-to. “Spring in a Small Town: Mastery and Restraint.” Cinemaya 49 (2000): 59-64.

Li, Jie. “Home and Nation Amid the Rubble: Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (Fall 2009): 86-125.

Liu, Wei. Spatialization of Confucian ethics in the Song of China.” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 7, 2 (2021): 207-21.

[Abstract: This article analyses the understudied film <i>Song of China</i>, mainly directed by Fei Mu, and argues that Confucian morality is spatialized and encapsulated in various chronotopes through the construction and movement of three types of ethical space (the space of propriety, the space of misconduct and the liminal space between good and evil), which enhances the aesthetic effect of conveying moral and political messages. The three main characters in the movie – the FATHER, the SON and the GRANDSON – each open up one of the three ethical spaces, and the spatial constructions interact or conflict with each other in the larger polarized spaces of country and city. Eventually, the temporospatial transmission of Confucian ethical values is achieved when the space of propriety is expanded from the individual to the whole society, the space of misconduct is closed up and the liminal space is transformed into the space of propriety. This ideal moral state has the political implication of promoting fascist militarization in the social context of the time. This analysis of ethical space and chronotopes sheds new light on the artistic technique employed in this silent film.]

Wang, David Der-wei. “Fei Mu, Mei Lanfang, and the Polemics of Screening China.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 62-78.

—–.”Fei Mu, Mei Lanfang, and the Poetics of Screening China.” In Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis. NY: Columbia University Press, 2015, 271-310.

Wang, Yuanyuan. “The Travel’s of Fei Mu’s film Confucius from 1939 to the Present.” The Journal of Cambridge Studies 4, no. 2 (June 2009): 126-38. [PDF download from Journal of Cambridge Studies]

Wong, Ain-ling. “Fei Mu: A Different Destiny.” Cinemaya 49 (2000): 52-58.

—– 黄爱玲, ed. Shiren daoyan Fei Mu 诗人导演费穆 (Poet Director Fei Mu). Shanghai: Fudan daxue, 2015.

—–. “Between Chineseness and Modernity: The Film Art of Fei Mu.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 467-72.

Wu Hung. “Between Past and Future: Transience as a Contemporary Aesthetic of Ruins.” In Wu, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, 165-235.

Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚

Braester, Yomi. “Chinese Cinema in the Age of Advertisement: The Filmmaker as a Cultural Broker.” The China Quarterly 183 ( Sept. 2005): 549-564

Cheng, Scarlet. “There’s Nothing Like Being There.” Los Angeles Times (Nov. 2, 1998). [about the filming of Feng Xiaogang’s Be There or Be Square]

Gong, Haomin. “Commerce and the Critical Edge: Negotiating the Politics of Postsocialist Film, the Case of Feng Xiaogang.”Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 3 (2009): 193-214.

Jiang, Jing. “Entertainment, Empowerment, and Education in Big Shot’s Funeral.” Asian Cinema 22, 2 (Fall/Winter 2010): 300-13.

Kong, Shuyu. “Big Shot from Beijing: Feng Xiaogang’s He Sui Pian and Contemporary Chinese Commercial Film.” Asian Cinema 14, 1 (Spring/Summer 2003): 175-87.

Lai, Bruce Yung-Hang. “Neoliberal Subjectivities and Cynicism in China: Feng Xiaogang’s Dream-Play Comedies.” Archiv orientální 90, 3 (2022): 473-501.

[Abstract: In China today, comedy is a popular film genre, of which Feng Xiaogang 馮小剛 is a prominent director. This paper argues that cynical humor is a key but under-investigated feature of Feng’s comedies, which amuse their audiences by walking the fine line between reality and illusion. Mainly based on Slavoj Žižek’s account of cynicism, I show how a cynical attitude, marked by self-deceptive and pragmatic reflexivity, is expressed comically in Feng’s The Dream Factory (Jia fang yi fang 甲方乙方, 1997) and Personal Tailor (Si ren ding zhi 私人订制, 2013) as examples. I also show how Feng masters cynical humor cinematically to address neoliberal subjectivity in China, of which cynicism is a key feature, in addition to self-entrepreneurship and consumerism. I use “dream-play” to specify cynical humor in these films, whose protagonists are entrepreneurs designing dream-like experiences for clients. Cynical amusement escalates as the dream-play minimizes (but does not eliminate) the distinction between reality and illusion. I argue that Feng’s cynical humor functions as a safety valve in response to neoliberalization’s impacts in China, while the state retains strict political control.

Leung, Wing-fai. “Product Placement with ‘Chinese Characteristics’: Feng Xiaogang’s Films and Go Lala Go!” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 2 (2015): 125-40.

Li, Dian. “The Play of Morality in Feng Xiaogang’s Films.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 9, 2 (Oct. 2009): 231-42.

McGrath, Jason. “Metacinema for the Masses: Three Films by Feng Xiaogang.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, 2 (Fall 2005): 90-132.

—–. “New Year’s Films: Chinese Entertainment Cinema in a Globalized Cultural Market.” In McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008, 165-202.

Qian, Kun. “Tracing Desire: Cell Phone and the Self-Reflexivity of Contemporary Chinese Media.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (May 2011).

Reynaud, Berenice. “I Am Not Madame Bovary: Felicitous Mistranslation.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 1 (2018).

[Abstract: The title of Feng Xiaogang’s 2016 film, Wo bu shi Pan Jinlian, which literally means I am not Pan Jilian, was translated as I Am Not Madame Bovary for its international release. The film’s heroine, publicly accused by her ex-husband of being a Pan Jinlian, wages a 10-year fight against the bureaucracy of her county to obtain justice. I re-examine the story of Pan Jinlian and its different versions in Chinese culture, as well as the myth of Madame Bovary and how it was translated in twentieth century China, to discuss how the mistranslation of Pan Jinlian into Madame Bovary becomes a portal for cross-cultural exchange. I am borrowing the concepts of heterotopia, écart, montage and obliqueness from the work of French Sinologist François Jullien – as well as François Cheng’s ethical considerations about a necessary dialogue between Chinese and Western cultures. As Chinese and Western thought use different categories of logic, I argue that, beyond the literal accuracy of a translation, a resonance may be created, through an oblique approach, in the mind of the reader or spectator.]

Wang, Rujie. “The Aesthetics of Retroactive Memory: Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock and the Historical Film.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (January 2011).

Wang, Shujen. “Big Shot’s Funeral: China, Sony, and the WTO.” Asian Cinema 14, 2 (Fall/Winter 2003): 145-54.

A World Without Thieves (天下无贼) [official website]

Wu Guangping. “Wo shi renmin de daoyan” (I am a people’s filmmaker). Dianying yishu 2 (2000): 44-48.

Zhang, Yongfeng. “The Film Back to 1842-From Investigative Reporting to the Absurd.” Frontiers in Literary Studies of China 7, 3 (2013): 520-24.

Zhang Rui. Feng Xiaogang and Chinese Cinema after 1989. Ph. D. diss. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 2005.

—–. The Cinema of Feng Xiaogang: Commercialization and Censorship in Chinese Cinema after 1989. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2008.

Zhang, Yingjin. “Big Shot’s Funeral: Performing a Postmodern Condition of Attractions.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave, 2008, 17-24.

Zhou, Shaoming. “Making Money Can Be Funny.” Cinemaya 52 (2001): 13-18.

Zhu, Ying. “Feng Xiaogang and the Chinese New Year Films.” Asian Cinema 18, 1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 43-64.

—–. “MUBI Podcast Expanded: Feng Xiaogang and Chinese New Year Comedies.” MUBI (July 8, 2021)

Gu Changwei 顾长卫

Qian, Kun. “Reluctant Transcendence: AIDS and the Catastrophic Condition in Gu Changwei’s Film Love for Life.” In Howard Y. F. Choy, ed., Discourses of Disease: Writing Illness, the Mind and Body in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2016, 203-30.

Zuo, Mila. “Bodies, Blood, and Love: The ‘Touching’ Politics of HIV/AIDS film Love for Life.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 3 (2015): 204-22.

[Abstract: The fear of contracting HIV rests on a conception of touch as a lethal and abject transgression of corporeal boundaries. Chinese social beliefs that HIV/AIDS is the consequence of unsafe, indulgent, and delinquent lifestyles pre-empt narratives of compassion – emotionally ‘touching’ stories. China’s most successful HIV/AIDS themed commercial film to date, Love for Life (Gu Changwei, 2011) re-narrativizes the social identity of the disease through the compassionate aesthetics and cultural technologies of melodrama, what could be termed the ‘touching’ politics of the film. Love for Life is also the first Chinese narrative film to address China’s recent history of illegal blood-selling in rural villages. Representations of a forgotten place echo the film’s representations of neglected bodies, inviting spectators to inhabit and experience both through cinesthetic touch. As the blood of villages flows into cities (in literal and symbolic ways), narratives about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in China similarly reveal the limits of modernization and urbanization. Touching films, like Love for Life, invoke an embodied ethics of a compassionate spectatorship necessary to make sense of Chinese modernity and its often cruel promises.]

Guo Fan 郭帆 (Frant Gwo)

Liu, Petrus and Lisa Rofel, eds. “The Wandering Earth: Gender, Sexuality, and Geopolitics.” MCLC Resource Center (September 202o).

Wang, Zhuoyi. “Between the World Ship and the Spaceship: Planetarianism, Hollywood, Nationalism, and the Iceberg-Shaped Story of The Wandering Earth (2019).” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 18, 1 (2021): 210-34.

[Abstract: Planetarianism, proposed by Masao Miyoshi for literature and literary studies, calls for a new sense and organization of human totality truly inclusive of all and against neoliberal division, exclusion, repression, and egocentric consumption. Ironically, it is also the global neoliberal economy that lays the only realistic foundation for such a totality, albeit under negative circumstances. This economy has caused a rapid environmental deterioration that involves everyone on the planet, regardless of identity. Human beings are left with just two choices: either collectively forge new relationships among ourselves and with the planet or perish in the environmental devastation wrought by our continuous consumption, exploitation, division, and conflict. Imagining a totalizing environmental disaster and a global unity fighting for the survival of humanity and Earth, the 2019 Chinese sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth is an important case for illustrating what complex forms the idea of planetarianism may take in a concrete ideological and creative context. The author argues that the film’s future imagination bears laudable potential to promote a turn from exclusionist individualism, represented by the Hollywood science fiction model, to inclusive planetarianism. However, the film’s persuasiveness is significantly limited by the double-layered restraint imposed on it by the state and the market. This article traces the turn and the restraint to their historical sources, closely analyzes where the film succeeds and fails in moving beyond the Hollywood vision of the planet’s future, and thereby enriches our understanding of the cinematic imagination of planetarianism.]

Han Shuai 韩帅

Korbecka, Maja. “‘I Myself Am a Woman’: A Conversation with Han Shuai.” Senses of Cinema 99 (July 2021).

He Yi 何一 / He Jianjun 何建军

Larson, Wendy. “He Yi’s The Postman: The Workspace of a New Age Maoist.” In Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds., Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Rpt. in Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009, 197-22.

He Menghua 何夢華 (Ho Meng-hua)

Chao, Shi-Yan. “An Auteurist Journey through the Fantastic Mode: A Case Study of Ho Meng-hua.” In Kenneth Chan and Andrew Stuckey, eds., Sino-Enchantment: The Fantastics in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 112-27.

Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝贤

Berry, Michael. “Words and Images: A Conversation with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chu T’ien-wen.” positions 11, 3 (Winter 2003): 675-716. Rpt as “Hou Hsiao-hsien with Chu T’ien-wen: Words and Images.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 234-71.

Browne, Nick. “Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Puppetmaster: The Poetics of Landscape.” Asian Cinema 8, 1 (Spring 1996): 28-38. Rpt. in Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds.,Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 79-88.

Burnett, Colin. “Parametric Narration and Optical Transition Devices: Hou Hsiao-hsien and Robert Bresson in Comparison.” Senses of Cinema 33 (2004).

Chen, Leo Chanjen. “Cinema, Dream, Existence: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien.” New Left Review 39 (May-June 2006).

Chen, Yun-hua. “Deleuze and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ‘Mosaic’ in Good Men, Good Women (1995).” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 2 (2014): 160-71.

[Abstract: As the last and arguably least discussed film of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwan Trilogy (starting with A City of Sadness [1989] and The Puppetmaster [1993]), Good Men, Good Women (1995) portrays 100 years of traumatic Taiwanese history spanning colonial Taiwan, the Second Sino-Japanese War, Nationalist rule and the ‘White Terror’ (1949–87 under martial law), through to the urbanized era that closed the twentieth century. Corresponding to the complex historical and geopolitical contexts of its setting and Hou’s own multiple identities, the narrative appears intentionally confusing and convoluted. It defies linearity via a labyrinthine structure that meanders between different character perspectives, spaces, time frames, and ‘virtualities’ (‘virtual realities’, in the Bergsonian sense of the virtual), in what I call a ‘mosaic’ form. This visual and spatial model of a multiplying multidimensional mosaic provides a useful concept for approaching complex films such as this, by accounting for the narrative’s projection of different historical settings, and its complex relationship with an embedded film-within-the film (which is also rather confusingly called ‘Good Men, Good Women’). This model is assisted by Deleuze’s interrelated concepts of the ‘time-image’ (in particular, the crystalline oscillation between virtual and actual states of time) and the ‘any-space-whatever’ (a space that leaves inhabitants unsure of how to react to their surroundings) to recuperate the way in which Hou’s film contemplates Taiwanese history and demonstrates transnational aesthetics. This approach offers a way to move beyond dichotomous critical positions regarding how appropriately the film portrays the collective traumas of the Taiwanese throughout the twentieth century, which are the Nationalist mainlander perspective (those who moved from the mainland to Taiwan after the Sino-Japanese war) and the nativist Taiwanese perspective (those whose family was rooted on the island for a couple of centuries before the mainlanders’ arrival).]

Cheshire, Geoffrey. “Time Span: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien.” Film Comment 29, 6 (1993): 56-63.

Chi, Robert. “Getting It on Film: Representing and Understanding History in A City of Sadness.” Tamkang Review 29, 4 (Summer 1999): 47-84.

—–. “A World of Sadness?” In Ban Wang and Ann Kaplan, eds., Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004, 65-89.

Chiao, Hsiung-ping (Peggy). “A Summer at Grandpa’s–Fields/Days of Infancy/Parent-Child Relationships.” Wave (Tokyo) 21 (Jan. 1989): 84-86.

—–. “Autobiographical Masterpiece.” Free China Review (Feb. 1988): 33-35.

—–. “History’s Subtle Shadows: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppet Master.” Cinemaya 21 (1993): 4-11.

—–. “Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Rocky Road to the Golden Lion.” Sinorama Nov. (1989): 82-87.

—–. “Great Changes in a Vast Ocean: Neither Tragedy nor Joy” (interview with Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien). Performing Arts Journal 50/51 (May/Sept 1995): 43.

Cafe Lumiere (official website)

Chen, Kuan-Hsing, Paul Willemen, and Ti Wei, eds. Hou Hsiao-hsien special issue. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 9, 2 (June 2008).

Cinema Scope 3 (2000). Special issue on Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Daly, Fergus. “On Four Prosaic Formulas Which Might Summarize Hou’s Poetics.” Senses of Cinema 12 (2001).

Deppman, Hsiu-Chuang. Ethics and Aesthetics in The Assassin.” In Hsiao-yen Peng, ed., The Assassin: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s World of Tang China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 2019, 161-177.

Den-ei shin seki. The Filmmaker of the 90s Hou Hsiao-hsien. Tokyo: Pia, 1989.

Ellickson, Lee. “Interview with Hou Hsiao-hsien.” Cineaste 27, 4 (Fall 2002).

Frodon, Jean-Michel, ed. Hou Hsiao-hsien. Lonrai : Editions Cahiers du cinema, 1999.

Guest, Haden. “Reflections on the Screen: Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Dust in the Wind and the Rhythms of the Taiwan New Cinema.” In Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 27-38.

Haddon, Rosemary. “Hou Hsiao Hsien’s City of Sadness: History and the Dialogic Female Voice.” In Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 55-65.

Hou, Hsiao-hsien. “In Search of New Genres and Directions for Asian Cinema.” Translated, Edited and Introduced by Lin Wenchi. Rouge 1 (2003).

Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Donostia-San Sebasti·n: Euskadiko Filmategia-Filmoteca Vasca, 1995.

“Hou Xiaxian dianying yanjiu” (Research on the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien). Special issue of Zhongwai wenxue 310 (1998).

Jones, Kent. “Cinema With a Roof Ever its Head: Kent Jones on the Latterday Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien.” Film Comment (October18, 1999).

Kaldis, Nick. “Compulsory Orientalism: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai.” In Chrs Berry and Fei-i Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 127-36.

Kasman, Daniel. “Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Urban Female Youth Trilogy.” Senses of Cinema 39 (April-June 2006).

Klinger, Gabe. “Decoding Hou: Analyzing Structural Coincidences in The Puppetmaster.” Senses of Cinema 8 (July/Aug. 2000).

Li, Tuo. “Narratives of History in the Cinematography of Hou Xiaoxian.” Positions 1, 3 (Winter 1993): 805-15.

Liang, Samuel. Y. “Ephemeral Households, Marvelous Things: Business, Gender, and Material Culture in Flowers of Shanghai.” Modern China 33, 3 (2007): 377-418.

Liao Ping-hui. “Rewriting Taiwanese National History: The February 28 Incident as Spectacle.” Public Culture 5, 2 (1993).

—–. “Passing and Re-articulation of Identity: Memory, Trauma, and Cinema.” Tamkang Review 29, 4 (Summer 1999): 85-114.

Lim, Song Hwee. “Domesticating Time: Gendered Temporalities in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumière.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10, 1 (2016): 36-57.

[Abstract: This article utilizes the trope of domesticity/domestication in order to explore notions of gendered temporality in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumière (2003). In dialogue with the Chinese writer Eileen Chang and Western theories about women’s time and domestic temporality, the article proposes that the works of both Hou and Chang can be described as instances of écriture féminine that interrogate an ambivalence toward domesticity. Drawing on Chantal Akerman’s film in contrast to that of Hou, the article further demonstrates how the use of the cinematographic long take domesticates time and space, as well as the ways in which the horror of everyday domesticity have been captured through what Rey Chow calls “feminine details.” Finally, the present article argues that Café Lumière domesticates a fear of domesticity and pregnancy through a reconfiguration of linear and cyclical time, a reversal of gender roles in its protagonists, and a privileging of aurality over visuality in its cinematic style, such that it presents the potential for a new kind of union and a new kind of futurity premised upon reordered gendered forms of temporality.]

Lin, Wenchi. “Screening Taiwan: Award-winning Director Hou Hsiao-hsien Lets his Homeland See Itself on Film.” Persimmon 2, 1 (2001): 16-25.

Lu, Tonglin. “From a Voiceless Father to a Father’s Voice: Hou Xiaoxian, A Time to Live and a Time to Die, City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster.” Lu,Confroniting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 95-115.

Lupke, Christopher. “The Muted Interstices of Testimony: A City of Sadness and the Predicament of Multiculturalism in Taiwan.” Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring 2004): 5-36.

—–. “Chu T’ien-wen and the Sotto Voce of Gendered Expression in the Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien.” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 274-92.

—–. “What Is Said and Left Unsaid in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai.” Senses of Cinema 62 (2012).

—–. The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2016. [MCLC Resource Center review by Frederik H. Green]

[Abstract: Hou’s work is technically pioneering, particularly for its signature approach to realism. His subtle interrogation of the aesthetics of Hollywood places him in a category with such greats as Satayajit Ray, Kitano Takeshi, Wong Kar-wai, Abbas Kiarostami, and Werner Herzog. His ability to capture and visualize such elusive phenomena as feelings of malaise, ambivalence and aimlessness in a world in which teleology is the only tolerable cultural logic, his elevation of the insignificant minutiae of daily life to objects of aesthetic sublime, his interrogation of cultural cohesion through the use of multiple languages and symbolic valences compels the serious student of cinema to study his work carefully. Christopher Lupke’s book is a comprehensive treatment of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s entire oeuvre, including The Assassin which was recently released. Lupke was able to visit the set of The Assassin and includes rare photos of Hou on his film set. In addition to a detailed filmography and a substantial bibliography, the book also several interviews of Hou Hsiao-hsien that Lupke has translated into English.]

Ma, Jean. Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2010.

[Abstract: Jean Ma offers an innovative study of three provocative Chinese directors: Wong Karwai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang, whose highly stylized and non-linear configurations of time have brought new global respect for Chinese cinema. Amplifying motifs of loss, nostalgia, haunting, and ephemeral poetics, they each insist on the significance of being out of time, not merely out of place, as a condition of global modernity and transnational cultures of memory.]

Maslin, Janet. “A Time to Live and a Time to Die.” The New York Times (Sept 23, 1986).

McKibbin, Tony. “Situations Over Stories: Cafe Lumiere and Hou Hsiao-hsien.” Senses of Cinema 39 (April-June 2006).

Millenium Mambo (official website).

Neri, Corrado. “A Time to Live, A Time to Die: A Time to Grow.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 160-66. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 212-18.

Nornes, Abé Mark. “Hou Hsiao-hsien and Narrative Space.” In Richard Suchenski, ed., Hou Hsiao-hsien. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, 154-68.

Nornes, Abé Mark and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh. Staging Memories: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, 2014.

Peng, Hsiao-yen, ed. The Assassin: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s World of Tang China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.

[Abstract: The Assassin tells the story of a swordswoman who refrains from killing. Hou Hsiao-hsien astonishes his audience once again by upsetting almost every convention of the wuxia (martial arts) genre in the film. This collection offers eleven readings, each as original and thought-provoking as the film itself, beginning with one given by the director himself. Contributors analyze the elliptical way of storytelling, Hou’s adaptation of the source text (a tale from the Tang dynasty, also included in this volume), the film’s appropriation of traditional Chinese visual aesthetics, as well as the concept of xia (knight-errant) that is embedded in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist worldviews. There are also discussions of the much-celebrated sonic design of The Assassin: the nearly exclusive use of a diegetic film score is a statement on the director’s belief in cinematic reality. . .]

Rawnsley, Ming-yeh. T. “Cinema, Historiography, and Identities in Taiwan: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness.” Asian Cinema 22, 2 (2011): 196–213.

Rayns, Tony. “The Sandwich Man: Between Taiwan and the Mainland, Between the Real and the Surreal: Tony Rayns Talks to Hou Xiaoxian.” Monthly Film Bulletin 55 (June 1988): 163-164.

—–. “Tongnian Wangshi (The Time to Live and the Time to Die).” Monthly Film Bulletin 55 (June 1988): 161-163.

—–. “Beiqing chengshi (A City of Sadness).” Monthly Film Bulletin 57 (June 1990): 152-4.

—–. “Hou Hsiao-hsien: Songs for Swinging Lovers.” Sight and Sound 16, 8 (August 2006): 14, 16–19.

Reynaud, Berenice. City of Sadness. London: BFI, 2002.

Sibergeld, Jerome. Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China’s Moral Voice. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. [with analyses of Good Men, Good Women] [MCLC Resource Center review by Robert Chi]

Sklar, Robert. “Hidden History, Modern Hedonism: the Films of Hou Xiaoxian.” Cineaste 27, 1 (Fall 2002).

Sodtholt, Dag. “The Complexity of Minimalism: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times.” Senses of Cinema 39 (April-June 2006).

Stanbrook, Alan. “The Worlds of Hou Hsiao-hsien.” Sight and Sound (1990): 120-124.

Stratton, David. “Beiqing chengshi (A City of Sadness).” Variety (Sept. 20-26, 1989): 30.

Suchenski, Richard I., ed. Hou Hsiao-hsien. NY: Columbia University Press, 2014.

[Abstract: For younger critics and audiences, Taiwanese cinema enjoys a special status, comparable with that of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave for earlier generations, a cinema that was and is in the midst of introducing an innovative sensibility and a fresh perspective. Hou Hsiao-hsien is the most important Taiwanese filmmaker working today, and his sensuous, richly nuanced films reflect everything that is vigorous and genuine in contemporary film culture. By combining multiple forms of tradition with a uniquely cinematic approach to space and time, Hou has created a body of work that, through its stylistic originality and historical gravity, opens up new possibilities for the medium. This new volume includes contributions by Olivier Assayas, Peggy Chiao, Chung Mong-hong, Jean-Michel Frodon, Hasumi Shigehiko, Ichiyama Shozo, Jia Zhang-ke, Kent Jones, Koreeda Hirokazu, Jean Ma, Ni Zhen, Abé Mark Nornes, James Quandt, Richard I. Suchenski, James Udden, and Wen Tien-hsiang, as well as conversations with Hou Hsiao-hsien and some of his most important collaborators over the decades.]

Stuckey, Andrew. “The Restrained Fantastic in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin.” In Kenneth Chan and Andrew Stuckey, eds., Sino-Enchantment: The Fantastic in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2021, 95-111.

Tam, Kwok-kan and Wimal Dissanayake. “Hou Hsiao-hsien: Critical Encounters with Memory and History.” New Chinese Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

“I Revolt, Therefore We Are to Come: Imaginary M / Other in The Assassin and The Grandmaster.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 45, 2 (Sept. 2019): 27-54.

Tay, William. “The Ideology of Initiation: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien.” In Browne et. al., eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics. Cambridge UP, 1994.

Udden’s, James. “Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Question of a Chinese Style.” Asian Cinema 13, 2 (Fall/Winter 2002): 54-75.

—–. “Taiwanese Popular Cinema and the Strange Apprenticeship of Hou Hsiao-hsien.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 1 (Spring 2003): 120-45.

—–. “‘This Time He Moves’: The Deeper Significance of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Radical Break in Good Men, Good Women.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 183-202.

—–. “The Future of a Luminescent Cloud: Recent Developments in a Pan-Asian Style.” Synoptique 10 (Aug. 2005).

—–. No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2009.

[Abstract: This pioneering study of Hou Hsiao-hsien illuminates the many distinctive achievements of Taiwan’s famous director. His body of work in films such as The Puppetmaster, City of Sadness, and Flowers of Shanghai reflects a powerfully unique style characterized by intricate lighting, improvisational acting, and exceptionally long, static shots. James Udden argues that Hou’s films reflect Taiwan’s peculiar historical and geographical situation and could only have emerged there. Udden also examines the regional impact Hou’s films have had on other Asian directors and cinema artists.]

Vitali, Valentina. “Variables of Transnational Authorship: Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wei Te-sheng.” In Kuei-fen Chiu, Ming-yeh Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley, eds., Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2017.

Wang, Ban. “Black Holes of Globalization: Critique of the New Millennium in Taiwan Cinema.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 1 (Spring 2003): 90-119.

Warner, Charles R. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Optics of Ephemerality.” Senses of Cinema 39 (April-June 2006).

Wicks, James. “Framing Taiwan Cinema: Perspectives on History in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times.” In Wicks, Transnational Representations: The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and 1970s. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2014, 1-22.

Wood, Robin. “Flowers of Shanghai.” CineAction (Summer 2001): 11.

Wu, I-fen. “Looking for Nostalgia: Memory and National Identity in A Time to Live, aTime to Die.” Cineaction 60, 1 (2003): 45-51.

—–. “Remapping Ozu’s Tokyo? The Interplay between History and Memory in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Cafe Lumiere.” Asian Cinema 19, 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 172-81.

Xu, Gang. “Sing-song Girls of the World: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Border Thinking in Flowers of Shanghai.” Conference papar, Remapping Taiwan (UCLA, Oct 13-15, 2000).

—–. “Flowers of Shanghai: Visualising Ellipses and (Colonial) Absence.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 104-110. Rpt. in Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave, 2008, 114-20.

—–. “The Smell of the City: Memory and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo.” In Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 111-32.

Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu. “Politics and Poetics of Hou Hsian-hsien’s Films.” Post Script 20, 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2001): 61-76. Rpt. in Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 163-85.

—–. “1989, September 8: Traum and Cinematic Lyricism.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 815-20.

Yip, June. “Constructing a Nation: Taiwanese History and the Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien.” In Sheldon Lu, ed. 1997.

—–. “Remembering and Forgetting, Part II: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwan Trilogy.” In Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004, 85-130.

City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi) (by Abe Mark Nornes and Yeh Yueh-yu) [excellent website with background, articles, filmography, synopses, etc.]

Hu Bo 胡波

Celluloid Liberation Front. “Deaths of Cinema | The Cracks of the World: Hu Bo (1988-2017).” Cinema Scope 76 (2017).

Hu Jie 胡杰

Johnson, Ian. “China’s Invisible History: An Interview with Filmmaker and Artist Hu Jie.” New York Review of Books (May 27, 2015).

Li, Jie. “Virtual Museums of Forbidden Memories: Hu Jie’s Documentaries on the Cultural Revolution.” Public Culture 21, 3 (2009): 539-49.

[Abstract: This essay explores the politics of remembering the Chinese Cultural Revolution through a study of two banned documentaries by Hu Jie that have circulated widely in cyberspace: Though I Am Gone (2006) and In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul (2004). Contextualizing them in discourses on the (still unrealized) Cultural Revolution Museum, I argue that these films manifest an intriguing tension between the traumatic past and the oblivious present, between the intimate confidentiality of interviews and their address of a larger public sphere, and between the courtroom-like “objectivity” of their photographic evidence and the passionate “subjectivity” of testimony.]

Rui, Shen. “To Remember History: Hu Jie Talks about His Documentaries.” Sense of Cinema 35 (April 2005).

Ruth, Jennifer. “Politically Incorrect Souls: In the Films of Hu Jie, China’s Survivors Speak.” Propeller Magazine (Feb. 2014).

