Film

posts related to Chinese-language film

Look Back in Anger

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Thomas Chen’s “Look Back in Anger: The Long Season (2023),” an essay on the TV series The Long Season. The essay appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/the-long-season/. My thanks to Prof. Chen for sharing his work with the MCLC community.

Kirk A. Denton, MCLC

Look Back in Anger:
The Long Season (2023)

By Thomas Chen

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July 2024)

Figure 1: Marketing poster for The Long Season.

First released in China in April 2023 and now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, The Long Season (漫长的季节) is the most popular and critically praised Chinese miniseries in recent memory. On Douban, China’s near-equivalent of IMDb, it has over 900,000 ratings, with an average score of 9.4 out of 10. What accounts for this stupendous acclaim?

The Long Season has an arresting storyline: complex, tightly written, and unpredictable. It is a double-plotted crime drama set in the fictional steel town of Hualin in northeastern China, deftly interweaving a mysterious hit-and-run incident in 2016—the present in which the series opens—with a case of murder by dismemberment in 1998.

Generically a whodunit, The Long Season is also a riot. The Northeast constitutes the wellspring of comedy in the Chinese cultural imagination. Some of the country’s most famous comedians hail from the region, and their skits and sketches on China Central Television’s annual New Year’s Gala have entertained generations of viewers. Directed by Xin Shuang 辛爽, a Northeasterner, the dialogue crackles with repartees, delivered impeccably in the distinctive local idiom by well-known actors Fan Wei 范伟 and Qin Hao 秦昊, both of whom themselves are from the Northeast. They play, respectively, Wang Xiang 王响, a former locomotive engineer for Hualin Steel who is now a taxi driver, and Gong Biao 龚彪, a fellow taxi driver who used to be an entry-level manager in the same factory. The third male lead is Ma Desheng 马德胜, a police captain turned amateur Latin ballroom dancer. All three give bravura performances in dual roles spanning almost two decades that anchor the temporal shifts in the narrative. Continue reading Look Back in Anger →

The Mighty Hero Gan Fengchi

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The Chinese Film Classics Project is delighted to announce the publication of Frank S. Zhou’s translation of the film The Mighty Hero Gan Fengchi 大俠甘鳳池 (Dumas Young 楊小仲, dir., 1928):

https://youtu.be/M5IiaW6dbtQ?si=m_wxqC4ViXR3bpoe

My thanks to Frank for sharing his translation with the Chinese Film Classics Project, and to Liu Yuqing for creating the subtitles.

  • Christopher Rea

ABOUT THE FILM

The Mighty Hero Gan Fengchi 大俠甘鳳池 (1928) is a partially-extant silent film released in China by the Great Wall Film Company during a peak in popularity of the wuxia (martial-chivalry) genre. The surviving 23 minutes of the film are filled with fight scenes, eye-catching sets, and special effects—notably multiple disappearances into thin air and an airborne clash between three “lightsabers” that shoot out of the warriors’ palms. As we pick up the story, Gan Fengchi and his two child disciples are battling against officialdom, represented by the fighters Cloud Ace and Cloud Eternity. What accounts for the children’s defiance of authority? Have they been poisoned and forgotten themselves? Or have the officials they fight betrayed the people? As the two sides spar over the Circuit Intendant’s seal of office and the children right other wrongs, a challenge arrives to settle a decade-old grudge on Crouching Tiger Mountain…

The historical Gan Fengchi is said to have been from Nanjing and lived during the reigns of the Qing emperors Kangxi and Yongzheng. Gan became a figure of literature and folklore, including a Qing-era biography by Wang Youliang 王友亮 (A Brief Biography of Gan Fengchi 甘鳳池小傳), a two-part Republican-era novel entitled The Blood-Soaked Mighty Hero Gan Fengchi 血滴子大俠甘鳳池, and a later novel by Liang Yusheng 梁羽生. A Cantonese-language sound film of the same title directed by Lin Cang 林蒼, featuring a Ming restoration plot, was released in Hong Kong in 1939. Continue reading The Mighty Hero Gan Fengchi →

Transborder Flows and Chinese Cinemas–cfp

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CFP – Journal of Chinese Film Studies
A special issue on
Transborder Flows and Chinese Cinemas
Edited by Chris Berry and Haina Jin

Chinese cinemas have always been characterised by transborder flows, both of foreign films flowing in and Sinophone films flowing out. What foreign films have been popular in Chinese-language territories, with what audiences, when, and why? What Chinese-language films have found audiences overseas, in what places, when, and why? And what forces and practices have shaped those transborder flows and what are the impacts and results of those flows? This special issue of Journal of Chinese Film Studies seeks to spotlight these under-explored topics. We seek proposals for 6,000-8,000 word scholarly articles on aspects of transborder flows and Chinese cinemas.

