The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion
The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion

Author: Christopher Lupke

Publisher: Cambria Press

Published: 2016-03-25

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1621967069

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"Featuring rare interviews and sophisticated analysis, this book sheds light on Hou's narrative innovations and aesthetic triumphs while, along the way, unlocking some of the mysteries lurking behind one of the greatest bodies of cinematic work ever produced." -MICHAEL BERRY, University of California Santa Barbara "Lupke's book provides comprehensive coverage, detailed contextualization, and insightful analysis from Hou's earliest works to his most recent accomplishment. The narrative is particularly compelling because it weaves cultural and social contexts and filmic texts together, and it brings various formal elements (image, editing, language, music) to bear upon one another. The book also includes careful comparison with another East Asian auteur Ozu Yasujirô. The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien is a significant addition." -GUO-JUIN, HONG, Duke University "Lupke's comprehensive and original study excavates the literary inspirations of Hou's filmmaking, showing how Wu Nianzhen, Shen Congwen, and especially Zhu Tianwen shape his philosophy and aesthetic. In Lupke's convincing account, the anti-filial behaviors of their characters, which have attracted little critical attention, are the key to understanding their shared concern for the visible dissolution of the family in the modern world. In addition to its lucid analysis, this book contextualizes the filmmaking history of Hou in ways that illustrate the cultural and political significance of studying Taiwan Cinema in a global context." -HSIU-CHUANG DEPPMAN, Oberlin College "Serving both as an excellent comprehensive introduction to the filmmaker and as a series of in-depth readings, this informative, engaging, and insightful book covers the full range of Hou's work. Writing clearly and elegantly, Lupke perceptively relates Hou's films to both literary and cinematic antecedents. Aside from Hou's well-known connection to Taiwan's 'native soil' literature, Lupke highlights as well the filmmaker's debt to earlier mainland Chinese authors such as Shen Congwen, Zhang Ailing, and Hu Lancheng. Hou's singular contribution to film aesthetics, summarized as 'stasis within motion,' comes through vividly and convincingly." -JASON MCGRATH, University of Minnesota *This book includes images.

Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas
Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas

Author: Michelle E. Bloom

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2016-01-31

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0824857453

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Transnational cinemas are eclipsing national cinemas in the contemporary world, and Sino-French films exemplify this phenomenon through the cinematic coupling of the Sinophone and the Francophone, linking France not just with the Chinese mainland but also with the rest of the Chinese-speaking world. Sinophone directors most often reach out to French cinema by referencing and adapting it. They set their films in Paris and metropolitan France, cast French actors, and sometimes use French dialogue, even when the directors themselves don't understand it. They tend to view France as mysterious, sexy, and sophisticated, just as the French see China and Taiwan as exotic. As Michelle E. Bloom makes clear, many films move past a simplistic opposition between East and West and beyond Orientalist and Occidentalist cross-cultural interplay. Bloom focuses on films that have appeared since 2000 such as Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There? , Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, and Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. She views the work of these well-known directors through a Sino-French optic, applying the tropes of métissage (or biraciality), intertextuality, adaptation and remake, translation, and imitation to shed new light on their work. She also calls attention to important, lesser studied films: Taiwanese director Cheng Yu-chieh's Yang Yang, which depicts the up-and-coming Taiwanese star Sandrine Pinna as a mixed race beauty; and Emily Tang Xiaobai's debut film Conjugation, which contrasts Paris and post-Tiananmen Square Beijing, the one an incarnation of liberty, the other a place of entrapment. Bloom's insightful analysis also probes what such films reveal about their Taiwanese and Chinese creators. Scholars have long studied Sino-French literature, but this inaugural full-length work on Sino-French cinema maps uncharted territory, offering a paradigm for understanding other cross-cultural interminglings and tools to study transnational cinema and world cinema. The Sino-French, rich and multifaceted, linguistically, culturally, and ethnically, constitutes an important part of film studies, Francophone studies, Sinophone studies and myriad other fields. This is a must-read for students, scholars, and lovers of film.

