Chris Berry

Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia

Mobile Cultures provides much-needed, empirically grounded studies of the connections between new media technologies, the globalization of sexual cultures, and the rise of queer Asia. The availability and use of new media—fax machines, mobile phones, the Internet, electronic message boards, pagers, and global television—have grown exponentially in Asia over the past decade. This explosion of information technology has sparked a revolution, transforming lives and lifestyles, enabling the creation of communities and the expression of sexual identities in a region notorious for the regulation of both information and sexual conduct. Whether looking at the hanging of toy cartoon characters like “Hello Kitty” from mobile phones to signify queer identity in Japan or at the development of queer identities in Indonesia or Singapore, the essays collected here emphasize the enormous variance in the appeal and uses of new media from one locale to another. Scholars, artists, and activists from a range of countries, the contributors chronicle the different ways new media galvanize Asian queer communities in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and around the world. They consider phenomena such as the uses of the Internet among gay, lesbian, or queer individuals in Taiwan and South Korea; the international popularization of Japanese queer pop culture products such as Yaoi manga; and a Thai website’s reading of a scientific tract on gay genetics in light of Buddhist beliefs. Essays also explore the politically subversive possibilities opened up by the proliferation of media technologies, examining, for instance, the use of Cyberjaya—Malaysia’s government-backed online portal—to form online communities in the face of strict antigay laws. Contributors. Chris Berry, Tom Boellstorff, Larissa Hjorth, Katrien Jacobs, Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin, Mark McLelland, David Mullaly, Baden Offord, Sandip Roy, Veruska Sabucco, Audrey Yue

The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Since the early 1990s, while mainland China’s state-owned movie studios have struggled with financial and ideological constraints, an exciting alternative cinema has developed. Dubbed the “Urban Generation,” this new cinema is driven by young filmmakers who emerged in the shadow of the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. What unites diverse directors under the “Urban Generation” rubric is their creative engagement with the wrenching economic and social transformations underway in China. Urban Generation filmmakers are vanguard interpreters of the confusion and anxiety triggered by the massive urbanization of contemporary China. This collection brings together some of the most recent original research on this emerging cinema and its relationship to Chinese society. The contributors analyze the historical and social conditions that gave rise to the Urban Generation, its aesthetic innovation, and its ambivalent relationship to China’s mainstream film industry and the international film market. Focusing attention on the Urban Generation’s sense of social urgency, its documentary impulses, and its representations of gender and sexuality, the contributors highlight the characters who populate this new urban cinema—ordinary and marginalized city dwellers including aimless bohemians, petty thieves, prostitutes, postal workers, taxi drivers, migrant workers—and the fact that these “floating urban subjects” are often portrayed by non-professional actors. Some essays concentrate on specific films (such as Shower and Suzhou River ) or filmmakers (including Jia Zhangke and Zhang Yuan), while others survey broader concerns. Together the thirteen essays in this collection give a multifaceted account of a significant, ongoing cinematic and cultural phenomenon. Contributors . Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Shuqin Cui, Linda Chiu-han Lai, Charles Leary, Sheldon H. Lu, Jason McGrath, Augusta Palmer, Berenice Reynaud, Yaohua Shi, Yingjin Zhang, Zhang Zhen, Xueping Zhong

The Urban Generation

Since the early 1990s, while mainland China’s state-owned movie studios have struggled with financial and ideological constraints, an exciting alternative cinema has developed. Dubbed the “Urban Generation,” this new cinema is driven by young filmmakers who emerged in the shadow of the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. What unites diverse directors under the “Urban Generation” rubric is their creative engagement with the wrenching economic and social transformations underway in China. Urban Generation filmmakers are vanguard interpreters of the confusion and anxiety triggered by the massive urbanization of contemporary China. This collection brings together some of the most recent original research on this emerging cinema and its relationship to Chinese society. The contributors analyze the historical and social conditions that gave rise to the Urban Generation, its aesthetic innovation, and its ambivalent relationship to China’s mainstream film industry and the international film market. Focusing attention on the Urban Generation’s sense of social urgency, its documentary impulses, and its representations of gender and sexuality, the contributors highlight the characters who populate this new urban cinema—ordinary and marginalized city dwellers including aimless bohemians, petty thieves, prostitutes, postal workers, taxi drivers, migrant workers—and the fact that these “floating urban subjects” are often portrayed by non-professional actors. Some essays concentrate on specific films (such as Shower and Suzhou River ) or filmmakers (including Jia Zhangke and Zhang Yuan), while others survey broader concerns. Together the thirteen essays in this collection give a multifaceted account of a significant, ongoing cinematic and cultural phenomenon. Contributors . Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Shuqin Cui, Linda Chiu-han Lai, Charles Leary, Sheldon H. Lu, Jason McGrath, Augusta Palmer, Berenice Reynaud, Yaohua Shi, Yingjin Zhang, Zhang Zhen, Xueping Zhong

