Affect, blankness, theatrics: Rurality and faciality in three Chinese instances

The face and the close-up have been central to film theory since its early days. If modern visual theories of the face arose in Europe amid urbanization and imperial encounter, in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the political aesthetics of faciality became central to Maoist mass mobilizations of the countryside, in part through collective village film screenings. Bringing together themes of faciality, rurality and anxieties of global encounter, this article considers how the rural has been staged through genres of the face in Chinese cinema and television. Through close readings of the Maoist era The Youth of Our Village, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Zhao Benshan Media’s series Rural Love Story, I consider three distinct deployments of the face in depictions of rural and environmental transformation. Thinking with while also departing from Deleuze’s formulations in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, the article traces an emotively intense face reminiscent of the affection-image, a blank face that operates in part as a time-image and a performative face of what might be called a theatrics-image. Across its readings as a site of affective immediacy, despotic inscription, moral character and social–political manoeuvring, the face offers a multivalent site for political, aesthetic and affective mediation, on- and off-screen.

Beyond aesthetics: The long take as the nation-form in the cinema of Lav Diaz

This article argues that the extreme long take of Lav Diaz is not only his aesthetic method but also his ideological position as a filmmaker of Third Cinema, reinstating the theory’s critical arsenal in opposing the violent structure of the postcolonial nation state. It maintains that the Diaz shot is isomorphic to the nation-form and has two political dimensions: first, the extreme duration of the shot is Diaz’s resistance to the imperialism of mainstream cinema and its debilitating effects by employing ‘dead time’ which creates restlessness and reflexivity that disrupt absorption to enable a mode of critical spectatorship; second, the Diaz shot is a critique on Philippine postcolonial society which can be understood by examining the triadic structure of space, time and body. Using the film Mula sa Kung Ano Ang Noon (From What Is Before) (2014), this article proposes an anatomy of the shot as a unitary system of environment, duration and progression of actions, labouring bodies of subalterns in the state of bare life. It expands the possibility of the long take from the narrowly held study of time and space to include a study of bodies.

Purba film as a prototype of Malay film genre: A preliminary exploration

This article attempts to trace the historical development of the period costume dramas known as purba films, a prototyped genre for Malay cinema produced in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur during the ‘studio era’ from the late 1940s to early 1970s. Either adapted from folk literature/theatre and historical texts or based on original ideas by the screenwriters/directors, purba films are set in the pre-colonial era, invariably in a kampong and glorify the Malay world prior to the arrival of the imperialists. I argue that the genre, which encompasses diverse variants and subdivisions, has undergone several phases of transformation and evolution, in particular, while drawing out the genre’s codes, conventions and ideologies. Additionally, I demonstrate that they are, on the one hand, culturally and cinematically specific, and, on the other, are borrowed from, and shaped by, other cinematic genres, forms and practices. The discussion also provides evidence on how purba films were situated within the cultural and industrial contexts.

‘Why am I still imprisoned in your eyes?’: Re-visioning ‘leftover women’ and the female gaze in Send Me to the Clouds

This article studies how a recent Chinese women’s film Send Me to the Clouds (2019) explores different ways of looking as innovative cinematic strategies of constructing and empowering the precarious female subject against a postsocialist patriarchal ideology that dominates gendered narratives and audio-visual codes of the mainstream Chinese cinema. The film is centred upon a 30-year-old ‘leftover woman’ Sheng Nan’s distressful life experiences and her anger at the prevailing sexism and ageism. Rather than being tamed or domesticated, throughout the film the angry and restless woman is shown to be constantly on the motion, making every effort to experiment with alternative looking relations that seek to destroy the voyeuristic pleasure and disciplinary power of the privileged male gaze, as well as to explore possibilities of creating a self-reflective and critical female gaze. A contextualized critical study of the female authorship and agency on and behind the screen will shed new light on how contemporary Chinese women filmmakers take on ‘concrete and various negotiations’ with the structure of domination and its representational system via ‘their socially and politically conditioned cinematic practice or performance’.

