Lee's Film Research Articles

Cinema of Senescence: Old Age, Slow Cinema, and Form

AbstractIf speed is a cornerstone of contemporary life, then one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in the fight against agism is the fact that senescence entails a slowing down of the human body and mind. The question this essay asks is whether this form of life can afford epistemological and moral benefits within a productivist culture of speed that stigmatizes slowness and inactivity. In order to pursue an answer to this question, the essay turns to what critics have begun to call “slow cinema” and examines two films about people suffering from senescence-related slowness: Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) and Lee Chang-dong's Poetry (2010). The essay treats the slowness that can accompany age as an experiential form and places it on the same plane of formalist inquiry as slow cinema, an aesthetic form characterized by a decelerated pace, long takes, minimalist editing, and an emphasis on the temporality of quotidian life. The essay establishes its methodological approach by bringing Caroline Levine's formalism into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and André Bazin's writings on cinematic realism. Ultimately, the essay contends that Ozu's and Lee's films associate the value of slowing down our thinking and expanding our attention spans with the perceptual potentialities of age-related slowness within a culture of speed.

Cross-cultural Comparison of Family Education in China and the West: A Study Centered on Ang Lee's Film Trilogy

Cross-cultural Comparison of Family Education in China and the West: A Study Centered on Ang Lee's Film Trilogy

Ang Lee's Tears: Digital Global Melodrama in The Wedding Banquet, Hulk, and Gemini Man

This essay reads three films across Ang Lee's eclectic oeuvre—The Wedding Banquet (1993), Hulk (2003), and Gemini Man (2019)—in terms of the director's ongoing experimentations with melodrama. In particular, Lee's film melodramas self-consciously dramatize the visualization and externalization of affective interiority. Whereas Lee's early Taiwanese American family melodramas (The Wedding Banquet) externalize diasporic interiority of Taiwanese bodies through forms of analog technology, his later CGI Hollywood melodramas (Hulk; Gemini Man) externalize this interiority through digitally manipulated bodies. In Lee's CGI melodramas, it is precisely the way bodies are under- or even un-marked—both indexically and racially—that allows them to typify not simply a national but a more global generic subject.

Introduction

Introduction:BlacKkKlansman, "On the Right Side of History"? Delphine Letort (bio) Loosely based on former police officer Ron Stallworth's recollections of his infiltration into the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, BlacKkKlansman (dir. Spike Lee, 2018) exploits the paradoxical situation of its black author passing for a white supremacist to integrate the "Organization" as a powerful source of humor and critique. Director Spike Lee uses the autobiographical narrative as a source text to trace the roots of the Trumpian rhetoric in a history of nativist activism, embedded in the history and the images of Hollywood. BlacKkKlansman uses intertextual references to depict a racially divisive culture, which undergirds films that produce 'whiteness' and 'blackness' for antithetical audiences. Excerpts from The Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith, 1915) and Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) underpin the mythology of white supremacy whereas those from Blaxploitation films nostalgically evoke the activist atmosphere of the Black Power era. Situated at the crossroads of black and white cinemas, BlacKkKlansman is a title that connotes the color line as a space of encounter and separation between two communities who find themselves trapped by a history of violence, which the film shows in its final photograph of Heather Heyer who died during a Black Lives Matter protest. In an interview with the New York Times on January 22, 2019, Lee declared: "And I feel that many years to come, when historians search for a piece of art that clearly shows what is happening today, BlacKkKlansman will be one of the first things they look at because this film is on the right side of history."1 This Close-Up takes those words at face value and considers BlacKkKlansman as a unique film deserving attention for its intervention in the contemporary political and racial polemics. Like every Spike Lee Joint film, BlacKkKlansman is controversial and at the epicenter of debates about cinema and politics. Some reviews celebrated Lee's film as: the "best nondocumentary feature in more than a decade and one of his greatest," [End Page 203] "a hellraising masterpiece," and a "hot-damn triumph—one of the year's best films," as well as "a major comeback."2 Yet the filmmaker's provocative political style—"the impassioned work of a cinema giant who has again found his voice and the power to make it heard" and "this admirably, unruly filmmaker back at the height of his provocative powers"—also drew a number of criticisms regarding form and content.3 Some French critics, for example, recommended the film while expressing some uneasiness about the mixture of politics and entertainment that is nonetheless characteristic of Lee's filmmaking. For example, Le Monde explained that "Spike Lee is overdoing it. Some gags are a little long. It may not have been necessary to accumulate so much hate speech in the mouths of racist whites. The filmmaker probably chose the caricature style to hammer home his point."4 Libération ambiguously argued that "the author of Do the Right Thing (1989) has not lost any of the rage that goes hand in hand with a certain heaviness—that of militant leaflets and incisive rap slogans. In other words: the fact that Lee has not learned to be subtle over time also proves that he has not given up his fights in any way."5 Télérama was no less ambiguous with the following statement: "Lee has regained his bite, his humor as a dirty kid militant for this anti-racist and anti-Donald Trump charge."6 Lee's racial politics obviously raised some discomfort among these reviewers, who disapproved of the blend of politics and humor in BlacKkKlansman, whereas other critics considered it not an efficient means of critique: "Yet the point of BlacKkKlansman seems to be that laughing at the KKK, dismissing them as an irrelevant group of backward morons, is what got us Donald Trump";7 and "BlacKkKlansman is the rare American film that doesn't treat the KKK as a joke. … The racism on display isn't exactly funny, not unless you find social discomfort humorous."8 The four articles composing this Close-Up relinquish the controversy and examine...