King Hu (Hu Jinquan) 胡金銓

Bordwell, David. “Richness through Imperfection: King Hu and the Glimpse.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 113-36.

Farquhar, Mary. “A Touch of Zen: Action in Martial Arts Movies.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 167-74. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 219-26.

Luk Yong-tong, ed. “Special Issue on King Hu Cinema.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 8, 1 (2007).

Rayns, Tony. “Laying Foundations: Dragon Gate Inn.” Cinemaya (Winter/Spring 1998): 80-83.

Rist, Peter. “King Hu: Experimental, Narrative Filmmaker.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 161-71.

Rodriguez, Hector “Questions of Chinese Aesthetics: Film Form and Narrative Space in the Cinema of King Hu.” Cinema Journal 38, 1 (Fall 1998): 73-97.

Steintrager, James. “The Thirdness of Hu: Wuxia, Deleuze, and the Cinema of Paradox.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 2 (2014): 99-110.

Teo, Stephen. “King Hu.” Senses of Cinema–Great Directors, a Critical Database.

—–. King Hu’s A Touch of Zen. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006.

Hu Mei 胡玫

Clark, Paul. “A Women’s Cinema? The Films of Hu Mei, Peng Xiaolian and Liu Miaomiao.” In Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2005, 122-36.

Cui, Shuqin. “Desire in Difference: Female Voice and Point of View in Army Nurse.” Annual of Film and Literature vol. 2 (Summer 1996): 63-72. Rpt. in Cui, Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003, 200-18.

Kaplan, E. Ann. “Affect, Memory, and Trauma Past Tense: Hu Mei’s Army Nurse (1985) and Xu Jinglei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004).” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 154-70.

Wei, Louisa S. “The Encoding of Female Subjectivity: Four Films by China’s Fifth Generation of Women Directors.” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 173-90. [deals with Hu Mei’s Army Nurse, Liu Miaomiao’s Women on the Long March, Li Shaohong’s Blush, and Peng Xiaolian’s Shanghai Women]

Huang Ji and Ryûji Otsuka

Xiao, Jiwei. “A Body of Her Own: An Interview with Huang Ji and Ryûji Otsuka.” Cineaste XLVIII, 3 (Summer 2023): 28-33.

Huang Jianxin 黄建新

Kaldis, Nicolas. “Huang Jianxin’s Cuowei and/as Aesthetic Cognition.” positions: east asian cultures critique 7, 2 (Fall 1999): 421-58.

Kuoshu, Harry H. “Beyond the Yellow Earth: The Postsocialist City as a Cinematic Space of Anxiety.” American Journal of Chinese Studies 4, 1 (April 1997): 50-72. [deals with Zhang Zeming’s Sunshine and Shower, Huang Jianxin’s Samsara, and Mi Jiashan’s Troubleshooters]

Lo, Kwai-cheung. “Feminizing Technology: The Objet a in Black Cannon Incident.” In William Burgwinkle, Glenn Man, and Valerie Wayne, eds.,Significant Others: Gender and Culture in Film and Literature (East and West: selected conference papers). Honolulu: College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, University of Hawaii: East-West Center, 1993, 88-95.

McGrath, Jason. “Black Cannon Incident: Countering the Counter-espionage Fantasy.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 8-14. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 25-31.

Pickowicz, Paul. “Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism.” In Nick Browne et al., eds. New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 57-87.

Wang, Eugene Yuejin. “Samsara: Self and the Crisis of Visual Narrative.” In Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Narratives of Agency: Self-making in China, India, and Japan. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 35-55.

Huang Shuqin 黄蜀芹

Cui, Shuqin. “Transgender Masquerading in Huang Shuqin’s Woman, Human, Demon.” In Cui, Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003, 219-37.

Dai, Jinhua. “‘Human, Woman, Demon: A Woman’s Predicament.” Tr. Kirk A. Denton. In Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow, eds., Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. London: Verso, 2002, 151-71.

Lee, Haiyan. “Woman, Demon, Human: The Spectral Journey Home.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 243-49.

Li, Xingyang. “The Voice of History and the Voice of Women: A Study of Huang Shuqin’s Women’s Films.” Tr. Thomas Moran. In Lingzhen Wang, ed.,Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia University Press, 2011, 113-31.

Wei, Louisa. “Woman, Are You Human or Demon? – Two Films by Huang Shuqin.” The South London Cultural Review, Volume II: On Feminist Films. Sutton, Surrey: the87press, 2024, 73-113.

Xiao, Li. “Huang Shiqun: A Woman Film Director.” Chinese Literature 2 (1992): 178-181.

Huang Weikai 黄伟凯

Shaffer, Benny. “The Films of Huang Weikai: Towards an Urban Documentary Surreal.” LEAP: The International Art Magazine of Contemporary China 6 (Dec. 2010).

Ann Hui (Xu Anhua) 许鞍华

Berry, Michael. “Ann Hui: Living Through Films.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 422-39.

Cheuk, Pak Tong. “Ann Hui.” In Cheuk, Hong Kong New Wave Cinema: 1978-2000. Bristol: Intellect, 2008, 53-82.

Chow, Rey. “Autumn Hearts: Filming Femine Psychic Interiority in Song of the Exile.” In Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. NY: Columbia, UP, 2007.

Chua, Siew Keng. “Song of Exile: The Politics of Home.” Jump Cut 42 (1998): 90-93.

Doraiswamy, Rashmi. “State of Flux: Ann Hui Talks to Rashmi Doraiswamy.” Cinemaya 7 (1990): 22-24.

Erens, Patricia Brett. “The Film Work of Ann Hui.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 176-195.

—–. “Crossing Borders: Time, Memory, and the Construction of Identity in Song of the Exile.” Cinema Journal 39, 4 (2000): 43-59.

Freiberg, Freda. “Border Crossings: Ann Hui’s Cinema.” Senses of Cinema 22 (2002).

Hau, Si Kit. “Ann Hui Playing Hide and Seek with the Audience.” Film Bi-monthly 35 (1980): 22-24.

Ho, Elaine Yee Lin. “Women on the Edges of Hong Kong Modernity: The Films of Ann Hui.” In Mayfair Mei Hui Yang, ed. Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 162-87. Rpt. in Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 177-206.

Hoare, Stephanie. “Romance of Book and Film: Literary Adaptation and Ann Hui’s Romance of Book and Sword.” Cinemas [Montreal, Canada] 3, 2/3 (1993): 141-156.

Huang, Yiju. “Protean Youth: Redemptive Poetics in In the Heat of the Sun and The Postmodern Life of My Aunt.” In Huang, Tapestry of Light: Aesthetic Afterlives of the Cultural Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 100-28.

Jaehe, Karen. “Boat People: An Interview with Ann Hui.” Cineaste 13, 2 (1984): 16-19.

Keng, Chua Siew. “The Politics of Home: Song of the Exile (Ann Hui, 1990).” Jump Cut 41 (1998).

Kennedy, Harlan. “Ann Hui’s Boat People–Canne 1983.” Film Comment (Oct. 1983).

Lee, Vivian. “Cinematic Remembrances: The Search for Local Histories in the Post-1997 Films by Ann Hui and Fruit Chan.” Asian Cinema 16, 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 263-85.

Li, Cheuk-to. “Survival is the Most Important: An Interview with Ann Hui.” Film Bi-monthly 96 (1982): 19-23.

Stringer, Julian. “Boat People: Second Thoughts on Text and Context.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 15-22. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 40-47.

Williams, Tony. “Border-Crossing Melodrama: Song of the Exile (Ann Hui, 1990).” Jump Cut 41 (1998).

Xiao, Hui Faye. “Seeking Second Chances in a Risk Society: The Cinema of Divorce in the New Millennium” In Xiao, Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2014, 140-76.

Yau, Ka-Fai. “Looking Back at Ann Hui’s Cinema of the Political.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, 2 (Fall 2007): 117-50.

Yoke, Kong Kam. “Ann Hui for the Underdogs.” [interview] Cinemaya 45 (Autumn 1999): 17-19.

Yue, Audrey. “Song of the Exile.” Senses of Cinema 56 (Oct. 2010).

Huo Jianqi 霍建起

Xiao, Hui Faye. “Chinese Melodrama, Japanese Nostalgia.” Asian Cinema 16, 2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 63-84. [deals mostly with Huo Jianqi’s film Nuan, an adaptation of a Mo Yan short story]

—–. “Cross-Cultural Nostalgia and Visual Consumption: On the Literary Adaptation and Japanese Reception of Huo Jianqi’s 2003 Film Nuan.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 31, 2 (2005): 227-248. Reprinted in Rebecca Housel, ed., From Camera Lens to Critical Lens: A Collection of Best Essays on Film Adaptation. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006, 142-59.

Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯

Andrew, Dudley. “Encounter: Interview with Jia Zhangke.” Tr. Jiwei Xiao. Film Quarterly 62, 4 (2009): 81-83.

—–. “The Absent Subject in The World.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 12, 1 (2018): 53-73.

[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.]

Bao, Ying. “Remembering the Invisible: Soundscape and the Memory of 1989.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 3 (Oct. 2013): 207-224.

[Abstract: This article intends to draw attention to the strategic exploitations of cinematic soundscape as a powerful affective tool to reflect personal and social memory, loss and trauma in three exemplary films, Yangguang canlan de rizi/In the Heat of the Sun (Jiang, 1994),Zhantai/Platform (Jia, 2000), and Dongci bianwei/Conjugation (Tang, 2001). Taking a semiotic approach to film sound, I scrutinize how the post-1989 trauma makes its presence as an acoustic and psychologically-penetrating experience. While the June Fourth Crackdown remains a taboo in cultural representations in the PRC, Chinese filmmakers have responded to the psychological, ideological, and socio-economic impacts of the event in various creative ways. Cinematic soundscape, in particular, constitutes powerful acts of remembering, recognizing, and critically reflecting the unspeakable and the invisible.

Berry, Chris. “Xiao Wu: China 1997.” Cinemaya (Winter 1998/99): 20.

—–. “Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 250-57.

Berry, Michael. “Cultural Fallout.” Film Comment (March/April 2003): 61-64.

—–. “Jia Zhangke: Capturing a Transforming Reality.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 182-207.

—–. Jia Zhangke’s ‘Hometown Trilogy’: Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

—–. “Jia Zhangke’s Memory Project, 24 City: Rewriting History, Rethinking Historiography.” In Katherine Swancutt, ed., Crafting Chinese Memories: The Art and Materiality of Storytelling. New York: Berghahn, 2021, 55-77.

Berry, Michael, ed. Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.

[Abstract: Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke is an extended dialogue between film scholar Michael Berry and the internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker. Drawing from extensive interviews and public talks, this volume offers a portrait of Jia’s life, art, and approach to filmmaking. Jia and Berry’s conversations range from Jia’s childhood and formative years to extensive discussions of his major narrative films, including the classics Xiao Wu, Platform, The World, Still Life, and A Touch of Sin. Jia gives a firsthand account of his influences, analyzes the Chinese film industry, and offers his thoughts on subjects such as film music, working with actors, cinematography, and screenwriting. From industry and economics to art and politics, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke represents the single most comprehensive document of the director’s candid thoughts on the art and challenges of filmmaking.]

Bloom, Michelle. “Transnational Chinese Cinema with a French Twist: Emily Tang Xiaobai’s Conjugation and Jia Zhangke’s The World as Sinofrench Films.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (Fall 2009): 198-245.

Bordeleau, Erik. “The World without Future: Stage as Entrapment in Jia Zhangke’s Film.” The China Review 10, 2 (2010).

[Abstract: The World offers a unique occasion to think of globalization’s process as entrapment. The setting, a Disney-like theme park, allows for a powerful critical allegory of globalization. It is a non-place, a paradoxical theatre of the characters’ efforts to form community. As underlined by Jia Zhangke in an interview, economic growth has introduced into the everyday life of the Chinese a constellation of “shows,” “sort of like economic bubbles, filling up every sector of our lives.” The author aims to show how The World works as a cinematic extension of this observation, by making us enter into the ob-scene conditions of production of the global spectacle and by showing its repercussions at the level of being together. The central idea of this article is to present The World as a practice of non-place and a unilaterizing itinerary for the existential malaise linked to the capitalist total mobilization. The author examines how The World can contribute to a collective demobilization through the production of a claustrophobic effect on the audience. The guiding hypothesis of this work is that the claustrophobic effect skillfully orchestrated by Jia assumes and conjures up the claustrophobic feeling provoked by the process of global entrapment and thus opens up new ways of being-in-the-world.]

Byrnes, Corey. “Specters of Realism and the Painter’s Gaze in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 2 (Fall 2012): 52-93.

Chan, Andrew. “Jia Zhangke Interview.” Film Comment (March-April 2009).

Cheah, Pheng. “World as Picture and Ruination: On Jia Zhangke’s Still Life as World Cinema.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 190-207.

Cheung, Esther M. K. “Realisms with Conundrum: The Personal and Authentic Appeal in Jia Zhangke’s Accented Films.” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 11-22.

Choi, Jinhee. “From Recording to Ritual: Weimar Villa and 24 City.” IAFOR Journal of Asian Studies 2, 1 (2016).

Cui, Shuqin. “Negotiating In-Between: On New-Generation Filmmaking and Jia Zhangke’s Films.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, 2 (Fall 2006): 98-130.

—–. “Boundary Shifting: New Generation Filmmaking and Jia Zhangke’s Films.” In Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen, eds., Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2010, 175-94.

Cui, Wenjin. “Waiting and the Duration of Time: The Critique of Everyday Life in Jia Zhangke’s Platform.” China Perspectives 2 (2020): 35-42.

Dai, Jinhua. “Temporality, Nature Morte, and the Filmmaker: A Reconsideration of Still Life.” Tr. Lennet Daigle. In Dai Jinhua, After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018, 67-90.

Deppman, Hsiu-chuang. “Reading Docu-fiction: Jia Zhangke’s 24 City.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 3 (2014): 188-208.

[Abstract: Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (2008) combines the work of professional actors with interviews of actual Chinese state employees to create a blended genre that illustrates changing economic fortunes in the 21st century. Through the medium of a new, hybrid filmic language, Jia articulates his concerns about the limitations of postsocialist realism and documentary in narrating factory workers’ emotional struggles with history and reality. The synthetic vision of docufiction, controversial and unsettling as it is, gives Jia the philosophical freedom to contrast, juxtapose, and integrate the real and the fictional in ways that defy and overwhelm conventional cinematic storytelling. Using narrative ellipsis,tableauxshots and intertextual references, Jia expands on the Deleuzean idea of ‘the power of the false’ to negotiate the roles of docufiction directors and complicate his own intellectual position as insider and outsider, artist and activist.]

—–. “Realism and Fantasy in Jia Zhangke’s The World.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 1, 1 (2021): 19-47.

[Abstract: One of the most prominent sixth-generation filmmakers, Jia Zhangke tells compelling stories about China’s floating population. He documents the quotidian activities of marginal people with long shots and long takes, showing their love, despair, and regrets. Scholars often consider Jia a neorealist or postsocialist realist, but close analyses of his works reveal his penchant for adding fantastical images to true-to-life stories. In his first officially released film, The World (2004), for example, Jia pairs long takes with animation and medium shots to capture the “surreal, unsettling effects” of a rapidly changing society. This generic mixture, I argue, allows the director to expose the psychologies of isolated migrant workers inhabiting multiple realities in a complex world. Jia’s willingness to investigate new ways of envisioning thoughts and emotions illustrates the corrosive effect of greed in postsocialist society and helps expand film’s formalistic commitments to the ethics of representing the real.]

Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk. “Global Beijing: The World Is a Violent Place.” In Christoph Lindner, ed., Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010, 122-34.

—–. “The Poetics of the Real in Jia Zhangke’s 24 City.” Screen 55, 2 (Summer 2014): 1-10.

Gaetano, Adriane. “Rural Woman and Modernity in Globalizing China: Seeing Jia Zhangke’s The World.” Visual Anthropology Review 25, no. 1 (2009): 25-39.

Hilo, Clifford. “Negotiating Global/Local Identities: Jia Zhang-ke’s The World.” Mediascape (Spring 2007).

Holtmeier, Matthew A. “The Wanderings of Jia Zhangke: Pre-Hodological Space and Aimless Youths in Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 2 (2014): 148-59.

[Abstract: This article examines the pre-hodological space Jia Zhangke creates in his films, such as Xiao Wu (1997) and Unknown Pleasures (2002), illustrating the connection between the formal construction of filmic space and economic reform in China. Gilles Deleuze defines pre-hodological space as the space before action, drawing from Kurt Lewin’s Principles of Topological Psychology (1936) and Gilbert Simondon on the concept of individuation. Exploring Jia’s films through these originary texts, the author elaborates a psychopolitics based on the connection between the production of subjects and the growth of globalized capitalist economies in China.]

Hui, Calvin. “Dirty Fashion: Ma Ke’s Fashion ‘Useless’, Jia Zhangke’s Documentary Useless and Cognitive Mapping.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 3 (2015): 253-70.

[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 documentaryWuyong/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.]

—–. “The Geopolitical Aesthetics: The Migrant Workers, Performance, and Globalization in Jia Zhangke’s Film The World (2004).” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 18, 1 (2021): 170-87.

[Abstract: This article focuses on contemporary Chinese film director Jia Zhangke 賈樟柯 (b. 1970–) and his engagement with what critical/cultural theorist Fredric Jameson (b. 1934- ) calls geopolitical aesthetics or cognitive mapping. Through the county-level city (xiancheng 縣城) perspective, the block (bankuai 板塊) structure, the interplay of real and fictional, and the intertextual and transmedial references, Jia explores the possibilities of representational forms and aspires to map and scan the otherwise unrepresentable totality that is global capitalism in China. In this essay, the author engages with Jia’s film Shijie 世界 (The World; 2004) and examines the portrayal of the migrant workers and their performances in the World Park in Beijing, China. Focusing on political economy and social class, he suggests that The World renders visible the dialectic of mobility and immobility of the migrant workers within the context of global capitalism in China. Shifting gears to gender, he explains how the female migrant workers, dressed in lavish and extravagant costumes and performing exotic dances for the tourists in the World Park, can be regarded as a productive site for deciphering the otherwise imperceptible contradictions of globalizing China. In particular, the author analyzes the film’s opening sequence to show that the world featured on-screen is located at the disjuncture between reality and fantasy.]

Jaffee, Valerie.”Bringing the World to the Nation: Jia Zhangke and the Legitimization of Chinese Underground Film.” Senses of Cinema 32 (July-Sept. 2004).

—–. “An Interview with Jia Zhangke.” Senses of Cinema 32 (July-Sept. 2004).

Jia, Zhangke. “The Age of Amateur Cinema Will Return.” dgeneratefilms.com (March 4, 2010).

—–. “In Public in My Own Words.” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 52-53.

—–. “What Remains in Silence.” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 54-57.

—–. Jia Zhangke Speaks Out: The Chinese Director’s Texts on Films. Trs. Claire Huot, Tony Rayns, Alice Shih, and Sebastian Veg. Transactions Publishers, 2014

Jones, Kent Jones.“Out of Time.” Film Comment 38, 5 (Sept./Oct. 2002): 43-47.

Kraicer, Shelly. “Review of Jia Zhangke’s Platform.” Cineaction 54 (Spring 2001): 67-70.

—–. “Interview with Jia Zhangke.” Cineaction 60, 1 (2003): 30-33.

—–. “Review of Unknown Pleasures.” Cineaction 61, 1 (2003): 65-66.

—–. “Chinese Wasteland: Jia Zhangke’s Still Life.” Cinema Scope 29 (2006).

Kyo, Yi Yi Mon (Rosaline). “Becoming Visible: Gender and Space in Chen Qiulin’s Farewell Poem (2002) and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006).” In Iris Borowy and Viktor Pal, eds., Waste and Discards in the Asia Pacific Region. New York and London: Routledge, 2023, 80-99.

Lee, Kevin. “Jia Zhangke.” Senses of Cinema, a Critical Database.

Li, Dang. “Chinese Dialect Film and Its Translation: A Case Study of The World (2004).” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 1 (2018).

[Abstract: Over the past few decades, China has produced a significant number of films that use dialect. Many of them have been screened in international film festivals or have been distributed in different countries. Focusing on Chinese-dialect films, this paper examines how dialects in such films are used to represent a reality often masked by a mainstream, Putonghua discourse; and how Chinese-dialect films travel cross-culturally through audiovisual translation. To address these questions, I use a case study The World (2004), a multilingual film made by Jia Zhangke, China’s most prominent art house director known for his consistent and ubiquitous use of dialects. Adopting a descriptive perspective, the case study investigates the multilingual elements of the original and translated film. It mainly focuses on the strategies adopted by the translator when dealing with multilingualism in the film, and the effects of such strategies on character and plot development in the translated version.]

Li, Jie. “Home and Nation Amid the Rubble: Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (Fall 2009): 86-125.

Liao, Hongfei. “Thinking the Inutility: Temporality, Affect, and Embodiment in Useless and Walker.” In Brian Berergan-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015, 137-58.

Lim, Dennis. “Lost in an Open Society: Jia Zhangke and Yu Lik Wai on Unknown Pleasures.” Cinema Scope 15, 1 (2003).

Liu, Jin. “The Rhetoric of Local Languages as the Marginal: Chinese Underground and Independent Films by Jia Zhangke and Others.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, 2 (Fall 2006): 163-205.

Lin, Xiaoping. “Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Trilogy: A Journey Across the Ruins of Post-Mao China.” In Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 186-209.

Lovatt, Philippa. “Sound, Music and Memory in Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy.” In Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, eds., Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks. Palgrave, 2016, 229-244.

Lu, Tonglin. “Music and Noise: Independent Film and Globalization.” The China Review 3, 1 (Spring 2003): 57-76.

[Abstract: This article proposes to study as a test case the use of popular music in Xiaowu, a Chinese underground film released in 1997. The three recurrent pieces of music underline the importance of a male bond between two former thieves, one of whom remains a pickpocket, while the other has become a model entrepreneur in the wake of economic reform. This bond is disrupted by the process of globalization, which has provided a different value system. Through the disruption of this bond, the film casts a critical light on the effects of globalization, which has contributed to a growing gap between the rich and the poor. The voices of the localized population can be heard through popular music, which is often submerged by a cacophony of machinery, or, at a different level, by a cacophony produced by state censorship and global capitalism.]

—–. “Fantasy and Reality of a Virtual China in Jia Zhangke’s film The World.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 3 (Nov. 2008): 163-79.

[Abstract: This essay studies Jia Zhangke’s film, The World, in the light of Agamben’s theory of dispositif and profanation. Jia and other independent film-makers in China use visualization to ‘profane’ dominant ideology in China in its complexity, contradictory and fragmentation. The open-endedness of film-making allows the director to politicize his work without falling into the trap of rigid dogma. The World is about localized migrant workers in the intensified process of globalization. As reality appears more fantastic than fantasy itself, the space of fantasy coincides with the death drive.]

Ma, Aliza. 2016. “Interview: Jia Zhang-Ke | Mountains May Depart.” Film Comment (January 4, 2016).

McGrath, Declan. “The Films of Jia Zhangke Poetic Realist of Globalization.” Cinéaste 41, 4 (2016): 34–39.

McGrath, Jason. “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic.” In Zhang Zhen, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 81-114.

—–. “‘Independent’ Cinema: From Postsocialist Realism to Transnational Aesthetic.” In McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, 129-64.

Peng, Yun. “Truancy, or Thought from the Provinces.” In Lars Kristensen, ed., Postcommunist Film–Russia, Eastern Europe and World Culture: Moving Images of Postcommunism. New York: Routledge, 2012, 154-170.

Ren, Hai. “Redistribution of the Sensible in Neoliberal China: Real Estate, Cinema, and Aesthetics.” In Ban Wang and Jie Lu, eds., China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012, 225-45. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Xiaobing Tang]

Shi, Xiaoling. “Between Illusion and Reality: Jia Zhangke’s Vision of Present-day China in The World.” Asian Cinema 18, 2 (Fall/Winter 2007): 220-31.

Silbergeld, Jerome. “Facades: The New Beijing and the Unsettled Ecology of Jia Zhangke’s The World.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 113-28.

Stuckey, Andrew. “Documentarization and Amplified Realism in Jia Zhangke’s Films.” In Stuckey, Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2018, 78-99.

Teo, Stephen. “China With an Accent–Interview with Jia Zhangke, Director of Platform.” Senses of Cinema 15 (2001).

Udden, James. “On the Shoulders of Giants: Tsai Ming-liang, Jia Zhangke, Fruit Chan and the Struggles of Second Generation Auteurism.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 158-66.

Veg, Sebastien. “Building A Public Consciousness: A Conversation with Jia Zhangke.” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 58-65.

Wagner, Keith B. “Jia Zhangke’s Neoliberal China: The Commodification and Dissipation of the Proletarian in The World (Shijie, 2004).” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, 3 (2013): 361-77.

[Abstract: This article explores the under-theorized subject of migrant labor and its precarious socio-economic position envisaged by Jia Zhangke in his The World (Shijie, 2004). As discussions of this film have largely been reduced to broad assertions in their handling of developmental adjustments–mainly, the country’s entry into the WTO in 2001 and the reality of globalization–the specificities that mark Beijing’s continuous and unfettered modernization projects under neoliberalization, are largely left untreated, leaving the study of labor incomplete. I will argue that The World transforms the concerns of the marginalized into a dialectical process by challenging the local imagery and celebrated urbanization in Beijing (commodification), while at the same time the workers in Jia’s film embrace newfound consumption (dissipation). The other aim of this paper will be to view new forms of Chinese identity (suzhi) that “marks a sense and sensibility of the self’s value in the market economy” (Yan 2003). Put another way, consumptive habits are indicative of a new neoliberal identity that complicates how Chinese service and industrial workers view themselves in post-social Beijing and what is fictionalized in The World.]

Wang, Ban. “Epic Narrative, Authenticity, and the Memory of Realism: Reflections on Jia Zhangke’s Platform.” In Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, eds.,Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007, 193-216.

Wang, Qi. “The Recalcitrance of Reality: Performance, Subjects, and Filmmakers in 24 City and Tape.” In Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito, eds., DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2015, 215-36.

Wang, Xiaoping. China in the Age of Global Capitalism: Jia Zhangke’s Filmic World. NY: Routedge, 2019.

[Abstract: This book provides an examination the content and forms of Jia’s featured films and analyzes their merits and faults. Jia’s films often narrate the lives of ordinary Chinese people against the backdrop of the political-economic changes. The author conducts an in-depth analysis of how this change have ferociously impinged upon the characters’ living conditions since China integrated itself with the world economy in the high tide of accelerated globalization since the 1970s. The author focuses on discussing the “politics of dignity” expressed by Jia’s allegorical renditions to explore the director’s political unconsciousness and cultural-political notions. This book maps ten of Jia Zhangke’s films onto three major themes: Jia’s filmmaking and China in the market society; truth claims and political unconscious; “post-socialist modernity” in the age of globalization. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese film studies, as well as other disciplines, such as political science, sociology, anthropology, etc.]

Wang, Yanjie. “Displaced in the Simulacrum: Migrant Workers and Urban Space in The World.” Asian Cinema 22, 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 152-69.

—–. “Violence, Wuxia, Migrants: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontent in A Touch of Sin.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 9, 2 (2015): 159-172.

[Abstract: This article examines the representation of violence in Jia Zhangke’s film A Touch of Sin (2013) in light of Žižek’s theory of ‘objective violence’ and the wuxia tradition. Jia attempts to understand the rise of individual violent incidents during China’s post-socialist transformations by laying out the social, historical and political milieus in which they take place. He unveils the Žižekian objective violence hidden in the realm of social normality, pinpointing the country’s sins of collusion with the global capital to impose injustice on the poor and disadvantaged. Invoking the wuxia genre, Jia portrays the protagonists not so much as perpetrators of violence but as xia, knights-errant, who demonstrate a precious spirit of rebellion that the contemporary ethos tends to lack. Focusing on often overlooked emotional experiences, Jia offers a humanist insight into the depths of these people’s despair, isolation and humiliation. Jia, thereby, makes his film a poignant critique of the dominant ideology that pushes neoliberal development regardless of its human costs.]

Wu, Shu-chin. “Time, History, and Memory in Jia Zhangke’s 24 City.” Film Criticism 36, 1 (2011): 3-23.

Xiao, Jiwei. “The Quest for Memory: Documentary and Fiction in Jia Zhangke’s Films.” Senses of Cinema 59 (2011).

—–. “China Unraveled: Violence, Sin and Art in Jia Zhangke’s Touch of Sin.” Film Quarterly 68, 4 (Summer 2015): 24-35.

[Abstract: Composed of four stories adapted from real-life incidents of violence spanning the first decade of China’s 21st century, Jia Zhangke’s 2013 film A Touch of Sin presents violence not as isolated incidents of individual crimes but as something fated to happen as a result of profound changes brought about by contemporary Chinese modernization and urbanization. In the film, Jia puts the whole society on trial by using theatrical artifice and by weaving seemingly unrelated characters into a larger tapestry of social ills and moral “sins.” Formally, A Touch of Sin marks a new chapter in Jia’s filmmaking career. The film is self-reflexive, anthologizing, and formally eclectic, marked by profuse self-references as well as an attempt at aesthetic hybridization. While demonstrating a style that is unmistakably his own, Jia experiments with techniques he felicitously adapts from literature, theatre, painting, and other art forms, both Chinese and Western.]

Yan, Haiping. “Intermedial Moments: An Embodied Turn in Contemporary Chinese Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 1 (2013): 41-61.

