Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films
Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780231133333

What is the sentimental and how can we understand it through the cinema of a particular culture in an age of globalisation? Chow explores these questions by examining nine contemporary Chinese directors whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema.

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films
Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231133324

What is the sentimental and how can we understand it through the cinema of a particular culture in an age of globalisation? Chow explores these questions by examining nine contemporary Chinese directors whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema.

Beyond Sinology

Beyond Sinology
Author: Andrea Bachner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231536305

New communication and information technologies provide distinct challenges and possibilities for the Chinese script, which, unlike alphabetic or other phonetic scripts, relies on multiple signifying principles. In recent decades, this multiplicity has generated a rich corpus of reflection and experimentation in literature, film, visual and performance art, and design and architecture, within both China and different parts of the West. Approaching this history from a variety of alternative theoretical perspectives, Beyond Sinology reflects on the Chinese script to pinpoint the multiple connections between languages, scripts, and medial expressions and cultural and national identities. Through a complex study of intercultural representations, exchanges, and tensions, the text focuses on the concrete "scripting" of identity and alterity, advancing a new understanding of the links between identity and medium and a critique of articulations that rely on single, monolithic, and univocal definitions of writing. Chinese writing—with its history of divergent readings in Chinese and non-Chinese contexts, with its current reinvention in the age of new media and globalization—can teach us how to read and construct mediality and cultural identity in interculturally responsible ways and also how to scrutinize, critique, and yet appreciate and enjoy the powerful multi-medial creativity embodied in writing.

The Rey Chow Reader

The Rey Chow Reader
Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2010-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231520786

Rey Chow is arguably one of the most prominent intellectuals working in the humanities today. Characteristically confronting both entrenched and emergent issues in the interlocking fields of literature, film and visual studies, sexuality and gender, postcolonialism, ethnicity, and cross-cultural politics, her works produce surprising connections among divergent topics at the same time as they compel us to think through the ethical and political ramifications of our academic, epistemic, and cultural practices. This anthology - the first to collect key moments in Chow's engaging thought - provides readers with an ideal introduction to some of her most forceful theoretical explorations. Organized into two sections, each of which begins with a brief statement designed to establish linkages among various discursive fields through Chow's writings, the anthology also contains an extensive Editor's Introduction, which situates Chow's work in the context of contemporary critical debates. For all those pursuing transnational cultural theory and cultural studies, this book is an essential resource. Praise for Rey Chow "[Rey Chow is] methodologically situated in the contentious spaces between critical theory and cultural studies, and always attending to the implications of ethnicity." Social Semiotics "Rich and powerful work that provides both a dazzling synthesis of contemporary cultural theory and at the same time an exemplary critique of Chinese cinema." China Information "Should be read by all who are concerned with the future of human rights, liberalism, multiculturalism, identity politics, and feminism." Dorothy Ko "Wide-ranging, theoretically rich, and provocative... completely restructures the problem of ethnicity." Fredric Jameson

Not Like a Native Speaker

Not Like a Native Speaker
Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2014-09-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231522711

Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering historical experience of being caught among unequal languages, is the subject of Rey Chow's book. A diverse group of personae, never before assembled in a similar manner, make their appearances in the various chapters: the young mulatto happening upon a photograph about skin color in a popular magazine; the man from Martinique hearing himself named "Negro" in public in France; call center agents in India trained to Americanize their accents while speaking with customers; the Algerian Jewish philosopher reflecting on his relation to the French language; African intellectuals debating the pros and cons of using English for purposes of creative writing; the translator acting by turns as a traitor and as a mourner in the course of cross-cultural exchange; Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating the politics of food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast. In these riveting scenes of speaking and writing imbricated with race, pigmentation, and class demarcations, Chow suggests, postcolonial languaging becomes, de facto, an order of biopolitics. The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of illusory linguistic origins and unities. By inserting British and post-British Hong Kong (the city where she grew up) into the languaging controversies that tend to be pursued in Francophone (and occasionally Anglophone) deliberations, and by sketching the fraught situations faced by those coping with the specifics of using Chinese while negotiating with English, Chow not only redefines the geopolitical boundaries of postcolonial inquiry but also demonstrates how such inquiry must articulate historical experience to the habits, practices, affects, and imaginaries based in sounds and scripts.

The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2002
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780231124218

A diverse set of texts from Foucault, Weber, Derrida and others are examined in this reconceptualization of the way ethnicity functions in capitalist society.

