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- Volume 26, Issue 1, 2015
Asian Cinema - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2015
Volume 26, Issue 1, 2015
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Looking at Foreign Sky, desperately seeking post- Asia: Soni Kum, Nagisa Oshima, Ri Chin’u
More LessAbstractThe article considers the role of citation and translation in two video works (Foreign Sky, 2005, and Beast of Me, 2005) by Soni Kum, producer and narrator who identifies herself as a member of the ‘North Korean community in Japan’. Both works cite words and images from Oshima Nagisa’s celebrated Death By Hanging (1968), a film protesting the Japanese state’s use of capital punishment in the execution of the zainichi youth, Ri Chin’u, in 1963. Through these interweavings, Kum suggests new perspectives on the role of gender politics in Oshima’s film, while more broadly foregrounding how manipulation of the gendered body produces the affect of cultural nationalism as a heteronormative ideology. While contending that Asia has yet to accede to a post – Cold War temporality, Kum’s work nevertheless searches for modes of transnational solidarity that might characterize something like ‘post- Asia’.
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Alternative locality: Geopolitics and cultural identity in Ann Hui’s A Simple Life
By Han LiAbstractAnn Hui’s A Simple Life became a box office sensation in 2012 and a favourite of the critics. Responding to both the mainland film industry’s hegemonic development and the production of ‘authentic Hong Kong cinema’ over the past decade, A Simple Life sheds light on the efforts of Hong Kong film-makers to explore an alternative local identity following the first decade of Chinese rule. This article situates A Simple Life amidst the Hong Kong film industry’s massive migration to Mainland China, and demonstrates the paradoxes embedded in producing and promoting ‘authentic Hong Kong cinema’. It also conducts a close reading of Ann Hui’s unique cinematic language in this work and argues that A Simple Life, though carrying pronounced Hong Kong cultural indicators, reveals awareness of the constructed nature of the ‘authenticity’ in its peer works. Overall, by situating A Simple Life in the broader and significant transformation of the Chinese film industry this article explores how Hui’s film offers an alternative imagination of Hong Kong local identity in the new millennium.
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Worker, peasant, soldier … middle class? Class figures in Jia Zhangke’s 24 City
More LessAbstractThis article analyses the Maoist-class figures in Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (2008) and compares them with those found in Maoist-era visual culture. It examines how the films record the destruction and redevelopment of the social order, and the ways that the Maoist figures in the film have been made wretched or have disappeared. It argues, however, that the echo of their importance still remains, since the middleclass figures that appear in the film fuse previous Maoist elements with the contemporary success of economic reforms. They thus serve as a symbolic solution that combines the Maoist past with the Reform era present, therefore evoking the past to serve the present and the anticipated future.
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Chinese lyrical tradition and the Taiwan new cinema: The case of Hou Hsiao-hsien
More LessAbstractMany film critics have noted Hou Hsiao-hsien’s distinguished film style and associated it with traditional Chinese aesthetics, but few scholars have succeeded in articulating Hou’s translation of traditional Chinese aesthetics into his cinematic work. This article intends to fill this gap by proposing that the static tragedy is the form that Hou consciously or unconsciously appropriates in his films. According to sinologist Chen Shixiang, the static tragedy of traditional Chinese poetry lacks antagonism and dynamic conflict typical of Greek tragedy, but it embodies a kind of cosmic sorrow that insignificant human beings feel while facing nature’s grand scale and noticing the unstoppable passage of time. While looking or gazing at nature, the poet occupies a bystander’s position; he keeps a sympathetic eye without intervention, detaching himself from the observed world while avoiding being completely indifferent. This bystander’s position has been duplicated in Hou’s films through the use of static camera, long takes and medium/long shots. Through this distinctive style of film language, two of Hou’s films in particular, A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) and The Puppetmaster (1993), enquire into the universal life circle of birth, growth, illness and death as well as meditate on the impermanence of life against the background of eternal nature, and thereby serve as examples that illustrate the characteristics of static tragedy.
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A ‘narrow world, strewn withprohibitions’: Chang Cheh’sThe Assassin and the 1967Hong Kong riots
By Luke WhiteAbstractChang Cheh is one of the most influential directors in Hong Kong martial arts cinema, and his film Da cike/The Assassin is a significant work produced at a key moment both in Chang’s early career and in the development of the increasingly violent 1960s swordplay (wuxia) genre that led ultimately to the appearance of the kungfu film in the 1970s. The Assassin was made during the Leftist Riots of 1967, a ‘watershed’ in Hong Kong’s modern history. In order to understand the changing fantasies of violence in Chang’s wuxia cinema during this period, this article makes a close reading of The Assassin in relation to the 1967 riots and through Frantz Fanon’s account of the effects of violence on the colonial subject. It argues for a close relationship between Chang’s cinematic violence and the real-world political violence which was erupting at the moment of its production and first reception.
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Hybridization, appropriation and identity: Moving images of Singapore artists Ho Tzu Nyen and Ming Wong
By Phyllis TeoAbstractWhile increased emphasis on experimentation has seen more contemporary Asian artists incorporating time-based elements in their artistic practice, studies of the relationship between film and visual arts have only been sporadic. Drawing upon the film installations of Singaporean visual artists Ho Tzu Nyen and Ming Wong, this article looks into the methodological and theoretical intersections of art and film in their practice. Ho and Wong are recognized for their wide-ranging artistic approaches, blending disparate genres into interdisciplinary installations. Forms of the moving image are utilized as an alternative mode of cinema, a tendency that provides for a more multifaceted study of filmic representations. Advocating a more fluid approach in the understanding of spectatorial position, both artists have produced a visual and experiential language in their work that enables viewers to develop a new consciousness about their environment and themselves.
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Book Review
By Shi-yan ChaoAbstractHou Hsiao-hsien, Richard I. Suchenski (ed.) (2014) New York and Vienna: Columbia University Press and Österreichisches Filmmuseum, 269 pp., ISBN: 9783901644580, p/bk, £22.50
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Revitalizing cinematic potential under authoritarian rule: Reporting from the second edition of the Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival (HRHDIFF), Yangon, Myanmar, 15–19 June 2014
By Nis GrønAbstractThe following is a report from the second edition of the Human Rights Film Festival in Yangon, Myanmar. Here we take a closer look at the realization of the newly established international film festival in Myanmar, and at how, despite the difficult socio-political conditions under which the organizers and local film-makers work, this festival is the result of courage and conviction as well as a belief in the power of cinema as a tool for social dialogue and change.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 34 (2023)
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Volume 33 (2022)
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Volume 32 (2021)
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Volume 31 (2020)
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Volume 30 (2019)
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Volume 29 (2018)
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Volume 28 (2017)
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Volume 27 (2016)
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Volume 26 (2015)
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Volume 25 (2014)
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Volume 24 (2013)
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Volume 23 (2012)
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Volume 22 (2011)
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Volume 21 (2010)
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Volume 20 (2009)
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Volume 19 (2008)
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Volume 18 (2007)
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Volume 17 (2006)
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Volume 16 (2005)
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Volume 15 (2004)
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Volume 14 (2003)
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Volume 13 (2002)
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Volume 12 (2001)
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Volume 11 (2000)
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Volume 10 (1998 - 1999)
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Volume 9 (1997 - 1998)
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Volume 8 (1996)
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Volume 7 (1995)
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Volume 6 (1993)