[Abstract: This article aims to foster thinking about the increasingly prevalent and fluid notion of the intermedial, a term that may be better approached with or ‘defined’ by its specific occurrences in various scenes across the fields of humanistic arts. Bringing works by two contemporary film directors into a constellation, this article offers an argument on how a distinct aesthetic transpires therein, intimating what may be called an ’embodied’ intermedial turn in Chinese cinema, which brings into a cognitive focus a humanly inhabited gesture evocative of a deeply differential country in its intricate mutations. Remaining at odds with the logic of global capital and its ‘liqui- dating’ motions of spectacle industry, these works refunction the cinematic by engag- ing the conditions and mediations of live-world intermedially, turning themselves into embodied innovations in the transformation of the aesthetic and the historical, at another conjuncture for a modernizing China and of modern times in general. (treats Peng Xiaolian’s Shanghai Trilogy and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life]

Yao, Sijia. “Nostalgia for the Future: Home Landscape in the Films of Jia Zhangke.” Tamkang Review: A Quarterly of Literary and Cultural Studies 47, 2 (2017): 83-96.

—–. “Pessimistic Chinese Cosmopolitanism and Jia Zhangke’s The World.” The Comparatist 43 (2019): 147-158.

Zeng, Hong. “Semiotics of Exile and Displaced Film Codes: Jia Zhangke’s Three Films.” In Zeng, Semiotics of Exile in Contemporary Chinese Film. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 139-57.

Zhang, Hongbing. “Ruins and Grassroots: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontents in the Age of Globalization.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 129-53.

Zhang, Xudong. “The Poetics of Vanishing: The Films of Jia Zhangke.” New Left Review 63 (May-June 2010).

[Abstract: Cinematic portraits of China’s breakneck social and economic transformation, as seen from street level at its provincial margins. Zhang Xudong on motifs of disappearance, demolition and mobility in the films of Jia Zhangke.]

Zhu, Ping. “The Sincere Gaze: Art and Realism in Jia Zhangke’s Films.” Chinese Literature Today 3/ 1/2 (2013): 88-94.

Jiang Wen 姜文

Bao, Ying. “Remembering the Invisible: Soundscape and the Memory of 1989.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 3 (Oct. 2013): 207-224.

Braester, Yomi. “Memory at a Standstill: ‘Street-Smart History’ in Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun.” Screen 42, 4 (Winter 2001): 350-62.

—–. “Memory at a Standstill: From Maohistory to Hooligan History.” In Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003, 192-205.

Devils on the Doorstep. FilmForum webpage.

Gieselmann, Martin. “Chinese Cinema in the Post-Cold War Era and the Legacy of the Sino-Japanese War: Devils on the Doorstep and Purple Sunset.” In Weigelin-Schweidrzik, ed., Broken Narratives: Post-Cold War History and Identity in Europe and East Asia. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 57-84.

Larson, Wendy. “Extracting the Revolutionary Spirit: Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun and Anchee Min’s Red Azalea.” In Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009, 155-96.

Liu, Xinmin. “Play and Being Playful: The Quotidian in Cinematic Remembrance of the Mao Era.” Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring 2004): 73-89. [deals in part with In the Heat of the Sun]

Lu, Tonglin. “Fantasy and Ideology in a Chinese Film: A Zizekian Reading of the Cultural Revolution.” positions: east asia cultures critique 12, 2 (Fall 2004): 539-64. [mostly about Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun]

Luo, Xiaoming. “The Hopeless Bullet: On Let the Bullets Fly.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 3 (2013): 512-17.

Luo, Xueying. “Born for Art–Jiang Wen.” China Screen 1 (1994): 26-27.

Silbergeld, Jerome. Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen. Princeton: Tang Center for East Asian Art, 2008. [In the Heat of the Sun and Devils on the Doorstep]

Song, Weijie. “Transgression, Submission, and the Fantasy of Youth Subculture: The Nostalgic Symptoms of In the Heat of the Sun.” In Haili Kong and John A. Lent, eds., 100 Years of Chinese Cinema: A Generational Dialogue. Norwalk, CT.: EastBridge, 2006, 171-182.

Stuckey, Andrew. “True Lies: Authority, Authenticity, and Authorship in In the Heat of the Sun and Suzhou River.” In Stuckey, Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2018, 61-77.

Talmacs, Nicole. “Let the Bullets Fly: The Socialisation of Assumptions.” In Talmacs, China’s Cinema of Class: Audiences and Narratives. NY: Routledge, 2017, 27-48.

Ward, Julian. “Filming the Anti-Japanese War: The Devils and Buffoons of Jiang Wen’s Guizi Laile.” New Cinemas 2, 2 (2004): 107-117.

Williams, Louise. “Men in the Mirror: Questioning Masculine Identities in In the Heat of the Sun.” China Information 17, 1 (2003): 92-106.

Xu, Gary G. “Violence, Sixth Generation Filmmaking, and Devils on the Doorstep.” In Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 25-46.

Stanley Kwan (Guan Jinpeng) 关锦鹏

Ai, Yiran. “Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage: A Feminist Film in a Postmodern Frame.” Asian Cinema 33, 1 (2022): 21-36.

[Abstract: Chinese-language film studies have paid scant attention to the intersection of feminism and postmodernism. This article argues that Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (1991), a film with a female protagonist and a postmodern narrative format, is demonstrably a feminist film. The parodic representation of protagonist Ruan Lingyu and the film’s scripted re-enactments of scenes from Hong Kong cinema are revealed as postmodern aesthetic processes, through which traditional gender norms can be explored and questioned. Finally, the article examines Kwan’s unique, self-reflexive narrative practice, which constructs an alternative female celebrity biopic and situates the film firmly as feminist historiographic metafiction.]

Atkinson, Michael. “Songs of Crushed Love: The Cinema of Stanley Kwan.” Film Comment (May/June 1996): 42-46, 49.

Berry, Michael. “Stanley Kwan: From Spectral Nostalgia to Corporeal Desire.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 440-57.

Chow, Rey. “A Souvenir of Love.” Modern Chinese Literature 7, 2 (Fall 1993): 59-78. Rpt. in Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 209-29.

Cui, Shuqin. “Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage: The (im)possible Engagement Between Feminism and Postmodernism.” Cinema Journal 39, 4 (2000): 60-80. Rpt. Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema. HK: Oxford UP, 2004. And in Cui, Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003, 30-48.

Eng, David L. “Love at Last Site: Waiting for Oedipus and Stanley Kwan’s Rouge.” Camera Obscura 32 (1993-94): 75-101.

—–. “The Queer Space of China: Expressive Desire in Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu.” positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 2 (Fall 2010): 459-87.

Farmer, Brett. “Mémoire en Abîme: Remembering (through) Centre Stage.” Intersections 4 (Sept 2000).

Fong, Ho-yin. “A Ghost Tour in Rouge.” Journal of Modern Literature in China 12, 1 (Winter 2014): 89-107.

[Abstract: The article critiques the 1988 Chinese film “Rouge” directed by Stanley Kwan. The film is an adapatation of the novel by Lillian Lee which focuses on a prostitute who attracts wealthy clients. It analyzes several of the film’s themes including revenge, romance between two people who are from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and reincarnation.]

Hjort, Mette. Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006.

Lai, Linda and Kim Choi. “Interview with Stanley Kwan on Yang and Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema.” Hong Kong International Film Festival (21st). (1997): 42-43.

Lan Yu official website

Law, Wai Ming. “Stanley Kwan: Carrying the Past Lightly.” Cinemaya 19 (1993): 10-13.

Lim, Bliss Cua. “Spectral Times: The Ghost Film as Historical Allegory.” positions 9, 2 (fall 2001): 287-329. [deals with, in part, Rouge] [Project Muse link]

Lim, Song Hwee. “Fragments of Darkness: Stanley Kwan as a Gay Director.” In Lim, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2006, 153-79.

Liu, Joyce Chi Hui. “Filmic Transposition of the Roses: Stanley Kwan’s Feminine Response to Eileen Chang’s Women.” In Peng-hisang Chen and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Amsterdam,: Rodopi, 2002, 145-58.

Rayns, Tony. “Review of Rouge and Notes on Stanley Kwan.” Monthly Film Bulletin (Feb. 1990): 31-33.

Reynaud, Berenice. “Centre Stage: A Shadow in Reverse.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 31-38. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 48-55.

Rojas, Carlos. “Specular Failure and Spectral Returns in Two Films with Maggie Cheung (and one without).” Sense of Cinema 12 (2001). [looks primarily atCentre Stage]

Stein, Wayne. “Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage (1992): Postmodern Reflections of the Mirror Within the Mirror.” In Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer, eds., Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006.

Stokes, Lisa Odham and Michael Hoover. “Resisting the Stage: Imaging/Imagining Ruan Lingyu in Stanley Kwan’s Actress.” Asian Cinema 11, 2 (Fall/Winter 2000): 92-98.

Stringer, Julian. “Centre Stage: Reconstructing the Bio-Pic.” Cineaction 42 (Feb. 1997): 28-39.

Tam, Kwok-kan and Wimal Dissanayake. “Stanley Kwan: Narratives of Feminine Anguish.” New Chinese Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Tsang, Daniel. “Interview with Stanley Kwan.” Subversity, radio show on KUCI, Irvine California.

Teo, Stephen. “Full Moon in New York.” Senses of Cinema 12 (2001).

Wang, Yiman. “The Palimpsest Body and the S(h)ifting Border: On Maggie Cheung’s Two Crossover Films.” positions: asia critique 20, 4 (fall 2012): 953-81. [deals with Centre Stage, as well as Irma Vep]

Williams, Tony. “Center Stage: The Melodrama of Resistance.” Asian Cinema 22, 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 274-307.

Stan Lai (Lai Sheng-ch’uan) 赖声川

Chan, Ching-kiu Stephen. “Temporality and the Modern Subject: Efects of Memory in Lai Sheng-ch’uan’s The Other Evening, We Put Up a Show of Hsiang-sheng.” Tamkang Review 18, 1-4 (1989): 1-37.

Chow, Eileen Cheng-yin. “A Peach Blossom Diaspora: Negotiating Nation Spaces in the Writing of Taiwan.” South Atlantic Quarterly 98, 1/2 (Winter/Spring 1999): 143-62. [about Stanley Lai’s 1992 film Anlian Taohua yuan (Secret Love/Peach Blossom Spring)]

Kowallis, Jon. “The Diaspora in Postmodern Taiwan and Hong Kong Film: Framing Stan Lai’s The Peach Blossom Land with Allen Fong’s Ah Ying.” In Sheldon Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

Clara Law 罗卓瑶

Braester, Yomi. “Modern Identity and Karmic Retribution in Clara Law’s Reincarnations of Golden Lotus.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 58-61.

Fore, Steve. Tales of Recombinant Femininity: The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus, the Chin P’ing Mei, and the Politics of Melodrama in Hong Kong.”Journal of Film and Video 45, 4 (1993): 57-70.

Li, Dian. “Clara Law.” Senses of Cinema–Great Directors, a Critical Database.

—–. “Between Memory and Forgetting: Clara Law’s Vision of the Transnational Self in Autumn Moon.” Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring 2004): 57-72.

—–. “Clara Law’s Construction of Postmodern Nature in the Film The Goddess of 1967.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 7, 2 (Oct. 2007): 125-38.

Louie, Kam. “Floating Life: Nostalgia for the Confucian Way in Suburban Sydney.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 97-103.

Millard, Katherine. “An Interview with Clara Law.” Senses of Cinema 13 (April-May, 2001).

Shen, Shiao-Ying. “Filming One’s Way Home: Clara Law’s Letters to Oz.” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 347-67.

Teo, Stephen. “Autumn Moon.” Senses of Cinema 12 (2001).

—–. “Temptation of a Monk.” Senses of Cinema 12 (2001).

—–. “Floating Life: The Heaviness of Moving.” Senses of Cinema 12 (2001).

Yue, Audrey. “Migration-as-Transition: Pre-Post-1997 Hong Kong Culture in Clara Law’s Autumn Moon.” Intersections 4 (Sept. 2000).

Ang Lee 李安

Berry, Chris. “Wedding Banquet: A Family (Melodrama) Affair.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 183-90. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 235-42.

Berry, Michael. “Ang Lee: Freedom in Film.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 324-61.

Cai, Rong. “Gender Imaginations in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Wuxia World.” positions: east asia cultures critiques 13, 2 (Fall 2005): 441-71.

Chan, Felicia. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Cultural Migrancy and Translatability.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 56-64. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 73-81.

Chan, Kenneth. “The Global Return of the Wu Xia Pian (Chinese Sword-Fighting Movie): Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.” Cinema Journal 43, 4 (2004): 3-17.

Chang, Eileen, Wang Hui Ling, and James Schamus. Lust, Caution: The Story, the Screenplay, and the Making of the Film. NY: Pantheon Books, 2007. [publisher’s blurb]

Chang, Hsiao-hung. “Transnational Affect: Cold Anger, Hot Tears and Lust, Caution.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35, 1 (March 2008). Rpt. in Hsiao-yen Peng and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution. NY: Routledge, 2014, 182-95.

[Abstract: This paper takes the 2007 film Lust, Caution by Ang Lee as its primary example to explore the ambivalent productivity of the “trans” in the current discourse on transnational cinema and global culture. The paper is divided into three parts. Part I takes the highly biased and provocative diatribes against Lust, Caution on the mainland Chinese internet as an intriguing cultural symptom for analysis, and finds in these angry reactions to the film not only an undisguised hostility toward collaboration framed in a paranoid rhetoric of nationalism, but also a new affective assemblage of “hanjian” (national traitor) and “the global man.” Part II shifts the focus to the cultural reception of the film in Taiwan and foregrounds the public shedding tears of Ang Lee and Ma Ying-jeou, the newly elected President of Taiwan, before and after the film’s world premiere: their emotional reactions are seen as being triggered by a new affective assemblage that seems to combine patriotic feeling with diasporic sentiment. A trans-historical linkage of two separate historical eras, those of World War II and the (post-) Cold War, is thus created to make “trans” less a border-crossing than a dynamic force of affective becoming. Part III further explores this affective becoming in light of the film’s major setting, Shanghai, in order to theorize a new concept of “homeland” that could be less a “single” spatial center than a “singular” temporal multiplicity. Therefore, the 1949 separation of Taiwan and China and subsequent cross-Strait geopolitical divisions can no longer be taken for granted for disparate responses; it is rather the trans as a new bloc of sensation variously affecting the audience members of Lust, Caution, creates lines of incongruity and incompatibility which form a new blockage of difference and differentiation across the Strait.]

Chen, Xiang-Yin Sasha. “Eros Impossible and Eros of the Impossible in Lust/Caution: The Shanghai Lady/Baby in the Late 1930s and Early 1940s.” In Hsiao-yen Peng and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution. NY: Routledge, 2014, 81-100.

Chi, Robert. “Lust, Caution.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 2 (Nov. 2009): 177-87.

[Abstract: The term ‘exhibitionism’ collects together a range of concepts and issues, enabling us to go beyond readings of an individual film as an ideological text. The term highlights contextual conditions that shape films. It also shows how films as artefacts invite contestations not just among different readings but among different kinds of social practices altogether. The exhibitionism of the film Lust, Caution/Se, jie (Ang Lee, 2007) reveals one of the most significant processes of contemporary Chinese cinema: the differential remapping of practices like production, exhibition and consumption.]

Chiang, Mark. “Coming Out into the Global System: Postmodern Patriarchies and Transnational Sexualities in The Wedding Banquet.” In David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, eds., Q & A: Queers in Asian America. Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1998.

Chow, Rey. “All Chinese Families Are Alike: Biopolitics in Eat a Bowl of Tea and The Wedding Banquet.” In Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. NY: Columbia, UP, 2007.

Chua, Ling-Yen. “The Cinematic Representation of Asian Homosexuality in ‘The Wedding Banquet.'” (Special Double Issue Multicultural Queer: Australian Narratives) Journal of Homosexuality 36, 3/4 (March, 1999): 99.

Corliss, Richard. “Crouching China, Hidden Agenda.” Time.com (March 14, 2001).

Dai, Jinhua. “In Vogue: Politics and the Nation-State in Lust, Caution and the Lust, Caution Phenomenon in China.” Trs. Erebus Wong and Lisa Rofel. In Dai Jinhua, After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018, 127-40.

Darius, Wei Ming and Eileen Fung. “Breaking the Soy Sauce Jar: Diaspora and Displacement in the Films of Ang Lee.” In Sheldon Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

Daruvala, Susan. “Self as Performance, Lust as Betrayal in the Theatre of War.” In Hsiao-yen Peng and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution. NY: Routledge, 2014, 101-120.

Davis, Darrell William. “Cannibal, Class, Betrayal: Eileen Chang and Ang Lee.” In Hsiao-yen Peng and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution. NY: Routledge, 2014, 54-78.

—–. “2010, January 10: Ang Lee’s Adaptations, Pretense, Transmutation.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 918-23.

Deppman, Hsiu-Chuang. “Recipes for a New Taiwanese Identity? Food, Space, and Sex in the Works of Ang Lee, Ming-liang Tsai, and T’ien-wen Chu.”American Journal of Chinese Studies 8, 2 (Oct. 2001): 145-68.

—–. “Seduction of a Filmic Romance: Eileen Chang and Ang Lee.” In Kam Louie, ed., Eileen Chang: Romancing Languages, Cultures, and Genres. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2012, 155-76.

Dilley, Whitney Crothers. The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen. London: Wallflower Press, 2007.

—–. “The ‘Real’ Wang Jiazhi: Taboo, Transgression, and Truth in Lust/Caution.” In Hsiao-yen Peng and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution. NY: Routledge, 2014, 121-32.

Jay, Jennifer. “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: (Re)packing Chinas and Selling the Hybridized Culture in an Age of Transnationalism.” In Maria N. Ng and Philip Holden, eds., Reading Chinese Transnationalisms Society, Literature, Film. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006.

Johnson, Matthew. “Lust, Camera, Action: How Ang Lee’s Risque Thriller Charts a Profitable New Course for Transnational Cinema.” The China Beat (April 16, 2008).

Kaldis, Nick. “Couching Race in the Global Era: Intra-Asian Racism in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 10, 1 (Summer 2010): 16-44.

Kim, L. S. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Making Women Warriors–A Transnational Reading of Asian Women Action Heroes.” Jump Cut 48 (Winter 2006).

Laine, Tarja. “Games of Love and Lust: Performance, Masquerade and Trauma in Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden.” Asian Cinema 34, 1 (2023): 81-101.

[Abstract: This article analyses Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007) and Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden (2016) as melodramas which foreground trauma as a deadlock of identity. In both films, trauma exposes cultural and social consequences of national betrayal and colonial hierarchies, drawing our attention to politically charged predicament of suspended agency. At the same time, in both films, trauma as the ‘affective bearing’ also becomes significant with regard to how the spectator understands the expressed, cinematic world. This affective bearing is not a quality ‘attached’ to the film externally, but it is immanent to its aesthetic-expressive specificity which evokes direct emotional engagement in the spectator. The trauma examined in both films bears less resemblance to attempts of representing national traumas than to matters of affective intensities experienced and understood organically from within the cinematic experience. This focus on trauma makes both films universally accessible insofar as it demonstrates not only what cinema can represent, but also what cinema can do: by means of its affective bearing a film can directly engage the spectators’ emotion in a way that alters their cinematic experience.]

Lee, David. “Ang Lee: Thoughts After the Oscars.” Sinorama (May 1994): 6-24.

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. 2008. “Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution and Its Reception” boundary 2 35, 3 (Fall 2008): 223-238

Levie, Matthew. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Art Film Hidden Inside the Chop-Socky Flick.” Bright Lights Film Journal 33 (July 2001).

Lim, January. “Father Knows Best: Reading Sexuality in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet and Chay Yew’s Porcelain.” In Maria N. Ng and Philip Holden, eds., Reading Chinese Transnationalisms Society, Literature, Film. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006.

Lim, Kien Ket. “Becoming Noir.” In Hsiao-yen Peng and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution. NY: Routledge, 2014, 135-54.

Lim, Song Hwee. “The Burden of Representation: Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet.” In Lim, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2006, 41-68.

Lo, Sandy Hsiu-chih. “Light and Shadow of Jianghu: Peering into the Contemporary Political Mythology in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Grandmaster.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Ella Raidel, eds., The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture: Altering Archives. Routledge, 2018, 163-84.

Lu, Sheldon. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Bouncing Angels: Hollywood, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Transnational Cinema.” In Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 220-36.

Luo, Liang. “Performing the Political in Lust, Caution.” Trans-Humanities 8, 3 (2015): 85-109.

Ma, Sheng-mei. “Ang Lee’s Domestic Tragicomedy: Immigrant Nostalgia, Exotic/Ethnic Tour, Global Market.” Journal of Popular Culture 30, 1 (1996): 191-201.

Marchetti, Gina. “Hollywood and Taiwan: Connections, Countercurrents, and Ang Lee’s Hulk.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds.,Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 95-108.

—–. “Eileen Chang and Ang Lee at the Movies: The Cinematic Politics of Lust, Caution.” In Kam Louie, ed., Eileen Chang: Romancing Languages, Cultures, and Genres. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2012, 131-54.

Martin, Fran. “Globally Chinese at The Wedding Banquet.” In Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer Representations in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2003, 141-62.

—–. “The China Simulacrum: Genre, Feminism, and Pan-Chinese Cultural Politics in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” In Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds.,Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 149-160.

Minnihan, David. “Ang Lee.” Senses of Cinema–Great Directors Critical Database.

Nordin, Kenneth D. “Shadow Archetypes in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Hulk: A Jungian Perspectve.” Asian Cinema 15, 2 (Fall/Winter 2004): 120-132.

Peng, Hsiao-yen, and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds. From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution. NY: Routledge, 2014.

[Abstract: This book analyses Ang Lee’s art of film adaptation through the lens of modern literary and film theory, as well as featuring detailed readings and analyses of different dialogues and scenes, directorial and authorial decisions and intentions, while at the same time confronting the intense political debates resulting from the film’s subject matter. The theories of Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, Bataille and others are used to identify and clarify issues raised by the film related to gender, sexuality, eroticism, power, manipulation, and betrayal; the themes of lust and caution are dealt with in conjunction with the controversial issues of contemporary political consciousness concerning patriotism, and the Sino-Japanese War complicated by divided historical experiences and cross-Taiwan Strait relationships. The contributors to this volume cover translation and adaptation, loyalty and betrayal, collaboration and manipulation, playing roles and performativity, whilst at the same time intertwining these with issues of national identity, political loyalty, collective memory, and gender. As such, the book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese and Asian cinema and literature, as well as those interested in modern Chinese history and cultural studies.]

—–. “Woman as Metaphor: How Lust/Caution Re/Deconstructs History.” In Hsiao-yen Peng and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution. NY: Routledge, 2014, 155-81.

Rothman, William. “New Life for an Old Genre: Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” Persimmon 2,3 (Winter 2002): 80-83.

Silbergeld, Jerome. “Ang Lee’s American, in Living Color.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 3 (2012): 283-97.

Smith, Ian Haydn. “Ang Lee.” In Yvonne Tasker, ed., Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers. London, New York: Routledge, 2002, 227-35.

Shi, Shu-mei. “Globalisation and Minoritisation: Ang Lee and the Politics of Flexibility.” New Formations: a Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics. 40 (Spring 2000): 87-101.

Sun, Cecile Chu-Chin. “Two Versions of Sejie: Fiction and Film–Views from a Common Reader.” In Hsiao-yen Peng and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds.,From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution. NY: Routledge, 2014, 35-50.

Szeto, Kin-Yan. “Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Gender, Ethnicity, and Transnationalism.” In Szeto, The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan in Hollywood. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011, 33-70.

Teo, Stephen. “Love and Swords: The Dialectics of Martial Arts Romance (A Review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).” Senses of Cinema 11 (Dec. 2000/Jan.2001).

—–. “We Kicked Jackie Chan’s Ass: An Interview with James Schamus.” Senses of Cinema 13 (April-May 2001).

Tsai, Robin Chen-hsing. “The Gaze of the Other in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hitchcock’s The Birds.” Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics 28, 1 (Jan. 2002): 181-202.

von Kowallis, Jon Eugene. “Sado-Masochism, Steamy Sex, and Shanghai Glitter: What’s Love Got to Do with It? A ‘Philologist’ Looks at Lust/Caution and the Literary Texts That Inspired It.” In Hsiao-yen Peng and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution. NY: Routledge, 2014, 51-63.

Wang, Georgette and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh. “Globalization and Hybridization in Cultural Products: The Cases of Mulan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8, 2 (2005): 175-193.

Wang, Xiaoping. “Making a Historical Fable: The Narrative Strategy of Lust, Caution and Its Social Repercussions.” Journal of Contemporary China 19 (65) (2010): 573-90.

[Abstract: The screening of the film Lust, Caution in China in late 2007 and the subsequent banning of its actress in early 2008 created a great stir, arousing heated debates across many ranks of society. The debates lasted for more than half a year, making it one of the most sensational cultural (and political) events in China of the year. As a result, the intricate texture of its cinematic text and the complex reactions of the social context constitute an intriguing case of sophisticated cultural politics with rich and significant import. Through an analysis of the film’s narrative strategy, this paper reveals the film’s nature as a political film noir aimed to allegorize the history of modern China. A discussion of its diversified reception in the Chinese world, rather than echoing the mainstream opinion that sees the harsh critique from the Chinese populace as merely a blind reaction of rampant nationalist sentiment, discloses the heterogeneous voices among differing social forces competing for cultural hegemony in contemporary China.]

Wei, Ti. “Generational/Cultural Contradictions and Global Incorporation: Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman.” In Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 101-12.

Yang, Haosheng. “Myths of Revolution and Sensual Revisions: New Representations of Martyrs on the Chinese Screen.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 2 (Fall 2012): 179-208. [deals in part with Lust, Caution]

Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu. “Montage of Attractions: Juxtaposing Lust/Caution.” In Hsiao-yen Peng and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution. NY: Routledge, 2014, 15-34.

Bruce Lee 李小龍

Berry, Chris. “Stellar Transit: Bruce Lee’s Body or Chinese Masculinity in a Transnational Frame.” In Martin and Larissa Heinrich, eds., Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006, 218-34.

Block, Alex Ben. The Legend of Bruce Lee. NY: Dell, 1974.

Hu, Brian. “Bruce Lee After Bruce Lee: A Life in Conjectures.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 2 (July 2008): 123-35.

[Abstract: In the decade after Bruce Lee’s death in 1973, film-makers from around the world produced numerous films starring imitation Bruce Lees with names like Bruce Li, Bruce Le and Dragon Lee. This article suggests that any understanding of the discourse of Bruce Lee as a star is incomplete without consideration of the ways in which the ‘Bruceploitation’ industry appropriated the star image of Bruce Lee and repackaged it for a transnational audience in the waning years of ‘kung fu fever’. By analysing the films’ narratives and marketing, the article argues that these films are not mere ‘clones’ of the ‘real’ thing, but rather imitations with a self-conscious difference. These films present ‘conjectural Bruce Lees’ that expand the familiar Bruce Lee image in order to maintain fan interest. As a result, ‘Bruce Lee’ as a discourse became increasingly flexible and sticky, hybridizing across cultures and genres. This view of ‘Bruce Lee’ beyond Bruce Lee asks that scholars approach stars not simply as discrete actors, but also as disembodied star-functions that transform across time and space.]

Kato, M. T. “Burning Asia: Bruce Lee’s Kinetic Narrative of Decolonization.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, 1 (Spring 2005): 62-99.

Teng, Sue-Feng. “From Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan-The Kungfu Film Carries On.” Sinorama (Jun. 1996): 28-35.

Teo, Stephen. “1973, July 20: The Mysterious Death of Bruce Lee, Chinese Nationalism, and Cinematic Legacy.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 707-12.

Lee Kang-sheng 李康生

Hummel, Volker. “The Missing: An Interview with Lee Kang-sheng.” Senses of Cinema 32 (July-Sept. 2004).

Li Hangxiang 李翰祥

Chen, Jasmine Yu-hsing. “‘Queering’ the Nation?: Gendered Chineseness, Cross-Dressing, and the Reception of Love Eterne in Taiwan.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 18, 1 (March 2021): 49-69.

[Abstract: This article explores how gendered Chineseness is represented, circulated, and received in Huangmei musical films for audiences in martial-law Taiwan. Focusing on Love Eterne (1963), the analysis examines how theatrical impersonations in the film provided a “queer” social commentary on aspects of Chinese nationalism that conflicted with the Kuomintang’s military masculinities. Love Eterne features dual layers of male impersonations: diegetically, the female character Zhu Yingtai masquerades as a man to attend school with other men; nondiegetically, the actress Ling Po performs the male character Liang Shanbo, Zhu’s lover. In addition to the “queer” imagination generated by Ling’s cross-dressing performance, the author considers how the feminine tone of Love Eterne allowed the Taiwanese audience to escape from masculine war preparations. Although the Kuomintang promoted Ling as a model patriotic actress, it was her background, similar to many Taiwanese adopted daughters, that attracted the most attention from female audiences. This female empathy and the queer subjectivity arguably disturbed the Kuomintang’s political propaganda. Hence, this study adds to the breadth of queerness in studies on the cinematic performance of same-sex subjectivities and invites new understandings of queer performance in Love Eterne as a vehicle that can inspire alternative imaginings of gendered selfhoods and nations.]

Wicks, James. “Love in the Time of Industrialization: Representations of Nature in Li Hanxiang’s The Winter (1969).” Taiwan wenxue yanjiu xue bao 17 (2013): 81-103.

