Posts Tagged ‘chinese cinema’
Friday, February 5th, 2010
“Critical Interventions” edited by Sheldon Lu is the latest series from University of Hawaii Press that aims at building a list of innovative, cutting-edge works with a focus on Asia or the presence of Asia in other continents and regions. Manuscripts and proposals exploring a wide range of issues and topics in the modern and contemporary periods are welcome, especially those dealing with literature, cinema, art, theater, media, cultural theory, and intellectual history, as well as subjects that cross disciplinary boundaries. The scholarship should combine solid research with an imaginative approach, theoretical sophistication, and stylistic lucidity.
The following two titles are released and available:
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Tags: chinese cinema, sheldon lu, xiaoping lin, yingjin zhang
Posted in Academic Resources | No Comments »
Friday, January 29th, 2010
Zhang Yimou
“Film Director Battles For Soul of Chinese Cinema” is the provocative title of an NPR report on Zhang Yimou’s new release A Simple Noodle Story (Sanqiang Pai’an Jingqi). Compared with the director’s early national allegories (Raise the Red Lantern; To Live) which made his name as an international arthouse auteur, the new comedy-murder movie is distinctly apolitical.
A radical remake of the Coen brothers’ 1984 neo-noir Blood Simple, Zhang’s latest work transplants the action from a Texas bar to a remote noodle shop in ancient China, and adds on to the crime thriller “a slapstick comedy with song-and-dance numbers revolving around noodle-making.” In an interview with NPR, Zhang does not deny the “commercial factors” behind his new experiment: he intends to make a “New Year film” (the Chinese equivalent of an American holiday season film) and to change his focus from the international to the domestic market.
Zhang is equally straightforward about his ambition behind the commercial turn, which the article dubs as his “battle with Hollywood for the soul of Chinese cinema.” According to the director:
Young people are the key. If they lose their interest in domestic movies, we will be in big trouble. The China’s film market will be occupied by foreigners. Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea are examples of this. The mainland is our last battlefield.
Behind this patriotism, the article also notes the director’s changed stature in China’s national imagination. The hugely popular successes in the spectacular Olympic opening ceremony in 2008 and the military parade marking China’s 60th anniversary in 2009 made him a national cultural hero, but also raised doubts “overseas” about whether Zhang had became Beijing’s “artist in residence.”
Zhang denies losing independence, arguing that censorship limits all Chinese directors equally, but his latest film has been panned after its premiere in China on Dec. 11. Half of those answering one online survey at a popular website, Sina.com, thought it was “terrible” or “worse than expected.” For China’s arguably most famous director, the leap between the political and the commercial, or the merging of the two, is not an easy one.
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Tags: blood simple, chinese cinema, coen brothers, hollywood, simple noodle story, zhang yimou
Posted in Chinese Cinema Today | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
Sun Spots (dir. Yang Heng)
18 films by Chinese directors or with a Chinese theme will be presented at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, which runs from January 27 to February 7. Among these films include Oxhide II, Liu Jiayin’s follow up to her debut feature Oxhide (recently voted one of the top ten Chinese films of the past decade). Sun Spots, the second feature by Yang Heng (whose debut Betelnut is a dGenerate Films ttle) will be in competition for the VPRO Tiger Award.
City of Life and Death, Lu Chuan’s controversial big-budget feature depicting the Nanjing Massacre, has inspired a sidebar of related films, several of which date back to the time of the historic tragedy.
The full lineup of films can be found after the break. (more…)
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Tags: chinese cinema, city of life and death, liu jiayin, lu chuan, nanjing massacre, oxhide ii, rotterdam, sun spots, yang heng
Posted in Chinese Cinema Events | No Comments »
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
A list of the ballots from all 47 participants of the Best Chinese Language Films of the 2000s Poll follows after the break. Several participants included comments and/or honorable mentions, which are also included. Some participants ranked their choices while others left their list unranked; the final results were tallied by the number of mentions each film received among all top ten ballots.
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Tags: chinese cinema, chinese cinema poll, cinema poll, films of the decade, top ten
Posted in Chinese Cinema Today | 5 Comments »
Monday, January 11th, 2010
Oxhide 2 (dir. Liu Jiayin)
On Wednesday, dGenerate Films will publish the results of its poll of Chinese filmmakers and experts on the top Chinese language films of the past decade. While the poll includes all Chinese language films, we’d like to take a moment to focus on films from Mainland China. Here are Shelly Kraicer’s top ten Mainland Chinese films of the 2000s, with some observations on key developments in the field over the past ten years. Shelly will give a slightly different list that includes all Chinese-language cinema for the official poll.
