Review of Jing Jing Chang, Screening Communities: Negotiating Narratives of Empire, Nation, and the Cold War in Hong Kong Cinema (original) (raw)
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2015
In the analysis of Hong Kong cinema side notes on the relationship between particular motifs or stylistic features and Chinese intellectual history are relatively common. Fleshing out this relationship, however, is problematic due to the intricacies of Chinese thought as well as pace and volume of popular culture. In spite of this difficult relation, the thesis reconstructs the narrative and stylistic development of post-war Hong Kong cinema against relevant aspects of premodern Chinese thought, demonstrating how the latter provides an effective framework in which to explicate prominent motifs and visual architecture. Yin, or ‘concealment’, furnishes the conceptual space for the encounter, isolating relevant elements in the Legalist, Confucian, Daoist, and aesthetic canon and informing the analysis of select Hong Kong films. The body of the dissertation is comprised of four chapters; each juxtaposes an aspect of pre-modern thought with cinematic texts chosen to illustrate distinct d...
The Ultimate Female Auteur: Visuality, Subjectivity, and History in the Works of Peng Xiaolian
Front. Lit. Stud. China, 2017
Peng Xiaolian is a rare and prolific Chinese author who writes both fiction and non‐fiction works and directs both dramatic and documentary films. Peng has not only written, cowritten, or rewritten all the screenplays of her eight dramatic features and two documentaries but is also the author of one novel, twelve novellas, over a dozen short stories, four book‐length memoirs, three collections of film reviews, and numerous essays. The existing scholarly studies, however, nearly all focus on Peng's dramatic films, with much less, if any, attention directed at her writing and documentaries. To really understand Peng as a film auteur, however, it is necessary to look at her films and writings together. Given the quantity and complexity of her works and the space limitations of this article, I examine Peng's subversion of the conventional treatment of character, location, and time in three thematic sections reflecting the key narrative motifs in her work. I first summarize existing studies of Peng's films, highlighting the rarely examined interaction between visuality and spatiality in her films. Then, after defining her sense of time in narrative, I demonstrate how family history and self‐reflexivity are the major difference between her films and her nonfiction works. Last but not least, I discuss how, through her use of multilayered narratives constructed by the female voice and subjectivity, her complete repertoire constitutes a unique history of modern Chinese women. This article aims to demonstrate how, through her use of multilayered narratives constructed by the female voice and subjectivity, her complete repertoire constitutes a unique history of modern Chinese women. This research is partially sponsored by GRF Project (No. 11610915) titled "Female Directors and Women's Cinema in Hong Kong：1950-1997“, awarded by Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong University Press, 2015
Visual Style and the Aesthetic of Disturbance Many of Asian cinema's most renowned auteurs have m ounted stylistic programs optimizing a narrow range of techniques. Ozu Yasujiro mines the expressive possibilities of frontal staging, xed shot perspective, and low camera height. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Jia Zhangke test the inexhaustibility of extended takes and distanced framings. Zhang Che and John Woo explore the kinesthetic effects of camera-speed juxtapositions and rapid zoom shots. In Bordwell's terms, these lmmakers are "stubborn stylists," faithful to their stylistic signatures (2007). Unlike these counterparts, Wong Kar-wai holds fast to no stable stylistic repertoire. And yet Wong's lms-even those as stylistically dissimilar as Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love-seem uni ed by a consistent visual sensibility. In this chapter I argue that Wong is a director wedded not so much to a privileged set of visual techniques as to an elevated narrational principle, to which an array of stylistic techniques is subordinated. This governing principle-Wong's stylistic dominant, in neoformalist parlance-involves complicating (or roughening) the viewer's perception and comprehension without sacri cing overall dramatic clarity. Pledged to making the image "dif cult" yet intelligible, Wong revises, recombines, and repurposes standard schemas of visual style. This authorial strategy contributes to an overall aesthetic of perceptual and cognitive disturbance. By promoting a formal principle above favored devices, Wong outstrips aesthetic pigeonholing-hence he is no more a "long-take director" than he is a devotee of MTV-style editing. And yet, while Wong is in a sense properly characterized as a "polystylistic" lmmaker (Bordwell 2011: 176), he stays monogamous to a stylistic (and narrative) norm of roughened form and perceptual dif culty. In other words, Wong embraces stylistic pluralism, but his lms are uni ed by an enduring aesthetic principle. For Wong, the lm experience involves perceptual and cognitive challenge. Since the early 1990s, he has sought to set dramatically legible devices against tactics that disturb the
Hong Kong University Press, 2015
The foregoing analysis of Wong's work has demonstrated his artistic ingenuity and accomplishment. In the following section, I examine Wong's most recent feature-length lm, The Grandmaster (2013), from the perspective of the parameters and contexts that have structured this book so far: musical and visual style, story and narration, and popular genre. The Grandmaster has become Wong's biggest commercial success to date, igniting claims that Wong has entirely abandoned his "local" sensibility and the complex storytelling style for which he is renowned. Detractors argue that The Grandmaster testi es to Wong's turn (or regression) to popular genre and an international mode of address. Indeed, several critical reviews describe this lm as an atypical or anomalous entry in Wong's authorial oeuvre. Yet The Grandmaster embodies and extends many of the stylistic, narrative, and thematic features identi ed in the preceding chapters, no matter the lm's "anomalous" global popularity and impressive box of ce success (it grossed $45,270,000 in the PRC market alone). The Grandmaster's aesthetic strategies attest to Wong's continued endurance as an innovative and artistically relevant lmmaker in world cinema. As Bordwell (1981, 1988, 2005) has shown, a director's importance and fecundity can be further highlighted by examining the uses his or her work gives rise to. In what ways has Wong's cinema been appropriated? This study has placed particular stress on the viewing effects engendered by Wong's lms; but what of the lms' wider artistic and social effects, effects that Wong might not have intended or foreseen? In this concluding chapter, I go on to sketch Wong's in uence on contemporary world cinema. In summarizing the book's main concerns, I also discuss how one particular lm-Happy Together-has been appropriated by queer scholarship and thus has yielded broad social effects. I take this opportunity to hypothesize some of the ways that a poetics of cinema can illuminate the kinds of culturalist inquiries pursued by queer theorists. Finally, I brie y sketch potential pathways for Wong's future productions.