Film

posts related to Chinese-language film

Nothing News screening

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Join us Tuesday, February 20th at 4:30 pm in Cobb 307 at the University of Chicago for a screening of Nothing News (庚子新年) (2023, 63 min.), followed by a discussion with Director GU Xue (顧雪) who will be in attendance.

Part of the Adaptation and Genre in Chinese Film: Reinventing the Cinematic film series, Nothing News is a portrait of the filmmaker’s family during the 2020 Chinese New Year, when they had to quarantine at home and spent time reading the news on their cellular phones. While Gu Xue’s family was reading about the pandemic, she turned on her camera, and a discussion about news and truth began. A surprising twist occurs at the end, when the director raises the question of which news one should trust.

This screening is co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies (with generous support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education), the Franke Institute for the Humanities, Film Studies Center, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Department of Cinema and Media Studies.

Click HERE to REGISTER for this FREE IN-PERSON event!

Posted by: Paola Iovene <iovene@uchicago.edu>

Hollywood and the Asian American Imagination symposium

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Symposium (hybrid): Hollywood and the Asian American Imagination
February 20 & 22 (Tuesday, Thursday): 12:00-4:15PM

Keynote lecture #1: “A Thousand Deaths”: Anna May Wong’s Death Acts
Yiman Wang, Professor of Film and Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz

Keynote lecture #2: “Cinematic Representations of East Asian Women”
Alexa Alice Joubin, Professor of English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures, George Washington University

All keynote lectures and panels are in a hybrid format at the Humanities Commons, University of Richmond (in person) and on Zoom (virtual).

Symposium schedule: https://as.richmond.edu/tucker-boatwright/2023-2024/hollywood-asian-american-symposium.html

Register here for zoom link: https://urichmond.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_eLPPCsagRi2bVJ0_fc5bIg#/registration

Posted by: Jessica Chan <jchan@richmond.edu>

Happy Together script

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of “Happy Together 春光乍洩 Script: Cantonese Transcription with English Translation,” by Sabrina Yu, Nicholas Kaldis, Kin Wing Kevin Chan, and Cecilia Liao. A teaser appears below. Click here for the full transcription/translation. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis for sharing this work with the MCLC community. Thomas Moran offered important editorial suggestions.

Enjoy,

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Happy Together 春光乍洩 Script:
Cantonese Transcription with English Translation

Directed by Wong Kar-wai 王家衛

Translated by: Sabrina Yu, Nicholas Kaldis, Kin Wing Kevin Chan, and Cecilia Liao
With assistance from: Ashley Yingxue Liu, Ana Ros Matturo, Gerardo Pignatiello[1]

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright February 2024)

Lai Yiu-fai Passport.

Ho Po-wing stares at Iguazú Falls lamp.

 Ho Po Wing: Lai Yiu Fai, let’s start over.
何寶榮: 黎耀輝, 不如我哋由頭再嚟過。

Lai and Ho making love.

Lai Yiu Fai: “Let’s start over,” this phrase is Ho Po Wing’s mantra. I admit that these lines are very lethal. We’ve been together a long time, with the occasional break up, but I don’t know why, whenever that phrase is uttered it’s always brought us back together. Because we wanted to start over, we left Hong Kong. Two people with no destination ended up in Argentina.
黎耀輝: “不如由頭嚟過，” 呢句說話係何寶榮嘅口頭禪。我𠄘認呢句說話對我來講好有殺傷力。我哋喺埋一齊已經好耐。中間亦都有分開過，但係唔知點解次次講呢句說話我都同佢喺返埋一齊。因為想由頭嚟過，離開香港。兩個人行下行下咁就嚟到阿根廷。

Lai Yiu Fai: Where is Iguazú?
黎耀輝：Dónde es Iguazú?

