Guest post by Elliot J. Reichert. Ai Weiwei is perhaps one of the most famous—or infamous—living artists. Known internationally for his provocative and politically charged artworks and films, Ai has lived in exile since the lifting of a ban on his travel by the Chinese government in 2015. The Fake Case, a 2013 documentary by… Read more »
Chinese cinema has produced a lot of great directors. The long list includes internationally respected artists such as Xei Fei, Wong Kar-Wai, and Shu Shuen Tong. These wonderful directors are associated with what Americans might call the arthouse tradition. But China also has a great tradition of action films that focus on martial artists. Many… Read more »
Auteur theory is a complicated subject to broach, seeing that the debate to place a definition on the term “auteur”has been ongoing since the 1940s. Everyone has their own variation and take on the term that gets assigned to monolithic and specific directors. To me, however, an auteur is a director with a singular and… Read more »
“To those who remember fondly” — Wong Kar Wai From the short film: Huay Yang De Nian Hua Nostalgia feels inherent to period pieces. Filmmakers tend to try to capture different angles on this fleeting remembrance of the past. The angle could be autobiographical, in the way Spike Lee’s 1994 film Crooklyn, set in 1973, recalls… Read more »
Guest contributor Nathaniel Sexton explores ways in which Chinese filmmaker Xie Fei plays with and disrupts our ideas of audience in Black Snow. [Warning: contains spoilers.] “Above all, the Chinese artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him. He expresses his awareness of being watched. This immediately removes one of… Read more »