Jump Cut. 49.

As if the new issue of Jump Cut weren't offering enough reading on "China and China disapora film," Chuck Kleinhans introducing that special section, adds an annotated list of recently published books for further reading.

Anyone prepping for Cannes, whether or not you'll actually be going, will want to get in the mood for Wong Kar-wai (whose My Blueberry Nights opens the festival) with Allan Cameron's piece on the films "which deal most specifically with cultural translation and travel: Chungking Express (1994), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004)."

Stephen Chow, whose latest, A Hope, has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics, has been invited to consult on a Japanese sequel of sorts to Shaolin Soccer, Shaolin Girl. Here, Kin-Yan Szeto examines how Kung Fu Hustle "depicts an imaginary China in ways that commingle various historical and political meanings."

For many, Curse of the Golden Flower, just out on DVD in the US and now opening in theaters in Europe, finds Zhang Yimou teetering on the edge of a rut. Just five years ago, though, Hero heralded "a new era in Chinese filmmaking, one that single-mindedly pushes for market success," writes Jenny Kwok Wah Lau. "Thus, we need to ask what conditions in Chinese cinema affected the emergence of films such as Hero and what does that film's success mean for Chinese films' future?"

In Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, June Yip "addresses Taiwanese identity within a broad framework of theoretical discussions on the relation between popular culture and collective identity, the tension between local and global, and issues of exile and displacement," writes Li Zeng.

Tan See-Kam aims to show "the contemporary discursive relevance of a now-defunct film genre" - Huangmei opera films - "in relation to current transnational film studies, star studies, diasporic studies, and queer studies."

Poshek Fu looks back to the 50s and the Shaw Brothers' rival studio in Singapore and Hong Kong: "I focus on one of its most celebrated films, Air Hostess (Kong zhong xiaozhe), to bring to light the ways Cathay-MP&GI production was intricately intertwined with the changes in gender relations and the Cold War politics of postwar Hong Kong and Chinese cinemas."

Similarly, Kenny KK Ng, who focuses on the studio's "North vs South" comedies of the early 60s and "their pioneering efforts to 'break the barrier between Mandarin and Cantonese films,' as well as [the way they envision] the city as a melting-pot of pluralistic languages and cultures, and its fellow citizens as 'travelers on the same boat.'"

"[T]he use of a specific dialect in a film pertains to nothing less than the symbolic construction of the modern Chinese nation-state," writes Sheldon Lu, who explores "the use of dialects in varieties of Chinese-language films in the early 21st century."

Esther MK Cheung talks with seven critics from the PRC and Macau: "These critics generally share strong convictions in upholding the oppositional nature and critical role of independent cinema."

Who knows where Brett Ratner will take Rush Hour 3, slated for August, but Wendy Gan notes a shift between the original and 2, namely, that Hong Kong "tends to become marginalized in the film's imagining of global relations as US-centric.... Do we find alternative renderings of transnationality in Hong Kong cinema and of what kind?" she asks. "My argument here is that we do and the examination of the Hong Kong films, Comrades: Almost a Love Story and One Nite in Mongkok, reveals a complicated world order where there is more than one center of power and where the tensions of difference are played out in ways that reveal globalization's deployment and maintenance, not erasure, of difference."

"Despite the fact some of the early Hong Kong films dealt with social injustice, inequities, and the gap between rich and poor, Hong Kong cinema has rarely taken as its theme the concept of class," writes Wimal Dissanayake. "Only with the work of Fruit Chan do we begin to see the persuasive articulation of class in cinematic terms." And Chuck Kleinhans sees Dumplings as "a disturbing social satire using creepy taboo topics of cannibalism and abortion to pump up the shock and to underline ethical issues of capitalist culture. With a foundation in class politics, the feature interweaves grotesque horror imagery and a critique of the cult of youth and the commoditization of beauty in contemporary consumer society."

Wrapping up the special section, Ting Wang examines how Hollywood forged inroads into the Chinese market long before China's accession to the WTO in November 1999.

One special section is not enough, evidently; there's also a "Spotlight on horror" in Issue 49, opening with Justin Vicari's piece on The Addiction. Having listened to launch of Adrian Martin's translation of Nicole Brenez's Abel Ferrara and having read Girish praise it ("simply a jaw-dropper"), I have little doubt that the neglect of Ferrara in the US which Edward Colless referred to during that launch simply cannot last.

Caetlin Benson-Allott has some provocative thoughts as to why "The Ring takes as its bugaboo VHS."

"As with Buffy, Ginger Snaps subverts the horror genre by providing an alienated cum kick-ass high school chick as its heroine," writes Patricia Molloy. "Yet whereas it is Buffy's reluctant transformation into the Slayer, the overwhelming responsibilities of being the 'Chosen One,' which is the source of her teen angst, Ginger's outsider status as geek is overcome with her transformation into a hypersexualized werewolf."

Stephen Harper takes aim at the "racist, sexist and homophobic elements" in Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse.

Nicola Rehling: "I would like to insert the whiteness as well as the maleness of serial killing into my analysis of the contemporary serial killer movie in order to explore the anxieties that the genre articulates about contemporary US, white, heterosexual masculinity."

Two pieces on "Audio in film and video": Giovanna Chesler on why she teaches sound production before image-making and Andrea Hammer asks, "[H]ow might a habit of listening deeply to what Don Ihde calls 'the noise and voice of the environment, of the surrounding lifeworld' lead to new forms of documentary expression and alternative habits of perception?"

