Bøker i Edinburgh Studies in East Asian Film-serien

This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Her career overlapped with a transformative period in Japanese history, and this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives, subjectivities and modes of analysis for the classical era of Japanese cinema.

Provides an in-depth study of Hong Kong directors' participation in Chinese 'main-melody' blockbusters in the 2010s.

This book problematises how the sense of self and subjectivities are understood in contemporary China, and provides illuminating new insights on the changing notion of the individual through cinema.

Eclipsed Cinema explores the under-investigated aspects of colonial film culture such as the representational politics of colonial cinema, the film unit of the colonial government, the social reception of Hollywood cinema in relation to emerging Korean nationalism, Japanese settlers'film culture, and gendered film spectatorship.

There has been an explosion in Chinese independent documentary making since the turn of the twenty-first century. How are we to understand this vibrant burst of activity? Are these films brave expressions of dissidence? Or a more complex attempt to expand the terms of public discourse in the People's Republic? This timely study is based on detailed interviews with Chinese documentary makers rarely available in English, and insights gained by the author while working as a journalist in Beijing. It considers the relationship between independent documentaries and China's official film and television sectors, exploring the ways in which independent films probe, question and challenge the dominant ideas and narratives circulating in the state-sanctioned public sphere. Detailed analyses of key contemporary documentaries reveal a sustained attempt to forge an alternative public sphere where the views and experiences of petitioners, AIDS sufferers, dispossessed farmers and the victims of Mao's repression can be publicly aired for a small, but steadily growing, public.

Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema provides a historically informed examination of independent moving image works made between 1990 and 2010 in China. Showcasing an evolving personal mode of narrating memory, documenting reality, and inscribing subjectivity in over sixteen selected works that range from narrative film and documentary to experimental video and digital media (even including a multimedia avant-garde play), this book presents a provocative portrait of the independent filmmakers as a peculiarly pained yet active group of historical subjects of the transitional, post-socialist era. Through a connected investigation of cultural and cinematic concepts including historical consciousness, personal memory, narrative, performance, subjectivity, spatiality, and the body, Wang weaves a critical narrative of the formation of a unique post-socialist cultural consciousness that enables independent cinema and media to become a highly significant and effective conduit for historical thinking in contemporary China. Covering directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Meng Jinghui, Wang Bing, Wang Guangli, Duan Jinchuan, Cui Zi'en, Shi Tou, and Tang Danhong, this book is essential reading for all students and scholars in Chinese film.

This book focuses on how the 'Reform Era' has been constructed in the work of the director Jia Zhangke, analysing the archetypal class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual and entrepreneur that are found in his films.

China's haunted screens boast a rich legacy of uncanny, bizarre, grotesque, horrific, mystical and paranormal tales dating back to the silent era. Emerging from a period in which the supernatural ran afoul of censors in the Peoples' Republic of China, the resurgence of films rooted in "superstition" merits serious critical attention. This anthology provides penetrating insight into this re-enchantment seen in films by auteurs such as Zhang Yimou (PRC), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), and Tsui Hark (Hong Kong) as well as in reimagined classics such as Journey to the West in its multiple manifestations on screen. Gina Marchetti, University of Hong Kong Although Chinese film audiences have always maintained a foundational cultural interest in the fantastic, this trend has dramatically increased over the last decade. Sino-Enchantment is the first work in English to approach this recent explosion of fantastic film in Chinese cinemas, where each re-envisioning of the form is determined by cultural, economic, political and technological factors to produce fresh inventions and creative reinventions of familiar narratives, characters and tropes. With case studies of films such as The Assassin (2015), Monster Hunt (2015) and The Great Wall (2016), this novel approach uses the framework of 'Sino-enchantment' as a new theoretical lens through which readers can engage with elements of the fantastic in Chinese cinema. Kenneth Chan is Professor of English at the University of Northern Colorado. Andrew Stuckey has taught at Kalamazoo College, the Ohio State University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

By giving shape to Imamura Shohei's career, this collection positions him as a stylistic innovator as well as an ethnographic investigator into Japanese culture and tradition; the preeminent examiner of the hidden, barely repressed underpinnings of Japanese society.

The first comprehensive collection on the subject of Hong Kong neo-noir cinema, this book examines the way Hong Kong has developed its own unique and culturally specific version of the neo-noir genre, while at the same time drawing on and adapting existing international noir cinemas.

With case studies of popular stars like Linda Lin Dai and Edison Chen, and spectacular genres like the Shaolin Temple cycle of martial arts films, the book explores what it meant to be both cosmopolitan and Chinese in the second half of the 20th century.

Examines how the Chinese Reform Era is contrusted and felt in the films of Jia Zhangke, using the concept of structures of feeling

By giving shape to Imamura Shohei's career, this collection positions him as a stylistic innovator as well as an ethnographic investigator into Japanese culture and tradition; the preeminent examiner of the hidden, barely repressed underpinnings of Japanese society.

This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Her career overlapped with a transformative period in Japanese history, and this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives, subjectivities and modes of analysis for the classical era of Japanese cinema.

This book problematises how the sense of self and subjectivities are understood in contemporary China, and provides illuminating new insights on the changing notion of the individual through cinema.

The first sustained study examining the reflection of China's new economic and cultural power on screen

This book offers a new interpretation of Ozu Yasujiro career, from his earliest work in the 1920s up to his death in 1963, focusing on Ozu's depiction of the everyday life and experiences of ordinary Japanese people during a time of depression, war and economic resurgence.

In this ground-breaking investigation into the seldom-studied film culture of colonial Korea (1910-1945), Dong Hoon Kim brings new perspectives to the associations between colonialism, modernity, film historiography and national cinema.