What is transnational cinema? Thinking from the Chinese situation

ABSTRACT This article examines Chinese cinema to think further about defining and researching transnational cinema. Can transnational cinema be defined as a theoretical concept and a set of practices? Can it become something more distinct and specific than just a catch-all category for everything that is not national cinema, or a synonym for existing terms? If ‘transnational cinema’ is to have any value, it needs to be more than just another way of saying ‘international cinema’ or ‘world cinema’. The article analyses the times and conditions in which the term ‘transnational cinema’ came into use. On this basis, it argues for understanding transnational cinema as growing out of the conditions of globalization, shaped by neo-liberalism, ‘free trade’, the collapse of socialism, and post-Fordist production. In other words, transnational cinema is a different order of cinematic cultures and industries from the old national cinema order. It also argues that this is not the same thing as saying that all cinema produced under the umbrella of this transnational order embodies, promotes or supports neo-liberal global capitalism. Indeed, a full understanding of what transnational cinema is requires an approach that understands that the values and operations of global capitalism are contested by other forces within this order that it has contributed so much to producing.

Public Space, Media Space

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction C.Berry, J.Harbord & R.O.Moore What Is a Screen Nowadays? F.Casetti Multi-Screen Architecture B.Colomina Mapping Orbit: Towards a Vertical Public Space L.Parks Cairo Diary: Space-Wars, Public Visibility and the Transformation of Public Space in Post-Revolutionary Egypt M.Abaza Shanghais Public Screen Culture: Local and Coeval C.Berry iPhone Girl: Assembly, Assemblages and Affect in the Life of an Image H.Grace In Transit: Between Labor and Leisure in Londons St. Pancras International R.Moore Encountering Screen Art on the London Underground J.Harbord & T.Dillon Direct Address: A Brechtian Proposal for an Alternative Working Method M.Lewandowska Domesticating the Screen-Scenography: Situational Uses of Screen Images and Technologies in the London Underground Z.Krajina Privatizing Urban Space in the Mediated World of iPod Users M.Bull Publics and Publicity: Outdoor Advertising and Urban Space A.M.Cronin Index

Introduction, or, What's in an ‘s’?

This special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas aims to encourage further interrogation of the ‘transnational’ in ‘transnational Chinese cinemas’ by publishing essays that do just that. Each of the five essays shines a light on five different paths for further thinking about the ‘transnational’ in ‘transnational Chinese cinemas’: as a method; as a history; in terms of its relationship to the national; as a space where cinema meets other media and as a cultural geography. It is a decade now since Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu published his anthology, Transnational Chinese Cinemas (1997). With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that this was a watershed moment in the study of Chinese cinemas. In fact, the very terms ‘Chinese cinemas’ (in the plural) and ‘transnational Chinese cinemas’ were rarely used before Lu’s book. Now they name the field that we study and are used routinely. ‘Chinese cinemas’ takes for granted the transborder production, distribution and exhibition of Chinese films. As a conceptual framework, ‘transnational Chinese cinemas’ certainly corresponds to empirical reality better than the old territorially-bounded fantasy of a monolithic ‘national cinema’. So, why do we feel a need to interrogate its ‘routine’ use and taken-for-grantedness? By way of explanation, let us tell you our story of an ‘s’. When we first wrote the proposal for this special issue and sent it in to the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, we called it ‘What is transnational Chinese cinema?’ The editor of the journal, Song Hwee Lim, accepted the proposal, but asked us to change the title to ‘What are transnational Chinese cinemas?’ We were happy to comply, but why did we not add the ‘s’ in the first place? And why did Lim want us to add it? The immediate answer is obvious; the title of the journal is also in the plural – Journal of Chinese Cinemas. However, beyond this ‘s’ lie the many senses of the ‘transnational’. In the editorial to the first issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Lim explored the example of Tsai Ming-liang and his complex background, encompassing Malaysia and Taiwan and interests outside the mainstream. He wrote that Tsai ‘problematizes any monolithic concept of a Chinese national cinema and embodies a complexity and diversity that demands an equally sophisticated and plural approach to his films, and, by extension, to the field of Chinese cinemas studies’ (Lim 2007: 3). In other words, Lim’s insistence on the ‘s’ is in recognition of the multiple and transnational quality of Chinese cinemas. We agree that Chinese film-making is plural and that the old idea of a monolithic national cinema must be rejected. So, why was our initial instinct to drop the ‘s’? Lim correctly points out that, ‘the plural form of

The documentary production process as a counter-public: notes on an inter-Asian mode and the example of Kim Dong-Won