Li Shaohong 李少红

Huang, Erin Y. “Intimate Dystopias: Dreams of the Interior and Architectural Feminism in Li Shaohong’s Urban Cinema.” positions: asia critique 27, 2 (May 2019): 333-60.

[Abstract: This article examines Chinese filmmaker Li Shaohong’s film productions in the 2000s—including Baober in Love (恋爱中的宝贝), Stolen Life (生死劫), and The Door (门)—and provides a gender history of post-socialist Chinese femininity and masculinity. Rather than reading the “post” as the transition from socialist to globally commodified femininity, this essay unravels it as a complex cultural field of gender recoding, negotiation, and experimentation. Critiquing the “city” as an expanding network of consumer desires, Li’s urban cinema illustrates the dystopic imaginary of post-socialist home spaces that evoke an invisible system of spatial violence. Adding a gendered twist to Walter Benjamin’s Marxist critique of phantasmagorias of the interior, Li’s feminist interior portrays a post-socialist masculinist urban (bodies-cities) network, where women are seen as displaced, homeless, and disappeared. In the struggle for “space,” both body and city are portrayed as intimate dystopias, where the most familiar things become the most estranging sites of horror.]

Lu, Tonglin. “Culture and Violence: Li Shaohong, Bloody Dawn.” in Lu, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 157-72.

Reynaud, Berenice. “Li Shaohong.” Cinemaya 25-26 (1994-1995): 8-9.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “How to Read the Revolution–Review of Blush.” Chicago Reader (October 4, 1996).

Xu, Jian. “Blush from Novella to Film: The Possibility of Critical Art in Commodity Culture.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 1 (Spring 2000): 115-63.

Li Xing 李行

Hong, Guo-juin. “Tracing a Journeyman’s Electric Shadow: Healthy Realism, Cultural Policies, and Lee Hsing, 1964-1980.” In Hong, Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 65-86.

Wicks, James. “Two Stage Brothers: Tracing a Common Heritage in Early Films by Xie Jin and Li Xing.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 1 (Spring 2009): 174-212.

Li Yang 李杨

Berry, Michael. “Li Yang: The Future of Chinese Cinema?” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 208-32.

Blind Shaft website (Ocean Films.com)

Chow, Rey. “‘Human’ in the Age of Disposable People: The Ambiguous Import of Kinship and Education in Blind Shaft.” In Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. NY: Columbia, UP, 2007.

Gladwin, Derek. “No Country for Young Men: Chinese Modernity, Displacement, and Initiatory Ritual in Chinese Sixth Generation Cinema.” Asian Cinema23, 1 (2012): 31-44.

[Abstract: This article examines youth initiation in two Chinese Sixth Generation films, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Shiqi sui de dan che/Beijing Bicycle(2001) and Li Yang’s Mang jing/Blind Shaft (2003). It addresses the broader issue of the ‘floating population’ in China and the impact that rapid modernization has on the social fabric of Chinese society. It also suggests that in light of such social injustices and cinematic representation in the post-socialist China of today, under the guise of modernity and economic progress, there exists a dislocated and disconnected transition into adulthood for youth populations. This article argues that Wang and Yi directly investigate one of the consequences of Chinese modernity: disrupted youth initiatory ritual. Beijing Bicycle and Blind Shaft depict in a narrative documentary form an entire generation of Chinese youth who have been geographically and psychologically displaced as they lose their family connections and education opportunities, move from job to job, and fail to experience appropriate initiation into adulthood, all of which have contributed to a fractured social system.]

Noble, Jonathan. “Blind Shaft: Performing the ‘Underground’ on and beyond the Screen.” In Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 32-39.

Stephen Teo [interviews with Li Yang]. “There is No Sixth Generation: Director Li Yang on Blind Shaft and His Place in Chinese Cinema.” Senses of Cinema27 (July/Aug. 2003).

Wang, Ban. “Documentary as Haunting of the Real: The Logic of Capital in Blind Shaft.” Asian Cinema 16, 1 (2005): 4–15.

—–. “Of Humans and Nature in Documentary: The Logic of Capital in West of the Tracks and Blind Shaft.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds.,Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 157-70.

Li Yu 李玉

Cui, Shuqin. “Searching for Female Sexuality and Negotiating with Feminism: Li Yu’s Film Trilogy.” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 173-90.

Nunes, Jennifer Marie. “Fish and Elephant: Reexamining (In)visibility and Claiming Queer Agency in China’s First Lesbian Film.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 12, 1 (2018): 74-91.

Shi, Liang. “Beginning a New Discourse: The First Chinese Lesbian Film Fish and Elephant.” Film Criticism 28, 3 (2004): 21-36.

Stuckey, Andrew. “Beyond Allegory: Symbol and the Family Melodrama in Lost in Beijing.” In Stuckey, Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2018, 100-13.

Liu Miaomiao 刘苗苗

Liu Na’ou 劉吶鷗

Ong, Donna. “Liu Na’ou And The 1930s Soft Film Movement: A New Approach In Revisionist Chinese Film Historiography.” Cinema Journal 2, 2 (2013).

[Abstract: This essay analyzes how the 1930s Chinese “Soft Film” movement emerged and developed in film historiography, and finds it is a discursive formation by the Leftists to create an ideological enemy that serves to define its own group’s identity through a struggle against an “other”. It challenges the naming of “Soft Film” through examining documents beyond the official archive. Unearthing the film writings of Liu Na’ou as the movement’s leading figure is a good entry point into excavating the history of the people and films associated with the label “Soft Film”. Reconstructing this “reactionary cinema” will reveal previously unknown cultural connections with classical and avant-garde Western film theories, and more importantly renovate the established Chinese film canon of the 1930s.]

—–. “Liu Na’ou: The Fate of ‘Middling Modernity’ and the Global Pure Film Movement in Republican-Era China.” Film Quarterly 72, 2 (Winter 2018): 26-37.

Zhang, Ling. “Rhythmic Movement, the City Symphony and Transcultural Transmediality: Liu Na’ou and The Man Who Has a Camera (1933).” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 1 (2015): 42-61.

[Abstract: This article explores how the creative career, protean experiments and theoretical writings of Taiwanese/Shanghainese/Japanese writer, translator, filmmaker and critic Liu Na’ou (1905-1940) were enriched by the interpenetration of his transcultural and transmedial aspirations. Through close reading of Liu’s amateur “city film,” The Man Who Has a Camera (1933), paying explicit homage to Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s “city symphony” film The Man With a Movie Camera (1929), I investigate how it embodies and encompasses the notions of reinvention and transculturation. Furthermore, through Liu’s film criticism, especially on sound aesthetic and rhythmicity, I examine how camera movement and body movement, rhythm and musicality communicate and become entangled with the concept of transmediality. These complications also mediate Liu’s ambiguous cultural identity as a colonial subject and transnational practitioner. I suggest how these intertwined concepts and practices created new aesthetic possibilities in 1930s Shanghai and contributed to—as well as constrained—a distinctively cosmopolitan vision.]

Lou Ye 娄烨

Berry, Chris. “Suzhou River.” (review). Cinemaya 49 (2000): 20-21.

Fleming, David. “The Creative Evolution and Crystallisation of the ‘Bastard Line’: Drifting from the Rive Gauche into Suzhou River.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 2 (2014): 135-47.

[Abstract: Deleuze argues that ‘it is never at the beginning that something new, a new art, is able to reveal its essence’; instead, what is tacit at the outset only reveals itself later, after taking a significant ‘detour in its evolution’. This paper argues that Lou Ye’s Suzhou River can be understood as the détournement of the ‘bastard line’ of the so-called Sixth Generation’s urban realist impulse, and as such materialises a new modality of mainland time-image cinema. By also putting the film into critical relation with Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961) via Deleuze, I aim to illustrate how Lou’s evental film can be understood as actively modifying our understanding of the cinematic past.]

Greenberg, Jonah. “Lou Ye’s Variations on Romance.” Virtual China (April 18, 2000).

Hageman, Andrew. “Floating Concsiousness: The Cinematic Confluence of Ecological Aesthetics in Suzhou River.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds.,Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 73-91.

Huang, Yiju. “By Way of Melancholia: Remembrance of Tiananmen Square Incident in Summer Palace.” Asian Cinema 21, 1 (Spring/Summer 2010): 165-78.

Metzger, Sean. “The Little (Chinese) Mermaid: Importing ‘Western’ Femininity in Lou Ye’s Suzhou he (Suzhou River).” In Andrew David Jackson, Michael Gibb, and David White, eds., How East Asian Films Are Reshaping National Identities: Essays on the Cinemas of China, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Albany: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007, 135-154.

Ortells, Xavier. “Symptomatic Metafiction in Lou Ye’s Suzhou River.” Asian Cinema 22, 2 (Fall/Winter 2010): 284-99.

Silbergeld, Jerome. “Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Lou Ye’s Suzhou River.” Persimmon 3, 2 (Summer 2002): 70-73.

—–. Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China’s Moral Voice. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. [with analyses of Suzhou River] [MCLC Resource Center review by Robert Chi]

Wang, Xiaoping. “Love in a Changing Society of the Past Half Century: Suzhou River as a Historical Allegory.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 4 (2013): 690-706.

Xu, Gary G. “‘My Camera Doesn’t Lie’: Cinematic Realism and Chinese Cityscape in Beijing Bicycle and Suzhou River.” In Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 67-88.

Lu Chuan 陆川

Bo, Cai. “Nanjing’s Fantasy, Lu Chuan’s Flaw–Reassessing City of Life and Death.” Frontier of Literary Studies in China 7, 3 (2013): 517-20.

Cui, Shuqin. “Kekexili: Mountain Patrol: Moral Dilemma and a Man with a Camera.” In Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 153-59.

Dai, Jinhua. “I Want to Be Human: A Story of China and the Human.” Social Text 109 (2012): 129-50.

[Abstract: This article reads a Chinese blockbuster film, City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing!; dir. Lu Chuan, 2009), as an allegory of China and the human for contemporary China. This movie illustrates the historical entanglement and tension of China and the human in twentieth-century Chinese cultural criticism and raises provocative questions about the geopolitics of historical trauma (the Nanjing Massacre in this case), the politics of memory, and the recuperation of Chinese humanity through memory work. I situate this film’s representation of the Nanjing Massacre in relation to two other texts, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe and The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, and examine the intricate power relations revolving around these contemporary discourses of the human in representations of this historical incident. I argue that these two texts have prepared the ground for City of Life and Death, positioning it strategically vis-a-vis Chinese history and the global condition of neoliberal globalization. I suggest that the movie articulates the Chinese desire for the universal human among the emerging new Chinese middle class, which has proved itself to be a formidable force in cultural and ideological production in contemporary China.]

Kraicer, Shelley. “A Matter of Life and Death: Lu Chuan and Post-Zhuxuanlu Cinema.” Cinema Scope 41 (2010)

Zhu, Yanhong. “A Past Revisited: Re-presentation of the Nanjing Massacre in City of Life and Death.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 2 (2013): 85-108.

Lu Ren 鲁韧

Berry, Chris. “Sexual Difference and the Viewing Subject in Li Shuangshuang and The In-laws.” Berry, ed., Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Papers, 1985. Rpt. London: British Film Institute, 1991.

Kuoshu, Harry H. “The White-Haired Girl and Li Shuangshuang: Female Visibility and the Socialist Feminism.” In Harry Kuoshu, Lightness of Being in China: Adaptation and Discursive Figuration in Cinema and Theater. NY: Peter Lang, 1999, 71-94.

Tang, Xiaobing. “Rural Women and Social Change in New China Cinema: From Li Shuangshuang to Ermo.” positions 11, 3 (Winter 2003): 647-74.

Zhang, Yingjin. “Eulogistic Comedy as Domestic Soft Power: Biopolitical Self-fashioning in It’s My Day Off (1959).” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 12, 2 (2018): 113-26.

[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.]

Meng Jinghui 孟京辉

Ferrari, Rossella. “Disenchanted Presents, Haunted Pasts, and Dystopian Futures: Defered Millenialism in the Cinema of Meng Jinghui.” Journal of Contemporary China 20 (71): (2011): 699-721.

[Abstract: Meng Jinghui’s Chicken Poets (2002) presents a postmodern meditation on the state and fate of Chinese cultural production, intellectual discourse, and social relations at the turn of the century and the millennium. Albeit released two years after 2000, it retains symptomatic traits of the fin-de-siecle and millennial mentality and is therefore examined as an instance of ‘deferred’ or ‘residual’ millennialism. As typical of such narratives, it merges visions of hope and horror, dream and disaster. The film is founded on a dialogic intersection of multiple ‘time-spaces’ of signification, each providing a separate locus of reflection and critique. Besides disclosing distinct discursive targets, the structural interplay of these different chronotopes also establishes generic distinctions within the narrative. Chicken Poets relates to the present as a self-reflexive Kunstler film addressing the conflict of creation and commodity in times of mechanical reproduction and mediated stardom. Its enquiry into the past triggers ghostly resurrections and nostalgic visions of compensation and resistance. Its imagination of the future generates apocalyptic fantasies of disaster while disclosing prospects of redemption.]

McGrath, Jason. “The New Formalism Mainland Chinese Cinema at the Turn of the Century.” In Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. London: Routledge, 2008, 207-22. [deals s in part with Chicken Poets]

Ning Hao 宁浩

Berra, John and Liu Yang. “Cheap Laughs: The Mass-Production of Low-Budget Chinese Comedies from Fengkuang de shitou/Crazy Stone (Ning Hao, 2006) to Gao Xing (Agan, 2009).” Asian Cinema 23, 1 (2012): 45-58.

[Abstract: This article will focus on the burgeoning production of low-budget feature film comedies in Mainland China. A number of these productions have achieved considerable success at the local box office since 2006. The popularity of these swiftly-produced features is the result of rapid industrialization and the increasing emphasis on genre in the Mainland China market. It also suggests a worrying trend in terms of the mass-production of films for local audiences; these films are manufactured in a rough manner with little regard for aesthetic quality or tonal consistency, leading to concerns about malformed genre product. This article outlines the definition, origins and variations of the low-budget comedies produced in China. Based on data gathered through several large-scale industry studies of the local audience, it will show that a relationship exists between the cultural mind-set of young cinemagoers and the styles of low-budget comedy films. To chart the success of this genre, and its evolution from low-budget production to mid-budget production due to consistent box office returns, the article will examine two industrially significant examples: Crazy Stone and Gao Xing. The former arguably started the genre, leading to a host of imitators, of which the latter has been particularly well-attended, despite evidencing a decline in quality as satirical humour is replaced by vulgarity. In this respect, it will be argued that the Mainland China production cycle of the low-budget comedy is an example of ‘ShanZhai’ culture as this is a form of commercial film-making that is largely based on imitation.]

Lin, Xiaoping. “Ning Hao’s Incense: A Curious Tale of Earthly Buddhism.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 235-54.

Liu, Hui. “Black Comedy Films in Postsocialist China: Case Study of Ning Hao’s Crazy Series.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 12, 2 (2018): 158-73.

[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.]

Ning Ying 宁瀛

Cui, Shuqin. “Ning Ying’s Beijing Trilogy: Cinematic Configuration of Age, Class, and Sexuality.” In Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2007, 241-63.

Li, Wei. “Ning Ying Declares No More Fantasy.” China Screen 3 (1994): 12-13.

Ma, Xuefei. “Queer Voice(over): Reassembling Female Desire in Chinese Cinema.” Asian Cinema 34, 1 (2023): 103-22.

[Abstract: This article discusses Ning Ying’s 2006 film Perpetual Motion 无穷动 with an emphasis on the development of queer voice(over) – a queer feminist aesthetic achievement that subverts and perverts the heteropatriarchal suppression of women’s desire. Specifically, I analyse the ways queer figure’s voice-over interacts with haptic visuality, contemporaneous image and the intertextual references between film-texts and exterior texts about the film. I argue, through queer voice(over), Perpetual Motion expands its theme beyond the issue of infidelity in a heterosexual marriage, develops a cinematic critique to the twentieth-century Chinese feminist movements and articulates female desires from multiple registers of senses, psychology and historical subjectivity. In Chinese cinema where queer voices are usually marginalized, Ning’s queer voice(over) establishes a mutually referent relation between queer and heteronormative storylines, thus circumventing the state censorship and adding queerness into Chinese-language feminist debates and cinematic expression.]

Marchetti, Gina. “From Mao’s ‘Continuous Revolution’ to Ning Ying’s Perpetual Motion (2005): Sexual Politics, Neoliberalism, and Postmodern China.” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 191-212.

Wei, Louisa S. “Images Real: An Interview with Ning Ying.” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 66-70.

White, Jerry. “The Films of Ning Ying: China Unfolding in Miniature.” Cineaction 42, 1(1997): 2-9.

Xiao, Hui Faye. “Interiorized Feminism and Gendered Nostalgia of the ‘Daughter Generation’ in Ning Ying’s Perpetual Motion.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 3 (Nov.2011)

[Abstract: Ning Ying’s 2006 film Wuqiong dong/Perpetual Motion can be regarded as her first attempt to explore the genre of ‘women’s film’. Deviating from her previous neo-realist style, this film seeks to cultivate an alternative cinematic practice through developing a heavy-handed negative aesthetics. Ning Ying interiorizes the filmic exploration of female subjectivity in an enclosed time and space, which is constantly haunted by a spectral aesthetics characterized by audio-visual allusions to loss, grave, ruins and ghosts. However, the film’s radical content and alternative aesthetics are, ironically, packaged in prevailing consumer aesthetics and commodity fetishism on and off the silver screen. All these competing drives and accounts render the film a contested narrative constantly oscillating between avant-garde feminism and domestic melodrama, and between a register of disintegrating sisterhood and a celebrity scandal of adultery. This article examines the discursive and aesthetic innovations, contradictions and limits of Ning Ying’s cinematic feminism.]

Niu Chen-Zer 鈕承澤

Wang, Sharon Chialan. “Brotherhood of No Return: A Queer Reading of Niu Chen-Zer’s Monga.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 3 (2015): 271-82.

[Abstract: This essay positions the 2010 highest-grossing domestic film,Monga, in Taiwan’s nativist discourses and teases out the alterity of queerness in the coming-of-age ‘buddy’ film. I contend thatMongadisengages from the narrative of ‘sadness’ (beiqing) which characterizes the Taiwan New Cinema in the late 1980s and New Wave Cinema in the 1990s. I read the queer element in the film as a trope for a tendency, as can be seen in other coming-of-age cultural productions after the millennium, to move past the dwelling over a homogenized colonial experience in Taiwan’s contemporary historical narratives. As the diegesis of the film displaces the nostalgic search for one’s cultural roots with a self-alienating subjectivity by a sublimation of homoeroticism, I posit thatMongaperforms a ‘patricide’ in its contestation of Taiwanese nationhood and gestures towards a transformative process constituted by self-estrangement.]

Ou Ning 欧宁

Peng Xiaolian 彭小莲

Podvin, Thomas. “A Woman of Substance, Director Peng Xiaolian on Chinese Women, the Film Industry and Shanghai.” (Nov. 4, 2005).

Movius, Lisa. “Old Shanghai Made New.” Asian Wall Street Journal (June 23-25, 2006).

—–. “The Ultimate Female Auteur: Visuality, Subjectivity, and History in the Works of Peng Xiaolian.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, 1 (2017): 157-79.

[Abstract: Peng Xiaolian is a rare and prolific Chinese author who writes both fiction and non‐fiction works and directs both dramatic and documentary films. Peng has not only written, cowritten, or rewritten all the screenplays of her eight dramatic features and two documentaries but is also the author of one novel, twelve novellas, over a dozen short stories, four book‐length memoirs, three collections of film reviews, and numerous essays. The existing scholarly studies, however, nearly all focus on Peng’s dramatic films, with much less, if any, attention directed at her writing and documentaries. To really understand Peng as a film auteur, however, it is necessary to look at her films and writings together. Given the quantity and complexity of her works and the space limitations of this article, I examine Peng’s subversion of the conventional treatment of character, location, and time in three thematic sections reflecting the key narrative motifs in her work. I first summarize existing studies of Peng’s films, highlighting the rarely examined interaction between visuality and spatiality in her films. Then, after defining her sense of time in narrative, I demonstrate how family history and self‐reflexivity are the major difference between her films and her nonfiction works. Last but not least, I discuss how, through her use of multilayered narratives constructed by the female voice and subjectivity, her complete repertoire constitutes a unique history of modern Chinese women. This article aims to demonstrate how, through her use of multilayered narratives constructed by the female voice and subjectivity, her complete repertoire constitutes a unique history of modern Chinese women.]

Yan, Haiping. “Intermedial Moments: An Embodied Turn in Contemporary Chinese Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 1 (2013): 41-61.

[Abstract: This article aims to foster thinking about the increasingly prevalent and fluid notion of the intermedial, a term that may be better approached with or ‘defined’ by its specific occurrences in various scenes across the fields of humanistic arts. Bringing works by two contemporary film directors into a constellation, this article offers an argument on how a distinct aesthetic transpires therein, intimating what may be called an ’embodied’ intermedial turn in Chinese cinema, which brings into a cogni- tive focus a humanly inhabited gesture evocative of a deeply differential country in its intricate mutations. Remaining at odds with the logic of global capital and its ‘liqui- dating’ motions of spectacle industry, these works refunction the cinematic by engag- ing the conditions and mediations of live-world intermedially, turning themselves into embodied innovations in the transformation of the aesthetic and the historical, at another conjuncture for a modernizing China and of modern times in general. (treats Peng Xiaolian’s Shanghai Trilogy and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life

Qiu Jiongjiong 邱炯炯

Xiao, Jiwei. “Make it New! An Interview with Qiu Jiongjiong on A New Old Play.” Cineaste XLVIII, 1 (Winter 2022): 20-25. [now included in the booklet for the DVD]

Shen Xiling 沈西苓

Shen, Jing. “Male Subjectivities: The Idealization of the Democractic Public Sphere: Crossroads (1937) and The Trouble Shooters (1988).” Asian Cinema 22, 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 208-39.

Zhang, Ling. “Shen [Xiling] and Cinema in 1930s Shanghai.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, 2 (2013).

Song Yi 宋轶

Perini, Gaia. “Operai in Cina. Un film di Song Yi” (Workers in China: A Movie by Song Yi), Gli asini 41. Republished on Communia Network, October 11, 2017. [On independent cinema, Fan Yusu 范雨素 and the Picun Migrant Workers Home]

Sun Yu 孙瑜

Berry, Chris. “The Sublimative Text: Sex and Revolution in Big Road [The Highway]” East-West Film Journal 2, 2 (June 1988): 66-86.

Fan, Victor. “The Cinema of Sun Yu: Ice Cream for the Eye . . . But with a Homo Sacer.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 3 (Nov. 2011): 219-52.

[Abstract: This article rethinks where the films of Sun Yu (1900-1990) stand in a highly complex political, theoretical and industrial matrix. By combining a historical reading of the industrial conditions, and a hermeneutic reading of the theoretical discourse in the 1930s, this article argues that the ‘soft film’ is not ‘apolitical’; rather, it shares with the ‘hard film’ position a common belief that cinema is an educational tool for political ends. In this light, the article uses a close analysis of two films by Sun Yu, Tianming/Daybreak (1933) and Tiyu huanghou/Queen of Sports(1934), to demonstrate that Sun’s films were intended as Nationalist propaganda. However, by focusing on perfecting the forms of these films as entertainment so knowingly, and by turning the female protagonist of each film as what Giorgio Agamben calls a homo sacer, the text becomes open to multiple and mutually conflicting readings.]

Li, Cheuk-to. “Eight Films of Sun Yu: A Gentle Discourse on a Genius.” Cineyama 11 (1991): 53-63.

Tang Shu Shuen 唐書璇

Yau, Ching. “Masochistic Men and Normal Women: Tang Shu Shuen and The Arch (1969).” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 66-87.

Tian Zhuangzhuang 田壮壮

Berry, Michael. “Tian Zhuangzhuang: Stealing Horses and Flying Kites.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 50-81.

Clark, Paul. “From the Margins: Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Films.” In Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2005, 106-21.

Gladney, Dru. “Tian Zhuangzhuang, the Fifth Generation, and Minorities Films in China.” Public Culture 8 (1995): 161-75.

Liu, Xinmin. “Play and Being Playful: The Quotidian in Cinematic Remembrance of the Mao Era.” Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring 2004): 73-89. [deals withBlue Kite]

Lopate, Phillipe. “Odd Man Out: Tian Zhuanzhuang Interviewed.” Film Comment (July/Aug. 1994): 60-64.

Lu, Tonglin. “Allegorical and Realistic Portrayals of the Cultural Revolution: Tian Zhuanzhuang, On the Hunting Ground, Horse Thief, Blue Kite.” In Lu, Confroniting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 58-92..

Nielsen, Hanna. “The Three Father Figures in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Film The Blue Kite: The Emasculation of Males by The Communist Party.” China Information 13, 4 (Spring 1999): 83-96.

Niogret, Hubert. “Tian Zhuangzhuang Interviewed.” Positif 397 (1994): 38-42.

Rayns, Tony. “China: Censors, Scapegoats and Bargaining Chips.” Index on Censorship 6 (1995): 69-81. [includes interview with Tian]

Reynaud, Berenice. “Cutting Edge and Missed Encounters–Digital Short Films by Three Filmmakers: Jia Zhangke (In Public), John Akomfrah (Digitopia), Tsai Ming-Liang (A Conversation with God).” Senses of Cinema 20 (May-June 2002).

Sklar, Robert. “People and Politics, Simple and Direct–an Interview with Tian Zhuangzhuang.” Cineaste (Oct. 1994): 36-38.

Tam, Kwok-kan and Wimal Dissanayake. “Tian Zhuangzhuang: Reconfiguring the Familiar and the Unfamiliar.” In New Chinese Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Vidal-Hall, Judith. “History, Homage, Memory: Interview with Tian Zhuangzhuang.” Index on Censorship 24, 6 (1995): 80-81.

Wang, Ban. “Trauma and History in Chinese Film: Reading The Blue Kite against Melodrama.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, 1 (Spring 1999): 125-56.

Zhang, Xudong. “National Trauma, Global Allegory: Construction of Collective Memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite.” In Zhang, Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2008, 269-88. Rpt. in Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scene at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 27-42.

Johnnie To 杜琪峯

Bettinson, Gary. “Sounds of Hong Kong Cinema: Johnnie To, Milkway Image, and the Sound Track.” Jump Cut 55 (Fall 2013).

Grossman, Andrew. “The Belated Auteurism of Johnnie To.” Senses of Cinema 12 (2001).

Ignham, Michael. Johnnie To: Kei-Fung’s PTU. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2009.

Kronengold, Charles. “Multitemporality and the Speed(s) of Thought in Johnnie To’s Action Films.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 3 (Oct. 2013): 277-.

[Abstract: Johnnie To’s post-1997 action films often contain sequences that present many simultaneous temporal processes. To’s group-oriented narrative strategies typically place an ensemble of people in the frame; even when they don’t speak we experience each of them seeing, hearing, touching, moving, and engaging in other sorts of body/brain activity. These sequences also include processes and forces that are other-than-human: wind, weather, machines, etc. Sound and music contribute to this complexity. What can we make of this multitemporal flow? Focusing on audiovisual practices this article considers three related effects of this multitemporality: (1) new possibilities for depicting the heterogeneity and the layered character of thinking (from higher-level decision-making down to autonomic processes); (2) an intense concreteness in the representation of thinking, especially nonverbal thinking, and (3) a thickening of the connections that bind cinematic renderings of what William Connolly calls the ‘body/brain/culture network’. Thinking becomes necessarily relational, externalized and ultimately collective.]

Lee, Vivian. “PTU: Re-mapping the Cosmopolitan Crime Zone.” In Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 182-88.

Teo, Stephen. “The Code of The Mission (Johnny To, 1999).” Senses of Cinema 17 (Nov./Dec. 2001).

—–. Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2007. [press blurb]

Walters, Mark. “De-Heroicizing Heroic Bloodshed in Johnnie To’s Election and Election 2.” Asian Cinema 22, 2 (Fall/Winter 2010): 234-53.

Williams, Tony. “Transcultural Spaces of a Vanishing Hong Kong: Johnnie To’s Sparrow.” Asian Cinema 21, 1 (Spring/Summer 2010): 113-23.

Tsai Ming-liang 蔡明亮

Bachner, Andrea. “Cinema as Heterochronos: Temporal Folds in the Work of Tsai Ming-liang.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, 1 (Spring 2007): 60-90.

Bao, Weihong. “Biomechanics of Love: Reinventing the Avant-garde in Tsai Ming-liang’s Wayward ‘Pornographic Musical.'” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, 2 (May 2007): 139-60.

Berry, Chris. “Where is the Love? The Paradox of Performing Loneliness in Ts’ai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour.” In Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros, eds.,Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Sydney: Power Publications, 1999, 147-75.

—–. “Where is the Love? Hyperbolic Realism and Indulgence in Vive L’Amour.” In Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 79-88.

Berry, Michael. “Tsai Ming-liang: Trapped in the Past.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 362-98.

Betz, Mark. “The Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang: A Modernist Genealogy.” In Maria N. Ng and Philip Holden, eds., Reading Chinese Transnationalisms: Society, Literature, Film. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006.

Biro, Yvette. “Perhaps the Flood: The Fiery Torrent of Tsai Ming-Liang’s Films.” Performing Arts Journal 78 (2004): 78-86.

——. “Stray Images, Inside-Outside: On Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs.” Senses of Cinema 72 (2014).

Bloom, Michelle E. “Contemporary Franco-Chinese Cinema: Translation, Citation and Imitation in Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Tsai Ming-Liang’s What Time is it There?” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22, 4 (2005): 311-25.