Essays on narrative features:

• Nina K Martin: "Underneath Down with Love's candy-colored, giddy veneer is the beating heart of a very traditional femininity coupled with a seemingly empowered view of sex."

• Bert Cardullo offers a "brief history" of "interrupting narrative" before turning his attention to Last Days, Tony Takitani, 3-Iron, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Me and You and Everyone We Know.

• Justin Vicari: "By concentrating on spectacular human failure rather than the unlikely overcoming of adversity, [Brokeback Mountain] suggests that our society's compassion toward its minority groups must be measured not by the anomalous, hit-or-miss success stories that spring up now and then in spite of discrimination, but by the people who drown along the way, the nameless ones who fail to survive."

• Carter Soles on how Chuck & Buck "engages with male homosexual desire in a way that renders its queer male characters and thematics at least potentially palatable to non-queer-identifying audiences while taking its viewers on a 'stalker's odyssey' that marks the film as pervasively queer."

• Thelma Wills Foote: "By critically examining the interplay of race, gender, sexuality, class, and age within the context of the contemporary black lesbian subject's relationship to the past, [Cheryl] Dunye's The Watermelon Woman ventures into a territory that the mock-documentary genre has rarely explored."

• Intan Paramaditha: "Through its cinematic language, Pasir Berbisik explores the dimensions of female gaze and female voyeurism as well as reappropriates the Oedipal narrative structure. It thus offers a new feminine aesthetics that one could hardly find in Indonesian cinema since 1926 until the end of the New Order era."

• Frank P Tomasulo looks at how Michelangelo Antonioni "uses mise-en-scène and other formal articulations" in L'Avventura "to convey both disgust and sympathy for the Italian bourgeoisie during the postwar 'boom' years."

In Hollywood, gossip has an economic impact. It always has. Anne Petersen examines "the gossip blogger" - and one in particular, Perez Hilton - "in relation to five key aspects of star production - economics, manipulation, fashion, magic/talent, and the nature of the medium - but also... how each element of production is (or is not) influenced by Hilton's status as a gay man. I go on to assert that the gossip blogger's use of new media is, in fact, a stripping of mechanisms mediated directly by Hollywood."

For Jyotsna Kapur, "a recent film/ performance, Mutual Conversations 1979 - 2005 (Mike Covell, 2005)... gets to the heart of confronting the image with the real." And this is relevant, even urgently so because: "In war, the reduction of distance between the image and the real, between the generals in their war rooms and the destruction of life on the battlefield is brutal and irrevocable."

"Such feature-length independent documentaries as Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland offer intriguing accounts of how the war is being represented as it is still taking place and, therefore, how it is likely to be remembered," writes Tony Grajeda, who examines the "limits and possibilities of their historicity" and "their formal and rhetorical framing of truth claims, in part by contrasting them with such Vietnam-era documentaries as the early in-country films The Anderson Platoon (1966-67) and A Face of War (1967), as well as the more well-known In the Year of the Pig (1968) and Hearts and Minds (1974), films noted for their historical contextualization of the Vietnam War and now recognized as documents of the past themselves."

"Mohamed Soueid's passion, compassion, love of lost or unlikely causes, and taste for slapstick are all aspects of a certain approach to the virtual that this filmmaker embraces in his personal documentaries," writes Laura U Marks. "Soueid is a central proponent of the experimental video documentary movement, which is perhaps Lebanon's greatest contribution to contemporary Arab and world cinema."

Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann argue "that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth mainly succeeds not because of its predictions but because of the eco-memories it evokes. Like eco-disaster films from the 1970s, Gore's film argues most powerfully when it draws on environmental nostalgia, a nostalgia we share for a better, cleaner world."

Francisca da Gama presents "a discussion of two feature films: Francisco Lombardi's The Lion's Den (1988; La boca del lobo) and Marianne Eyde's You Only Live Once (1993; La vida es una sola), in the context of Peruvian historiography and intellectual cultural production."

Book reviews:

• Angelica Fenner on Women Filmmakers Refocusing.

• Shannon Gore on Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955 - 1969.

• Susan Ericsson on Porn Studies and More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power.

In his "media salad," Chuck Kleinhans considers Notes on Marie Menken, a feature-length doc that "combines samples of Menken's short, intense lyrical films which influenced other makers such as Stan Brakhage (who honored her as the major influence on his own style), and interviews with friends who remember her life and work such as Kenneth Anger, Alfred Leslie, Peter Kubelka, Gerard Malanga and Jonas Mekas." Even so: "This film would have been much better at half the length." Also, a quick review of Russell Campbell's Marked Women: Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Cinema.

Julia Lesage traces the path that's led her to "a new social use for bookmarks or favorites, previously accumulated on individual web browser software," which isn't exactly "participating in a new kind of community," though, of course, there's nothing wrong with that. "My own process of exploring the Internet, especially the social web, has made clear just how located we are historically in our own time and place as learners, and thus also as teachers."

And finally, a "last word" from editors Chuck Kleinhans, John Hess and Julia Lesage: "Today the US has lost strategic focus, pissed away international prestige and credibility, and crippled its ability to respond militarily in the future, while increasing debt, further wrenching trade imbalance, and compromising the domestic economy. With the recent shift in US public opinion, evidenced in the November 2006 Congressional elections, and the subsequent ramping up of US media skepticism regarding the Bush agenda, there seems to be a new terrain for thinking about popular political films." And, as they explain, realism, too.

Posted by dwhudson at April 24, 2007 8:54 AM