Sinascape Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Sinascape book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema is a comprehensive study of Chinese-language films at the turn of the millennium. Emphasizing the transnational nature of contemporary Chinese cinema, it provides close readings of most of the important films of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and explores the interactions and transactions among these films and between Chinese cinema and Hollywood. General readers, film enthusiasts, and critics will all benefit from Gary Xu's discussion of popular films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Kung Fu Hustle, Devils on the Doorstep, Suzhou River, Beijing Bicycle, Millennium Mambo, Goodbye Dragon Inn, and Hollywood Hong Kong.
Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema is a comprehensive study of Chinese-language films at the turn of the millennium. Emphasizing the transnational nature of contemporary Chinese cinema, it provides close readings of most of the important films of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and explores the interactions and transactions among these films and between Chinese cinema and Hollywood. General readers, film enthusiasts, and critics will all benefit from Gary Xu's discussion of popular films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Kung Fu Hustle, Devils on the Doorstep, Suzhou River, Beijing Bicycle, Millennium Mambo, Goodbye Dragon Inn, and Hollywood Hong Kong.
An Annotated Bibliography for Taiwan Film Studies by Jim Cheng,James Wicks,Sachie Noguchi Pdf
Compiled by two skilled librarians and a Taiwanese film and culture specialist, this volume is the first multilingual and most comprehensive bibliography of Taiwanese film scholarship, designed to satisfy the broad interests of the modern researcher. The second book in a remarkable three-volume research project, An Annotated Bibliography for Taiwan Film Studies catalogues the published and unpublished monographs, theses, manuscripts, and conference proceedings of Taiwanese film scholars from the 1950s to 2013. Paired with An Annotated Bibliography for Chinese Film Studies (2004), which accounts for texts dating back to the 1920s, this series brings together like no other reference the disparate voices of Chinese film scholarship, charting its unique intellectual arc. Organized intuitively, the volume begins with reference materials (bibliographies, cinematographies, directories, indexes, dictionaries, and handbooks) and then moves through film history (the colonial period, Taiwan dialect film, new Taiwan cinema, the 2/28 incident); film genres (animated, anticommunist, documentary, ethnographic, martial arts, teen); film reviews; film theory and technique; interdisciplinary studies (Taiwan and mainland China, Taiwan and Japan, film and aboriginal peoples, film and literature, film and nationality); biographical materials; film stories, screenplays, and scripts; film technology; and miscellaneous aspects of Taiwanese film scholarship (artifacts, acts of censorship, copyright law, distribution channels, film festivals, and industry practice). Works written in multiple languages include transliteration/romanized and original script entries, which follow universal AACR-2 and American cataloguing standards, and professional notations by the editors to aid in the use of sources.
Show People offers a comprehensive history of the idea of the film star from Mary Pickford to Andy Serkis, traversing more than one hundred years and drawing on examples from America, Britain, Europe, and Asia. Renowned film writer Michael Newton explores our enduring love affair with fame, glamour, and the cinematic image. Newton builds up an expansive picture of movie stardom through explorations of striking and diverse figures such as Ingrid Bergman and John Wayne, Anna Karina and Sidney Poitier, Maggie Cheung, and Raj Kapoor. He celebrates the great performers of the past, and he looks forward to developments in the future, while also illuminating the inner workings of the movie industry and what moves us in a film and in an actor’s performance. An encyclopedic, illustrated history of film idols ready for their close-ups, Show People is ultimately a book about cinephilia, the love of cinema, and our complex connection to that celebrated and beleaguered figure, the movie star.
Author : Sheldon H. Lu,Jiayan Mi Publisher : Hong Kong University Press Page : 384 pages File Size : 43,5 Mb Release : 2009-12-01 Category : Social Science ISBN : 9789622090866
This anthology is a book-length study of China's ecosystem through the lens of cinema. Proposing 'ecocinema' as a new critical framework, the volume collectively investigates a wide range of urgent topics in today's world.
