FH FNL 2

Hong Kong compared to Hollywood of the studio era: Similarities

• A commercial cinema (no state funding)

• Fueled by immigrant energy

• Massive studios

• Vertical integration

• Large export market

• Genre- and star-based cinema

• Mass-produced films that are also artful

Hong Kong compared to Hollywood of the studio era: Differences

• Not as concerned about realism and plausibility

• Not as concerned with emotional restraint

• More grotesque and vulgar

The 1960s: Shaw Brothers Studios

-Giant Movietown studio complex

-Pioneered color and wide-screen production

-Revitalized the wuxia pian (martial-arts film)

King Hu and the revision of the martial arts film (wuxia pian)

-Researched costumes and settings

-Used storyboards

-Fight sequences designed as dances

-Rapid editing (as little as 8 frames)

-Strong female characters

Tsui Hark and Film Workshop

-“The Steven Spielberg of Hong Kong”

-A revamping of popular genres

John Woo and the “hero” film

-Stylized gunplay

-Romanticized characters with strong code of ethics

Filming “time” in Chungking Express

-Shooting at 8 to 12 frames per second, then stretch printing to 24

-Blurring and pulsing

Action that is clearer and more expressive

• Thoughtful alternation between long shots, medium shots, and close-ups for purposes of clarity and expressiveness

• Match-on-action editing

• Overlapping editing

• Pause/burst/pause rhythm (swift attack, abrupt rest)

• Moments of slow motion

• Formulaic sound effects that emphasize every movement

Mobile projection units

Mobile projection units designed to reach the 80% of the population that lives in rural districts

Jiang Qing

-Wife of Mao Zedong

-All foreign films and pre-1966 films banned

-No new films released between 1966 and 1969

The ”revolutionary model performance film”

The only type of film produced between 1970 and 1972

Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy

One of the most viewed films of all time (1970)

Vietnam

-Focus on local cultures and landscape

-Influence of European art cinema

Yellow Earth

-Visually and narratively, a break with socialist realist and popular cinema conventions

-Favoring nuance and ambiguity over propaganda

Fifth-Generation Chinese Cinema

-Drew on models of global art cinema

-Indirect storytelling, symbolic imagery, psychologically complex characters, ambiguity

-Emphasis on the image

-Exploration of Chinese history from a non-propagandist perspective

Sixth-Generation Chinese Cinema

-Group of filmmakers that emerges in the 1990s

-Independent filmmakers, many of whom did NOT go to the Film Academy

-Often made “unofficial” or “illegal films”

-Filming experiences le: out of official Chinese cinema

• Focus on contemporary urban life and young people

• Focus on local iden>>es and marginalized people

Main melody films

-The few films s+ll directly produced by studios tended to be “main melody” “major theme” films (Zhuxuanlü dianying)

-In 1987, Deng Xiaoping declared that art should “invigorate national spirit and national pride.”

-Propaganda films that pay tribute to the Chinese na8on and the party

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

-Co-starring Micheal Yeoh and Chow Yun-fat

-Budget $17 million

-Made $213 million

-Highest grossing foreign-language film in United States history

-Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, United States coproduction

Hero

Modeled after the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Very Successful

Pro-PRC themes

Proved that domestically produced genre pictures could compete with Hollywood

“Main-melody” blockbusters

-Often made by Hong Kong directors

-The Battle at Lake Changjin (Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark & Dante Lam)

The current market share for U.S. films in China

5%, down from a peak of 30%

Taiwanese-dialect films

-Between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s, more than 1,000 low-budget Taiwanese-dialect films produced, compared to only around 400 Mandarin-language films

-All privately produced

-Most are now lost

The conditions that made a “new cinema” possible

1. The emergence of an educated, affluent audience

2. An economically struggling film industry

3. Government support

4. Political reform

4. Political reform

-A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hisen, 1989)

-The “February 28 Incident” of 1947

Characteristics of the Taiwan New Cinema

• Location shooting

• Often using nonprofessional actors

• Loose, episodic narratives

• Dedramaticized situations

• Elliptical storytelling

• Subordination of characters to a large-scale visual field

Tsai Ming-Liang

-Second-generation of the New Taiwan cinema

-Roots in experimental theater and performance art

-”Slow cinema”

-Comedy and eroticism

-Includes queer themes

Optical printer

-A device on which a film can be rephotographed one frame at a time.

-Images can be sped up, slowed down, reframed, alternately lit and colored, or composited with other images.

-Originally used for Hollywood special effects, but adopted by experimental filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s

Machinima

-”machine” + “cinema”

-Diary of a Camper

-Make Love, Not Warcraft

Stranger Than Paradise

-Four years after the failure of Heaven’s Gate

-Signaled the start of the American “Independent Film Movement”

The black filmmaking boom of the early 1990s:

“hood films,” including Juice, Ernest R. Dickerson, that focus on male characters, urban setting, and gang violence

Pastiche

An artistic work that imitates the style of another work, artist, or period

Stranger Than Paradise

-Four years after the failure of Heaven’s Gate

-Signaled the start of the American “Independent Film Movement”

Stranger Than Paradise: Money

-Shot with a budget of $110,000

-A surprise hit, making $2 million in its American release

sex, lies, and videotape

-Earns more than $100 million worldwide against a budget of $1.2million

-Not “art cinema,” but the reinvigoration of recognizable genres

Why the boom in independent cinema in the 1980s and 1990s?

1. New labor policies

2. The theater construction boom

3. New venues for independent work

4. Financing from “ancillary markets” (non-theatrical markets)

“Indie” cinema

When the media talks about “indie” cinema, what do they have in mind?

• Characters over narrative

• Movie-consciousness

• Play with narrative form

• Anti-Hollywood

1. A reappropriation of “negative” images

Flaunting “negative” images in order to critique the idea that there are “correct” lesbian or gay identities and behaviors

2. Hybrid forms and reflexivity

Wanting views to think about the nature of representation, to think about how stories are told

3. A challenge to middle-class, white images

Slumdog Millionaire

-Cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle

-First time the Academy Award for Best Cinematography goes to a film that was shot digitally

EuropaCorp

-Focus on genre-based franchises produced and co-written by Luc Besson

-These also turned into television shows

Yeelen [Brightness]

Wins the Jury Award at the Cannes Film Festival, the first major film festival award for a sub-Saharan African film

“Nollywood”

-Up until 2004, not shown in movie theaters, since there were no movie

theaters

-People watched them at home or in market “theaters” on TV screens

“New Nollywood”

-Films shot with larger budgets and higher production values, designed to be shown in theaters or on streaming services

-Direct-to-video films still being made and are still very popular

Sholay

-The film that transformed Indian popular cinema

-“Curry Western”,

“masala film”

-Emerges as the primary form of commercial Indian cinema in the 1970s

-Indian films that blend several genres into a single film, comparable to a spice blend

-Action, slapstick comedy, romance, melodrama, song-and-dance

“Parallel cinema”

Starting in the 1970s, an art cinema alternative to commercial Indian cinema