The persistent dominance of the outdated understanding of both national cinema as films produced in a certain territory and cinema as simply film texts has left transborder flows long neglected. Work such as Andrew Higson’s redefinition of national cinema as films viewed within a certain territory back in 1989 is now combining with research on distribution and exhibition by scholars such as Li Daoxin, Li Jie, Liu Guangyu, and Zhou Chenshu, along with work on transborder flows by scholars such as Huang Xuelei, Su Tao and Fu Yongchun to break the logjam and stimulate greater interest in the character and role of transborder flows in Chinese cinemas. Continue reading Transborder Flows and Chinese Cinemas–cfp →

On Tsui Hark’s ‘The Taking of Tiger Mountain’

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Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (5/5/2024)
What Happens to the Index in Animation? The Case of The Taking of Tiger Mountain
By Cassandra Xin Guan

In the opening sequence of The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhiqu Weihushan 智取威虎山  2014), an overseas Chinese student, “Jimmy,” walks into a karaoke parlor in Manhattan’s Chinatown trailing a suitcase. He mingles with a noisy group of young Asians, until the incongruous sound of Peking opera and the vision of a fur-clad actor gesturing before a painted snowy landscape interrupts the karaoke program. It is reconnaissance officer Comrade Yang Zirong astride an invisible horse in the 1970 film adaptation of the revolutionary model opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. [1]The room erupts into hilarity at the embarrassment of the singer, taken aback by this prank. Jimmy alone is entranced by the apparition on the flatscreen TV. Someone asks, “It’s your hometown, isn’t it?” Next, we see the young man sitting in a yellow cab en route to the airport. While the driver curses Yuletide traffic, Jimmy begins to watch a YouTube video of the model opera on his phone. The operatic soundtrack swells while the camera zooms intently into his face. Snow is falling in America and in the deciduous forests of Northeast China. Over aerial vistas of the hyperborean landscape, the title of the film appears followed by the name of the director and source material: The Taking of Tiger Mountain, a film by Tsui Hark 徐克, adapted from the 1955 novel Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xueyuan 林海雪原) by Qu Bo 曲波. Continue reading On Tsui Hark’s ‘The Taking of Tiger Mountain’ →

Subtitled version of ‘The White-Haired Girl’

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The Chinese Film Classics Project is delighted to announce the publication of a subtitled version of the film The White-Haired Girl 白毛女 (Wang Bin 王濱 and Shui Hua 水華, dirs., 1950), translated by Pete Nestor and Thomas Moran:

https://chinesefilmclassics.org/the-white-haired-girl-1950/

My thanks to Pete Nestor and Thomas Moran and the MCLC Resource Center for granting the Chinese Film Classsics Project permission to use their translation, and to Tamar Hanstke for doing the subtitling.

ABOUT THE FILM:

The White-Haired Girl 白毛女 (1950) is a seminal work of New China cinema. A musical film adapted from a stage production, which in turn was claimed to have been adapted from a popular folk legend, The White-Haired Girl is an ideologically-freighted story of liberation and rejuvenation. A fresh young country girl is subjected to inhuman suffering by a despicable landlord, before being rescued when the communist Eighth-Route Army liberates her village and sees justice done. Xi’er’s new lease on life became symbolic of the rebirth of China, whose history the film divided into two distinct periods with the slogan: “The old society forced humans to become ghosts / The new society turns ghosts into humans.” Continue reading Subtitled version of ‘The White-Haired Girl’ →

‘Nikah’ review

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Source: Art of Life in Central Asia (5/29/24)
‘Nikah’: An astonishing portrait of Uyghur life on the edge of erasure
By Darren Byler

A still from “Nikah,” a fictional film by Mukaddas Mijit and Bastien Ehouzan, showing Dilber and Rena preparing for Rena’s wedding.

Mukaddas Mijit and Bastien Ehouzan’s Nikah is extraordinary. It is a quiet film, a portrait of a young Uyghur woman and her family living in a Uyghur world in the late 2010s. It is astonishing in its restraint, in the way it remains true to a ground-level view of what it looked and felt like to be on the verge of internment. Nikah is a portrait of the impossible becoming reality.

The story on the surface is a simple one. Two daughters in their twenties, Dilber and Rena, are caught between their own ambitions — careers, travel, love — and community pressures to follow gendered norms dictating what young women should do, whom they should get married to, and the life path of a wife and mother. After the younger sister, Rena, is married to a young man in the community, the pressure builds on the older sister, Dilber, to marry as well — or be lost to old age or, more ominously, as whispers imply, be married off to a Han man.