From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda by Naomi Greene Pdf
Throughout the twentieth century, American filmmakers have embraced cinematic representations of China. Beginning with D.W. Griffith’s silent classicBroken Blossoms (1919) and ending with the computer-animated Kung Fu Panda (2008), this book explores China’s changing role in the American imagination. Taking viewers into zones that frequently resist logical expression or more orthodox historical investigation, the films suggest the welter of intense and conflicting impulses that have surrounded China. They make clear that China has often served as the very embodiment of “otherness”—a kind of yardstick or cloudy mirror of America itself. It is a mirror that reflects not only how Americans see the racial “other” but also a larger landscape of racial, sexual, and political perceptions that touch on the ways in which the nation envisions itself and its role in the world. In the United States, the exceptional emotional charge that imbues images of China has tended to swing violently from positive to negative and back again: China has been loved and—as is generally the case today—feared. Using film to trace these dramatic fluctuations, author Naomi Greene relates them to the larger arc of historical and political change. Suggesting that filmic images both reflect and fuel broader social and cultural impulses, she argues that they reveal a constant tension or dialectic between the “self” and the “other.” Significantly, with the important exception of films made by Chinese or Chinese American directors, the Chinese other is almost invariably portrayed in terms of the American self. Placed in a broader context, this ethnocentrism is related both to an ever-present sense of American exceptionalism and to a Manichean world view that perceives other countries as friends or enemies. “From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda chronicles the struggle within Hollywood film to come to grips with American ambivalence toward China as a nation against the backdrop of its current economic and geopolitical ascendancy on the world stage. Reaching back to early film portrayals of Chinatown, Christian missionaries, warlords, and perverse villains bent on world domination, Greene moves from the ‘yellow peril’ to the ‘red menace’ as she examines WWII and Cold War cinema. She also explores the range of film fantasies circulating today, from films about Tibet to Chinese American independent features and the global popularity of kung fu cartoons. This accessible book allows these films to speak to the post 9-11/Occupy Wall Street generation and makes a welcome contribution to debates about Hollywood Orientalism and transnational Chinese film connections.” —Gina Marchetti, author of The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema “A significant work of filmography, Naomi Greene’s book explores the exotic, at times menacing, but always fantastic images of China flickering on the silver screen of the American imagination. The author writes lucidly, jargon-free, and with the sure-footedness of a seasoned scholar.” —Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China by Yingjin Zhang Pdf
In this milestone work, prominent China film scholar Yingjin Zhang proposes "polylocality" as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema paradigm, Zhang calls for comparative studies of underdeveloped areas beyond the imperative of transnationalism. The book begins by addressing theories and practices related to space, place, and polylocality in contemporary China before focusing on the space of scholarship and urging scholars to move beyond the current paradigm and explore transnational and comparative film studies. This is followed by a chapter that concentrates on the space of production and surveys the changing landscape of postsocialist filmmaking and the transformation of China’s urban generation of directors. Next is an examination of the space of polylocality and the cinematic mappings of Beijing and a persistent "reel" contact with polylocality in hinterland China. In the fifth chapter Zhang explores the space of subjectivity in independent film and video and contextualizes experiments by young directors with various documentary styles. Chapter 6 calls attention to the space of performance and addresses issues of media and mediation by way of two kinds of playing: the first with documentary as troubling information, the second with piracy as creative intervention. The concluding chapter offers an overview of Chinese cinema in the new century and provides production and reception statistics. Combining inspired critical insights, original observations, and new information, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China is a significant work on current Chinese film and a must-read for film scholars and anyone seriously interested in cinema more generally or contemporary Chinese culture.
Author : James Wicks Publisher : Hong Kong University Press Page : 192 pages File Size : 49,8 Mb Release : 2014-11-01 Category : History ISBN : 9789888208500
Transnational Representations focuses on a neglected period in Taiwan film scholarship: the golden age of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw innovations in plot, theme and genre as directors highlighted the complexities of Taiwan’s position in the world. Combining a concise overview of Taiwan film history with analysis of representative Taiwan films, the book reveals the internal and external struggles Taiwan experienced in its search for global identity. This cross-disciplinary study adopts a transnational approach which presents Taiwan’s film industry as one that is intertwined with that of mainland China, challenging previous accounts that present the two industries as parallel yet separate. The book also offers productive comparisons between Taiwan films and contemporary films elsewhere representing the politics of migration, and between the antecedents of new cinema movements and Taiwan New Cinema of the 1980s. “James Wicks’s book offers a most nuanced, sensible, and timely account of the 1960s to 1970s Taiwan films in terms of plot, theme, language, and generic innovations. It zooms in on works by such prominent directors as Li Xing, Bai Jingrui, Song Cunshou, and others, highlighting local, regional, and transnational flows, while not losing sight of the complexities in the island-state’s identity and modernity formation processes.” —Ping-hui Liao, University of California, San Diego “Wicks’s engaging study forges a comparative approach to Taiwanese cinema that is enlivened and inspired by the possibility of close reading, historical research, and interviews. Most importantly, it draws attention to seminal films so rarely discussed in the English language.” —Brian Hu, artistic director of the San Diego Asian Film Festival
A tour de force chronicling the development of realism in Chinese cinema The history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Be it the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, each Chinese cinematic era has necessitated its own form in conversation with broader trends in politics and culture. In Chinese Film, Jason McGrath tells this fascinating story by tracing the varied claims to cinematic realism made by Chinese filmmakers, officials, critics, and scholars. Understanding realism as a historical dynamic that is both enabled and mitigated by aesthetic conventions of the day, he analyzes it across six different types of claims: ontological, perceptual, fictional, social, prescriptive, and apophatic. Through this method, McGrath makes major claims not just about Chinese cinema but also about realism as an aesthetic form that negotiates between cultural conventions and the ever-evolving real. He comes to envision it as more than just a cinematic question, showing how the struggle for realism is central to the Chinese struggle for modernity itself.
