Month: February 2024

Speaker:
Dr. Serkan Şavk
Department of Cinema and Digital Media, Izmir University of Economics

Moderator:
Dr. Peter J. Cobb
Assistant Professor, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Turkey’s domestic film industry Yeşilçam, produced nearly 6000 films from the late 1940s to the late 1980s. Most of these films had androcentric narratives depicting women characters as passive and silent subjects. In this seminar, we start by introducing Yeşilçam and the place of women in this industry both behind the camera and within the films’ narratives. We will then introduce DOYeşilçam, an ongoing interdisciplinary research project about Yeşilçam history. Finally, we will focus on a case study of about 20 select woman’s films from the 1980s either directed by Mr Atıf Yılmaz (1925-2006) or Ms Bilge Olgaç (1940-1994). Our goal is to compare how Bilge Olgaç, as a female director, and Atıf Yılmaz, as a male director, include woman characters in their films. With this goal in mind, we apply a data-driven approach, measuring and analyzing how woman characters are shot and how much they talk.

Serkan Şavk received his PhD in 2014 from Hacettepe University’s Department of History. He pursued post-doctoral studies at Princeton University with a focus on digital history (2016–2017). His research interests cover a variety of subjects, including the history of Turkish cinema, Digital Humanities, and image-space-culture relations in a historical context. He’s currently the principal investigator of two research projects: DOYeşilçam A data-driven, digital and open approach to the history of Turkish cinema: Examining stylistic features of Yeşilçam films (funded by TÜBİTAK The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) and Animals as Actors, Vehicles, and Props: Metazoa in the History of Turkish Cinema (funded by Izmir University of Economics). He is the co-editor of the book Imaginaries Out of Place: Cinema, Transnationalism and Turkey (with Gökçen Karanfil, Cambridge Scholars, 2013).

This event is co-organised by Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, and the BA in Humanities and Digital Technologies (BaHDT) Programme, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.

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Speaker:
Tomoyuki Sasaki, Professor of Japanese Studies, College of William & Mary

Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, February 26, 2024
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (9:00 pm/Feb 25, Virginia/U.S.A.)
Venue: On Zoom

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, Japan experienced an unprecedented level of economic growth, transforming itself from a war-devastated country to a global economic power. Our image of postwar Japan has been shaped by this event, and we tend to see its history as a story of great national success. In his newly released book Cinema of Discontent: Representations of Japan’s High-Speed Growth, Dr. Sasaki challenges this view and details the tensions generated by massive and intense capitalist development through analyses of popular cinema produced during the era of high-speed growth. In this talk, he focuses on industrial spy films made by Daiei during the 1960s, examining how the films of this genre in general, and Black Weapon (Kuro no kyōki) specifically, represented popular anxiety about mushrooming corporate society and its increasing control over working people’s everyday lives.

Tomoyuki Sasaki is a Professor of Japanese studies at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. He earned his PhD in history from the University of California, San Diego. He has held his current position since 2016. He specializes in history, cultural studies, and film studies. He is especially interested in the issues of high-speed economic growth, inequality, uneven development, democracy, military bases, and their representations in popular culture. He is the author of Cinema of Discontent: Representations of Japan’s High-Speed Growth (SUNY Press, 2022) and Japan’s Postwar Military and Civil Society: Contesting a Better Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). His articles include “Shimizu Elegy: Capital, Patriarchy, and Desire for Freedom in Naruse Mikio’s Yearning (1964)” in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema (2023).

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Speaker:
Mélanie Shi, EHESS (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), Paris

Moderator:
Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, February 22, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

This talk examines the material socialist literary networks during the Cold War via collaborations between communist publishing houses in China and the ex-Soviet bloc and their confluence in 1960s Paris. I discuss the publication of Chinese books and their worldwide diffusion during the 1960s to 1980s, centred on the central publishing house of China, the Foreign Languages Press (FLP, or Presses en Langues Étrangères), which exported books about communist China to non-Chinese readers along with similar state-sanctioned publishing houses in the ex-Soviet bloc. The translation of writers nominated for the Mao Dun and Stalinist prizes circulated in and through Paris, residence of expatriate intellectuals from East Asia, the USSR, and Latin America, and expatriate librairies like Éditeurs Réunis, Le Phénix, Le Point du Jour, and Librairie You Feng promoted the translation and circulation of literature to French where it was then read by European leftists converging in the capital. The texts translated by the Foreign Language Presses promoted the image of a unified revolutionary socialism countering the West based on a network of socialist cosmopolitanism, that converged in Paris despite the pressure of French linguistic assimilation.