Filming the Singaporean killer: Trauma, murder and modernity in Medium Rare (1991) and God or Dog (1997)

This article considers how two Singapore horror films, Medium Rare (1991) and God or Dog (1997), attempted to make sense of the real-life Adrian Lim ritual murders through two divergent approaches to the co-constitutive relationship between modernity and violence. First, by formulating an image of Singapore as a rational global cosmopolis, Medium Rare positions Lim and his superstitious violence as malignant anomalies that must be expelled to protect Singapore’s modern identity. Conversely, God or Dog portrays Lim’s madness as an unfortunate consequence of the country’s rapid modernization. Put together, these films use Lim and his crimes as vehicles through which they explore Singapore’s troubled endeavours at self-definition within the early fringe of the 1990s Singapore new wave cinema.

Sentimental journey? The drifting rhythms of Tsai Ming-liang’s Journey to the West

With his experimental short, Journey to the West, Tsai Ming-liang creates a cinematic experience that recalls the early ‘cinema of attractions’, but this is an attraction with a twist. As a spectacle, it is more specular than spectacular. An attraction without the attendant excitement, his is a reflection that presents a provocation. By calling out the shortened attention span of contemporary life, Tsai identifies the level of distraction that characterizes the contemporary, post-industrialized spaces of late-stage capitalism. An attempt at redemption, his film conveys a sense of what Rey Chow refers to in contemporary Chinese cinema as ‘the sentimental’. Framed by Henri Lefebvre’s and Lea Jacobs’s respective ideas concerning rhythms both extrinsic and intrinsic to the cinematic, and complemented by considerations of temporality, rather than making meaning, this article attempts to make sense of the film by locating these rhythms within it.

Foreign ideas, native spaces: Crime and Punishment in recent Asian cinema

In recent years, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has furnished source material for two major Asian film directors: Darezhan Omirbaev (Student [2012]) and Lav Diaz (Norte, the End of History [2013]). Each director adapts Dostoevsky’s critique of the newly emerging market economy in 1860s Russia in order to depict the impact of capitalism on postcolonial Asian societies, highlighting the alienation characters experience from themselves and in relation to other human beings in particular. In doing so, Omirbaev and Diaz recreate and transfer the novelist’s opposition between native, eastern, Russian Orthodox values and encroaching western ideas to their own countries. Omirbaev depicts the damage caused to ordinary Kazakhs by a ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ economic model; Diaz chronicles the merciless toll of capitalism on the rural Filipino poor. Like Dostoevsky, each director proposes a return to native cultural, linguistic and environmental elements as a means of countering harmful foreign ideologies that victimize everyday people.

Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Brian Hu (2018)

Review of: Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Brian Hu (2018) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 264 pp., ISBN 978-1-47442-845-3, h/bk, £75.00 ISBN 978-1-47442-846-0, p/bk, £19.99

Hooligan Sparrow: Representation of sexual assault in Chinese cinema, feminist activism and the limits of #MeToo in China

Hooligan Sparrow breaks with many taboos in Chinese cinema. It is the first internationally acclaimed documentary by a Chinese female director to centre upon investigating the activities of Ye Haiyan, a Chinese sex and women’s rights activist, as well as to address the politically sensitive topic of sexual assault in China. This is the first study to examine the cinematic contributions of Wang Nanfu and Ye Haiyan’s activism and feminist writings posted on Ye’s online social media accounts on Sina Weibo and Twitter. I unpack the power dynamics in this documentary as well as the interplay between the filmmaker’s subjectivity and the female rights activist’s subjectivity. This study also investigates how masculine aesthetic representations of sexual assault in Chinese cinema have blurred the issue of consent and shows how the subjectivities of female directors like Wang Nanfu and Vivian Qu bring more impactful representations of sexual violence in Chinese cinema.

Storming off the tracks: Zombies, high speed rail and South Korean identity in Train to Busan

This article focuses on how the recent blockbuster hit Train to Busan (Yeon 2016), in transposing the zombie horror genre into the South Korean setting, allows South Korean history and social context to actively shape the manner in which it appropriates a genre largely untested by the local film industry. It argues that the film uses genre as a global vernacular through which to speak of specifically Korean issues (in particular, the Korean War, and the issues of South Korea’s speed-oriented Ppalli-Ppalli culture), and locates such practice within the broader context of contemporary South Korean cinema.