Lai Yiu Fai: You said you knew how to read maps, we went in the wrong direction!
黎耀輝: 你又話識睇地圖，行錯路呀！[READ THE FULL TEXT HERE]

Hong Kong Crime Films

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I am pleased to announce the publication of my book Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986 (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

DESCRIPTION

Hong Kong Crime Films is the first book detailing the post-war history of the genre before the release of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), the film that put Hong Kong action-crime on the global map. Focusing on what it calls the mode of ‘criminal realism’ in the crime film, the book shows how depictions of Hong Kong’s social reality (including crime) were for decades anxiously policed by colonial censors, and how crime films tended (and still tend) to confound and transgress critical definitions of realism.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Hong Kong Crime Films covers several neglected topics in the study of Hong Kong cinema, such as the evolving generic landscape of the crime film prior to the 1980s, the influence of colonial film censorship on the genre, and the prominence and contestation of “realism” in the local history of the crime film.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Criminal Realism

Part I: The Generic Landscape of the Post-War Hong Kong Crime Film, 1947-1969

  1. Gangsters and Unofficial Justice Fighters: Realist Lunlipian versus Action-Adventure Films
  2. Detectives and Suspense Thrillers: Remaking Hitchcock in Hong Kong

Intermezzo: Censorship of Cinematic Crime and Violence in Colonial Hong Kong

Part II: The Modern Hong Kong Crime Film, Criminal Realism and Hong Kong Identity, 1969-1986

  1. A New Form of Criminal Realism
  2. Crime Films and Hong Kong Identity
  3. The New Wave, Critical Discourse and Deepening Localisation

Afterword: The Uncertain Present and Future of Criminal Realism in Hong Kong

The book can be ordered at https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-hong-kong-crime-films.html. Use the promo code NEW30 for a 30% discount.

Posted by: Kristof Van den Troost k.vandentroost@cuhk.edu.hk

Revisiting Chinese New Comedy Film

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Screening Series February 6th and 9th
LAUGHING, WE MOVE FORWARD: REVISITING CHINESE NEW COMEDY FILM
笑着前进：重温中国‘新喜剧’电影
RSVP HERE
CURATED BY PhD STUDENT LILIAN KONG

During the late 1970s, China transitioned to a market-driven reform era. Both large-scale government policies and the rhythms of everyday life experienced drastic transformation. In this mini-series featuring three comedy films, we delve into the world of New Comedy, which flourished during this pivotal period. Modeling progressive youth during the early reform era, New Comedies experimented with novel media objects, forms, and environments, while also repurposing tropes from socialist era films.

Join us as we laugh our way towards new understandings of how comedies portrayed Chinese youth’s hopes, struggles, and worldviews during a transitional era, as well as how comedy films sought to make sense of other emerging media technologies. This is a rare opportunity to view the following three films in such high quality, on the big screen!

The Young Generation and Twins Come in Pairs depicts 20-something youths in Shanghai, weaving their interpersonal relationships together with urban infrastructure and a groundbreaking emerging technology: television.

Our screening of The Young Generation will be preceded by socialist era classic Today is My Day Off, in order to spark discussion on the influence of socialist era filmmaking on early reform era films.

Today is My Day Off (今天我休息Lu Ren, 1959); The Young Generation (小字辈Wang Jiayi and Luo Qin, 1979); Twins come in Pairs (她俩和他俩 Sang Hu, 1979)

Tuesday, February 6 | 3:45-7 PM | Venue: Cobb Lecture Hall, Room 307 (5811 S Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637)

Double Bill: Today is My Day Off (今天我休息 Lu Ren, 1959); The Young Generation (小字辈 Wang Jiayi and Luo Qin, 1979)

Friday, February 9th | 7-9 PM | Venue: Logan Center for the Arts, Room 201 (915 E 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637)

Screening: Twins Come in Pairs (她俩和他俩 Sang Hu, 1979)

This mini-series is co-sponsored by the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Franke Institute for the Humanities, Film Studies Center, Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, with generous support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education, and Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

The Moving Image in Contemporary Chinese Art–cfp

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Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art
When the Shadow Flickers: The Moving Image in Contemporary Chinese Art
A special issue co-edited by Yang Panpan and Jiang Jiehong

Call for Papers

At a time when the moving image has become a ubiquitous presence in museums and galleries in China and the Sinophone world, the studies of the moving image in the sphere of contemporary Chinese art remain surprisingly scarce. The shadow that flickers on the walls of museums and galleries or on other surfaces has transformed what we understand as the art of curating today. In addition, documentary footage shot by Wu Wenguang, Wen Pulin, Chi Xiaoning and others retells the story of contemporary Chinese art.

