Ethical Code

Università di Venezia

Université Jean Moulin – Lyon 3

Corrado Neri is Associate Professor at the Jean Moulin University, Lyon 3. He has conducted extensive research on Chinese cinema in Beijing and Taipei and published many articles on books and magazine (in English, French and Italian). His book Tsai Ming-liang on the Taiwanese film director appeared in 2004. Ages Inquiets. Cinémas chinois: une représentation de la jeunesse, was printed in 2009. His third book, Retro Taiwan, has recently been published for l’Asiathèque (2016). He co-edited (with Kirstie Gormley) a bilingual (French/English) book on Taiwan cinema (Taiwan Cinema/Le Cinéma taiwanais, 2009), and Global Fences (with Florent Villard, 2011).

Università di Udine

Federico Zecca insegna Teoria e critica dei media e Semiologia degli audiovisivi all’Università di Udine. È caporedattore di Cinergie: Il cinema e le altre arti, redattore di Cinéma & CIE: International Film Studies Journal (Carocci), e componente dell’Editorial Board di Porn Studies (Routledge). È membro del Comitato Scientifico del FilmForum di Udine/Gorizia. Dal 2010 coordina la sezione dedicata ai porn studies della MAGIS – Gorizia International Film Studies Spring School. I suoi principali interessi di ricerca vertono sull’intertestualità e l’intermedialità filmica, la teoria dell’adattamento e della traduzione, la convergenza dei media, il cinema popolare italiano, i gender studies e gli studi sulla pornografia. Tra le sue ultime pubblicazioni: le curatele Il cinema della convergenza. Industria, racconto, pubblico (2012) e Porn After Porn: Contemporary Alternative Pornographies (2014, con Enrico Biasin e Giovanna Maina); e la monografia Cinema e intermedialità. Modelli di traduzione (2013). 

School of Professional Education and Executive Development, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Man-tat Terence Leung received his Ph.D. degree in Humanities and Creative Writing in 2014. Several of his essays on various subjects, including Kieslowski’s late ethical-political cinema and Godard-Gorin’s post-1968 militant films, have been published in internationally refereed edited volumes. His paper on Milan Kundera’s historical novel Life Is Elsewhere in relation to the Prague/Paris 1968 was published by peer-reviewed journal Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas (15.1, 2017). He is now preparing his first monograph, tentatively entitled The Dialectics of Two Refusals: French May ’68 and Its Chinese Nexus in Western Cinematic Imaginaries. Leung is currently a full-time lecturer in General Education (specializing in Film, Cultural and Chinese Studies) in the School of Professional Education and Executive Development (SPEED) at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

With reference to the historical trajectory of modern French cinema, the Maoleaning period (1967-1972) of Jean-Luc Godard under the collective spell of the Groupe Dziga Vertov (Dziga Vertov group, or DVG in short) was often a controversial and divisive subject among his critics and commentators following the political watershed of French May ‘68. This essay will take two of the most provocative and representative features made during the DVG period, Vent d’est (Wind from the East, 1969) and Tout va bien (All’s Well, 1972), as the major point of departure to critically re-examine how Godard and his major film collaborator, Jean-Pierre Gorin, endeavored to revolutionize the bourgeois traditions of Western narrative cinema with the radical introduction of Maoist discourses and dialectics shortly after the wake of May 1968. Also, by reorienting some lingering epistemological and ethical questions of post-68 French Maoism back into the predominant symbolic fabric of contemporary neoliberal consensus, the aim of this paper is to re-examine the profound dialectical nexus between Western political cinema and the legacies of global 1968 to illuminate the current predicaments of leftist utopianism in our midst.

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier is an art historian and associate researcher at the Centre for Historical Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. She received her master’s degree in art history from the Université La Sorbonne – Paris I in 1997, and her Ph.D from the Erasmus University in 2016. The subject of her doctoral dissertation was ‘Images of Khmer Rouge atrocities, 1975-2015’. She also works as curator and has organized exhibitions and projects in Israel, France, Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Thailand. She was the recipient of a Leon Milman Memorial Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC (2012), a fellowship at the Stone Summer Theory Institute at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois (2010), and was researcher in the Theory Department at Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands (2005-2006).

