Remaking Chinese Cinema：Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood

Thursday, May 09, 2013
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Bunche Hall 10367
 

The talk is based on Wang's recently published book, Remaking Chinese Cinema：Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood. In the talk, she will specifically focus on the process of "foreignizing translation"（Lawrence Venuti）and its ramifications for imagining a national and regional cinema, as well as the correlated  collective subject position. She posits the notion of "trans" as an intractable zone of contact where jarring differences are deliberately maintained rather than massaged into wish-washy "hybridity".  It is the "trans" zone that "foreignizing translation" is staged with far-reaching ramifications.  Her argument is based on the analysis of the genre of "Western costume Cantonese opera film "（xizhuang ju）made in Shanghai in the 1930s and in Hong Kong in the 1950s -- both deriving from Hollywood fantastic musicals made the cusp of the the talkie era. By studying "foreignizing translation" in the mid-century Sino-American filmic interactions, She hopes to offer a new framework for understanding the cross-Pacific film and media exchange in the present day.

Yiman Wang is an Assistant Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California Santa Cruz.  She is author of Remaking Chinese Cinema：Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood（Honolulu, HI：University of Hawaii Press, 2013）.  Her articles have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Journal of Film and Video, Literature/Film Quarterly, Positions：East Asia Cultures Critique, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Chinese Films in Focus（Chris Berry, ed. 2003, 2008）, Idols of Modernity：Movie Stars of the 1920s（Patrice Petro, ed. 2010）, The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement：For the Public Record（Chris Berry, Lü Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel eds. 2010）, Cinema at the City’s Edge：Film and Urban Networks in East Asia（Yomi Braester and James Tweedie, eds. 2010）, and Engendering Cinema：Chinese Women Filmmakers Inside and Outside China（Lingzhen Wang, ed. 2011）.