—–. “The Intertextuality of Tsai Ming-liang’s Sinofrench Film, Face.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 2 (Aug. 2011): 103-122.

[Abstract: This article considers Tsai Ming-liang’s second ‘Sinofrench’ film, Lian/Face (2009), as even more richly intertextual than Ni na bian ji dian/What Time is it There? (2001). The ‘Sinofrench’ entails crossover between France and the ‘sinophone world’, including Taiwan and the mainland. These interactions include intertextuality, adaptation, funding, casting and language. Face’s intertextuality echoes What Time’s homage to Fran?ois Truffaut and his French New Wave feature debut, The 400 Blows (1959), starring Jean-Pierre L?aud. However, in Face, sponsored by the Louvre, Tsai expands the French cast beyond L?aud’s cameo in What Time to Truffaut’s ‘leading ladies’, thereby evoking other Truffaut films, and going beyond cinematic intertextuality to theatre (Oscar Wilde’s Salom?, incarnated by French supermodel Laetitia Casta in the film mise-en-abyme), music (Zhang Lu’s 1940s Shanghai popular music) and painting (Leonardo da Vinci’s St. John the Baptist). Intertextuality facilitates the Sinofrenchness of Face and of cinema more generally.]

Cai Mingliang, et al. Aiqing wansui: Cai Mingliang de dianying (Vive l’amour: Tsai Ming-liang’s film). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1994.

Chan, Kenneth. “Goodbye, Dragon Inn: Tsai Ming-liang’s Political Aesthetic of Nostalgia, Place, and Lingering.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, 2 (May 2007): 89-104.

—–. “Queerly Connecting: The Queer Sinophone Politics of Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone.” In Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich, eds., Queer Sinophone Cultures. NY: Routledge, 2014, 160-76.

Chang, Ivy I-chu. “The Ruin, Body, and Time-Image in Tsai Ming-liang’s Films: The Wayward Cloud, What Time Is It There?, and I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone.” In Chang, Taiwan Cinema, Memory, and Modernity. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Chang, Kaiman. “Gender Hierarchy and Environmental Crisis in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole.” Film Criticism (Sept. 22, 2008).

Cheah, Pheng. “1997: Representing the Sinophone, Truly: On Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 861-67.

Cheong, Wong Tuck. “What Time Is It There?” [review] Cinemaya 52 (Summer 2001).

Chong, Woei Lien, “Alienation in the Modern Metropolis: The Visual Idiom of Taiwanese Film Director Tsai Ming-liang.” China Information 9, 4 (Spring 1995): 81-95.

Chow, Rey. “A Pain in the Neck, a Scene of ‘Incest,’ and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema: Tsai Ming-liang’s The River.” CR: The New Centennial Review 4, 1 (2004): 123-142.

Deppman, Hsiu-Chuang. “The Cinema of Disillusionment: Chen Guofu, Cai Mingliang, and Taiwan’s Second New Wave.” positions: east asia cultures critique 17, 2 (2009): 435-54.

[Abstract: This essay is a study of Chen Guofu and Cai Mingliang, two prominent Taiwan directors whose work in the 1980s helped shape the Second New Wave movement. More recently, Chen’s 1998 The Personals and Cai’s 2002 What Time Is It There? broke new ground by developing controlled realist styles into an aesthetics of “disillusioned cinema”: a postmodern urban genre that simultaneously derides personal fantasies of sexual love and political fantasies of nation building. Both films use the formulas of romance to highlight the illusions and alienations of contemporary love, of individual pleasures disintegrating communal bonds. On a more symbolic level, they banish male authority into the netherworld and deconstruct patriarchal structures, some of which can be associated with the oppression of “first-world” cultural imperialism. Such thematic and allegorical topics are presented through a variety of styles–including play-within-the-play, repetitions of plot and motif, and symbolic mise-en-scène–with Cai, in particular, testing the possibilities of antinarrative. Both directors also use a gendered filmic language to illustrate Taiwan’s “third-world” deconstruction of the classical Hollywood narrative and to echo the crises of a new democracy.]

Hee, Wai-Siam. “Coming Out in the Mirror: Rethinking Corporeality and Auteur Theory with Regard to the Films of Tsai Ming-laing.” In Brian Berergan-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015, 113-36.

Hitchcock, Peter. “Taiwan Fever? Tsai Ming-Liang and Everyday Postnation.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 234-48.

Hong, Guo-juin. “Anywhere But Here: The Postcolonial City in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Taipei Trilogy.” In Hong, Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 159-81.

—–. “Theatrics of Cruising: Bath Houses and Movie Houses in Tsai Ming-liang’s Films.” In Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich, eds., Queer Sinophone Cultures. NY: Routledge, 2014, 149-59.

Hsiu-Chuang, Deppman. “Recipes for a New Taiwanese Identity? Food, Space, and Sex in the Works of Ang Lee, Ming-liang Tsai, and T’ien-wen Chu.”American Journal of Chinese Studies 8, 2 (Oct. 2001): 145-68.

Hsu, Jen-yi. “Re-enchanting the Everyday Banal in the Age of Globalization: Alienation, Desire, and Critique of Capitalist Temporality in Tsai Ming-liang’sThe Hole and What Time Is It There?” NTU Studies in Language and Literature 17 (June 2007): 133-58.

Hu, Brian. “Goodbye City, Goodbye Cinema: Nostalgia in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Skywalk is Gone.” Senses of Cinema 29 (Nov.-Dec. 2003).

Huang, Erin Yu-tien. “The De-Spectacular and Taiwanese Neo-Noir—Rebels of the Neon God and the Crime Cinema of Triviality.” In Chi-Yun Shin and Mark Gallagher, eds., East Asian Film Noir. London: I. B. Tauris, 2015, 145-62.

Hughes, Darren. “Tsai Ming-liang.” Senses of Cinema–Great Directors, a Critical Database.

Koc, Aysegu. “Vive le Cinema: A Reading of What Time Is it There?” CineAction 62, 1 (2003): 54-57.

Kraicer, Shelly. “Interview with Cai Mingliang.” positions: east asian cultures critique 8, 2 (Fall 2000): 579-588.

—–. “What Time Is It There? A Comedy of Rebirth.” Persimmon 3, 1 (Spring 2002): 89-91.

Lee, Vivian. “Pornography, Musical, Drag, and the Art Film: Performing ‘Queer’ in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, 2 (May 2007): 117-38.

Leopold, Mark. “Confined Space–Interview with Tsai Ming-Liang.” Senses of Cinema 20 (May-June 2002).

Lim, Song Hwee. “Confessing Desire: The Poetics of Tsai Ming-liang’s Queer Cinema.” In Lim, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2006, 126-52.

—–. “Positioning Auteur Theory in Chinese Cinemas Studies: Intratextuality, Intertextuality, and Paratextuality in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, 3 (Sept. 2007): 223-.

—–. “Manufacturing Orgasm: Visuality, Aurality, and Female Sexual Pleasure in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 2 (Aug. 2011): 141-56.

[Abstract: In the study of both sex and the city, sound tends to be an aspect that does not receive as much attention as visuality. By examining the sound of sex in Tsai Ming-liang’s 2005 film, The Wayward Cloud, this article will argue that the aural is privileged over the visual and explore its implications for female subjectivity, sexual intimacy and gender politics. It suggests that the film challenges us to think whether it might be possible to forge what Mary Ann Doane calls ‘a political erotics of the voice’, but in a wayward manner that deploys comatose bodies that have no voice, that fragments the unity of voice and body and that privileges the representation of the sonic over the visual in a cinematic tradition that generally dictates otherwise.]

—–. Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014.

[Abstract: How can we qualify slowness in cinema? What is the relationship between a cinema of slowness and a wider socio-cultural “slow movement”? A body of films that shares a propensity toward slowness has emerged in many parts of the world over the past two decades. This is the first book to examine the concept of cinematic slowness and address this fascinating phenomenon in contemporary film culture. Providing a critical investigation into questions of temporality, materiality, and aesthetics, and examine concepts of authorship, cinephilia, and nostalgia, Song Hwee Lim offers insight into cinematic slowness through the films of Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang. Through detailed analysis of aspects of stillness and silence in cinema, Lim delineates the strategies by which slowness in film can be constructed. By drawing on writings on cinephilia and the films of directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, he makes a passionate case for a slow cinema that calls for renewed attention to the image and to the experience of time in film. ]

—– and Wai Siam Hee. “‘You Must Believe There Is an Author Behind Every Film’: An Interview with Tsai Ming-liang.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 2 (Aug. 2011): 181- .

[Abstract: This interview was conducted on 31 January 2010 during the Rotterdam International Film Festival where Tsai Ming-liang’s latest feature film, Lian/Visage (2009), was screened. Commissioned by the Mus?e du Louvre and set partly in the museum’s premises, the film suitably pays homage to the legacy of the French New Wave. Famed for his affinity to Fran?ois Truffaut and having cast Jean-Pierre L?aud and incorporated scenes from Truffaut’s 1959 film, Les quatre cents coups/The 400 Blows, in his 2001 film, Ni nabian jidian/What Time Is It There?, Tsai extends this cross-cultural cinephilia in Visage by casting L?aud, Jeanne Moreau and Fanny Ardant, all of whom had had close working and personal relationships with Truffaut. The interview thus focused on Visage and its commission by an internationally renowned art museum.]

Liu, Ying Hao. “‘I Thought of the Time We Were in Front of the Flowers’: Analyzing the Opening Credits of Goodbye Dragon Inn.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 172-82.

de Luca, Tiago. “Sensory Everyday: Space, Materiality, and the Body in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 2 (Aug. 2011): 157-80.

[Abstract: This article proposes to examine the cinema of Tsai Ming-liang as perpetuating, and recycling, an aesthetics of ‘the everyday’ in film. Characterized by an ultra-reflexive formal style steeped in the hyperbolic application of traditional realist devices such as the long take and deep focus, Tsai’s cinema highlights, in line with films cathexed on the everyday trope, the sheer physical presence of domestic spaces. In symmetry with this, his is a realist project focused on the human body as incarnated by characters whose overexposed, involuntary physiology, combined with extreme physical movements, testifies to a cinema resolutely eager to open up the doors of privacy. As this article argues, such an obsession with the density of animate and inanimate matter results in sensory audio-visual experiences, which, averse to representational logic, highlight undisciplined bodies resistant to essentialist and normative assumptions.]

Ma, Jean. Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2010.

—–. “Delayed Voices: Intertextuality, Music, and Gender in The Hole.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 2 (Aug. 2011): 123-40.

[Abstract: The idea of delayed cinema offers a lens through which to explore Tsai Ming-liang’s approach to intertextuality. As much as intertextuality for Tsai functions in the mode of homage or a self-conscious play with genre conventions, it also demands to be understood as a historically meaningful gesture. This article looks at The Hole’s references to Grace Chang and post-war Mandarin popular cinema, taking up the question of why the music of Grace Chang. Is there more to the intertextual dialogue that the film establishes with her songs, beyond what many commentators have framed as a relation of counterpoint or ironic contrast? The entanglement of music, femininity and an ideal of cosmopolitan modernity within the figure of the songstress opens up provocative angles on the gender and identity politics of Tsai’s work.]

Marchetti, Gina. “On Tsai Mingliang’s The River.” In Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 113-26.

Martin, Fran. “Wild Women and Mechanical Men: A Review of The Hole.” Intersections 4 (Sept. 2000).

—-. “Vive L’Amour: Eloquent Emptiness.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 175-82. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 227-34,

—–. “The European Undead: Tsai Ming-liang’s Temporal Dysphoria.” Senses of Cinema (2003).

—–. “Perverse Utopia: Reading The River.” In Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer Representations in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2003, 163-84.

—–. “Tsai Ming-liang’s Intimate Public Words.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, 2 (May 2007): 83-88.

Neri, Corrado. Tsai Ming-liang. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2004.

—–. “Past Masters, New Waves: Tsai Ming-liang / Francois Truffaut.” Transtext(e)s Transcultures: Journal of Global Cultural Studies 1 (May 2006).

—–. “Tsai Ming-liang and the Lost Emotions of the Flesh.” positions: east asian cultures critiques 16, 2 (Fall 2008): 389-408.

Peranson, Mark. “Interview: Cities and Loneliness: Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There?” indieWIRE (Jan. 22, 2002).

Pollacchi, Elena. “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.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 2 (June 2019): 130-46.

Raidel, Ella. “The Missing and the Fictional Memory: Leitmotifs of Tsai Ming-liang’s Oeuvre.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Ella Raidel, eds., The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture: Altering Archives. Routledge, 2018, 142-62.

Rapfogel, Jared. “Tsai Ming-liang: Cinematic Painter.” Senses of Cinema 20 (May-June 2002).

Rapfogel, Jared. “Taiwan’s Poet of Solitude: An Interview with Tsai Ming-liang.” Cinéaste 4 (Fall 2004): 26-29.

Rehm, Jean-Pierre, Olivier Joyard, and Daniele Riviere. Ts’ai Ming-liang. Paris: Dis voir, 1999.

Rojas, Carlos. “Nezha Was Here”: Structures of Dis/placement in Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 1 (Spring 2003): 63-89.

—–. “Along the Riverrun: Cinematic Encounters in Tsai Ming-liang’s The River.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 626-45.

Stephens, Chuck. “Intersection: Tsai Ming-liang’s Yearning Bike Boys and Heartsick Heroines.” Film Comment 32, 5 (1996): 20-23.

Stuckey, Andrew. “Ghosts in the Theater: Generic Play and Temporality in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn.” Asian Cinema 25, 1 (2014): 31-46.

—–. “Consumption: Genre and Quotation in Goodbye, Dragon Inn.” In Stuckey, Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2018, 38-60.

Trice, Jasmine Nadua. “Diseased Bodies and Domestic Space: Transmodern Space in Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Hole.” Asian Cinema 16, 2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 255-67.

Tsai, Beth. “The Many Faces of Tsai Ming-Liang: Cinephilia, the French Connection, and Cinema in the Gallery.” International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 13, 2 (2017): 141-60.

[Abstract: The Malaysia-born, Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s Visage (2009) is a film that was commissioned by the Louvre as part of its collection. His move to the museum space raises a number of questions: What are some of the implications of his shift in practice? What does it mean to have a film, situated in art galleries or museum space, invites us to think about the notion of cinema, spatial configuration, transnational co-production and consumption? To give these questions more specificity, this article will look at the triangular relationship between the filmmaker’s prior theatre experience, French cinephilia’s influence, and cinema in the gallery, using It’s a Dream (2007) and Visage as two case studies. I argue Tsai’s film and video installation need to be situated in the intersection between the moving images and the alternative viewing experiences, and between the global and regional film cultures taking place at the theatre-within-a-gallery site. While Tsai’s slow film aesthetics can be traced in relation to his prior theatre practice, his installation and film in the gallery are grounded in the belief that cinema needs to be resurrected in the museum. The interrelations between Tsai’s video installation and feature films show that they originate from, and are still part of, love for cinema. Tsai’s move to the museum space exemplifies the possibility for the future of cinema: it may lose its exclusivity of the collective experience in the movie theatre, yet still privileges the architectural situation of cinema.

Tsai, Ming-liang. “On the Uses and Misuses of Cinema.” Senses of Cinema 58 (2011).

Udden, James . “The Future of a Luminescent Cloud: Recent Developments in a Pan-Asian Style.” Synoptique 10 (Aug. 2005).

—–. “On the Shoulders of Giants: Tsai Ming-liang, Jia Zhangke, Fruit Chan and the Struggles of Second Generation Auteurism.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 158-66.

Villella, Fiona A. “Notes on Tsai Ming-liang’s The River.” Senses of Cinema 12 (2001).

Wang, Ban. “Black Holes of Globalization: Critique of the New Millennium in Taiwan Cinema.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 1 (Spring 2003): 90-119. [deals with The Hole]

Wang, Shujen. “My Films Reflect My Living Situation”: An Interview with Tsai Ming-liang on Film Spaces, Audiences, and Distribution.” positions: east asia cultures critique 14, 1 (Spring 2007): 219-41. [Project Muse link]

Wen Tianxiang . 2002. Guangying dingge: Cai Mingliang de xinling changyu (Patterns of light and shadow: Cai Mingliang’s psychological terrain). Taipei: Hengxing.

Wilder, Seth. “Sentimental Journey? The Drifting Rhythms of Tsai Ming-liang’s Journey to the West.” Asian Cinema 32, 1 (2021): 3-18.

[Abstract: With his experimental short, Journey to the West, Tsai Ming-liang creates a cinematic experience that recalls the early ‘cinema of attractions’, but this is an attraction with a twist. As a spectacle, it is more specular than spectacular. An attraction without the attendant excitement, his is a reflection that presents a provocation. By calling out the shortened attention span of contemporary life, Tsai identifies the level of distraction that characterizes the contemporary, post-industrialized spaces of late-stage capitalism. An attempt at redemption, his film conveys a sense of what Rey Chow refers to in contemporary Chinese cinema as ‘the sentimental’. Framed by Henri Lefebvre’s and Lea Jacobs’s respective ideas concerning rhythms both extrinsic and intrinsic to the cinematic, and complemented by considerations of temporality, rather than making meaning, this article attempts to make sense of the film by locating these rhythms within it.]

Wood, Chris. “Realism, Intertextuality and Humour in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, 2 (May 2007): 105-116.

Wu, I-Fen. “Flowing Desire, Floating Souls: Modern Cultural Landscape in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Taipei Trilogy.”Cineaction 58 (Jan. 2002): 58-64.

Xu, Gary G. “Shaw Brothers’ Old Cinema Excavated: From Kung Fu Hustle to Goodbye, Dragon Inn.” In Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 89-110.

Yao, Kuang-Tien. “Commentary on the Marginalized Society: The Films of Tsai Ming-liang.” In Reginald Yin-Wang Kwok ed., Globalizing Taipei: The Political Economy of Spatial Development. NY: Routledge, 2005, 219-40.

Zhu, Ying. “Ts’ai Ming-liang.” In David Gerstner, ed., International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture – Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transexual Cultures. London: Routledge: 2006.

Tseden, Pema 万玛才旦

Berry, Chris. “Pema Tseden and the Tibetan Road Movie: Space and Identity beyond the ‘Minority Nationality Film.'” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 2 (June 2016).

[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.]

Frangville, Venesssa. “Pema Tseden’s The Search: The Making of a Minor Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 2 (June 2016).

[Abstract: This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor’ to examine Pema Tseden’s second full-length feature film, The Search. Expanding on Deleuze’s definition of minor cinema, this paper shows how The Search, through various strategies and narrative devices, deconstructs the myth of a pre-existing Tibetan people, and builds upon individual and fragmented narratives to create a new collective subjectivity, thus opening the way for a new understanding of Tibet. This case study demonstrates how Pema Tseden’s in-between position (between languages, cultures and geographical areas) permits him to develop a cinema that gives space for Tibetans to become, giving the viewer a rare insight into contemporary Tibet.]

Grewal, Anup. “Contested Tibetan Landscapes in the Films of Pema Tseden.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 2 (June 2016): 135-49.

[Abstract: This article closely examines the representation of landscapes in two films, The Silent Holy Stones (2005) and Old Dog (2011), both by the Tibetan director, Pema Tseden. Through mobilizing a range of formal techniques, including the use of long takes, a documentary aesthetic, and foregrounding acts of looking, these films portray Tibetan landscapes as realms of contested meanings between different subjects. I argue that these contested Tibetan landscapes in the films of Pema Tseden open up the space for the emergence of a heterogeneous Tibetan subject whose imagined worlds and lived realities cannot be captured by any singular narrative or dualism between tradition–modernity or resistance–subjection. At the same time, they suggest a form of minority ethnic self-representation that resists homogenizing and re-naturalizing a singular Tibetan voice. This essay situates Pema Tseden’s films in a larger sphere of contemporary Tibetan cultural production in the PRC, and proposes connections to projects of cultural activism and cultural renaissance enacted by minoritized groups in other contemporary contexts.]

Hladíková, Kamila. “Shangri-la Deconstructed: Representations of Tibet in the PRC and Pema Tseden’s Films.” Archiv Orientalni 84(2) (2016): 349-380.

Lo, Kwai-Cheung. “Buddha Found and Lost in the Chinese Nation of ‘Diversity in Unity’: Pema Tseden’s Films as a Buddhist Mode of Reflexivity.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 2 (June 2016).

[Abstract: This essay examines how, under the conditions that religion has been appropriated to serve political purposes in modern China, the Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden makes use of the Buddhist mode of thought to reflect upon the complex situations his community is facing in order to seek a way of life that has been alienated by many forms of control and infringement. While modernity’s impacts are subtly examined and Tibetan traditions are critically reviewed, the reflexivity in Pema Tseden’s movies also breaks down the false dichotomies that have been conventionally upheld. Their aesthetic and political productivity precisely lies in the tension between the subjective intervention of telling stories and the muteness of banal realities in Tibet overwhelmed by numerous stereotypical representations.]

Pecic, Zoran Lee. “Boxed within the Frame: Tibetan Masculinities in Transformation in Pema Tseden’s Jinpa.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film (2022).

[Abstract: The Tibetan auteur Pema Tseden is renowned for using the road movie as a means of interrogating the relationship between his characters and society in the Tibetan areas of the PRC. As his protagonists travel, the natural settings become an integral part of the journey through the Tibetan lands. The amalgamation of movement and landscapes enables the emergence of a Tibetan subject whose complex and heterogenous self-representation defies the dualism of tradition and modernity. In this article, I argue that Pema Tseden’s recent feature Jinpa (2018) marks an aesthetic and thematic departure from his earlier work. Rather than looming large over the characters, the landscapes serve as an underlying framework for a heightened emphasis on the interaction between the characters. At the heart of the film is the notion of Tibetan masculinity in crisis. Whilst portraying the ways that history, culture and tradition haunt the men in the film, Pema Tseden also turns his attention to the female characters. Proposing a new take on Tibetan masculinities who assume the previously women-only roles of carriers of culture, he offers a unique perspective on and in New Tibetan Cinema.]

Robin, Francoise. “From the Inside, in Black and White: Tharlo, a Tibetan Shepherd, by Pema Tseden.” MCPH Film Club 1, 3 (2017).

Yau, Wai-Ping. “Reading Pema Tseden’s Films as Palimpsests.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 2 (2016).

[Abstract: This article analyses the Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden’s films as palimpsests in order to draw attention to his transformation of earlier work into new constellations and additional layers of meaning. It is argued that Pema Tseden’s films, read as palimpsests, constitute attempts to resist narrative closure, dissolve dichotomies and stress the unfixity of the self and the diversity of perspectives. It is also argued that a palimpsestic reading shows Pema Tseden to be both a sober realist and a visionary: even in the bleakest of hours, his films are driven by a utopian impulse springing from a compassionate view of the world that is an essential part of Buddhism. Reading Pema Tseden’s films as palimpsests in the context of contemporary China, it is argued, highlights the ways in which his films challenge the cinematic representation of Tibet and articulate the problems and aspirations of Tibetans in the face of Chinese domination.]

Yeung, Jessica and Yau, Wai-ping, eds. Tharlo. Short Story and Film Script by Pema Tseden. Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2017.

[Abstract: The story of a Tibetan shepherd who is pulled from the security of his mountain flock into a harsh and alien urban world. Imaginatively adapted for the big screen from his short story (2012) by the author-director himself, the film version of Tharlo (2015) represents Pema Tseden’s greatest cinematic achievement to date, and has garnered numerous international prizes.]

Tsui Hark 徐克

Cheuk, Pak Tong. “Tsui Hark.” In Cheuk, Hong Kong New Wave Cinema: 1978-2000. Bristol: Intellect, 2008, 83-118.

Hendrix, Grady. “Tsui Hark.” Senses of Cinema–Great Directors, a Critical Database.

Ho, Sam and Wai-leng Ho, eds. The Swordsman and His Jianghu: Tsui Hark and Hong Kong Film. HK: HK Film Archive, 2002.

Hwang, Angela. “The Irresistible: Hong Kong Movie Once Upon a Time in China Series–An Extensive Interview with Director/Producer Tsui Hark.” Asian Cineam 10, 1 (1998): 10-24.

Kam, Tan See. Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2016.

[Abstract: Part historical drama, part thriller, and part comedy, Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (1986) invites―if not demands―examinations from multiple perspectives. Tan See Kam rises to the challenge in this study by first situating Tsui in a Sinophone context. The diasporic director explores different dimensions of “Chineseness” in the film by depicting competing versions of Chinese nationalism and presenting characters speaking two Chinese languages, Cantonese and Mandarin. In the process he compels viewers to recognize the multiplicities of the Chinese identity and rethink what constitutes cultural Chineseness. The challenge to a single definition of “Chinese” is also embodied by the playful pastiches of diverse materials. In a series of intertextual readings, Tan reveals the full complexity of Peking Opera Blues by placing it at the center of a web of texts consisting of Tsui’s earlier film Shanghai Blues (1984), Hong Kong’s Mandarin Canto-pop songs, the “three-women” films in Chinese-language cinemas, and of course, traditional Peking opera, whose role-types, makeup, and dress code enrich the meaning of the film. In Tan’s portrayal, Tsui Hark is a filmmaker who makes masterly use of postmodernist techniques to address postcolonial concerns.]

Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah. “‘Peking Opera Blues: Exploding Genre, Gender and History.” In Film Analysis. NY: Norton, 2005: 739.

Li, Cheuk-to. “Tsui Hark and Western Interest in Hong Kong Cinema.” Cinemaya 21 (1993): 50-51.

Liu, Zixu. “Once upon a Time in China: Nationalism, Modernity, and Cinematic Representation.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 4 (2014): 532-54.

Lo, Kwai-Cheung. “Once Upon A Time: Technology Comes to Presence in China.” Modern Chinese Literature 7, 2 (1993): 79-96.

Morton, Lisa. The Cinema of Tsui Hark. Jefferson City, MC: McFarland, 2001.

Pettigrew, Ian. “The Sacred Spectacle: Subverting Scepticism in Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee Films.” In Kenneth Chan and Andrew Stuckey, eds., Sino-Enchantment: The Fantastic in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2021, 166-83.

Reid, Craig D. “Fant-asia Filmmaker: Producer Tsui Hark.” Imagi-Movies 2, 4 (1995): 21-23, 27-30.

Reid, Criag D. “Interview with Tsui Hark.” Film Quarterly 48, 3 (1995): 34-41.

Rodriguez, Hector. “Hong Kong Popular Culture as an Interpretive Arena: The Huang Feihong Film Series.” Screen 38, 1 (1997): 1-24.

Schroeder, Andrew. Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warrior from the Magic Mountain. HK/Seattle: Hong Kong UP/University of Washington Press, 2004.

Song, Weijie. “Cinematic Geography, Martial Arts Fantasy, and Tsui Hark’s Wong Fei-hung Series.” Asian Cinema 19, 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 123-42.

Stringer, Julian. “Review of Peking Opera Blues.” Film Quaterly 48, 3 (1995): 34-42.

Teo, Stephen. “Tsui Hark: National Style and Polemic.” In Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 143-58.

—–. “Tsui Hark Filmography.” Senses of Cinema 17 (Nov./Dec. 2001).

—–. “Starting Over: Tsui Hark’s Time and Tide (2000).” Senses of Cinema 17 (Nov./Dec. 2001).

Wang, Hongjian. “A Chinese Ghost Story: A Hong Kong Comedy Film’s Cult Following in Mainland China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 12, 2 (2018): 142-57.

[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.]

Wang, Zhuoyi. “Transforming the Liminal Hero: Border-Crossing Interconnections in The Taking of Tiger Mountain and Its Textual Pedigree.” Chinese Literature Today 7, 1 (2018): 118-28.

[Abstract: Previously known as a Hong Kong director of action-filled and visually spectacular blockbusters, Tsui Hark made a surprising move in 2014 by shooting a 3-D remake of the 1970 Maoist revolutionary opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy in mainland China. Existing scholarship tends to see the remake as a reflection of the close marriage between politics and commerce in contemporary Chinese cinema. This paper attempts to offer a more nuanced perspective on the remake, revealing its long historical dimension that generated complexity and subtlety in Tsui’s directorial approach. Rather than just commercially packaging and disseminating current state ideology, the remake reflects Tsui’s long-term personal and artistic navigation across multiple national and ideological borders. It embodies Tsui’s signature way of constructing alluring cinematic shapes for a liminal “Chineseness” that lacks substantial reference, consistency, and clear origin. Precisely for its void in the core, the “Chineseness” may offer traces of identification for a diverse range of Chinese cultural, political, and ethnic subjects.]

Zou, John. “A Chinese Ghost Story: Ghostly Counsel and Innocent Men.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 39-46. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 56-63.

Wang Bing 王兵

Lessard, Bruno. The Cinema of Wang Bing: Chinese Documentary between History and Labor. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: Having made documentary films screened at the most prestigious film festivals in the West, Chinese documentary filmmaker Wang Bing presents a unique case of independent filmmaking. Lessard examines the documentarian’s most important films, focusing on the two obsessions at the heart of his oeuvre—the legacy of Maoist China in the present and the transformation of labor since China’s entry into the market economy—and how the crucial figures of survivor and worker are represented on screen. He argues that Wang Bing is a minjian (grassroots) intellectual whose films document the impact of Mao’s Great Leap Forward on Chinese collective memory and register the repercussions of China’s turn to neoliberalism on workers in the post-Reform era. Bringing together Chinese documentary studies and China studies, the author shows how Wang Bing’s practice reflects the minjian ethos when documenting the survivors of the Great Famine and those who have not benefitted from China’s neoliberal policies—from laid-off workers to migrant workers. The films discussed include some of Wang Bing’s most celebrated works such as West of the Tracks and Dead Souls, as well as neglected documentaries such as Coal Money and Bitter Money.]

