Lee Kang-sheng: Non-professional Star (original) (raw)

Ang Lee: The Universal Language of Cinema

2019

Ang Lee has directed breathtaking films in 6 different languages across countries, genres, cultures and decades. Starting in Taiwan and then England, the United States's midwest, New England, China and India he has created a vast and diverse library of stories that have earned him international acclaim in almost every film festival. Ever the outsider in each of these cultures, Lee has managed to successfully make of the foreign language category a masterpiece assembly line, cranking out universally loved stories that rival any one nation's work. An auteur that speaks to the hearts of generations across languages in the one language they all understand, cinema. Lee was born in Taiwan, his family, like many others left china after the Chinese civil war ended with Mao's communists in power. He grew up in a heavily academic household, his father had always pressured him into academic excellence, expecting him to go on into a respectable career. Although after a discovery of his love for theater in Taiwan and in pursuit of a creative freedom, Lee set off to study in America, a theater student from a different country, speaking and performing in a second language, in The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen author Whitney Crothers Dilley explains how "[i]n 1974 Ang Lee went to the United States and, with financial support from his family, entered the University of Illinois [...] as a theatre major [...]. His English was heavily accented and far from fluent. Therefore, he faced inevitable difficulties with his drama performance courses" (1)

Ang Lee: when East met West

LMU Munich, Cultural Studies Workshop, 2015

The transgression of borders as basic condition for the theming of the other is one of the essential concerns of art and culture (Waldenfels, 1998). For example, Mikhail Bachtin (1995) formulated his theory about the Carnival around the concept of the other. Carnival is characterized by the transcending of borders. Only during those crazy times can one look at what is otherwise hidden. In this way, popular culture with its exaggerated desire to "laugh" contributes to the carnival of high cultures (Bachtin, 1995, 52-54). Is this boundary blurring a subject in Lee's work? The worldwide reception of Lees' films gives rise to the question as to what extent Bachtin's carnival as a result of literary transgressions also contributes to the softening of cultural boundaries trough Lee's cinematographic work. However, while Bachtin concluded the design of a counterculture with the carnival of high cultures, Lee's stagings of others portray rather opposing worlds that are to be located beyond conventional concepts of culture: That is when East and West finally finished meeting each other to become a transcultural heirtage.

Spatial and Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang

IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship, 2013

Malaysian-born Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang is known for his films about encounters between strangers in disorienting urban environments. His films are also often tinged with nostalgia and a sense of temporal disorientation in the modern world. In this paper, I examine Tsai's film The Hole along with his earlier Vive L'Amour in terms of his motifs of disorientation, in both the temporal and spatial senses, adding another dimension that I will call "sexual disorientation" drawing from Michael Moon and Sara Ahmed. Sexual disorientation unsettles our assumptions, our "knowingness," about sexual identity, resulting in uncanny and queer effects on our reading of desire in cinematic narratives. Queer in this sense challenges the fixity implied by the logic of sexual orientation. My reading of Tsai's films as having queer effects is in part a way of understanding his statement that he is "sick of people labeling my films as 'gay films'." I argue that both Vive L'Amour and The Hole perform a deconstruction of sexual identity, in that they treat sexuality and desire as performed without cohering in an identity. Tsai's framing of how bodies are oriented in space also manages to "queer" space. I end with a coda on the transnational queer encounters in his recent film I Don't Want to Sleep Alone.

The Limits of Resemblance: Gender Representation in the Films of Hong Sang-soo

San Francisco State University, 2019

This paper looks to Hong Sang-soo’s 2010 film, Oki’s Movie, to analyze how a middle-aged male filmmaker attempts to express the subjective experience of a woman who is three decades his junior. This semi-episodic film tells four stories from the alternate perspectives of Korean men and women of different generations. Instead of simply reversing dominant gender roles, the film’s complex semi-episodic narrative encourages the audience to engage with multiple contradictory male and female perspectives simultaneously. The effects of these strategies are demonstrated through an analysis of the interaction between gender and narrative structure within the film’s four overlapping storylines. I argue that the way that Hong’s film confuses the separation between the diegeses of each episode encourages the viewer to recognize the different webs of systemic and interpersonal power that shape all gender identities. I also survey various theories of voice-over (particularly those of Britta Sjogren and Kaja Silverman) to show how point of view is sexually differentiated between each episode. Each character is then examined as a surrogate for the director himself in order to show the vital role that self-reference plays as a tool by which the author deconstructs their own privilege and authority. Finally, my paper expands the film’s gender politics to a larger critique of “phallocentric” theories of sexual difference and cultural studies. The film’s presentation of multiple subjectivities is framed as a powerful opposition to overly essentializing approaches to sexuality, identity and film theory. This approach toward Oki’s Movie shows how an author in a majority position may respectfully speak to the subjective experience of a member of their social minority.

The ambivalent identity of Wong Kar-wai's cinema

2009

Ayant realise neuf longs-metrages entre 1988 et 2007, aussi que plusieurs campagnes publicitaires, video-clips, courts-metrages et projets collectifs, Wong Kar-wai est un des realisateurs contemporains les plus importants actuellement. Issu de l'industrie cinematographique fortement commerciale de Hong Kong, Wong est parvenu a attirer l'attention du circuit international des festivals de cinema avec son style visuel unique et son recit fragmente. Considere par plusieurs critiques comme le poete de la recherche d’identite de Hong Kong apres 1997, Wong Kar-wai defie toutes les tentatives de categorisation. L’etude qui se poursuivit ici a donc pour objet essentiel de fournir une analyse attentive et complete de son oeuvre, tout en se concentrant sur les traits stylistiques qui donnent a ses films une unite. Ces caracteristiques correspondent a une certaine facon de raconter des histoires, de composer des personnages et des recits, de manipuler le temps et d'utiliser des res...