Chinese-language Films Research Articles

Learning to Speak Chinese: Defining the Sino-American Film Paradigm

This article proposes a new paradigm, Sino-American film, that is centered on Chinese language in American films. Sino-American films comprise two generations. The First Generation includes Pushing Hands (1993), Take Out (2004), and Saving Face (2004) and is characterized by independent production, limited distribution, and creation during a period when Asian Americans were rarely represented on film. The Second Generation includes The Farewell (2019), Tigertail (2019), Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings (2021), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and is characterized by a Hollywood production model, widespread distribution across streaming services, and creation during a period of growing Asian American cultural representation. Sino-American films negotiate both Chinese-language film and Hollywood by focusing on overlooked characters— Chinese-language-speaking Americans. This article contributes to conversations in Chinese film studies and Asian American studies by bringing Asian American film into exchanges with three Chinese film studies paradigms: transnational cinema, Chinese-language film, and Sinophone film. This cross pollination uncovers new areas for further study. Sino-American film demonstrates the importance of Sino-American language, ethnicity, and culture within the subsuming category of Asian American film. Furthermore, pairing Sino-American films with Chinese film studies uncovers a new category of Chinese-language film outside assumed contexts and paradigms.

Ethnicity and Global Dissemination in Transnational Chinese-language Cinema

Ethnicity and Global Dissemination in Transnational Chinese-language Cinema

Chinese Sources for AfterWards: From Premodern Poetry, Paintings, and Medical Texts to Modern Novels, Film, and Documentaries

This paper focuses on Chinese sources suggested for a narrative medicine (NM) program, called AfterWards. Dr Lauren Small established AfterWards in 2014 and has been coordinating it since out of the Pediatrics Department at Johns Hopkins Medicine. In early 2019, she started giving a series of lectures and workshops about AfterWards to Chinese medical educators and clinicians in Beijing and Shanghai. She created an AfterWardsFacilitator’s Guidebased on Western-language sources for workshop participants. She also started to organize with Jiang Yuhong (Peking Union Medical College) a workshop for Chinese colleagues to be held at Johns Hopkins Medicine in October 2019. They invited the author to participate. The idea was hatched then to develop Chinese source materials following the AfterWards structure for an updatedFacilitator’s Guidethat Dr Small had initially written. A typical one-hour AfterWards session consists of a specific five-part structure: a literary text or artwork, an associated theme, discussion topics, a writing exercise, and shared reflection. While the content of the program always changes from session to session, the basic structure remains the same. This paper summarizes the types of Chinese sources and their related narrative-medicine themes that were originally selected for inclusion in the updated AfterWardsFacilitator’s Guideintended for Chinese colleagues. These sources about coping with sick family members, aging, and illness ranged from the textual (classical Chinese poems on aging and diagnostic forms for training students) and visual (premodern Chinese paintings and murals of medical encounters) to the fictive (novels) and performative (contemporary Asian-American film in English and Chinese-language film and documentaries).

