Review of: Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China, Zhou Chenshu (2021)Berkeley: University of California Press, 282 pp.,ISBN 978-0-52034-339-9, p/bk, $34.95
{"title":"Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China, Zhou Chenshu (2021)","authors":"Victor Wu","doi":"10.1386/ac_00043_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00043_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China, Zhou Chenshu (2021)Berkeley: University of California Press, 282 pp.,ISBN 978-0-52034-339-9, p/bk, $34.95","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41496742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article studies how a recent Chinese women’s film Send Me to the Clouds (2019) explores different ways of looking as innovative cinematic strategies of constructing and empowering the precarious female subject against a postsocialist patriarchal ideology that dominates gendered narratives and audio-visual codes of the mainstream Chinese cinema. The film is centred upon a 30-year-old ‘leftover woman’ Sheng Nan’s distressful life experiences and her anger at the prevailing sexism and ageism. Rather than being tamed or domesticated, throughout the film the angry and restless woman is shown to be constantly on the motion, making every effort to experiment with alternative looking relations that seek to destroy the voyeuristic pleasure and disciplinary power of the privileged male gaze, as well as to explore possibilities of creating a self-reflective and critical female gaze. A contextualized critical study of the female authorship and agency on and behind the screen will shed new light on how contemporary Chinese women filmmakers take on ‘concrete and various negotiations’ with the structure of domination and its representational system via ‘their socially and politically conditioned cinematic practice or performance’.
{"title":"‘Why am I still imprisoned in your eyes?’: Re-visioning ‘leftover women’ and the female gaze in Send Me to the Clouds","authors":"H. Xiao","doi":"10.1386/ac_00040_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00040_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article studies how a recent Chinese women’s film Send Me to the Clouds (2019) explores different ways of looking as innovative cinematic strategies of constructing and empowering the precarious female subject against a postsocialist patriarchal ideology that dominates\u0000 gendered narratives and audio-visual codes of the mainstream Chinese cinema. The film is centred upon a 30-year-old ‘leftover woman’ Sheng Nan’s distressful life experiences and her anger at the prevailing sexism and ageism. Rather than being tamed or domesticated, throughout\u0000 the film the angry and restless woman is shown to be constantly on the motion, making every effort to experiment with alternative looking relations that seek to destroy the voyeuristic pleasure and disciplinary power of the privileged male gaze, as well as to explore possibilities of creating\u0000 a self-reflective and critical female gaze. A contextualized critical study of the female authorship and agency on and behind the screen will shed new light on how contemporary Chinese women filmmakers take on ‘concrete and various negotiations’ with the structure of domination\u0000 and its representational system via ‘their socially and politically conditioned cinematic practice or performance’.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49054519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The face and the close-up have been central to film theory since its early days. If modern visual theories of the face arose in Europe amid urbanization and imperial encounter, in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the political aesthetics of faciality became central to Maoist mass mobilizations of the countryside, in part through collective village film screenings. Bringing together themes of faciality, rurality and anxieties of global encounter, this article considers how the rural has been staged through genres of the face in Chinese cinema and television. Through close readings of the Maoist era The Youth of Our Village, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Zhao Benshan Media’s series Rural Love Story, I consider three distinct deployments of the face in depictions of rural and environmental transformation. Thinking with while also departing from Deleuze’s formulations in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, the article traces an emotively intense face reminiscent of the affection-image, a blank face that operates in part as a time-image and a performative face of what might be called a theatrics-image. Across its readings as a site of affective immediacy, despotic inscription, moral character and social‐political manoeuvring, the face offers a multivalent site for political, aesthetic and affective mediation, on- and off-screen.
