Sinophone Cinemas considers a range of multilingual, multidialect and multi-accented cinemas produced in Chinese-language locations outside mainland China. It showcases new screen cultures from Britain, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia.

Sinophone Cinemas considers a range of multilingual, multidialect and multi-accented cinemas produced in Chinese-language locations outside mainland China. It showcases new screen cultures from Britain, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia.

Cinema archives memories, conserves the past, and rewrites histories. As much as the Sinophone embodies differences, contemporary Sinophone cinemas in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China invest various images of contested politics in order to assert different histories and self-consciousness. As such, Sinophone cinemas and image production function as archives, with the capability of reinterpreting the multiple dimensions of past and present. The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture investigates Sinophone films and art projects that express this desire for archiving and reconfiguring the past. Comprising ten chapters, this book brings together contributors from an array of disciplines - artists, filmmakers, curators, film critics, and literary scholars - to grapple with the creative ambiguities of Sinophone cinemas and image culture. Blending eclectic methods of scholarly research, knowledge-making, and art-making into a new discursive space, the chapters address the diverse complexities of the cinematic culture and image production in Sinitic language regions. This book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of film studies, China studies, East Asian studies, Taiwan studies, and Sinophone studies, as well as professionals who work in the film industry.

This book looks closely at some of the most significant films within the field of queer Sinophone cinema. Examining queerness in films produced in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the book merges the Sinophone with the queer, theorising both concepts as local and global, homebound as well as diasporic. Queerness in this book not only problematises the positioning of non-normative desires within the Sinophone; it also challenges Eurocentric critical perspectives on filmic representation that are tied to the idea of the binary between East/West. New Queer Sinophone Cinema will appeal to scholars in Chinese and film studies, as well as to anyone who is interested in queer Chinese cinema.

"Featuring rare interviews and sophisticated analysis, this book sheds light on Hou's narrative innovations and aesthetic triumphs while, along the way, unlocking some of the mysteries lurking behind one of the greatest bodies of cinematic work ever produced." -MICHAEL BERRY, University of California Santa Barbara "Lupke's book provides comprehensive coverage, detailed contextualization, and insightful analysis from Hou's earliest works to his most recent accomplishment. The narrative is particularly compelling because it weaves cultural and social contexts and filmic texts together, and it brings various formal elements (image, editing, language, music) to bear upon one another. The book also includes careful comparison with another East Asian auteur Ozu Yasujirô. The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien is a significant addition." -GUO-JUIN, HONG, Duke University "Lupke's comprehensive and original study excavates the literary inspirations of Hou's filmmaking, showing how Wu Nianzhen, Shen Congwen, and especially Zhu Tianwen shape his philosophy and aesthetic. In Lupke's convincing account, the anti-filial behaviors of their characters, which have attracted little critical attention, are the key to understanding their shared concern for the visible dissolution of the family in the modern world. In addition to its lucid analysis, this book contextualizes the filmmaking history of Hou in ways that illustrate the cultural and political significance of studying Taiwan Cinema in a global context." -HSIU-CHUANG DEPPMAN, Oberlin College "Serving both as an excellent comprehensive introduction to the filmmaker and as a series of in-depth readings, this informative, engaging, and insightful book covers the full range of Hou's work. Writing clearly and elegantly, Lupke perceptively relates Hou's films to both literary and cinematic antecedents. Aside from Hou's well-known connection to Taiwan's 'native soil' literature, Lupke highlights as well the filmmaker's debt to earlier mainland Chinese authors such as Shen Congwen, Zhang Ailing, and Hu Lancheng. Hou's singular contribution to film aesthetics, summarized as 'stasis within motion,' comes through vividly and convincingly." -JASON MCGRATH, University of Minnesota *This book includes images.

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.

The Sinophone framework emphasises the diversity of Chinese-speaking communities and cultures, and seeks to move beyond a binary model of China and the West. Indeed, this strikingly resembles attempts within the queer studies movement to challenge the dimorphisms of sex and gender. Bringing together two areas of study that tend to be marginalised within their home disciplines Queer Sinophone Cultures innovatively advances both Sinophone studies and queer studies. It not only examines film and literature from Mainland China but expands its scope to encompass the underrepresented ‘Sinophone’ world at large (in this case Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and beyond). Further, where queer studies in the U.S., Europe, and Australia often ignore non-Western cultural phenomena, this book focuses squarely on Sinophone queerness, providing fresh critical analyses of a range of topics from works by the famous director Tsai Ming-Liang to the history of same-sex soft-core pornography made by the renowned Shaw Brothers Studios. By instigating a dialogue between Sinophone studies and queer studies, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars of modern and contemporary China studies, particularly to those interested in film, literature, media, and performance. It will also be of great interest to those interested in queer studies more broadly.