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Children of Ol’ Man River: The Life and Times of a Show-Boat Trouper
by Billy BryantRECOLLECTIONS OF A FAMILY WHO LIVED THEIR LIVES AS SHOWBOAT ENTERTAINERS ON AMERICAN RIVERS.Children of the Ol’ Man River, which was first published in 1936, tells the colorful and witty life story of the Bryants, a poor family who found fortune aboard the Mississippi steamboat they built and performed on at the beginning of this century. In addition to chronicling his own family’s history, Bryant provides an excellent introduction to the importance and history of river travel and entertainment on the most famous of American rivers.For many years, colorful showboats traveled the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries, bringing entertainment to eager audiences in communities large and small.Huntington was a regular stop for the showboats, which made their arrival known by the musical strains of a powerful steam calliope, audible for miles around. Hearing the music, people would make a beeline for the 10th Street river landing to have a look at the boat and see what time the show would start.Some of the boats were lavish floating palaces, while others were far from grand. Some traveled only for a summer season or two, others for years.Billy Bryant’s Showboat plied the inland waterways of the Ohio River watershed from before the First World War until 1942, bringing a blend of melodrama and vaudeville, laughter and therapeutic tears, into the lives of isolated people in rural communities along the way.
Children's Books on the Big Screen (Children's Literature Association Series)
by Meghann MeeusenIn Children’s Books on the Big Screen, Meghann Meeusen goes beyond the traditional adaptation approach of comparing and contrasting the similarities of film and book versions of a text. By tracing a pattern across films for young viewers, Meeusen proposes that a consistent trend can be found in movies adapted from children’s and young adult books: that representations of binaries such as male/female, self/other, and adult/child become more strongly contrasted and more diametrically opposed in the film versions. The book describes this as binary polarization, suggesting that starker opposition between concepts leads to shifts in the messages that texts send, particularly when it comes to representations of gender, race, and childhood. After introducing why critics need a new way of thinking about children’s adapted texts, Children’s Books on the Big Screen uses middle-grade fantasy adaptations to explore the reason for binary polarization and looks at the results of polarized binaries in adolescent films and movies adapted from picture books. Meeusen also digs into instances when multiple films are adapted from a single source such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and ends with pragmatic classroom application, suggesting teachers might utilize this theory to help students think critically about movies created by the Walt Disney corporation. Drawing from numerous popular contemporary examples, Children’s Books on the Big Screen posits a theory that can begin to explain what happens—and what is at stake—when children’s and young adult books are made into movies.
Children's Learning From Educational Television: Sesame Street and Beyond
by Shalom M. FischAt its best, educational television can provide children with enormous opportunities and can serve as a window to new experiences, enrich academic knowledge, enhance attitudes and motivation, and nurture social skills. This volume documents the impact of educational television in a variety of subject areas and proposes mechanisms to explain its effects. Drawing from a wide variety of research spanning several disciplines, author Shalom M. Fisch analyzes the literature on the impact of educational resources. He focuses on television programs designed for children rather than for adults, although adult literature is included when it is particularly relevant. In addition, much of the discussion concerns the effects of unaided viewing by children, rather than viewing in the context of adult-led follow-up activities. The role of parent-child co-viewing and issues relevant to the use of television in school or child care also receives consideration. This volume is intended to make the disparate literature on educational television's impact more accessible, by bringing it together into a centralized resource. To that end, the volume draws together empirical data on the impact of educational television programs--both academic and prosocial--on children's knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behavior. In addition to its emphasis on positive effects, this volume addresses a gap in the existing research literature regarding children's learning from exposure to educational television. Acknowledging that little theoretical work has been done to explain why or how these effects occur, Fisch takes a step toward correcting this situation by proposing theoretical models to explore aspects of the mental processing that underlies children's learning from educational television. With its unique perspective on children's educational television and comprehensive approach to studying the topic, this volume is required reading for scholars, researchers, and students working in the area of children and television. It offers crucial insights to scholars in developmental psychology, family studies, educational psychology, and related areas.
