Ma offers an innovative study of three provocative Chinese directors: Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang. Focusing on the highly stylized and monlinear configurations of time in each director's films, she argues that these dirctors have brought new global respect for Chinese cinema in amplifying motifs of loss, nostalgia, hauntin, absence and ephemeral poetices Hou, Tsai, and Wong all isist on the significance of being out of time, not merely out of place, as a condition of global modernity. Ma argues that their films collectively foreground the central place of contemporary Chinese films in a transnational culture of memory, characterized by a distinctive melancholy that highlights the difficulty of binding together past and present into a meaningful narrative. Jean Ma is assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University Melancholy Drift rides the films of three Chinese auteurs right into the heart of its subject, the mismatch between private feeling and collective history. These crucial films, set carefully beside one another, begin to pulse anew under the deft touch of Jean Ma's analyses. Drawing on a deep reservoir of historical and critical knowledge, she helps us hear these films speak of our times, then speak of time itself and of its dislocations---Dudley Andrew, Yale University Theoretically sophisticated and elegantly written, Melancholy Drift elucidates the subject of cinematic time in its various configurations: as a response to historical ruptures and political upheavals as representational politics, and as a reinvention of the art cinema. This book is a timely demonstration of the key roles played by Chinese auteurs in shaping the new face of world cinema today and an important contribution to scholarship both within and beyond the field of transnational Chinese cinemas---Song Hwee Lim, University of Exeter

A brilliant approach to the queerness of one of Taiwan’s greatest auteurs A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation. Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.

Depictions within a movie of either filmmaking or film watching are hardly novel, but the dramatic expansion of the reach of the metacinematic into contemporary Chinese cinemas is nothing short of remarkable. To G. Andrew Stuckey, the prevalence of metacinematic features forms the basis of a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. Such a discourse, in turn, outlines the boundaries of the possible for film in China as aesthetic or sociopolitical practice. Metacinema also draws our attention to the presence of the audience, people actively responding to a film. In elucidating the affective responses elicited by the metacinematic mode in the viewers, Stuckey argues that metacinema reflects ways of being in the world that audiences may take up for themselves. The films studied in this book are drawn across the full spectrum of Chinese films made in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the 1990s and 2000s, from award-winning conceptual art films to popular crowd pleasers, blockbusters to low-budget productions, and documentary-style social realist exposé projects to studio assembly-line investments. The recurrence of the metacinematic across this broad range of works is indicative of its relevance to Chinese films today, and the analysis of these diverse examples allows us to gauge the cultural, social, and aesthetic implications of Chinese cinemas as a whole. “Stuckey surveys a broad swath of contemporary Chinese cinema, from popular blockbusters to elite art films, around the theme of metacinema, yielding new insights into both previously neglected films and those already acknowledged as contemporary classics. The result is a fascinating dive into the growing and diversifying cinema culture of China today.” —Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota “Stuckey’s brilliant work, Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film, offers insightful close analyses of films by key directors from the PRC (Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Jia Zhangke, and Li Yu), Hong Kong (Peter Chan), and Taiwan (Tsai Ming-liang). This clearly written book is essential reading for scholars and students of Chinese cinemas. Stuckey’s study of genre and metacinema makes it a must-read for anyone interested in cinema.” —Michelle Bloom, University of California, Riverside

Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity.

Taiwan was able to solidly build and sustain a film industry only after locally-produced Mandarin films secured markets in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. Though only a small island with a limited population, in its heyday, Taiwan was among the top-10 film producing countries/areas in the world, turning out hundreds of martial arts kung fu films and romantic melodramas annually that were screened in theaters across Southeast Asia and other areas internationally. However, except for one acclaimed film by director King Hu, Taiwan cinema was nearly invisible on the art cinema map until the 1980s, when the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and other Taiwan New Cinema directors gained recognition at international film festivals, first in Europe, and later, throughout the world. Since then, many other Taiwan directors have also become an important part of cinema history, such as Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang. The Historical Dictionary of Taiwan Cinema covers the history of cinema in Taiwan during both the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945) and the Chinese Nationalist period (1945-present). This is accomplished through a chronology highlighting the main events during the long period and an introduction which carefully analyses the progression. The bulk of the information, however, appears in a dictionary section including over a hundred very extensive entries on directors, producers, performers, films, film studios and genres. Photos are also included in the dictionary section. More information can be found through the bibliography. Taiwan cinema is truly unique and this book is a good place to find out more about it, whether you are a student, or teacher, or just a fan.

Global Melodrama is the first booklength work to investigate melodrama in a specifically twenty-first century setting across regional and national boundaries, analyzing film texts from a variety of national contexts in the wake of globalization.

Transnational cinemas are eclipsing national cinemas in the contemporary world, and Sino-French films exemplify this phenomenon through the cinematic coupling of the Sinophone and the Francophone, linking France not just with the Chinese mainland but also with the rest of the Chinese-speaking world. Sinophone directors most often reach out to French cinema by referencing and adapting it. They set their films in Paris and metropolitan France, cast French actors, and sometimes use French dialogue, even when the directors themselves don't understand it. They tend to view France as mysterious, sexy, and sophisticated, just as the French see China and Taiwan as exotic. As Michelle E. Bloom makes clear, many films move past a simplistic opposition between East and West and beyond Orientalist and Occidentalist cross-cultural interplay. Bloom focuses on films that have appeared since 2000 such as Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There? , Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, and Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. She views the work of these well-known directors through a Sino-French optic, applying the tropes of métissage (or biraciality), intertextuality, adaptation and remake, translation, and imitation to shed new light on their work. She also calls attention to important, lesser studied films: Taiwanese director Cheng Yu-chieh's Yang Yang, which depicts the up-and-coming Taiwanese star Sandrine Pinna as a mixed race beauty; and Emily Tang Xiaobai's debut film Conjugation, which contrasts Paris and post-Tiananmen Square Beijing, the one an incarnation of liberty, the other a place of entrapment. Bloom's insightful analysis also probes what such films reveal about their Taiwanese and Chinese creators. Scholars have long studied Sino-French literature, but this inaugural full-length work on Sino-French cinema maps uncharted territory, offering a paradigm for understanding other cross-cultural interminglings and tools to study transnational cinema and world cinema. The Sino-French, rich and multifaceted, linguistically, culturally, and ethnically, constitutes an important part of film studies, Francophone studies, Sinophone studies and myriad other fields. This is a must-read for students, scholars, and lovers of film.