All the world’s a stage: global players and transnational film performance (original) (raw)

Blockbuster Performances: How Actors Contribute to Cinema’s Biggest Hits

2018

This series encompasses the spectrum of contemporary scholarship on screen performance and embraces productive tensions within film and media studies and between cinema and cultural studies. It features historical research that sheds light on the aesthetic and material forces that shape the production and reception of screen performances in different times, venues, and locales. The series also presents research that expands our understanding of screen performance by examining various types and registers of performance, including those outside the domain of conveying character. The series strives to offer new insights into film/media practice and history by exploring the tools and methods of screen performance practitioners as well as the shifting modes and significances of screen performance in changing social-technological environments.

"Hero": Placing Asian Cinema within National and International Boundaries

This paper focuses on Chinese auteur Zhang Yimou, in particular his work on the martial arts epic "Hero" (2002). By using "Hero" as a case study, this paper argues for the film to be both a strong example of national cinema at work by the function of its martial arts genre, as well as a globalized cultural product intent on selling China’s soft, and possibly, hard power to the world via its aesthetical form and political subtext embedded in the film. In addition, this paper explores "Hero"’s attempt to bridge the cultural gap between the East and West, forming a kind of global-local alliance that sees Zhang not only as a respected auteur, but also as one of his country’s foremost cultural brokers. Lastly, this paper discusses on the implications for Asian cinema in relation to national identity and an increasingly transnational influence on film production and distribution.

Martial arts and the globalization of US and Asian film industries

Comparative American Studies An International Journal, 2004

This article investigates how globalization is affecting film industries in the USA and Asia. It argues that these industries are becoming more closely integrated with one another both materially and aesthetically, and that this in turn is leading to the denationalization of individual films and film industries on both sides of the Pacific. The article explores how globalization is experienced differently by different film industries-and by different sectors within individual industries-and how it entails both losses and opportunities for Asian film makers. Taking the contemporary Hollywood and East Asian martial arts film as an exemplary cultural style of globalization, it also looks at how integration involves both cultural homogenization and the production of difference. Specific topics discussed include the growth of Hollywood's Asian markets, Jackie Chan and the flow of Hong Kong talent into Hollywood, Hollywood remakes of South Korean movies, the resurgence of Asian film industries, Hollywood's local-language film production and Zhang Yimou's Hero.