Legacies of the Drunken Master: Politics of the Body in Hong Kong Kung Fu Comedy Films by Luke White

Reviewed by: Legacies of the Drunken Master: Politics of the Body in Hong Kong Kung Fu Comedy Films by Luke White Paul B. Foster (bio) Luke White. Legacies of the Drunken Master: Politics of the Body in Hong Kong Kung Fu Comedy Films. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2020. x, 240 pp. Hardcover $68.00, isbn 978-0-8248-8157-3. Legacies of the Drunken Master is a highly structured, tightly planned, and well-written application of theory in critique of Hong Kong kung fu comedy films from the 1970s and their thematic legacy through the present. Luke White is very specific in his choice of theories and appropriately circumspect in the application thereof, which are lucidly described and consistently applied throughout his analysis. He couches his approach well, choosing which theories to both apply and engage with, as well as why he so chooses, and he builds the structure of his interpretation with his goal(s) throughout clearly stated: [End Page 121] The question I would like to address in this book, then, is how the Hong Kong kung fu comedy film responds or reacts to its moment in time. Drawing on the insight of cultural studies into popular culture, and approaching the films from a fundamentally left-wing perspective, I am interested in investigating the extent to which, alongside forces within them that seem to reinforce the dominant ideologies of the moment in which they were made, they might also harbor moments of rebellion or resistance—if, perhaps, not of downright "protest" or revolution, (p. 15) In the process of establishing his analytical framework, White surveys the critical field and its trends over the past decades in both his introduction and throughout the body of the study, which is finely illuminating even if the reader may or may not agree with the author's choice of theories or assessments. White notes in the introduction that he is "unashamedly 'theoretical'" (p. 18), as he contextualizes his choices while acknowledging the state of film studies '"theory wars' of the late 1980s and early 1990s" and the general trends of film theory. White's chosen discursive space lies in "European cultural Marxism, Frankfurt School critical theory, gender studies and postcolonial theory" (p. 19). The author identifies two films directed by Yuen Woo-ping and starring Jackie Chan that initiated the kung fu comedy "event" in the 1970s, Drunken Master (1978) and Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1978), marking a contrast to Bruce Lee's more seriously ethnonationalistic kung fu works of the time. These two films, and the films that compose their kung fu comedy legacy, are thoroughly detailed throughout the study and analyzed vis-a-vis critical theory of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno (cartoonesque film violence), Michel Foucault (legacy and genealogy), Mikhail Bakhtin (carnivalesque), and a number of other critics, including Sigmund Freud and Jean-Martin Charcot's analyses of "hysteria." The chapter structure in this study is centered around these critical topics (Carnival, Utopia, Violence, Hysteria, and Masculinity) as an exploration of the elements that compose the legacies of kung fu comedy, on which White focuses in the final chapter of the book. I appreciate this choice and the visioning as an exploration because the reader is also engaged in exploration that does not necessarily require thorough grounding in the author's chosen critical lens, especially since White provides sufficient explication of such theoretical background throughout the study. White envisions his work as an engagement with both theory and kung fu comedy films, and this engagement is fully and faithfully implemented throughout the study. Importantly, the author frames the act of critique and the conversation that ensues as an engagement between theory and subject, as he proceeds "to think through whether and in what ways comic kung fu bodies continue or reverse the anticolonial wishes of the heroic kung fu era" (p. 16). In chapter 1, "Carnival," the author uses Bakhtin's writing on the "grotesque body" and carnival to demonstrate the departure of kung fu comedy [End Page 122] body from the earlier nationalistic "heroic, epic, or tragic" body in Hong Kong film, first examining Bruce Lee's film, Fist of Fury (1972) to situate...

The American Subplot: Colson Whitehead's Post-Racial Allegory in Zone One

The American SubplotColson Whitehead's Post-Racial Allegory in Zone One Grace Heneks When Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, many people declared that the U.S. had become a postracial1 society. The conservative radio host Lou Dobbs, for example, said in 2009 that "We are now in a 21st-century post-partisan, post-racial society that is being led by those who are racial and those who are partisan" (The Lou Dobbs show, November 12, 2009).2 The Black novelist Colson Whitehead echoed these statements in a 2009 satirical op-ed for the New York Times. Mocking the idea of a post-racial society, Whitehead claimed that in "officially" becoming one, the U.S. had "eradicated racism forever" (par.1). As the self-declared Secretary of Post-Racial Affairs, Whitehead asserted that people of color simply suffer from a "branding problem," and coined a new politically correct term for people of color: "People Whose Bodies Just Happen to Produce More Melanin, and That's O.K. or PWBJHTPMMATOK" (par. 4). He joked that his next official action would be to tackle popular culture, including revising Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) by replacing an angry and hostile ghost with a more "Casperlike one," and re-imagining Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing (1989) to include a group of multi-cultural hipster Brooklynites who host a block party on a hot summer's day. By erasing all semblance of race as a meaningful category of identity in American culture, Whitehead pretended to promise that we could continue to live in a post-racial world where race no longer matters. Whitehead's hyperbolic op-ed helps to illustrate the folly of the notion of a post-racial society and makes clear that, despite the 2008 election of its first Black president, the U.S. is not free from racism, racial injustice, or oppression. Though his article is meant to be humorous,3 there nonetheless remains an undercurrent of criticism leveled at those in the U.S. who have adopted post-raciality as a fact—a population Eduardo Bonilla-Silva identifies as "colorblind" racists (262). Bonilla-Silva explains that most white people would rarely identify themselves as racist; rather, they see race as an irrelevant factor in the U.S., declaring that "they don't see color, just people." The concept of colorblindness helps white people justify racial inequality, allowing them to believe that the higher levels of incarceration for Black men or residential and school segregation have nothing to do with race. Instead, [End Page 60] white people link these glaring disparities to personal choice or "natural" inclinations to remain within distinct racial or ethnic communities. Colorblindness dismisses what people of color in the United States have always known, and what poet Langston Hughes gives voice to when he declares, "America never was America to me;" or more significantly, "There's never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this 'homeland of the free'" (Hughes 5, 15–16). Nearly eighty years later, racial inequalities continue to exist, despite the desire of white people to believe the U.S. has moved beyond them. In fact, as Stephanie Li points out in Signifying without Specifying 2012) the use of "post-" denotes this wish: the urge to identify "post-" moments of social development reflects a desire to be done with the complicated legacies of oppression and inequality that still plague our nation. This totalizing gesture implies that fulfillment of liberty and justice for all, the promise of an ideal America at last made true, as if the wrongs of any nation can be neatly surmounted with a prefix. (4) Here, Li argues that tacking on the prefix "post-" to the concept of race indicates a conflation of race and racism so that the "end of race" signifies the end of racism too. Therefore, as discourse on race becomes irrelevant, a means of effective change also becomes irrelevant. Li, like Bonilla-Silva, claims that this conflation of race and racism is just another "iteration of the misguided aspiration for 'color-blindness'" (3), and a way to both ignore and erase the legacy of race...

