Chinese Cinema

"Even though I am poor and I have AIDS, I am happy. Each day brings hope." Ximei

Ximei, a documentary filmed in China over a seven-year period by Andy Cohen and Gaylen Ross, follows the HIV-positive titular protagonist and plain-spoken community leader named Ximei, a local "peasant" woman in her thirties. Ximei is filmed as she negotiates the government bureaucracy in remote Henan province while acting as a community activist and advocate for the 300,000 other people in the region that developed HIV/AIDS as a result of a national government program during the 1990s, whose goal it was to increase blood bank reserves at a minimal cost. The program offered a month's wages (about five dollars) to blood donators. Tragically and stupidly, the public health workers in the province didn't decontaminate their transfusion equipment. As a result, many local residents that took advantage of the opportunity to earn extra money, contracted HIV, either from coming in contact with contaminated medical equipment or by receiving transfusions of untested, tainted blood during treatments for an accident or disease.

Justo después de saber que había conseguido su tercer Oscar por Amarcord (1973), un periodista le pidió a Federico Fellini que diera un consejo a los jóvenes cine-astas. La respuesta del director italiano empezaba así: "Que hablen de sí mismos". Así se entiende mejor el empeño de Lulu Wang (Posthumous, 2014) por cimentar su incipiente carrera en una historia autobiográfica hasta en los detalles más pequeños. Lulu Wang nació en China pero tuvo que mudarse a Estados Unidos con sus padres cuando tenía 6 años. Igual que Billi, la protagonista de The Farewell, papel interpretado por Nora Lum, Awkwafina de nombre artístico.

Global Cinema Networks investigates the evolving aesthetic forms, technological and industrial conditions, and social impacts of cinema in the twenty-first century. The collection’s esteemed contributors excavate sites of global filmmaking in an era of digital reproduction and amidst new modes of circulation and aesthetic convergence, focusing primarily on recent films made across Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Moving beyond the digital as a harbinger of transformation, the volume offers new ways of thinking about cinema networks in a historical continuum, from “international” to “world” to “transnational” to “global” frames. 
Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Global Cinemas in a Time of Networks
Elena Gorfinkel, King’s College London (U.K.)

Part 1: Cartographies, Geopolitics, Aesthetics

Chapter 2: Beyond and Beneath the Map of World Cinema
Dudley Andrew, Yale University

Chapter 3: Frame
Adrian Martin, Monash University (Australia)

Chapter 4: Abstraction and the Geopolitical: Lessons from Antonioni’s Trip to China
John David Rhodes, University of Cambridge

Chapter 5: The City of Bits and Urban Rule: Media Archaeology, Urban Space, and Contemporary Chinese Documentary
James Tweedie, University of Washington

Part 2: Global Ideality, History, Representation

Chapter 6: Toward an Archeology of Global Rhythms: Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World, 1929) and its Reception in France
Laurent Guido, University of Lille (France)

Chapter 7: When Cinema was Humanism
Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick

Chapter 8: African Cinema: Digital Media and Expanding Frames of Representation
N. Frank Ukadike, Tulane University, New Orleans

Chapter 9: Changing Circumstances: Global Flows of Lesbian Cinema
Patricia White, Swarthmore College

Part 3: Kinships, Identifications, Genres

Chapter 10: Hermano and La hora cero: Violence and Transgressive Subjectivities in Venezuelan Youth Cinema
Luisela Alvaray, DePaul University

Chapter 11: Between Love and the Moral Law: The Fatal Mother in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Peter Y. Paik, Yonsei University (Korea)

Chapter 12: The Queer Mexican Cinema of Julián Hernández
Gilberto M. Blasini, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Chapter 13: The Gangster Film as World Cinema
Jian Xu, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Chapter 14: Epilogue: 24 Frames: Regarding the Past and Future of Global Cinema
Tami Williams, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/global-cinema-networks/9780813592725

Chapter 7, "Disowning Shakespeare and China," delineates the theoretical and political consequences of disowning “Shakespeare” and “China” in the present time. Part of the question of consequence necessarily remains open-ended, as international circumstances continue to change. However, a number of new trends in performance since 1990 have gained momentum. Stan Lai’s Lear and the Thirty-seven-fold Practice of a Bodhisattva (Pusa zhi sanshiqizhong xiuxing zhi Li’er wang) and Wu Hsing-kuo’s Lear Is Here (Li’er zai ci) exemplify performances that are framed by the artists’ autobiography and religious discourse. They signal the arrival of a new Asian identity in the global marketplace of cultures. The grand narrative of East meets West now coexists with an account of the living, contemporary directors’ personal engagement with Shakespeare, and with new but equally elusive categories such as “I” and “Shakespeare.”

