Following two highly successful symposia, the Chinese Film Forum UK, a research network supported by the AHRC, is hosting an international conference on Chinese cinemas in and outside of China.

By Robert Hamilton

Following the success of CFFUK’s symposium on Chinese Identities and in celebration of Chinese New Year, the Cornerhouse screened the Taiwanese romantic comedy You Are the Apple of My Eye (Na xie nian, wo men yi qi zhui de nu hai) directed by Giddens Ho in 2011. In support of the screening and to contextualize the film, Dr. Felicia Chan (University of Manchester and Chinese Film Forum, UK) gave an introductory talk on Popular Taiwan Cinema Beyond the Arthouse.

It was an informal and informative lecture that placed Taiwanese popular cinema outside the west’s received perception of the sad, melancholic, slow cinema of the New Taiwan cinema of Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang. While these directors are fêted in the west with little concern of the taint of commercialism, a popular, youth orientated cinema emerged from the rapid social modernisation of the 1980s. It drew on the small budget, big box office savvy of Ang Lee. It opted for a youthful promise as opposed to the artistic depression of the arthouse film. Dr. Chan argued that while it was aimed at a youth market, it dealt with a school days nostalgia that appealed to a wide range of ages that, in the words of Dr. Ming-Yeh Rawnsley (University of Leeds), ‘triggered a sense of nostalgia and reverence’.In an age of changing social relations within the political economy of rampant capitalism, a romanticised school past provided a safe fantasy for audiences of all ages to indulge in.

Furthermore, she stated that in these anxious encounters with modernity in which adult years could be a lonely search for identity and belonging, childhood seemed a comparatively happier time, swaddled in the authority of an overbearing, but loving parent. This is how Dr. Chan characterised the political relations between East Asian nation states and their subjects, who in turn accept this exercise of power as one would with a parent. They might miss their school days, but do not desire a return to them, it is a ‘nostalgia without mourning’.

Dr. Chan concluded that it was a popular cinema aimed at a specifically East Asian audience and culture with no desire to court western markets. The box office receipts for You Are the Apple of My Eye would seem to support her argument, as it made nearly $30 million in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and China. It was a convincing argument, as well as an engaging one.

It was an encouraging turn out, too, for the screening, proving that CFFUK is attracting a respectable and reliable audience. In true Chinese New Year style, You Are the Apple of My Eye is a romantic comedy with its fair share of laughs and heavy dollops of schmaltz. It was a classic boy meets girl, girl and boy hate each other, they fall in love, boy loses girl story with a neat twist at the end. It had all the tropes Dr. Chan had indicated with a few more thrown in for good measure. It tells the off/on/off love story of class wastrel, Ko-teng (Ko Chen-tung) and class swot, Shen Chia-yi (Michelle Chen) in the last year of school and their college days into the early stages of marriage and adulthood.
They were supported by an array of kooky friends, stern teachers, a comic headmaster, a naked father and a horny dog amid teenage masturbation jokes, romantic montages and tearful arguments in the rain. I enjoyed it as though a teenage schoolboy again, but my cynical present self reminded me that I had been expelled.

By Wikanda Promkhuntong

This is the second time I had the opportunity to attend the Chinese Film Forum UK’s (CFFUK) Symposium. Set up for the research and promotion of transnational Chinese film, CFFUK is an AHRC-supported joint venture between the University of Manchester, University of Salford, Manchester Metropolitan University, Confucius Institute, Chinese Arts Centre and Cornerhouse. I recall that one of the highlights of the CFFUK symposium I attended last spring (The Distribution and Exhibition of Chinese and Asian Cinema in the UK) was the dynamic between academic paper presentations and talks by those involved in the distribution and promotion of Chinese and Asian films in the UK. The sheer diversity of papers this time from established scholars from all over the world combined with a large and vibrant group of young researchers in the field was equally impressive.

Held at the Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester on 29th-30th January 2013, the symposium presented a total of eight panels with twenty-two invigorating papers that explored the subject of Chinese identities from incredibly diverse aspects. These included the historical studies of Chineseness in early cinema and animations, papers on the shifting representations of gender and class of characters and film stars in contemporary Chinese cinema, the commoditisation of Taiwan’s landscapes though cinema, the construction of Chinese public personas and works on industrial contexts particularly the transnational commercial productions and festival films. The symposium also featured a keynote speech from a revered Chinese cinema expert, Professor Chris Berry and a public film screening. The organisers remain committed to showcasing Chinese films that have not received UK distribution, so I had a chance to see Song Fang’s meditative directing debut, Memories Look At Me (China 2012) in the evening of the first day.