Bruce Lee en Chile: ironía y parodia en Fuenzalida de Nona Fernández

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the use of irony and the parody of Bruce Lee in Fuenzalida (2012), a novel by the Chilean author Nona Fernández. Through a close reading of the text, I endeavor to show how the novel parodies Enter the Dragon, the most famous of Bruce Lee's films. In this way, the narrator imagines an alternative biography of her father, as if he never voluntarily left her for another family, but rather was forced by the dictatorship to abandon her. The narrator's memories do not distinguish between reality and imagination as she creates a fantasy in the form of bruceploitation films, in which her father fought like a martial arts star against the greatest enemies of the Chilean dictatorship. Thus, irony and parody allow us to understand how martial arts films of the 1970s can be used to elaborate both a private and a political mourning.

True Terror: The Haunting of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour

The opening sequence of Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992) is a relentless act of cinematic aggression. Malcolm's rhythmic condemnation of white man as history's greatest scourge provides aural context for the infamous video footage of the Rodney King beating. These discrete audio and visual texts resonate to create an inescapable ideological indictment that draws to a close upon a stark visual presenting an American flag engulfed in flames, burning away to reveal an iconic X. In the confluence of its texts, this sequence amounts to a militant statement of black grievance and defiance. However, as this assault arrogates and deforms the master symbol of the American flag, it also suggests that the film to follow speaks about African America within an American discourse. Like the film it prefaces, the evocative opening of Malcolm X announces aggressively Lee's desire to be understood as an auteur consciously attempting to engage and influence public narratives about the idea of race in America and, therefore, about the idea of America itself. Along with other films from his early career, Malcolm X helped establish Lee's reputation as a bold yet mainstream cultural commentator whose films require their audiences to question conventional structures of feeling, the normative approaches to life as lived in the United States, and to rethink national mythology (Massood, Introduction xvi). Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that more than a decade after becoming a reliable provocateur Lee directed 25th Hour, Hollywood's first contemplation of the national trauma produced by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Released just sixteen months after the event, the film's post-9/11 New York setting was the representation of a national wounding, still raw. Projecting it upon the silver screen was in itself an aggressive gesture; it was a risk no other Hollywood filmmaker would take until almost five years after the attacks. Yet at first blush it appears that in 25th Hour Lee handles his confrontation of the American imagination with uncharacteristic deference; one critic described the film as a heartfelt love letter to New York and America (Massood, Introduction xvii). The ideological fire witnessed in Malcolm X seems tamped in reverence to the sensitized post-9/11 audience. Issues of race feel muted in a narrative focused upon the fate of a sympathetic white protagonist; and Lee's treatment of the events of 9/11 is ostensibly apolitical and ideologically open. On its surface, the film strikes its viewer as a collage of intimate character studies, distanced from the public discourses of race and nation that organize so much of Lee's earlier work. However, in the context of Lee's oeuvre, 25th Hour represents not a departure in theme and attitude, but rather a shift in method. The film is in fact a profound contemplation of the way in which race continues to haunt the American mind, and it is an important development in Lee's extensive and evolving artistic project. Modernizing the national gothic tradition, 25th Hour suggests that, despite programs of gentrification, suburbanization and incarceration which have virtually inoculated the affluent white body against racial hazard, America remains deeply troubled by its dark bogeymen. This argument is elaborated amidst a specific post-9/11 historical context that was--among other things--animated by rhetoric of American interracial solidarity marshaled against a cave-hidden threat from abroad. Lee's film carefully hollows out this rhetoric by demonstrating that for the American imagination, even in the post-9/11 moment, the most potent menace lurks at home--in a sepulchral prison system that efficiently disappears black male bodies from civil society and social discourse, while intensifying the terror they produce in the national psyche. The subtlety and restraint that Lee uses to re-create the hauntings in 25th Hour gives the film a simmering, understated power that distinguishes it from his more noted films of the late 1980s and early '90s, like Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991) and Malcolm X--films that conveyed ideology in heavy-handed, sometimes didactic, terms that could prompt an unsympathetic (and hyperbolic) critic like Stanley Crouch to declare Lee's aesthetic fascist (qtd. …

