Visualising a Film Past: Early Korean Cinema through the Lens of Teaching, Curating and Scholarship
Professor Kate Taylor-Jones (University of Sheffield)
Whilst academic scholarship on pre-1945 Korean cinema has been steadily growing, contemporary knowledge, both amongst students and wider cinema goers, remains limited. The rapid growth in popularity of South Korean visual culture products on the international stage, exemplified by Parasite (2019), Burning (2018), Squid Games (2021) and Kingdom (2019-) has seen renewed interest in post-2010 products and in some rare cases earlier films (Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (1960) is notable example). However, for the most part, pre-1945 film remains ignored. This is not a problem specific to South Korean cinema. In most global spaces beyond a few specific festivals or collections, early film struggles to hold audience attention and students remain, for the most part, reluctant to engage with these texts beyond their position as sites of historical meaning.
Early Korean cinema operates as an interesting case study since it has only been in the last decades that these films have been available for viewing and more and more academic work is produced on these products. This talk will explore two aspects of the utilisation of Early Korean cinema in the UK context. Firstly, I will explore the complexities of audience development in Korean cinema in the UK setting and how working with the BFI and the Korean Cultural Centre brought these films to London and the UK for a limited program. Part of this program was a series of events designed to allow students to engage and learn about these products from both a cultural and a filmic perspective. Introducing these events will lead to the second part of my talk, where I will explore how early Korean cinema can be used to teach key elements of film language. Moving the debate away from Anglo-American-European examples of the development and articulation of film aesthetics and narratives allows us to offer a wider engagement with a cinematic past that moves the prevailing narratives away from the Western domination of international screen studies. I will explore how connections between the past and the present need to be drawn, so that students can conceive of cinema not only via the historical/chronological lens but also allow them to develop skills that allow them to evaluate and engage early East Asian cinema as aesthetic texts and explore their relationship to the contemporary. The need is to teach early Korean cinema not as simply a means to access a specific image of history and culture but as Lindiwe Dovey notes in her teaching on African Film, to encourage students to approach the material “not simply as scholars, but through a filmmaker’s and curator’s eyes, reflecting not only on films as texts but also on the processes of making, distributing, and exhibiting film”. In the visually saturated world in which the students now live, early cinema can cause a disruption that allows them to enter a new frame of reference for film. Seeing cinema as multidimensional and potentially playing a key role in ungerdagaute teaching and scholarship has been seen in other national cinema collections such as the Chinese Film Classics Project and Kyoto Toy Museum’s curation of early Japanese cinema. In the post pandemic age of global insecurity and limited archive budgets, how and why we engage with early cinema is a key development in digitisation and archiving.
The Cold War in Hong Kong Cinema
Professor Po-Shek Fu (University of Illinois)
My talk discusses the little-studied role of the Cold War in the modernization and globalization of Hong Kong’s film culture in the mid-twentieth century. It brings to focus the ways in which the Mandarin film industry was entangled with British colonialism and Cold War ideological rivalry in the region
The Captive Audience and Albanian Films in Mao’s China
Dr Xiaoning Lu (SOAS)
The ironclad alliance between the People’s Republic of China and Albania during the 1960s is often taken as the unquestioned starting point of transnational film exchanges between the two fraternal socialist states. This talk delineates the presence of Albanian cinema in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 to 1976, when geopolitical realignments reconfigured the socialist camp, with special attention to Albanian cinema’s position within the filmscape in Mao’s China. Drawing on official news reports, movie reviews and recently published personal reminiscences, and employing the lens of the captive audience, it teases out the multifaceted reception of Albanian films, including the types of engagement that deviate from and challenge the then-prevailing revolutionary discourses. The study thus helps to demystify a reductive understanding of the socio-political significance of Albanian cinema in China.
DUST & METAL: a Cine-poem Journey through Vietnam’s Film Heritage
Professor Esther Johnson (Sheffield Hallam University)
DUST & METAL (CTBỤI & KIMLOẠI) brings together for the first time, a live cinema documentary feature film using little seen archive film from Hanoi-based Vietnam Film Institute (VFI). Directed by Esther Johnson and working with Live Cinema UK, the project has resulted in a unique partnership with the VFI, and TPD: The Centre for Assistance and Development of Movie Talents. With a score composed by San Francisco-based electronic artist Xo Xinh, and sound design by Hanoi-based artist Nhung Nguyễn, the global pandemic has led to creative collaborative co-production methods for the production between the UK, Vietnam and US. Funded by the British Council, the work offers alternative perspectives of Vietnamese cultural heritage through the synergy of difficult to access archive film, crowd-sourced material, and newly shot footage. At the heart of the research are unfamiliar histories of freedom in Vietnam that connect with the country’s ubiquitous mode of transport: the MOTORBIKE. With a population of 97 million, and 45 million registered motorbikes (the highest in SE Asia) that’s almost one bike for every two people. The countries urban roads and ‘hẻm’ alleys are only accessible by two-wheels. These roads are awash with the transportation of goods of all types and sizes on the back of motorbikes, including washing machines, entire families, and chickens. This talk will discuss the research methodologies used for the production of DUST & METAL, and in particular learnings from the first ever partnership the Vietnam Film Institute has undertaken with an artist and filmmaker. For more information about the project, see www.dustandmetal.com