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.

Documentary as Contemporary Art – A Dialogue

Wang Bing can be considered one of the greatest representatives of contemporary Chinese cinema. A meeting between him, Dominique Chateau and José Moure at a Master Class, as part of a series of Interface meetings at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris I in 2019, led to the idea of this present dialogue. Here, Wang (whose films are off the beaten track in many ways) clarifies his connection to various issues raised by post-cinema, in particular, the consequences of technological changes with regard to film creation and distribution and evolution in the aesthetic conception of cinema.

Chinese cinema and Australian audiences: an exploratory study

Since Wanda’s acquisition of Hoyts Group in 2015, and Australia’s signing of the Film Co-production Treaty with China in 2008, Chinese cinema has gained access to mainstream Australian cinemas more than ever before. To date, these films have struggled to cross over into the mainstream (that is, attract non-diasporic audiences). Drawing on film screenings of a selection of both Chinese and Chinese-foreign co-productions recently theatrically released in major cities in Australia, this article finds Chinese and Chinese-foreign co-produced cinema will likely continue to lack appeal among non-Chinese Australian audiences. Concerningly, exposure to contemporary Chinese cinema was found to negatively impact willingness to watch Chinese cinema again, and in some cases, worsen impressions of China and Chinese society.

9Film Theory

In this chapter I review six contributions to the field of film theory published in 2018: Carl Plantinga’s Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (Oxford University Press); Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen’s Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh University Press); Nicholas Godfrey’s The Limits of Auteurism: Case Studies in the Critically Constructed New Hollywood (Rutgers University Press); Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis’s The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema’s Most Celebrated Era (Bloomsbury Academic); Dorothy Wai Sim Lau’s Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (Edinburgh University Press); and Gina Marchetti’s Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema (University of Hawaii Press). The chapter has three sections: 1. Cognition, Emotion, and Ethics; 2. The New Hollywood; 3. Contemporary Chinese Cinema.

Wolf Warrior 2: Imagining the Chinese Century

How has contemporary Chinese cinema responded to China's new outward focus as global trade and military presence? Until recently, representations of the country's overseas military presence have been few and far between, that is until the release of Zhanlang 2 (Wolf Warrior 2, 2017), a phenomenally successful Rambo-style action adventure. This article explores the ways in which Wolf Warrior 2 adapts Hollywood conventions to China's current nationalist ambitions, with particular regard to issues of genre and masculinity.