Sinophone Studies
Sinophone Studies

Author: Shu-mei Shih

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2013-01-22

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 0231527101

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This definitive anthology casts Sinophone studies as the study of Sinitic-language cultures born of colonial and postcolonial influences. Essays by such authors as Rey Chow, Ha Jin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Ien Ang, Wei-ming Tu, and David Wang address debates concerning the nature of Chineseness while introducing readers to essential readings in Tibetan, Malaysian, Taiwanese, French, Caribbean, and American Sinophone literatures. By placing Sinophone cultures at the crossroads of multiple empires, this anthology richly demonstrates the transformative power of multiculturalism and multilingualism, and by examining the place-based cultural and social practices of Sinitic-language communities in their historical contexts beyond "China proper," it effectively refutes the diasporic framework. It is an invaluable companion for courses in Asian, postcolonial, empire, and ethnic studies, as well as world and comparative literature.

Writing the South Seas
Writing the South Seas

Author: Brian C. Bernards

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2016-01-01

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 029580615X

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Postcolonial literature about the South Seas, or Nanyang, examines the history of Chinese migration, localization, and interethnic exchange in Southeast Asia, where Sinophone settler cultures evolved independently by adapting to their "New World" and mingling with native cultures. Writing the South Seas explains why Nanyang encounters, neglected by most literary histories, should be considered crucial to the national literatures of China and Southeast Asia.

The Assassin
The Assassin

Author: Peng Hsiao-yen

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2019-10-23

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 9888455699

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The Assassin tells the story of a swordswoman who refrains from killing. Hou Hsiao-hsien astonishes his audience once again by upsetting almost every convention of the wuxia (martial arts) genre in the film. This collection offers eleven readings, each as original and thought-provoking as the film itself, beginning with one given by the director himself. Contributors analyze the elliptical way of storytelling, Hou’s adaptation of the source text (a tale from the Tang dynasty, also included in this volume), the film’s appropriation of traditional Chinese visual aesthetics, as well as the concept of xia (knight-errant) that is embedded in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist worldviews. There are also discussions of the much-celebrated sonic design of The Assassin: the nearly exclusive use of a diegetic film score is a statement on the director’s belief in cinematic reality. Underlying all the chapters is a focus on how Hou reinvents Tang-dynasty China in contemporary culture. The meticulously recreated everyday reality of the Tang world in the film highlights the ethnic and cultural diversity of the dynasty. It was a time when Sogdian traders acted as important intermediaries between Central Asia and the Tang court, and as a result Sogdian culture permeated the society. Taking note of the vibrant hybridity of Tang culture in the film, this volume shows that the historical openness to non-Chinese elements is in fact an essential part of the Chineseness expressed in Hou’s work. The Assassin is a gateway to the remote Tang-dynasty world, but in Hou’s hands the concerns of that premodern world turn out to be highly relevant to the world of the audience. “This book promises to be a useful companion to the film The Assassin. Contributors to this collection have convincingly and compellingly elucidated some of the film’s most difficult features. The result is a rich and wide-ranging analysis of one of the most beautiful films of our time.” —Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang, The University of Texas at Austin “This collection of essays unfolds the many layers of The Assassin by speaking to its aesthetic achievements, reinvention of genre conventions, deep historical engagement, and philosophical substance. It exceeds the sum of its individual parts by building a vibrant cross-disciplinary conversation among a diverse group of accomplished scholars, who contribute original and compelling insights on the film.” —Jean Ma, Stanford University

Sinophone Cinemas
Sinophone Cinemas

Author: A. Yue

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-01-22

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1137311207

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Sinophone Cinemas considers a range of multilingual, multidialect and multi-accented cinemas produced in Chinese-language locations outside mainland China. It showcases new screen cultures from Britain, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia.

Asia-Pacific Film Co-productions
Asia-Pacific Film Co-productions

Author: Dal Yong Jin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-20

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1000766551

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This book examines cross-regional film collaboration within the Asia-Pacific region. Through a mixed methods approach of political economy, industry and market, as well as textual analysis, the book contributes to the understanding of the global fusion of cultural products and the reconfiguration of geographic, political, economic, and cultural relations. Issues covered include cultural globalization and Asian regionalization; identity, regionalism, and industry practices; and inter-Asian and transpacific co-production practices among the U.S.A., China, South Korea, Japan, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand.