Modernity as Crisis: Goeng Si and Vampires in Hong Kong Cinema (translation into Russian)

This article is a translation of a chapter from the collective monograph Draculas, vampires, and other undead forms: essays on gender, race, and culture, edited by John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart (2009, Scarecrow Press). The author analyzes the question of how Hong Kong cinema responds to the complex situation of Hong Kong's transition from its status as a British territory on loan to a special territory with extended autonomy within the PRC. As a marker pointing to the crisis development of this process, the Chinese people's particular ideas about the so-called “goeng si” (“jumping corpses”) were chosen. These revived corpses move in a peculiar jumping way, due to which they received this name. According to the author, in the images of these creatures, as well as in the cinematic vampires that have become an integral part of films made by Hong Kong studios, all the contradictions of the cultural and political situation in Hong Kong are manifested as in a mirror. Despite the fact that Hong Kong was able to actively oppose the global cinema represented by Hollywood, it had to adjust to the global cinematic trends in which vampires played an important role. All of this led to a certain hybridity of images that combined both Western and Chinese traits.

Network Narratives in Global Cinema: The Shift from Community to Network and Their Narrative Logics

In the backdrop of global interconnection, such films as “Crash”, “Syriana”, and “Babel” drew attention to the six-degrees-of-separation “network narrative.” This type of distributed narrative with multiple access points or discrete threads has long evolved, perhaps since Griffith’s “Intolerance” and via modern masterpieces: Altman’s “Nashville” and “Shortcuts” weave many characters into a portrait of their social ground unmapped by themselves; Bunuel’s “Phantom of Liberty” shifts among characters only through the contingent movement of the camera. These two elements (multiple characters, a floating agent) intermingle now in the way that the protagonist takes the role of the very agent navigating among contingently networked characters in further decentralized directions: “Birdman” centers on the hero’s salvation but many other people around him form and cross small dramas; the protagonist in “Waking Life” shuffles through a dream meeting various people; “Holly Motors” stages a Parisian’s bizarre city odyssey, with the true agent turning out to be a car/cars; “Mysterious Object at Noon” experiments on the ‘exquisite corpse’ relay of a story through different people whom the director encounters while moving around... What does this non-linearity with different causal relations imply? How do mobile agents floating over decentralized events relate to global networks in general? This paper investigates today’s network narratives through an interdisciplinary approach to the notion of network as opposed to community even beyond film narratology. For instance, if the masculine formula of Lacan’s sexuation (all are submitted to the phallic function but for one exception) underlies community, its feminine formula (not all are submitted to the phallic function but there is no exception) works for networking. Community forms the totality of all and an exception that fuels the universal desire to make it utopian, but network has the infinity of drives to (dis)connections dismantling community, yet thereby leaving no exceptional outside. Community is a closed set of subjects who may be ‘abjected’ from it; network is an open whole of endless links along which the subject-abject shift constantly occurs in the mode of being ‘on/off’ rather than ‘in/out.’ In Deleuze’s terms, community works as a “tree-like” vertical system of hierarchical units in the historical trajectory to its perfection, whereas the network creates a “rhizomatic” horizontal movement of molecular forces in non-dialectic, non-linear directions. Foucauldian “discipline” is a key to subjectivation in the community, but it turns into Deleuzian “control” in the network that promotes flexible agency and continuous modulation without exit. As actor-network theorists argue, nothing precedes and exists outside ever-changing networks of relationship. The network narrative will thus be explored as a cinematic symptom of the radical shift from community to network that both society and subjectivity undergo with all the potentials and limitations in our global age.

Metacinema

When a work of art shows an interest in its own status as a work of art—either by reference to itself or to other works—we have become accustomed to calling this move “meta.” While scholars and critics have, for decades, referred to reflexivity in films, it is only here, for the first time, that a group of leading and emerging film theorists joins to directly and systematically address with clarity and rigor the meanings and implications of the meta for cinema. In ten new essays and a selection of vital canonical works, contributors chart, explore, and advance the ways in which metacinema is at once a mode of filmmaking and a heuristic for studying cinematic attributes. What we have here, then, is not just an engagement with certain practices and concepts in widespread use in the movies (from Hollywood to global cinema, from documentary to the experimental and avant-garde), but also the development of a veritable and vital new genre of film studies. Since metacinema has become an increasingly prominent cultural phenomenon—a kind of art and logic familiar to everyday experience around the world—its abundance and pervasiveness draws our attention. With more and more films expressing reflexivity, recursion, reference to other films, mise en abîme, seriality, and exhibiting related intertextual traits, the time is overdue for the kind of capacious yet nuanced critical study now in hand.

Cinema and New Media Possibilities in the Pandemic

Cinema, which started to digitalize in the 20th century, continues to be integrated with digital publishing platforms that emerged with the development of new media technologies in the 21st century. With the coronavirus pandemic that affected the whole world in 2019, digital broadcasting platforms became popular as an alternative cinema event in the quarantine process. Various precautions have been taken around the world for the coronavirus pandemic. As a result of the quarantine precaution, the local and global cinema industry was negatively affected. Cinema industry which is a collective production and screening process, has been interrupted by the suspension of the filming and the closing of the movie theaters during the quarantine. New media created a movement area for the cinema industry in this process. In this sense, the aim of this study is examining the researches on the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on the cinema and the effect of new media tools and opportunities on the cinema sector.

The Photo-filmic and the Post-human: Picturesque Landscapes at the Peripheries of Global Cinema

The chapter describes a slightly paradoxical form of the picturesque tableau that has emerged in a globalized, markedly transnational cinema. The relative autonomy of such a tableau, defined by the aesthetic of high definition digital photography, foregrounds both the single photograph’s inherent connection to death and its close ties with the art of painting. As such, it also becomes a perfect form to unfold a kind of post-human landscape, a setting for eschatological narratives told in the minimalist mode, staging a clash between elemental, biological existence and powerful forces of society that threaten this existence with imminent destruction. In the international arthouse film festival circuit we see a number of films made in the context of so-called peripheral cinemas which engage in this way the in-betweenness of photography and film in an unsettling mixture of documentary realism and pictorial detachment. The chapter focuses on the photo-filmic qualities of three such films: Timbuktu directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, Test (Ispytaniye) by Alexander Kott, and Nabat, by Elchin Musaoglu (all made in 2014).

Why Do Cash Cow Movies Work?

This research study aims to investigate all possible reasons that lead to the success of Cash Cow movies in Hollywood. We examine diverse elements used to produce these movies to identify the key factors that ensure the consistent success of cash cow movies since the beginning. It is evident from the box-office records that these movies have tested the tides of time yet have always been in public demand for decades. This study also examines why movie critics have hardly applauded these commercially hit movies as the jury never nominates them for any significant accolades, including Academy or Oscar Awards. Further, this research analyzes the duration of the success of cash cow movies. As the Top Lifetime Grosses (2020) indicate, cash cow movies have almost always been stood out as the 'highest-grossing movies of the year for the past two decades, and they barely suffer box office fatigue for long. While examining these diverse aspects, we also try to determine the dynamic effects these movies have created on the global cinema industry regarding the nature and quality of content being created and the revenue generated.

World Cinema, vod Platforms and the Western Demand

The article explores the concept of world cinema as an other to global cinema from a marketing perspective. Special attention is given to the way the world cinema universe is presented on video-on-demand platforms in Western markets. To demonstrate that the stories, scope and concerns of this universe vary according to marketing objectives, the article compares presentations on three platforms with contrasting business models and marketing algorithms: Netflix, Filmin, and FilmDoo. This leads to an important conclustion: presentations on platforms with an apparently more ethical business model are not necessarily more progressive and more advantageous to world cinema in terms of avoiding its “genre-fication”.