In this article, I employ Naficy's expanded concept of accented cinema as an analytical framework to examine two films by Chinese ethnic minority filmmak(2015). The focus is on how these films embody a sense of displacement, vulnerability and confinement through the spatial chronotopes of open, closed and third a central concern with the complexity of belonging by illuminating the multifarious experiences of non-belonging or uncomfortable belonging in various specific contexts. Pema Tseden's work foregrounds the Tibetan experience of confinement and alienation in the face of modernity's encroachment, whereas Zhang L & uuml;'s film explores the diasporic condition and the marginalization experienced by KoreanChinese people in China, offering nuanced understandings of displacement within their respective contexts.
Women working in Indian film industries face many challenges related to equality, freedom and safety. They are not only under-represented in every stage of film production, but also harassed and controlled by patriarchal hegemonic forces. This article examines the possibility of women’s collective action in traditionally masculine working environments of Indian cinema. It focuses on a case study of the Malayalam film industry, the South Indian regional cinema of the state of Kerala, to analyse how the emergence of feminist solidarity can challenge public perceptions of women in the popular medium of cinema. It examines the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), an organization for women workers in Kerala’s film industry, which assisted women in coming forward to discuss gender discrimination and workplace issues in the film industry.
During China's early reform era of the late 1970s and early 1980s, popular film addressed institutional transformation and the effects of change on the lives of ordinary Chinese people. This included transformations in the sphere of education, including the impact of key policies such as the restoration of the university entrance exam. This article investigates the 1986 film Father and Son, a comedy that can be read as a site for dramatizing the ambiguous experience of educational policy change in the 1980s. In Father and Son, while the father in question cherishes the opportunities afforded to his son by new educational policies, the son regards them as a burden and not worthy of serious consideration. This article education in the site of the family home. Specifically, it considers how comedic behaviours, expressions and situations are used to represent tension and differing attitudes towards the prospect of university. By taking a case example of popular Chinese comedy, the article offers insights into cinema's value in bridging official policy and everyday life. It engages with the journal's theme of advancing Asian cinema studies throughout the world, amid asymmetric political equations, by probing debates about cinema's representation of education in a comic way during the early reform era, specifically in the 1980s.
This article compares the Russian writer Anton Chekhov and the Japanese filmmaker Ozu Yasujir & omacr;, highlighting their shared aesthetic philosophy of the everyday. Their similarities extend beyond their treatment of time: both display a profound awareness of their social and historical contexts. By privileging ellipsis, silence and suggestion over central conflict, their works subvert conventional plot structures and cultivate meaning in seemingly trivial gestures or peripheral moments. This philosophy of the everyday transforms absence and understatement into narrative principles, enabling their works to capture the complexities of evolving societies without recourse to spectacle or resolution. Chekhov and Ozu offer formal, thematic and ethical affinities to storytelling that elevates the ordinary into a site of historical and philosophical significance.
Koreyoshi Kurahara’s raucous, disorienting and confounding 1964 film Black Sun challenges viewers’ efforts to find meaning. The film privileges our affective experience over our cognitive ability to make sense of what we see and hear. This article explores the dynamic surrounding meaning and affect in Black Sun through a close reading of three connected foci: jazz, Blackness and salvation. It concludes by linking our affective dislocation as a viewer with the fraught and often incommensurable nature of cross-cultural encounters.