A History of Forgetting

A History of Forgetting Elizabeth Wijaya (bio) REMAPPING THE SINOPHONE: THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF CHINESE-LANGUAGE CINEMA IN SINGAPORE AND MALAYA BEFORE AND DURING THE COLD WAR BY WAI SIAM HEE Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019 REMAPPING THE SINOPHONE: THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF CHINESE-LANGUAGE CINEMA IN SINGAPORE AND MALAYA BEFORE AND DURING THE COLD WAR BY WAI SIAM HEE Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019 What does it mean to remember an absence? Many of the films analyzed and listed in the filmographies of Hee Wai Siam's Remapping the Sinophone are doubly lost: both materially absent and barely present in film canons and popular memory. Even some of the films that have survived or have recently resurfaced and have been restored, such as Blood and Tears of the Overseas Chinese (Cai Wenjin, 1946) and Spirit of the Overseas Chinese (Wan Hoi-Ling, 1946), having already been once-forgotten, currently still have limited visibility as they can only be accessed at film archives or during special screenings. In Hee's Remapping the Sinophone: The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War, the status of whether a film is extant or nonextant is not always marked because Hee's concern is less with listing the material disappearances of the films than with tracing the causes and effects of the disappearances from the cultural histories of Chinese-language cinema. Through foregrounding lost but important films or rediscovered films and the debates surrounding their production, the ambition of Remapping the Sinophone extends to reclaiming the history of early Chinese-language cinema in Singapore and Malaya and positing the importance of this history for Sinophone and Cold War cinema studies. Remapping the Sinophone presents an indictment of forgetting and a call to remember that which has been obscured by historical and [End Page 197] geopolitical forces. The author argues that Mandarin and Chinesetopolect cinemas from Singapore and Malaya (1927 to 1965) have been neglected within academic discourse, cultural memory, as well as contemporary debates on inclusion and exclusion in cultural productions framed as Sinophone/Chinese-language. Hee is concerned that early Chinese-language cinema has been overlooked not only in Singapore and Malaysian cinema history but also in histories of Chinese-language cinema. This forgetting encompasses the films themselves as well as the debates on the term "Chinese-language cinema" in Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s. Hee's project of "remapping" the terrain of the Sinophone occurs alongside a recovery of the Singapore and Malayan roots of the "Sinophone" and "Chinese-language" debate as well as the Cold War context of the making and forgetting of this oeuvre that is further marginalized within the already marginalized cinemas of Singapore and Malaysia. In terms of the timeline covered in the book, 1927 was the release year for New Friend, the first locally produced film in Singapore, while 1965 was the year of Singapore's independence after separation from Malaysia and the last year in which the director Yi Shui made a film. In Hee's telling, 1965 was a crucial year of beginnings and endings, when Singapore's independence coincided with the end of Yi Shui's dream of the acceptance of the hybridized "Malayanised Chinese-language" cinema. The first chapter of the book begins with a debate over two non-extant films: New Friend (1927) directed by Guo Chuwen, and Leila Majnun (1934) directed by Balden Singh Rajhans. Hee argues that unlike what Latent Images by Uhde and Uhde claimed, New Friend (1927), rather than Leila Majnun (1934), was the first locally produced film in Singapore. Both films, though materially lost, remain significant in the entangled memory and legacy of Singapore and Malaysian cinema. The chapter continues with characteristically detailed research on the historical evidence pertaining to the production and release of New Friend. Hee ties the fate of New Friend to that of Chinese immigrants in Singapore and Malaysia, arguing that the neglect of New Friend reveals the "double rejections" of "Chinese immigrants in Singapore and Malaysia" by "national ideologies in their homeland and by postcolonial concerns in a new country" (45). For Hee, this double rejection is not...

Tradition, Transmediality, and Modernity: Representation of the Double in Chinese Modern Visual Culture

ABSTRACT Films featuring look-alikes with contrasting attributes played by the same actor or actress were prevalent in both Republican cinema before 1949 and contemporary Chinese-language cinema. This trope of doubling is a focal point of this article. To examine the distinctiveness of the Chinese cinematic double, this article looks back on the pictorial and conceptual paradigm of traditional Chinese painting, as well as the photographic technology of the late nineteenth century. The interaction between cultural and aesthetic conventions of Chinese painting and the imported modern technology played a significant role in configuring the double in Chinese photography. The uncanny magic of the mimetic technologies that created the perfect doubles of man, culminated in Chinese cinema in the 1920s and 1940s. While this article focuses primarily on the relationship between the trope of the double and the history of media, it also examines the themes, technologies, mimesis, and identity that were inextricably interwoven with the figure of the double. From painting to photography and on to film, the intermedial and historical journey of doubling reflects the emergence of visual regimes of modernity which changed the optical experience, transformed perceptions of the real, and challenged social ideas about class and gender.

Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage: A feminist film in a postmodern frame

Chinese-language film studies have paid scant attention to the intersection of feminism and postmodernism. This article argues that Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (1991), a film with a female protagonist and a postmodern narrative format, is demonstrably a feminist film. The parodic representation of protagonist Ruan Lingyu and the film’s scripted re-enactments of scenes from Hong Kong cinema are revealed as postmodern aesthetic processes, through which traditional gender norms can be explored and questioned. Finally, the article examines Kwan’s unique, self-reflexive narrative practice, which constructs an alternative female celebrity biopic and situates the film firmly as feminist historiographic metafiction.

Awarding Chinese-Language Cinemas: Imaginary Transnational Identities of the Golden Horse Awards

Frequently referred to as the “Chinese Oscars,” the Golden Horse Awards, held in Taiwan annually since 1962, accept submissions from various Chinese-speaking countries despite China’s suppression of Taiwan. This article reveals that the transnationalism of the Golden Horse Awards has been influenced by the cross-border tendency of early Chinese cinemas, the political turmoil of the past six decades in Taiwan, and the shifts in Chinese-language film industries in East and Southeast Asia under the influence of neoliberal globalization. It examines how the Golden Horse Awards have transformed from a tool of state ideology during the Cold War into an evaluating system that aims to promote both the global image of Taiwan and the artistic values of Chinese-language films in a broader sense. Drawing on theories from film festival and transnational cinema studies, this article further compares the Golden Horse Awards with the Cannes Film Festival to demonstrate the ways in which both festivals culturally legitimize local “national” cinema while aligning with transnational cinemas to counter larger film hegemonies. I bring the research up-to- date by examining the challenges the Golden Horse Awards have faced since China withdrew from the competition following political controversy at the 2018 ceremony. By focusing on how the Golden Horse Awards function both as a physical and an imaginary site that embodies the ambivalence of the umbrella term “Chinese-language cinemas,” this article sheds light on broader complex issues of national identities, globalization, and transnational cinemas in film awards studies.

Histrionics of a Hong Kong migrant: Shu Qi’s transnational performance style in A Beautiful Life

ABSTRACT This article examines Taiwanese actress Shu Qi’s theatrical mode of performance in Andrew Lau’s film, A Beautiful Life/Mei Li Ren Sheng (2011), as a way of trying to understand the diverse nature of Shu’s transnational stardom. Through a textual analysis of pivotal scenes from the film, the article argues that Shu’s virtuoso performance highlights a transnational acting style that challenges cultural understandings of acting in Chinese-language cinemas built around minimalism, thus suggesting the need for a reappraisal of what constitutes a ‘good’ screen performance in the East Asian region. Shu’s exaggerated performance style ultimately influences the performance delivery of her co-star, mainland Chinese actor Liu Ye. The emerging interplay between Shu’s and Liu’s acting techniques showcases the regional and transnational potential of Chinese film acting that exploits the energetic and corporeal registers of performance. In place of a minimalist acting style that focuses upon limited bodily movement and emotional restraint, the delineation of the somatic aspects of Shu’s performance, and a critical recognition of the presentational and expressive features of her voice, actions, and gestures, contributes to a more multilayered and exploratory understanding of East Asian and transnational film performance.

The limitless Possibility of Combination: Filmic Lego Poetics of Storytelling and Structure in Global Film Scriptwriting and Duration