Throughout both days, one of the recurring subjects discussed in several papers and the keynote speech was the struggle and the shift in the cinematic representations of Chinese women. While early British cinema like Piccadilly (Ewald André Dupont, UK 1929) purposefully portrayed Anna May Wong, the Chinese female star of the time, as a sensational exotic attraction (discussed in Hiu M. Chan’s paper on London’s Limehouse quarter), the orientalist representation of Chinese women in Chinese blockbusters like The Flowers of War (Zhang Yimou, China/HK 2011) was seen by Xiaoxi Zhu (London School of Economics) as a self-conflicting strategy China employed to attract the global film market.

Under the rubric of post-socialist economy, the stereotypical and somewhat static representations of gender and national identity have also been heavily problematised as reflected in a number of papers. Juliette Ledru (University of Le Havre) explored the queer storyline of Saving Face (Alice Wu, USA 2004) which works within and challenges the mainstream representation of Chinese-American diaspora through the intertextual elements and mise-en-abîme. Focusing on film stars, Clemens Von Haselberg (Berlin Free University) pointed out the unclear identity and transnational look of Jiang Wen, the masculine star of the wuxia genre. An ambiguous identity was also seen in Dr. Chi-Yun Shin’s (Sheffield Hallam University) discussion of the ‘illusive double’ figure of Zhou Xun, China’s emerging female star who appears as a mysterious femme fatale in films like Suzhou River (Lou Ye, Germany/China 2000) and Beijing Bicycle (Wang Xiaoshuai, France/Taiwan/China 2001).

Professor Chris Berry’s keynote speech also centred on the notion of doubling and ‘the double-bind of modernity’. Early Chinese films from the 1930s like New Women (Chusheng Cai, China 1935) captured, in its final scene, two female figures whose dreams of having respected careers and independent lives were dashed, through the freeze frame technique. Drawing on Paul Willemen’s 2007 work on South Korean cinema, Berry saw this freeze-frame ending as a ‘blockage’ between tradition and modernity and pointed out that recent Chinese films like Lotus (Liu Shu, China 2012) offered an alternative magical realist ending where the blockage collapses. In Lotus, the past and present figures of the female protagonist meet without noticing each other. This indicates the attitude of Chinese women in the new economic market where one shall not mourn for the lost dream but push through any obstacle to exist in the commercially driven city.

Alongside the problematisation of gender on screen is the restructuring of class as seen through the coexistence between the ‘often-marginalised’ artists and entrepreneurs in Corey Schultz’s (Goldsmiths, University of London) close-up analysis of the intellectuals in the films of Jia Zhangke. The subject of class, both of the Chinese characters and filmmakers, was also given emphasis in Professor Catherine Liu’s paper on Song Fang’s mediated character in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon (France/Taiwan 2007).

On both days, the symposium also expanded the topic of the representation to the construction and circulation of Chinese public personas. A number of papers explored how Chinese characters negotiate their positions within and outside the Chinese film industries. Dr. Anthony McKenna (Trinity College, Dublin) offered a constructive analysis of Han Sanping, a renowned Chinese film producer and the Chairman of China Film Group, by drawing on the model of Paramount’s film mogul, Barney Balaban. Having freedom to realise his vision in China, Han was able to employ his own directors (a successful case is John Woo’s Red Cliff (China 2008) which managed to top Titanic’s box office record). McKenna’s paper is also in line with my paper on Wong Kar-wai’s appropriation of his hybrid Chineseness, cinephile connections, and his consistent public image as part of his star-auteur branding and Dr. Tianqi Yu’s discussion of China’s renowned artist/activist filmmaker, Ai Weiwei. Pointing out Ai’s efforts in representing the individuality of the Chinese people, Yu questioned if Ai’s method of using himself as a medium can encourage young activists or only works to construct him as an anti-authoritarian hero in the eyes of the Western media.