This chapter attempts to understand the projection of stardom on a national and transnational level in the context of Taiwan and Hong Kong cinema. By studying Brigitte Lin, Rawnsley addresses four questions: (1) how is Lin’s star image produced and consumed in Taiwan and in Hong Kong? (2) Can the ways that Lin’s earlier star image produced in Taiwan explain the difficulty for Lin’s stardom to break free from a national framework when she left for Hong Kong to seek trans-border breakthrough? (3) Can the ways that Lin’s national stardom was produced and consumed in pre-democratic Taiwan offer an insight into why her image appears redundant in the post-democratization era? And (4) what can we learn about the Taiwan and Hong Kong film industries and their respective film cultures from a close examination of Brigitte Lin as a star?

This article uses Sino-Soviet film festival diplomacy to show how anticolonialism played a crucial role in the cinematic Cold War. First, it analyzes the Sino-Soviet cinematic cooperation at the Asian Film Week in Beijing in 1957 and the First Afro-Asian Film Festival (AAFF) in Tashkent in 1958. Second, it examines the breakdown of Sino-Soviet cinematic ties at the Third AAFF in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1964, and via the trenchant Chinese critique of Grigorii Chukhrai’s films. The Chinese retreat from Soviet cinema paralleled the deterioration of political relations between Mao’s China and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. Immediate diplomatic needs informed ideological clashes at festivals and brutal film criticism. But cinematic encounters exceeded state directives. They redefined revolutionary film aesthetics and the role of cinema in liberation struggles in ways that inspired the militant «Third Cinema» movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Španac Galen Boka kineskoj publici prikazuje prvi film 11. avgusta 1896. godine u Šangaju. Godinu dana kasnije, u Kinu dolazi jedan Amerikanac koji snima Čajdžinicu, film koji je bio senzacija među Kinezima. Pošto nisu imali reč za ovu novu umetnost, Kinezi su je nazvali "električno pozorište senki". Prvi filmovi koji su pristizali u Kinu bavili su se egzotičnim mestima i narodima: Careva poseta Parizu, Zmijski ples na Floridi, Španski ples, Grad Madrid itd. To su uglavnom bili jednokalemski filmovi sa nerazvijenim narativnim tehnikama. Prikazivali su se i filmovi u obliku žurnala koji su podsećali na dela braće Limijer i Melijes. Prikazivani su većinom filmovi sa zapada, a prve bioskopske sale otvarali su stranci u njihovim delovima grada. Finansirali su eksperimentalne filmove snimane u Kini i radili su kao tehnička lica na njihovom snimanju. Kineska proizvodnja filmova počinje 1905. godine, kada je fotograf Ren Qingtai izgradio prvi bioskop kao svoje sporedno zanimanje, te iste godine snimio deo filma Osvajanje planine Đun. Glavnu ulogu igrao je Tan Xinpei, kralj Pekinške opere. Bendžamin Brodski osnovao je prvi filmski studio-Asia Film Company. Pored dokumentarnog filma Kina, producirao je i nekoliko kratkih filmova, a 1912. studio je prodao Jašelu i Sufertu. U četiri godine nastalo je 18 kratkih filmova, među kojima je i prvi kineski kratki film-Težak par Zhang Shichuan-a iz 1913. godine. Ovo je prvi kineski film koji je imao scenario, imao je nešto više od 1000 karaktera i trajao je oko pola sata. Pevi dugometražni kineski film-Yan Ruisheng, režisera Ren Pengnian-a, objavljen je 1921. godine, a do 1926. u Kini je već bilo otvoreno 106 sala sa ukupno 68000 mesta.