In 2017, the Chinese state criminalized much of what is portrayed in the film as signs of religious extremism. Drawing on one of the world’s broadest counterterrorism laws and a mandate from Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, police and civil servants began to use face-recognition video surveillance, informants, and torture to “round up those that needed to be rounded up.” Dilber and Rena — plus other characters portrayed in the film — are exactly whom that mandate was for. As viewers, we are placed on the precipice of the largest mass internment of a religious minority since World War II.

But it doesn’t feel that way until the film’s final sequence, when we witness the quiet shattering of the families we have met. This narrative technique, holding in reserve the immense tragedy that is about to emerge, is what makes this film so astonishing. It allows viewers to understand the stakes of that shattering, the absurdity of traditions misread and flattened by digitized anti-Muslim racism. And it also lets the viewer appreciate the extreme beauty of Uyghur communal life. Continue reading ‘Nikah’ review →

‘Caught by the Tides’ review

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Source: Variety (5/18/24)
‘Caught by the Tides’ Review: Jia Zhangke Weaves a Shimmering New Tapestry from Threads of His Previous Films
Zhao Tao stars as a woman searching for a lost lover in an epic, lyrical drama that is both Chinese master Jia’s career-retrospective reinvention and a defining portrait of modern China.
By Jessica Kiang

Courtesy of X Stream Pictures, Cannes Film Festival.

Zhao Tao stars as a woman searching for a lost lover in an epic, lyrical drama that is both Chinese master Jia’s career-retrospective reinvention and a defining portrait of modern China.

The Chinese title of Jia Zhangke‘s mesmerizing “Caught by the Tides,” a masterfully poetic and pioneering fusion of the old and the new, can be translated in several ways. Jia himself suggests “The Drifting Generation,” but it can also mean “The Romantic Generation” with the etymology of “romantic” lying in the Chinese words for wind and current. The restless motion of the natural world is certainly captured in the English title’s reference to an ocean’s ebb and flow. But what that version cannot adequately convey is the airiness and the yearning that Jia whips in to “Caught by the Tides” — quite miraculously considering he is largely working with repurposed footage from across the last 23 years of his justly celebrated career.

Loosely speaking a love story, “Tides” is also perhaps the most definitive national portrait that Jia, modern China’s foremost cinematic chronicler, has ever delivered. This is what it might look like if the eye of the storm of 21st century China’s many transformations could tell us what it saw … or could sing us, perhaps. For the most part, Jia’s new-old film features little sync dialogue and unfolds as a flowing series of extended montages with a musicality that is a splendid testament to the work of its three editors, Yang Chao, Lin Xudong and Matthieu Laclau — not to mention the use of actual music. Jia’s trademark fondness for the unexpected soundtrack cut finds its zenith here, as rave music, rock music, pop and dance anthems counterpoint the sometimes grim visuals, adding a splash of color to gray landscapes, like discarded bubblegum gritted into tarmac. Continue reading ‘Caught by the Tides’ review →

Chinese Anime lecture

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LECTURE: Chinese Anime: The Junctive Geopolitics of Regional Media, by Professor Thomas Lamarre

Title: Chinese Anime: The Junctive Geopolitics of Regional Media
Speaker: Professor Thomas Lamarre, University of Chicago, USA
Moderator: Professor Baryon Posadas, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, HK
Format: 40-50 minutes’ lecture, followed by around 30 minutes’ Q & A
Time: 9:30-11am, May 22, 2024 (Wed, Hong Kong Time)
Location: This lecture was changed to Zoom only. Please ignore the physical building and room number in the poster.  
Zoom ID: 953 3208 9304
Password: ACASSHSS

Abstract: 

The very idea of “Chinese anime” raises a geopolitical eyebrow.  What does it mean for a putatively Chinese phenomenon to mesh with the materiality of media forms associated with contents industries that are typically characterized as “Japanese” or “global”?  What exactly is meant by “Chinese” and “anime” anyway?  The phenomenon of Chinese anime encourages a thorough reconsideration not only of forms of animation but also of the geopolitical forms that are summoned when trying to account for the national, regional, and global circulation of contemporary media forms.  Through an inquiry into the modes of production, circulation, and reception of some fairly popular Chinese anime series such as Tong Ling Fei (Psychic Princess, 2018-2019) and Quanzhi Gaoshou (King’s Avatar, 2017; 2020) as well as some decidedly less popular series such as Lixiang jingqu (Evil or Live, 2017), I wish to explore how the phenomenon of Chinese anime forces us to rethink both the materiality of anime and the materiality of its putative Chineseness in a regional and global context.  The inquiry begins with a demonstration of the “junctive” materiality of Chinese anime.  The guiding question is: to what extent does thinking Chinese anime in terms of junctive materiality offer an alternative understanding of the geopolitics of media in East Asia? Continue reading Chinese Anime lecture →