Another recurring thread of discussion led by Chris Berry was the ‘polarisation’ between Hollywood (as the dominant market that Chinese film and TV industries aspire to) and the shrinking number of dissident films from diasporic Chinese directors at international film festivals. Dr. Adam Frank (University of Central Arkansas) shared a compelling story of a Shanghai TV series Flatland (China, 2002) starring Dennis Hopper, which set out to be a model case for future collaborations between mainland China, Hong Kong and the U.S. production companies. While this mashed-up futuristic costume drama was never publically broadcast, it is interesting to learn that what is left of this dream team is the studio that continues to stay in business. Expanding from the production to the marketing and distribution spheres, Dr. Ruby Cheung’s (United International College, China and University of St. Andrews) paper detailed the not-so-simple journey of Ann Hui’s A Simple Life through the festival film circuit. The film managed to gain various short, mid, and long term benefits from the festival life line from gaining cinephiles’ awareness, garnering box-office return and boosting the career of Deanie Ip and playing a part in generating a reputation for Hong Kong’s non-kung fu films.

Another distribution related point, raised on the last day of the symposium, was the pursuit to negotiate or transcend the controlling Chinese censorship Bureau (who occasionally threatens festivals to drop films directed by the PRC’s unfavourable figures). This subject was discussed by Dr. Vanessa Frangville (Victoria University of Wellington) and Marco Donadon through the case of a Korean-Chinese director – Zhang Lu, Tibetan director – Pema Tseden and the plight of Uyghurs directors in exile. The discussions of Hollywoodised Chinese cinema with transnational casts and the festival and online distributed films by ethnic minorities in China and overseas also probe an interesting and contentious question of what is actually counted as Chinese cinema.

Perhaps, the answer lies in the diversity of papers presented at the symposium that include both the production and construction of Chinese blockbusters and films that problematise the representation of marginalised groups. While the conclusion is far from definitive, what is certain is the growing number of symposium participants and large public attendance of Song Fang’s movie, pointing to the continuous success of the Chinese Film Forum UK and the ever growing interest in Chinese cinema(s).

Wikanda Promkhuntong is a PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University, Wales. Her thesis explores the transnational reputation making processes of East Asian auteurs, through the case studies of Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai, Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul and South Korea’s Kim Ki-duk. She has presented academic papers at the Bangor University’s conference on Cultural Translation and East Asia: Film, Literature and Art and the Chinese Film Forum UK symposium. Along with her background as a freelance Thai-English translator and PR consultant, her research interests are in East Asian cinemas, film authorship, transnationalism, fan/cinephile culture and reception studies.

Please note that places are limited, so early registration is advised.

A draft programme may be found here.

The registration fee includes a ticket to the film Memories Look at Me (Song Fang 2012). Tickets for the film alone may be purchased via the Cornerhouse website.

The Creation and Circulation of Chinese Identities in and through Cinema

A Chinese Film Forum UK symposium
29th — 30th January 2013
Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester

Tickets:
£25 Standard (including lunch, refreshments and complimentary cinema ticket)
£15 Students/Concessions (including lunch, refreshments and complimentary cinema ticket)

Questions of identity and representation have been prominent in film studies, including the proliferation of work produced on Chinese cinemas to date. However, the question of how identities may be circulated, and created, through cinema as a socio-cultural formation and industrial product remains to be explored. For example, what role do genres play in identity formation and circulation? How do distribution networks and marketing practices impact on what kinds of Chinese films are produced and received? Is there a space that exists for multilingualism and cultural diversity within Chinese cinemas, and what implications might it have for how Chinese cinemas are conceptualised?

Keynote lecture: ‘The Chinese Woman Doubled: Chinese Modernity and Compulsory Progress’ (Professor Chris Berry, King’s College, London)

Manchester is well connected by public transport. If you are flying in to Manchester airport, there is a train from the airport into the city centre, which is less than half an hour away by train. Manchester is also accessible by train from London (Euston station). There are 3 trains per hour on average and the journey is about 2h 15mins or so.

The city centre is small and it takes no more than 25-30 mins to walk from one end to another, so many of the hotels in the city centre will be within walking distance of the Chinese Arts Centre, which is located in the popular Northern Quarter area of the city.

There are also 3 free city centre Metroshuttle bus services that run frequently throughout the day. The stop for the Chinese Arts Centre is Shudehill Station, and the stop for Cornerhouse is Oxford Road Station.

