Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (3/14/24)
Failed Animation, Limited Theory: Feminist Reflections in a Transnational Context
By Karen Redrobe
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I write with some informal responses to three questions posed by Daisy Yan Du as part of her invitation to give a lecture in the Association for Chinese Animation Studies’ series: “Why did Animating Film Theory [published in 2014] not cover China or Chinese animation? A gap for future scholars? Will Chinese animation be important for animation theories?” These are good and challenging questions that identify one of the limitations of that edited collection and I am grateful for their provocation. I enter this conversation in the spirit of what British feminist scholar Jacqueline Rose describes as “an ethics of failure” in her important essay, “Why War?” There, she describes a relationship between being willing to fail, “resisting the conviction of absolute truth,” to the avoidance of war and warlike violence.[1] Within Rose’s war-resistant ethics of failure, recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge helps to make more conscious the things one did not even know one did not know in ways that make space for the limitations of others. As such, failure has relational potential that demonstrates little interest in moving toward triumphalist completion. No doubt my introduction to Animating Film Theory should have made the limits of its roots, frameworks, and concerns more explicit. Although we cannot travel backwards in time, the composited nature of animated time, like feminist theoretical critiques of linear and unidirectional temporalities, invites what Patricia White has described as “retrospectatorship.”[2] In trying to address Du’s questions, I am keenly aware of my lack of expertise in the area of Chinese animation theory; this project has helped me to think more deeply about how we define fields and subfields, and how we do or don’t foster dialogue across such categories of knowledge.

Rose’s “ethics of failure” resonates with the innovative scholarly paradigm Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon foreground in their recent edited collection, Incomplete: the Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (2023), where the editors consider “unfinished projects as both projections and projectiles, pitched forward in time and space to new worlds, even as they manifest so clearly how the old worlds could not, or would not, sustain their development.[3]” I also hear a resonance between the ethics of incompletion, and Baryon Tensor Posadas’s discussions of science fiction and its affinity with what Arjun Appadurai calls “the ethics of possibility,” which requires us, Posadas suggests, to “break open the continuity of the present.”[4] Animation, with its frequent use of frame-by-frame and variable frame rate processes, is particularly adept at challenging linear time and inventing temporal visualizations that offer different ways to conceptualize and express time, and this inventive quality has sometimes been seen as limiting its utility for engaging the past and historical time. In “Animation, the Obsolescence of the Image, and the Disappearance of Hong Kong Architecture,” Yomi Braester registers a distinction—one that he suggests is “bound to fail”—between “medial time” and “historical time,” and asks, “Is animation especially equipped to address the link between medial time and historical time?”[5] In this paradigm, the “craft of the single frame” is linked to “pushing aside historical time” in favor of “fantastic temporalities,” but Posadas’s work on science fiction, along with other theoretical work I’ll discuss in these reflections, suggests that non-fantastical temporalities, more predictable and predetermined outcomes, are just as fabricated, just as much the product of particular imaginations of the future, as more fantastical variants. In short, I think there is exciting work to be done at the intersection of transnational animation studies, genre studies, intermedial animation studies (including between animation and built space), and the philosophy of history. Scholars of Chinese animation are among those playing a leading role in thinking across these areas. Continue reading Failed Animation, Limited Theory →

Source: ThinkChina (3/1/24)
Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: Blossoms Shanghai as a tale of two cities
By Ying Zhu, Professor, Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University

Academic Ying Zhu observes that in Blossoms Shanghai directed by Wong Kar-wai, Shanghai is vivid, vibrant and evocative of both the glamour of a colonial Hong Kong and the hustle and bustle of a gilded age Shanghai. The TV drama speaks of the historical relationship between the two cities, and when the bright lights have dimmed, the ruins of the spectacle and the broken dreams. If geopolitical reshuffling in recent years has diminished Hong Kong’s lustre as a first-tier global city and the link between China and the rest of the world, what does the future have in store for Shanghai?

A publicity poster for Blossoms Shanghai starring Hu Ge. (Internet)

Blossoms Shanghai (《繁花》), the 30-episode TV drama, captures in a prosaic fashion life in the fast lane of A Bao, a dashing Shanghai man with a can-do spirit who accumulates dazzling wealth during Shanghai’s boom times. Market speculation and import-export manipulation were shortcuts to getting rich, and Bao is dexterous at both. Blossoms Shanghai captures a moment of Shanghai in golden glory and a state of euphoria.

The impressionistic and stylised images of Shanghai in Blossoms Shanghai attests to the director Wong Kar-wai’s abiding yearning for Shanghai, the city of his birth. Blossoms Shanghai also carries a torch for Hong Kong, with the drama bearing imprints of Wong’s adoptive city, from his generous appropriation of Hong Kong pop for soundtracks to his actual plot linking Hong Kong to Shanghai of the 1990s. The Shanghai in Wong’s cinematic imagination is vivid, vibrant and evocative of both the glamour of a colonial Hong Kong and the hustle and bustle of a gilded age Shanghai. Continue reading Blossoms Shanghai as a tale of two cities →

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>

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.

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 Why China has lost interest in Hollywood →