David Desser Research Articles

Review: The Japanese Cinema Book, edited by Hideaki Fujiki and Alastair Phillips; Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, edited by Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa; A Companion to Japanese Cinema, edited by David Desser

Review: <i>The Japanese Cinema Book</i>, edited by Hideaki Fujiki and Alastair Phillips; <i>Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema</i>, edited by Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa; <i>A Companion to Japanese Cinema</i>, edited by David Desser

Don’t Look Down

Don’t Look Down

Lenuta Gukin, Janina Falkowska and David Desser (eds.): Small Cinemas in Global Markets. Genres, Identities, Narratives

Andrea Virginas review of Lenuta Gukin, Janina Falkowska and David Desser's edited volume Small Cinemas in Global Markets. Genres, Identities, Narratives

On &lt;em&gt;Epstein’s American Jewish Films&lt;/em&gt;: The Search for Identity

On Epstein's American Jewish Films: The Search for Identity American Jewish Films: The Search for Identity. By Lawrence J. Epstein. London: McFarland, 2013. xii + 210 pp., ISBN 978-0-7864-6962-8 (pbk). US $40.00.Anyone seeking to survey the depiction of Jews in American movies faces a crucial choice of how to arrange them for purposes of analysis. Adherence to the dictates of chronology is one option (and historical obligation). Prime examples of this strategy are Lester D. Friedman's Hollywood's Image of the Jew (1982) and Patricia Erens's The Jew in American Cinema (1984), both of which are pioneering and still useful overviews. They seek to be comprehensive in coverage (at the expense of depth of diagnosis), and tend to be encyclopedic more than interpretive. Highlighting the fate of common representations of Jews onscreen, Nathan Abrams has recently updated the works of Friedman and Erens in The New Jew in Film (2012). Eric A. Goldman's recent book, The American Jewish Story through Cinema (2013), seeks to make a handful of films reflective of particular phases of the communal experience, and covers roughly nine decades to illumine the animating impulses of this minority group. David Desser and Lester Friedman made an odd choice by organizing American Jewish Filmmakers (1993) around four noteworthy directors (Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and Paul Mazursky). Much that is relevant in imagining American Jews is therefore neglected. Moreover the co-authors are forced to consider works that have not survived the test of timeless value, as well as those that betray only the slightest interest in the singularity of Jewish experience. Nor have all important films about Jews been directed by Jews; think of D. W. Griffith's Romance of a Jewess (1908), Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement (1947), and Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof (1971).Lawrence J. Epstein has sensibly opted for a different approach. He has elected to arrange movies by certain common themes-whether by locale (the Catskills, the Lower East Side, the Near East), by the variety of communal types (the pious, the gangsters), or by social problem (assimilation, anti-Semitism). The topics are neither arbitrary nor surprising. The focus on issues, as well as on the sites of the struggle to reconcile citizenship and ethnicity, is promising. But the execution is quite disappointing.American Jewish Films suffers primarily from an absence of energetic research. The endnotes are extended over a mere two pages; by contrast, far more of a scholarly apparatus is expected of a typical undergraduate paper. Epstein's bibliography is more useful, and runs four pages-but the volumes and articles that he lists do not seem to have been confronted or even implicitly criticized in his text as a way of moving the study of the subject into fresh or illuminating directions. As a work of serious engagement with his subject, Epstein's foray into cinematic history does not pass muster, and is much inferior to his previous work, a charming study of American Jewish comedians, The Haunted Smile (2001). That book, like American Jewish Films, constitutes an effort to answer the question of what happens to religious faith and collective memory when America intervenes.Thus Epstein's primary concern, it can be inferred, is neither aesthetic nor primarily historical. He regards film not as an art form that must obey (or invent) formal rules to get its emotional effects, nor movies even as specimens of sociological evidence that reveal over time the vicissitudes of Jewish life in the United States. …

On Bernardi et al.'s &lt;em&gt;Hollywood's Chosen People&lt;/em&gt;

