Chinese Director Research Articles

Chinese‐German Cooperation Group Tumor Immunology: Another inspiring Meeting in Deidesheim

Chinese‐German Cooperation Group Tumor Immunology: Another inspiring Meeting in Deidesheim

Human Flow. Weiwei, Ai (Realizador). Alemanha: Ac Films, 2018, 140 Mins.

Human Flow (2018), by Chinese director Ai Weiwei, is a raw documentary about refugees seeking the right to life, away from the violence of their home countries. Like these, Weiwei is a dissident, who escaped Beijing during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. This review analyses the documentary from Weiwei's perspective, face to face with the implications of migration, as exposed by the refugees' testimonies. For the director, international compassion and solidarity are the only way to deal with the exodus of migrants fleeing war and misery.

Manuel Puig y lo latino en la producción de Wong Kar-wai

El cineasta chino Wong Kar-wai ha reconocido la influencia de las novelas de Manuel Puig en la estructura de sus películas, y esta influencia ha sido comentada por diversos críticos. Sin embargo, se ha tendido a obviar el hecho de que el director también presentó Happy Together como “basada en” la novela The Buenos Aires Affair del mismo escritor. Nuestro artículo analiza la influencia de la narrativa de Manuel Puig en las producciones de Wong Kar-wai, haciendo especial hincapié en la que afecta al contenido de los filmes y explica, tal como argumentamos, la construcción de una determinada idea de lo latino, estereotipada pero al mismo tiempo bien definida, que el director contrapone a la de lo chino.

Chinese Woman Director Li Yu and Her Film World

Chinese Woman Director Li Yu and Her Film World

King Hu in Hollywood: Making The Battle of Ono

Abstract The Battle of Ono was supposed to be King Hu’s American feature debut. But after more than two decades of devoted efforts to develop and finance this ambitious project, King Hu suddenly passed away before principal photography could begin. Now, more than twenty years since his death, there exists no in-depth documentations nor comprehensive studies of the great Chinese director’s unfulfilled Hollywood experience. To patch a long void in our knowledge of King Hu’s late-career activities and struggles in Hollywood, this article chronicles the development of The Battle of Ono and King Hu’s dauntless navigations through the American film industry, and examines the significant challenges and incidents King Hu had faced in his pioneering yet futile efforts to conquer Hollywood.

The ‘diaspora advantage’ of Pauline Chan (1956–): from multicultural filmmaker to cultural broker

ABSTRACTThis is the first academic paper to critically introduce and document the 30-year screen career of Pauline Chan, Australia’s highest profile Chinese film director, television actress and media producer. Sydney-based, Vietnam-born, Hong Kong-educated and US-trained, Chan has directed six films, starred in 14 and produced four television series and films. Despite her prolific career, there has been no sustained research on her profile and repertoire. This paper evaluates the evolution of Chan’s career using the diaspora ‘advantage’ as a new approach. Characterised by mobility rather than culturalism, the term refers to the benefits brought by and skills of diaspora groups that have allowed them to flourish as transnational actors able to leverage resources in both their countries of origin and settlement. It begins by elaborating how Chan’s diaspora advantage has allowed her to challenge welfare multiculturalism and extend aesthetic multiculturalism. It further documents her transition from a multicultural filmmaker to a cultural intermediary by leveraging her diasporic advantage across the film sectors in China and Australia, and opening up new industrial routes outside of the confines of policy. Using interdisciplinary methods to screen biography that include interviews with the filmmaker, film archival research, critical cultural policy studies, and studies in Asian Australian cinema and political economy, this paper argues that the new approach of the diaspora advantage turns the deficit associated with the diaspora into a dividend that has the potential to rethink the imaginary between Asia and Australia.

The Influence of Meyerhold on the Stage Work of the Famous Chinese Director Wang Xiaoying

The Influence of Meyerhold on the Stage Work of the Famous Chinese Director Wang Xiaoying

Report on the First “In Art We Trust” Chinese Opera in New York Forum, New York City, USA, 2016

Report on the First “In Art We Trust” Chinese Opera in New York Forum, New York City, USA, 2016 Dong Sun (bio) Dong Sun State University of New York Dong Sun Dong Sun is a Professor of English Literature at Nanjing University of Finance and Economics. She currently works as the Chinese Director of the Confucius Institute for Business at the State University of New York. Her research focuses on theater, poetry and international education. Her publications include one book and many academic articles. Correspondence to: Dong Sun, Confucius Institute for Business, SUNY Global Center, 116 East 55th Street, New York, NY, USA. Email: sundong2013@hotmail.com Copyright © 2018 The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc.

