Film Studies For Free: Hong Kong cinema

Showing posts with label Hong Kong cinema. Show all posts

Monday, 17 March 2014

Study of a Single Film: IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

INTERSECTION, a videographic film study of In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

By Catherine Grant, Chiara Grizaffi and Denise Liege

The above video explores the notion (and some of the motifs) of 'Intersection' in Wong Kar-wai's 2000 film In the Mood for Love. It works through a synchronous compilation of the images and soundtracks from the montage sequences in the film that use the same orchestration of a waltz originally composed by Shigeru Umebayashi for the film Yumeji (Suzuki Seijun, 1991). Watch the video, then read these linked to, intersecting quotations from written texts about Wong's film. Then repeat.

Film Studies For Free proudly presents its latest "Study of a Single Film" entry which, this time, showcases open access scholarly work on the subject of Wong Kar-wai's 2000 film In the Mood for Love.

It's a film that FSFF's author has been fortunate to have been teaching this semester, on a course which devotes its entire attention just to this one movie. As with the corresponding course last year (which treated Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados), this period of intense study has resulted in a videographic study of In the Mood for Love on the film - embedded above - this year, one co-produced as part of a research collaboration with two graduate students Chiara Grizzaffi and Denise Liege.

Speaking of videographic film studies... is exactly what FSFF's author will be doing at a workshop at the upcoming Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference in Seattle, USA (download PDF of the program here). At this workshop an important announcement will be made: notably, the precise online location of a brand new open access journal to which the below official press release refers:

Announcing [in]Transition

Cinema Journal and MediaCommons will soon announce the launch of the first peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies. The journal, [in]Transition, will unveil its inaugural issue at next week's annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle, Washington. The journal will be formally launched and discussed (amongst other topics) at the “Visualizing Media Studies: The Expansion of Scholarly Publishing into Video Essays” workshop on Thursday, March 20th (Session E14).

[in]Transition will provide a forum for a range of digital scholarship (which includes such formats as the video essay and the visual essay) and will also create a context for understanding and evaluating videographic work as a new mode of scholarly writing for the disciplines of cinema and media studies and related fields. This goal will be achieved through editorial curating of exemplary videographic works, through critical analysis and appreciation, pre-publication peer review and Open Peer Commentary.

[in]Transition will be co-edited by Catherine Grant (University of Sussex), Christian Keathley (Middlebury College), and Drew Morton (Texas A and M University-Texarkana) and managed by Christine Becker (Cinema Journal) and Jason Mittell (MediaCommons).

FSFF will also bring you that news as hot off the press as it can, probably just after the conference. So do please stay tuned! It hopes to see some of you at the workshop, too, as well as at its author's other conference panel appearance (on "Transnational Film Remakes" with Iain Robert Smith and Michael Lawrence).

But, in the meantime, please enjoy perusing the below links to scholarly material about Wong's wonderful film.

Tuesday, 26 November 2013

New Issue of JUMP CUT!

Frame grab from The Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939). See the Jump Cut dossier on Ford's film, Spielberg's version of the Lincoln story, and the classic Cahiers du Cinéma debate on the earlier film. Also see Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

Film Studies For Free has been away, gadding about and gabbling at a wonderful conference in Frankfurt on The Audiovisual Essay (organised by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, with Vinzenz Hediger, for Deutsches Filminstitut and Goethe University), about which you will hear a great deal in the coming weeks and months.

Next, tomorrow, it departs for yet another exciting public event - a panel discussion on 'The Future of Film Criticism" at King's College, London, speaking alongside Jean-Michel Frodon (Editor of Cahiers du Cinéma and film critic for Le Monde) and Nick James (Editor of Sight & Sound).

In between these two magnificent events, it had to bring you news of a huge new issue of the online journal Jump Cut, which is absolutely full of incredibly interesting looking contents - FSFF particularly liked the dossier on Lincoln and ideology, but there's so much more to enjoy here. Thank you, Jump Cut!

Back soon.