Beyond the consequences for Europe, a convenient geographical confluence, I show how the diffusion of socialist literature via Paris connected the Chinese socialists with writers from the Global South through the review Littérature Chinoise, which posited China as an ally to anti-colonial struggles in the ex-Francophone empire and Latin America. While both the FLP and Littérature Chinoise emitted publications directly to other countries, the convergence of intellectuals and expatriate librairies in Paris made it an intermediator between China/Russia and the “Global South.”

Mélanie Shi is pursuing a postgraduate degree at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and previously studied at Columbia University (English/Comparative Literature) for her BA and at Peking University. She has  written about orientalism in the 18th and 19th century European novel and then on the afterlife of “French Theory” via Sino-French literary and semiotic exchanges notably in the literary group Tel Quel’s voyage to Maoist China, and since then has become interested in the “actual China.” She is broadly interested, both literally and historically, in ideas from the 1960s, including Maoism, Lacanian analysis, the relation of expatriation and exophonic writing, and the Latin American left. Her current project examines the Foreign Languages Press (Presse en Langues Étrangères) in China and its role in a network of socialist literary cosmopolitan nodes spanning the USSR, the European left, and the global anti-capitalist anti-imperialist bloc and her ancillary project traces Jacques Derrida’s notions of cosmopolitanism and “geopsychoanalysis.”

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Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, February 19, 2024
Time: 5:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 3.01, 3/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

City of Knowledge is an essay film which examines the 19th century idea of knowledge characterized by the spirit of inclusivity, of making things accessible, of literatures, literary practices, and reading cultures, of open spaces. It traces the transformation of this idea to Knowledge City, a city based on the economy of byte sized information. It tells this story through small narratives from the city of Hyderabad, in the Deccan region of India. It features the work of modernist intellectual Dr. Syed Mohiuddin Qadri Zor of the Deccan. The film was funded through an archival grant from the Asia Art Archive – Shergil Sundaram Foundation.

C. Yamini Krishna works on film history, urban history, and Deccan history. She received her PhD from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, in 2020. She is the recipient of grants from the India Foundation for the Arts (2023), Indian Council of Social Science Research (2023), Asia Art Archive – Shergil Sundaram Foundation (2022), and Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (2022), as well as of the Philip M Taylor Award for best article by a new researcher in media history (2021) and Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship (2017). Her work has been published in Urban History, the Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, South Asia, and South Asian Popular Culture. Her co-edited volume Claims on the City: Situated Narratives of the Urban was published by Lexington Books in 2023. She currently teaches at FLAME University in India. Ilm Ka Shehar first started as a project of archival preservation and took new directions as a film.

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張愛玲與中國寫作傳統

分享嘉賓 Speaker: 王風 教授 Prof. WANG Feng (Peking U)
主持人 Moderator: 黃心村 教授 Prof. Nicole HUANG (HKU)

日期時間 Date & Time: February 7, 2024 (Wed) 16:30-18:00pm
語言 Language: 普通話 Putonghua
地點 Venue: CBA, Chow Yei Ching Building, Main Campus, HKU

摘要 Abstract:
張愛玲小說所汲取的資源，古今中外均有。但就本質而言，仍在中國自身的寫作傳統中生長。而其所偏重，卻在主動承繼作為市民消費品的古典白話小說，以及延續到現代的所謂通俗文學，同時對新文學表現出明顯的排斥。不過其作品形態，無疑還是精英文學，而被納入到新文學的敘事中。就小說類型的角度，她所喜讀的“社會小說”和小報等“雜纂”，是被作為“材料”來吸收。至於其寫作手法，則多取“世情小說”並加變化。尤其對《金瓶梅》、《紅樓夢》、《海上花列傳》有意識的繼承，構成她個人所追認的傳統。同時加上她自己的寫作，可看作某種“私類型”，或暫稱作“世態小說”。