Introduction: Hip-Hop Cinema as a Lens of Contemporary Black Realities

Introduction:Hip-Hop Cinema as a Lens of Contemporary Black Realities Regina N. Bradley (bio) The focus for this Close-Up on hip-hop cinema examines how hip-hop culture and its aesthetics manifest on film. For nearly half a century, hip-hop has served as a mouthpiece for exploring the marginalized experiences of black and brown people in the United States and abroad. Hip-hop was more than a popular cultural expression. It served as a context for complicating and recognizing a transition into a post–civil rights movement era. More specifically, hip-hop expressed the messiness of the generational angsts about race, class, and identity that were left unresolved from the movement. For the most part, America's embrace of hip-hop has been its musicality and its associated aesthetics. The focus on lyricism and production, very much integral to understanding the agency behind hip-hop's message, leaves much room for considering the other elements of hip-hop cultural production such as its visual narratives. I am not referencing the music videos that accompanied the music, though some videos such as Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" (intentionally) resemble outtakes from Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing (1989). As hip-hop crossed over into mainstream American popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s, its influence also reached across community and cultural boundaries. It would be remiss to not point out that hip-hop's growing popularity paralleled its increasing profitability. Hip-hop's growing influence on American popular culture needed to simultaneously amplify its beginnings in urban working-class black and brown communities while making room to present a narrative that was alluring and profitable to a mainstream white audience. For the purpose of the examinations that follow, we focus on hip-hop cinema as a mainstream and commercial phenomenon, as well as the visualization of hip-hop's cultural identities, aesthetics, and iconography that signify hip-hop's influence on the American popular imagination. Some of these identities and aesthetics are immediately recognizable because of their presence in hip-hop music: the focus on working-class; predominantly [End Page 141] black communities in urban areas; the inner tension of a young black man attempting to establish self agency while balancing the needs and desires of his community; and an urban soundtrack of hip-hop music and its preceding music genres such as funk or soul, often sonic markers of generational and cultural differences of masculine expression between characters and plot. The inclusion of previous eras' popular black music is significant in establishing not only a cultural trajectory from which hip-hop emerges but also the importance of black identities as non-linear and frequently in conversation with each other. Kenton Rambsy's intriguing essay focuses on Jay-Z's album American Gangster, a soundtrack for the 2007 film starring Denzel Washington about 1960s and 1970s drug kingpin Frank Lucas. Rambsy utilizes the literary method of analysis known as textual mining to explore Jay-Z's use of the American Gangster film to produce not only a hip-hop soundtrack but also to map out the impact of the film on his emceeing. Additionally, hip-hop cinema also highlights hip-hop performers, whether in front of the camera as actors or behind it like the cinematic career of rappers like Ice Cube, who is examined as both an actor and as a producer in this collection of essays. Brandon J. Manning explores the presence of vulnerable black masculinity in Ice Cube's first screenplay, Friday (dir. F. Gary Gray, 1995). Manning interrogates Ice Cube's positioning and balancing of inner-city black men's interiority and emotional baggage using humor. Adam Haupt's essay interrogates representations of the profitability of hip-hop narratives within white-supremacist constructs as seen in the biopic Straight Outta Compton. Overall, hip-hop cinema is a visual interrogation of how hip-hop sustains and also challenges articulations of post-civil rights black experiences. Further, it is important to provide a brief chronological overview of how hip-hop cinema created space for itself in popular culture. Hip-hop cinema made space to articulate the frustrations and challenges of urban black life...

Deflecting Absence: 9/11 Fiction and the Memorialization of Change

Abstract “Deflecting Absence: 9/11 Fiction and the Memorialization of Change” is an interdisciplinary examination of the way in which post-9/11 texts have been instrumental in memorializing the event as a moment of radical historical departure. Focusing on fiction through the reading of seminal 9/11 literary texts including Falling Man, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Amy Waldman's The Submission, the article deals with the internal contradictions at work both in reading and writing about works of 9/11 fiction and the way in which such texts eternally memorialize the discourse of change. Examining these literary texts alongside “Reflecting Absence,” the 9/11 memorial site, Spike Lee's film 25th Hour, and a broader discussion of the implications of the cultural discourse offered through these texts, the article exposes the disjuncture between 9/11 texts' desire to memorialize the event as the moment that “everything changed” and the missed opportunities for radical political change that followed.

Eating Popcorn with Chopsticks: Revisionary Black Masculinity in <em>Berry Gordy's the Last Dragon</em>

Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon (TriStar, 1985) performs a disruption into racist Hollywood depictions of Black men through the use of satire, stereotype, kitsch, camp, and fantasy. The him depicts its unconventional hero, a young Black martial arts master, as an endearing odd embodiment of Orientalist stereotypes. For instance, hero Leroy Green watches Bruce Lee's film Enter the Dragon (1973) in a New York City mid town movie theater while wearing traditional Chinese male clothing (cant: cheongsam) and a straw hat while he eats popcorn with chopsticks. This mise-en-scene is heavily coded in Western Orientalism and in Black fantasy of and desire for the grandeur of Chinese culture.1 White society is absent in the film and both the Black hero and Black villain of the film are invested in parodic, limited versions of Chinese and Japanese cultural forms. The film relieves us of the inevitability of a black-white racial binary by reframing this particular world as black-yellow. As M. T. Kato argues in discussing the globalization of martial arts popular culture, [t]he popular cultural revolution ... offers a space in which autonomous subjectivity alternative to the dominant mode can be constructed.2 The Last Dragon, a box office success,3 functions as a fantastical space wherein Black and mixed-race authors (director Michael Shultz and screenwriter Louis Venosta) and audience engage in a complex, uneven, entertaining, and problematic relationship with Chinese and Japanese martial arts popular culture placed in a New York City context.Journey into The Last DragonThe film narrates the journey of young Black Harlem martial arts practitioner Leroy Green (Taimak Guarriello), who has reached the end of his training with his teacher, Master (Thomas Ikeda). Leroy must venture into the wider world (other parts of Manhattan) in order to obtain his last stage of realization-the glow (the last stage of the dragon's training). During his search, Leroy finds a love interest in local club celebrity Laura Charles (Vanity) and encounters two raffishly, comically wicked bad guys-a bullying martial arts tough named Sho'Nuff the Shogun of Harlem (Julius J. Carry III) and Eddie Arkadian (Christopher Murney), an impish arcade czar. The feel-good narrative ends with Leroy defeating the bad guys, winning the heart of the successful, worldly woman, and cementing his reputation as local hero. Although The Last Dragon ends in a typical, formulaic heterosexual romance, the film resists heteronormativity. Instead, it provides us with a virginal hero who is able to navigate martial arts masculinity and Orientalist feminization in order to offer a new model of Black masculinity.The opening scene of The Last Dragon unfolds like many films from Shaw Studios and Golden Harvest, the two preeminent Hong Kong martial arts film studios in the 1970s and early 1980s. Like the opening sequence of both the Hong Kong print and the Cantonese print of its genealogical, aesthetic, and nominative forbearer Enter the Dragon (1973), The Last Dragon commences with a musical martial arts montage/ The viewer is treated to Leroy Green-a young, sweating, brown-skinned, wavy-haired muscular man-practicing his martial arts forms. The camera takes three quick shots of him-frontal, profile, and back to a frontal shot. It reads as a revised mug shot. Rather than ending on the profile shot, the camera reorients the viewer, interrupting the overdetermined idea of the young muscular Black man as a criminal. Leroy begins with a bow before cycling through punching and kicking poses, flips, and pectoral flexes. His topless torso is awash with perspiration. It's clear from his precise, fluid movements that he's no novice. Leroy performs a final front kick-his right thigh touching his chest and his foot coming above his head. During his routine, we're privy to shots of his white kung fu pants clinging to his firm, round posterior. The camera jump cuts from more flowing movements to Leroy flexing his chest and arm muscles. …

