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- Volume 1, Issue 3, 2015
East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 1, Issue 3, 2015
Volume 1, Issue 3, 2015
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In search of an ‘origin’: Re-presenting guoxue in Chinese cinema of the new millennium
By Yun ZhuAbstractThis article examines Zhang Yimou’s Yingxiong/Hero (2002), Chen Kaige’s Mei Lanfang/Forever Enthralled (2008) and Hu Mei’s Kongzi/Confucius (2010), and discusses how they respectively reconstruct narratives of a mythical national spirit via sublimated portrayals of guoxue and how such re-presentations respond to both earlier cinematic traditions and the more and more intense trend of commercialization in the Chinese film industry. What makes these films’ shared investment in guoxue even more interesting is the fact that all these three directors are representative figures of the so-called ‘Fifth Generation’, a group of film-makers who were best known for their self-consciously critical approaches towards Chinese cultural traditions in the 1980s. Their recent collective enthusiasm for guoxue and much more positive re-presentations of it not only indicate a revisit to the heated discussions over indigenous cultural roots two to three decades ago but also reflect the restructured relationships among film-makers, their audiences and the state.
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The sky is the limit: Feng Xiaonings leitmotif cinema, Chinese soft power and ideological fantasy
More LessAbstractThis article explores the intersection of politics and popular entertainment in contemporary Chinese leitmotif cinema (zhuxuanlü dianying), a genre that conflates political didacticism with Hollywood-style entertainment. Through my reading of three movies by Feng Xiaoning (馮小寧) – the hero-epos Qingzang xian/A Railway in the Clouds (2006) about the building of a rail link to Tibet; the disaster movie Chaoqiang taifeng/Super Typhoon (2008), about a Chinese metropolis hit by a storm; and the war-action drama Jiawu dahaizhan/Naval Battle (2012), about the Sino-Japanese naval conflict of 1895 – I will illustrate how leitmotif cinema negotiates demands for doctrinal orthodoxy with expectations for box office success. Feng’s cinematic aesthetics are thus symptomatic of the discursive complexity of post-socialist Chinese cinema where multiple temporalities and modes of production coexist in a climate of state-enforced ideological hegemony and revenue-driven market economics.
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Bodies in crisis: Sensuality and the cinematic reconfiguration of the spy genre in contemporary Chinese cinema
By Yanhong ZhuAbstractSpy films produced during the Cold War and the immediate post-Cold War era in Mainland China reflect a heightened anxiety of national security and serve primarily as political propaganda. This article examines the changing cultural context of post-socialist China and the transformation of the spy film genre in contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization and transnationalism. Looking specifically at three recently released films, Ang Lees Se jie/Lust, Caution (2007), Chen Guofu and Gao Qunshus Fengsheng/The Message (2009) and Alan Mak and Felix Chongs Ting feng zhe/The Silent War (2012), this article examines the centrality of body narrative to the cinematic reconfiguration of the spy genre in contemporary Chinese cinema. It argues that the recently emerged spy films demonstrate special interests in the bodys dual role in cinema as both an image that invites the embodied spectator to engage with it and a site where multiple discourses of nationhood, sexuality and individual identity intersect to reveal the transnational imagination and reconfiguration of the spy figure, whose identity can no longer be defined by an absolute dichotomy between mind and body, between exteriority and interiority, but by the constant tension generated from the inseparability between the minds rationality and the bodys corporeality.
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Lost in Thailand: Travel metaphors in contemporary Chinese comedy
By Wei YangAbstractChinese cinema at the turn of the twenty-first century is replete with metaphors of travel migration, roaming, exile, diaspora, and more recently, adventure and tourism. This article explores the allegorical uses of mobility and journey in recent New Years comedies, as exemplified by Xu Zhengs 2012 blockbuster release Ren zai jiongtu zhi taijiong/Lost in Thailand, a film that is widely considered to have shaken up Chinas domestic film industry. The notion of Thailand in the film as simultaneously a commercial and spiritual destination is crucial to the matter at hand. I argue that the spatial consumption typical of travel films acquires an alternative form here, one that does not fortify but rather undermines the imagination of Chinese power in a foreign land. This form of spatiality is best understood within the generic framework of New Years comedy, as well as the larger context of consumer culture and mass entertainment. Inquiring into the mixed tropes of comedy and melodrama, I seek to illustrate how the newly emergent tourist discourse builds upon the organizational principles of holiday-themed films, and how this particular genre and style, at times, can enable apolitical encounters with the societys collective consciousness, while critiquing the limits and conditions of Chinas post-socialist reality from within.