The following is a small, but by no means exclusive, list of hotel options across different price ranges you may wish to consider. There are no special deals arranged with them, so you would be booking with them on normal terms.

Ibis Hotel, Portland Street

Premier Inn, Manchester Central

Jurys Inn

Crowne Plaza Hotel

Doubletree by Hilton

Palace Hotel

The various locations are indicated on this Google map.

Please note that January winters in Manchester can sometimes be cold and rainy, and we have had some unexpected snow fall in the last couple of years, which can sometimes take the British transport system by surprise. So do keep an eye out for the weather report before you arrive.

Any questions, please email (link on the side bar).

The event will take place over two full days and include the screening of Memories Look at Me (Song Fang, China 2012) at Cornerhouse, Manchester’s independent cinema and art gallery. (Tickets for the screening may be purchased separately if not attending the symposium.)

The keynote lecture will be delivered by Professor Chris Berry, King’s College London.

More details about the programme and booking to follow shortly.

Angie Chen’s This Darling Life (2008) opened Visible Secrets, the festival of Hong Kong’s Women Filmmakers held at Cornerhouse in 2009. It was a film which marked Angie’s return to feature filmmaking after an absence of 20 years, and is a playful and poignant meditation on the companionship between dogs and their owners from the homeless inhabitant beneath a Hong Kong underpass to the residents of the Peak. It starred her own pets and featured a dialogue with her brother on their family history. The film had the feel of the director taking stock of life and, as she said at the time, was ‘a quirky kind of film and a very personal one too’.

Up to that point Angie’s career had included acting, directing, working with Jackie Chan and for the Shaw Brothers as well as a lengthy time directing commercials. Since graduating from the film school at UCLA, she has worked in the media industries for over 30 years. In America, Angie was working on Liu Jia-Chang’s first English project when Jackie Chan asked her to return to Hong Kong to work on Dragon Lord (1982). She finished the film as Chan’s assistant director.  She went on to make three features for the Shaw Brothers, Maybe It’s Love (1985), My Name Ain’t Suzie (1985) and Chaos by Design (1988).  She then moved into directing TV commercials and teaching film production at the Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts.

Two decades later, Angie and her producer, Pamela Ley, brought This Darling Life to Manchester. To those of us who met her then, she also brought an infectious enthusiasm and an engaging energy for film as well as a knowledge of the Hong Kong movie industry that only a respected insider could have gained and an entertaining stream of anecdotes to go with it. Since then Cornerhouse and the Chinese Film Forum has stayed in contact with Angie and Pamela through visits to the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the same festival at which Angie’s new film One Tree, Three Lives (2012) premiered earlier this year.

It is therefore with the greatest of pleasure that we welcome Angie and Pamela back to Manchester with One Tree, Three Lives for its UK premiere at Cornerhouse on Monday, 22^nd October, at 6:15pm. Some three years in the making, the film focuses on the life and career of Chinese American novelist, Nieh Hualing, who with her husband, the poet Paul Engle, set up the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. The IWP was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 and coincidentally attended by Mo Yan, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is an intimate and personal portrait of Nieh Hualing’s commitment to writing and politics as well as a life lived in exile. The screening will be followed by a Q and A with Angie Chen and we look forward to a lively discussion.

Bookings for the film may be made via the Cornerhouse box office.

*FREE STUDENT TICKETS available* Just bring your student ID to the Cornerhouse box office, first come, first served on Monday. Note that event starts on time!

From 9th to 11th July, the University of Exeter hosted the inaugural event of the ‘Chinese Cinemas in the 21st Century: Production, Consumption, Imagination’ research project, funded by a Leverhulme Trust International Network grant and led by Exeter’s Song Hwee Lim. Organised by network partners based in universities from across the world, including in the UK, Australia, Singapore, the Netherlands, Taiwan and the US, the project aims to explore the role played by cultural products (and film in particular) in the construction of both China’s self-image and others’ perception of the region’s culture on local, national, regional and global levels. Consisting of a launch event, a one day conference and a postgraduate workshop, these three days were to focus specifically on one of the project’s main concerns: the function of imagination in the production and consumption of Chinese cinemas in the new millennium.