Film Review: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, by Grace Lee

Grace Lee American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, 2013, LeeLee Films. It is difficult to reconcile the opening images of Grace Lee's film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs with its opening monologue. As a seemingly fragile old woman pushes a walker past the desolate ruins of Detroit's Packard plant, we hear her say, 'I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit.' The initial temptation is to read the opening ironically, as in Mark Binelli's (2012) Detroit City is the Place to Be, or any of the other versions of Detroit as urban dystopia that plague our popular consciousness. This sense of irony is reinforced by the filmmaker's frequent use of dissolves that juxtapose images of Detroit's past as a bustling, thriving, racially segregated metropolis with its present as a partially deserted majority black city. However, irony is not a trope to describe the life of activist, thinker and revolutionary Grace Lee Boggs. And as the film unfolds, it is clear that Grace Lee the filmmaker loves Grace Lee Boggs, her subject and namesake, too much to simply impose such an irony. Lee Boggs loves her adopted hometown, and that love is the very antithesis of irony: it is passionate, committed, and frequently, it seems from the backdrops of gutted homes and burned-out businesses that texture this film, unrequited. And so viewers are left to ponder: if not irony, then what does Lee Boggs mean when, in surveying the devastation, she remarks, and this is a symbol of how giants fall'? The giants Grace Lee Boggs has seen fall are many. As a testament to a life lived at the intersection of every radical movement and revolution that has come to define the 20th century, American Revolutionary traces a life that embodies all of the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the project of revolutionary change. Born Grace Lee in 1915, she trained as a philosopher but was unable, as a Chinese-American woman, to find academic employment due to the racism and sexism of the 1930s. Lee Boggs found her way to Marxism through her work in Chicago's black community, where she came under the influence of C.L.R. James. Arising out of her experience in Chicago and the influence of James, she came to see the black community as the lynchpin to building an American revolutionary movement. However, she also became convinced that James and fellow Trotskyite Raya Dunayevskaya were mired in patterns of thinking inherited from the Russian Revolution, and so she came to Detroit, then ground zero of working-class politics and therefore revolutionary politics, to edit the socialist newspaper Correspondence. It was to be written by the social forces she saw as being at the forefront of a new American Revolution: blacks, women and youth. And it was in Detroit that she met the revolutionary autodidact and Chrysler line worker, James 'Jimmy' Boggs, and began an enduring life partnership with him, committed to thinking through, and perhaps fomenting, the next American Revolution. Inspired by Malcolm X, black nationalism and the black power movements, Grace and Jimmy became instrumental in organising the African-American community in what was then, and remains, the most racially segregated city in the USA. …