Current issue, No. 55, fall 2013: INSTITUTIONS, TECHNOLOGIES, and LABOR

Digital dreams in a material world: the rise of Netflix and its impact on changing distribution and exhibition patterns by Kevin P. McDonald
“From, by, for”: Nairobi’s Slum Film Festival, film festival studies, and the practices of development by Lindiwe Dovey, Joshua McNamara, and Federico Olivier
The normativity of 3D: cinematic journeys, “imperial visuality” and unchained cameras by Bruce Bennett
Native images: the otherness and affectivity of the digital body by Adam Davis
Sounds of Hong Kong cinema: Johnnie To, Milkyway Image, and the sound track by Gary Bettinson
To work or not to work: the dilemma of Hong Kong film labor in the age of mainlandization by Mirana M. Szeto and Yun-chung Chen

THIRD CINEMA/INTERNATIONAL

Jai Bhim Comrade: tales of oppression and songs of resistance by Catherine Bernier
“The revolutionary founding moments of a contra-Grierson tradition” by Brian Winston (a review of Joshua Malitsky, Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations)
Thauk gya paw hee thwi deh thwi /Blood’s Oath to Beautiful Flower —Blood’s Oath, drama of insurgency in a Burmese Pwo Karen Film by Violet Cho
Amnesiac memory: Hiroshima/Nagasaki in Japanese film by Inez Hedges
Body memories, body cinema: the politics of multi-sensual counter-memory in György Pálfi’s Hukkle by György Kalmár
We lost our way: the time and space of alienation in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together by Caroline Guo
Hong Kong’s liminal spaces: unveiling nature and identity in Tsang Tsui-shan’s Big Blue Lake by Winnie L. M. Yee
Capitalist childhood in film: modes of critique by Susan Ferguson
National identity, cultural institutions, and filmmaking in “Paradise” —the Puerto Rican successes of Talento de barrio and Broche de oro by Naida García-Crespo
“Behind her laughter…is fear!” Domestic abuse and transnational feminism in Bollywood remakes by Gohar Siddiqui

GENDER

New queer cinema by Roxanne Samer
Feminist porn by Erica Rand (a review of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, edited by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young)
The gay-for-pay gaze in gay male pornography by Kevin John Bozelka
Dire straights: the indeterminacy of sexual identity in gay-for-pay pornography by John Paul Stadler
Sartorial signifiers, masculinity, and the global recession in HBO's Hung by Chris Vanderwees
The multivalent feminism of The Notorious Bettie Page by Steven S. Kapica
Descent : “Everything’s okay now”—race, vengeance, and watching the modern rape-revenge narrative by Jenny Lapekas
Bringing out Baby Jane —camp, sympathy, and the horror-woman’s film of the 1960s by David Greven
Doing his homework by David Greven (a review of David Halperin’s How to be Gay)

IN AND AGAINST THE MAINSTREAM

Skyfall : a mother and her twin boys by Robert Alpert
“Propane is for pussies” —Bellflower’s bromance of retro technology and hip masculinity by David Church
Take Shelter; Meek’s Cutoff; The Turin Horse — the end of everything by Timothy Kreider
Workers' confessions and the reality TV series Undercover Boss by Lyell Davies
From Hoover to Bush Jr. — home and crisis scripts in U.S. social cinema by Antonio Sánchez-Escalonilla
Ecocinema by Joe Heumann and Robin Murray (a review of Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, Sean Cubitt
The earth bites back: vampires and the ecological roots of home by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
Broomhilda Unchained: Tarantino’s Wagner by Adrian Daub and Elisabeth Bronfen

EXPERIMENTAL/INDEPENDENT

Movies in miniature by Midi Onodera
Amateurization of the entire media universe by Patricia R. Zimmermann (a review of Amateur Media: Social, Cultural and Legal Perspectives, ed. Dan Hunter, Ramon Lobato, Megan Richardson and Julian Thomas)
Varient cinematic artistic expression by Greg DeCuir (a review of Pavle Levi, Cinema by other means)