This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art makes a radical gesture towards studying the moving image as an art object, as a curatorial method and as a new form of art historical writing. The collaborative, interdisciplinary endeavour participates in – and hopefully contributes to – what Georges Didi-Huberman, speaking of Aby Warburg’s thought, terms ‘an art history turned towards cinema’: ‘to understand the temporality of images, their movements, their “survivals”, their capacity for animation’.

Possible perspectives for proposals include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Case studies of contemporary artists across Greater China and the Chinese diaspora working with the moving image
  • Curating the moving image and the moving image as a curatorial method
  • Documentary in relation to contemporary Chinese art
  • Discourses across Greater China on yingxiang yishu, and its partial semantic overlaps with video art, new media art, and artists’ film
  • Animation as contemporary art
  • Issues of acquisition, preservation and access surrounding the moving image
  • The market of the moving image

Publication Timeline

1 March 2024, abstract due (300 words)

1 November 2024, full manuscript due (7,000-8,000 words)

Publication: Spring 2025

Please send an abstract, along with a brief bio, in the same file, to Guest Editor Yang Panpan (py6@soas.ac.uk), Principal Editor Jiang Jiehong (joshua.jiang@bcu.ac.uk), and Assistant Editor Lauren Walden (ccva@bcu.ac.uk)

Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is an associate journal of the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts at Birmingham City University.

Why China has lost interest in Hollywood

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Source: NYT (1/23/24)
Why China Has Lost Interest in Hollywood Movies
No American films ranked among the 10 highest grossing in China last year as viewers who once flocked to foreign blockbusters continued to disappear.
By Claire Fu, Brooks Barnes and Daisuke Wakabayashi, Claire Fu and Daisuke Wakabayashi reported from Seoul, and Brooks Barnes from Los Angeles

Before the sequel to “Aquaman” was released in China last month, Warner Bros. did everything it could to sustain the original movie’s success.

The Hollywood studio blanketed Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, with movie clips, behind-the-scenes footage and a video of an Aquaman ice sculpture at a winter festival in Harbin, a city in China’s northeast. It sent the franchise’s star, Jason Momoa, and director, James Wan, on a publicity tour in China — the type of barnstorming that had disappeared since the Covid pandemic. Mr. Momoa said China’s fondness for the first “Aquaman” was why the sequel was debuting in China two days before the U.S. release.

“I’m very proud that China loved it, so that’s why we brought it to you, and you guys are going to see it before the whole world,” he said in an interview with CCTV 6, China’s state-run film channel.

The big push didn’t work.

“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” has collected only about $60 million in China after a few weeks of release. That was nowhere near the 2018 original’s $90 million opening weekend in China on its way to a $293 million haul, accounting for a quarter of that movie’s $1.2 billion box office success. Continue reading →

Failed Animation, Limited Theory

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Failed Animation, Limited Theory: Feminist Reflections in a Transnational Context, lecture by Professor Karen Redrobe, 9:30-11am, Feb 7, 2024 (Wed, HK Time), Room 3301 & Zoom

Title: Failed Animation, Limited Theory: Feminist Reflections in a Transnational Context
Speaker: Professor Karen Redrobe, Pennsylvania University, USA
Moderator: Professor Daisy Yan Du, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, HK
Format: 40-50 minutes’ lecture, followed by around 30 minutes’ Q & A
Time: 9:30-11am, Feb 7, 2024 (Wed, Hong Kong Time)
Location: Room 3301 (Lifts no. 2, 17, 18), Academic Building, HKUST
Zoom ID: 956 6919 0626
Password: ACASSHSS

Abstract: 