打着环保意识这个旗号，《美人鱼》讲述了一个多层次的寓言故事。然而，作为一部商业爱情电影，《美人鱼》是否有效而明确地传达环境保护的意识？电影是如何透过人鱼族比喻现实世界中濒危的海洋生物？我们如何在近年生态电影批评（eco-film criticism）这个学科的框架内审视《美人鱼》的环保、生态理念？
本文第一部份将集中在《美人鱼》当中的地方意识和中港合拍片模式带来的「去地域化」呈现如何改变了香港电影当中的地方意识和生态想象。第二部份我们将会探讨《美人鱼》当中的跨物种关怀伦理和多物种公义的想像，藉以指出为何电影未能摆脱人类中心主义的固有思维，以及其生态意识为何未能更有系统地、更贯彻地展现人与非人物种的复杂关系。

This paper argues that the current notion of ‘essay film’ is a western construct and questions whether it is a useful term to understand experiments in personal nonfiction cinema in non-western cultures. Essay film can be translated as ‘sanwen dianying’. Sanwen literally means ‘loose text’, referring to writing with looser structures than verse or other highly rhetorically structured texts. Instead of simply finding a Chinese equivalent of ‘essay’, I present some observations on what the essayistic looks like in Chinese cinemas. It does not suggest a completely different set of aesthetics but seeks to explore how these films inherit Chinese literary origins and cultural-linguistic traditions, and in what way they reference western essay films. The paper opens to draw attention to emerging new forms by foregrounding practices in Chinese language context.

The Symptomatics of the Wenyi Film in Contemporary China QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO Haomin Gong "If I love you, what business is it of yours?" Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's well-known line from Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1830) was used as a promotional slogan for Chinese director Xu Jinglei's second film Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004, hereafter Letter), adapted from Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig's 1922 novella of the same title. It won the Best Director award at the 52nd San Sebastian Film Festival in 2004. Goethe's quote speaks of the ambition of a young Chinese woman director striving to establish herself on the world stage. Xu borrowed Goethe to exhibit not only the cosmopolitan nature of her filmmaking but also her unique personality as a woman representing a new generation of directors in contemporary China. Xu's Letter is regarded as one of the most compelling examples of contemporary Chinese wenyi (literally "letters and arts") film, a special genre of Chinese-language cinema that refers to films with varying degrees of artistic qualities. 1 Although it is a loaded, malleable term that has been called an "an enigmatic nomenclature," 2 the wenyi film has come to play a significant role in Chinese cinema, so much so that some scholars believe that it may provide a new framework for an alternative Chinese cinematic historiography. 3 Xu's choice to direct Letter as a contemporary production of the wenyi film intriguingly evokes many historical aspects of this genre and reveals how the contemporary wenyi film repositions and renegotiates itself within China's new postsocialist context.

Se il cinema orientale inizia a farsi conoscere in Occidente già a partire dai primi anni Cinquanta - per merito dei film di Kurosawa e Mizoguchi, della tardiva scoperta di Ozu e dell'avvento, nel decennio successivo, della Nouvelle Vague nipponica di Oshima e Imamura -, è però indubbiamente solo dalla fine degli anni Ottanta, grazie a cineasti cinesi della Quinta generazione come Zhang Yimou e Chen Kaige, che questo cinema è diventato nel suo complesso un punto di riferimento imprescindibile per la stessa storia del cinema, portando all'attenzione del pubblico nuove autorialità e nuovi generi e contribuendo a rinnovare sensibilmente il linguaggio cinematografico contemporaneo. Di questo complesso e affascinante fenomeno "Il cinema dell'Estremo Oriente" vuole rendere conto proponendone un approccio sia di carattere introduttivo, sia in termini di approfondimento. Di ognuna delle cinque realtà prese in esame (Cina, Corea del Sud, Giappone, Hong Kong e Taiwan) il libro presenta, infatti, un'introduzione generale che ne ricostruisce la storia di questi ultimi venti-trent'anni, alcuni ritratti d'autore dedicati a cineasti dal grande talento e dalla poca fortuna critica in Italia (Jia Zhang-ke, Lee Chang-dong, Koreeda Hirokazu, Wong Kar-wai, Edward Yang), e ancora diversi saggi che indagano tematiche, generi e approcci estetici specifici di tali cinematografie.