{"title":"Affect, blankness, theatrics: Rurality and faciality in three Chinese instances","authors":"Emily Ng","doi":"10.1386/ac_00039_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00039_1","url":null,"abstract":"The face and the close-up have been central to film theory since its early days. If modern visual theories of the face arose in Europe amid urbanization and imperial encounter, in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the political aesthetics of faciality became central to Maoist mass\u0000 mobilizations of the countryside, in part through collective village film screenings. Bringing together themes of faciality, rurality and anxieties of global encounter, this article considers how the rural has been staged through genres of the face in Chinese cinema and television. Through\u0000 close readings of the Maoist era The Youth of Our Village, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Zhao Benshan Media’s series Rural Love Story, I consider three distinct deployments of the face in depictions of rural and environmental transformation. Thinking with while\u0000 also departing from Deleuze’s formulations in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, the article traces an emotively intense face reminiscent of the affection-image, a blank face that operates in part as a time-image and a performative face of what might be called a theatrics-image. Across\u0000 its readings as a site of affective immediacy, despotic inscription, moral character and social‐political manoeuvring, the face offers a multivalent site for political, aesthetic and affective mediation, on- and off-screen.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42720020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article argues that the extreme long take of Lav Diaz is not only his aesthetic method but also his ideological position as a filmmaker of Third Cinema, reinstating the theory’s critical arsenal in opposing the violent structure of the postcolonial nation state. It maintains that the Diaz shot is isomorphic to the nation-form and has two political dimensions: first, the extreme duration of the shot is Diaz’s resistance to the imperialism of mainstream cinema and its debilitating effects by employing ‘dead time’ which creates restlessness and reflexivity that disrupt absorption to enable a mode of critical spectatorship; second, the Diaz shot is a critique on Philippine postcolonial society which can be understood by examining the triadic structure of space, time and body. Using the film Mula sa Kung Ano Ang Noon (From What Is Before) (2014), this article proposes an anatomy of the shot as a unitary system of environment, duration and progression of actions, labouring bodies of subalterns in the state of bare life. It expands the possibility of the long take from the narrowly held study of time and space to include a study of bodies.
本文认为,Lav Diaz的极端长镜头不仅是他的美学方法,也是他作为第三电影制片人的意识形态立场,恢复了理论的批判武器库,反对后殖民民族国家的暴力结构。它认为,迪亚兹的镜头与国家形式是同构的,具有两个政治维度:首先,镜头的极端持续时间是迪亚兹对主流电影的帝国主义及其通过使用“死时间”产生的不安和反思性的抵制,这种“死时间”会破坏吸收,从而实现一种批判性的观看模式;其次,迪亚兹的镜头是对菲律宾后殖民社会的批判,可以通过审视空间、时间和身体的三元结构来理解。本文以2014年的电影《从前》(Mula sa Kung Ano Ang Noon, From What Is Before)为例,将镜头作为一个统一的系统进行剖析,包括环境、动作的持续时间和进程、处于赤裸生命状态的次等人的劳动身体。它扩大了从狭义的时间和空间研究到包括对身体的研究的长远考虑的可能性。
{"title":"Beyond aesthetics: The long take as the nation-form in the cinema of Lav Diaz","authors":"E. García","doi":"10.1386/ac_00038_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00038_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that the extreme long take of Lav Diaz is not only his aesthetic method but also his ideological position as a filmmaker of Third Cinema, reinstating the theory’s critical arsenal in opposing the violent structure of the postcolonial nation state. It maintains\u0000 that the Diaz shot is isomorphic to the nation-form and has two political dimensions: first, the extreme duration of the shot is Diaz’s resistance to the imperialism of mainstream cinema and its debilitating effects by employing ‘dead time’ which creates restlessness and\u0000 reflexivity that disrupt absorption to enable a mode of critical spectatorship; second, the Diaz shot is a critique on Philippine postcolonial society which can be understood by examining the triadic structure of space, time and body. Using the film Mula sa Kung Ano Ang Noon (From\u0000 What Is Before) (2014), this article proposes an anatomy of the shot as a unitary system of environment, duration and progression of actions, labouring bodies of subalterns in the state of bare life. It expands the possibility of the long take from the narrowly held study of time and space\u0000 to include a study of bodies.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42146446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article considers how two Singapore horror films, Medium Rare (1991) and God or Dog (1997), attempted to make sense of the real-life Adrian Lim ritual murders through two divergent approaches to the co-constitutive relationship between modernity and violence. First, by formulating an image of Singapore as a rational global cosmopolis, Medium Rare positions Lim and his superstitious violence as malignant anomalies that must be expelled to protect Singapore’s modern identity. Conversely, God or Dog portrays Lim’s madness as an unfortunate consequence of the country’s rapid modernization. Put together, these films use Lim and his crimes as vehicles through which they explore Singapore’s troubled endeavours at self-definition within the early fringe of the 1990s Singapore new wave cinema.