Film histories, theories, and textbooks have often focused on “peak” live-action moments, triumphant or movement-defining aesthetics, box office hits, award-winning auteurs, and dominant, enduring theories. As such narratives have largely prioritized white, male, heteronormative artists and thinkers, feminist historians and theorists have, not surprisingly, frequently demonstrated a more active interest in what might be designated unsuccessful, failed, marginalized, collaborative, modest, and even laughable filmmaking and theoretical efforts. This feminist preoccupation with the incomplete, the unresolved, and the non-triumphant, recently explored in Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon’s coedited collection, The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (2023), suggests what the British psychoanalytic feminist scholar Jacqueline Rose describes as an “ethics of failure” (“Why War?”). For Rose, being willing to fail and resisting the “conviction of absolute truth” is intimately linked to the avoidance of war and warlike violence. In this talk, I will reflect informally, at the intersection of animation and film theory and within the context of 21st century efforts to develop transnational scholarly methods that do not reproduce colonial forms of knowledge, on the possibilities for thought generated in spaces of incompletion, failure, and provisionality. Continue reading →

Chine: les influenceurs de la colonisation

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Excellent new film on the ongoing Chinese colonization of genocided areas:

https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/113682-006-A/sources/
Chine: les influenceurs de la colonisation [English subtitles]
Arte / Sources, France 2023.
Disponible: 15 dec. 2023 to 29 Nov. 2026

Also available on Youtube:

This new 15 minute ARTE film is about Chinese colonizer-influencers in Xinjiang, hired by the State to promote colonization of ethnic- cleansed areas under the military-industrial Bingtuan complex (XPCC), the main tool of state settler colonialism in Xinjiang kicking in higher gears during this phase of the genocide.

It’s a lot like what Nazi Europe would have been like, had the Nazis won WWII. Or indeed, Israelis in a future fully cleansed Gaza, with an ocean view,” as one extremist settler leader recently memorably promoted it.

(I was just interviewed by the RFA to comment on the ARTE film. The interview may first come out in Uyghur, but I can send the link later. The main point: this is all part of a logical sequence of genocide – camps, mass destruction of separated families, forced labor or prison for split up parents and children’s Gulag for the kids. Down to how the belongings of the evicted and detained Uyghur owners of the land, now in the camps, or dead, shows up on Chinese ebay: https://bitterwinter.org/uyghur-family-fortunes-mysteriously-reappear-for-auction/)

Sincerely,

Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

Interviews with filmmakers

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List members might be interested in two interviews I published recently in Cineaste, one with the director Qiu Jiongjiong and the other with the directing team of Huang Ji and Ryûji Otsuka. Here are the details:

“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)

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

Jiwei Xiao <jiweixiao@gmail.com>

Qiu Jiongjiong seminar–cfp

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CALL for PAPERS
Memories, Storytelling, and Intermediality in the Film World of Qiu Jiongjiong
Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies
Department of Comparative Literature
University of Hong Kong
March 15, 2024

The Dept. of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong invites speakers to present research at a seminar focused on the films of internationally acclaimed Chinese independent filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong. A major contributor to the growth of Chinese independent cinema from the mid-2000s to 2012, Qiu is known for his documentary portraits of marginalized Chinese subjects relegated from mainstream society. Eschewing the observational mode of his contemporaries and their realistic static shots of everyday life, Qiu calls upon his intermedial background as a playwright, stage actor, and visual artist to vivify performative portraits of charismatic characters living through periods of monumental change, from the cultural revolution to the reform and opening up, as well as neoliberalization endemic to the post-socialist era.

Recalling personal minor histories, such as his family’s embedded influence on Sichuan Opera, Qiu uses experimental techniques to create unique assemblages of sound, image, and narrative that generate intertextual, intergenerational, and affective resonances. Qiu’s alienating yet intimate documentaries “evoke and record social and political material that mainstream Chinese culture is uncomfortable with” (Kraicer 2022). He gained critical acclaim at Chinese film festivals with his “chatterbox trilogy,” which focuses on dynamic subjects such as a retired Sichuanese police officer in A Portrait of Mr. Huang (2009), whose jovial demeanor offsets his horrifying tales of murder and cannibalism. Chinese audiences and critics embraced Qiu’s most unforgettable subject, Fan Qihui/Bilang de Linphél of Madame (2010). A tailor of couture knockoffs by day and drag stage performer by night, Fan/Bilang’s comedic insights and melancholic obsessions with the aesthetic valuations of contemporary Chinese beauty and bodily commodification found added resonance when news broke of their unexpected suicide before the film’s premiere. Continue reading →