By 1978, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia engaged in a limited ‘open door’ policy under the pressure of its Chinese ally. The country had been carefully sealed off thus far, but in need of a more positive image abroad, the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea invited journalists from friendly countries and representatives from Western Maoist organisations. These visitors filmed their journey in Cambodia in order to show the international public what the Khmer Rouge had achieved economically and socially within a few years. The paper examines two of the resulting productions: Kampučija 1978 (Kampuchea 1978, 1978) by Yugoslav film director Nikola Vitorović and Democratic Kampuchea (Demokratiska Kampuchea, 1978) by Swedish writer Jan Myrdal. Drawing on anthropologist Faye Ginsburg’s application of the notion of ‘parallax effect’, it compares the two works with Khmer Rouge propaganda movies. It proposes to investigate through an ethnographic lens the articulation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ performed in these films, and the way ideology both shaped and challenged forms of solidarity and identification. It argues that the ‘parallax effect’ enables a more nuanced view of the filmic representation of Democratic Kampuchea in the years 1975-1978, far from the monolithic perception people may have of it today

University of St Andrews

Sanghita Sen is a researcher and tutor in the Department of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She has a doctoral degree from Jadavpur University for her research on nationalism(s) and popular aesthetics in post-1992 Indian advertisements. Between 1997 and 2015 she worked in India as an Associate Professor of English. She is currently pursuing her second doctoral project, researching the representation of the Naxal Movement in Indian cinema. Her research interests include Marxism, feminism, post-colonialism, popular cinema and culture, political cinema and documentaries. She curates film programmes and writes English subtitles for films in Bengali and Hindi languages.

This article investigates why and how the Naxal movement, a Marxist-Leninist- Maoist armed revolutionary movement which emerged in May 1967 in India, has been repeatedly addressed, adapted, and accommodated in Indian cinema. As an organized political movement with specific manifesto and vision of the nature of the state, the Naxal movement attempted to disrupt and dismantle the quasi-feudal Indian social structure and an oppressive Indian state that functioned still under colonial administrative regulation, as caretaker of interests of the powerful classes. In this article, I argue that the Naxal movement helped Indian cinema to map out the history and internal architecture of political dissent in post-independence India and construct a counter-nationalist discourse. The paper aims to evaluate how the Naxal Movement serves as a resource to represent the critique of the neo-liberal policies of the Indian State in the postmillennial Bollywood films. It aims to analyse selected films that deal with the Naxal/Maoist movements in India as a counter historiography.

Appalachian State University

Wendy Xie is an Associate Professor of Chinese at Appalachian State University. She received her doctorate in Comparative and Chinese Literature from Yale University in 2010. At Appalachian State University, she teaches Chinese language, cinema and literature courses. Her recent publications include ‘Japanese Idols in Trans-Cultural Reception: the Case of AKB48’ (in Visual Past, 2.1, 2015). Her current research interests include issues of emotion and intimacy in Chinese and Japanese popular culture, especially in operatic and cinematic narratives, in relation to the socio-political history of twentieth-century China and Japan. She is currently completing a book project on veteran Hong Kong director Li Han-hsiang. She is also collaborating with Dr. Xiaofei Tu on another book project entitled J-Pop Goes to China: AKB48, SNH48 and Nationalism.

Tsui Hark’s 2014 film The Taking of Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu weihushan) is the latest in a long line of adaptations of Qu Bo’s historical novel Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xueyuan), one of the most canonized and adapted revolutionary works in the 1950s and 1960s. This essay seeks to trace the success of Tsui’s remake to its melodramatic reconfiguration of history, memory and nostalgia. Specifically, it investigates the ways in which the film undercuts the reverential Maoist revolutionary discourse inherent in the original source material by modeling on the wuxia (martial arts) paradigm. In addition, the essay argues that by bookending the 1946 war story with a 2015-set prologue and epilogue, Tsui’s adaptation presents the audiences with an exquisite example of how memory invokes and re-presents the past, and ultimately points to the fictionality of the reconstructed past. Finally, the essay focuses on the film’s self-consciously simulacral status, and argues that Tsui is motivated by a desire to address the prevailing social climate of excessive commercialization and moral decay in contemporary China, and his retelling of a revolutionary tale is deeply implicated in nostalgic longing for idealism of a bygone era.