{"title":"Filming the Singaporean killer: Trauma, murder and modernity in Medium Rare (1991) and God or Dog (1997)","authors":"Benson Pang","doi":"10.1386/ac_00041_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00041_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers how two Singapore horror films, Medium Rare (1991) and God or Dog (1997), attempted to make sense of the real-life Adrian Lim ritual murders through two divergent approaches to the co-constitutive relationship between modernity and violence. First,\u0000 by formulating an image of Singapore as a rational global cosmopolis, Medium Rare positions Lim and his superstitious violence as malignant anomalies that must be expelled to protect Singapore’s modern identity. Conversely, God or Dog portrays Lim’s madness as an\u0000 unfortunate consequence of the country’s rapid modernization. Put together, these films use Lim and his crimes as vehicles through which they explore Singapore’s troubled endeavours at self-definition within the early fringe of the 1990s Singapore new wave cinema.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47562819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Early Transnational Chinese Cinema Industry, Fu Yongchun (2019)","authors":"R. Hyland","doi":"10.1386/AC_00037_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/AC_00037_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: The Early Transnational Chinese Cinema Industry, Fu Yongchun (2019)London: Routledge, 156 pp.,ISBN 978-0-42949-006-4, e-book, £29.59ISBN 978-0-36766-134-2, p/bk, £29.59ISBN 978-1-13859-237-7, h/bk, £96.00","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":"32 1","pages":"118-121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47657361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article focuses on how the recent blockbuster hit Train to Busan (Yeon 2016), in transposing the zombie horror genre into the South Korean setting, allows South Korean history and social context to actively shape the manner in which it appropriates a genre largely untested by the local film industry. It argues that the film uses genre as a global vernacular through which to speak of specifically Korean issues (in particular, the Korean War, and the issues of South Korea’s speed-oriented Ppalli-Ppalli culture), and locates such practice within the broader context of contemporary South Korean cinema.
{"title":"Storming off the tracks: Zombies, high speed rail and South Korean identity in Train to Busan","authors":"Ryan Gardener","doi":"10.1386/AC_00032_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/AC_00032_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on how the recent blockbuster hit Train to Busan (Yeon 2016), in transposing the zombie horror genre into the South Korean setting, allows South Korean history and social context to actively shape the manner in which it appropriates a genre largely untested\u0000 by the local film industry. It argues that the film uses genre as a global vernacular through which to speak of specifically Korean issues (in particular, the Korean War, and the issues of South Korea’s speed-oriented Ppalli-Ppalli culture), and locates such practice within the\u0000 broader context of contemporary South Korean cinema.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":"32 1","pages":"37-53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47557294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In recent years, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has furnished source material for two major Asian film directors: Darezhan Omirbaev (Student [2012]) and Lav Diaz (Norte, the End of History [2013]). Each director adapts Dostoevsky’s critique of the newly emerging market economy in 1860s Russia in order to depict the impact of capitalism on postcolonial Asian societies, highlighting the alienation characters experience from themselves and in relation to other human beings in particular. In doing so, Omirbaev and Diaz recreate and transfer the novelist’s opposition between native, eastern, Russian Orthodox values and encroaching western ideas to their own countries. Omirbaev depicts the damage caused to ordinary Kazakhs by a ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ economic model; Diaz chronicles the merciless toll of capitalism on the rural Filipino poor. Like Dostoevsky, each director proposes a return to native cultural, linguistic and environmental elements as a means of countering harmful foreign ideologies that victimize everyday people.