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The editors of the dGenerate Films blog have asked me to come up with a list of the ten best Chinese films of the decade (2000-2009). I’ve thought about this for several days, and would prefer to call these the ten films from China that I consider to be the most important from the last ten years. This shifts the emphasis from “best”, from some difficult-do-objectify criterion of excellence to one of significance. Equally non-objective, to be sure, but I feel more comfortable with significance as a subjective criterion. This is for several reasons: one in particular is that “best” seems at least to imply a criterion of professional polish, of mastery, that I would not want to over-value while surveying recent Chinese film.
In fact, the key trend, if I can call it that, of the last decade of Chinese filmmaking seems to be precisely its de-professionalization. Filmmaking has moved beyond the academy, the Beijing Film Academy to be exact, responsible for so many filmmakers superbly trained in their crafts, and towards something much more broadly based and open, dominated by amateur digital filmmaking. These young, often self-trained filmmakers aren’t necessarily making the most well-crafted films out there, but their experiments are often among the most important things happening in cinema in this part of the world.
Rather than ranking films (which is sort of silly: what makes #6 better than #7?), I’d like to group my choices into three larger sets, as follows:
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Tags: chinese cinema, jia zhangke, liu jiayin, oxhide, platform, shelly kraicer, top ten, top ten films of the decade, wang bing, west of the tracks
Posted in Chinese Cinema Today, Film Reviews, dGenerate Titles | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
1428 (dir. Du Haibin)
Part One: Toronto International Film Festival (September 10-19, 2009)
One looks to comprehensive film festivals, such as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), for an overview of contemporary cinema that offers both breadth and depth. TIFF’s expansiveness, for example, allows one to make some judgments about the relative place of particular kinds of film in the world right now. I would like to try something of the sort with Mainland Chinese cinema in the context of TIFF, in particular how several new films might be situated in the world-cinematic scene.
Although Jia Zhangke seems in the process of retooling his cinema to head in new directions (though his public reaction, uncomfortably aligned with the Chinese government’s, to the Melbourne Film Festival Affair gives one pause), Jia-ist cinema, through its profound effect on most younger independent Chinese directors, seems lately more restrictive than liberating in its influence. Film language in “mainstream” indie Chinese films (both docs and features) seems to have temporarily congealed into something like formulaic liturgies: fetishization of the long take, the distant camera, the objective tone, the unedited minutiae of daily life.
At the same time, commercial Chinese film has adopted its own pathologies, giving us a series of big budget bloated historical epics cautiously tucked away, far from the sensitivities of the Film Bureau, into genres that are safely protected from any possible overt contemporary relevance. Several of these latter works found their way into TIFF, which has frequently, in the past ten years, extended a generous welcome to foreign fare that might attract the attentions of North American distribution. Since sword-wielding costumed Chinese actors sold in the past (thanks, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and your progeny), they have gained a marketable sheen that TIFF is one of the key agents in promoting.
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Tags: chinese cinema, cui zi'en, film festivals, queer china, shelly kraicer, toronto, vancouver
Posted in Chinese Cinema Events, Chinese Cinema Today, Shelly Kraicer on Chinese Film, dGenerate Titles | 1 Comment »
Friday, October 16th, 2009
by Lu Chen
Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town is about alienation and distance, about aimless wanderers and broken hearts, yet it is shot with the tenderness of a root-seeking journey. In this three-hour documentary, the meditative rhythm parallels the pace of life depicted. The scale of screen time embodies the scale of lost history the film tries to capture through extraordinary visual sensitivity.
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Tags: chinese cinema, chris berry, christianity, ghost town, lisu, lu xinyu, minority groups, nu, ritual, urbanization, zhao dayong, zhiziluo village
Posted in Film Reviews, dGenerate Titles | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
By Shelly Kraicer
San Yuan Li (dir. Ou Ning, 2003)
What is a Chinese film? Ever since I’ve started living and working in Beijing over six years ago, most serious discussions about Chinese cinema ultimately come down to this elemental question, either in its descriptive mode (what defines a Chinese film?) or in its more urgently prescriptive version (what should a Chinese film be?). Often, it’s filmmakers themselves who seem most anxious about the issue. Behind it lie several subsidiary anxieties: “What do Westerners want from Chinese films?”, “What’s my role in Chinese society?”, “Are films art, or commerce, or politics?”