Li, Jie. “West of the Tracks: Salvaging the Rubble of Utopia.” Jump Cut 50 (Spring 2008).

Pernin, Judith. “Dead Souls (四靈魂)–film review.” China Perspectives 3 (2019): 69-70.

Pollacchi, Elena. “Wang Bing’s The Ditch: Spaces of History between Documentary and Fiction.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 2 (2012): 189-202.

[Abstract: Wang Bing’s Jiabiangou/The Ditch premiered as a competition entry at the Venice Film Festival 2010 after a six-year-long production process. It is Wang Bing’s first full-length feature film after he established his reputation as a leading documentary film-maker on the international film scene thanks to the worldwide acclaimed Tiexi qu/West of the Tracks (2002) and He Fengming (2007). This article provides a reading of The Ditch (2010), based on a contextual investigation of the interplay of documentary and fiction, an high-end film aesthetics, and Wang Bing’s concern with the role of the film-maker vis-?-vis a sensitive historical subject, here the Anti-rightist movement (1957-1960). Comolli’s discussion of historical films and Pasolini’s approach to cinema as a way to engage with the present provide relevant theoretical basis for this study. Parallels are drawn with Pedro Costa’s work which also moves away from cinematic realism to challenge the boundaries of representation.]

—–. “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.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 2 (June 2019): 130-46.

—–. Wang Bing’s Filmmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses and Marginal Spaces. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.

[Abstract: This volume offers an organic discussion of Wang Bing’s filmmaking across China’s marginal spaces and against the backdrop of the state-sanctioned ‘China Dream’. Wang Bing’s cinema gives voice to the subaltern. Focusing on contemporary China, his work testifies to a set of issues dealing with inequality, labour, and migration. His internationally awarded documentaries are considered masterpieces with unique aesthetics that bear reference to global film masters. Therefore, this investigation goes beyond the divides between Western and non-Western film traditions and between fiction and documentary cinema. Each chapter takes a different articulation of space (spaces of labour, history, and memory) as its entry point, bringing together film and documentary studies, Chinese studies, and globalization studies. This volume benefits from the author’s extensive conversations with Wang Bing and insider observations of film production and the film festival circuit.]

Veg, Sebastian. “The Limits of Representation: Wang Bing’s Labour Camp Films.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 2 (2012): 173-87.

[Abstract: This article proposes to compare two films by Wang Bing – his documentary He Fengming (2007) and feature film The Ditch (2010) – from the perspective of their implicit ethics of representation. The two films are part of one original project: after its publication in 2001, Wang Bing bought the rights to Yang Xianhui’s collection of reportage literature Chronicles of Jiabiangou, devoted to a labour camp in Gansu, where several hundred ‘rightists’ died of famine in 1959-1960. He Fengming, whose husband died in Jiabiangou, was one of his interviewees: her testimony stood out so strongly that Wang Bing used it as material for a stand-alone documentary. This individual testimony, filmed in a markedly undramatic style, contrasts with the theatrical mode adopted by Wang in the 2010 feature film, raising many fundamental questions about the representation of suffering, the conceptualization of history, and the relationship between factual and fictional accounts of history.]

Wang, Ban. “Of Humans and Nature in Documentary: The Logic of Capital in West of the Tracks and Blind Shaft.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds.,Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 157-70.

Zhang, Ling. “Collecting the Ashes of Time: The Temporality and Materiality of Industrial Ruins in Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks.” Asian Cinema (Spring/Summer 2009): 16-34.

Wang Jiuliang 王久良

Gong, Haomin. “Place, Animals, and Human Beings: The Case of Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Waste.” In Chia-ju Chang, ed., Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 167-188.

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Ragpicking as Method.” Prism 16, 2 (2019): 260–97. [On visual art and film, with special attention to Wang Jiuliang 王久良]

Liu, Jin. “A Cinematic Presentation of Trash: An Interview with Wang Jiuliang.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May 2020).

—–. “Dislocation and Displacement: An Analysis of Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 3 (2020): 205-22.

[Abstract: This essay uses the concepts of place and space to analyze Wang Jiuliang’s environmental documentary film Plastic China (2016) by examining three kinds of dislocation and displacement: the importation of Western trash to China, Yijie’s migration from Sichuan to Shandong, and Kun’s transformation from an agricultural peasant to an industrial worker in post-socialist China. Building on previous scholarship on dirt, rubbish, and ruins, the essay explores how the film’s focus on trash—“matter out of place”—sustains a critique of global consumerism, capitalism, and eco-colonialism. Cinematic features, such as the spatial imbalance the film constructs between its human subjects and the plastics processing plant where they work, are discussed. Yijie’s longing for home, a preindustrial place untouched by modernization and globalization, is evoked by the use of nondiegetic music. Her desire to go to school, a major narrative theme, is interpreted to indicate her spatialized alienation and non-locatable subjectivity as a migrant child. Although Kun is a native of the town where the processing plant stands, he experiences displacement without moving, as his hometown has been ecologically degraded and thus rendered inhabitable by the intrusion of toxic trash. Both Yijie and Kun, representing millions of Chinese peasants uprooted from the soil, are trapped in a one-way, no-return journey from place to space.]

Schulz, Yvan. “Plastic China: Beyond Waste Imports.” Made in China 3, 4 (2018): 96–101 and 119–20. [On film, with a case study of Wang Jiuliang 王久良]

Wang, Meiqin. “Waste, Pollution, and Environmental Activism: Wang Jiuliang and the Power of Documenting” and “From Representation to Collaboration: Wen Fang and Her Participatory Art.” In Wang, Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China: Voices from Below. New York: Routledge, 2019, 53–81; 149–80.

Wang Ping 王苹

Wang, Lingzhen. “Wang Ping and Women’s Cinema in Socialist China: Institutional Practice, Feminist Cultures, and Embedded Authorship.” Signs 40, 3 (2015): 589-622.

[Abstract: This essay examines Wang Ping 王苹, the first Chinese socialist female film director, and her most representative film: The Story of Liubao Village (柳堡的故事, 1956), retheorizing female cinematic authorship as a contingent articulation embedded within dynamic interactions among a multiplicity of historical forces. This analysis addresses three critical issues in Chinese studies and cross-cultural feminist analysis: the dismissal of socialist cinema as mere propaganda, the influence of the Cold War on the study of socialist China and women since the 1980s in American academia, and the liberal and radical feminist approaches to gender, which tend to separate gender from other political, social, and cultural practices by adhering to a Western-centered universalism. Methodologically, this essay critically reconstructs socialist feminist institutionalization in Chinese socialist revolution (1921-1949), as well as the formation of socialist feminist public/official space and cultural practice in early socialist China (1949-1966), rehistoricizes the practice of early Chinese socialist cinema (1949-1957) as dynamic and experimental; and resituates Wang Ping within those socialist feminist and filmmaking contexts to reconfigure women’s cultural agency as a historical effect of multiforce significations.]

Wang Qiong 王瓊

Li, Yawen. “Reconstruction Women’s Time for the ‘Unplanned’ in Wang Qiong’s All About My Sisters.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 54, 3-4 (2023): 116-25.

[Abstract: Released at a time when the social costs of the One-Child Policy in China were being reassessed, aspiring documentarian Wang Qiong’s All About My Sisters (2021) serves as a poignant commentary on another pressing demand placed upon women in the nation, namely reproducing more children to alleviate labor shortages. As official discourses, led by president Xi Jingping’s speech in 2021, began to revive traditional family values and women’s particular role in the domestic sphere, My Sisters’ taboo-breaking portrayal of a “disintegrated” family that highlights the gendered implications of the policy and China’s modernization becomes particularly timely in reenergizing women’s discontent with domesticity and conventional gender norms. By delving into the undocumented and unmeasurable traumas of abandonment, everyday patriarchal violence, and the unrecognized feminine labor endured by the “unplanned” person, Wang stresses the need to overcome the cruel predictability that characterizes the time of national modernization and cultural amnesia, in which women’s sacrifice appears to be the only conceivable option. My Sisters therefore represents a leap of hope towards envisioning a new future through the untold narrative of a delegitimized time, in memory of all the female victims and survivors of the policy, which can potentially disrupt the gendered violence that History both sells and prescribes.]

Wang Quan’an 王全安

Huang, Phyllis Yu-ting. “The Returnee as an Outsider: Reunion and Division in Wang Quan’an’s Apart Together (團圓, tuan yuan).” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 4, 1 (2021): 143-62.

[Abstract: Mainland Chinese director Wang Quan’an’s Apart Together, which won the Silver Bear Award for Best Screenplay in 2010, tackles the issue of cross-Strait relations by telling the story of Kuomintang veteran Liu Yansheng’s return to mainland China after nearly 40 years of separation from his wife and son. Shanghainese is the main language of the film, a dialect that is used to suggest a local attitude towards the national issue. While earlier Chinese films on similar themes often emphasise the cultural and emotional ties between Taiwan and China, in Wang’s film Liu is characterised as an unwelcome Taiwanese guest, an intruder in his wife’s Chinese family. This essay argues that Wang’s Apart Together contests the People’s Republic of China’s official discourse of cross-Strait reunification by demonstrating the cultural and identity divisions between the Taiwanese character and his Chinese family. Wang provides an alternative perspective on the ‘Taiwan issue’, showing that ordinary people’s experience of cross-Strait reunion might be painful and problematic.]

Li, Hua. “Gender Roles and their Displacement in Tuya’s Marriage.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 2 (2013): 123–137.

Wang Tong 王童

Hong, Guo-juin. “Island of No Return: Cinematic Narration as Retrospection in Wang Tong’s Taiwan Trilogy and Beyond.” In Hong, Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 139-58.

[Abstract: Wang Tong’s Banana Paradise (1989) is a melodrama about Chinese Nationalist soldiers’ forced migration to Taiwan, a story of broken families and lost identity that spans 40 years, from 1949 to 1989. The main character, Men-Shuan, has for four decades adopted a false identity, as Li Chi-Ling, holding Li’s job at various government posts and raising Li’s family in his stead. The political division between Communist China and Nationalist Taiwan has prevented millions, Men-Shuan among them, from reconnecting with their loved ones, up until the lifting of martial law and the gradual reopening of the passage across the Taiwan Strait beginning in the late 1980s. Epic in scope, this film ends in a particularly intriguing final scene. The night before, Men-Shuan spoke to Li’s father over the phone, a complex and emotional event during which Men-Shuan and his adopted identity, Li, finally merge as one; he sobs and wails, begging for the father’s forgiveness for having left him behind in China. Clearly, he cries not only for Li but also for himself and, perhaps, for all who have suffered the same fate. The scene cuts to the following day at work. Men-Shuan/Li stares blankly into the air while a coworker pokes fun at him for presenting a fake diploma in an effort to petition for postponed retirement. Other coworkers gather around his desk.]

Scruggs, Bert. “Remembering the Colonial Past.” In Scruggs, Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015, 129-36.

Shie, Elliott S. T. “A Comic Vision in a Tragic World: On Wang Tong’s Taiwan Trilogy.” Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 41, 2 (June 2011): 375-402.

[Abstract: Compared with Hou Hsiao-Hsien 侯孝賢, the Taiwanese director Wang Tong 王童 cannot be considered a revolutionary auteur in terms of film language, but no one would deny his talent for storytelling. As a storyteller, Wang Tong combines the tragic and comic and thus revives the tradition of melancholic laughter in modern Chinese literature. Using the theories of comedy, this essay explores and articulates the comical elements, spirit, and vision of Wang Tong’s Taiwan trilogy. The first part of the trilogy, The Straw Man, sets up a variety of comical devices, including grotesque bodies, chance, and coincidence, and manifests a comical rhythm of death and rebirth. Nonetheless, the seemingly happy ending of the film departs from the “living happily ever after” formula of pure comedy by hinting at the uncertainty of the future. The second film, Banana Paradise, besides employing the comic elements of the first film, mediates the struggle between the apparatus of the nation-state and the marginal underclass from Mainland China. Without using any big heroic action against the powerful, the powerless employ the tactics of parasitism, living with the oppressor of the nation-state and taking advantage of it for their own survival. The final film, Hills of No Return, endows the comic elements of sex and excrement with symbolic meanings, and critiques not only the Japanese colonial regime but also greedy human nature and the dehumanization of the market. As a whole, Wang Tong’s Taiwan trilogy provides a double vision through which the audience can recognize the contradictions and ambiguities of human affairs and can thereby avoid the one-sidedness inherent in the act of judging.]

Yeh, Yueh-yu and Darrell Davis. “Return to History: Wang Tong.” In Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island. NY: Columbia University Press, 2005, 74-80.

Wang Xiaoshuai 王小帅

Bao, Ying. “Cinematic Amnesia as Remembering: Coming Home (2014) and Red Amnesia (2014).” Arts 7, 83 (2018).

Berry, Michael. “Wang Xiaoshuai: Banned in China.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 162-81.

Chen, Thomas. “The Two Versions of So Long, My Son.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (February 2024).

Gong, Haomin. “Social Critiques and Sentimentalism: On Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Close to Paradise.” Asian Cinema 20, 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 182-92.

Gladwin, Derek. “No Country for Young Men: Chinese Modernity, Displacement, and Initiatory Ritual in Chinese Sixth Generation Cinema.” Asian Cinema23, 1 (2012): 31-44.

[Abstract:This article examines youth initiation in two Chinese Sixth Generation films, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Shiqi sui de dan che/Beijing Bicycle(2001) and Li Yang’s Mang jing/Blind Shaft (2003). It addresses the broader issue of the ‘floating population’ in China and the impact that rapid modernization has on the social fabric of Chinese society. It also suggests that in light of such social injustices and cinematic representation in the post-socialist China of today, under the guise of modernity and economic progress, there exists a dislocated and disconnected transition into adulthood for youth populations. This article argues that Wang and Yi directly investigate one of the consequences of Chinese modernity: disrupted youth initiatory ritual. Beijing Bicycle and Blind Shaft depict in a narrative documentary form an entire generation of Chinese youth who have been geographically and psychologically displaced as they lose their family connections and education opportunities, move from job to job, and fail to experience appropriate initiation into adulthood, all of which have contributed to a fractured social system.]

Kochan, Dror. “Wang Xiaoshuai.” Senses of Cinema–Great Directors, a Critical Database.

Letteri, Richard. “Realism, Hybridity, and the Construction of Identity in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle.” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 29 (2007): 72-89.

—–. “History, Silence and Homelessness in Contemporary Chinese Cinema: Wang Xiaoshuai’s Shanghai Dreams.” Asian Studies Review 34 (March 2010): 3-18.

Lu, Jie. “Metropolarities: The Troubled Lot and Beijing Bicycle.” Journal of Contempary China no. 57 (Nov. 2008): 717-32.

Shao, Xuesong. “Restoring and Reimagining Socialist-Built Cities: Wang Xiaoshuai’s ‘Third Front Trilogy.'” Telos 197 (Winter 2021): 13-33.

“A Trip Through Wang Xiaoshuai’s Film World.” China.org.cn

Visser, Robin. “Spaces of Disappearance: Aesthetic Responses to Contemporary Beijing City Planning.” Journal of Contemporary China 13, 39 (May 2004): 277-310. [On Qiu Huadong’s Chengshi zhanche (City Tank), Wang Xiaoshuai’s Jidu hanleng (Frozen), and experimental art.]

Wang, Yanjie. “Ghostly Haunting and Moral Interrogation in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, 2 (Fall 2017): 34-65.

Xu, Jian. “Representing Rural Migrant Workers in the City: Experimentalism in Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Close to Paradise and Beijing Bicycle.” Screen 46, 4 (Winter 2005): 433-49.

Wei Desheng 魏德圣

Berry, Chris. “Imagine There’s No China: Wei Te-sheng and Taiwan’s Japan Complex.” In Kuei-fen Chiu, Ming-yeh Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley, eds., Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2017.

Chang, Ivy I-chu. “Colonial Reminiscence, Japanophilia Trend, and Taiwanese Grassroots Imagination in Cape No. 7.” In Chang, Taiwan Cinema, Memory, and Modernity. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Chiu, Kuei-fen. “Violence and Indigenous Visual History: Interventional Historiography in Seediq Bale and Wushe, Chuanzhong Island.” In Kuei-fen Chiu, Ming-yeh Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley, eds., Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2017.

Green, Frederik H. “All Under Heaven KANO: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Making of a New Taiwanese Identity in Wei Desheng’s Taiwan-Japan Trilogy.” Journal of East-Asian Popular Culture 3, 2 (Fall 2017): 169-182.

Hsiung, Yuwen. “Competing with Urban Verticality: Cinematic Landscapes in Seediq Bale and Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above.” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 4, 1 (2021): 33-53.

[Abstract: While buildings strive to reach higher and higher, cities are obsessed with a visible expression of verticality. Seediq Bale (2011) and Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above (2013) represent a new development in Taiwan’s cinematic use of landscape that challenges the dominance of urban verticalism. Seediq Bale sets up an alternative vertical dimension of mountainous areas that puts into dialogical relationship the dichotomies of civilised/barbarous, advanced/primitive, and vertical/horizontal. Audiences no longer experience space in a traditional manner, as eventually Mona Rudao’s graveyard is undiscovered/undefined. Beyond Beauty, on the other, asks viewers to ‘go higher’, encouraging a break with ordinary experience for a more spiritual quest like aerial shots. As both offer a sense of disorientation and alienation, what does the spatial metaphor address to aesthetics, ecocriticism, politics of identity, and sovereignty in geography? What are the implications as cinematic landscapes extend into a real-life environment that is ready to be consumed?]

Hyland, Robert. “Global Politics and a Cinema of Localism: Contemporary Taiwanese Film.” IAFOR Journal of Asian Studies 1, 1 (2014).

[Abstract: In the opening sequence of Wei Te-sheng’s Cape No. 7 (Hai Jiao Qi Hao) (2008), the lead character Aga smashes a guitar against a lamppost while shouting ‘Fuck you Taipei.’ He then leaves the city on his motorbike and turning his back on the metropolis, heads down Highway Number One toward the southern county of Pingtung. This is a brief moment of populist politics in the film, and Aga’s rejection of a ‘false’ Taipei identity in favour of a more ‘true’ local identity relates to contemporary Taiwan’s contested political identity. The People’s Republic of China, which officially considers Taiwan a province of the mainland, insists that the world deny Taiwan independent nation status in international venues, considering Taiwan as encompassed by China under a ‘One China, Two Systems’ policy. In Cape No. 7, Aga’s cry becomes a means of denying that reductive imago of Taipei as province of China/Taipei as representative of all Taiwan. By translocating its story to Pingtung’s ethnically diverse and linguistically polyglot local communities, the film articulates a comprehensive and encompassing conception of Taiwan that is posed in opposition to Mandarin speaking ‘Chinese Taipei’. The film promotes a Taiwanese identity that consists of a diversity of political and cultural forms: Han Chinese as well as Hokklo, Hakka, aboriginal and immigrant. This paper explores the search for ‘the local’ in contemporary Taiwanese populist cinema.]

Kimura, Tets and Shih-Ying Lin. “Friend and Foe: Wei Te-Sheng on Taiwanese Emotions towards Japanese Colonization and the Japanese Perspectives of Ryotaro Shiba and Yoshinori Kobayashi.” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 7, 2 (2021): 169-188.

Lee, Yu-lin. “Archiving an Historical Incident: The Making of Seediq Bale as a Socio-Political Event.” In Kuei-fen Chiu, Ming-yeh Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley, eds., Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2017.

Liao, Ping-hui. “Kano and Taiwanese Baseball: Playing with Transregionality and Postcoloniality.”In Kuei-fen Chiu, Ming-yeh Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley, eds., Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2017.

Rawnsley, Ming-yeh T. “A Conversation with Taiwanese Filmmaker Wei Te-sheng.” In Kuei-fen Chiu, Ming-yeh Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley, eds., Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2017.

Rosenstone, Robert A. “Seediq Bale as History.” In Kuei-fen Chiu, Ming-yeh Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley, eds., Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2017.

Sterk, Darryl. “Mona Rudao’s Scar: Two Kinds of Epic Identity in Seediq Bale.” In Kuei-fen Chiu, Ming-yeh Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley, eds., Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2017.

—–. Indigenous Cultural Translation: A Thick Description of Seediq Bale. London: Routledge, 2020.

[Abstract: Indigenous Cultural Translation is about the process that made it possible to film the 2011 Taiwanese blockbuster Seediq Bale in Seediq, an endangered indigenous language. Seediq Bale celebrates the headhunters who rebelled against or collaborated with the Japanese colonizers at or around a hill station called Musha starting on October 27, 1930, while this book celebrates the grandchildren of headhunters, rebels, and collaborators who translated the Mandarin-language screenplay into Seediq in central Taiwan nearly eighty years later. As a “thick description” of Seediq Bale, this book describes the translation process in detail, showing how the screenwriter included Mandarin translations of Seediq texts recorded during the Japanese era in his screenplay, and then how the Seediq translators backtranslated these texts into Seediq, changing them significantly. It argues that the translators made significant changes to these texts according to the consensus about traditional Seediq culture they have been building in modern Taiwan, and that this same consensus informs the interpretation of the Musha Incident and of Seediq culture that they articulated in their Mandarin-Seediq translation of the screenplay as a whole. The argument more generally is that in building cultural consensus, indigenous peoples like the Seediq are “translating” their traditions into alternative modernities in settler states around the world.]

Wang, Sharon Chialan. “Cape No. 7 and Taiwan’s National Consciousness.” Asian Cinema 20, 2 (Winter/Fall 2009): 244-59.

—–. “Memories of the Future: Remaking Taiwanese-ness in Cape No. 7.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 2 (2012): 135-51.

[Abstract: Focusing on the 2008 blockbuster Cape No. 7 as a case study, this article thinks through the vexed issue of Taiwan’s national sovereignty. In the specific historical context of its release, Cape No. 7 was embraced by the domestic audience. This article examines how Wei Te-Sheng’s film at once conjures up an imagined postcolonial community and exemplifies a post-capitalist trend to commodify cultural particularity. As Wei’s low-budget commercial film indicates a revival of Taiwan’s film industry, it engineers a nostalgia that envisions a flexible national identity.]

—–. “Becoming a Nation: The Shaping of Taiwan’s Native Consciousness in Wei Te-sheng’s Post-Millennium Films.” In Kuei-fen Chiu, Ming-yeh Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley, eds., Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2017.

Wang, Ying-bei. “Love Letters from the Colonizer: The Cultural Identity Issue in Cape No. 7.” Asian Cinema 20, 2 (Winter/Fall 2009): 260-71.

Wu, Chia-rong. “Re-Examining Extreme Violence: Historical Reconstruction and Ethnic Consciousness in Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale.” ASIANetwork Exchange 21, 2 (2014): 24-32.

Wong Kar-wai 王家衛

Abbas, Ackbar. Wong Kar-wai: Hong Kong Filmmaker.” In Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 16-62.

—–. “The Erotics of Disappointment.” In Lalanne, et al. eds., Wong Kar Wai. Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1997, 39-.

—–. “Wong Kar-wai’s Cinema of Repetition.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 115-34.

Alovisio, Silvio, Vanessa Durando, and Micaela Veronesi. Le ceneri del tempo: il cinema di Wong Kar Wai. Piombino (LI): Traccedizioni, 1997.

Ashes of Time (Wong Kar-wai Website)

Bellour, Raymond. “Chungking Express: Slow — Images — Ahead.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 347-52.

Berry, Chris. “Happy Alone? Sad Young Men in East Asian Gay Cinema.” Journal of Homosexuality 39, 3/4 (June 2000): 187-200. Rpt. in Andrew Grossman, ed. Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade. NY: Harrington Press, 2000, 187-200.

Bettinson, Gary. “Reflections on a Screen Narcissist: Leslie Cheung’s Star Persona in the Films of Wong Kar-wai.” Asian Cinema 16, 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 220-38.

—–. “Made in Hong Kong, In the Mood for Love, and the Metaphysics of Melodrama.” Asian Journal of Literature, Culture and Society 1, 2 (2007): 21-39.

—–. “Happy Together? Generic Hybridity in 2046 and In the Mood for Love.” In Warren Buckland, ed., Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 167-186.

—–. The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetics of Disturbance. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2015.

[Abstract:The widely acclaimed films of Wong Kar-wai are characterized by their sumptuous yet complex visual and sonic style. This study of Wong’s filmmaking techniques uses a poetics approach to examine how form, music, narration, characterization, genre and other artistic elements work together to produce certain effects on audiences. Bettinson argues that Wong’s films are permeated by an aesthetic of sensuousness and “disturbance” achieved through techniques such as narrative interruptions, facial masking, opaque cuts, and other complex strategies. The effect is to jolt the viewer out of complete aesthetic absorption. Each of the chapters focuses on a single aspect of Wong’s filmmaking. The book also discusses Wong’s influence on other filmmakers in Hong Kong and around the world.The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai will appeal to all who are interested in authorship and aesthetics in film studies, to scholars in Asian studies, media and cultural studies, and to anyone with an interest in Hong Kong cinema in general, and Wong’s films in particular.]

Biancorossa, Giorgio. “The Value of Re-exports: Wong Kar-wai’s Use of Pre-existing Soundtracks.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 182-205.

Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-Wai. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.

—–. “Metonymy, Mneme, and Anamnesis in Wong Kar-wei.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 397-417.

Braester, Yomi. “Cinephiliac Engagement and the Disengaged Gaze in In the Mood for Love.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 467-84.

Brown, Andrew M. J. Directing Hong Kong: The Political Cinema of John Woo and Wong Kar-Wai. Political Communications in Greater China: the Construction and Reflection of Identity. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2001.

Brunette, Peter. Wong Kar-wai. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. [first book to cover all of Wong’s films from As Tears Go By to 2046]

Cameron, Alan. “Trajectories of Identiification: Travel and Global Culture in the Films of Wong Kar-wai.” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007).

de Carvalho, Ludmila Moreira Macedo. “Memories of Sound and Light: Musical Discourse in the Films of Wong Kar-wai.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 3 (Nov. 2008): 197-210.

[Abstract: This essay promotes an investigation into the musical discourse in the films of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai, focusing primarily on the way that music is applied to disrupt narrative time, thus creating what Gilles Deleuze called ‘pure optical and sonorous situations.’ It also considers the use of popular and pre-existing music and the cultural relations established by them, raising the questions of what it means to use songs that are recognizable in a global cultural context, and what they can add to the filmic experience.]

Chaudhuri, Shohini. “Color Design in the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 153-81.

Chen, Ya-chen. “As Simple as an Egg: Lessons about Love in Ashes of Time.” Asian Cinema 17, 2 (Fall/Winter 2006): 84-102.

Cheng, Sinkwan. “Chinese Cinema in the Global Age: Ashes of Time and the Human Condition.” Asian Cinema 19, 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 86-103.

Chiao, Peggy Hsiung-ping. “Happy Together: Hong Kong’s Absence.” Cinemaya (Oct/Dec 1997): 17-21.

Chion, Michel. “The Third Reality: In the Mood for Love.” Tr. Claudia Gorbman. In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 462-66.

Chow, Rey. “Nostalgia of the New Wave: Structure in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together.” Camera Obscura 42 (1999): 30-49. Rpt. in Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. NY: Columbia, UP, 2007.

—–. “Sentimental Returns: On the Uses of the Everyday in the Recent Films of Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar-wai.” In Maria N. Ng and Philip Holden, eds.,Reading Chinese Transnationalisms Society, Literature, Film. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006. Rpt. in Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. NY: Columbia, UP, 2007.

Desser, David. “Chungking Express, Tarantino, and the Making of a Reputation.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 319-45.

Dissanayake, Wimal with Dorothy Wong. Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2003. [MCLC Resource Center review by John Christopher Hamm]

Durafour, Jean-Michel. “WKW: A Cinema of the Exappropriation.” Asian Cinema 16, 2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 268-76.

Fang, Karen. “‘Pity about the furniture’: Violence, Wong Kar-wai Style.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 272-94.

Fuller, Graham. “Wong Kar-wai: Interview.” Interview 31, 2 (Feb. 2001): 96-97.

Garcia, Roger. “The Touch of Hu.” Cinema (Winter/Spring 1998): 77-79.

Gross, Larry. “Nonchalant Grace.” Sight and Sound 6, 9 (Sept, 1996). [analyses of Wong Kar-Wai’s films]

Guo, Caroline. “‘We Lost Our Way’: The Time and Space of Alienation in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together.” Jump Cut 55 (Fall 2013).

Hampton, Howard. “Blur as Genre.” (Wong Kar-Wai’s film Chungking Express) Artforum 34, 7 (March, 1996).

Havis, Richard J. “Wong Kar-wai: One Entrance, Many Exits.” Cinemaya (Oct/Dec 1997): 15-16.

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Murakami Haruki in Greater China: Creative Responses and the Quest for Cosmopolitanism.” Journal of Asian Studies 68, 3 (2009): 715-747. [deals in part with Chungking Express]

Huang, Tsung-yi. “Chungking Express: Walking with a Map of Desire in the Mirage of the Global City.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video (Fall 2001): 129-42.

—–. “Hong Kong Blue: Flaneurie with the Camera’s Eye in a Phantasmagoric Global City.” JNT-Journal of Narrative Theory 30, 3 (Fall 2000): 385-402.

Ingham, Mike and Matthew Kwok-kin Fung. “In the Mood for Food: Wong Kar-wai’s Culinary Imaginary.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 295-318.

Khoo, Olivia. “Love in Ruins: Spectral Bodies in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love.” In Martin and Larissa Heinrich, eds., Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006, 235-52.