Children's Responses to the Screen: A Media Psychological Approach (Routledge Communication Series)
by Patti M. ValkenburgThe past several decades have witnessed thousands of studies into children and the media. Yet, much academic research is still in its infancy when it comes to our knowledge about the uses, preferences, and effects of different media. This distinctive volume moves the field forward in this regard, with its insights into the latest theories and research on children and the media. Author Patti M. Valkenburg explores "screen" media (i.e., television, films, video and computer games, and the Internet), and focuses her study on the most fundamental topics in the study of children and the media. In each chapter, Valkenburg examines an essential topic on children and the media: the effect of media violence, children's emotional reactions to news and entertainment, the intended and unintended effects of advertising, and the uses and effects of computer games and the Internet. She has structured the chapters to provide an overview of existing theories and research on a particular topic, and supplements the work of others with her own ground-breaking research findings. She provides a careful and even-handed treatment of research in children's media, and includes current and noteworthy studies. As a resource for study in children and media and media psychology, this volume provides a timely and thorough examination of the state of theory and research. It will serve as a valuable reference for scholars and as an engaging text for advanced students.
Children, Deafness, and Deaf Cultures in Popular Media (Children's Literature Association Series)
by John Stephens and Vivian Yenika-AgbawContributions by Cynthia Neese Bailes, Nina Batt, Lijun Bi, Hélène Charderon, Stuart Ching, Helene Ehriander, Xiangshu Fang, Sara Kersten-Parish, Helen Kilpatrick, Jessica Kirkness, Sung-Ae Lee, Jann Pataray-Ching, Angela Schill, Josh Simpson, John Stephens, Corinne Walsh, Nerida Wayland, and Vivian Yenika-AgbawChildren, Deafness, and Deaf Cultures in Popular Media examines how creative works have depicted what it means to be a deaf or hard of hearing child in the modern world. In this collection of critical essays, scholars discuss works that cover wide-ranging subjects and themes: growing up deaf in a hearing world, stigmas associated with deafness, rival modes of communication, friendship and discrimination, intergenerational tensions between hearing and nonhearing family members, and the complications of establishing self-identity in increasingly complex societies. Contributors explore most of the major genres of children’s literature and film, including realistic fiction, particularly young adult novels, as well as works that make deft use of humor and parody. Further, scholars consider the expressive power of multimodal forms such as graphic novel and film to depict experience from the perspective of children. Representation of the point of view of child characters is central to this body of work and to the intersections of deafness with discourses of diversity and social justice. The child point of view supports a subtle advocacy of a wider understanding of the multiple ways of being D/deaf and the capacity of D/deaf children to give meaning to their unique experiences, especially as they find themselves moving between hearing and Deaf communities. These essays will alert scholars of children’s literature, as well as the reading public, to the many representations of deafness that, like deafness itself, pervade all cultures and are not limited to specific racial or sociocultural groups.
Children, Youth, and International Television (Routledge Advances in Television Studies)
by Debbie Olson Adrian SchoberThis volume explores how television has been a significant conduit for the public consumption of changing ideas about children, childhood, and national identity, via a critical examination of programs that prominently feature children and youth in international television. The chapters connect relevant cultural attitudes within their respective countries to an analysis of children and/or childhood in international children’s programming. The collection addresses how international children’s programming in global and local context informs changing ideas about children and childhood, including notions of individual and citizen identity formation. Offering new insights into childhood and television studies, this book will be of great interest to graduate students, scholars, and professionals in television studies, childhood studies, media studies, cultural studies, popular culture studies, and American studies.
Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)
by Carl Fischer María Helena Rueda María Paz Peirano Carolina Urrutia Neno Camilo Trumper Paola Lagos Labbé Jonathan Risner Moisés Park María Angélica Franken Arturo Márquez-Gómez Vania Barraza Mónica Ramón Ramón Ríos Claudia Bossay María Constanza Vergara ReyesFocusing on films from Chile since 2000 and bringing together scholars from South and North America, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World is the first English-language book since the 1970s to explore this small, yet significant, Latin American cinema. The volume questions the concept of "national cinemas" by examining how Chilean film dialogues with trends in genre-based, political, and art-house cinema around the world, while remaining true to local identities. Contributors place current Chilean cinema in a historical context and expand the debate concerning the artistic representation of recent political and economic transformations in contemporary Chile. Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World opens up points of comparison between Chile and the ways in which other national cinemas are negotiating their place on the world stage. The book is divided into five parts. "Mapping Theories of Chilean Cinema in the World" examines Chilean filmmakers at international film festivals, and political and affective shifts in the contemporary Chilean documentary. "On the Margins of Hollywood: Chilean Genre Flicks" explores on the emergence of Chilean horror cinema and the performance of martial arts in Chilean films. "Other Texts and Other Lands: Intermediality and Adaptation Beyond Chile(an Cinema)" covers the intermedial transfer from Chilean literature to transnational film and from music video to film. "Migrations of Gender and Genre" contrasts films depicting transgender people in Chile and beyond. "Politicized Intimacies, Transnational Affects: Debating (Post)memory and History" analyzes representations of Chile’s traumatic past in contemporary documentary and approaches mourning as a politicized act in postdictatorship cultural production. Intended for scholars, students, and researchers of film and Latin American studies, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World evaluates an active and emergent film movement that has yet to receive sufficient attention in global cinema studies.
