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- Volume 8, Issue 3, 2011
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 8, Issue 3, 2011
Volume 8, Issue 3, 2011
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The aesthetics of mythical violence in Hong Kong action films
By Stephen TeoHong Kong cinema is known throughout the world for its action cinema, including martial arts films and gangster pictures that portray violence as an integral part of their appeal. This article examines the nature of violence in contemporary Hong Kong cinema, borrowing concepts from Walter Benjamin's essay Critique of violence to define the violence in Hong Kong action films as mythical and aestheticized. The article analyses a body of films such as King Hu's classic A Touch of Zen (197071), John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1987) and Johnnie To's Election (2004) to support its thesis. The mythical violence portrayed in these films, it is argued, constructs a critique of violence. Furthermore, the films set up a wider framework of discourse about violence itself as a method of questioning social institutions and norms affecting gender.
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Rules of the forbidden game: Violence in contemporary Chinese cinema
By Ma NingThis article examines the new trend in the filmic representation of violence in contemporary Chinese cinema by analysing more recent key works made by the renowned Fifth Generation film-makers in the new millennium in terms of their production economy and aesthetics, the specific generic conventions, narrative structures and strategies employed and the promotional and critical discourses of the distributors, exhibitors and critics. The article argues that the form and function of these films can best be explored by focusing on the rules by which this new type of filmic discourse on violence is produced and regulated within the context of the emerging global cultural economy in relation to international politics.
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Gendered trauma in Korean cinema: Peppermint Candy and My Own Breathing
By Kim SoyoungPeppermint Candy (1999) and My Own Breathing (1999) are privileged texts for understanding the historical burdens of Korean society. These films touch upon key traumas in modern Korean history: the Gwangju Uprising and the plight of the comfort women during the colonial era. I argue that the trauma played out in Peppermint Candy, under the pretence of progressive political historiography, renders women's traumas invisible and unrepresentable in public discourse. My Own Breathing, on the other hand, presents an alternative way of approaching the historical trauma of comfort women.
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Self-inflicted pain: Japanese cinema on the Pacific War
More LessWith a sample of post-war Japanese films, this article explores the cinematic treatment of violence, trauma and memory experienced by Japan during the Pacific War. Avoiding the cardboard villains of Hollywood and Asian cinema, Japanese film-makers have sought to legitimize Japanese people as victims of not just the mechanized violence of the twentieth century, but that of Japanese imperialism and the retributive justice of the victors in suppressing the lived memories of this period. A notable consistency of the films discussed here is a more self-reflexive internationalization of the enemy. Rather than American bombers, the source of violence lies in the culture and policies of Japanese militarism personified in both the recklessly ruthless military planners and the brutish military police. As this article argues, the study of the reconstruction of the Pacific War in Japanese cinema serves as a critical platform in providing a more holistic frame in understanding the politics of war, violence, trauma and memory arising from the Pacific War.
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The language of violence in Indonesian cinema
By Krishna SenIn thinking of the relationship between political and cinematic violence in Indonesia, this article ponders the relatively infrequent violence in the cinema that emerged in the shadows of the mass killings of 196566. How should one think about the new fascination with violence in recent Indonesian cinema? The answer may lie in a comparison of Indonesian film form with the unique nature of the Indonesian language and its prevalence of the passive voice or object-focused syntax. In Indonesian films the agent of the act of violence is not articulated, and instead violence becomes victim-focused. This article pays close attention to a post-New Order film, Novel Tanpa Huruf R/A Novel without R, which marks a departure in moments of graphic violence while also maintaining some consistencies with the language of New Order cinema.
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Violence and the supernatural in Singapore cinema
More LessThis article surveys the approach of two important film-makers to the experience of redevelopment projects and the spatial reconfigurations of the urban landscape in Singapore. Tan Pin Pin's documentary Moving House depicts the violent collision of modern development with traditional rituals, showing the mass exhumation and transfer of graves to apartment-like style blocks to accommodate public housing construction. The ghosts of the dead return to such public housing estates in Eric Khoo's fiction film 12 Storeys (1997) to pass through the claustrophobic spaces of alienation containing the struggles of upward mobility. In such examples, the supernatural and fantastic provide a violent reconstruction of the social memory of postcolonial Singapore.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 20 (2022)
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Volume 19 (2021)
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Volume 18 (2020)
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Volume 17 (2020)
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Volume 16 (2018)
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Volume 15 (2017)
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Volume 14 (2016)
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Volume 13 (2015)
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Volume 12 (2014)
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Volume 11 (2013)
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Volume 10 (2012)
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Volume 9 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 8 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 7 (2009)
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Volume 6 (2008 - 2009)
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Volume 5 (2007)
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Volume 4 (2006 - 2007)
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Volume 3 (2005)
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Volume 2 (2004)
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Volume 1 (2002 - 2003)