On Bernardi et al.'s Hollywood's Chosen People Hollywood's Chosen People: The Experience in American Cinema. Edited by Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2013. 270 pp., ISBN 978-08143-9 (pbk). US $31.95.This collection aims highlight ways in which the experience is essential both to the history of Jews in and to the history of film and media in America (12). The contributors employ a variety of disciplinary approaches to examine the role of prominent actors, directors, producers, and screenwriters in reflecting and shaping American attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. In the introduction the editors decry the small number of significant volumes on these topics and list Lester Friedman's Hollywood's Image of the Jew (1982), Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own (1988), and David Desser and Lester Friedman's American Filmmakers (2004) in this select group. They also should have mentioned Patricia Erens's The Jew in American Cinema (1984), Joel Rosenberg's Jewish Experience on Film: An American Overview (American Year Book, 1996), Jon Stratton's Coming Out (2000), Steven Carr's Hollywood and Anti-Semitism (2001), Henry Bial's Acting (2005), and Donald Weber's Haunted in the World (2005).Several articles cover familiar ground in Hollywood's history. Lester Friedman situates Edward Sloman's His People (1925) in the context of the mass immigration of Eastern European Jews to the United States and the transformation of the film industry from a plebian form of entertainment into a mainstream one. Projecting their vision of the American dream onto the screen, most movie moguls celebrated the assimilation, intermarriage, and upward mobility of the children of immigrants. While His People depicts a Jewish-Irish romance and money as the great equalizer, it disapproves of the unbridled quest for social acceptance which severs ethnic and filial bonds. Wheeler Winston Dixon's article on the anti-Semitic, legal, and political pressures that culminated in the reign of Joseph Breen as the strict enforcer of the Motion Picture Production Code cogently and concisely synthesizes material from Gregory Black's Hollywood Censored (1996), Thomas Doherty's Hollywood's Censor (2009), and Gabler's An Empire of Their Own. Catherine Portuges profiles filmmakers who fled Nazi persecution in the 1930s and 1940s and injected a transnational sense of their displacement and vulnerability into Hollywood films. Acknowledging related books by Vincent Brook, John Russell Taylor, and Anthony Heilbut, she also contends that the Austrian and Hungarian origins of many of these emigres influenced the acting, directorial, musical, and writing styles they brought to American films. Sarah Kozloffcites Susan Sontag's concept of Jewish moral seriousness to account for the considerable number of social problem films directed, produced, or written by Jews like Elmer Rice, Robert Rossen, Stanley Kramer, and Sidney Lumet.Another group of articles focuses on actors and directors. William Rothman discerns traces of George Cukor's background in the (ac)cultured civility of his lead characters and the Emersonian moral outlook that enables them to attain dignity by discovering their true selves. That the latter is a product of a sensibility seems strained when applied to Katharine Hepburn's emotional growth as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story (1940), but proves more convincing when accounting for Judy Holliday's evolution as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday (1950). Cukor nurtured Holliday's New York voice to elicit a performance in which her linguistic inflections and personal mannerisms initially camouflaged the intelligence Billie eventually reveals.Lucy Fischer interprets David Mamet's Homicide (1991) as a stage in the development of his current identity. …

On Abrams's &lt;em&gt;The New Jew in Film&lt;/em&gt;