With a dynamic and convivial atmosphere from the start, the proceedings kicked off on the first day with a well-attended, thought-provoking keynote address by the distinguished Rey Chow. After a welcome to the conference and a brief introduction to the project by Song, Rey delivered a stimulating and somewhat challenging paper (deceptively subtitled ‘Some Basic Questions’) examining the interplay between ‘foreign observers’ and ‘native informants’ in the (pseudo-)documentary work of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo – Cina (Italy/China 1972) and Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew (China 2010). That this event was opened by Rey’s declaration of the significance of the documentary genre in the study of modern Chinese cinemas would prove to be fitting, prematurely revealing as it did one of the major threads that were to develop over the three days.

Indeed, a number of papers from both established scholars and postgraduate students dealt with the documentary form in a variety of ways. Sabrina Yu’s exploration of independent documentaries focusing on the Three Gorges area of mainland China (including Dong (China 2006) from Jia Zhangke, a filmmaker who would become ubiquitous throughout this event) investigated the representation and transmission of local reality that can be facilitated by the genre’s textual potentials. In his close reading of How is Your Fish Today? (Xiaolu Guo, China 2006), John Berra assessed the film as an example of meta-fiction through his study of its dialectical shift from documentary to narrative, examining the auto-reflexivity of its merging of the director’s initial investigative footage with the screenwriter’s fictional story. On the final day, Calvin Hui considered the role played by fashion and cinema (in the form of Ma Ke’s show Useless and Jia Zhangke’s 2007 documentary of the same name) in the construction of the Chinese middle class subjectivity, and Tamara Courage’s detailed textual analysis of Hu Jie’s Though I Am Gone (China 2006) raised the issue of the cinematic representation of cultural memory. Certainly, it appears that documentary – as a genre, a mode of filmmaking, a philosophy – is beginning to occupy a significant position in the study of Chinese cinemas in the 21st century, as the approaches to be found in these diverse and exciting papers demonstrate.

Another key theme that spanned the three days was the relationship between the local and the global, often baring itself through differing examinations of hybridity. In the first paper of the conference, Gaik Cheng Khoo used the Malaysian movies Petaling Street Warriors (James Lee, Malaysia 2011) and Nasi Lemak 2.0 (Wee Meng Chee, Malaysia 2011) to call for a way of reading films that takes into account the specific ideologies and social contexts through which production is framed. These two texts, Gaik argued, envisage Malaysia as a hybrid, cosmopolitan community; culturally and geographically grounded in contemporary Malaysian politics, they localise a supposedly ‘Chinese’ genre through intertextual references which may be lost on global audiences. Following this, Felicia Chan and Andy Willis delivered a fantastic paper on the little-known, British-born Chinese director Po-Chih Leong, who is currently based in the US. Contending that Leong has been all but forgotten in scholarship on transnational Chinese filmmaking due to a privileging of the auteur, Felicia and Andy convincingly asserted that space be made for a consideration of a director – who works across different commercial industries, national cinemas and genres – in the study of contemporary global cinema. Hybridisation at the level of production also proved to be a popular topic over the three days. Andrew Stuckey approached Peter Chan’s overlooked Perhaps Love (China/Malaysia/HK 2005) as belonging to a ‘globalising genre’, in which musical film generic conventions are used to express an opening up to the outside world through a circulation between Hollywood, Bollywood and China. Turning to Taiwanese cinema, both Michelle Bloom and Pei-Yin Lin considered hybridity in their examinations of films in which China and France interact not simply as locations, but as constructs. Michelle viewed Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon (France/Taiwan 2007) as a multicultural, hybrid, ‘makeover’ product, and Pei-Yin Lin analysed the portrayal of Taipei and French culture in Arvin Chen’s Au Revoir Taipei (Taiwan/USA/Germany 2010), a film whose interweaving of foreign-culture and locally-based threads led to a discrepancy in its reception domestically and globally.