Literary translation is a love affair. Depending on the context, it could be love at first sight or hot pursuits of a lover’s elusive nodding approval. In other instances it could be unrequited love, and still others a test of devotion and faith. Or an eclectic combination of any of these events. Translation involves artistic creativity, not a workshop of equivalences.

To think of translation as a love affair does not eliminate the hierarchies that are part of the historical reality. In terms of its symbolic and cultural capital, literary translations always reflect the global order of the centre and the peripheral. Shakespeare remains the most canonical of canonical authors in a language that is now the global lingua franca.

Contradictory to the purists’ anxiety that the proliferation of Shakespeare in translation, whether in modern English or foreign languages, will spell the demise of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, the rise of a global industry of translation speaks to the power of Shakespeare’s words—not bound within the limit of one language and historical period but open to a wide spectrum of interpretive possibilities, a common feature shared by great works of art.

Exclusion Act (1882-1943) was in effect, her strategy of sustaining her professional life and film career for two decades was through ocean-crossing-pursuing roles in the United Kingdom, the Weimar Republic, and Australia, then returning to Hollywood on her own will. Rejected for the role of a lifetime as O-Lan, the good wife, in the cinematic adaptation of Pearl Buck's novel, The Good Earth (1937), she made a highly publicized trip to China. Upon her return, she starred in a series of B-movies with a positive view of China and its people. During World War II, Anna May Wong made several propaganda films and toured USO bases entertaining the troops. Never completely forgotten, Anna May's legend was revived by scholars during the centennial of her birth in 2003. As an early cosmopolitan woman, a fashion icon, and an imposing photographed image, Anna May Wong inspired scholarly studies, as well as creative works including song, children's books, documentaries, and recently, a multimedia work. In the era celebrating global cultures, Anna May Wong is recognized for defining a lifestyle that was unique then but is now considered distinctly modern. Nancy Gibbs named Anna May Wong as the woman of 1928 in her article "100 Women of the Year" for Time magazine's 16-23 March 2020 issue to celebrate women of influence. Autobiographies and Biographies The diversity of Anna May Wong's work, her artistic forms, her performative language, and the international settings of her film pose sizable challenges to a biographer. As an eloquent actress, fashion icon, and early cosmopolitan, Anna May Wong documented her life and career through many interviews, articles, and letters, as exemplified by her mini-autobiography published in China (Wong 1936). Her self-expressed philosophy of life enlightens her biographers as well as urging them to (re)interpret the not-so-favorable realities in

This study is about the development of the Chinese movie industry through the economic and political opening of the country, from 1979 to 2015. It analyzes, in the first place, the demographic changes, as well as the economic and political ones in order to understand the environment in which the movie industry is found. Later on, it overviews the main regulations that have shaped the industry and finally, it goes deep into the business of moviemaking through the analysis of the studio system, the main filmmakers and the use of censorship as a protectionist measure for its cultural assets.

Taking a close look at Zhao Liang's 2015 documentary Behemoth, this article argues that the film employs the aesthetic of slow cinema and combines it with Marxist critique in order to generate an ecological awareness that pushes the boundaries of ecocinema. By suturing the slow aesthetic to the environmental destruction of Inner Mongolia's landscape and the exploitation of China's migrant workers, Behemoth reorients the viewing gaze from the spectacular and the exotic towards the self-aware and the introspective. The article argues that Zhao's film, which featured in the main competition for the Golden Lion at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival, self-consciously manoeuvres between a critique of China's environmental devastation and the western audience's expectation of viewing such a catastrophe as a sign of self-expression and self-critique.

Excerpt: "In an August 1995 issue of the American entertainment news magazine Variety, Todd McCarthy published an article titled 'Eng’s Lost Pix, a Chinese Puzzle,' mentioning Esther Eng for the first time in recent memory. Despite the recent surge of scholarship on issues such as identity and gender in Asian cinema, film historians seem to have forgotten this pioneer in Chinese-language filmmaking. More unfortunately, her films seem to have eluded film archives altogether. If Eng had worked in the film industry today, she could have easily been seen as a champion of transnational filmmaking, feminist filmmaking, or antiwar filmmaking. In many ways, Eng was ahead of her time. As a Chinese-American woman filmmaker active from the 1930s to the 1950s, she put into practice many theories that later gained currency in academic scholarship."