On Abrams's The New Jew in Film Carolina Rocha The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema. By Nathan Abrams. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 258 pp., ISBN 978-0-8135-5341-2 (pbk). US $25.95. Jewish men and women have been represented by stereotypes in films since the inception of cinema. Heavily influenced by sociopolitical developments in both Europe and the United States, these representations underwent changes throughout the twentieth century. In The New Jew in Film, Nathan Abrams sets out to explore the transformations that Jews have undergone in world cinema since 1990. The book, which is a collection of some previously published articles and book chapters, consists of an introduction and eight chapters. In the introduction Abrams presents a concise background of the portrayal of Jews in American and European films during the twentieth century in order to contextualize his thesis that, since the 1990s, representations of Jews not only have become more prominent in cinema around the world but also have paralleled the assimilation of Jews in different societies as well as their attainment of middle-class status. The author identifies the widespread depiction of Jews in cinema as representing a global trend that has become more noticeable in the last three decades. Abrams also makes the case that this trend is the result of a new generation of actors and actresses, screenwriters, and directors who take pride in their Jewishness. (Here he borrows Daniel Boyarin’s term, “Jewissance,” or [End Page 108] pleasure in being Jewish.) The author argues that many of these new portrayals originate with the Jewish directors, screenwriters, and actors who deploy reverse stereotypes as a way to challenge prevailing perceptions of Jews. This study builds on previous work by Lester Friedman and Patricia Erens, who surveyed Jewish cinematic representations up to the 1980s, and challenges David Desser and Lester Friedman’s assertions from 2004 about the final flowering of American-Jewish cinema (18). Chapter 1 presents a history of the Jew in film, concentrating on two opposing self-images: the tough Jew and the sissy Jew. The latter has been perceived as an image of Jewish passivity, but for Abrams he embodies the new characterizations of Jews in film through the lenses of multiculturalism and pluralism. Furthermore, he argues that new varieties of Jewish masculinities have emerged, including the stoner Jew and the working-class Jew. Such changes are seen, for example, in Woody Allen’s 1990s films, in which the hysterical schlemiel has been replaced by less lovable characters; in David Mamet’s screenplays, which depict sexist and aggressive Jews; and in the Coen brothers’ films. Similarly, European films have also depicted working-class Jews, notably in the work of the French-Jewish director Mathieu Kassovitz. The same images can be found in the comedies of the Jewish-American director Judd Apatow, where Jewish characters assume the roles of badkens (slackers). These new representations of Jews in film have also transformed the penis from a locus of shame to one of comedy, and blatantly critique the values of the dominant Gentile society. The second chapter centers on the depiction of the Jewess in film. Whereas earlier depictions of Jewesses had them relegated to secondary roles as the overbearing Yiddishe momme or the asexual and materialistic Jewish American Princess, Abrams identifies in post-1990s films the “Jewess with attitude,” who evolved from the feminist movement and found expression particularly in the positive Jewish female film roles played by Barbra Streisand. In addition, Jewish female directors presented the feminine Jewish gaze in films such as The Governess (Sandra Goldbacher, 1998). Iconoclastic Jewish female characters also were depicted in Aimée & Jaguar (Max Färberböck, 1999) and Zwartboek (Paul Verhoeven, 2006). The subsequent chapters examine film depictions of Jews in relation to sex, passivity, agency, religion, food, and bathrooms. The fact that Jews and Jewesses are represented as sexual predators, erotic beings, and porn stars is interpreted by Abrams as a sign of a heightened confidence on the part of Jewish and non-Jewish directors to take on these portrayals. The topics of exogamy and endogamy are [End Page 109] also explored, leading...

Nouvelle manga and cinema

This article argues that drawing in comics is, fundamentally, a narrative process. Thus, the turn in comics away from the literary, towards the visual arts (especially cinema) has also been a result of comic artists aligning their visual aesthetics with new innovative narratives: the visual turn is not merely a rejection of the literary or textual aspect of comics but a readjustment to new non-sequential narratives (like those of the nouvelle vague). Only in this way can we explain the paradox that nouvelle manga's self-proclaimed interest in storytelling over illustration does not seem to fit with the general critical agreement about a 'visual turn' in comics since the early 1990s. To call nouvelle manga 'cinematic', then, is to refer not only to particular visual techniques that we have come to associate with cinema, but also to a particular type of storytelling characteristic of the nouvelle vague and of Japanese cinema. There are undeniable similarities between nouvelle vague's episodic narrative structure and what David Desser calls 'the classical paradigm' of Japanese cinema, best exemplified by Ozu's films whose narrational mode Desser compares to Kabuki plays and Japanese novels. Ozu's films disrupt narrative linearity, stress spatial manipulations, rely on temporal ellipsis, employ an episodic structure and avoid climactic moments to explore the mundaneness of daily life. Frédéric Boilet, author of the Nouvelle Manga manifesto, wanted nouvelle manga to use the everyday stories of Japanese manga to counterbalance the excessive emphasis on illustration he found in French BD. Paradoxically, however, the incorporation of everyday stories does not result in a greater emphasis on storytelling; just the opposite: in fact, nouvelle manga's loose, episodic narrative or lack of narrative has served to refocus attention on the visual plane.

