Contemporary Sino French Cinemas

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.

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

A brilliant approach to the queerness of one of Taiwan’s greatest auteurs A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation. Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.

Youth has been represented on screen for decades and has informed many directors' visual, narrative and social perspectives, but there has not been a body of work addressing the richness and complexity of this topic in a French and Francophone context. This volume offers new insights into the works of emerging and well-established directors alike, who all chose to place youth at the heart of their narrative and aesthetic concerns. Showing how the topic of 'youth' has inspired filmmakers to explore and reinvent common tropes associated with young people, the book also addresses how the representation of youth can be used to mirror the tensions - political, social, religious, economic or cultural - that agitate a society at a given time in its history.

With culinary nationalism defined as a process in flux, as opposed to the limited concept of national cuisine, the contributors of this book call for explicit critical comparisons of cases of culinary nationalism among Asian regions, with the intention of recognizing patterns of modern culinary development. As a result, the formation of modern cuisine is revealed to be a process that takes place around the world, in different forms and periods, and not exclusive to current Eurocentric models. Key themes include the historical legacies of imperialism/colonialism, nationalism, the Cold War, and global capitalism in Asian cuisines; internal culinary boundaries between genders, ethnicities, social classes, religious groups, and perceived traditions/modernities; and global contexts of Asian cuisines as both nationalist and internationalist enterprises, and "Asia" itself as a vibrant culinary imaginary. The book, which includes a foreword from Krishnendu Ray and an afterword from James L. Watson, sets out a fresh agenda for thinking about future food studies scholarship.

Thirty-two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema covers thirty-two films from Taiwan, addressing a flowering of new talent, moving from art film to genre pictures, and nonfiction. Beyond the conventional framework of privileging “New and Post-New Cinema,” or prominence of auteurs or single films, this volume is a comprehensive, judicious take on Taiwan cinema that fills gaps in the literature, offers a renewed historiography, and introduces new creative force and voices of Taiwan’s moving image culture to produce a leading and accessible work on Taiwan film and culture. Film-by-film is conceived as the main carrier of moving picture imagery for a majority of viewers, across the world. The curation offers an array of formal, historical, genre, sexual, social, and political frames, which provide a rich brew of contexts. This surfeit of meanings is carried by individual films, one by one, which breaks down abstractions into narrative bites and outsized emotions.

This revised and updated new edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of cinema in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as to disaporic and transnational Chinese film-making, from the beginnings of cinema to the present day. Chapters by leading international scholars are grouped in thematic sections addressing key historical periods, film movements, genres, stars and auteurs, and the industrial and technological contexts of cinema in Greater China.

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.