Transgressive Women in East Asian Screen Cultures–cfp

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CFP Symposium: Transgressive Women in East Asian Screen Cultures
23 – 24 May 2024
Cardiff University School of Modern Languages
More information here

Call for Papers

Female transgression – the act of pushing or breaking the boundaries of social, moral and/or legal codes – has long fascinated producers and consumers of culture. Nowhere is this more the case than in East Asian societies – think of the many literary works, films and plays inspired by the notorious story of Japan’s Abe Sada, who killed and mutilated her lover; or the numerous Chinese films and television dramas about the myths of Wu Zetian, who allegedly assassinated her own son to become the first and only female emperor in Chinese history. Some of the most popular original Netflix Korean series this year, The Glory, Kill Boksoon, Mask Girl, have a common theme of vengeful women who struggle with their motherhood/family relationships. Such creative production often acts as a window into the anxieties and pain of a society undergoing political upheaval, particularly with regards to changing gender dynamics and the advancement of women’s rights. Historically, stories of transgression in a male-dominated cultural field have not only revealed underlying social tensions, they have also served as sites for (re)articulating norms with regards to gender and sexuality. As Christine Marran (2007, xvii) observes, “[t]hose marginalised within society are symbolically central to how a society describes itself”. Continue reading →

Uyghur filmmaker who studied in Turkey prosecuted in China

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Source: Ethnic ChinaLit (Bruce-Humes.com) (11/9/23)
Uyghur Film-maker Who Studied in Turkey Prosecuted in China

In “Uyghur film-maker claims he was tortured by authorities in China,” the Guardian reports that Ikram Nurmehmet, a director known for his Uyghur protagonists in films such as The Elephant in the Car, recently had his day in court in Ürümqi:

“I was held in a dark room for 20 days and physically tortured,” Nurmehmet reportedly said during the trial, adding that he had been made to give false confessions under duress while in detention. “I never joined any terrorist group or any political activities while I was in Turkey,” he said.

It is not clear who revealed what Nurmehmet testified, but the report notes that members of his family were present at the trial. That such a trial was open to anyone outside of the prosecution is rare, as China normally treats terrorism-related trials as state secrets. He has reportedly been charged with terrorism and participating in a separatist movement.

According to Peter Irwin, an associate director for research and advocacy at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, who also spoke to the Guardian, the Turkey connection is key:

“There are a lot of people being sentenced who went to Turkey. In some ways, what this film-maker was doing through his work – the humanisation of Uyghurs and [facilitating] communication between Uyghurs and Chinese people – I think the government is suspicious and worries about this kind of stuff.” Continue reading →

Jewher Ilham on ‘All Static and Noise’

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Source: China Digital Times (11/7/23)
Interview: Jewher Ilham on the Documentary “All Static and Noise”
By 

On November 5, 2023, the Double Exposure Film Festival in Washington, D.C. screened the U.S. premiere of the documentary “All Static and Noise,” which investigates the arbitrary mass detention of Uyghurs and other Muslim-majority ethnic groups in Xinjiang, China.

The film is titled after the Party Secretary of Xinjiang University’s 2017 call to eliminate any “static and noise,” i.e. dissent, about the “People’s War on Terror,” the Chinese government’s euphemism for its campaign against the Uyghur people. In 2020, CDT published a leaked censorship directive issued by central Party authorities to state media instructing that the still-unfinished documentary be blocked within China: “Please take note and block the following illegal videos: the Tibet-related documentary ‘A Fugitive for 60 Years: the Dalai Lama’s Old Age,’ the Xinjiang documentary ‘Static and Noise,’ and the Hong Kong documentary ‘City of Tears.’”

The official trailer for “All Static and Noise” can be viewed here:

After the showing, CDT conducted a brief interview with Jewher Ilham, rights activist and daughter of jailed Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti; David Novack, the film’s director; and Janice Englehart, a producer/writer. Their responses situate Jewher Ilham’s advocacy in the longer tradition of those initially drawn into broader activism by the plight of a loved one. The transcript of our conversation has been lightly edited for grammar only: Continue reading →