Drawing upon diverse literary resources, from indigenous to foreign literatures at both ancient and modern times, Eileen Chang’s works of fiction were essentially rooted in the native Chinese writing tradition, with an inclination to voluntarily inherit the lineage of classical vernacular novels as a type of consumer goods for citizens as well as the so-called popular literature that stretched into modern times. Although Chang’s works manifested a strong repulsion for the New Literature, they were nonetheless admitted into the narrative of the New Literature due to their unmistakable tone of elite literature. From the perspective of novel genres, the “social novels” and the “miscellaneous compilations” like tabloids, which she personally enjoyed reading, were assimilated as “materials”. When it comes to writing techniques, she borrowed largely from the “secular novels” with certain modifications. In particular, she purposefully followed the examples of The Golden Lotus, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Shanghai Flowers, which thereby constituted the tradition that she personally identified with. Combined with her own writings, it could be considered as a “private genre”, or provisionally referred to as “worldly fiction”.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
王風  福州人，北京大學中文系教授，現代文學教研室主任，北京大學現代中國人文研究所副所長、中國昆劇古琴研究會常務理事。主要研究領域有中國近現代文學、學術史、文化史、古琴史、古琴器等，均有多篇重要論文。出版有《世運推移與文章興替》（北京大學出版社）、《琴學存稿》（重慶出版社）。輯校《廢名集》（全六卷），獲第二屆中國出版政府獎圖書獎。主編《曹禺全集》（全十一卷），協助鄭珉中先生編輯《故宮古琴》。

WANG Feng is Professor of Chinese Literature and Head of the Modern Chinese Literature section of the Department of Chinese, Peking University. He is also the Deputy Director of the Institute of Modern Chinese Humanities at Peking University. He is a long-time executive director of the China Kun Opera and Guqin Research Institute. He has published extensively on early modern and modern Chinese literature, cultural and intellectual history, history of guqin and other classical instruments. His recent works include the award-winning 6-volume Collected Works of Fei Ming, the 11-volume Complete Works of Cao Yu, and the co-edited Forbidden City: Guqin.

This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series |
張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 
Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty
& Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)

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Speaker:
Karen Redrobe, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor in Cinema and Media Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Moderator:
Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Time: 4:45 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: CBC, Chow Yei Ching Building, Main Campus, HKU

Postcolonial feminists have critiqued reparative impulses to “animate” the traces of those trapped in colonial archives using ventriloquizing strategies that seek to give voice or life to those rendered voiceless and fixed by colonial archiving strategies. In this presentation, an excerpt from my forthcoming book Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminism, and the Art of War, I introduce the term “(inter)(in)animation,” a relational use of “animation” operating along a variable scale, to consider non-ventriloquizing animating options available to artists and scholars seeking to grapple with this weaponized place of fabrication and storage. The talk will foreground issues arising at the intersection of movement, “war” (what counts as war?), and the archive within the context of Onyeka Igwe’s 2023 installation A Repertoire of Protest (No Dance, No Palaver).

Karen Redrobe is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism and Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, and editor of Animating Film Theory. She has co-edited three volumes, Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma, On Writing With Photography, with Liliane Weissberg, and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures with Jeff Scheible, which won SCMS’s Best Edited Collection Award. In addition to completing Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminism, and the Art of War, she is collaborating with Kartik Nair on a co-edited volume entitled, Required Readings: Film Scholars on Freedom and Discipline in the Classroom.

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Moderator:
Nicole Huang, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, February 2, 2024
Screening: 4:30 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Languages & Subtitles of the film: Chinese & English
Discussion: 6:10 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Language of the discussion: English
Venue: Rayson Huang Theatre, Main Campus, HKU

In A Life in Six Chapters 蕭軍六記 (2022), documentary filmmaker S. Louisa Wei chronicles the life and works of a charismatic modern literary figure: Xiao Jun. She weaves his own accounts with recollections of his family members and close associates and places a richly layered personal narrative against monumental events that punctuated China’s long and violent twentieth century. The film spans more than 60 years from the 1920s to the 1980s, taking a tour of China’s literary scene, and introducing renowned writers like Lu Xun, Xiao Hong, Hu Feng, Ding Ling, Nie Gannu, Ai Qing, Lao She, and more. The film continues Wei’s long-time effort to preserve, reconstruct, and memorialize individual voices against the powerful forces that constantly threatened to render them silent.

S. Louisa Wei – Director & Writer

S. Louisa Wei is a Professor at the City University of Hong Kong, as well as an award-winning director, screenwriter and author. Her 2014 feature documentary Golden Gate Girls focuses on the life and works of Esther Eng, once honoured as the “first woman director of China.” Her 2019 film Havana Divas follows two female Cantonese opera singers and offers a window into over 170 years of Chinese migration to Cuba. She is currently editing a documentary on musician and singer-songwriter Cui Jian.

This event is co-organized by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, Department of Comparative Literature, and the School of Chinese in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong.

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