The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (review)

Reviewed by: The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity Jay McRoy (bio) The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Poshek Fu and David Desser. Cambridge University Press 2008. $100.00 hardcover; $36.99 paper. 348 pages As many film scholars well know, writing and teaching about “Chinese cinema” presents a set of distinct challenges, especially given the multiplicity of nationalist and sociocultural specificities that render such a project both historically complex and aesthetically expansive. Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all have their own rich and multifaceted traditions of motion picture production, the convoluted developments of which can be evidenced by the wealth of scholarship in English that has been generated over the last few decades. Scholarly engagements of Hong Kong cinema alone have ranged from popular overviews (Stephen Teo, David Bordwell, and Esther Yau on Hong Kong cinema), to monographs dedicated exclusively to the films of specific directors (Kenneth E. Hall’s John Woo: The Films, Peter Brunette’s Wong Kar-wai, and Lisa Martin’s The Cinema of Tsui Hark), to critical anthologies containing key essays on Hong Kong cinema (Poshek Fu’s edited collection on the Shaw Brothers, and Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai’s recent edited volume on East Asian cinemas).1 While the aforementioned works represent important contributions to the study of Hong Kong cinema, there is still plenty of ground to cover when discussing such a dynamic and vast film culture. [End Page 175] To this fertile dialogue The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Poshek Fu and David Desser, contributes a variety of perspectives by established and emerging voices in cinema studies. As the book’s subtitle suggests, the contributors write at the intersection of the political and the aesthetic. Indeed, it is in its extensive range of critical inquiries that the collection distinguishes itself from other critical anthologies on Hong Kong cinema. As Fu and Desser observe in their introduction, scholars and fans of Hong Kong cinema have been challenged by, first, a lack of “access to the cinematic past,” a situation that has only been partially addressed by the admittedly meager availability of titles on DVD and celluloid, and, second, by the intensive cross-fertilization that defines “the very place, the very situation, of Hong Kong itself.”2 Such obstacles are indeed profound, and it is a credit to this volume and its knowledgeable contributors that better-known aspects of Hong Kong cinema—like the martial arts extravaganzas of the 1970s—while certainly not overlooked, by no means dominate the book’s content. Consequently, The Cinema of Hong Kong allows for extensive investigations of the rise and fall of various Mandarin-and Cantonese-language traditions in Hong Kong film, a topic addressed in greatest detail by Stephen Teo in his contribution, “The 1970s: Movement and Transition.” Such an approach also provides for considerations of heretofore rarely considered auteurs such as King Hu, Ann Hui, and Michael Hui in excellent chapters by David Bordwell, Patricia Brett Erens, and Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, respectively. Assembling an anthology both strongly researched and diverse in its focus is no easy task, which makes what Fu and Desser have accomplished all the more remarkable. No collection of essays on the features of a national or regional cinema can provide an exhaustive overview. What this book provides, though, are several valuable additions to the existing scholarship. One such essay is Tony Williams’s “Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo.” Through a careful consideration of the oeuvre of one of the most iconic directors of the Hong Kong new wave of the 1980s, Williams posits that in seminal works like A Better Tomorrow (Ying hung boon sik; 1986), The Killer (Dip huet seung hung; 1989), and Bullet in the Head (Die xue jie tou; 1990), Woo dissects a culture rapidly approaching a defining historical moment. Consequently, Woo’s trademark “stop-motion visual images of heroes transcending the normal temporal boundaries of time and space” provide “tentative possibilities” for a heterogeneous society “struggling to survive a problematic future”3 that is marked not only by the loss of a stable cultural identity, but also by a potential...

‘We’re on Flashdrive or CD-ROM’: Disassembly and Deletion in the Digital Noir of Collateral

This paper analyses the inflection of film noir that occurs in Michael Mann’s Collateral, adding to a thread by Paul Schrader, John G. Cawelti and David Desser. These arguments are applied to Collateral, which features a distinctive aesthetic that I argue is ‘digital noir’. Collateral both adheres to and departs from the features of noir, presenting an environment that is similar to an information system in which lives are comparable to computer programs. The film’s digital cinematography blurs people and places together, reducing the very presence of the characters into digital information, captured by the camera for easier manipulation.