Kickasola, Joseph G. “It Is a Restless Moment: Wong Kar-wai and the Phenomenology of Flow.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 47-79.

Kraicer, Shelly. “Time Blossoms, Time Fades” (reivew of In the Mood for Love).

—–. “Tracking the Elusive Wong Kar-Wai.” Cineaste [review of Peter Brunette’s Wong Kar-wai (University of Illinois) Stephen Teo’s Wong Kar-wai (British Film Institute)]

In the Mood for Love (website for the film)

Jousse, Thierry. Wong Kar-Wai. Les petits cahiers. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006.

Lalanne, Jean-Marc, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, Jimmy Ngai. Wong Kar Wai. Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1997.

—–. “Images from the Inside.” In Lalanne, et al. eds., Wong Kar Wai. Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1997, 9-28.

Lee, Vivian P. Y. “Infidelity and the Obscure Object of History.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 378-96.

Leung, Anthony. “Meditations on Loss: A Framework for the Films of Wong Kar-wai.” Asian Cult Cinema (Jan. 1999).

Leung, Helen Hok-Sze. “New Queer Angles on Wong Kar-wai.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 250-71.

Li, Cheuk-to. “The Polarization of Art and the Marketplace.” Ashes of Time Website.

Lim, Song Hwee. “Travelling Sexualities: Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together.” In Lim, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2006, 99-125.

n.a. “Wong Kar-wai: Charisma Express.” Sight and Sound website.

Ma, Jean. Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2010.

Marchetti, Gina. “Wong’s Ladies from Shanghai.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 207-31.

Martinez, David. “Chasing the Metaphysical Express.” In Lalanne, et al. eds., Wong Kar Wai. Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1997, 29-38.

Mazierska, Ewa and Laura Rascorali. “Trapped in the Present: Time in the Films of Wong Kar-Wai.” Film Criticism 25, 2 (Winter 2000-2001): 2-20.

McElhaney, Joe. “Happy Together.” Senses of Cinema (2000).

—–. “Wong Kar-wai: The Actor, Framed.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 353-77.

Miller, Blair. “…Simply Because You’re Near me: Love, Chungking Express, and In the Mood for Love.” Cineaction 62, 1 (2003): 58-66.

Nestler, Sebastian. “Minor Movies: On the Deterritorialising Power of Wong Kar-wai’s Works.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 4 (2012): 582-97.

[Abstract: The article approaches Wong Kar-wai’s cinematic work using the notion of “minor literature” as coined by Gilles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari. Minor literature–or, in other words, minor language–signifies oppositional/resistant uses of a major/hegemonic language. It appropriates hegemonic language and deterritorialises it by re-signifying its original meanings. By transferring this concept from literature to cinema, we can describe Hong Kong cinema, which deterritorialises Hollywood cinema, as a minor cinema in relation to Hollywood. Following this interpretation, Wong Kar-wai’s movies appear as a “minor language of a minor cinema” because they are significantly different from Hong Kong’s mainstream action cinema. Consequently, Wong’s movies possess a high level of deterritorialising power, which opens up new spaces of meaning and gives voice to positions usually oppressed by mainstream cinema. Finally, a close reading of Wong’s movie Happy Together shows how “minor movies” challenge the mainstream’s unison and give space to a resistant and transforming polyphony.]

Ngai, Jimmy. “A Dialogue with Wong Kar Wai: Cutting Betweeen Time and Two Cities.” In Lalanne, et al. eds., Wong Kar Wai. Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1997.

Nochimson, Martha P., ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016.

[Abstract: With 25 essays that embrace a wide spectrum of topics and perspectives including intertextuality, transnationality, gender representation, repetition, the use of music, color, and sound, depiction of time and space in human affairs, and Wong’s highly original portrayal of violence, A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai is a singular examination of the prestigious filmmaker known around the world for the innovation, beauty, and passion he brings to filmmaking.]

Nochimson, Martha P. “Wong Kar-wai: Invoking the Universal and the Local.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 3-22.

—–. “We Can’t Go On Not Meeting Like This: Fallen Angels and Wong’s Intertextuality.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 438-61.

Payne, Robert M. “Ways of Seeing Wild: The Cinema of Wong Kar-Wai.” Jump Cut 44 (Fall 2001).

Peng, Hsiao-yen. “Wong Kar-wai’s Mood Trilogy: Robot, Tears, and the Affective Aura.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Ella Raidel, eds., The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture: Altering Archives. Routledge, 2018, 131-41.

Petrovic, Paul. “‘All Memories Are Traces of Tears’: Trauma and the Foreclosure of Testimony in Wong Kar Wai’s 2046.” Asian Cinema 22, 2 (Fall/Winter 2010): 217-33.

Provencher, Ken. “Transnational Wong.” In Martha P. Nochismson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 23-46.

—–. “Wong’s America, North and South: My Blueberry Nights and Happy Together.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 485-507.

Rayns, Tony. “Poet of Time.” Sight and Sound (Sept. 1995): 12-14.

—–. “Chungking Express (Chongqing Senlin).” [film review] Sight and Sound 5, 9 (Sept, 1995).

Redmond, Sean. Studying Chungking Express. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2004.

Restivo, Angelo. “Wong Kar-wai: The Optics of the Virtual.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 135-52.

Reynaud. Berenice. “Wong Kar-wai and his jiang hu.” In Martha P. Nochismson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 80-114.

Reinhard, Fabian. “Liminality in a Microcosm: ‘California Dreaming’ in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express (1994).” Senses of Cinema 96 (Oct. 2020).

Rojas, Carlos. “Queer Utopias in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 508-21.

Schnelle, Josef, and Rüdiger Suchsland. Zeichen und Wunder das Kino von Zhang Yimou und Wong Kar-Wai. Marburg: Schüren, 2008.

Siegel, Marc. “The Intimate Spaces of Wong Kar-wai.” In Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 277-94.

Sim, Jiaying. “Transnational Cinema as a Matter of Address: Considering Eros and Embodiment in Wong Kar-wai’s ‘The Hand.'” In Brian Berergan-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015, 51-68.

Stephens, Chuck. “Time Pieces: Wong Kar-Wai and the Persistence of Memory.” Film Comment (Jan/Feb 1996): 12-18.

Stringer, Julian. “Wong Kar-wai.” In Yvonne Tasker, ed., Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers. London, New York: Routledge, 2002, 395-402.

Tambling, Jeremy. Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together. HK: Hong Kong University, 2003. [UBC Press (distributer) abstract]

Tan, Yuh-yi. “Resisting the Lure of the Fetish: Between Abjection and Fetishism in Kar Wai Wong’s In the Mood for Love. ” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36, 2 (Sept. 2010): 149-179.

“I Revolt, Therefore We Are to Come: Imaginary M / Other in The Assassin and The Grandmaster.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 45, 2 (Sept. 2019): 27-54.

Tang, Pao-Chen. “The Grandmaster of Snow: Martial Arts, Particle Systems and the Animist Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 12, 1 (2018): 74-91.

[Abstract: By looking at selected sequences from Wong Kar-wai’s 2013 The Grandmaster in which characters, especially Gong Er (played by Zhang Ziyi), interact with the ubiquitous falling snow created by particle systems, this essay argues that the film’s effects work visualizes the invisible flow of energy in traditions of Chinese visual culture, medicine and martial arts – all prominent or related motifs in the film’s narrative. Moreover, such energy gets to be envisaged because of the very medium of the particle system, with its ideology closely related to a worldview based on animism and animation. Growing out of Wong’s use of visual effects – specific to the cultural-historical context of the film – and the animist concept behind its technology, I offer a relational perspective for contemporary studies of visual effects to conceptualize the interactions between martial arts actions performed in front of the camera and digital work in the postproduction stage.]

Teo, Stephen. “Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love: Like a Ritual in Transfigured Time.” Senses of Cinema 13 (April-May 2001).

—–. Wong Kar-wai: Auteur of Time. London: BFI, 2005.

—–. “2046: A Matter of Time, a Labour of Love.” Sense of Cinema 35 (2005).

—–. “Wong Kar-wai’s Genre Practice and Romantic Authorship: The Cases of Ashes in Time Redux and The Grandmaster.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 522-39.

Tong, Janice. “Chungking Express: Time and Its Displacement.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 47-55. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 64-72.

Tremblay, Phillipe. “Regard dynamometrique sur Hong Kong.” Synoptique 10 (Aug. 2005).

Tsui, Curtis K. “Subjective Culture and History: The Ethnographic Cinema of Wong Kar-wai.” Asian Cinema 7, 2 (1995): 93-124.

Villella, Fiona A., compiler. “The Cinema of Wong Kar-wai–A Writing Game.” Senses of Cinema 13 (April-May 2001).

Wang, Yiman. “Serial, Sequelae, and Postcolonial Nostalgia: Wong Kar-wai’s 1960s Hong Kong Trilogy.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 419-37.

Wilson, Flannery. “Viewing Sinophone Cinema Through a French Theoretical Lens: Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, and 2046, and Deleuze’sCinema.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 1 (Spring 2009): 141-173.

Wong, Nicholas Y. B. “The Carnal Hand and Fetishism in Wong Kar-wai’s The Hand.” Asian Cinema 19, 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 47-58.

Wong, Kar-wai. “Wong Kar-wai on Chungking Express.” Sight and Sound (Sept. 1995): 14-16.

Wong, Kar-wai, and Tony Rayns. Wong Kar-Wai on Wong Kar-Wai. London: Faber, 2002.

Wong Kar-wai’s Cinema Lesson. Cannes Film Festival 2001 Website.

Wong Kar-wai World Wide

Wong Kar Wai (fan website by Lok Man Tsui)

Wong, Mary Shuk-Han. “1972-73; 2000: A Subtle Encounter: Tete-Beche and In the Mood for Love.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 703-7.

Wright, Elizabeth.”Wong Kar-wai.” Senses of Cinema–-Great Directors, a Critical Database. [includes biography, bibliography, filmography, as well as links to Senses of Cinema articles on Wong and his films]

Wypkema, Laurel. “Corridor Romance: Wong Kar-wai’s Intimate City.” Synoptique 10 (Aug. 2005).

Yau, Wai-ping. “Wong Kar-wai, Auteur and Adaptor: Ashes of Time and In the Mood for Love.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 540-56.

Yeh, Emily Yueh-yu. “A Life of Its Own: Musical Discourses in Wong Kar-Wai’s Films.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Special issue on HK Cinema. 19, 1 (Fall 1999).

Yeh, Emily Yueh-yu and Lake Wang Hu. “Transcultural Sounds: Music, Identity, and the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai.” Asian Cinema 19, 1 (Spring/Summer 2009): 32-46.

Yu, Sabrina, Nicholas Kaldis, Kin Wing Kevin Chan, and Cecilia Liao. “Happy Together 春光乍洩 Script: Cantonese Transcription with English Translation.” MCLC Resource Center Publication, 2024.

Yue, Audrey. “What’s So Queer About Happy Together? a.k.a. Queer (N)Asian: Interface, Community, Belonging.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1, 2 (2000): 251-64.

—–. “In the Mood for Love: Intersections of Hong Kong Modernity.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 128-36. Rpt. in Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave, 2008, 144-52.

—–. “The Sinophone Cinema of Wong Kar-wai.” In Martha P. Nochimson, ed. A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 232-49.

Zhou, Juanita Huan. “Ashes of Time: The Tragedy and Salvation of the Chinese Intelligentsia.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 62-70.

Zhu, Ying. “Wong Kar-wai.” Zhu, Ying. “Chinese Comrade Literature.” In David Gerstner, ed., International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture – Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transexual Cultures. London: Routledge: 2006.

John Woo 吳宇森

An, Jinsoo. “The Killer: Cult Film and Transcultural (Mis)Reading.” In Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 95-114.

Bliss, Michael. Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2002.

Ciecko, Anne T. “Transnational Action: John Woo, Hong Kong, Hollywood.” In Sheldon Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

Doraiswamy, Rashmi. “The Spectacle of Action: John Woo’s Face\Off.” Cinemaya (Winter/Spring 1998): 17-19.

Elder, Robert K, ed., John Wo Interviews. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

Elrick, Ted. “The Woo Dynasty Comes to Hollywood.” DCA Magazine 20, 5 (1995).

Fang, Karen. John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2004.

Hall, Kenneth. John Woo: The Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1999.

—–. John Woo’s The Killer. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2009.

[Abstract: A classic tale of loyalty and bloody betrayal, John Woo’s The Killer (1989) was centrally important to the growth of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. It helped launch the international stardom of Woo and lead actor Chow Yun-fat, who plays a disllusioned hitman taking his fatal final assignment to help a lounge singer he accidentally blinded. Illustrating the film’s place in the chivalric tradition of Chinese and Hong Kong cinema, where cops and noble villains sometimes join forces in defense of traditional virtues and personal honor, Kenneth Hall documents the strong influence of Woo’s mentor Chang Cheh as well as Jean-Pierre Melville and other film noir pioneers. Hall also analyzes the film’s influence on other directors, including Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.]

Havis, Richard J. “Hong Kong’s John Woo Finally Does It His Way in Hollywood.” Cinemaya (Winter/Spring 1998): 10-16.

Heard, Christopher. Ten Thousand Bullets: The Cinematic Journey of John Woo. Los Angeles: Lone Eagle, 2000.

Koven, Mikel J. “My Brother, My Lover, My Self: Traditional Masculinity in the Hong Kong Action Cinema of John Woo.” Canadian Folklore Canadien 19, 1 (1997).

Li, Jinhua. “Topography of Cinematic Heroism: The Transregional Remakes of A Better Tomorrow (1986).” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 8, 1 (2022): 91-108.

[Abstract: This article investigates the cultural politics and identity discourses in the two East Asian reproductions of A Better Tomorrow (1986). Rethinking the power dynamics of a homogenizing transnationalism from a vantage point that is alternative rather than resistant, this article employs a critical approach that is interconnective instead of hierarchical to refocus on the local and the heterogeneous and argues that each remake renegotiates Woo’s cinematic heroism and retools it into the trope for nationhood and identity. The transnational circulation of John Woo’s classical hero narrative traces how heroism and its historical, cultural, political, gender and ideological connotations are renegotiated and reconfigured for unique representational purposes and sociopolitical agendas. As a politically charged, culturally specific and historically circumscribed concept, heroism is deceptively transcendental, in the sense that its definition and expression defy ideological abstraction and cognitive certitude. This elusiveness precludes a consensus on heroism in the remakes; instead, each film contributes to a shifting topography of cinematic heroism mapped by the intricate dynamics of identity, politics and nationhood. Thus, whereas the tragedy of fragmented brotherhood metaphorized, divided and fractured nationhood in Moo-jeok-ja, Tomorrow 2018 propagandized heroism by replacing violence-glorifying brotherhood with nationalist patriotism.]

Magal, Uma. “At One with the Other: An Examination of John Woo’s Vision Climaxing in Face Off.” Asian Cinema 10, 2 (Spring/Summer 1999): 80-86.

McDonagh, Maitland. “Action Painter: John Woo.” Film Comment 29 (1993): 46-49.

—–. “Things I Felt Were Being Lost: Interview with John Woo.” Film Comment 29, 5 (1993): 50-52.

Rayns, Tony. “Hard Boiled.” Sight and Sound (Aug. 1992): 20-23.

Sandell, Jillian. “A Better Tommorrow? American Masochismo and the Hong Kong Film.” Bright Lights 13 (1994): 40-45, 50.

—–. “Reinventing Masculinity: The Spectacle of Male Intimacy in the Films of John Woo.” Film Quarterly 49, 4 (1996): 23-34.

Sandell, Jillian. “Interview with John Woo.” Bright Lights 13 (1994): 36-39.

Steintrager, James. “Bullet in the Head: Trauma, Identity and Violent Spectacle.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 23-30.

Stephens, Chuck. “Time Pieces: Wong Kar-Wai and the Persistence of Memory.” Film Comment 32, 1 (1996): 12-18.

Stokes, Lisa Odham. “John Woo’s War: Real (Reel) Dreams, Windtalkers and the Hollywood Machina.” Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring 2004): 187-202.

Stringer, Julian. “Your Tender Smiles Give Me Strength: Paradigms of Musculinity in John Woo’s A Better Tommorrow and The Killer.” Screen 38 (1997): 25-41.

Szeto, Kin-Yan. “Facing Off East and West in the Cinema of John Woo.” In Szeto, The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan in Hollywood. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011, 71-112.

Williams, Tony. “From Hong Kong to Hollywood: John Woo and His Discontents.” Cineaction 42 (1997): 40-46.

—–. “To Live and Die in Hong Kong: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo.” Cineaction 36 (1995): 42-52.

—–. “Space, Place and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo.” Cinema Journal 36, 2 (Winter 1997): 67-84. Rpt in Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds.,The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 137-57.

—–. “John Woo.” In Yvonne Tasker, ed., Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers. London, New York: Routledge, 2002, 403-11.

—–. John Woo’s Bullet in the Head. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2009.

[Abstract: Though under-appreciated in contemporary film criticism, Bullet in the Head is a landmark in John Woo’s career as a film director. Featuring strong early work by Hong Kong stars such as Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Simon Yam, the film functions both as modern Jacobean revenge tragedy and as an allegory of fears surrounding the Tiananmen Square incident for Hong Kong residents facing reunification with China. Detailing the circumstances surrounding production and the role of leading stars, Tony Williams argues for the film’s central importance as a major triumph of dynamic Asian cinema and assesses its significance both for Hong Kong cinema and Woo’s later career.]

Wolcott, James. “Blood Test.” New Yorker 23 (Aug. 1993): 62-68.

Xu, Gary G. “Children Caught in Crossfire: John Woo and Global Affective Cinema.” The China Review 10, 2 (2010).

[Abstract: This article begins with an observation of the imitations of Asian cinematic aesthetics, especially John Woo’s “aesthetics of violence,” in contemporary Hollywood. The author points out the fallacy of the binary between Hollywood’s attention to realistic details and what Hollywood filmmakers usually perceive as “fantastic/otherworldly” in the “Asian elements.” The author uses John Woo as the primary example of a global affective cinema, which not only features qing (feelings, affects, love) thematically but also relies on qing as the guiding stylistic principle to intensify the emotional and affective power. Drawing on recent scholarships on affect, which has been distinguished from feeling or emotion, he argues that the increasingly popular global affective cinema is different from traditional Hollywood narrative cinema in the sense that it is all about the very effect of intensification, not what is intensified. John Woo’s films strike a chord with the international affective politics that seek to move the “irrational,” “individual,” and “private” affects into the arena of the rational, collective, and public politics.]

Wu Nien-chen [or Wu Nien-jen] 吳念真

Berry, Michael. “Wu Nien-jen: Writing Taiwan in the Shadows of Cultural Colonialism.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 296-323.

Davis, Darrell W. “Borrowing Postcolonial: Wu Nien-chen’s Dou-san and the Memory Mine.” Post Script 20, 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2001): 94-114. Rpt. in Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 237-66.

—–. “A New Taiwan Person? A Conversation with Wu Nien-chen.” positions 11, 3 (Winter 2003): 717-34.

Lu, Tonglin. “A Postcolonial Reflection: Buddha Bless America.” In Lu, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 191-205.

Teng, Sue-Feng. “Wu Nien-chen, Master Storyteller.” Sinorama (May 1996): 36-43.

Wu Tianming 吴天明

Liu Binyan. “Meishang yinmu de gushi…” (The story not adapted for the screen). Renmin ribao (August 7 and 8, 1986). [reportage on Wu Tianming and his Xian Studio]

Luo, Xueying. “Wu Tianming’s Rise to Fame.” Chinese Literature 3 (1989): 188-195.

Shapiro, Judith. After the Nightmare: A Survivor of the Cultural Revolution Reports on China Today. New York: Knopf, 1986. [contains an interview with Wu Tianming]

Wang, Yuejin. “The Old Well: A Womb or Tomb? The Double Perspective in Wu Tianming’s Old Well.” Framework 35 (1988): 73-82.

Weng, Li. “Making of the Film ‘Story of a Life'” China Reconstructs (Feb. 1985): 16-17. 3.

Wu Wenguang 吴文光

Berry, Chris. “Chinese Documentary at Home in the World: A Report on the China-Australia Documentary Workshop Beijing, July 11-13, 1997.”Documentary Box 11 (January 31, 1998).

——–. “Facing Reality: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism.” In Wu Hung with Wang Huangsheng and Feng Boyi, ed., Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art. Guangzhou: Chuangdong Museum of Art, 2002.

——–. “Getting Real: Chinese Documentaries, Chinese Postsocialism,” in Zhang Zhen, ed., China’s Urban Generation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

—-. “Wu Wenguang: An Introduction.” Cinema Journal 46, no. 1 (2006): 133-136.

Dai, Jinhua. “A Scene in the Fog: Reading Sixth Generation Films.” In Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow, eds., Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. London: Verso, 2002.

Goldstein, David. “Wu Wenguang Interview.” China Independent Documentary Film Archive, 2002.

Hong Kong International Film Festival Society. The 16th Hong Kong International Film Festival Main Catalogue. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1992.

Iovene, Paola. “A Madwoman in the Art Gallery? Gender, Mediation, and the Relation between Life and Art in Post-1989 Chinese Independent Film.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 3 (2014): 173-187.

Johnson, Matthew David. “A Scene Beyond Our Line of Sight: Wu Wenguang and New Documentary Cinema’s Politics of Independence.” In Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang eds., From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, 47-76.

Larsen, Ernest. “Video vérité from Beijing.”Art in America (September 1998).

Leary, Charles. “Performing the Documentary, or Making it To the Other Bank.” Senses of Cinema 27 (July-August 2003).

Lü Xinyu 吕新雨. Jilu Zhongguo: dangdai Zhongguo xin jilu yundong 记录中国: 当代中国新记录运动 (Documenting China: contemporary China’s new documentary movement). Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2003.

The Memory Project (Duke University Libraries)

“Recording real life.” China Daily (April 5, 2004).

Reynaud, Bérénice. “Dancing With Myself, Drifting With My Camera: The Emotional Vagabonds of China’s New Documentary.” Senses of Cinema 28 (September-October 2003).

Wong Ain-ling (reviewer). “Wu Wenguang, ed. Document: Xianchang (‘Document: The Scene’).” Documentary Box 18 (October 1, 2001).

Wu Wenguang 吴文光. Jingtou xiang ziji de yanjing yiyang 镜头向自己的眼睛一样 (The lens is the same as my eye). Shanghai: Shanghai yishu, 2001.

Zhang Yingjin. “Styles, Subjects, and Special Points of View: A Study of Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentary.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 2, 2 (Sept. 2004): 119-36.

Wu Yonggang 吴永刚

Harris, Kristine . “The Goddess: Fallen Woman of Shanghai.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 111-19. Rpt. in Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave, 2008, 128-36.

Meyet, Richard J. Ruan Lingyu: The Goddess of Shanghai. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2005.

Rothman, William. “The Goddess: Reflections on Melodrama East and West.” In Wimal Dissanayake, ed, Melodrama and Asian Cinema. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 59-72.

Xiao, Zhiwei. “Wu Yonggang and the Ambivalence in the Chinese Experience of Modernity: A Study of His Three Films of the Mid-1930s.” Asian Cinema 9, 2 (Spring 1998): 3-15.

Wu Ziniu 吴子牛

Clark, Paul. “The Spirit of the Times: Wu Ziniu’s Films.” In Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2005, 90-105.

Zhang, Yingjin. “Evening Bell: Wu Ziniu’s Visions of History, War and Humanity.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 81-88..

Xie Jin 谢晋

Berry, Michael. “Xie Jin: Six Decades of Cinematic Innovation.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 20-49.

Browne, Nick. “Society and Subjectivity: On the Political Economy of Chinese Melodrama.” In Browne, ed. New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, 57-87.

Chi, Robert. “The Red Detachment of Women: Resenting, Regendering, Remembering.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 152-59. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 189-96.

Cui, Shuqin. “Gender Politics and Socialist Discourse in Xie Jin’s Red Detachment of Women.” In Cui, Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003, 79-95.

Da, Huo’er. “An Interview with Xie Jin.” Jump Cut 34 (March 1989): 107-09.

Fonoroff, Paul. “Live from Hong Kong: The Opium Wars.” Manga Mania (Jan/Feb 1998): 10-11.

Harris, Kristine. “Re-makes/Re-models: The Red Detachment of Women between Stage and Screen.” The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 31-42.

Hayford, Charles W. “Hibiscus Town: Revolution, Love and Bean Curd.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 120-27.

Karl, Rebecca E. “The Burdens of History: Lin Zexu (1959) and the Opium War (1997).” In Xudong Zhang, ed., Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Kipnis, Andrew. “Anti-Maoist Gender: Hibiscus Town‘s Naturalization of a Dengist Sex/Gender/Kinship System.” Asian Cinema 8, 2 (Winter 1996-97): 66-75.

Kuoshu, Harry H. “Two Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemie, dir Xie Jin, 1965).” In Kuoshu, Celloid China: Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002, 29-51.

Iovene, Paola. “Landscape of Words: Romance on Lushan Mountain (1980) and Sinoglossia and Delimination.” In Andrea Bachner, Howard Chiang, and Yu-lin Lee, eds., Sinoglossia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023, 73-90.

Li, Cheuk-to. “Yapian Zhanzheng (The Opium War).” Cinemaya (Oct/Dec 1997): 30-31.

Liu, Mia Yinxing. “The Phantom Landscape of Jiangnan: The Politics of Topograph in Stage Sisters.” In Liu, Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019, 70-109.

—–. “The Remnant Intellectuals: Ruins and Monuments on Tianyunshan Mountain.” In Liu, Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019, 153-85.

Ma, Ning. “Spatiality and Subjectivity in Xie Jin’s Film Melodrama of the New Period.” In Nick Browne, Paul Pickowicz, Vivian Sochack, and Esther Yau, eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 15-39.

—–. “Symbolic Representation and Symbolic Violence: Chinese Family Melodrama of the Early 1980s.” East-West Film Journal 4.1 (Dec. 1989): 79-112.

Mao, Jian. “Gender Politics and the Crisis of Socialist Aesthetics: The ‘Room’ in Woman Basketball Player No. 5.” In Xueping Zhong and Ban Wang, eds. Debating the Socialist Legacy and Capitalist Globalization in China. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014, 73-84.

Marchetti, Gina. “Two Stage Sisters: The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic.” Jump Cut 34 (March 1989): 95-106.

Tung, Timothy. “The Work of Xie Jin: A Personal Letter to the Editor.” In John Downing, ed. Film and Politics in the Third World. New York: Praeger, 1987, 199-207.

Wicks, James. “Two Stage Brothers: Tracing a Common Heritage in Early Films by Xie Jin and Li Xing.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 1 (Spring 2009): 174-212. Rpt. in Wicks, Transnational Representations: The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and 1970s. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2014, 23-52

Xiao, Zhiwei. “The Opium War in the Movies: History, Politics and Propaganda.” Asian Cinema 11, 1 (Spring/Summer 2000): 68-83.

Xie Jin Website

Zeng, Hong. “Semiotics of Exile and Genre Upsetting: Xie Jin’s Subversion of Melodrama in Hibiscus Town.” In Zeng, Semiotics of Exile in Contemporary Chinese Film. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 107-22.

Xie Tieli 谢铁骊

Liu, Mia Yinxing. “Early Spring in February: Reframing the Problems of Utopia in the 1960s.” In Liu, Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019, 110-52.

Xu Jinglei 徐静蕾

Gong, Haomin. “‘If I Love You, What Business Is It of Yours?’ Or, Is It? The Symptomatics of the Wenyi Film in Contemporary China.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 39, 4 (2022): 776-798. [This essay discusses Xu Jinglei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman]

Guo, Shaohua. “Wenyi, Wenqing and Pure Love: The European Imaginary in Xu Jinglei’s Films.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 12, 1 (2018): 41-58.

Leung, Wing-fai. “Product Placement with ‘Chinese Characteristics’: Feng Xiaogang’s Films and Go Lala Go!” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 2 (2015): 125-40.

Li, Jinhua. “Chinese Feminisms and Adaptation-as-Translation Reading of Letter from an Unknown Woman.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture9, 4 (Dec. 2007):

McGrath, Jason. “Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People’s Republic of China.” World Picture 3 (Summer 2009). [deals in part with Xu’s film Letter from an Unknown Woman]

Talmacs, Nicole. “Go Lala Go: Secretaries, Shopping and Spinsterhoood.” In Talmacs, China’s Cinema of Class: Audiences and Narratives. NY: Routledge, 2017, 73-97.

“Xu Jinglei: In Front of and Behind the Camera” (interview). Kinema (Spring 2006).

Zhang, Jingyuan. “To Become an Auteur: The Cinematic Maneuverings of Xu Jinglei.” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 293-310.

Xu Xin 徐辛

Byler, Darren. “‘Disposable’ Bodies on Screen in Xu Xin’s Karamay: Biopolitics, Affect, and Ritual in Chinese Central Asia.” In Brian Berergan-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015, 159-80.

Lee, Kevin. “A Documentary Monument: KARAMAY.” Keyframe (Fandor).

Edward Yang (Yang Dechang) 楊德昌

Anderson, John. Edward Yang. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. [comprehensive overview of the work of Edward Yang]

Austerlitz, Saul. “Music and A Brighter Summer Day.” Cineaction 62, 1 (2003): 67-71.

—–. “Edward Yang.” Senses of Cinema–Great Directors, a Critical Database.

Berry, Michael. “Edward Yang: Luckily Unlucky.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 272-95.

Bugeja, Nick. “A City in Transition in Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 1985).” Senses of Cinema 88 (Oct. 2018).