In other papers, the diverse and far-reaching potential of the future of Chinese cinemas scholarship was certainly on display. Crossing boundaries in terms of methodologies, disciplines and theoretical frameworks, the variety to be seen in the talks given across the entire three days suggests to me (despite my lack of detailed knowledge of the subject) that the current work being done on the area points towards a rich and lively field of study. Some fine textual analysis came in the form of Margaret Hillenbrand’s exploration of space in the films of Jia Zhangke, Marco Bohr’s deconstruction of the representation of landscape in Zhangke’s Still Life (China/HK 2006), and Yijie Zou’s assessment of Zhang Meng’s stylised aesthetics. On the industrial side of things, a number of excellent papers drew on issues of distribution, exhibition, reception and consumption. Leung Wing-Fai (speaking also on behalf of her co-author, Daria Berg) discussed product placement in contemporary commercial Chinese cinema, whilst Yen-Nan Lin turned to box office and budget figures in his consideration of the production and reception of Cape No. 7 (Wei Te-Sheng, Taiwan 2008). Su-Anne Yeo’s brilliant study of the dissemination of independent screen media traced the circulation of Asian films in both Hong Kong and Canada, and How Wee Ng’s survey of the reception of the US television series Garrison’s Gorillas in China in the 1980s called for a rethinking of censorship as a positivist discourse. Elsewhere, Corrado Neri took an interdisciplinary approach in his entertaining discussion of propaganda film My Long March (Zhai Junjie, 2010) and Feng Menbo’s art installation Long March: Restart, and Tan See Kam brought to the fore a notion of ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ in his talk on Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War (China/HK 2011).

Perhaps the most rewarding and productive period of the event, however, came in the final day: a postgraduate workshop in which student papers were followed by feedback from discussants (all network partners), and then opened up for discussion. Conducted in a relaxed and friendly environment that had been building steadily over the previous two days, these sessions prompted lively debate from all those who attended, and no doubt the advice given by the discussants was gladly received by each student. Proceedings started with a lengthy roundtable discussion led by Rey Chow and the revered Chris Berry (if only it were longer!), reflecting on the conference by pulling together some of the major themes and threads that had emerged over its course. Reiterating what Song had asserted in his closing talk the previous day, both Rey and Chris were quick to recognise the important role played by postgraduate work in shaping and pushing forward the field of Chinese cinemas studies. That this project was set up with the postgraduate community in mind is indeed to be commended, offering as it does the vital opportunity for Chinese cinemas students to meet with one another, share their work with other academics, and become part of a rich and dynamic research community. The intelligent and engaging papers delivered by Emilia Chi-Jung Cheng, Wen-chun Kuan and Shu-Yi Lin, among others, were certainly testament to this, with all contributing postgraduates confidently challenging and questioning the boundaries of the field through their original and insightful research. This, coupled with a wealth of fascinating presentations by established scholars and a welcoming and inspiring atmosphere that developed throughout, made for a most intellectually stimulating and enjoyable three days; the subsequent events scheduled to take place in Amsterdam, Singapore and Taiwan surely now have a tough act to follow!

Joe Hickinbottom is a PhD student at the University of Exeter. His thesis focuses on the distribution, exhibition, reception and consumption of the work of Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike through an examination of the process of cultification. He has recently presented at the Chinese Film Forum UK’s 2012 symposium, ‘The Distribution and Exhibition of Chinese and Asian Cinema in the UK’, and at the ‘Cultural Translation and East Asia: Film Literature and Art’ conference in Bangor.

Call for Papers
The creation and circulation of Chinese Identities in and through cinema

Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester
29-30 January 2013

The Chinese Film Forum UK, a research network supported by the AHRC, is hosting its second symposium. The focus is on the creation and circulation of Chinese identities in and through cinema.

Questions of identity and representation have been prominent in film studies, including the proliferation of work produced on Chinese cinemas to date. However, the question of how identities may be circulated, and created, through cinema as a socio-cultural formation and industrial product remains to be further explored. For example, what role do genres play in identity formation and circulation? How do distribution networks and marketing practices impact on what kinds of Chinese films are produced and received? Is there a space that exists for multilingualism and cultural diversity within Chinese cinemas, and what implications might it have for how Chinese cinemas are conceptualised?

We invite proposals on the following or any other topic of relevance:
- The plurality of Chinese cultural, ethnic and linguistic identities in film
- Representations of Chineseness as self and other
- Historical adaptations and fictionalisations
- Construction of stars as the mythic embodiments of national identities
- Chinese characters, characterisation and characteristics in non-Chinese films
- Chinese diasporic filmmaking, including in South-east Asia, North America and the UK
- Genres in Chinese cinemas or Chinese genre-films?
- Theoretical explorations of ‘Chineseness’ in film
- Questions of identity and international co-productions
- The role of industry practice, e.g. casting, marketing, distribution, awards selection, etc.
- Reception of Chinese cinemas in local and foreign markets

Keynote speaker: Professor Chris Berry, King’s College London.