Learning to Love What Passes: Sensual Perception, Temporal Transformation, and Epistemic Production in Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life

Research Article| September 01 2008 Learning to Love What Passes: Sensual Perception, Temporal Transformation, and Epistemic Production in Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life Kristi McKim Kristi McKim Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Camera Obscura (2008) 23 (2 (68)): 69–101. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-003 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kristi McKim; Learning to Love What Passes: Sensual Perception, Temporal Transformation, and Epistemic Production in Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life. Camera Obscura 1 September 2008; 23 (2 (68)): 69–101. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-003 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCamera Obscura Search Advanced Search Hirokazu Kore-eda's 1998 film After Life stylistically cites canonical Japanese films (especially that of Yasujiro Ozu), while heralding the cinema's role in both photogenically defamiliarizing the familiar and naturalizing the new. Set in a way station between heaven and earth and alternating between documentary-like scenarios and quiet, evocative cinematic pauses on the natural world, After Life contrasts a bucolic landscape with the spectacle of film production. Moreover, After Life privileges the transformative potential of a benevolent gaze (subjectively held by its female protagonist) that productively learns from and contributes to a sensual, humanistic, and epistemic perception. Combining analyses of Ozu's films (by Noël Burch, Gilles Deleuze, David Desser, and Donald Richie) with film theories (by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Mary Ann Doane, and Jean Epstein), I trace the temporal underpinnings of After Life's evocation of photogénie, seasonal passing, memory, identification, and gendered experience to show the sensual gravity of benevolent attention. I argue that After Life illustrates the way in which film can enable our taking the time to learn a sensual and sensitive way of being in the world. Through the point of view of the female protagonist, this film moves from a contemplative to a loving and epistemically productive gaze; in so doing, this story about learning to love what passes writes the history of women's cinematic subjectivity as the worldly exercise of photogenic love. The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2008 by Camera Obscura2008 You do not currently have access to this content.

Citizen Spielberg (review)

Reviewed by: Citizen Spielberg Jeffrey Shandler Citizen Spielberg, by Lester D. Friedman. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 361 pp. $24.95. Film scholar Lester Friedman is best known in the field of Jewish studies for his books on Jewish characters in Hollywood movies and Jewish directors who brought them to the screen: The Jewish Image in American Film (1987) and American Jewish Filmmakers (1993, with David Desser). In Citizen Spielberg, Friedman sets out to take film director and producer Steven Spielberg seriously—a task that, Friedman argues, critics and scholars of film have hitherto been loath to do, as they are largely dismissive of this highly successful, popular filmmaker. Friedman seeks a more nuanced approach to Spielberg’s cinematic output as director; taking readers through an analysis of his films and responding to the critical assessments of others, Friedman asserts that “Spielberg is a far more complex, sophisticated, and wry filmmaker than most mainstream critics and academic scholars appreciate” (p. 5). Friedman organizes his study by grouping the films according to genre. Therefore, for Jewish studies scholars, Citizen Spielberg will be of interest largely for its final chapter, which is devoted to the 1993 film Schindler’s List, a film that stands alone among Friedman’s typology of fantasy films, adventure melodramas, World War II combat films, and social problem films. (Although there is brief mention in the book of Munich, Spielberg’s 2005 drama about the Israeli government’s response to the terrorist attack on the nation’s athletes [End Page 250] at the 1972 Olympics, Friedman does not include any analysis of the film, as it was released after he completed his study.) In his chapter on Schindler’s List, Friedman locates the film in a cursory overview of Holocaust remembrance in America and offers some interesting information about the film’s production—for example, that the cinematic adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s book on Oscar Schindler’s rescue of hundreds of Jews from Nazi persecution might well have been directed by Martin Scorsese or Billy Wilder. Most of the chapter consists of Friedman’s refutation of other scholars’ and critics’ cavils about the film, paying particular attention to those who fault its portrayal of Jews, which he discusses at length. In his introduction to Citizen Spielberg, Friedman asserts the importance of genre study and auteur criticism, rather than more “postmodern” approaches, for this project. But the popularity of Spielberg’s work and the problems this raises for many viewers—not only critics and scholars, though theirs are the most readily available public voices—are issues worth considering in themselves. They are better assessed by looking elsewhere than within the director’s films—and one doesn’t need to be a postmodernist to do so. Consider, for example, the larger issues that Friedman raises in his introduction to the chapter on Schindler’s List, in which he characterizes his response to the film as “passionate ambivalence. As a Jew who lost grandparents in the Holocaust, I am deeply moved each time I watch Schindler’s List, sincerely admire Spielberg’s courage in making the film, and applaud his willingness to challenge himself technically, thematically, and emotionally. Yet as a film scholar trained to analyze moving images and the reasons these images affect audiences, I find it difficult to embrace the film uncritically” (p. 290). It is certainly useful to examine Spielberg’s accomplishments as a leading figure of American popular culture—as a director and producer of films and television programs, as the cofounder of the studio Dreamworks SKG, and, moreover, Friedman argues, as a ubiquitous force and iconic presence in contemporary American popular culture. But doing so demands looking beyond the films themselves, however skillfully crafted they may be, to their epiphenomena. What, for example, does Friedman’s own complex engagement with Schindler’s List reveal, both about the power of a fictional film to effect the extraordinary responses it has engendered, across the United States and around the world, and about Spielberg’s stature (since the making of this film) as a public figure, especially for Jews? Spielberg’s investment, not only of the profits from Schindler’s List but also of the value of...