Chill Out! The Cat's Wintertime Ebook Collection: A Reindeer's First Christmas; New Friends for Christmas; A Long Winter's Nap; Flight of the Penguin (Pictureback(R))
by Joe Mathieu Aristides Ruiz Tish RabeCurl up and chill out with this winter-themed omnibus including four ebooks based on the hit PBS Kids' TV show The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That! With two based on the PBS Kids' holiday special The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About Christmas! (A Reindeer's First Christmas and New Friends for Christmas), and two based on the TV show (A Long Winter's Nap--a story about hibernation), and Flight of the Penguin (a story about--what else?--penguins), this is a perfect holiday gift that can be enjoyed long beyond the holidays!
China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (Film and Culture Series)
by Christopher Berry Mary Ann FarquharIn China on Screen, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, leaders in the field of Chinese film studies, explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, Berry and Farquhar analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the abandonment of "national cinema" as an analytic tool and propose "cinema and the national" as a more productive framework. With this approach, they show how movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora construct and contest different ideas of Chinese nation—as empire, republic, or ethnicity, and complicated by gender, class, style, transnationalism, and more. Among the issues and themes covered are the tension between operatic and realist modes, male and female star images, transnational production and circulation of Chinese films, the image of the good foreigner—all related to different ways of imagining nation. Comprehensive and provocative, China on Screen is a crucial work of film analysis.
China through the Camera Lens 镜头中的中国: A Multimedia Reader for Advanced Chinese 多媒体高年级中文读本
by Ying Gao Shuqin Cui Hsin-hsin Liang Julian K. WheatleyChina through the Camera Lens combines Chinese language learning with film analysis, offering a unique and comprehensive learning experience beyond traditional methods.The book consists of twelve chapters, each based on a carefully selected short film or video. Each chapter is divided into a presentation section and a practice section. The presentation includes short narratives illustrated with color screen shots, with vocabulary glossed alongside for easy reference. It also introduces relevant film terms to help students focus on filmmaking techniques as well as the content of the films. The practice sections cover word collocations, near synonyms, word meanings, idiomatic phrases, paragraph structure, topics for class discussion, composition practice, and extended reading. By integrating short films, cultural insights, and film analysis, learners not only enhance their language skills but also gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between film and content.This book is an innovative and engaging advanced Chinese language textbook that immerses advanced Chinese learners in language and culture through short films and videos.
China's Cinema of Class: Audiences and Narratives (Routledge Studies on China in Transition)
by Nicole TalmacsChina’s commercial film industry can be used as a map to understand how class is interwoven into the imaginations that inform and influence social change in Chinese society. Film consumption is important in this process, particularly for young adult urbanites that are China’s primary commercial cinema patrons. This book investigates the web between the representation of class themes in Chinese film narratives, local audience reception to these films, and the socialisation of China’s contemporary class society. Bringing together textual analyses of narratives from five commercially exhibited films: Let the Bullets Fly (Jiang: 2010), Lost on Journey (Yip: 2011), Go Lala Go! (Xu: 2011), House Mania (Sun: 2011) and The Piano in the Factory (Zheng: 2011); and the reception of 179 Chinese audiences from varying class positions, it investigates the extent to which fictional narratives inform and reflect current class identities in present-day China. Through group discussions in Beijing, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Lanzhou and Taiyuan, the author searches for audiences beyond major cities that are typically the focus of film consumption studies in China. As such, the book reveals not only how deeply and widespread the socialisation of China’s class society has become in the imaginations of Chinese audiences, but also what appears to be a preference of both audiences and filmmakers for the continuation of China’s new class society. Revealing the extent to which cinema continues to play a key role in the socialisation of class structures in contemporary Chinese society, this book will be important for students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Film Studies, Communication Studies, as well as observers of China’s film industry.