These notes introduce some hypotheses about the characteristics of what I call the ‘socially engaged’ mode of independent documentary film and video making in East Asia. The mode itself is particularly associated with the late Japanese filmmaker Ogawa Shinsuke and the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. As a result of the activities of the Yamagata festival, Ogawa’s work has been adopted and adapted as a model by many film and video makers working across the East Asian region and beyond. The main example examined in these notes is Kim Dong-Won, one of South Korea’s most experienced and respected independent documentary activists. Kim is now the president of a prominent South Korean independent documentary film association, the PURN group. Since the late 1980s, he has been actively making video documentaries to support a variety of struggles grounded in local communities. I discuss Kim’s work here because it was while watching one of his documentaries that I began to think about what was distinctive and significant about this particular independent documentary practice. Another World We Are Making: Haengdang-Dong People 2 (Ddo Hanaui Saesang–Haengdang-Dong Saramdul 2, 1999) records the struggle of local residents to create a community in resistance to the unfair redevelopment of their neighbourhood by property developers, and to secure their rights to accommodation and other services in the process. At various points in the film, there are scenes in which the residents gather to watch the video that Kim has shot. As I watched these scenes, I realized that the subjects of the documentary were also its primary audience, and that they alternated being documentary subjects and audience during the production process. This gives the documentary a direct role in the formation and maintenance of the community and the movement, as we see when the residents discuss what they have just seen with each other. This phenomenon interests me for a number of reasons. First, as part of the Yamagatainspired mode, it is at once transnational and local. Second, unlike so many global/local media phenomena today, it is not generated by the globalizing and globalist projects of contemporary transnational capitalism, but often attempts to function as an organic and uncommodified part of the community that it documents. Third, this mode of documentary film and video making itself is quite distant from the concerns about accuracy of representation and objectivity that continue to animate so much discussion of documentary, because commitment to the cause and involvement in it are assumed. And fourth, it raises questions about the public sphere and counter-publics in Cinema Studies, extending Miriam Hansen’s classic work on the topic beyond the classic site of reception in the movie theatre (Hansen 1991). At this point, this project consists mostly of hypotheses and questions for further investigation. Thinking about these questions together constitutes an attempt to use the debate around the public sphere and counter-publics to intervene into debates on the global and the local. The idea of public spheres is itself grounded in the media, with newspapers as the original privileged example of a medium that helps to construct a shared space, culture,

Images of urban China in Cao Fei’s ‘magical metropolises’

This article examines the moving image works of Chinese artist Cao Fei as a response to China’s rapid urbanization and the transformation of its existing urban spaces which are no longer shaped by socialism but instead by what this article considers as China’s engagement with neo-liberalism, including and facilitated by globalization. The urban sprawl of the Pearl River Delta inspired Rem Koolhaas’s writings on the ‘generic city’, which he celebrates precisely for its blandness. Cao herself is from Guangzhou. Yet, in works such as RMB City, Haze and Fog, Whose Utopia, and Hip Hop: Guangzhou, Cao creates what she calls ‘magical metropolises’. This article asks what kind of responses Cao’s ‘magical’ works are to contemporary Chinese urbanization. As part of the answer to this question, it applies four hermeneutic frameworks to analyse the works themselves. The findings from each of those frameworks indicate that Cao’s work not only reflects the current Chinese urban condition, but also participates and intervenes in it in various ways.

Transnational Culture in East Asia and the Logic of Assemblage

AbstractThis essay examines the growth of transnational culture in East Asia, drawing heavily on the example of Chinese cinema. It notes the growth of a variety of transborder-based Chinese cinema cultures, ranging from blockbuster productions to independent documentary culture, and argues that similar phenomena can be found in other parts of East Asia and with other arts and media. Until now, the tendency has been to tag such phenomena as “transnational” without further elaboration. This essay argues that the time has come for a more rigorous interrogation of the transnational. It argues that the transnational order should be distinguished from both the earlier international order of nation-states and from the ideology of globalisation. Further, it argues that the cultural formations that grow under the logic of transnational and flexible production operate not as part of a stable national system but according to the contingent and fluid logic of assemblage.

Shanghai’s Public Screen Culture: Local and Coeval

Moving image screens used to be confined indoors, in the form of either movie theater screens or TV screens. But, over the last decade and more, electronic moving image screens of various sizes and types have moved out to proliferate across the public spaces of the world’s cities. From the huge LED screens that cover whole sides of office towers and shopping malls to ATM screens and information screens in the lobbies and entrance halls of stations, banks and other publicly accessible buildings, they have become commonplace. How should we understand these public screens and their role in the public spaces of contemporary urban life? Many scholars who work on public screens are drawn by the novelty of certain screens and their unusual uses, such as the monumental size of certain screens; how some are not attached to but are an integral part of architecture; efforts to use them to stimulate public debate; and art shows using public screens. But, with the significant exception of Anna McCarthy’s seminal work on what she terms “ambient television,” written before the arrival of the flat screen, the everydayness of public screens has been relatively neglected so far (McCarthy, 2001). Perhaps they are so taken for granted that it is hard to pay attention to them except when they are exceptionally large or something unexpected is seen on them. But how are they actually used in everyday life? And are they used in the same way all over the world, as part of some post-modern homogenization of urban life?