LINCOLN & IDEOLOGY FORUM

Introduction by Chuck Kleinhans
Young Mr. Lincoln and ideological analysis: a reconsideration (with many asides) by Chuck Kleinhans
Lincoln in contemporary U.S. culture and politics by Douglas Kellner
Equality before the law in Spielberg’s Lincoln by Gary Bettinson and Richard Rushton
Symptomatic reading in Althusser, Cahiers du cinéma, and Zizek by Warren Buckland
Lincoln : shared myths in a revisionist age by Frederick Wasser
The hysteric, the mother, the natural gal:
male fantasies and male theories in films about Lincoln by Deborah Tudor
The significance of Steven Spielberg's Old Mr. Lincoln:
political emotions and intertextual knowledge by Janet Staiger
Mr. Spielberg's Mr. Lincoln by Chuck Kleinhans

HIV/AIDS ACTIVIST MEDIA

Introduction: Ghost stories by David Oscar Harvey, Marty Fink, Alexandra Juhasz, Bishnu Gosh
Ghosts caught in our throat —
of the lack of contemporary representations of gay/bisexual men and HIV by David Oscar Harvey
Two ghost stories: disability activism and HIV/AIDS by Marty Fink
Acts of signification-survival by Alexandra Juhasz
What time is it here? by Bishnupriya Ghosh

CLASSICS FROM THE PAST
S/Z and Rules of the Game by Julia Lesage

THE LAST WORD The war on/in higher education by the Editors

Monday, 12 August 2013

Woo, To, Wong Kar-wai, Asian Horror, Anime and More: Twelve Open-Access Film Studies Books from Hong Kong University Press and OAPEN!!

A little interchange on Twitter, this morning, with the fabulous open access book library OAPEN has revealed to Film Studies For Free that TWELVE film studies books published by Hong Kong University Press in the last ten years have recently been made freely accessible via the OAPEN website! The keyword search link to access all OA HKUP books with a film connection is here. Below FSFF has listed links to the twelve e-tomes with the most substantial film studies content. When you arrive at the linked-to page for each item click on the PDF icon there to download the books.

All of these will now be added to FSFF's permanent listing of links to open access film and media studies e-books! Thank you to all the below authors, to Hong Kong University Press and, especially, to OAPEN!

Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema by Choi, Jinhee & Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo (2009)
Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time by Dissanayake, Wimal (2003)
Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together by Tambling, Jeremy (2003)
Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge by Lu, Sheldon H. & Mi, Jiayan (2009)
John Woo's A Better Tomorrow by Fang, Karen (2004)
John Woo's The Killer by Hall, Kenneth E. (2009)
Johnnie To Kei-Fung's PTU by Ingham, Michael (2009)
Fruit Chan's Durian Durian by Gan, Wendy (2005)
Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong by Cheung, Esther M.K. (2009)
Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building by Hu, Tze-Yue G. (2010)
Hong Kong Culture: Word and Image by Kam, Louie (2010)
The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity by Khoo, Olivia (2007)

Monday, 2 May 2011

Liquid Atmospherics: On the cinema of Wong Kar-wai

ENVOI (2011) from Elaine Castillo on Vimeo. The above video is a ficto-biographical essay-film taking two looped scenes from two Wong Kar-wai films (HAPPY TOGETHER and DAYS OF BEING WILD) as its point of departure, arrival (also: non-departure, non-arrival). On grief, migration, the romantic, hyper-specificity, sentimental time, queer space, Asian celebrity gossip, fantasies involving Maggie Cheung, covers and translations, the writing body, the filmmaking body, readability, speakability.

Almost devoid of irony, Wong’s films, like classic rock and roll, take seriously all the crushes, the posturing, and the stubborn capriciousness of young angst. They rejoice in manic expenditures of energy. They celebrate the momentary heartbreak of glimpsing a stranger who might be interesting to love. The best comparison is surely not with Godard, whose romantic streak has a bitter edge. In Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong may have its Truffaut, the director who in Tirez sur le pianiste and Jules et Jim concentrated on not-quite-grown- up characters brooding on eternally missed chances. In any case, Wong stands out from his peers by abandoning the kinetics of comedies and action movies in favor of more liquid atmospherics. He dissolves crisp emotions into vaporous moods. For all his sophistication, his unembarrassed effort to capture powerful, pleasantly adolescent feelings confirms his commitment to the Hong Kong popular tradition.
David Bordwell, 'Avant-Pop Cinema Romance on Your Menu: Chungking Express' in Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Second edition: e-book; Wisconsin: Irvington Way Institute Press Madison, 2011), pp. 178-179

Today, Film Studies For Free massively updates its existing entry on the cinema of Wong Kar-wai.