Chang, Ivy I-chu. “The Visible and the Invisible: Edward Yang’s Taipei Trilogy.” In Chang, Taiwan Cinema, Memory, and Modernity. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne. “The Terrorizer and the Great Divide in Contemporary Taiwan’s Cultural Development.” In Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 13-26.

Cheah, Philip. “A One and a Two” [review].Cinemaya 49 (2000): 26-27.

Chen, Leo Chanjen. “The Frustrated Architect: The Cinema of Edward Yang.” New Left Review 11 (Sept-Oct. 2001).

Chen, Robert Ru-Shou. “Du Li Shi Dai (A Confucian Confusion).” Cineyama ??

Chiao, Hsiung-ping Peggy. “Mahjong: Urban Travails.” Cineyama 33 (1996): 24-27.

Deng, MaoHui. “Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000).” Senses of Cinema 88 (Oct. 2018).

Huang Jianye 黃建業. Yang Dechang dianying yanjiu–Taiwan xin dianying de zhixing sibain jia 楊德昌電影研究–台灣新電影的知性思辨家 (Studies on films by Yang Dechang– a critical thinker in Taiwan’s new cinema). Taipei: Yuanliu, 1995.

Jameson, Fredric. “Remapping Taipei.” In Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992, 114-57.

Kraicer, Shelly. “Edward Yang: a Taiwanese Independent Filmmaker in Conversation.” CineAction 47 (Oct. 1998): 48-55.

Kraicer, Shelly and Lisa Roosen-Runge. “Interview with Edward Yang,” CineAction 47 (Summer 1998).

Li, David Leiwei. “Yi Yi: Reflections on Reflexive Modernity in Taiwan.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 198-204. Rpt. in Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 265-72.

Liu Yu-hsiu. “The Story of Power and Desire: A Brighter Summer Day.” In Catherine Farris, Anru Lee, and Murray Rubenstein, eds., Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles adn Gender Consciousnesss in a Changing Society. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2004, 278-94.

—–. “A Myth(ology) Mythologizing Its Own Closure: Edward Yang’s A Brighter Sunny Day.” In Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 67-78.

Lu, Tonglin. “Melodrama of the City: Edward Yang, Taipei Story, The Terrorizers, Confucius’s Confusion.” Lu, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 116-54.

Nornes, Markus. “The Terrorizer” [review]. Film Quarterly 42, 3 (Spring 1989):43-47.

Reynaud, Berenice. “Mahjong.” Cineyama 32 (1996): 31-32.

Shiau, Hong-Chi. “A Brighter Summer Day: Mourning Yang De-chang (Edward).” Asian Cinema 18, 2 (Fall/Winter 2007): 294-302.

Tam, Kwok-kan and Wimal Dissanayake. “Edward Yang: Visions of Taipei and Cultural Modernity.” New Chinese Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Teo, Stephen. “A Brighter Summer Day: The Four-Hour Version Reviewed and Reassessed.” Cinemaya 14 (1992): 44-47.

—–. “A New Kind of Alienation: Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day.” Cinemaya 13 (1991): 41-44.

Tweedie, James. “Edward Yang and Taiwan’s Age of Auteurs.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 421-37.

Waters, James. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: The Terrorizers (Edward Yang, 1986).” Senses of Cinema 88 (Oct. 2018).

Wu, George. “Both a One and a Two.” Senses of Cinema 14 (2001).

Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu. “Elvis, Allow Me to Introduce Myself: American Music and Neocolonialism in Taiwan Cinema.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 1 (Spring 2003): 1-28. [deals primarily with A Brighter Summer Day]

—–. “American Popular Music and Neocolonialism in the Films of Edward Yang.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 82-94.

Yiyi (And a one and a two) website

Yim Ho 嚴浩

Cheuk, Pak Tong. “Yim Ho.” In Cheuk, Hong Kong New Wave Cinema: 1978-2000. Bristol: Intellect, 2008, 147-62.

Richie, Donald. “The Day the Sun Turned Cold: Some Aspects of Yim Ho’s Film.” Cinemaya 31 (1996): 16-18.

Ying Liang 应亮

Fisher, Jaimey. “Locarno Interview: Ying Liang and his Family Tour.” Senses of Cinema (March 2019).

Yang, Mei. Regional Filmmaking After Jia Zhangke: Relational Cinematic Space and Ying Liang’s The Other Half.” Sage Open 5, 3 (2015): 1-11.

[Abstract: This article examines Ying Liang’s films to illustrate Chinese independent filmmakers’ growing propensity for representing regional space through innovative cinematic techniques. As one of the most conspicuous directors onstage in the 2000s, Ying Liang rekindles independent regional film following the legacy of Jia Zhangke’s hometown trilogy. Varying shooting angles and camera positions, his exemplar work of formalistic experimentation, The Other Half (Ling yiban, 2006), presents space as a pivot of relations, within which the position of self and the situation of the local are intertwined. In line with Doreen Massey’s proposition for a spatial turn in theoretical conceptions, I argue that Ying Liang’s exploration of relational cinematic space, between on-screen and offscreen, from selfhood to nation, continues to challenge the legitimacy of the foretold metanarrative of national progression in which the countryside and inland cities belong to a bygone time that ought to be replaced in a forward-looking timeline. The explosive endings characteristic of Ying’s film oeuvre, in which all the imminent calamities happening to the region and its inhabitants eventually break out, belie the promise of a bright future told by the state and underline the symbolic violence endured by the local.]

Zhang Meng 张猛

Dai, Jinhua. “The Piano in a Factory: Class, in the Name of the Father.” Tr. Jie Li. In Dai Jinhua, After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018, 91-108.

Shi, Xiaoling. “The Absurd and the Comical in The Piano in a Factory.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, 3 (2017): 536-62.

[Abstract: Whereas scholarship on Zhang Meng’s acclaimed film The Piano in a Factory is scarce and mainly focuses on working-class identities, the present article contributes to the discussion by investigating the film’s tragicomic style. By taking an existentialist viewpoint about the absurd, it demonstrates that the furloughed workers in fact live in an absurdist existence. Moreover, the changing era rather than character flaws is blamed for the absurdity. Specific images are examined in order to reveal a symbolism having to do with the demise of industrialism and the advent of commercialism. While absurdity is the undercurrent, the characters use humor as a strategy to evade, elude, and cope with life. The third section employs theories of comedy to investigate the comicality of the movie, which derives from exaggeration of negative traits in the characters. The paper argues that by manipulating the scenario at the end, Zhang holds out hope for the working-class’ future. Piano is hence able to transcend the absurdist existence and end up with joy, hope and faith.]

Zhang Ming 张明

Elley, Derek. “In Expectation (Wushan Yunyu). CineEast (1997): 1-2.

Kaldis, Nick. “National Development and Individual Trauma in Wushan yunyu (In Expectation).” The China Review 4, 2 (Fall 2004): 165-192.

—–. “Submerged Ecology and Depth Psychology in Wushan yunyu: Aesthetic Insight into National Development.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds.,Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 57-72.

Zhang Nuanxin 张暖忻

Berry, Chris. “Interview with Zhang Nuanxin.” Camera Obscura 18 (Sept. 1988):20-25.

Wang, Lingzhen. “Zhang Nuanxin and Social Commitment in 1980s Chinese Women’s Experimental Cinema.” Camera Obscura 34, 3 (2019): 1-29.

Zhang Shichuan 張石川

Dong, Xinyu. “The Laborer at Play: Laborer’s Love, the Operational Aesthetic, and the Comedy of Inventions.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, 2 (Fall 2008): 1-39.

Fan, Victor. “Laborer’s Love: An Anthropotechnogenetic Mediation between Cinematism and Animetism.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022): 239-60.

[Abstract: How can media philosophy help us rehistoricize Zhang Shichuan (director) and Zheng Zhengqiu’s (screenwriter) Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, 1922] and foster a deeper understanding of its aesthetics within its historical context? In this article, I take Zhang Zhen’s (1999, 27–50) book chapter on the film, “Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage Cinema,” as a point de départ of my investigation. I argue that Laborer’s Love is best understood as part of a larger media ecology that has always been in transition, or more properly speaking, always in a process of becoming. I want to demonstrate that in the film, the hybridity between a more presentational style that stemmed from early-twentieth-century Chinese theater and a more representational style that stemmed from American cinema may not be a symptom of the film’s transitionality. Rather, such hybridity might have been Zhang Shichuan’s conscious stylistic choice. Also, in the light of Thomas Lamarre’s understanding of the cinema as a negotiation between two relationships between the human and the machine—cinematism (an alignment between the human body and the moving trajectory of the machine) and animetism (a positing of the body within a moving machine)—we can rethink the film as an anthropotechnical mediation between these two relationships.]

Huang, Xuelei. “Editor’s Introduction.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022): 217-19.

—–. “Beyond Labourer’s Love: Rethinking Early Chinese Film Comedy.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022): 277-97.

[Abstract: This article examines three lost short comedies produced alongside Labourer’s Love by the Mingxing Film Studio in 1922: The King of Comedy Visits Shanghai (Huaji dawang you hu ji), Havoc in a Bizarre Theatre (Danao guai xichang), and The Naughty Kid (Wantong). I propose to look beyond the extant Labourer’s Love and instead to delve into the broader intertextual, intermedial fabric of early film comedy for a re-evaluation of this neglected genre. Drawing on advertising texts, stills, and film reviews, this study corrects misinformation and supplements new data, based on which I posit two notions for a reconceptualization of early Chinese comedy film. First, I propose the Chinese concept of renao (“hot noise”) as a particular sensorial-somatic mode of experience to account for the Chinese engagement with film comedy in the tumultuous 1920s. Second, I borrow the Chinese poetic device of allusion to interpret their widespread references to Hollywood films in structural, narrative, and visual terms. Through the prism of allusion, the appropriation and re-production of Hollywood elements can be regarded as a means of adding authority to inchoate Chinese filmmaking, while at the same time complicating familiar topoi, symbols, and imageries in culturally sensitive ways.]

Huang, Xuelei, ed. Special Section on the Centenerary of Labourer’s Love. Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022).

Jia, Binwu. “Zheng Zhegu and Performances in Early Chinese Film.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022): 261-76.

[Abstract: The actor Zheng Zhegu is a long-forgotten pioneer in Chinese film. He is perhaps best known for playing the part of Carpenter Zheng in China’s earliest surviving film, Labourer’s Love. Both professionals in the film industry and audiences of the time recognized him as achieving new heights in acting. Starting with Zheng Zhegu’s personal story, this article explores the history of performances in early Chinese film. It emphasizes the transition from “new play-oriented” screen acting to interiors performances, placing this shift in the transformation of Chinese cinema from a “cinema of attractions” to narrative films.]

Xu, Meimei. “Alternative Readings of Labourer’s Love: The Shakespearean, Pan-Laborist, and Technological Uncanny.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022): 221-37.

[Abstract: Contemporary source materials confirm that Labourer’s Love was designed to be experimental and editable. It puts the credibility of the extant film in question, and opens up many hermeneutic possibilities. Intriguing issues such as its titles, thematic narrative, and technological aspects of its production call for alternative readings. Based on Zheng Zhengqiu’s benshi (the original synopsis), this paper discusses about the film’s Shakespearean predilection and pan-laborist ideologies. A further relational sociological analysis, however, shows that with the hidden functioning of technical media like lighting and noise, the film has transcended the superficial laborer/non-laborer narrative and created a craftsman/technology discourse. As a result, the established spatial–temporal relations were annihilated and the film generated an experience of technological uncanny.]

Zhang Yang 张扬

Proctor-Xu, Jami. “Sites of Transformation: The Body and Ruins in Zhang Yang’s Shower.” In Martin and Larissa Heinrich, eds., Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006, 162-76.

Zhou, Zuyan. “Dao and Reconstruction of Cultural Identity in Contemporary Chinese Literary and Mass Media Products.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, 2 (Fall 2016): 223-284.

Zhu, Aijun. “The (Auto)biography of a Madman: Ambivalence and Ambiguity in Zhang Yang’s Quitting.” Asian Cinema 19, 2 (Fall/Winter 2008): 256-69.

Zhang Yimou 张艺谋

Anagnost, Ann. “Chili Pepper Politics.” In National Past-times: Narravtive, Representations and Power in Modern China. Durham: Duke UP, 1997, 138-60. [deals with The Story of Qiuju]

Bao, Ying. “Cinematic Amnesia as Remembering: Coming Home (2014) and Red Amnesia (2014).” Arts 7, 83 (2018).

Berry, Chris. “Zhang Yimou: Film Maker with the Golden Touch.” China Reconstructs (May 1988): 13-17.

—–. “Calm in the Eye of the Storm.” Cinemaya 30 (1995). [reprinted here on the AsianFilms.org website]

Berry, Michael. “Zhang Yimou: Flying Colors.” [Interview]. In Berry, ed., Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia UP, 2005, 108-41.

Boyer, M. Christine. “Approaching the Memory of Shanghai: The Case of Zhang Yimou and Shanghai Triad (1955).” In Mario Gandelsonas, ed., Shanghai Reflections: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Search for an Alternative Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, 56-87.

Brook, Vincent. “To Live and Dye in China: The Personal and Political in Zhang Yimou’s Judou.” Cineaction 60, 1 (2003): 21-29

Callahan, W.A. “Gender, Ideology, Nation: Ju Dou in the Cultural Politics of China.” East-West Film Journal VII.1 (January 1993): 52-80.

Chan, Evans. “Zhang Yimou’s Hero: The Temptation of Fascism.” Film International 8 (March 2004). Rpt. in In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 263-77. [Evans Chan analyzes the career of a director working under restrictions imposed by state censors]

Chen, Luying. “Media, Redemption, and Myth Superscription in Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, 3 (2017): 510-35.

[Abstract: This article analyzes scenes of media and redemption in Zhang Yimou’s 张艺谋 film Qianli zou danqi 千里走单骑 (Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, 2005) as a critique of Romantic Orientalism. Whereas in Western Romantic poetry, the themes of retreating to nature and journeying abroad are strengthened by imagining the Orient and appropriating the local voice, Riding Alone negates that motif by depicting the divided subjectivities of Kenichi, a historian of Oriental Art at Tokyo University, and his failed redemption during his journey to China. The film offers his father Takata’s alternative journey, which involves the foreign traveler losing his subject position before asserting his own, leading to the revival of the Lord Guan story. Much of the historical myth-making of Lord Guan in Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian religious practices involves a reinvention of a cultural tradition as a response to foreign threat; all share the features of what Prasenjit Duara calls “the apotheosization of a hero and his role as guardian” in a process of the “superscription of symbols.” By contrast, Riding Alone is secular and forward-thinking while reenacting several meanings of the Lord Guan myth such as repentance, sacrifice, redemption, and guardianship….]

Chen, Xihe. “On the Father Figures in Zhang Yimou’s Films: From Red Sorghum to Hero.” Asian Cinema 15, 2 (Fall/Winter 2004): 133-40.

Chen, Ya-chen. “There Is a Beauty in the Door(way) of Flying Daggers.” Asian Cinema 16, 2 (Fall.Winter 2005): 277-91.

China News Digest. “Interview with Zhang Yimou.”

Chiu, Tzuhsiu Beryl. “Public Secrets: Geopolitical Aesthetics in Zhang Yimou’s Hero.” E-ASPAC: An Electronic Journal of Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast (2004/05).

Coming Home (归来). Official website.

Chow, Rey. “We Endure, Therefore We Are: Survival, Governance, and Zhang Yimou’s To Live.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95, 4 (Fall 1996): 1039-64.

—–. “Not One Less: The Fable of Migration.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 144-51. Rpt. in Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 167-74.

—–. “Sentimental Returns: On the Uses of the Everyday in the Recent Films of Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar-wai.” In Maria N. Ng and Philip Holden, eds.,Reading Chinese Transnationalisms: Society, Literature, Film. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006. Rpt. in Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. NY: Columbia, UP, 2007.

—–. “The Political Economy of Vision in Happy Times and Not One Less; or A Different Type of Migration.” In Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. NY: Columbia, UP, 2007.

Chute, David. “Golden Hours.” Film Comment 27, 2 (March-April 1991):64-66. [author relates visit to filming of Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern in Shanxi]

Clark, Paul. “Reds: Zhang Yimou’s Films.” In Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2005, 164-86.

Cui, Shuqin. “Gendered Perspective: The Construction and Representation of Subjectivity and Sexuality in Ju Dou.” In Sheldon Lu, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. Rpt. in Cui, Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003, 127-49.

—–. “Raise the Red Lantern: Cinematic Orient and Female Conflict.” In Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 2005.

Dai, Jinhua. “Hero and the Invisible Tianxia.” Tr. Yajun Mo. In Dai Jinhua, After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018, 47-66.

Dai, Qing. “Raised Eyebrows for Raise the Red Lantern.” Public Culture 5 (1993); 333-37.

de la Garza, Armida. “Negotiating National Identity on Film: Copeting Readings of Zhang Yimou’s Hero.” Media Asia 34, 1 (2007): 27-32.

Delamoir, Jeanette. “Woman as Spectacle in Zhang Yimou’s ‘Theatre of Punishments.” Screening the Past 5 (Dec. 1998).

Deppman, Hsiu-Chuang. “Body, Space, and Power: Reading the Cultural Images of Concubines in the Works of Su Tong and Zhang Yimou.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 2 (Fall 2003): 121-53.

Eng, Robert Y. “Is Hero a Paean to Authoritarianism?” Asia Media (posted Sept. 7, 2004).

Erlich, Linda. “Courtyards of Shadow and Light.” Cineyama 37 (1997): 8-16. (section on Raise the Red Lantern)

Farquhar, Mary Ann. “Oedipality in Red Sorghum and Judou.” Cinemas: Le nouveau Cinema Chinois 3, 1/2 (Spring 1993): 61-86.

—-. “Zhang Yimou.” Senses of Cinema–Great directors, a Critical Database. [includes biography, bibliography, filmography, as well as links to Senses of Cinema articles on Zhang and his films]

Gao, Yuan. “Archetypes in Zhang Yimou’s Films: Significance of Regional Culture.” Asian Cinema 19, 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 104-22.

Gateward, Frances, ed. Zhang Yimou: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2001. [collection of previously published interviews with Zhang Yimou]

Gong, Haomin. “Zhang Yimou.” In Yvonne Tasker, ed., Fifty Contemporary Film Directors. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2011, 434-42.

Guo, Yingjie. “National Unification Overrides All: The Heroism of Hero.” Media Asia 34, 1 (2007): 3-13.

Havis, Richard James. “The Selling of Zhang Yimou: Marketing Chinese Images.” Cinemaya 30 (1995).

Hero official website

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Hero, Kurosawa and a Cinema of the Senses.” Screen 54, 2 (Summer 2013): 127-51.

[Abstract: Zhang Yimou’s relationship to the filmmaking of Kurosawa Akira is an intriguing one, and especially with regard to the Chinese director’s controversial film Yingxiong/Hero (2002), a film whose treatment of authoritarianism has fuelled debate and divided its critics since it was first released. Zhang has made no secret of the fact that his own cinematic “hero” is Kurosawa; but despite this admission, the relationship between Hero and Kurosawa’s filmmaking has not been extensively explored. This essay argues that Zhang adopts, adapts and even expropriates Kurosawa’s style to create a sensuously unifying cinematic language which reframes recent ideas about so-called “pan-Asian cinema” despite the militantly imperialist designs with which Hero’s transnationalism has been routinely associated. At the heart of this cinematic language is a commitment to the power of colour that is inspired by films such as Rashamon (1950), Ran (1985) and Yume/Dreams (1990), but which Zhang takes in new filmic and philosophical directions. Abetted by the work of Kurosawa, colour in Hero becomes a powerfully synaesthetic experience, and one that has helped to inspire a chromatic “cinema of the senses” across East Asia.]

Hintzen, Geor. “Zhang Yimou’s ‘The Story of Qiu Ju’: A Propaganda Film for Recent Legislation.” China Information 7, 4 (Spring 1993): 48-54.

Hoberman, J. “Man with No Name Tells a Story of Heroics, Color Coordination.” Village Voice (Aug. 17, 2004).

House of Flying Daggers (Shimian maifu) [official website]

Hsiau, A-chin. “The Moral Dilemma of China’s Modernization: Rethinking Zhang Yimou’s Qiu Ju da guansi.” Modern Chinese Literature 10, 1 (1998): 191-206.

Huang, Yiju. “Weaving a Dark Parody: A Psychoanalytical Reading of Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower.” Film International 6, 2 (2008): 41-51.

[Abstract: The writer presents a psychoanalytical reading of Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s latest feature film Curse of the Golden Flower(2006). He discusses the excessive representation of female bodies, the life-and-death conflict between a mother and a father, and the primordial force of anarchy and the patriarchal civilization. He states that the movie articulates a regressive tone of going back to the maternal realm, maintaining the Oedipus complex as a constant presence.]

Kaldis, Nicholas. “A Brief Response to Wendy Larson’s ‘Zhang Yimou’s Hero: Dismantling the Myth of Cultural Power.'” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 1 (June 2009): 83-88.

Kaufmann, Stanley. “Emerging and Submerging: Red Sorghum, Madame Sousatzka.” New Republic (Oct 17 1988):36-37.

Klawans, Stuart. “Zhang Yimou, Local Hero.” Film Comment 31, 5 (1995).

Kokas, Aynne. “Producing Global China: The Great Wall and Hollywood’s Cultivation of the PRC’s Global Vision.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 3 (Nov. 2019): 215-27.

Kong, Haili. “Symbolism Through Zhang Yimou’s Subversive Lens in His Early Films.” Asian Cinema 8, 2 (Winter 1996-97): 98-115

Kraicer, Shelly. “Allegory and Ambiguity in Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad.” CineAction 42 (Feb 1997): 18-27.

—–. “Music and Femininity in Zhang Yimou’s Familiy Melodrama.” CineAction 42, 1 (April 1997).

—–. “Zhang Yimou in Lumiere et Compagnie (1995): 52 Seconds x 9 Readings: An Exercise in Over-interpretation.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 112-17.

—-. “Absence as Spectacle: Zhang Yimou’s Hero.” Cinema Scope 5, 1 (2003).

Lan, Feng. “Zhang Yimou’s Hero: Reclaiming the Martial Arts Film for ‘All under Heaven.'” Modern Chinese Literature and Cutlure 20, 1 (Spring 2008): 1-43.

Larson, Wendy. “Zhang Yimou: Inter/National Aesthetics and Erotics.” In Soren Clausen, Roy Starrs, and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds., Cultural Encounters: China, Japan, and the West: Essays Commemorating 25 Years of East Asian studies at the University of Aarhus. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1995, 215-26; also published in Chinese translation as “Dangdai Zhongguo shige zhong de meigan he seqing: Zhang Yimou yingpian zhong de guojixing he minzuxing.” Qingxiang (Trends) (1997).

—–. “Zhang Yimou’s To Live and the Field of Film.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 178-97.

—–. “Zhang Yimou’s Hero: Dismantling the Myth of Cultural Power.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 3 (Nov. 2008): 181-196.

[Abstract: Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film Hero has been acclaimed by audiences and attacked by film and cultural critics, who often interpret it as an example of fascist aesthetics that supports totalitarianism in general and the Chinese authoritarian state in particular. I analyse Hero as an investigation into the viability of culturalism, or a meditation on aesthetics and its relationship to political power under the conditions of the nation state and the ‘community of nations’ to which modern countries belong. Culturalism refers to the implicit nation state mandate that each nation must have a set of distinct cultural practices, ideas and forms that inspire love and delight in the homeland, are readily represented and performed, and are powerful enough to lure and capture the gaze of the outsider while simultaneously appearing authentic in the eyes of the insider. Hero shows the false underpinnings of culturalism, in the process dismantling a powerful twentieth-century myth.]

—–. “Chinese Culture on the Global Stage: Zhang Yimou and Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.” ASIANetwork Exchange 20, 1 (2012): 3-11.

—–. Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2017. [MCLC Resource Center review by Chris Berry]

[Abstract: Zhang Yimou is one of the most famous filmmakers of China, as well as one of the most controversial. Long the object of intense discussion and critique in China, Zhang’s approach can express a highly stylized and crafted aesthetics, a documentary, daily-life feel, or a historically rich sense of tragedy and sometimes comedy. The director of some twenty feature films, Zhang also is known for other projects, including work as a cinematographer and actor, and directing the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As a prominent member of the pioneering Fifth Generation of film directors that began working after the Maoist period, Zhang’s unique aesthetics garnered global attention.]

Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah. “Judou: An Experiment in Color and Portraiture in Chinese Cinema.” In Linda Erlich and David Desser, eds., Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994, 127-45.

—–. “Hero: China’s Response to Hollywood Globalization.” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007).

Lee, Joann. “Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern: Contextual Analysis of Film Through a Confucian/ Feminist Matrix.” Asian Cinema 8, 1 (Spring 1996): 120-27.

Li, Erwei. “Zhang Yimou: Magician of the Chinese Cinema.” Cinemaya 30 (1995). [reprinted here on the AsianFilms.org website]

—–. “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Zhang Yimou Speaks About His New Film.” Cinemaya 34 (1996): 27-29.

Li, H.C. “Color, Character, and Culture: On Yellow Earth, Black Canon Incident, and Red Sorghum.” Modern Chinese Literature 5, 1 (Spring 1989): 91-119.

Lorrain, Fiona Sze. “Qiu Ju Goes to Court: Relating Cinematic Art to Juridical Reality.” Asian Cinema 17, 2 (Fall/Winter 2006): 173-81.

Lo, Kwai-Cheung. “When China Encounters Asia Again: Rethinking Ethnic Excess in Some Recent Films from the PRC.” The China Review 10, 2 (2010).

[Abstract: The essay deals with ethnic excess through the dynamism of self-other relationships in China’s films about ethnic minorities. As the notion of social harmony becomes the defining discourse of Chinese policy in the 21st century, its repercussions can be found in the cinematic treatments of the ethnic other. A different handling of the ethnic or foreign other in some recent productions could be related to China’s consciousness of its new social relations. Those films reveal a strategy of othering in which recognition and alienation of oneself in the other is always in play. The focus, however, is on Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, which depicts a Japanese visitor being offered the greatest hospitality from his Chinese hosts during his trip to Yunnan. On the surface, the film resonates with China’s harmonizing foreign policy, but it implicitly gives voice to the alterity within nationhood by functioning as the internal re-marking of the disturbing excess in China’s capitalization project.]

Louie, Kam. “Hero: The Return of a Traditional Masculine Ideal in China.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave, 2008, 137-43.

Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. “National Cinema, Cultural Critique, Transnational Capital: The Films of Zhang Yimou.” In Sheldon Lu, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

—–. “Understanding Chinese Film Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century: The Case of Not One Less by Zhang Yimou.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 4, 2 (2001): 123-42.

—–. “Zhang Yimou.” In Yvonne Tasker, ed., Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers. London, New York: Routledge, 2002, 412-17.

—–. “Chinese Film Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century: The Case of Not One Less by Zhang Yimou.” In Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds.,Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 120-40.

Lu, Tonglin. “The Zhang Yimou Model.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 3, 1 (July 1999): 1-22. Rpt. in Lu, Confroniting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 157-72. [focus on Raise the Red Lantern]

Luo, Xueying. “The Ambitions of Zhang Yimou.” Chinese Literature 4 (1990): 168-176.

Ma Junxiang. “Cong Hong gaoliang dao Judou” (From Red Sorghum to Judou). Ershiyi shiji 7 (Oct. 1991): 123-32.

McGrath, Jason. “Heroic Human Pixels: Mass Ornaments and Digital Multitudes in Zhang Yimou’s Spectacles.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, 2 (Fall 2013): 51-79. Rpt. in Kenneth Chan and Andrew Stuckey, eds., Sino-Enchantment: The Fantastic in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2021, 27-48.

Meng, Jing. “Sentimentalism in Under the Hawthorne Tree.” IAFOR Journal of Asian Studies 2, 1 (2016).

Metzger, Sean. “Farewell My Fantasy.” Journal of Homosexuality 39, 3-4 (2000): 213-232. Also in Andrew Grossman, ed., Queer Asian Cinema, ed. NY: Haworth Press, 2000.

—–. “Ice Queens, Rice Queens, and Intercultural Investments in Zhang Yimou’s Turandot.” Asian Theatre Journal 20, 2 (Fall 2003): 109-17.

Mu, Aili. “Imaginary Constructs as Instruments of Critical Engagement: Titanic Reference in Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home.” Asian Cinema 14, 2 (Fall/Winter 2003): 35-54.

Ng, Daisy Sheung-Yuen. “When the Woman Looks: Female Desire in Three Chinese Films Directed by Zhang Yimou.” Papers on Chinese Literature 2 (Aut. 1994): 63-86.

North, Dan. “The Spectacle of Co-Production in The Great Wall.” In Kenneth Chan and Andrew Stuckey, eds., Sino-Enchantment: The Fantastic in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2021, 49-70.

Not One Less (official Sony website)

O’Meara, Radha. “Inventing Rituals: Cultural Politics in Zhang Yimou’s Historical Films.” Senses of Cinema 88 (Oct. 2018).

Parfect, Ralph. “Zhang Yimou’s Sexual Storytelling and the iGeneration: Contending Shanzhushu Zhi Lian (Under the Hawthorn Tree) on Douban.” In Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds. China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 301-20.

Qian, Kun. “Love or Hate: The First Emperor on Screen–Three Movies on the Attempted Assasination of the First Emperor Qin Shihuang.” Asian Cinema 20, 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 39-67.

Qin, Liyan. “Transmedia Strategies of Appropriation and Visualization: the Case of Zhang Yimou’s Adaptation of Novels in His Early Films.” In Stanley Rosen and Ying Zhu, eds., Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cineam. Hong Kong: H