The Straussian Reception of Plato and Nationalism in China

Peking University opened its center for Classical Studies on November 15, 2011. Because Peking University is considered to be China's preeminent institution for the liberal arts and humanities, the opening ceremony was something of a event. According to the media reports on the internet, this center for Classical Studies, situated in the Department of History at Peking University, has more than ten faculty members of different disciplinary backgrounds. (1) In December 2012, the first conference of Chinese Comparative Classical Studies (bijiao gudianxue) was held at Sun Yat-sen University in Southern China with participants from seven academic disciplines. The Association of Chinese Comparative Classical Studies was considered to be the first interdisciplinary and cross-cultural academic association in China. Seemingly, Chinese readers have acquired an unprecedented interest in Western classics in the past decade and are eager to support the academic discipline of Classical Studies. The establishment of the discipline of Western Classical Studies in China in the past decade was largely kindled, promoted, and supported by the reading of Plato in contemporary China since 2000. There was a boom in translating and interpreting Platonic dialogues in the Chinese language since 2000. This revival of interest in Plato included a translation of Timaeus by Xie Wenyu in 2004, and a complete translation of Plato's dialogues, edited by Wang Xiaochao in 2002-03 (Cheng 120). However, the most noticeable translation of Plato in the early 1990s was Liu Xiaofeng's translation of Symposium, best known by its Chinese title Huiyin (Symposium). Huiyin became the first translation of a comprehensive series titled Hermes: classici et commentarii. The book series Hermes includes translations, commentaries, and interpretations of Platonic dialogues as well as of other Western classics and came out over the past decade as a systematic project. The translations of Plato's work in the Hermes project were formerly published in a sub-series titled Platonis omnia cum commentariis. As suggested by the Latin words opera omnia, which mean complete works, the translations and interpretations of Plato into Chinese under Hermes started with an ambitious goal and a systematic plan. However, the Hermes project to date has succeeded in translating only a small portion of Plato's works from Greek to Chinese. These successes include: Symposium, Apology, part of Republic, Ion, and collections of interpretative essays on a particular work of Plato, such as a collection of essays on Republic. (2) Meanwhile, the name of Plato and many Platonic concepts have been referenced in many books, journal articles, online forum discussions, as well as commentary essays on popular culture. Plato has been serving as the backbone of discussions across disciplines, and his work has even reached general audiences to become part of popular culture. For instance, Liu, in a lecture given at the School of Film and Television Art and Technology in 2008, criticizes the immorality in Ang Lee's film Lust, Caution by introducing Socrates's concept of philosophical freedom as in opposition to public morality. Liu's accusation of the immorality in Lust, Caution, which so far only exists in a transcript of his lecture, is largely an expression of the recurrent theme in the Hermes project, i.e., the tension between philosopher and society, with the premise that democratic society tends to ignore differences among human beings in terms of knowledge, intelligence, and virtue, and society as such does not respect the philosopher's freedom to live a philosophical life. Even in Liu's lecture to a general audience untrained in philosophy, Plato and Socrates are mentioned not as names with remote relevancy but rather as rubrics of thoughts on political philosophy and as an attempt to address certain social realities in China with a particular view on philosophy and politics. …

“Not Just the Levees Broke”: Jazz Vernacular and the Rhetoric of the Dispossessed in Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke

This essay proposes the notion of the “jazz vernacular” as a tool specific to the Creole culture in New Orleans for understanding racial discourses of disposability both geographically and historically. We argue that the jazz vernacular is a discourse structured by musical repertoire. The jazz vernacular provides a channel for the historical pain of the black diaspora by playing in the background, both literally and figuratively, of communication in and about New Orleans. This essay considers Spike Lee's documentary When The Levees Broke to understand how the jazz vernacular frames hurricane Katrina as well as how it frames Lee's film as an intervention into “neoliberal” racial discourses. We argue that Lee's film utilizes the jazz vernacular as a metadiscourse to reinforce the ways in which residents used jazz to restructure cultural memory around the rhetoric of the dispossessed in New Orleans after Katrina. When the Levees Broke uses testimonials and affective communication to structure the narrative of Katrina through elements of the jazz vernacular like: displacement, embodiment, brashness, and improvisation to connect contemporary Creole New Orleanians to a long history of structural oppression and violence. By harnessing performative elements, Lee's film performs a jazz intervention into neoliberal discourses about freedom, defense, safety, and heroism that contrasts these discourses with the despair and the resistance of black America. Consequently, Lee's use of the jazz vernacular relies on native musical culture to recontextualize what neoliberalism had erased.

The need for a film rating system in China: the case of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007)

This paper examines the bureaucratic processes that govern film censorship in China, including SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) and the Movie Promotion Law. It then considers arguments for replacing censorship with a rating system, which would benefit both domestic films as well as imports. As a case study, this paper briefly considers the censoring of Ang Lee's film Lust, Caution on the Chinese Mainland in 2007.

Chinese and English Literary Scholarship on Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution: The Necessity for Cross-cultural Communication in the 21st Century

North American reception of Chinese American director Ang Lee's 2007 film Lust, Caution was luke-warm, but Chinese interest in the film has been high. Traditional Western databases suggest that English-language scholarship on both film and novel (on which the film is based) is very sparse. But Google Scholar, as well as Chinese databases suggest another story altogether. The discrepancy suggests a problematic disconnect between Western and Chinese scholarship, even within the work of a single scholar. Harvard academic Ou-fan Lee has written an English article on Ang Lee's film adaptation of the novel, but has also published a monograph (Oxford University Press, Hong Kong) on the same topic in Chinese. Why has Ou-fan Lee, working in both Chinese and English, chosen to publish his monograph in Chinese only? Why has his monograph not been translated into English? If strong nationalist attitudes make Chinese humanities scholars resistant to writing in English, a preference for Orientalist discourses on the part of western journals makes it difficult for Western scholars to access a plethora of Chinese material that falls outside of this discourse and is therefore not translated into English (Flowerdew&Li). Is this the case with Ou-fan's monograph? What are the differences between Ou-fan's English article and his Chinese text? My investigation contributes to an only recentlydeveloping, long-overdue intercourse between English and Chinese-speaking scholars in 21st-century humanities.

Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature Terence Tucker Brian Norman . Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010. vii + 214 pp. At first glance, Brian Norman's Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature would seem to be an extension of Kenneth Warren's thesis that African American literature is at an end, a claim based on the idea that African American literature is inseparable from and beholden to its relationship with white America and white oppression during the Jim Crow years after Reconstruction and before the Voting Rights Act. Warren's claims are part of a larger push to proclaim a "postracial" moment, an argument that conflates the end of de jure segregation with the end of Jim Crow. Yet one of the primary elements of the celebration of diversity and postraciality has been dissipating and delegitimizing African American voices and perspectives that openly speak about the despair of the black poor, the conflicts of the black middle class, or the reassertion of white supremacy. However, Norman rejects the very premises on which Warren bases his claim and which many use to express their hostility toward antiracist work and programs. In particular, Norman sees the terms "post-Jim Crow" and "post-Civil Rights" as especially vexing because they ignore the structural inequalities that continue to marginalize, appropriate, and exploit African American culture and experience. Initially, Norman's promotion of the neo-segregation narratives might seek to capitalize on the success of the neo-slave narrative. However, to Norman's credit, and ultimately to the book's, he knows what he's getting into and productively wrestles with the potentially troublesome terms (for example, "neo") that could sabotage his efforts in his introduction. In fact, throughout the first two chapters, Norman casts the neo-segregation narrative alongside the neo-slave narrative tradition and uses it to lay out the parameters for a definition of the neo-segregation narrative. Norman's first chapter uses Lorraine Hansberry's screenplay adaptation of her play A Raisin in the Sun as a brilliant starting point. Hansberry's unfilmed version of Raisin disrupts popular readings of the play as a universal family drama and produces a more explicitly critical viewing of integration than it appears in the play or the multiple film adaptations. In choosing Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Norman finds the perfect companion to Hansberry. The novel, like Norman's book, makes a compelling case against a mainstream narrative that promotes integration but retains its racial hierarchy, often to destructive effects on African Americans. Morrison's work is particularly useful because Beloved, like David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident, is [End Page 415] part of the neo-slave narrative tradition that Norman engages. In fact, Norman makes a daring play for Chaneysville as a neo-segregation narrative. More importantly, his claim stands as the guiding edict for the book as a whole: "The novel does not pose segregation as just an extension of slavery, as is common in neo-slave narratives, but rather poses slavery as another form of the longstanding and intricate maintenance of the color line in the legal sphere. Jim Crow remains the pivotal point of reference for all eras" (60). To drive home his point, Norman focuses on Alice Walker's The Color Purple and an obsession with the white gaze. In highlighting the womanist politics in Purple, Norman produces a community that centers on "a decidedly minoritarian perspective" (55). Nevertheless, Norman smartly avoids wedding himself to any strict theoretical or political ideology. Chapter 3 reveals his eclectic collection of works by performing a virtual resurrection of Wesley Brown's Darktown Strutters, a novel that Norman claims uses black-face as a radically political act. The pairing of Brown's novel with Spike Lee's film Bamboozled makes blackface minstrelsy a dramatic point of reference that signals virtually no change in the representations of African Americans in the mainstream imagination. Norman willingly engages volatile terrain and challenges us to consider the complex meanings that sit behind the donning of the blackface mask and, by extension, Jim Crow. In...

Tears for Queers: Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, Hollywood, and American Attitudes toward Homosexuality

Every once in while film comes along that changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it . . . is just such film. Even for audiences educated by decade of Queer Cinema phenomenon ... it's shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal new era. -B. Ruby Rich on Ang Lee's film adaptation of Annie Proulx's short story Brokeback Mountain has widely been praised as brave and daring film. Supposedly it takes on iconic image of cowboy as epitome of American heterosexual masculinity and exposes fact that, in words of singer/ songwriter Ned Sublette, are frequently, secretly fond of each other.1 Review after review referred to Lee's film as first ever (Clark, New Vistas; Clark, Westerns; A. Thompson) or cowboy (Stein; Clarke 29; A. Thompson; D'Angelo) and hails it as bending (A. Thompson) groundbreaker (Clark, Westerns, A. Thompson,) of movie that has queered Western (Rich 8). When won three Academy Awards in 2006 (for Best Original Score, Best Adapted Screen Play, and Best Director), critics saw this official approbation as sign of radical breakthrough in representation of on screen and commended Hollywood for its boldness in humanizing love between two men in mainstream film for very first time.2 Ingrid Sischy, former editor-in-chief of Interview, interpreted this purported change in representation of male-male affection as a sign of America's readiness to humanize and civilize its attitude towards homosexuality (88). Claims of such seismic shifts in social attitudes towards are greatly exaggerated. Now that discussions in mainstream and queer publications, in blogs, and on-line chat rooms are themselves history, there is sufficient critical distance to reconsider assertions concerning historic significance of Lee's film. In particular, this essay will examine definitions of as genre-busting (Johnson 988) queer Western and first gay love story, which supposedly not only constituted radical break in history of in American movies, but also ushered in kinder, gentler attitude towards in American society. In fact, neither of these claims will hold up if one considers Lee's film in context of history of representing in American cinema. Cowboys, Queers, and Western When it comes to analyzing representation of in American films no book has been as been as influential as Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in Movies (1981). No doubt, impact of Russo's text was further enhanced by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's 1995 documentary film based on book. While The Celluloid Closet may lack theoretical sophistication of much contemporary queer film criticism, it will prove helpful here for two specific reasons. To begin with, as Michael Bronski argues in recent review essay, the continuing power of Russo's book resides in its political analysis of social and cultural (emphasis added). In addition to Russo's critique of homophobia as socio-cultural phenomenon (rather than mere personal aversion), The Celluloid Closet is also notable for its sheer encyclopedic coverage of in films ranging from silent era to early 1980s (in Russo's book) or early 1990s (in Epstein and Friedman's eponymous documentary). One thing The Celluloid Closet makes clear is that Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are no more first gay cowboys in American film than is first queer Western. Perhaps what comes to mind most immediately when one thinks about and Western genre are Western spoofs, from Andy Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys (1969) to Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (1974). …