Law, Kar. “In Search of Esther Eng: Border-Crossing Pioneer in Chinese-Language Filmmaking.” In Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts, edited by Wang Lingzhen, translated by Chris Tong, 313-329. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

This introduction to the special issue, ‘Engagement, Witnessing and
Activism: Independent Chinese Documentary Filmmakers’ Different
Positions, Approaches and Aesthetics,’ argues that how the political
is registered and expressed in Chinese activist documentaries
cannot simply be read through Western ideas, concepts and
aesthetics. Rather, Chinese work has been shaped partly in
relation to state-sanctioned public discourse, and partly through
the localising of international influences according to Chinese
socio-political conditions. Contemporary Chinese activist
documentary makers have chosen as their primary modus
operandi an open, exploratory engagement with the ‘grassroots’
(jiceng). The core commitment in this approach is to the truth of
the on-screen subject’s experience as they themselves see it. Modes
of engagement with the grassroots include: making visible people
and identities that state-sanctioned representations hide or gloss
over; bearing witness to events and situations that are similarly
hidden, or presented in a very particular manner, in state sanctioned
representations; and exploring memories and historical
experiences which are otherwise unacknowledged or presented
within narrow interpretive parameters in state-sanctioned media.
This introduction details how the articles in this special issue
analyse and discuss Chinese activist works that utilise one or more
of these modes.

This study discusses the differences between Chinese youth film and American teen film through the perspective on cultural foundation. The authors argue that Confucianism is an alternative that greatly affects the depiction of young characters and the causal relationship of morality and fate of the characters in films. The objective of such a comparison is not to advocate for either Chinese or American youth cinema in portraying young people, but to promote a better understanding of the strengths and impacts of youth cinema and youth genre. In addition, this study examines cinematic depictions of young characters portrayed in Chinese youth films and American teen films. It is argued that Chinese youth films and American youth films differ in depictions of school settings and even their purposes.

Xie Jin’s film Hibiscus Town (Furong Zhen; 1986) tells a story whose message was welcome to audiences in the 1980s: the Cultural Revolution is over, now “to get rich is glorious.” Based on a popular novel by Gu Hua, the plot is relatively straightforward: In a scenic provincial river town in the 1950s, a handsome young woman entrepreneur and her husband set up a street restaurant and get rich selling spicy beancurd soup; they build a house; in the early 1960's, local cadres, carrying out leftist policies of class struggle, label them New Rich Peasants; her husband is hounded to death; she takes up with a poet/folk-song researcher who had been criticized as a Rightist and set to sweep the town streets; she and the rightist conceive a child; after the Cultural Revolution, they are rehabilitated and set up her street restaurant again. Yet the film raises far more complex issues than this plot summary can imply: after the historical hurricane, what do we return to? On what moral ground do we build?

In March 2010, MoMA dedicated a retrospective to Jia Zhangke, l'enfant terrible of contemporary Chinese cinema. (1) Considering his relatively young age (40) and the relatively short span of his filmmaking career (15 years), it was a remarkable honour. It was also timely. The event seemed to echo a spirit emanating from Jia's filmmaking-the urgency to come to grips with something new and exciting, something that evolves so fast that one has to look back every now and then, and with attention. In the eyes of the MoMA curator, Jia's cinema derives its power from the interplay of seemingly contradictory impulses:

In contemporary Sino-French cinema, father characters who are dead, long lost or geographically distant leave gaping holes in the lives of the offspring left behind. The absent fathers in Sino-French films by Taiwanese auteurs Cheng Yu-chieh, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang serve as metaphors for French auteurs. French New Wave films constitute the majority of the intertexts; however, early 1950s French cinema and even late nineteenth-century painting reflect the expansiveness of French influence. Despite the possibility of an orientalist dynamic, Taiwanese auteurs not only pay homage to their French ‘fathers’, and especially New Waver Franc ̧ois Truffaut, but also strike out on their own, contributing innovative work to contemporary transnational cinemas.