Melancholy Drift

Melancholy Drift
Author: Jean Ma
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9888028065

Ma offers an innovative study of three provocative Chinese directors: Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang. Focusing on the highly stylized and monlinear configurations of time in each director's films, she argues that these dirctors have brought new global respect for Chinese cinema in amplifying motifs of loss, nostalgia, hauntin, absence and ephemeral poetices Hou, Tsai, and Wong all isist on the significance of being out of time, not merely out of place, as a condition of global modernity. Ma argues that their films collectively foreground the central place of contemporary Chinese films in a transnational culture of memory, characterized by a distinctive melancholy that highlights the difficulty of binding together past and present into a meaningful narrative. Jean Ma is assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University Melancholy Drift rides the films of three Chinese auteurs right into the heart of its subject, the mismatch between private feeling and collective history. These crucial films, set carefully beside one another, begin to pulse anew under the deft touch of Jean Ma's analyses. Drawing on a deep reservoir of historical and critical knowledge, she helps us hear these films speak of our times, then speak of time itself and of its dislocations---Dudley Andrew, Yale University Theoretically sophisticated and elegantly written, Melancholy Drift elucidates the subject of cinematic time in its various configurations: as a response to historical ruptures and political upheavals as representational politics, and as a reinvention of the art cinema. This book is a timely demonstration of the key roles played by Chinese auteurs in shaping the new face of world cinema today and an important contribution to scholarship both within and beyond the field of transnational Chinese cinemas---Song Hwee Lim, University of Exeter

Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray

Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray
Author: Keya Ganguly
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2010
Genre: Motion picture producers and directors
ISBN: 0520262166

"This is a deeply researched, theoretically sophisticated and organic study. Keya Ganguly's intellectual tour de force in this analysis of the great Indian film maker Satyajit Ray will provide a benchmark for future studies of the subject."--Partha Mitter, author of The Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922-1947 "What distinguishes Ganguly's book from the more fashionable approaches to non-Western cinema is her willingness to assert the importance of European theory--specifically, writings on film by Eisenstein, Benjamin, Kracauer, Balázs, among others--as a way to elaborate Satyajit Ray's contributions in the larger postwar context of an international New Wave cinema movement. She does this with extraordinary intelligence and finesse, and the result is an illuminating statement on how a cinema that seems nostalgic for a disappearing cultural past can in fact be read, for the first time perhaps, for its intimations of an as-yet unrealized futurity."--Rey Chow, author of Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films

Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film

Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film
Author: G. Andrew Stuckey
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2018-08-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9888390813

Depictions within a movie of either filmmaking or film watching are hardly novel, but the dramatic expansion of the reach of the metacinematic into contemporary Chinese cinemas is nothing short of remarkable. To G. Andrew Stuckey, the prevalence of metacinematic features forms the basis of a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. Such a discourse, in turn, outlines the boundaries of the possible for film in China as aesthetic or sociopolitical practice. Metacinema also draws our attention to the presence of the audience, people actively responding to a film. In elucidating the affective responses elicited by the metacinematic mode in the viewers, Stuckey argues that metacinema reflects ways of being in the world that audiences may take up for themselves. The films studied in this book are drawn across the full spectrum of Chinese films made in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the 1990s and 2000s, from award-winning conceptual art films to popular crowd pleasers, blockbusters to low-budget productions, and documentary-style social realist exposé projects to studio assembly-line investments. The recurrence of the metacinematic across this broad range of works is indicative of its relevance to Chinese films today, and the analysis of these diverse examples allows us to gauge the cultural, social, and aesthetic implications of Chinese cinemas as a whole. “Stuckey surveys a broad swath of contemporary Chinese cinema, from popular blockbusters to elite art films, around the theme of metacinema, yielding new insights into both previously neglected films and those already acknowledged as contemporary classics. The result is a fascinating dive into the growing and diversifying cinema culture of China today.” —Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota “Stuckey’s brilliant work, Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film, offers insightful close analyses of films by key directors from the PRC (Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Jia Zhangke, and Li Yu), Hong Kong (Peter Chan), and Taiwan (Tsai Ming-liang). This clearly written book is essential reading for scholars and students of Chinese cinemas. Stuckey’s study of genre and metacinema makes it a must-read for anyone interested in cinema.” —Michelle Bloom, University of California, Riverside