Feature film is most limited in 90 mins in Chinese-language films to 120 mins in Hollywood films in term of length and duration, and there are popularly summarizing in several film structures like 3 act , 4 act, 5 act structure, John Truby’s story anatomy, Blake Synder’s Beat Sheet, Christopher Vogler’s Hero Journey, Paul’s Sequence Approach, etc. the well-established film structure is well tested and practiced in film industry in term of box office, film comments and general audience’ likeness and taste. It is so popular as it does suit the tastes and viewing habit of general audience. However, it will also limit the unlimited possibility of film structure and storytelling in another angle and how we perceive the film story concept. Therefore, this original and innovative paper would explore the interactive relationship and poetics between the length, duration and film storytelling and structure in a metaphysical and aesthetical form. If we can challenge or revisit the traditional film structure form, it may enlighten and explore the possibility of film art and our perception of film story. it may not just be about “problem and resolution” pattern. Everything can be possible like the bricks in Lego as film art is still very young in art historical aspect. Therefore, the paper challenges our traditional sense of frame to frame becoming shot, shot to shot becoming scene, scene to scene becoming sequence, sequence to sequence becoming act, and finally, act to act becoming film concept. It also challenges our long established understanding of how we view the film in 90 to 120 mins duration. In the end, the paper would propose a new paradigm or model of film structure.

What is transnational Chinese Cinema today? Or, Welcome to the Sinosphere

ABSTRACT A decade ago, I wrote a piece called ‘What Is Transnational Cinema? Thinking from the Chinese Situation’. It argued that knowledge is situational and perspectival; what transnational cinema is depends on when and where you are looking from and writing about. It observed and analysed two current phenomena relevant to understanding what Chinese transnational cinema was then: the growth of cross-border Chinese film production involving the People’s Republic, Hong Kong, Taiwan and more, known as ‘Chinese-language cinemas’ (huayu dianying); and the larger phenomenon of globalisation. This article asks what has changed since and proposes ‘cinemas of the Sinosphere’ as an idea to encompass those changes. However, the term refers to two very different phenomena. First, it responds to the higher profile of films that are part of a Chinese cultural sphere but not in a Sinitic language, rendering the idea of ‘Chinese-language cinemas’ inadequate. Second, it acknowledges the re-emergence of the nation-state and what some people call the ‘Second Cold War’ or what I call a ‘Two Globalizations’ phenomenon, and it refers to the cinema of the People’s Republic of China under the conditions of the Belt and Road Initiative and the non-Chinese cinemas that respond to it.

A scholarly roundtable part II Bérénice Reynaud: ‘The love of cinema is also the love of encountering people’

ABSTRACT A roundtable discussion organized by the JCC’s two guest co-editors, Timmy Chih-Ting Chen and Belinda Qian He, took place between early December 2020 and January 2021. Scholars from a variety of backgrounds and co-founders of two remarkable cinephilic organizations/groups (Deep Focus and DIRECT UBE) in the Chinese-speaking world were invited to share their experiences and ideas about cinema and cinephilia. The roundtable started with a virtual gathering via zoom, which initially took a roundtable form. Ten participants from six time zones continued the conversation through contributing to a Google document. The shared file afforded each participant the opportunity to partake at their own convenience, thereby enabling the roundtable to develop organically during two months. The online format thus shaped a timely attempt to experiment with the notion of roundtable during the pandemic. Divided into two parts, the roundtable revolved around how participants discussed their multiple identities, positionalities, and border-crossing experiences about cinema. Among them, Bérénice Reynaud stands out as a special guest who shared and reflected on her personal experiences as a non-Chinese and non-Chinesespeaking scholar, curator, and cinephile who has developed close connections with Chineselanguage cinemas. As the second part of the roundtable, Bérénice Reynaud’s autobiographical account is shown below.