ЖИТТЄВИЙ ШЛЯХ І ТВОРЧА ДІЯЛЬНІСТЬ ГЕНІАЛЬНОГО КИТАЙСЬКОГО КІНОРЕЖИСЕРА У ТІАН МІНГА

Мета статті. Дослідити та проаналізувати життєвий і творчий шлях геніального китайського режисера художніх фільмів, знаного директора Сіанської кіностудії, наставника творчої молоді, «хрещеного батька» п’ятого покоління китайських режисерів У Тіан Мінга. Методологія дослідження полягає в застосуванні методів персонології, теорії особистості та історико-біографічного методу. Зазначені методологічні підходи дозволяють зібрати та дослідити невідомі та маловідомі факти з життя й творчої діяльності кінорежисера та продюсера У Тіан Мінга. Висновки. Досліджуючи життєвий і творчий шлях китайського режисера художніх фільмів У Тіан Мінга, аналізуючи його творчу діяльність у китайському кінематографі, можемо зазначити: що віднайдений та введений в науковий обіг новий цінний фактаж про творчу діяльність в аудіовізуальному мистецтві. Перспективи наукових досліджень. Незважаючи на проведене ґрунтовне наукове дослідження життя й творчої діяльності У Тіан Мінга, маємо великі перспективи щодо наукових розвідок даної тематики, оскільки творча діяльність У Тіан Мінга потребує ще ретельного вивчення.

Malayanized Chinese-language cinema: on Yi Shui’s Lion City, Black Gold, and film writings

ABSTRACTThis article discusses how the Singaporean Chinese director, Yi Shui, created a Malayanized Chinese-language cinema during the 1950s and 1960s, and offers a retrospective of the way people in Malaya and Singapore framed their nation-building discourse in terms of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism after the Bandung Conference in 1955. This article holds that the term huayu dianying (Chinese-language cinema) was not first used in the 1990s by scholars in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but that its origins can be traced to Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s where Yi Shui promoted Malayanized Chinese-language cinema in the Nanyang Siang Pau. This earlier use of the term “Chinese-language cinema” overlaps with its current academic usage, including films in Mandarin and Chinese dialects. In 1959, Yi Shui’s essays were collected in On Issues of the Malayanization of Chinese-Language Cinema. Yi Shui also directed several Malayanized Chinese-language films. This article analyzes his “Chinese language cinema” film practice by examining the discourses surrounding the “Malayanization of Chinese-language cinema” in order to show that his semi-documentary Lion City and the melodrama Black Gold attempted to mediate the misunderstandings rooted in the national boundaries and politics of various dialect groups through a “multi-lingual symbiosis” of Chinese languages.

Voicing Concerns over Women's Destiny in the Market Society

The present conflict between Marxism and a certain strand of feminism centers on the role of class in the oppression of women. This debate can be examined in a recent Chinese ‘women’s film’. Lunar Eclipse (Yùe shí月蚀, 1999), written and directed by the renowned Chinese director Wang Quan’an (b 1965) which is acclaimed as one of the earliest leading art film in China by the Chinese sixth-generation auteur. This article aims to explore the cultural-political import and social significance of the film through analysing its narrative structures and cinematic methodology. It contends that through layers of love stories and the notion of searching for the ‘other half’, it represents the rampant class division and restructuring in Chinese society after the 1990s. Ultimately, in terms of aesthetics, it depicts the harsh social reality through its deployment of a realist approach. However, the lack of a class perspective prevents the film from going deeper into an exploration of the social contradictions and consequences of class restructuring.

De dia Deng Xiaoping, de noite Deng Lijun: música e memória em Plataforma

<p>Este artigo é dedicado à relação intermidiática entre o cinema e a música pop em mandarim no filme <em>Plataforma </em>(<em>Zhantai</em>, 2000) do cineasta chinês Jia Zhang-ke. Um dos principais diretores do cinema mundial contemporâneo, Jia é considerado o maior expoente da Sexta Geração do cinema chinês, também conhecida como a “geração urbana” por seu enfoque na vida e na paisagem das cidades em constante mutação da China atual. As diversas canções que pontuam o filme, que traça um panorama das transformações ocorridas no país durante a década de 1980 a partir da história de uma trupe de artistas itinerantes, são por um lado fragmentos da memória individual e autoral de Jia, transformados em peças importantes no seu empenho de reconstrução de uma memória coletiva através do cinema. Por outro lado, e para além de seu valor memorial, o impacto dessas canções nos anos 1980 e 1990 na China continental está relacionado, em grande medida, ao seu caráter de novidade, tanto por virem do exterior (principalmente de Hong Kong e Taiwan) quanto por empregarem a enunciação na primeira pessoa do singular, algo ausente nas canções revolucionárias chinesas ubíquas até então. Assim, a hipótese a ser explorada é de que a inclusão de canções pop em <em>Plataforma</em> se manifesta como uma marca autoral complexa relacionada à emergência e valorização do indivíduo no panorama das recentes mudanças econômicas e sociais da China continental. </p>