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Cultural extraterritoriality: Intra-regional politics in contemporary Hong Kong cinema
By Victor FanAbstractIn this article, Victor Fan argues that analysing contemporary Hong Kong cinema requires active rewriting of established postcolonial theories by taking into account the specific mode of colonization of Hong Kong: extraterritoriality. This concept has been responsible for the construction of the cultural plurality, linguistic ambiguity and political liminality of Hong Kong and its cinematographic experience, as well as the incongruence between the communitys political consciousness after 1997 and the larger national imagination promulgated by the Beijing government. The term extraterritoriality was translated into Chinese after 1895 via Japanese as zhiwai faquan: the right to exercise ones law outside a nation states sovereign terrain, and colonialism in China between 1844 and 1949 was largely characterized by a continuous reformulation and systematization of this concept. It in fact still informs the way former colonized regions in China are administered today, and the political unconscious of their residents. With Johnnie Tos 2012 film Duzhan (Ct. Dukzin)/Drug War as a case study, contemporary Hong Kong cinema, Fan argues, can be understood as a public sphere where an extraterritorial consciousness and the contesting political affects associated with it are actively negotiated.
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Anticipating action: The evolving grammar of action and montage in Hong Kong cinema
More LessAbstractIn his formalist reading, David Bordwell (2001: 73, 80) uses the term pause-burst-pause pattern to refer to the cinematic expressivity of Hong Kong action cinema. Although the pause-burst-pause paradigm locates stasis and action that lie at the heart of the performance and cinematic representation of physical action, the pause-burst-pause punctuation undergoes aesthetic transformation in the digital age. Through a comparative analysis of five representative films from the 1960s to the millennium, this article explores Hong Kong action cinemas historical evolution from the display of physical combat (swordplay, kung fu and gunplay) to intense psychological mind game and heightened aestheticization in four stylistic turns fantastic, realist, formalist and digital. Wong Kar-wais Yi dai zong shi/The Grandmaster (2013), following the box office success of transnational Chinese martial arts cinemas, serves as a prime example of the digital turn as postcolonial Hong Kong action cinema positions and articulates itself to an increasingly international film scene. Taking Lisa Purses (2005: 152) notion of hypermediacy as a springboard, I argue that the combined use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and aestheticized slow motion in The Grandmaster represents a new appreciation of slowness and softness, reinventing corporeal authenticity that the action genre is premised on.
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Dont mention (them) again! Shame, the Black Eagles Incident and Winds of September
By Po-hsi ChenAbstractThe 1997 Black Eagles Incident of the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) marks the Edenic fall in the history of baseball in Taiwan. Since the Black Eagles Incident, the nationalist discourse of glory had been intertwined with the narrative of shame. Having been immersed in the spirit of triumphalism in the early 2000s, baseball in Taiwan was again beset by a series of large-scale game-fixing scandals in the latter half of the 2000s. The neologism mozaiti dont mention again was coined as a response by desperate fans. This article reads Lin Shu-yus 2008 film Jiujiang feng/Winds of September, a baseball story of initiation and disillusion featuring a former professional baseball players cameo appearance, against this backdrop. The film visually frames a phantasmatic space in which the not-to-be-mentioned fallen hero is staged to perform his failure and guilt. In so doing, his affect of shame is exchanged with his fans through that cinematically imagined, constructed phantasmatic space. In this sense, the image of baseball in the post-martial-law era is internalized within ones adolescence and familial (especially father-and-son) relationship. In Winds of September, ones faulted youth and troubled family ties are reconciled through coming to terms with the baseball scandal.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Ulises Moreno and Marc L. MoskowitzAbstractPopular Culture in Asia: Memory, City, Celebrity, Lorna Fitzsimmons and John A. Lent (eds), (2013 First Edition) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 240 pp., ISBN: 1137270195, Hardback, $47.50, 9781137270207 Electronic, $35.62
Asian Popular Culture: The Global (Dis)continuity, Anthony Y. H. Fung (ed.), (2013 First Edition) New York: Routledge, 274 pp., ISBN: 9780415557177, Paperback, £29.99
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