There are two compelling reasons for this: the first is there are lots more scholarly resources available, or discoverable, now on this filmmaker's work that are worth listing, including some great items on video.

The second is that this is the first of two posts in celebration of the online publication, as a PDF, of a full colour, second edition of the peerless David Bordwell's book Planet Hong Kong, an opus well worth its $15 pricetag, in FSFF's humble and, usually, frugal opinion.

FSFF doesn't normally celebrate, or promote, pay-to-own resources. But, apart from the fact that this is a highly interesting development in online Film Studies publishing in its own right, no one has given so generously online, either of his already published work or of his ongoing scholarly work, as David Bordwell.

What is more, Bordwell's PHK chapter entitled 'Avant-Pop Cinema', with its lyrical and beautifully illustrated section on Wong's work: 'Romance on Your Menu: Chungking Express', is worth the download price alone. If you need to save up to purchase Planet Hong Kong first, you can enjoy, in the meantime, several excellent posts at Observations on Film Art on Wong's work, including 'Ashes to Ashes (Redux)' and 'Years of being obscure'.

Video material:

Brian Hu, 'Pop Music and Wong Kar-wai (visual essay)' Mediascape, Winter 2011
Soraya Sélène, 'Decoding Wong Kar-wai', Vimeo, March 4, 2011
Vicky Thai, 'Wing Kar-wai's Notion of Time', Vimeo, December 15, 2010
Quentin Tarantino on Chungking Express on YouTube

Written material:

Monday, 29 November 2010

Wide Screen Journal on Film Production Studies


*Javier Casanova in Vainilla Chip* (Erik Knudsen, 2009) Watch this film here (or here) and read Knudsen's article on his work**

Set in the small Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baños, just outside Havana, Vainilla Chip tells the story of an ordinary day for an elderly ice cream maker, Javier Rodriguez Casanova. An ordinary day which, like all the other ordinary days, has become painfully pierced by an acute sense of longing for his deceased wife.
This film is an intimate portrait of a hard working man in a contemporary Cuba far removed from clichés of The Revolution and romanticised memories of Cuban music. Vainilla Chip brings the musicality of one ordinary man’s life to the fore to reveal a universal struggle affecting many people across cultural and political divides. [Erik Knudsen]

We often hear that the power of films lays in their emotional impact. In recent years, some corners of film studies have been preoccupied with the investigation of the senses and the body, which could be related to the view of films in terms of emotions and affect. Much of the filmmaking process rests on creating and communicating this emotional power of the films. Instead of thinking, like Powdermaker did, that the film workers are collectively involved in story-telling, or like Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger, that they are preoccupied with the generation of a particular style of filmmaking, we would like to argue that films are collectively involved in generating, assembling and crafting the emotion of the film. [Graham Roberts and Dorota Ostrowska]

Film Studies For Free is very happy to pass on news that a special issue of the online, Open Access film journal Wide Screen has just been published on "Production Studies". The issue was edited by Graham Roberts and Dorota Ostrowska. The Table of Contents is given below.

Essays

'Magic, Emotions And Film Producers: Unlocking The “Black-Box” Of Film Production' by Dorota Ostrowska Abstract PDF HTML

'The Film Producer as a Creative Force' by Alejandro Pardo Abstract PDF HTML

'Housekeeper of Hong Kong cinema: The role of producer in the system of Hong Kong film industry' by Cindy Chan Abstract PDF HTML

'Close Encounters?: Contemporary Turkish Television And Cinema' by Melis Behlil Abstract PDF HTML

'Anthology Film. The Future Is Now: Film Producer As Creative Director' by Shekhar Deshpande Abstract PDF HTML

'Cinema Of Poverty: Independence And Simplicity In An Age Of Abundance And Complexity' by Erik Knudsen Abstract PDF HTML

'Understanding Orlova: Youtube producers, Hot for Words, and some pitfalls of production studies' by Patrick Vonderau Abstract PDF HTML