Cool Jewz: Contemporary Jewish Identity in Popular Culture/-/-An Introduction

“Cool Jewz.” The term came to me as a response to watching the film The Hebrew Hammer ( Jonathan Kesselman, 2003). What is going on, I asked myself, in Jewish Popular Culture? Since 1988 and Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own, Jon Stratton’s Coming Out Jewish, David Zurawik’s The Jews of Prime Time, and Paul Buhle’s From the Lower East Side to Hollywood,1 new scholarship has been emerging which seeks to reclaim Jewish cultural history from essentialist ontologies about Jewish identity (like David Desser and Lester Friedman’s American Jewish Filmmakers).2 I remember seeing Jon Lovitz on David Letterman’s show one night. “So, Jon,” Letterman asked, “you’re a Jew?” To which Lovitz replied, “Well, Jewish.” Jews and Judaism were ceasing to be superficial and one-dimensional identities which presupposed cultural consensus—on religious praxis, on politics (specifically about the State of Israel), on history (specifically about the Holocaust). Despite the stereotype of Jewish domination of twentieth-century

Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema (review)

Reviewed by: Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema Kam Louie (bio) Laikwan Pang and Day Wong, editors. Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. xi, 342 pp. Hardcover $59.50, ISBN 962-209-737-5. As one of the co-editors of this informative and stimulating collection observes in her introduction, in recent years Hong Kong cinema productions have been recognized "as the most interesting and successful alternatives to Hollywood's dominant global, commercial film market" (p. 1). This recognition is evidenced by the large number of scholarly and popular publications on this topic that have appeared in the past few years. In particular, Hong Kong University Press has led the field in publishing excellent academic titles such as the monographs in its acclaimed New Hong Kong Cinema series. Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema is a worthy addition to its list of titles. The appearance of this volume is very timely given the growing interest not just in Chinese cinema, but in masculinities in Asia. As East Asians become increasingly wealthy and confident and Chinese men are perceived by more people around the world as "sexy," Chinese masculinity has become a major topic for investigation in the past few years. Given that Hong Kong cinema is best-known for its action movies, one would expect discussions of Chinese masculinities to take center stage in this genre. However, this has not been the case. The majority of critical studies and collections have tended to concentrate more on nationalist or transnational concerns. Although this is understandable given Hong Kong's geopolitical significance and importance in the East-West divide, the bottom line is that Hong Kong cinema made its name and prospered because of the success of the kung fu genre. This book places masculinities in the forefront. It is divided into three parts: (1) "History and Lineage," (2) "Transnational Significations," and (3) "Production, Reception and Mediation." But these groupings do not mean that the topics are mutually exclusive or that they exhaust all the major issues discussed in the book. For example, many of the essays look at the role of women as much as that of men. Indeed, with women audiences becoming major consumers of the industry, [End Page 488] and the rise of femocrats and metrosexuals in the industrialized world, the distinctions between chick flick and dick flick could eventually blur. Certainly, the stated intention of the editors of this volume is to "investigate the multiple meanings and manifestations of masculinities in Hong Kong cinema that compliment, contradict, and complicate each other" (p. 7). The assumption throughout is that masculinity is a moving target, and its composition changes as the context changes. This assumption enables the discussions to take masculinity into both territories that are familiar and those that are less trodden. Interestingly, the less-known features of masculinity in Hong Kong cinema for Western readers relate to the indigenous origins of this cinema itself. In part I, the first two chapters address these origins. David Desser's discussion of the development of male movies in the late 1960s and early 1970s is especially enlightening. I am convinced by his argument that of the two early martial artists—Zhang Che and King Hu—it is Zhang Che who had an immediate and lasting impact on the Shaw Brothers' films that became so influential in later years. Unfortunately, the book does not contain a chapter specifically on the period directly after this: from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. This is a pity because the 1980s and early 1990s were highly profitable years for Hong Kong cinema, and discussions about them would have been robust in tone. Nonetheless, Laikwan Pang's chapter, which concentrates on the post-1997 situation, is fascinating in terms of the information it provides about the local context at that less prosperous time. Pang illuminates this context by focusing on the work of the relatively new film studio Milkway Image (Yinhe yingxiang). This is a wise choice, not only because this company was established during an economic recession, but also because it continues to be successful, thanks to its innovative director Johnnie To, whose gangster films such as The Mission (Qianghuo...

Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas. By Poshek Fu. [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. 288 pp. £14.95. ISBN 0804745188.

Despite its short length (152 pages excluding reference matters), this pioneering study in English of “the Shanghai–Hong Kong nexus” in Chinese cinema succeeds in placing wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong cinemas in specific (albeit not always “proper” as Poshek Fu claims (p. xvi)) institutional and industrial contexts, bringing to light the “humanity” of the filmmakers, the “multiplicity of the historical situations,” and the “complexity of the cultural politics” of filmmaking and film criticism (p. xv). Most impressive of all is Fu's dedication to primary research, reading hard-to-find print materials as well as conducting interviews and watching rare films. The book's incredibly rich information (e.g. studio assets, production costs, ticket prices) will certainly interest scholars of modern Chinese history and culture, and Fu's accessible stories should attract general readers as well.After a preface outlining Fu's aims, chapter one, “Mapping Shanghai cinema under semi-occupation,” traces the rise of Zhang Shankun's Xinhua Company in Shanghai and reveals the ambiguities, contradictions and ironies of “Solitary Island cinema” between 1937 and 1941 – a cinema that defied political boundaries and thrived against odds. Chapter two, “Between nationalism and colonialism,” based on Fu's similarly-titled previous study (in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Fu and David Desser (2000)), discusses Hong Kong's “double marginality” between “Sinocentric” nationalism and British colonialism, and critiques the “Central Plains syndrome” in Shanghai filmmakers stranded in Hong Kong in the late 1930s. Against the Chinese syndrome, Fu asserts, Cantonese films like Southern Sisters (1940) articulated “a both/and hybridity” constitutive of a new “local consciousness” or emergent identity (p. 87). Chapter three, “The struggle to entertain,” derives from Fu's previous article (“The ambiguity of entertainment: Chinese cinema in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, 1942 to 1945,” Cinema Journal, 37.1 (Fall 1997)) and argues against a binary view of either/or (e.g. resistance/collaboration, patriots/traitors). Fu depicts “occupation cinema” as a space of entertainment for the colonized to “escape from Japanese propaganda” (p. xiv), although the both/and logic also compels him to note the paradox that occupation cinema ultimately “helped normalize and naturalize the everyday violence of the occupation” (p. 131). In an epilogue, “Filming Shanghai in Hong Kong,” Fu goes through the changing political–economic situations in post-war Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia. Edited by Jenny Kwok Wah Lau. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. x, 250 pp. $79.50 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction - Jenny Kwok Wah Lau Part I: States of Modernities 1. Globalization and Youthful Subculture: The Chinese Sixth-Generation Films at the Dawn of the New Century - Jenny Kwok Wah Lau 2. Marx or Market: Chinese Rock and the Sound of Fury - Jeroen de Kloet 3. Reexamining the East and the West: Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Orientalism, and Popular Culture - Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto 4. Stranger Than Tokyo: Space and Race in Postnational Japanese Cinema - Yomota Inuhiko, translated by Aaron Gerow 5. Discourse on Modernization in 1990s Korean Cinema - Han Ju Kwak 6. Youth in Crisis: National and Cultural Identity in New South Korean Cinema - Frances Gateward 7. The Fragmented Commonplace: Alternative Arts and Cosmopolitanism in Hong Kong - Hector Rodriguez Part II: Postmodernism and Its Discontents 8. Immediacy, Parody, and Image in the Mirror: Is There a Postmodern Scene in Beijing? - Dai Jinhua, translated by Jing M. Wang 9. Terms of Transition: The Action Film, Postmodernism, and Issues of an East-West Perspective - Chuck Kleinhans 10. Consuming Asia: Chinese and Japanese Popular Culture and the American Imaginary - David Desser Part III: Women in Modern Asia 11. Of Executioners and Courtesans: The Performance of Gender in Hong Kong Cinema of the 1990s - Augusta Lee Palmer and Jenny Kwok Wah Lau 12. The Woman with Broken Palm Lines: Subject, Agency, Fortune-Telling, and Women in Taiwanese Television Drama - Lin Szu-Ping About the Contributors Index