150-200 word proposals for papers or contributions and a short biography should be sent by 26th October 2012 to both Felicia Chan and Andy Willis.

Chinese Film Forum UK was founded to support the visibility and literacy of film from across the Chinese diaspora and is a joint venture between University of Manchester, University of Salford, Manchester Metropolitan University, the Confucius Institute, Chinese Arts Centre and Cornerhouse. Further information can be found at: http://www.cffuk.org

An innovative and fruitful symposium on The Distribution and Exhibition of Chinese and Asian Cinema in the UK took place in Manchester at the end of March 2012 organised by an AHRC-funded research network, the Chinese Film Forum UK (CFFUK). It facilitated discussions between film scholars, programmers and filmmakers to reach a fuller understanding on why it is difficult for Chinese and Asian films to reach UK audiences.

The symposium tackled the issues and challenges of distribution and exhibition from three dimensions. Firstly, it built an intellectual discourse on the current paradox, i.e., on the one hand there is a growing number of enthusiasts for Asian cinema in the UK, but on the other hand, hardly any of the Asian films adored by fans find their way onto UK cinema screens. Secondly, panels were organised to illuminate the conditions and factors that practitioners take into account when they decide to feature a Chinese/Asian film in festival programmes or to schedule film screenings in a local art-house cinema. Thirdly, the symposium unravelled certain policy blind-spots especially regarding the lack of funding for British-Chinese filmmakers, which may partly explain the almost nonexistence of British-Chinese film productions in the landscape of Chinese and Asian cinema in the UK.

From the perspective of intellectual discourse, Dr Valentina Vitali (University of East London) examined the specific ways Asian films have been introduced to European audiences over the years. Using Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien as a case study, Vitali argued that there is a complacency with which a range of European magazines have encouraged their readers to consume Hou and other Asian filmmakers’ output only on the basis of an auteur mode of viewing films. When Hollywood productions and European cinema have both adopted increasingly aggressive marketing strategies, the outdated educational realignment of Chinese/Asian cinema has resulted in the negligible European circulation of Hou’s work. Consequently it created a counter effect by pushing the Chinese and Asian filmmakers today to vigorously reformat their production in a Hollywood-style.

Independent scholar Roy Stafford pondered on why different forms of Asian cinema are treated as separate entities. He pointed out that, among South Asian cinema, the UK audiences have only access to the mainstream Hindi cinema, which has so far failed to cross over into the wider UK market. At the same time East Asian cinema is mainly disseminated by independent distributors focusing on specific genres. Stafford posed a question to the participants: how can scholars foster interest from distributors, exhibitors and festival programmers in increasing public access to more forms of Chinese and Asian cinema by thinking about the similarities rather than the differences between them?

On the second day of the symposium, one of the sessions was focused around reception and consumption of Asian cinema, with three papers that addressed the topic of audiences. Dr Virginia Crisp (Middlesex University) looked at digital piracy, usually perceived as a major obstacle for the distribution of Asian cinema. Upon her detailed analysis of the relationship between two UK distribution companies (Tartan Films and Third Window Films) and two filesharing forums (Chinaphiles and Eastern Film Fans), Crisp proposed that it may be more constructive to view filesharers as consumers instead of simply criminals who infringe copyrights. She concluded that the complex attitudes of the filesharers toward the film industry may have serious implications for independent distribution of East Asian films in the UK. In addition, both Joe Hickinbottom (University of Exeter) and Jonathon Wroot (University of East Anglia) investigated the dissemination of Japanese cinema in the UK. While Hickinbottom explored how limitations of viewers’ access to Japanese film titles lead to a process of cultification, Wroot’s research focused on NEO magazine, the only UK publication that reviews Japanese films especially as DVD releases. Together their discussions helped us conceptualise the roles of the practitioners in the film industry, critics, academics and the rapid proliferation of alternative forms of circulation, such as digital downloading and new viewing platforms may shape the ways the distributors and audiences view cult Japanese cinema in the UK.