Chinaberry Sidewalks
by Rodney CrowellFrom the acclaimed musician comes a tender, surprising, and often uproarious memoir about his dirt-poor southeast Texas boyhood. The only child of a hard-drinking father and a Holy Roller mother, Rodney Crowell was no stranger to bombast from an early age, whether knock-down-drag-outs at a local dive bar or fire-and-brimstone sermons at Pentecostal tent revivals. He was an expert at reading his father's mercurial moods and gauging exactly when his mother was likely to erupt, and even before he learned to ride a bike, he was often forced to take matters into his own hands. He broke up his parents' raucous New Year's Eve party with gunfire and ended their slugfest at the local drive-in (actual restaurants weren't on the Crowells' menu) by smashing a glass pop bottle over his own head. Despite the violent undercurrents always threatening to burst to the surface, he fiercely loved his epilepsy-racked mother, who scorned boring preachers and improvised wildly when the bills went unpaid. And he idolized his blustering father, a honky-tonk man who took his boy to see Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash perform live, and bought him a drum set so he could join his band at age eleven. Shot through with raggedy friends and their neighborhood capers, hilariously awkward adolescent angst, and an indelible depiction of the bloodlines Crowell came from, Chinaberry Sidewalks also vividly re-creates Houston in the fifties: a rough frontier town where icehouses sold beer by the gallon on paydays; teeming with musical venues from standard roadhouses to the Magnolia Gardens, where name-brand stars brought glamour to a place starved for it; filling up with cheap subdivisions where blue-collar day laborers could finally afford a house of their own; a place where apocalyptic hurricanes and pest infestations were nearly routine. But at its heart this is Crowell's tribute to his parents and an exploration of their troubled yet ultimately redeeming romance. Wry, clear-eyed, and generous, it is, like the very best memoirs, firmly rooted in time and place and station, never dismissive, and truly fulfilling.
Chinatown (SparkNotes Film Guide)
by SparkNotesChinatown (SparkNotes Film Guide) Making the reading experience fun! SparkNotes Film Guides are one-stop guides to great works of film–masterpieces that are the foundations of filmmaking and film studies. Inside each guide you&’ll find thorough, insightful overviews of films from a variety of genres, styles, and time periods. Each film guide contains:Information about the director and the context in which the film was made Thoughtful analysis of major characters Details about themes, motifs, and symbols Explanations of the most important lines of dialogue In-depth discussions about what makes a film so remarkable SparkNotes Film Guides are an invaluable resource for students or anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the great films they know and love.
Chinatown Film Culture: The Appearance of Cinema in San Francisco’s Chinese Neighborhood
by Kim K. FahlstedtChinatown Film Culture provides the first comprehensive account of the emergence of film and moviegoing in the transpacific hub of San Francisco in the early twentieth century. Working with materials previously left in the margins of grand narratives of history, Kim K. Fahlstedt uncovers the complexity of a local entertainment culture that offered spaces where marginalized Chinese Americans experienced and participated in local iterations of modernity. At the same time, this space also fostered a powerful Orientalist aesthetic that would eventually be exported to Hollywood by San Francisco showmen such as Sid Grauman. Instead of primarily focusing on the screen-spectator relationship, Fahlstedt suggests that immigrant audiences' role in the proliferation of cinema as public entertainment in the United States saturated the whole moviegoing experience, from outside on the street to inside the movie theater. By highlighting San Francisco and Chinatown as featured participants rather than bit players, Chinatown Film Culture provides an historical account from the margins, alternative to the more dominant narratives of U.S. film history.
Chinatown Opera Theater in North America
by Nancy Yunhwa RaoThe Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre “World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.
Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion (Harvard East Asian Monographs #475)
by Daisy Yan DU, John A. CRESPI, Yiman WANGChinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion is the first edited volume that explores the multiple histories, geographies, industries, technologies, media, and transmedialities of Chinese animation, from early animated special effects to socialist classics, from computer-generated-imagery (CGI) blockbusters to edgy independent films, and from stop-motion to virtual reality.Its fifteen chapters, grouped under the five themes of junctures, gender, identities, digitality, and practices, span a century of animation since the 1920s across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and the diasporic world. Derived from the 2021 Inaugural Conference of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies (ACAS), this volume as a whole defines Chinese animation studies as a new field of research emerging from the peripheries of modern Chinese literature and film studies on the one hand, and from the margins of Western and Japanese animation studies on the other. Incorporating diverse academic approaches and perspectives, this groundbreaking book is an indispensable guide for a rapidly growing community of scholars, students, animators, fans, and general readers interested in Chinese and world animation.
Chinese Culture in the 21st Century and its Global Dimensions: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Chinese Culture #2)
by Kelly Kar Yue Chan Chi Sum Garfield LauThis book investigates the internationalization of Chinese culture in recent decades and the global dimensions of Chinese culture from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. It covers a variety of topics concerning the contemporary significance of Chinese culture in its philosophical, literary and artistic manifestations, including literature, film, performing arts, creative media, linguistics, translations and philosophical ideas. The book explores the reception of Chinese culture in different geographic locations and how the global reception of Chinese culture contrasts with the local Chinese community. The chapters collectively cover gender studies and patriarchal domination in Chinese literature in comparison to the world literature, explorations on translation of Chinese culture in the West, Chinese studies as an academic discipline in the West, and Chinese and Hong Kong films and performances in the global context. The book is an excellent resource for both scholars and students interested in the development of Chinese culture on the global stage in the 21st Century.
Chinese Dance: In the Vast Land and Beyond
by Emily Wilcox Lynn E. Frederiksen Shih-Ming Li ChangAs China becomes increasingly important in world relations, many components of the country's cultural arts remain unknown outside its borders. Shih-Ming Li Chang and Lynn E. Frederiksen's Chinese Dance: In the Vast Land and Beyond undertakes the challenge of discovering the relationship between Chinese dance in its many forms and the cultural contexts of dance within the region and abroad. As a comprehensive resource, Chinese Dance offers students and scholars an invaluable introduction to the subject. It serves as a foundation of common knowledge from which Chinese and English-language communities can begin a cross-cultural conversation about Chinese dance. The text, along with a comprehensive glossary of key terms, gives English-language readers a chance to understand the development of Chinese dance as it is officially articulated by historians and dance scholars in Asia. An online database of video clips, an extensive bibliography, and Web-based appendices provide a broad collection of primary source materials that invite interactive and flexible engagement by a range of users. The inclusion of interviews with Chinese dance practitioners in North America offers a view into the Asian diaspora experience.
Chinese Ecocinema
by Sheldon H. LuThis anthology is the first book-length study of China's environmental condition and ecosystem through the lens of cinema from a non-anthropocentric point of view. By proposing "ecocinema" as a new critical framework, the volume breaks new ground in Chinese and global film studies.
Chinese Film Classics, 1922–1949
by Christopher G. ReaChinese Film Classics, 1922–1949 is an essential guide to the first golden age of Chinese cinema. Offering detailed introductions to fourteen films, this study highlights the creative achievements of Chinese filmmakers in the decades leading up to 1949, when the Communists won the civil war and began nationalizing cultural industries.Christopher Rea reveals the uniqueness and complexity of Republican China’s cinematic masterworks, from the comedies and melodramas of the silent era to the talkies and musicals of the 1930s and 1940s. Each chapter appraises the artistry of a single film, highlighting its outstanding formal elements, from cinematography to editing to sound design. Examples include the slapstick gags of Laborer’s Love (1922), Ruan Lingyu’s star turn in Goddess (1934), Zhou Xuan’s mesmerizing performance in Street Angels (1937), Eileen Chang’s urbane comedy of manners Long Live the Missus! (1947), the wartime epic Spring River Flows East (1947), and Fei Mu’s acclaimed work of cinematic lyricism, Spring in a Small Town (1948). Rea shares new insights and archival discoveries about famous films, while explaining their significance in relation to politics, society, and global cinema. Lavishly illustrated and featuring extensive guides to further viewings and readings, Chinese Film Classics, 1922–1949 offers an accessible tour of China’s early contributions to the cinematic arts.
