This book examines the aesthetic qualities of particular Chinese-language films and the rich artistic traditions from which they spring. It brings together leading experts in the field, and encompasses detailed and wide-ranging case studies of films such as Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Spring in a Small Town, 24 City, and The Grandmaster, and filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, Fei Mu, Zhang Yimou, Johnnie To, and Wong Kar-wai. By illuminating the form and style of Chinese films from across cinema history, The Poetics of Chinese Cinema testifies to the artistic value and uniqueness of Chinese-language filmmaking.

This book examines the aesthetic qualities of particular Chinese-language films and the rich artistic traditions from which they spring. It brings together leading experts in the field, and encompasses detailed and wide-ranging case studies of films such as Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Spring in a Small Town, 24 City, and The Grandmaster, and filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, Fei Mu, Zhang Yimou, Johnnie To, and Wong Kar-wai. By illuminating the form and style of Chinese films from across cinema history, The Poetics of Chinese Cinema testifies to the artistic value and uniqueness of Chinese-language filmmaking.

Mosaic Space and Mosaic Auteurs constructs a model of mosaic, which extends our focus beyond narrative strategy, to approach the trend of diverse multi-strand films across genres, nations and filmmaking contexts since the late 1980s. Different from investigation of this recurring global phenomenon from perspectives of spectator engagement, narratology, cognitive understanding and socio-political messages, proposed by film scholars, the model of mosaic helps establish the intertwining relationship between narrative, aesthetics, transnational production, and distribution modes – and in the framework of contextualised geopolitical spaces. As the transnational auteurs in question draw talents, resources, and subject matters from a wide range of geopolitical spaces along their border-crossing journeys, their films juxtapose diverse spatial configurations. In fact, "mosaic" is a spatial metaphor which puts emphasis on the visual image of spaces and links space, narrative, and authorship into a multidimensional model of spatial compilation. It is a mosaic which gathers, groups, juxtaposes, and re-arranges spaces, offering a reading of mosaic beyond an exclusive focus on narrative – its nuances are examined in detail in different mosaics of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Atom Egoyan, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Michael Haneke.

Compiled by two skilled librarians and a Taiwanese film and culture specialist, this volume is the first multilingual and most comprehensive bibliography of Taiwanese film scholarship, designed to satisfy the broad interests of the modern researcher. The second book in a remarkable three-volume research project, An Annotated Bibliography for Taiwan Film Studies catalogues the published and unpublished monographs, theses, manuscripts, and conference proceedings of Taiwanese film scholars from the 1950s to 2013. Paired with An Annotated Bibliography for Chinese Film Studies (2004), which accounts for texts dating back to the 1920s, this series brings together like no other reference the disparate voices of Chinese film scholarship, charting its unique intellectual arc. Organized intuitively, the volume begins with reference materials (bibliographies, cinematographies, directories, indexes, dictionaries, and handbooks) and then moves through film history (the colonial period, Taiwan dialect film, new Taiwan cinema, the 2/28 incident); film genres (animated, anticommunist, documentary, ethnographic, martial arts, teen); film reviews; film theory and technique; interdisciplinary studies (Taiwan and mainland China, Taiwan and Japan, film and aboriginal peoples, film and literature, film and nationality); biographical materials; film stories, screenplays, and scripts; film technology; and miscellaneous aspects of Taiwanese film scholarship (artifacts, acts of censorship, copyright law, distribution channels, film festivals, and industry practice). Works written in multiple languages include transliteration/romanized and original script entries, which follow universal AACR-2 and American cataloguing standards, and professional notations by the editors to aid in the use of sources.

Zhang Yimou's first film, Red Sorghum, took the Golden Bear Award in 1988 at the Berlin International Film Festival. Since then Chinese films have continued to arrest worldwide attention and capture major film awards, winning an international following that continues to grow. Transnational Chinese Cinemas spans nearly the entire length of twentieth-century Chinese film history. The volume traces the evolution of Chinese national cinema, and demonstrates that gender identity has been central to its formation. Femininity, masculinity and sexuality have been an integral part of the filmic discourses of modernity, nationhood, and history. This volume represents the most comprehensive, wide-ranging, and up-to-date study of China's major cinematic traditions. It is an indispensable source book for modern Chinese and Asian history, politics, literature, and culture.

Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance examines films of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries from postcolonial countries around the globe. In the mid twentieth century, the political reality of resistance and decolonization lead to the creation of dozens of new states, forming a backdrop to films of that period. Towards the century’s end and at the dawn of the new millennium, film continues to form a site for interrogating colonization and decolonization, though against a backdrop that is now more neo-colonial than colonial and more culturally imperial than imperial. This volume explores how individual films emerged from and commented on postcolonial spaces and the building and breaking down of the European empire. Each chapter is a case study examining how a particular film from a postcolonial nation emerges from and reflects that nation’s unique postcolonial situation. This analysis of one nation’s struggle with its coloniality allows each essay to investigate just what it means to be postcolonial.

Highlights the industries, markets, identities, and histories that distinguish cinema beyond the traditional hubs of mainstream Western cinema. From Iceland to Iran, from Singapore to Scotland, a growing intellectual and cultural wave of production is taking cinema beyond the borders of its place of origin--exploring faraway places, interacting with barely known peoples, and making new localities imaginable. In these films, previously entrenched spatial divisions no longer function as firmly fixed grid coordinates, the hierarchical position of place as "center" is subverted, and new forms of representation become possible. In Cinema at the Periphery, editors Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal assemble criticism that explores issues of the periphery, including questions of transnationality, place, space, passage, and migration. Cinema at the Periphery examines the periphery in terms of locations, practices, methods, and themes. It includes geographic case studies of small national cinemas located at the global margins, like New Zealand and Scotland, but also of filmmaking that comes from peripheral cultures, like Palestinian "stateless" cinema, Australian Aboriginal films, and cinema from Quebec. Therefore, the volume is divided into two key areas: industries and markets on the one hand, and identities and histories on the other. Yet as a whole, the contributors illustrate that the concept of "periphery" is not fixed but is always changing according to patterns of industry, ideology, and taste. Cinema at the Periphery highlights the inextricable interrelationship that exists between production modes and circulation channels and the emerging narratives of histories and identities they enable. In the present era of globalization, this timely examination of the periphery will interest teachers and students of film and media studies.

The Encyclopedia of Chinese Film, one of the first ever encyclopedias in this area, provides alphabetically organized entries on directors, genres, themes, and actors and actresses from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as 300 film synopses. Great care has been taken to provide solid cultural and historical context to the facts. The alphabetical entries are preceded by a substantial historical section, incorporating material on the the main studios and analysing the impact of Chinese film abroad as well as at home in recent years. This Encyclopedia meets the needs, equally, of * the film studies scholar * the student of Chinese culture * the specialist in Chinese film * the curious viewer wanting to know more. Additional features include: * comprehensive cross-references and suggestions for further reading * a list of relevant websites * a chronology of films and a classified contents list * three indexes - (one of film and tv titles with directors names and year of release, one of names including actors, writers, directors and producers and one of studios, all with pinyin romanizations) * a glossary of pinyin romanizations, Chinese characters and English equivalents to aid the specialist in moving between Chinese titles and English translations.

Thirty-two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema covers thirty-two films from Taiwan, addressing a flowering of new talent, moving from art film to genre pictures, and nonfiction. Beyond the conventional framework of privileging “New and Post-New Cinema,” or prominence of auteurs or single films, this volume is a comprehensive, judicious take on Taiwan cinema that fills gaps in the literature, offers a renewed historiography, and introduces new creative force and voices of Taiwan’s moving image culture to produce a leading and accessible work on Taiwan film and culture. Film-by-film is conceived as the main carrier of moving picture imagery for a majority of viewers, across the world. The curation offers an array of formal, historical, genre, sexual, social, and political frames, which provide a rich brew of contexts. This surfeit of meanings is carried by individual films, one by one, which breaks down abstractions into narrative bites and outsized emotions.