Critical theory and popular wisdom are rife with images of surveillance as an intrusive, repressive practice often suggestively attributed to eastern powers and opposed to western liberalism. Hollywood-dominated global media has long promulgated a geopoliticized east-west axis of freedom vs. control. This book focuses on Asian and Asia-based films and cinematic traditions obscured by lopsided western hegemonic discourse and—more specifically—probes these films’ treatments of a phenomenon that western film often portrays with neo-orientalist hysteria. Exploring recent and historical movies made in post-social and anti-Communist societies such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and South Korea, the book picks up on the political and economic concerns implicitly underlying Sinophobic and anti-Communist Asian images in Hollywood films while also considering how these societies and states depict the issues of centralization, militarization and technological innovation so often figured as distinctive of the difference between eastern despotism and western liberalism.
Nascent Filmmakers in Hong Kong, 2000–2020 by Fangyu Chen Pdf
This book is an interdisciplinary study of the commerce–art–politics nexus of Hong Kong cinema from 2000 to 2020, investigating the current nascent generation of film workers who joined the industry as it gradually entered an era marked by the domination of Hong Kong/mainland co-productions. Fangyu Chen explores the filmmaking ideologies of the emerging filmmakers from both within and beyond their film texts and uncovers the artistic and ideological discrepancies between this generation and their predecessors—the established generation who contributed to the glory days of Hong Kong cinema during its economic boom. By tracing the studies of national cinema and transnational cinema, Chen debunks the national/transnational antagonism with the case of post-2000 Hong Kong cinema and argues that it has split into two: a transnational cinema represented by the established generation of filmmakers and a national cinema that is driven by the nascent generation who are struggling for better preservation of Hong Kong local culture and their own cultural identities. Employing a Hong Kong/mainland film dynamics perspective, this study addresses a gap in the academic study of Hong Kong cinema, drawing attention to the material conditions and artistic visions of the craft labour in the industry. Scholars of communication, film studies, and labor economics will find this book of particular interest.
The first comprehensive collection on the subject of Hong Kong neo-noir cinema, this book examines the way Hong Kong has developed its own unique and culturally specific version of the neo-noir genre, while at the same time drawing on and adapting existing international noir cinemas. With a range of contributions from established and emerging scholars, this book illuminates the origins of Hong Kong neo-noir, its styles and contemporary manifestations, and its connection to mainland China. Case studies include classics such as The Wild Wild Rose (1960) and more recent films like Full Alert (1997) and Exiled (2007), as well as an in-depth look at the careers of iconic figures like Johnnie To and Jackie Chan. By examining at its past and its contemporary development, Hong Kong Neo-Noir also points towards the genre's possible future development.
A Companion to Chinese Cinema by Yingjin Zhang Pdf
A Companion to Chinese Cinema is a collection of original essays written by experts in a range of disciplines that provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution and current state of Chinese cinema. Represents the most comprehensive coverage of Chinese cinema to date Applies a multidisciplinary approach that maps the expanding field of Chinese cinema in bold and definitive ways Draws attention to previously neglected areas such as diasporic filmmaking, independent documentary, film styles and techniques, queer aesthetics, star studies, film and other arts or media Features several chapters that explore China’s new market economy, government policy, and industry practice, placing the intricate relationship between film and politics in a historical and international context Includes overviews of Chinese film studies in Chinese and English publications
Postsocialist China is marked by paradoxes: economic boom, political conservatism, cultural complexity. Haomin Gong’s dynamic study of these paradoxes, or “unevenness,” provides a unique and seminal approach to contemporary China. Reading unevenness as a problem and an opportunity simultaneously, Gong investigates how this dialectical social situation shapes cultural production. He begins his investigation of “uneven modernity” in China by constructing a critical framework of unevenness among different theoretical schools and expounding on how dialectical thinking points to a metaphysical paradox in capitalism and modernity: the inevitable tension between a constant pursuit of infinite fullness and a break of fullness (unevenness) as the means of this pursuit. In the Chinese context, this paradox is created in the “uneven developmentalism” that most manifestly characterizes the postsocialist period. Gong goes on to investigate manifestations of the dialectics of unevenness in specific cultural events. Four case studies address respectively but not exclusively literature (the prose of Yu Qiuyu), popular fiction (Chi Li’s neorealist fiction), commercial cinema (the movies of Feng Xiaogang), and art-house cinema (Wang Xiaoshuai’s filmmaking). Representing different aspects of cultural production in postsocialist China, these writers and directors deal with the same social condition of uneven development, and their works clearly exhibit the problematics of this age. Uneven Modernity makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of China studies as well as the study of uneven development in general. It addresses some of the most popular, yet understudied, cultural phenomena in contemporary China. Specialists and students will find its insights admirable and its style accessible.