The Cinema of Hong Kong: history, arts, identity

List of contributors Acknowledgements Poshek Fu and David Desser Introduction Poshek Fu and David Desser Chronology of Hong Kong cinema David Desser and Poshek Fu Part I. History: 1. The Kung Fu craze: Hong Kong cinema's first American reception David Desser 2. The American connection in early Hong Kong cinema Law Kar 3. The 1960s: modernity, youth culture, and Hong Kong Cantonese cinema Poshek Fu 4. The 1970s: movement and transition Stephen Teo Part II. Arts: 5. Richness through imperfection: King Hu and the glimpse David Bordwell 6. Space, place, and spectacle: the crisis cinema of John Woo Tony Williams 7. Besides fists and blood: Michael Hui and Cantonese comedy Jenny Lau 8. The film work of Ann Hui Patricia Erens Part III. Identity: 9. Between Nationalism and Colonialism: mainland emigres, marginal culture, Hong Kong cinema 1937-1941 Poshek Fu 10. Urban cinema and cultural identity of Hong Kong Leung Ping-Kwan 11. Rewriting history: Hong Kong nostalgia cinema and its social practice Natalia Chan Sui Hung 12. Filming diaspora and identity: Hong Kong and 1997 Sheldon Lu 13. Buying American, consuming Hong Kong: cultural commerce, fantasies of identity, and the cinema Gina Marchetti 14. Hong Kong electric shadows: a selected bibliography of studies in English H. C. Li Index.

Ozu's Tokyo Story. Edited by David Desser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 173 pp. $13.95.

<i>Ozu's</i> Tokyo Story. Edited by David Desser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 173 pp. $13.95.

Review: Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan by Linda C. Ehrlich, David Desser

Book Review| April 01 1997 Review: Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan by Linda C. Ehrlich, David Desser Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and JapanLinda C. EhrlichDavid Desser Matthew Bernstein Matthew Bernstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (1997) 50 (3): 52–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/1213617 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Matthew Bernstein; Review: Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan by Linda C. Ehrlich, David Desser. Film Quarterly 1 April 1997; 50 (3): 52–53. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1213617 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1997 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

: Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan . Linda C. Ehrlich, David Desser.

: Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan . Linda C. Ehrlich, David Desser.

Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China Japan. Edited by Linda C. Ehrlich and David Desser. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. xii, 345 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China Japan. Edited by Linda C. Ehrlich and David Desser. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. xii, 345 pp. $19.95 (paper). - Volume 55 Issue 3