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Tags: china, chinese cinema, chinese film, cui zi'en, documentary, enter the clowns, film bureau, film festival, ghost town, independent film, liu jiayin, meishi street, ou ning, oxhide, san yuan li, shelly kraicer, what is a chinese film, zhao dayong
Posted in Academic Resources, Chinese Cinema Today, Shelly Kraicer on Chinese Film | No Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2009
dGenerate Films presents CinemaTalk, an ongoing series of conversations with esteemed scholars of Chinese cinema studies. These conversations are presented on this site in audio podcast and/or text format. They are intended to help the Chinese cinema studies community keep abreast of the latest work being done in the field, as well as to learn what recent Chinese films are catching the attention of others. This series reflects our mission to bring valuable resources and foster community around the field of Chinese film studies.
Michael Berry is Associate Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of the BFI Film Classics monograph Jia Zhang-ke’s Hometown Trilogy, which offers extended analysis of the films Xiao Wu, Platform, and Unknown Pleasures; A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, which explores literary and cinematic representations of atrocity in twentieth century China; and Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, a collection of dialogues with contemporary Chinese filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zhang Yimou, Stanley Kwan, and Jia Zhangke. Also an active literary translator, Berry has translated several important contemporary Chinese novels by Yu Hua, Ye Zhaoyan, Chang Ta-chun, and Wang Anyi. Current literary translation projects include the modern martial arts novel The Last Swallow of Autumn (Xia Yin) and Wu He’s (Dancing Crane) award-winning novel Remains of Life (Yu Sheng), a fascinating literary exploration of the 1930 Musha Incident, which was honored with a 2008 NEA Translation Grant.
In this conversation with dGenerate’s Kevin Lee, Michael shares his insights on Jia Zhangke, specifically his career development since the “Hometown Trilogy” and his recent controversy at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Be sure to read Jia’s statement of withdrawal from the Melbourne Film Festival as a point of reference.
Play the Podcast (Time: 17:39)
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Download it here (right-click to download, file size: 8.2 MB).
Get a list of Michael’s publications and a timecoded index of topics covered in the interview after the jump.
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Tags: academic, chinese cinema, cinema studies, educational resource, film studies, interview, jia zhang-ke, jia zhangke, melbourne international film festival, michael berry, podcast
Posted in Academic Resources, CinemaTalk: Conversations on Chinese Cinema Studies | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
Ghost Town (photo courtesy of Fanhall Films)
Marking a breakthrough for the Chinese digital filmmaking community, director Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town (Fei Cheng, 2008) was selected for the 47th New York Film Festival (September 25 – October 11), as the only Chinese entry in the lineup. This low-budget documentary shot on HD has never been shown in any major festival outside China; as of this article it has yet to even appear on IMDb and All Movie Guide. Yet it joins a prestigious NYFF lineup that features new works by renowned directors such as Alain Resnais, Pedro Almodovar, Jacques Rivette, and Lars von Trier. Its inclusion in the NYFF represents a first in the festival’s program: a nod to China’s digital generation of documentary filmmakers.
According to the website of Fanhall Films, a multi-faceted indie film support organization based in Beijing, the three-hour documentary is not about phantoms, but the Lisu and Nu minority villagers in the abandoned halls of a remote former communist county seat in the southwestern province of Yunnan, China. Consisting of three chapters, “Voices,” “Recollections,” and “Innocence,” the film observes and records the mode of existence of the nameless and the forgotten, offering extraordinary insights into such topics as religious faith, relationships, juvenile deviants, generational differences, and lost history.
Dennis Lim, a member of this year’s NYFF jury and a major voice in promoting Chinese independent cinema, shared his reasons for selecting the film with dGenerate Films’ Kevin Lee: “Ghost Town is one of the most surprising and rewarding films I’ve seen all year, one of the most important films to have emerged from the booming (but still underexplored) field of Chinese independent documentaries.” Fellow jury member Scott Foundas also considered the film an exciting discovery, exclaiming: “I didn’t think there was another Jia Zhangke or Wang Bing lurking out there, but it turns out there is!”
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Tags: chinese cinema, dennis lim, dgenerate films, digital generation, documentary, fanhall films, film distribution, film festival, ghost town, jia zhangke, new york film festival, nyff, scott foundas, wang bing, zhao dayong
Posted in Chinese Cinema Events, Chinese Cinema Today, dGenerate Titles | 2 Comments »
