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- Volume 29, Issue 1, 2018
Asian Cinema - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 29, Issue 1, 2018
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Hong Kong in the Hollywood imaginary: Deterritorialization and reterritorialization in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow and The Killer
More LessAbstractThis article examines the way Hong Kong figures in the Hollywood imaginary by examining John Woo’s films A Better Tomorrow and The Killer. For the purpose of my investigation, I show how the two films exemplify the twin concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization with regard to a variety of analytical categories including genre, gender, values, somatic pleasure, affect, melodrama, religion, nostalgia, morals, and the social and cultural context. My analysis demonstrates the hybrid nature of John Woo’s films and provides evidence that cultural identities are flexible and change as they are faced with different contexts and challenges.
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King Hu in Hollywood: Making The Battle of Ono
More LessAbstractThe Battle of Ono was supposed to be King Hu’s American feature debut. But after more than two decades of devoted efforts to develop and finance this ambitious project, King Hu suddenly passed away before principal photography could begin. Now, more than twenty years since his death, there exists no in-depth documentations nor comprehensive studies of the great Chinese director’s unfulfilled Hollywood experience. To patch a long void in our knowledge of King Hu’s late-career activities and struggles in Hollywood, this article chronicles the development of The Battle of Ono and King Hu’s dauntless navigations through the American film industry, and examines the significant challenges and incidents King Hu had faced in his pioneering yet futile efforts to conquer Hollywood.
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Wang was missing: Rediscovering Wayne Wang’s independence
More LessAbstractWayne Wang (1949–present) occupies a unique position among Chinese American directors working in the United States as he has enjoyed a long and productive career spanning more than 30 years. Unlike most filmmakers, Wang has moved back and forth between independent filmmaking with experimental characteristics and mainstream commercial Hollywood productions. After early success with his pioneering Chinese American film Chan is Missing (Wang, 1982), audiences and film critics were wondering what happened to the ‘independent’ after a string of several commercial Hollywood films during the early 2000s. In 2007 and 2008, Wang returned to independent film production with A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2007) and even formal experimentation in The Princess of Nebraska (2008). Both films benefit from violations of mainstream Hollywood film form in the areas of editing, subtitling, camera, mise-en-scène and narrative. Wang could realize these projects through innovative financing using the strategy of shadow film and pioneering new approaches to distribution by premiering The Princess of Nebraska on YouTube.
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Entering the cinema of attractions’ Matrix: Yuen Wo-Ping’s merging of Hollywood spectacle with kungfu choreography
More LessAbstractOn its ascension to its current status as Hollywood’s chief competitor and collaborator, mainland Chinese cinema has benefited from a select group of filmmakers who contributed to blockbuster films overseas. Many of these filmmakers, including Yuen Wo-Ping, returned home and fused the awe-inducing visual effects (e.g. ‘the bullettime effect’) of the new wave of Hollywood’s cinema of attractions with the acrobatics of Chinese wuxia and kungfu films. This article will look closely at Yuen’s work in Hong Kong cinema before moving onto an analysis of his work on films such as The Matrix trilogy and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I will then demonstrate how his experience abroad brings a transnational aesthetic to mainland Chinese cinema that proffers new senses of global identity and being amidst its thrills.
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Modernizing primordialism: Deterritorializing Chineseness and reterritorializing the sinophone in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
By Jason G. CoeAbstractThe wuxia tradition in cinema constructs primordial ‘Chineseness’ and ‘cultural China’ as identities to be transmitted and deployed around the world. The article critiques frameworks that take cultural identities such as ‘Chineseness’ or ‘Americanness’ for granted. Such frameworks engender reductive views of culture as an essential substance, with the cinema of said culture expressing or conveying that cultural essence, or imitations thereof, around the world. Such arguments falsely assume that cinemas either ‘authentically’ represent the national or ethnic origin of their producers or signify the coming together of two vaguely defined cultures in hybrid form, typically east meeting west. This article demonstrates how cinema generates cultural identities, using Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to illustrate how the wuxia tradition creates imagined worlds that connect disparate peoples, including populations traditionally regarded as diaspora. Wuxia uses imagined histories of mythical places to enable imagined community, while transmitting and concretizing that cultural identity through cinema. As the film’s main plot device, the sword demonstrates how passing for traditional is a modern practice for local cinemas to gain access to global film markets. The article concludes by discussing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a minoritarian artwork that engenders becoming sinophone by deterritorializing cultural Chineseness from the nation state, thereby highlighting the processes by which sinophone cinemas mediate cultural identity by engaging and modernizing established norms.
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A taste of home: Emotional transnationalism and China Lion Film Distribution in the United States
By Valerie SoeAbstractBetween 2010 and 2015, China Lion Film Distribution released 55 Chinese-language films in North America on the same day as the films were released in the People’s Republic of China. In 2014, China Lion hit its stride, with a string of seven films that each grossed more than US$100,000 in limited release in North America. By marketing Chinese-language films in the United States to Chinese transmigrant communities rather than to mainstream US audiences, China Lion takes advantage of the emotional transnationalism of Chinese Americans, bringing them a recognizable taste of ‘Home’ in their new place of residence. This article looks at the ways in which China Lion’s recent releases in US multiplexes differ from past attempts to bring Chinese and Hong Kong cinema to North America. China Lion’s success reflects China’s rapidly expanding film industry and the growing relationship between China, Hollywood and the global film market at large, and also reflects the changing demographics of the twenty-first-century Chinese American community.
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Leukocentric Hollywood: Whitewashing, Alohagate and the dawn of Hollywood with Chinese characteristics
More LessAbstractHollywood’s long-standing practice of leukocentrism is condemned as a false and outdated adherence to an aspect of commercial determinism whereby whitewashing a film is held to ensure its profitability, universality, popularity and social meaningfulness, especially when it involves Asian and Asian American characters. Criticism of this practice came to a head in what became known as ‘Alohagate’, which started with the miscasting of Emma Stone in Aloha (2015) and continued with Doctor Strange (2016), Birth of the Dragon (2016) and plans for the live action version of Disney’s animated Mulan (2020 forthcoming). Asian American filmmakers protested via their #WhiteWashedOut Twitter campaign and drew attention to the targeting of Asians for racist jokes at the 2016 Oscars. The Hollywood response is one of innocent ignorance, which only highlights rather than dispels the deep-rootedness of leukocentrism. These individuals are identified as hūpō haole, Hawaiian for ‘clueless Caucasian/foreigner’, who are granted an opportunity to become enlightened by abandoning their leukocentric bias.
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Book Review
More LessAbstractKing Hu In His Own Words, Roger Garcia and George Chun Han Wang (eds) (2013) 15th Udine Far East Film Festival, Udine: Centro Espressioni Cinematografiche, 213 pp., p/bk, ISBN 9788889887134, €20,
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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)