Performativities in Brief einer Unbekannten

Stefan Zweig's novella Brief einer Unbekannten continues to draw critical and popular interest for its intriguing contents. The article explores the performativities relating to social status and then discusses its culturally and cinematically distinct representations in the Hollywood adaptation by Max Ophüls (1948) and the film by Chinese director Xu Jinglei (2004). This approach suggests that the novella consists of two interwoven narrative threads, one devoted to the theme of unrequited love and the other to the development of Aladdin's “rags to riches” motif linked to the performativities of social status. The challenge for a film adaptation is the creation of a visual representation that will retain the impassioned voice speaking from the written text. Ophüls shifts the narrative and performativities toward a melodramatic romance with an ending that plays into the practical expectations of Hollywood. Xu is concerned not with the relief from an emotional condition but with feudal mentalities.

A Study on the Chinese Youth Director Li Rui Jun

A Study on the Chinese Youth Director Li Rui Jun

Thoughts on cinema: An Interview with Jia Zhang-ke

Interview with Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke, recorded in Beijing, in July 19, 2013.

Space and Intermediality in Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life

This article is dedicated to an analysis of Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke’s film Still Life (San Xia Hao Ren 三峡好人, 2006) from the point of view of its intermedial relationship with Chinese landscape painting. As I will suggest, Jia’s discovery of a real landscape and a vanishing cityscape in this film, shot on location in the region of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, springs from a realist impulse and from an original aesthetic response to a new historical and social conjuncture. But while it seems firmly located in the landscape of contemporary China, the film also shares aesthetic qualities with the tradition of Chinese landscape painting, mounted on hanging or hand scrolls. A focus on this particular instance of intermediality leads to a reflection on cinema’s spatial organization in light of current revisions in film and audiovisual theory, which suggest that filmic space and its spectatorial experience should be considered above all from the point of view of touch and movement. It also allows for a broader understanding of the political implications of intermediality in Jia Zhang-ke’s oeuvre, fruit of an organic link between form and content that brings a historical resonance to a contemporary perspective.

The Sincere Gaze: Art and Realism in Jia Zhangke's Films

At the 2013 Festival de Cannes, Chinese director Jia Zhangke won the Prix du scenario, the Best Screenplay Award, with his new feature film A Touch of Sin (Tian zhuding , 2013). As the most celebrated figure among the “sixth generation” group of Chinese filmmakers, Jia continues to impress his audience with films that demonstrate the piercing power of realism through an artistic lens. The inextricable relationship between art and realism in Jia Zhangke's films reflects the director's anxious desire to document China's modernization process and integrate individual life experience into history, a desire shared by a whole generation of young Chinese filmmakers.

Beijing’s Innovations in Social Management: An Interview with Song Guilun (宋贵伦)

Abstract In the afternoon of September 9, 2010, the Tsinghua University Social Management Innovation Research Group led by Professor Wang Ming (王名) conducted an interview with Song Guilun, the Party Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Social Work Committee of Chinese Communist Party and Director of the Beijing Municipal Social Development Office in which they discussed in-depth recent Beijing innovations in social management. The interview covered topics related to social management systemic and institutional innovations in Beijing, including resolution of acute local-level issues; “pivotal” social organizations; social worker team building; party building in the social field; network-style social service management; and management of foreign NGOs.

Tan Dun and Zhang Yimou between Film and Opera

Tan Dun's opera, The First Emperor—premiered in 2006 at the Metropolitan Opera and staged by the Chinese film director Zhang Yimou—was based on a preexistent film and was intended as a sequel to their 2002 film Hero. This cluster of films and performances, the intricate connections between Chinese opera and film, and Tan's and Zhang's prior work in both media offer an excellent opportunity for comparative study of the “operatic” and “cinematic” in musical and visual terms. The prominence of these figures and the charged context in which these works were created prompt investigation of their cultural and political implications as well.

"A Mixed-Blooded Child, Neither Western Nor Eastern": Sinicization of Western-Style Theatre in Rural China in the 1930s

From 1932 to 1937, Xiong Foxi, a Chinese playwright, director, and theatre professor who had studied theatre at Columbia University, directed the drama division of a high-profile literacy campaign in the villages of Ding Xian County in northern China. There, he and his colleagues staged outdoor productions that used traditional, folk, and Western theatrical techniques and incorporated mass participation of the peasant audience. As a successful experiment in localization and popularization of Western-style theatre, the Ding Xian model stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing trend of Chinese spoken drama as a canonical, didactic, and illusionary theatre aimed toward educated city audiences.