Vivian P. Y. Lee

Virtual bodies, flying objects: the digital imaginary in contemporary martial arts films

Abstract The international success of contemporary martial arts films has stimulated critical debates and reflections on the aesthetics, politics, and economics of local/national Chinese cinemas, as well as the ideological implications of reinventing a ‘traditional’ genre for international audiences, against the backdrop of increasingly interpenetrable national and cultural borders brought on by the forces of globalization. This article attempts to delineate an ‘extra’ dimension of the martial arts film in the global context — the creation of a ‘digital imaginary’ that not only reinforces and supplements the more conventional modes of representation, but also enables a ‘universal’ frame of reference that contributes to the global currency of martial arts films. Drawing upon Zhang Yimous Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), and Stephen Chows Shaolin Soccer (2001) and Kung Fu Hustle (2004), it will illustrate how this digital imaginary displaces the exotic (Chinese) tradition into the familiar realm of digital media, resulting in a hybrid, multiply coded, culturally ambiguous, and therefore transnational visual medium for global consumption.

Pornography, musical, drag, and the art film: performing ‘queer’ in Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud

Abstract This article situates The Wayward Cloud alongside Tsai Ming-liangs previous films in which subjects such as urban alienation, generational conflicts, postmodern ennui, and the ambivalence and secrecy surrounding homosexual or queer identities in contemporary Taiwan are intricately woven into a cinematic aesthetic characterized by sparse dialogue, minimalist setting, and striking imagery of urban and social decay. It looks at how the film refers to Tsais previous films by displacing and transforming a set of visual codes and metaphors that has been characteristically associated with Tsais style. Connected to this self-referencing is the films ironic and self-reflexive play with generic conventions that cuts across a vast terrain of cinematic forms i.e. the musical, pornography and drag, in the making of an ‘art film’. It argues that self-referentiality, intertextuality, and genre-bending in Tsais film call into question established conventions about genre, hence audience expectations, by bringing these apparently incompatible generic forms and conventions into a mutual dialogue.

J-Horror and Kimchi Western: Mobile Genres in East Asian Cinemas

Writings on East Asian cinemas, or non-Western cinemas in general, have tended to focus on the representation or contestation of the nation, and the negotiation between indigenous traditions and what were considered “modern” cinematic codes in the evolution of film art. Chinese cinema scholarship has produced a fascinating account of how these various positions are argued, debated, rethought and revised, particularly the controversy over the exact meaning of the “nation” and the “national” when applied to Chinese or any non-Western cinema in today’s globalized world (e.g. Zhang 2004; Berry and Farquhar 2006; Lu and Yeh 2005).1 In the early 1990s, the “New Korean cinema” came into being against a long history of political repression and state interference. This history, Julian Stringer (2005) notes, is also a narrative that “encompass[es] the experience of successive national traumas.” Beginning with the political democratization in 1992, the massive program of commercialization and globalization orchestrated by the state and large multinational corporations (chaebols in Korean) has given rise to the phenomenon of “record-breakers” or Korean blockbusters,2 a number of which have gained arthouse respectability.

Introduction: Placing Value in the Missing and the Lost

ABSTRACT The concept of lost films and missing directors or missing periods is a fact of life in the study of Hong Kong cinema. However the idea could be turned to advantage — as a necessary epistemological process for scholars to study long neglected or simply forgotten parts of a cinema. The meaning of loss here can be extended to also denote a state of neglect and a general unresponsiveness on the part of the critical establishment towards the work of a certain filmmaker, star, a genre, or a particular production company. This Special Issue showcases five articles dealing with different aspects of ‘loss’ in Hong Kong cinema. Taken together, they map out a topology of ‘rediscovered’ sites that have hitherto been ‘missing’ from critical scholarship.

Migrants in a Strange City: (Dis-)Locating the China Imaginary

Since the earliest days of Hong Kong cinema, ‘China’ has been a material, cultural, and ideological presence. The local film industry’s long history of collaboration with its Mainland counterparts in Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century,1 the ideological tugof-war among Mainland China and Taiwan in the British colony after 1949, and the film industry’s need for expansion into overseas markets, especially the Chinese-speaking world in Southeast Asia and North America, bespeak the ambivalence, or multivalence, of ‘China’ in the local context. As it were, the term designates not a monolithic entity but a polyglot of histories, cultures, and identities that characterized twentieth-century Chinese and world history.2 ‘China’ as such has been, and still is, a contested field, a site where artistic, political, and economic interests intersect in response to the historical vicissitudes of the times. This aspect of Hong Kong cinema has been fruitfully explored in recent critical scholarship. In a very broad and general sense, the ‘China factor’ is understood in these terms: (1) the historical connections between Hong Kong and Shanghai (China’s ‘film capital’ before 1949) and the interflow of capital, technology, and production and acting talents3; (2) the creation of an ‘imaginary China’ in Hong Kong cinema, especially the historical epics and martial arts films, in the works of emigre directors from Shanghai in the 1960s and 1970s4; and (3) new manifestations of this imaginary in film and television during the 1980s and 1990s, the years of political transition from British to Chinese rule, which also coincided with the emergence of the Hong Kong New Wave cinema, the accelerated internationalization of Hong Kong films, and ironically the rapid decline of the local film industry.5