This is Chapter 7 of Lingzheng Wang ed. Chinese Women's Cinema: Transnational Contexts, published by Columbia University Press in 2012. This chapter focuses on four female directors of China's "Fifth Generation": Peng Xiaolian, Li Shaohong, Hu Mei and Liu Miaomiao. It has two parts--(Re)wrting Women's Histories/Stories, and, (Re)mapping Women's Spaces/Place--that respectively discusses these female writer's contribution in writing about women and the unique ways they used in exploring cinematic spaces.

This article begins by asking why colour has ignited only limited interest in the field of Chinese film studies, and it uses the critical reception of China's first colour film -Fei Mu's Shengsi hen/Remorse at Death (1948) -as a condensed case study. An analysis of scholarly responses to Fei Mu's film, the article argues, suggests that colour as a critical category in Chinese-language cinemas has vanished at the intersection of two persistent biases in the discipline: a certain reluctance to research Chinese film history in technological terms; and the early dominance of the cinema-as-realist-paradigm across the field, which led to a lengthy neglect of colour as an independent aesthetic property. The article goes on to argue that the vibrant use of colour in much recent Chinese-language auteur cinema -dubbed 'chromatic expressionism' here -merits more attention. In particular, the article suggests that colour can pose an intense provocation to the long-standing notion that the cinema-as-spectacle exists in a dichotomous relationship with the cinema-as-storytelling. The article explores this idea through a close reading of Fruit Chan's Jiaozi/Dumplings (2004), focusing on the film's vivid use of saturated complementary colours.

Audience reception has been an important area of research in literary, cinema, media, and performance studies in the West. The audience as a whole has become an influential force in the global cultural sphere today, as audience participation no longer occurs solely in physical gatherings, but often through online and social media in addition to traditional channels of mass communication. In the field of ecocinema studies, recent scholarship has expanded the focus of research from the formal, psychological, historical, material, and intercultural dimensions of ecocinema to include more empirical approaches that take into account how individual viewers receive specific films. At the same time, audience members are not passive recipients, but rather active participants that impact the processes of cultural production. In this article, the author argues that audiences are conceptually intertwined with publics and analyzes the dynamics between aesthetic judgment and political engagement in the reception of ecocinema.

内容提要: 西方对观众接受的研究在文学、电影、媒体、表演等学术领域里都占有一席之地。观众群体作为一个整体在全球的文化界内成为了一股强大的影响力， 其中的原因在于借助了传统大众媒体之外的网络、社交媒体等交流渠道的帮助， 观众群体的参与性已经突破了线下集会这一局限。在生态电影的研究领域里， 近期的学术成果把研究的焦点从生态电影的形式、心理、历史、物质和跨文化维度拓展到了诸如思考关于个体观影者如何接受特定电影这类涉及到实证研究法的问题。本文中， 作者论述了观众与公众二者间在概念上的纠葛， 并分析了生态电影在接受过程中引起的美学判断与政治参与间的张力。

Tong, Christopher K. 唐思凯 "Ecocinema's Audiences and Publics 生态电影的观众与公众." Huaxia wenhua luntan 华夏文化论坛 19, no. 1 (2018): 391-402.

This article studies several shots of large-scale natural disasters (flood, typhoon, volcanic eruption, and so on) that punctuate Dragonfly Eyes (2017), Chinese artist Xu Bing’s first foray into cinematic production which stitched and edited more than 10000 hours of video footage recorded by surveillance cameras across China and uploaded to cloud storage online. Through the lens of found footage aesthetics and the concept of ecological sublime in recent scholarship--on both the sublimity of nature and the viewing condition of this sublimity afforded by modern technologies—I address the following questions: How do these shots speak to the video’s overall storyline? What do they tell us about the avant-garde practice of found footage film? More crucially, what ecological significance does the video’s peculiar natural aesthetics carry? Paying heed to these aspects of the video, I suggest, helps us open up larger inquiries concerning the search for a suitable means of representing our ecological condition today.

Through an analysis of popular combat films and television shows, this article argues that there has been a transformation in the representation of the hero-soldier in both China and Japan. Using theories of masculinity and nationalism, it suggests that recent Chinese films reveal a turn towards hybrid heroism-victimhood, increased focus on the emasculation of Japanese soldiers, and tensions between the market and the state.