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 / IRCAV

Kristian Feigelson is a sociologist and Professor at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 where he teaches film studies. He has contributed to various journals and has published numerous works on Russian cinema and Soviet Union film culture. He co-edited Bollywood: Industrie des images (a special issue of Théorème, 16, 2012). His recent publications include La Fabrique filmique: Métiers et professions (Armand Colin, 2011).

Unlike written production, which was plentiful, only a few French fictional films about the Cultural Revolution were produced between 1966 and 1976. Nevertheless, it was the object of contradictory discourse in two films which reveal the cultural cleavages in 1960s and 1970s French society. Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and René Viénet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (La Dialectique peut-elle casser les briques?, 1973) confront Maoist and anti-Maoist perspectives, as seen from France. Simon Leys’s seminal book Chinese Shadows and its problematization of the achievements of the Cultural Revolution serve here as a point of departure for an analysis of the various debates of this period. This article will also take into consideration a few contemporary Chinese films that form a sort of counterpoint to the French fiction films of the 1960s and 1970s. Wang Bing’s The Ditch (Jiabiangou, 2010), for instance, unveils the consequences of the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960).

University of Washington

Yomi Braester is Byron and Alice Lockwood Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media at the University of Washington in Seattle, as well as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Beijing Film Academy. He is also the co-editor of Journal of Chinese Cinemas. Among his books are Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract (Duke University Press, 2010), which won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize. Among his current book projects is Cinephilia Besieged: Viewing Communities and the Ethics of the Image in the People’s Republic of China, which is supported by a Guggenheim fellowship.

The essay examines post-Maoist cinema by looking at two interrelated issues: the portrayal of sexuality and cinephilia during the Maoist period. Sexual urges are inextricable from post-Maoist cinema; in particular, the connection between eros and revolution serves to criticize Maoism from within. Another common trait is the long shadow cast by films made in the Maoist period. Whether by explicit reference to movie-going in the diegesis or through allusions understood by those familiar with Maoist oldies, post-Maoist cinema tends to be highly cinephilic. The onscreen reemergence of cinephilia – often in conjunction with the eruption of youthful libido – is no low-stakes game; rather, it enables a critical view of Maoism. This essay focuses on The Dreamers (The Dreamers - I sognatori, Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003) through a diachronic and synchronic lens, placing the film side by side with other movies – the historical precedent La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) and the roughly contemporary Chinese film In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi, Jiang Wen, 1994).

Leiden University / University of Copenhagen

Pepita Hesselberth is Assistant Professor in Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University, and research fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests revolve around questions concerning the production of subjectivity and the fabric of the social within our increasingly global, networked, and media-saturated society. She is the author of Cinematic Chonotopes (Bloomsbury, 2014), and the editor of Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media (Bloomsbury, 2016, together with Maria Poulaki) and Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines (Brill, 2018). She is currently working on her project on Disconnectivity in the Digital Age, for which she received a two-year fellowship from the Danish Council for Independent Research (2015-2018).

This essay picks up on the invitation extended by the sessions on ‘Media Archeology: Network(s)’ at FilmForum 2017 to engage, with some political urgency, in ‘an archaeological excavation of the post-Fordist, post-industrial and global emergence of the Network(s).’ In a time and age in which the network, to speak with Galloway and Thacker, ‘has emerged as a dominant form describing the nature of control today, as well as resistance to it’1 such a historicizing move seems all the more important, not just for the sake of historical depth, but also, in particular, in our attempts to refine our understanding of the present-day situation. Taking up their invitation and yet giving it a somewhat different twist, in this paper, I will appraise a genealogy of what could be seen as the inverse of the network, or the idea of networked connectivity, which, I argue, in the last decade has manifested itself most clearly in the desire to disconnect. Drawing a link between the current preoccupation with digital detoxing and anti-television movement of the 1980s onwards, I will reflect on the relevance of doing such a historicizing comparative analysis.

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, Italy

University of Stirling

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

IULM