A scholarly roundtable with Deep Focus and DIRECTUBE

Co-organized by JCC’s guest editors Timmy Chen and Belinda He, a roundtable discussion took place between December 2020 and January 2021. Co-founders of two remarkable cinephilic organizations in the Chinese-speaking world (Deep Focus and DIRECTUBE) and scholars from various backgrounds were invited to share their observations and insights about cinema and cinephilia. Participants from six time zones started with a roundtable gathering via video conferencing and continued the conversation through an online document. The shared file afforded each participant the opportunity to contribute to the discussion at their own convenience, thereby enabling the roundtable to develop organically within the two-month period. The roundtable during the pandemic was a timely attempt to experiment with the notion of roundtable, whereby we appreciate and intend to keep the friction, interruption, fragmental thoughts, in-between moments, and even random diversions in the process. Such a multivocal conversation was a live event among us and remains ongoing for everyone. Part I of the roundtable, as shown below, revolves around participants’ positionalities and border-crossing experiences about cinema. In Part II, our special guest, Bérénice Reynaud recounts her cinephiliac experience of working as a non-Chinese, non-Chinese-speaking scholar and curator who has developed a special relationship to Chinese-language cinema.

The disaster artist (2017): How we appreciate bad films

The following record is an excerpt of the Deep Focus Roundtable Discussion originally published on April 3, 2018, which was part of the second round of the Chinese-language film criticism competition organized by Deep Focus. Since 2016, Deep Focus has held a Chinese-language film criticism competition that targets a young generation of cinephiles, comprising film professionals, college students, or white-collar workers in a variety of fields. The competition usually consists of three rounds. At the preliminary stage, the first-round reviewers rank submissions and select a certain number of good reviews according to their shared criteria. In the second round, the authors of those selected film reviews are randomly allocated into groups. Each group is asked to discuss an assigned film as a roundtable. Each member of the reviewing committee leading such roundtables picks one film that merits in-depth discussions from multiple perspectives, and they serve as both the facilitator and the examiner of the roundtable contest. One winner within each group is selected for the final round, during which the finalists write criticism on a single film. The roundtable “How We Appreciate Bad Films” exemplifies the importance of the roundtable format for the Deep Focus collective. Responding to the debates and controversy over The Disaster Artist (2017) among Chinese fans and cinephiles, the four participants of this competitive roundtable engage the category of “bad film” (lanpian, a Chinese term referring to box-office flops and/or aesthetically bad films) in a global context. Respectively hailing from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China, young cinephiles confront each other in an intellectual battle around one film.

The translation of extralinguistic cultural references in subtitling

AbstractThere has been substantial scholarly interest in extralinguistic cultural references (ECRs) in translation, especially in audiovisual translation (AVT). However, most scholars have investigated subtitling from English into other languages. Although China has a long tradition of film production, few studies have investigated the subtitling of ECRs from Chinese into English. This article attempts to remedy this by investigating the translation strategies, translation strategy distribution, and fidelity indexes of six subtitled versions of Chinese-language films. We compare our results withGottlieb’s (2009)results on Danish subtitles, and find that both Chinese and Danish subtitlers hold a target-oriented attitude. We then investigate the share of the strategies in the subtitling of ECRs across different Chinese films and determine that this varies by genre and that the difference in the fidelity index among films of different genres is substantial. The translation of epic films appears to be highly faithful, whereas that of crime and gangster films is much less faithful.

Chinese Film Studies Online: Technological Innovations, Pedagogical Challenges, and Teaching Chinese-Language Cinema in the Digital Age

Abstract Because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education, online initiatives have moved from the periphery to the very heart of teaching and learning across disciplines. However, the profession has just begun to consider the full impact these new technologies have on the way we research and teach Chinese-language cinema. Using the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and University of Hong Kong Common Core campus-based course, Hong Kong Cinema through a Global Lens, as my principal case study, I explore some of the ways in which the digital revolution has transformed research on and teaching about Hong Kong film. From surveying the types of material available for research to exploring the differences between MOOCs and flipped classrooms, this essay considers the positive implications and potential drawbacks of these new technologies in global, regional, and local educational contexts.

Remapping the Sinophone: The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War. By Wai-Siam Hee. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. 242 pp. ISBN: 9789888528035 (cloth).