{"title":"Foreign ideas, native spaces: Crime and Punishment in recent Asian cinema","authors":"Alexander Burry","doi":"10.1386/AC_00034_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/AC_00034_1","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has furnished source material for two major Asian film directors: Darezhan Omirbaev (Student [2012]) and Lav Diaz (Norte, the End of History [2013]). Each director adapts Dostoevsky’s critique\u0000 of the newly emerging market economy in 1860s Russia in order to depict the impact of capitalism on postcolonial Asian societies, highlighting the alienation characters experience from themselves and in relation to other human beings in particular. In doing so, Omirbaev and Diaz recreate and\u0000 transfer the novelist’s opposition between native, eastern, Russian Orthodox values and encroaching western ideas to their own countries. Omirbaev depicts the damage caused to ordinary Kazakhs by a ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ economic model; Diaz chronicles the merciless toll\u0000 of capitalism on the rural Filipino poor. Like Dostoevsky, each director proposes a return to native cultural, linguistic and environmental elements as a means of countering harmful foreign ideologies that victimize everyday people.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":"32 1","pages":"75-93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44593804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or-awarded Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) has ostensibly been embraced by both critics and scholars alike as international art cinema and for being constitutive of a canon of world cinema from the vantage of Southeast Asia. This article, however, takes a detour to focus particularly on the film’s engagement with Thai politics and its complex intertwinement with Buddhism during the period of anti-communism. I specifically look at how the film replicates religious beliefs and indigenous practices, such as the structure of kamma and reincarnation as redemption, that were used by the right-wing military government to justify a series of anti-communist pogroms. I argue that by hijacking such religious narratives and translating them into cinematic form, the film manages to eschew the risk of being suppressed by censorship, or, at worst, of reproducing the state-imposed narrative on the appropriation and accomplishment of such violence in the name of the nation. This article aims to shed light on how the film criticizes not only the past ‐ what historically happened ‐ but also the way we come to understand the history of such atrocious event and relate to it as our national history.
{"title":"The critique of anti-communist state violence in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives","authors":"Palita Chunsaengchan","doi":"10.1386/AC_00035_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/AC_00035_1","url":null,"abstract":"Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or-awarded Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) has ostensibly been embraced by both critics and scholars alike as international art cinema and for being constitutive of a canon of world cinema from the vantage of\u0000 Southeast Asia. This article, however, takes a detour to focus particularly on the film’s engagement with Thai politics and its complex intertwinement with Buddhism during the period of anti-communism. I specifically look at how the film replicates religious beliefs and indigenous practices,\u0000 such as the structure of kamma and reincarnation as redemption, that were used by the right-wing military government to justify a series of anti-communist pogroms. I argue that by hijacking such religious narratives and translating them into cinematic form, the film manages to eschew\u0000 the risk of being suppressed by censorship, or, at worst, of reproducing the state-imposed narrative on the appropriation and accomplishment of such violence in the name of the nation. This article aims to shed light on how the film criticizes not only the past ‐ what historically happened\u0000 ‐ but also the way we come to understand the history of such atrocious event and relate to it as our national history.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":"32 1","pages":"95-111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49360634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
{"title":"Sentimental journey? The drifting rhythms of Tsai Ming-liang’s Journey to the West","authors":"Seth A. Wilder","doi":"10.1386/AC_00030_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/AC_00030_1","url":null,"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\u0000 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,\u0000 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\u0000 of temporality, rather than making meaning, this article attempts to make sense of the film by locating these rhythms within it.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":"32 1","pages":"3-18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44103738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}