Pink Film Theatres: the Theatrical Space vs Social Space
Hoi-yan Yau (Lingnan University) and Heung-wah Wong (University of Hong Kong)
This paper revisits the Pink Film genre and examines the theatrical-cum-social space of adult theatres dedicated specifically to its consumption in modern Japan. Emerged in Japan in the 1960s, Pink Film is a kind of softcore pornographic film that portrays women in naked torsos and buttocks. While Pink Film was popular among Japanese men in the 1960s and 1970s, it gradually lost its momentum when adult videos emerged in the 1980s. Since then, the number of Pink filmgoers kept declining. It was especially the case for young Japanese men. By the 2010s, the theatre attendance plummeted by at least 60% and the number of theatres also declined. Nevertheless, these theatres are still popular among certain groups of audiences in modern Japan. In this paper, we shall show how certain audiences have developed new meanings of and understanding with these theatres. Based on our ethnographic research, these audiences can be largely divided into four groups, namely, retired salarymen, crossdressers, gay men, and middle-aged men. Certainly, these four groups of the audience came to the theatres for different reasons and purposes. Yet, they all paid little attention to theatrical space and developed new modes of interactions and meanings with the social space of the theatres. In the conclusion, we shall spell out some theoretical implications to the study of film reception.
Landscapes in Feng Xiaogang’s Big Shot’s Funeral: An Intertextual Approach
Tianxiang Wang (National University of Ireland, Galway)
Compared with the coetaneous Fifth and Sixth Generation directors, who enjoy an aura of auteurship and whose works are endowed with higher artistic value by the wester reception, Feng Xiaogang, whose comedy films are considered popular and entertaining, has gained little international attention. This is largely a consequence of his influence being limited to domestic Chinese cinema. However, if genre film is a result of the joint creation between film production system and audience in a specific ideological context, each of Feng’s highly popular and sought-after films is inscribed with collective memories of Chinese society within a particular time period. This paper will focus on Feng’s Big Shot’s Funeral (2001), which provides a portrayal of Beijing’s changing urban spaces in the midst of globalization. This study draws on James Duncan’s intertextual approach to landscape studies, which broadly understands human practice as text encoded with ideological meanings and notes that all texts are intertextual with other texts. Using Big Shot’s Funeral as a case study, this paper will take both film and the landscape as signifying systems, exploring their intertextuality through a political lens. It will, on the one hand, inquire into the relationship between the film text and the orientalist discourse encoded within the Forbidden City landscape in which the film is mainly set. On the other hand, it will scrutinize the film’s engagement with the ideologies and power relations underpinning the cityscape of globalized Beijing. I wish to explore how the film integrates seemingly unrelated or even contradictory discourses inscribed in landscapes in order to invalidate social values that hinder the legitimation of Beijing’s globalization project.
Atlas in Motion: Visualising Manchuria in Moving Images
Yufei Li (Jesus College, University of Cambridge)
The mimetic nature of film gives it the ability to create a place in cinematic geographies that is bonded to the particular time and spatial coordinates and tinted with historical and social contexts. As a practical example of such virtual recreation, a specific group of films were produced during the period of the 1930s-40s, all serving a placemaking purpose: to portray a territory named Manchuria.
Manchuria, corresponding roughly to the current Northeast China geographically, was under the control of Imperial Japan as the puppet state of Manchukuo from 1932 to 1945. While Japanese architects planned their cities as a dreamscape of Far East modernisation, their politicians relied on media in cultural construction to promote the region towards the wider world. Films, produced by the South Manchuria Railway Company and Manchuria Film Association, mapped out Manchuria in a collection of moving images featuring its urban landscapes, customs and daily lives. However, after the Japanese retreated in 1945, the region’s colonial past as Manchuria remains distant from the mainstream historical accounts of modern China, despite the glorious propaganda on screen.
How was Manchuria lived, experienced and picturised? Can we visualise its past, through film as a ‘live’ medium? How has the absent Manchuria shaped the current cultural identity of Northeast China? With these questions in mind, the research offers a novel approach to cinematic place-making by using film as a medium to immerse the present landscape into its visual and experiential past, in this case mapping the historical geography of Manchuria in a collection of moving images. The research sources available Manchuria films produced between 1932 and 1945, accompanied with on-site ethnographic surveys, to illustrate the cinematic ukiyo-e of Manchuria in the light of its contemporary urban cultural regeneration.
Landscapes from the Margin: Ethnicity, Geopolitics, and Border-crossing in Zhang Lu’s Dooman River
Yanjie Wang (Loyola Marymount University)
This paper examines Korean-Chinese filmmaker Zhang Lu’s films, with a focus on Dooman River (2010) and Ode to the Goose (2018). While studies on Chinese ethnic minority cinema have been flourishing in recent years, there is yet little scholarship on ethnic Korean filmmakers. Born and raised in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin Province, third-generation Korean-Chinese filmmaker Zhang Lu ventured into filmmaking in early 2000. Dooman River, one of Zhang’s most celebrated films, focuses on the everyday lives of ethnic Koreans in his native Yanbian. Set in a border village, the film captures an array of border-crossing activities which give rise to complex senses of ethnic identification beyond the confines of the nation-state. After relocating to Seoul for a teaching appointment at Yonsei University in 2012, Zhang began to base his filmmaking primarily in South Korea. Following a romantic pair’s trip to Gunsan, a city in North Jeolla Province, South Korea, Ode to the Goose unfolds (dis)connections between dislocated/diasporic peoples such as diasporic Chinese in Korea, second-generation ethnic Koreans from China, and Zainichi Koreans. Their interactions are reflective of historical, as well as ongoing, intra-Asia political and economic tensions. This paper argues that whether set in China or South Korea, Zhang’s filmmaking insists on a diasporic ethnic perspective from the margin, breaking national boundaries and instead drawing attention to transregional flows of people, cultures, and capital. His marginal lenses prompt the audience to critically examine the ethnic landscapes of both nations in a new light, one that illuminates not only the ways in which state ethnic policies minoritize ethnic groups but also how migration and border-crossing complicate ethnic identity formation.