Remapping the Sinophone: The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War. By Wai-Siam Hee. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. 242 pp. ISBN: 9789888528035 (cloth). - Volume 80 Issue 1

Cinematic Representation of Ethnic Minorities in PRC and Postcolonialism

This paper explores the notions of “Sinophone” and “Chinese-language cinema” under the rubrics of postcolonialism in Chinese film studies both in China and elsewhere around the world. The paper argues that these postcolonial-inspired notions misconstrue Chinese national identity building as imperialist/colonialist endeavours, and dichotomize Han and Chinese ethnic minorities. The paper offers its counterargument by examining cinematic practices of people’s cinema, minority nationality films and native-language films in the PRC.

Introduction: making a queer turn in contemporary Chinese-language media studies

ABSTRACT The past decade has seen a surge in the scholarship of queer China and Sinophone studies, which has productively explored the geocultural travelling and transformation of Western-originated queer theories and identity politics as powerful, generative tools in both the social-political and scholarly dimensions of diverse Chinese-speaking contexts. Along this line, this article, as the introductory piece to the special issue ‘Making a queer turn in contemporary Chinese-language media studies’, proposes a radical queer theorization, reading and critique of today’s Chinese-language film, television, pop music and related celebrity and fan cultures. We connect queer China and Sinophone studies with (the too-often Western-centric) queer media studies to question the assumed absence or minoritarian position of queer media productions and fantasies in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds. Through unravelling various roots and routes in which visual-aural media forms, formats and imaginaries form discursive intervention into, if not close association with, the hetero-patriarchally structured societies and media industries, we show the research possibilities and directionalities opened up by recognizing the co-presence of and continual negotiation between queer and normative fantasies surrounding gender, sexuality, nationhood, ethnicity and class in Chinese-language media production, circulation and consumption.

K. Rajagopal on making films for and on the ethnic minority in Singapore

This interview was motivated by an interest in exploring how Singapore film directors perceive the three major Chinese cinema awards, mainly the Golden Horse Awards (GHA), Hong Kong Film Awards (HKFA) and Golden Rooster Awards (GRA), and what they might signify for Singapore cinema, especially for a nation that is predominantly ethnic Chinese. Compared to the number of Singapore Chinese-language films produced in the last two decades, there have been considerably less Indian-language productions. K. Rajagopal’s A Yellow Bird (2016) alongside two other Tamil films, namely Eric Khoo’s My Magic (2008) and T. T. Dhavamanni’s Gurushetram: 24 Hours of Anger (2010) offer critical takes on the vicissitudes of Singapore Indians struggling with issues such as socioeconomic inequality and racial prejudice in a booming Chinese-majority city-state.

The Life and Times of Lilian Lee: An Analysis of Lee's Screenplays From Psychological and Stylistic Perspectives

Lilian Lee, a novelist and screenwriter, is a prominent figure in the Hong Kong film industry and literary circles. Her unique writing style has earned her wide acclaim. Most of her works feature romances, fantasies or mysteries, showing her creative imagination. However, she didn't let love stories and supernatural elements overshadow the full picture she depicted. Instead, she further explored themes such as gender identity, sexual orientation and feminism, and dug deeper into a broad range of topics including mortality, fatality, history and patriotism. She revealed the complexity of human nature and the inner conflicts her characters underwent through incisive remarks and heart-rending stories. Her best-known works include Farewell My Concubine, Green Snake, Rouge and Kawashima Yoshiko, all of which are considered masterpieces, representing a milestone in the history of Asian cinema. Farewell My Concubine remains the only Chinese-language film to win both the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was included in Time's list of "All-Time" 100 Movies in 2005. Rouge had 16 nominations and awards at the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. It also earned Lee the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Screenplay. The critical and commercial success of these films is largely attributed to Lee's screenwriting, and the success of her screenwriting rests on her relatively fixed writing mindset. This article focuses on screenplays written by Lilian Lee and analyzes her construction of plot, narrative techniques and her writing mindset and style, by exploring the influence of her personal experience, aesthetic preference, writing habits, and her cultural, social and educational background on her works.