When the Levees Broke : Inconvenient Truths and the Limits of National Identity

Today, the people living along the Gulf Coast continue their daily struggle to rebuild, revive, and renew in these United States of America (opening dedication of When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts) Introduction Spike Lee's epic documentary testifies to the inconvenient truths that enabled the social disaster so spectacularly showcased by Hurricane Katrina. Where Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (2006) highlights the often willful blindness with which the catastrophic threat of climate change has been greeted, Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) points to a complicated web of social, political, and environmental blind spots that led to Katrina and its catastrophic aftermath. truths, which hovered just beneath national consciousness, constituted a disaster of racial and economic disenfranchisement that was exposed and further exacerbated by the levee breaches in August 2005. What apparently began as only a natural disaster soon revealed itself as something all-too-human, disproportionately striking those already existing on the edges of survival. Not only was it that the predominantly poor who were abandoned to the drowning city, but it is also this same group that has faced the most obstacles to returning and reclaiming their homes. Katrina dispelled the myth that disasters are social levelers, and vividly highlighted the role played by national governments in selecting the constituencies it chooses to protect. Lee's documentary thus raises inconvenient truths only about race and class in but also about the limits of national identity in an increasingly divided and unequal world. Climate change, which is one of the inconvenient truths at the heart of Lee's film, vividly attests to the arbitrariness of national borders and the protections that these borders may or may afford. The film points to these limits by featuring a frequent insistence on the part of many of its protagonists that the hurricane victims were not, and should be called, refugees. Yet there is a sense in which these voices protest too much, and the film leaves the viewer with the lingering sense that particularly America remains at the outer boundary of national identity. To borrow a phrase from Yvonne Haddad, who uses it to describe the dilemmas of America's Muslim and Arab populations in a post-9/11 environment, Lee's film fails to dispel the notion that African Americans, and perhaps especially those residing in Louisiana's Crescent City, are not quite American. These United States of America, referred to in the film's dedication, cited in the epigraph, and signaling a subtle yet powerful transformation of the definite article from single to plural, thus emerge in Lee's film as a deeply troubled site in which the relative protections of national citizenship remain elusive for all but a privileged few. The long history of African disenfranchisement--placing a large proportion on the rough end of both race and class prejudice--means that America's population plays a central role in illuminating the national drama of inclusion and exclusion. This essay explores these dynamics by following the conversations in When the Levees Broke that, almost in spite of themselves, pit the terms black and American against one another. What emerges, however, is far more complex than the articulation of a simple black/white binary. As has been much noted, poor whites share in the post-hurricane neglect experienced by predominantly people. Moreover, both Louisiana's French and Spanish pasts endow the state's race relations with a very different history from that of the rest of the United States. New Orleans, in particular, remains deeply marked both by European and West African culture. Louisiana's own persistent foreignness within the U. S. is underscored in the film on the part of one commentator who remarks that the state functions as a kind of colony of the federal government. …

The Jackie Robinson Story A Reflection of Its Era

The in question is Jackie Robinson. In the mid-199os, Spike Lee attempted to mount a celluloid biography of the Brooklyn Dodgers legend who, as a twenty-eight-year-old rookie in 1947, integrated Major League Baseball (MLB). (1) Lee's film would not have been the first Robinson biopic. Three years after debuting with the Dodgers, Jackie himself starred in The Jackie Robinson Story, a Hollywood life story that deals with issues which transcend singles, doubles, and dingers, making the team and winning the big game. The Jackie Robinson Story is very much a product of its era: the dawn of the civil rights movement. When it was released in 1950, 21-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. had recently received his BA from Morehouse College and was a first-year student at Crozer Theological Seminary. Brown v. Board of Education and the signing of the Voting Rights Act into law were respectively four and fifteen years in the future. No one could foretell the scope of the demand by black Americans to share equal rights with white Americans. (2) And Hollywood--after years of marginalizing African American characters as mammies, housemaids, janitors, and Pullman porters, who comically wrecked the English language--finally began acknowledging that racism was intrinsic to the American experience. (3) Body and Soul (1947), a classic boxing film, features an African American supporting character--an ex-champion named Ben Chaplin (Canada Lee) who is articulate, soulful, and respected by the main character, Charlie Davis (John Garfield). When Ben talks of what it felt like to strut down Harlem's Lenox Avenue after winning a fight, there at least is the acknowledgement that he thrived within a community of his own. (4) But the era's other progressive, well-intentioned films--for example, Intruder in the Dust, Home of the Brave, and Lost Boundaries, all released in 1949--feature sympathetic, victimized black characters who exist entirely in Caucasian worlds. Even though they are more three-dimensional than the stereotypical Stepin Fetchit, and are as complex and tormented as Caucasian characters, they are portrayed through the sensibilities of white screenwriters and directors--and, as in Body and Soul, they are portrayed in relation to Caucasian characters. They are baited by racist white villains and supported/rescued by fair-minded white heroes. (5) This same value system exists in The Jackie Robinson Story. All the film's makers are Caucasian, and the individual most responsible for its content is Branch Rickey, the Dodgers general manager and powerbroker who signed Jackie and brought him to Brooklyn. (6) As it highlights Robinson's struggle, the film acknowledges the reality of racism in America. But the scenario stresses that, in due course, fairness will prevail. If you believe otherwise, just look at Jackie Robinson. He is black. And here he is, playing major-league baseball. In America, for every exclusionary bigot there is a man who is fair and humane, a man who will judge Jackie solely on his performance between the foul lines. In other words, for every racist, there is a Branch Rickey. Back in the late 194os, given his accomplishment and celebrity, it seemed that Jackie Robinson would have been a natural subject for a screen biography. In fact, just after Jackie's MLB debut, Lawrence Taylor, a baseball fan and screenwriter whose credits included a couple of Philo Vance mysteries and several other B films, penned a screenplay about Jackie's struggles and triumphs. But Taylor found no takers for his script. The reason: its primary character was African American. The writer reported that several unnamed major studios were interested in his script, but only if it was rewritten and fictionalized to include a white athlete/hero who mentored Jackie--one who, in essence, would play Svengali to Jackie's Trilby. (7) But the production of films like Intruder in the Dust, Home of the Brave, and Lost Boundaries--as well as Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and Crossfire (1947), both of which exposed the insidiousness of anti-Semitism--augured well for Taylor. …