Anime’s Knowledge Cultures talk

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BOOK TALK: Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: From Astro Boy to China’s Zhai Generation, by Professor Jinying Li

Title: Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: From Astro Boy to China’s Zhai Generation
Speaker: Professor Jinying Li, Brown University, USA
Moderator: Professor Baryon Posadas, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, HK
Format: 40-50 minutes’ lecture, followed by around 30 minutes’ Q & A
Time: 9:00-10:30am, May 16, 2024 (Thur, Hong Kong Time)
Zoom ID: 939 9388 3522
Password: ACASSHSS

ABSTRACT:

This talk introduces the theses of my book Anime’s Knowledge Cultures that studies the historical and cultural formation of anime geekdom to illustrate the growing expansion of a transnational knowledge culture that had emerged since the 1980s with the rise of network society and information capitalism. It examines zhai culture in China as a case study to demonstrate the emergence and development of anime geekdom, along with the changing meanings and functions of knowledge, in a socially and historically specific context. It traces the emergence and development of zhai culture from the popular reception of Astro Boy as the first TV animation imported to China in the 1980s to the recent anime fandom that reshaped Chinese internet culture in the twenty-first century. The coming of age of the zhai generation amid China’s profound social and economic transformation in the past four decades provides a vivid picture of how a knowledge culture formed and evolved, along with the development of a new generation of Chinese workers and consumers, during the uneven transition from the industrial to the postindustrial economies. At the center of this cultural history is the shifting relationship between the zhai generation and the nation’s renewed interest in cultivating and soliciting skilled knowledge workers through institutional and market means. This historical study illuminates the changing meanings and significance of anime geekdom in relation to knowledge work in the context of China’s overwhelming social, cultural, and economic transformations. Continue reading Anime’s Knowledge Cultures talk →

The Films of Chor Yuen–cfp

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Call for Papers: ReFocus: The Films of Chor Yuen
Editors: Jessica Siu-yin Yeung, Tom Cunliffe, and Raymond Tsang

The veteran film cultural worker Law Kar called Chor Yuen 楚原 (b. Cheung Po-kin, 1934–2022) “a stylist without an intrinsic style and an auteur without an eternal obsession”. Another veteran film cultural worker Shu Kei called Chor Yuen “The Last Guardian of Cantonese cinema” in relation to the Cantonese cinema’s decline in the late-1960s to early-1970s. These critical perspectives on Chor Yuen situate him in the producer-driven Hong Kong film industry and its studio system, contextualising his works within the industrial conditions and the seismic changes that took place at various crucial points between the late 1950s and the early 1990s. These commentaries also confirm Chor Yuen’s pivotal role in bridging the Hong Kong Cantonese cinema in the 1950s–1960s and more contemporary Hong Kong cinema.

Chor Yuen is one of the few filmmakers to have successfully transitioned from making films in the 1950s all the way up to his last in 1990, excelling in directing, writing, and producing films in most popular genres. His career encompasses and, in some cases, has instigated many of the most important trends and shifts over these decades. His agility in moving to and succeeding at different studios with different house styles and different genres is unmatched. In the “100 Must-See Hong Kong Movies” list compiled by the Hong Kong Film Archive Selection Panel, Chor Yuen’s works took up five places. Despite his illustrious status and copious works, there is little academic research on Chor Yuen. As such, this anthology will rectify this wrong, and assess Chor Yuen through the studios he worked for and the many genres he was involved in to demonstrate the central position he has in Hong Kong film history and the wider world of Chinese cinemas. It will also provide a much more comprehensive overview of his entire career to redress his image outside of Hong Kong as being known primarily as a director of aesthetically lush wuxia films. Continue reading The Films of Chor Yuen–cfp →

Special issue of Taiwan Lit–cfp

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Call for papers: Special Issue of Taiwan Lit
Theme: Mobility in the 21st Century Taiwan Literature and Film
Guest editors: Pei-yin Lin, Hsin-Chin Evelyn Hsieh, Wan-jui Wang

While Taiwan-centric nativization has been a prominent trend in post-martial law Taiwan literature and film, there has been a notable transformation in literary works and films in the new millennium. This transformation has been characterized by endeavors to explore Taiwan’s intricate interactions with the global community, specifically through the lens of people’s movement, migration, and displacement. As nearly a quarter-century has passed, it is now an opportune moment to reflect on how literary works and films produced in the past 25 years have portrayed Taiwan’s evolving social, cultural, and political landscape, as well as the experiences of individual writers and directors navigating these transformative shifts.