In the Wu Xia film Hero (Yimou, 2002), Jet Li's character Nameless ponders mid-combat the connection between the martial arts and music, stating that both wrestle with 'complex chords and rare melodies'. There have been various articulations of the Chinese equivalents to the Medieval Quadrivium, whereby the cultured person is expected to be competent in a select number of artistic and intellectual disciplines. Rather than the four disciplines of this particularly western approach, several Chinese equivalents have been based on the number five, a significant number featured in the I Ching, whose articulation of the Five Elements (Fire, Metal, Wood, Water and Earth) can be found throughout traditional Chinese medicine, cosmology, and martial arts. One such articulation expects the cultured martial artist to be competent in the disciplines of calligraphy, music, healing (acupuncture, Chinese medicine), cosmology, and of course, kung fu. My interest in this article is to explore the ways in which the philosophical connections between music and martial arts have been represented and articulated in contemporary kung fu films.

This preface by the guest editors provides a situated overview of the purpose, structure and methodologies of the contributing articles on Chinese animations in this special issue. Aiming to reconfigure Chinese film studies through historical and theoretical inquiries about the relationship between the animated and the cinematic, the special issue introduces a nascent perspective on Chinese animations by offering rigorous and stimulating studies on the forms, genres and materiality of animation, as well as on the technological and ontological conditions of animated moving images in the age of digital new media. The preface also provides a brief historical overview of Chinese animation and animation studies, generating dialogues with diverse approaches to Chinese animation at home and abroad. Whereas the socio-historical contexts of Chinese animation highlight its ideological functions, the contributing authors in this special issue present fresh visions and innovative studies of Chinese animation as a crucial cultural form with transnational popularity and unique aesthetics.

‘My’ Self on Camera is the first book to explore first person narrative documentary in China’s post-Mao era. Since the emergence of the individual as an ever more important social figure in China, this mode of independent filmmaking and cultural practice has become increasingly significant. Combining the approach of cultural ethnography, interviews, and textual analysis of selected films, this study examines the motivations, key aesthetic features and ethical tensions of presenting the self on camera, as well as the socio-political, cultural and technical conditions surrounding its practice. This book problematises how the sense of self and subjectivities are understood in contemporary China, and provides illuminating new insights on the changing notion of the individual through cinema.

When Wendi Deng (邓文迪 ), from China magically fell into the pan-national world of international business and married the media billionaire Rupert Murdoch, (who had abandoned Australia for the same stateless realm of five star hotels), at once we recognized that age old story of the gold digger and the sugar daddy. Perhaps though our belief in a simple storyline was, if not wrong, at least incomplete. Origins matter after all. As a teacher to young women in Zhengzhou, central China for three years recently, I could sense the conflicting currents of duty, ambition and the hope for love that tossed them about in relationships. The mix for each modern girl was individual, and Deng herself is a product of those choices. It is surely no accident then that Wendi Deng and another high profile Chinese-American transplant, Florence Sloan, were co-producers of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a film which deals directly, though often through a veil of tears, with just these dilemmas.

Zhang Zhen has recently brought Jane M. Gaines’ notion of “political mimesis” to bear on a young lineage of Chinese activist documentaries. This article considers the appropriateness of political mimesis as a critical tool for understanding Chinese activist works, arguing it needs to be heavily qualified. The article proposes that Laura Rascaroli’s theorisation of the essay film can help us understand the critical dialogue Chinese activist documentaries seek to open with viewers, through a close analysis of Hu Jie’s pioneering Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul (2004). The article considers how Hu Jie encourages the forging of an emotional bond between viewers and his film’s absent subject – the murdered dissident Lin Zhao – via the filmmaker’s embodied presence on screen. It then analyses how Hu Jie uses a mode of direct, embodied address to insert viewers into a politicised dialogue in the film’s concluding moments, via an act of dialogical interpolation similar to that which Rascaroli describes in relation to the essay film. It is through its emotive representation of a political “martyr” and the interpolation of the viewer into a politicised dialogue relevant to the present that Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul achieves is efficacy as an “activist” text.