“Forgotten Popular Culture: Asian Cinema and Film History” is an international conference that aims to rediscover popular Asian films, genres and filmmakers that are either overlooked in film history or critically deemed ‘unworthy’ at the time. Popular cinema provides a crucial tool to examine a wide range of cultural, social and political issues, such as audiences’ taste, collective memory, creative economy, cultural history, and social-political systems. Yet, often associated with low-brow entertainment, it could also be neglected by film critics or in official discourses for reasons such as censorship, cultural hegemony, border control and cultural goods embargo, intellectual elitism, linguicism, and sexism. Whereas such oversight leads to amnesia of film history, it also reinforces the hierarchy of cultural criticism.
This conference intends to bring both established and emerging scholars together to examine these overlooked and understudied areas of Asian popular cinema, such as dialect cinema, B-movie, female filmmakers, popular film curation, exhibition, and preservation as well as the ’forgotten’ creative talents behind the popular cinema. Through probing the official and mainstream discourse, this conference encourages scholarly challenge of established discourse of (world) film history.
More importantly, this conference serves as a starting point to build a research network in the field. By encouraging constructive dialogues between researchers, scholars, practitioners, archivists, it provide a platform to develop future collaborations.