The term “mobility” can be understood from various perspectives. It can encompass the actual movements of Taiwanese people, both domestically from rural areas to cities or vice versa, and transnationally, such as traveling or living abroad facilitated by globalization. It also includes those who immigrate to Taiwan from elsewhere in search of better economic opportunities or more conducive creative environments. Literature and films provide creative outlets for expressing the challenges faced by individuals as they adapt to urban life, confront social disparities, and grapple with issues of identity and belonging. Continue reading Special issue of Taiwan Lit–cfp →

NUS media studies position

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FACULTY POSITION IN MEDIA AND FILM STUDIES, DEPARTMENT OF CHINESE STUDIES AND DEPARTMENT OF JAPANESE STUDIES, NUS

The Department of Chinese Studies and the Department of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore jointly invite applications for the post of Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) in East Asian Media and Film Studies. Two positions are available for this appointment. The successful candidates will be jointly appointed in both departments, with a higher weightage in the department their research focuses more on.

Applicants for this position should have a PhD in East Asian Studies, Film Studies, Media Studies, Comparative Literature, or any other relevant discipline. Successful applicants should be able to conduct research and teaching on China (including the Chinese diaspora) and Japan. Their research must cover either the modern or contemporary periods (from 1900s onwards). Scholars who can contribute to further interdisciplinarity in research or teaching are particularly encouraged to apply.

The successful applicant will be expected to have a strong commitment to a) teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels; b) providing supervision to undergraduate and graduate students and c) undertaking research in East Asian Media and Film Studies and other related fields; as well as d) playing an active role in both Departments’ curriculum and development. They should possess native-speaking, or near native-speaking, competence in English, Mandarin and Japanese. Continue reading NUS media studies position →

Jia Zhangke film nominated for Palme d’Or

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Source: China Daily (4/12/24)
Jia Zhangke’s new movie nominated for Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival
By Xu Fan

Poster of Caught by the Tides. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Celebrated director Jia Zhangke, a pioneering figure in China’s arthouse cinema, has achieved a remarkable feat as his latest directorial work, Caught by the Tides, has been shortlisted to compete for the prestigious Palme d’Or at the upcoming 77th Cannes Film Festival. This marks the sixth time in his illustrious directorial career, spanning nearly three decades, that Jia has been recognized in this manner.

The unveiling of the main competition section lineup by Cannes’ organizers featured a host of high-profile rivaling movies, including Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, American filmmaker Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, and French director Jacques Audiard’s musical melodrama Emilia Perez.

Jia’s earlier achievements at Cannes include winning the Award for Best Screenplay for A Touch of Sin in 2013, a film interweaving four stories occurring in different provinces with respective violent ends. This recognition adds to the anticipation surrounding Caught by the Tides. Continue reading Jia Zhangke film nominated for Palme d’Or →

Yolo–the feelgood female boxing movie

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Source: The Guardian (3/31/24)
Knockout success of Yolo – the feelgood female boxing movie from China
Director and star Jia Ling – who reportedly lost 50kg to make comedy that rivals Dune 2 at box office – insists ‘it’s not a diet movie, not even about boxing’
By , Senior China correspondent

Director and star Jia Ling – who reportedly lost 50kg to make comedy that rivals Dune 2 at box office – insists ‘it’s not a diet movie, not even about boxing’

In a country where cinemas are normally dominated by wolf warrior blockbusters or nationalist historical epics, the surprise hit of China’s box office in 2024 is a feelgood comedy about a woman who transforms her lacklustre life – and herself – through boxing.

Released for the lunar new year holiday on 10 February, Yolo (You Only Live Once) has become the highest grossing film of the year in China, earning more than 3.4bn yuan (£375m) in less than two months, according to the China Movie Information Network. Globally, it is second only to Dune 2.

Critics and cinemagoers are divided about whether the film, a lighthearted comedy which has drawn comparisons with Rocky, is feminist or not. It is directed by and stars Jia Ling, a well-known comedian, who reportedly lost 50kg for the role in order to perform the physical as well as mental transformation of the main character, Du Leying, sparking a debate about body image. In February, Jia wrote on Weibo: “It’s not a diet movie, it’s not even about boxing”.

But Jia’s success as a female film-maker is undoubtedly a triumph. Her first film, the 2021 semi-autobiographical comedy Hi, Mom made her the highest-grossing solo female director of all time – until Greta Gerwig took that title in 2023 with Barbie. Continue reading Yolo–the feelgood female boxing movie →