Chinese Film Stars (Routledge Contemporary China Series)
by Mary FarquharThis volume of original essays fills a significant research gap in Chinese film studies by offering an interdisciplinary, comparative examination of ethnic Chinese film stars from the silent period to the era of globalization. Whereas studies of stars and stardom have developed considerably in the West over the past two decades, there is no single book in English that critically addresses issues related to stars and stardom in Chinese culture. Chinese Film Stars offers exemplary readings of historically, geographically and aesthetically multifaceted star phenomena. An international line up of contributors test a variety of approaches in making sense of discourses of stars and stardom in China and the US, explore historical contexts in which Chinese film stars are constructed and transformed in relation to changing sociopolitical conditions, and consider issues of performance and identity specific to individual stars through chapter-by-chapter case studies. The essays explore a wide range of topics such as star performance, character type, media construction, political propaganda, online discourses, autobiographic narration, as well as issues of gender, genre, memory and identity. Including fifteen case studies of individual Chinese stars and illustrated with film stills throughout, this book is an essential read for students of Chinese film, media and cultural studies.
Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age
by Jason McGrathA tour de force chronicling the development of realism in Chinese cinema The history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Be it the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, each Chinese cinematic era has necessitated its own form in conversation with broader trends in politics and culture. In Chinese Film, Jason McGrath tells this fascinating story by tracing the varied claims to cinematic realism made by Chinese filmmakers, officials, critics, and scholars. Understanding realism as a historical dynamic that is both enabled and mitigated by aesthetic conventions of the day, he analyzes it across six different types of claims: ontological, perceptual, fictional, social, prescriptive, and apophatic.Through this method, McGrath makes major claims not just about Chinese cinema but also about realism as an aesthetic form that negotiates between cultural conventions and the ever-evolving real. He comes to envision it as more than just a cinematic question, showing how the struggle for realism is central to the Chinese struggle for modernity itself.
Chinese Films Abroad: Distribution and Translation (Routledge Studies in Chinese Cinema)
by Haina Jin Yves GambierThis book examines Chinese films made and shown abroad roughly between the 1920s and the 2020s, from the beginning of the international exchange of the Chinese national film industry to the emergence of the concept of soft power.The periodisation of Chinese cinema(s) does not necessarily match the political periods: on the one hand, the technical development of the film industry and the organisation of translation in China, and on the other hand, official relations with China and translation policies abroad impose different constraints on the circulation of Chinese films. This volume deals with the distribution and translation of films from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora. To this end, the contributors address various issues related to the circulation and distribution of Chinese films, including co- productions, agents of exchange, and modes of translation. The approach is a mixture of socio- cultural and translational methods. The data collected provides, for the first time, a quantitative overview of the circulation of Chinese films in a dozen foreign countries.The book will greatly interest scholars and students of Chinese cinema, translation studies, and China studies.
Chinese Independent Animation: Renegotiating Identity in Modern China (Palgrave Animation)
by Wenhai ZhouThis study of ‘independent’ animation opens up a quietly subversive and vibrant dimension of contemporary Chinese culture which, hitherto, has not received as much attention as dissident art or political activism. Scholarly interest in Chinese animation has increased over the last decade, with attention paid to the conventional media circle of production, distribution and consumption. The ‘independent’ sector has been largely ignored however, until now. By focusing on distinctive independent artists like Pisan and Lei Lei, and situating their work within the present day media ecology, the author examines the relationship between the genre and the sociocultural transformation of contemporary China. Animation, the author argues, has a special significance, as the nature of the animation text is itself multilayered and given to multiple interpretations and avenues of engagement. Through an examination of the affordances of this ‘independent’ media entity, the author explores how this multifaceted cultural form reveals ambiguities that parallel contradictions in art and society. In so doing, independent animation provides a convenient ‘mirror’ for examining how recent social upheavals have been negotiated, and how certain practitioners have found effective ways for discussing the post-Socialist reality within the current political configuration.
Chinese Looks
by Sean MetzgerFrom yellow-face performance in the 19th century to Jackie Chan in the 21st, Chinese Looks examines articles of clothing and modes of adornment as a window on how American views of China have changed in the past 150 years. Sean Metzger provides a cultural history of three iconic objects in theatrical and cinematic performance: the queue, or man's hair braid; the woman's suit known as the qipao; and the Mao suit. Each object emerges at a pivotal moment in US-China relations, indexing shifts in the balance of power between the two nations. Metzger shows how aesthetics, gender, politics, economics, and race are interwoven and argues that close examination of particular forms of dress can help us think anew about gender and modernity.