From the perspective of distributors and exhibitors, Jason Wood of Curzon Cinemas admitted that cinema is culture, art, as well as business. Wood explained his strategies of using the profit generated by showing a number of more mainstream films in his theatres to subsidise the scheduling of less popular, more challenging work. Digital technology has dramatically reduced the cost of distribution and exhibition. Meanwhile Wood revealed his frustration that it is increasingly difficult to bring audiences to the cinema to see any subtitled or specialised films. Therefore, Wood pointed out that Curzon Cinemas plans to take the advantage of digital distribution and exhibition and is launching a new service, Curzon on Demand, by addressing the issues of film library and access to films of special interest.

Artistic Director at the Pan-Asian Film Festival, Dr Sonali Joshi, and Programme and Engagement Director at Cornerhouse, Sarah Perks, talked about their commitment to enhance the diversity of film cultures in the UK. They believe there is an audience for Asian cinemas, but they are aware how poorly served in the UK, with limited access to Chinese and Asian cinema. They emphasised that it takes time to build up the relationship with an audience. Hence, Joshi and Perks are dedicated to work with partners and sponsors to organise special-themed film festivals and programmes that can establish more long-term partnerships. Maintaining the ties and continuing these programmes are essential, once the acceptance of Asian cinemas within a specific group of audience is formed.

Ian Wild of Sheffield Media Centre, Showroom/Workstation and Rachel Hayward of Cornerhouse shared their experiences of cultivating a more vibrant and multicultural film environment in Sheffield and Manchester respectively. They echoed the impression of Wood, Joshi and Perks that it is increasingly difficult to bring interesting but unfamiliar films to the viewing public. They agreed with Joshi and Perks that it is important to build a long-term relationship with the audience, but funding, scheduling and availability of titles become major challenges. For example, Showroom/Workstation hosted a successful South Korean Film Festival for a number of years and established a group of loyal supporters. However, when the funding body decided to assume the control of organising the event in London, the South Korean Film Festival in Sheffield was discontinued until recently, when Wild was able to secure funding and renew local interest in South Korean films. Hayward contemplated the possibility, but also the difficulties of having a dedicated slot in the regular schedule of Cornerhouse for Chinese and Asian cinemas. Nevertheless, the lack of steady supply of quality titles from the region and the difficulty of timetabling itself prevent the idea from being materialised.

Finally from the perspective of British-Chinese filmmaker Rosa Fong, we are reminded of the fact that British Chinese films do not have a presence in British Cinema. British Chinese films are difficult to distribute because they defy the static identities that are required for marketing. Fong said that in the 1980s and the 1990s, British Black and Asian cinema found its voice and has achieved a level of self-determination that eluded the Chinese. She analysed why this has come about and, in the context of the recent UK Film Policy review, argued for the need to invest in a culture of filmmaking that is diverse and is able to reach an audience through distribution.

To summarise, the symposium began examining the issues of distribution and exhibition from the process of dissemination (in terms of films and film reviews), to the roles of distributors and exhibitors, the behaviours of audiences, the challenges of funding and scheduling, and finally back to the needs of production. It demonstrates that the subject of Chinese and Asian cinemas is both an intellectual discourse and a socio-political project. The issues of distribution and exhibition exist within a complex socio-cultural construct which is part of an economically-motivated creative industry. The symposium in Manchester made a brave first attempt to unlock the secrets of distribution and exhibition within the film industry. Along with the two future events by Chinese Film Forum UK (a symposium in early 2013 and a larger conference following that), it is hoped that more symposiums on similar subjects may be organised in the future in order to foster further cross-sectional communications between practitioners and film scholars, and to broaden our knowledge on how the film industry is shaped by and contributes to shape the modern society.

As part of the symposium, Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai’s semi-autobiographical film, 11 Flowers / Wo 11 (China/France 2011), was screened at Cornerhouse.  

Dr Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley is Research Fellow at the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds where she lectures and researches on East Asian cinema. She publishes widely both in Chinese and in English on media/cinema, literature and culture. Her most recent publications include Global Chinese Cinema: The Culture and Politics of Hero (Routledge, 2010) and Chinese title Small Study, Big Universe (Lixu, 2010). She is currently writing a monograph, Culture and Democratization in Taiwan: Cinema, Theatre and Social Change (Routledge, forthcoming). She is also pursuing a new project on Trans-Disciplinary Education (TDE) and communications where she tries to investigate how the BBC and Open University collaboration model may be applied onto a Taiwanese context. She hosts a blog run by China Times and produces a series of podcasts.