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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (6 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2019)
This paper argues that repulsive images of violated internal bodies can function as powerful political resistance in visual terms. By examining the visceral visuality in Drug War (2013) directed by Johnnie To, this study illustrates how in film, the internal body aesthetically resists, with involuntary bodily responses, both China’s authoritarian judiciary and Hong Kong’s corrupt capitalism under the city’s “One Country, Two Systems” constitutional principle implemented after the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). When this forcefully imposed political principle becomes too contradictory for Hong Kong people to accept, common film narrative strategies no longer suffice. In turn, disgust, as characterized by visceral images of vomiting and hyperventilating in Drug War, appears as affective reflections of Hong Kong’s social reality. With reference to the theories by Gilles Deleuze, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Fabio Vighi, George Bataille, and Julie Kristeva, this paper observes that in some cases, visceral visuality could positively recognize the political abject’s personhood and reconfigure the abject’s political identity.
    Cover page: Hong Kong’s Cinema of Cruelty: Visceral Visuality in Drug War
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2017)
    This chapter investigates the function of morally ambiguous characters in documentary film; it argues that such characters can persuade documentary viewers to renegotiate their moral values, transcend the differences between authentic artworks and replicas, and transgress established social boundaries. It takes, as a case study, the documentary Art and Craft (dirs. Sam Cullman & Jennifer Grausman, 2014), which chronicles the life of Mark A. Landis, an American art forger living in Laurel, Mississippi. This study reveals that the viewers’ sympathy and transgressive emotions often undergo a similar trajectory for both documentaries and fiction films. However, the difference is that documentaries provide an alternative access to engagement, due to the genre’s special relationship with reality, as evidenced in Art and Craft.
      Cover page: Fake Pictures, Real Emotions: A Case Study of Art and Craft
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2016)
      This chapter looks at the examples from the late 1920s and early 1930s Shanghai new sensationist (xin’-ganjuepai) author, Liu Na’ou 劉吶歐, to offer a reading of his short stories in reference to the philosophy of perceptual experience and the literary history of the texts. It argues that literature written with a focus on sensational responses is a genre resistant to representation. The more exhaustively the city is portrayed with an emphasis on sensations, the more perceptual knowledge the reader seems to have of the city; but paradoxically, the less she knows the city itself. To read such literature, it requires a rigorous philosophical analysis of the problem of perception, such as what this chapter develops by borrowing from study of Cézanne’s paintings by the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty. This study discovers that while the sensationist literature poses a challenge of interpreting the narrated urban reality for the reader, it also suggests a new epistemology of the city in literature, as well as explores a different framework of understanding the city in terms of sensations.
        Cover page: The Sensibilities of Semicolonial Shanghai: A Phenomenological Study of the Short Stories by Liu Na’ou
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2013)
        This article is about the movies from Chinese mainland under the production category of minority cinema (shaoshu minzu dianying), between the years 1940 and 1963. It argues that the taxonomic effort of grouping different non-Han ethnicities together into a single category of minority cinema is a sociopolitical attempt to construct, maintain and control the definition of ethnic minorities. It calls into question not what is within the film, but the classificatory practices outside of the film collectively engaged by the government, the film industry, the critics and the mass audience. Moving away from the methods of examining the representation and generic conventions of the cinema other scholarship has employed, this article emphasizes the classification system used during the time of the cinema. By comparing it with a similar classificatory problem in Western national history, using an epistemological perspective, this article criticizes the negative impact inevitably left in rhetorically driven classification systems.
          Cover page: "filmagining" ethnicities: The making of a Chinese nation with film genres and styles between 1940 and 1963
            UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2013)
              Cover page: Make It Till You Fake It: The Four-Claw Dragons in <em>The Labyrinthine Garden</em>
              • Thesis
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2019)

              ...By examining the cinema of Hong Kong’s commercial crime film director Johnnie To, this dissertation explains how film aesthetics offers a profound understanding of the geopolitical status of the city. In particular, this study concerns, in To’s aesthetic practice, the shift from the modern man’s ocular-phono-logocentric perception to a postmodern type of film viewing experience, which is not only ocular-phonic, but also corporeal. Using To’s post-1997 cinema as a frame of reference, this study observes that in order for Hong Kong’s film audience to comprehend the city, besides using only what the camera or the characters see or hear, they have begun to use what the characters appear to feel with their skin and internal organs. These transitions from sight and sound to haptic perceptions are signs of the skin and inner body taking over as the dominant layers of onscreen perception and cultural memory in post-1997 Hong Kong. This study brings to awareness a historical shift around 1997 in Hong Kong’s crime films from the ocular-phonic perceptual tradition to a corporeal aesthetic, what I call the “haptic turn” of the cinema. This suggests a sensory-visceral-affective film viewing experience that symptomatically informs some unsolvable dilemmas under Hong Kong’s “One Country, Two Systems” geopolitical framework.

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