Organizer: Tze-Lan D. Sang, Michigan State University, USA Discussant: Lingzhen Wang, Brown University, USA The development of Chinese cinema has long been intertwined with other types of media. However, the cross-fertilization and multi-directional adaptation between film and other forms of narrative have been underappreciated. This panel will examine the relationship between word and image in a diversity of practices in Chinese film adaptation. We will focus on film adaptations of fiction, histories, biographies, and other narrative genres, while also touching on the adaptation of films for other media. Our goal is to present a number of strategies for exploring Chinese film adaptation, shedding light on such issues as gender, nationalism, colonialism, socialism, and adaptation theory through comparative case studies.
Nicole Huang looks at the adaption of film soundtracks for the radio in the PRC during the 1970s to examine radio’s role in promoting socialist visual culture and the encoded ideology. Xiaoquan Zhang reads two early 1980s film adaptations as examples of new Chinese cinema’s negotiation with state discourse in the immediate post-Mao era. Alexander Huang looks at a recent PRC film about Zheng Chenggong to illuminate how nationalism and colonialism are projected differently in various narratives about the historical figure. Hsiu-chuang Deppman compares the different feminist tactics in Eileen Chang’s famous short story and Ann Hui’s adaptation. Rae Chang and Adam Tow discuss reimagining the life of Qiu Jin on screen. Tze-lan Sang analyzes the tension between word and image in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s transmedial adaptation. Finally, Lingzhen Wang will offer remarks connecting the papers, raise issues and questions, and moderate discussion.
This paper reexamines two critically-acclaimed Chinese films of the early 1980s, namely, My Memories of Old Beijing (Chengnan jiushi, 1982) directed by Wu Yigong (b. 1938) and Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984) by Chen Kaige (b. 1952), from the perspective of politicized, personalized, and gendered adaptation. By comparing the originals and the adapted films and examining the authorial background and production context of both the literary works and the adapted films, I attempt to show that in the early 1980s filmmakers of New Chinese Cinema strove to create an art form which integrates artistic endeavors with personal experiences and critical reflections upon Chinese culture and history. However, filmmakers of the 1980s had to deal with state censorship in the meanwhile and needed to compromise occasionally. Therefore, their politicized adaptation should be partially seen as their negotiation with the state discourse. On the other hand, I examine the toned-down gendered voice in the film adaptations through the perspective of male ventriloquism, which also illuminates the multivalence of film adaptation in early-1980s China.
What does the legend of Zheng Chenggong mean to today's China and Taiwan? How does a 2000 mainland Chinese film about seventeenth-century China and Dutch Formosa--with a mainland Chinese/Hong Kong/Japanese cast--complicate the questions of belonging and betrayal? Taiwan's cultural identities have always been politically charged, in 1661 as in the new millennium, and film and literature have played different roles in censoring and projecting the history of colonialism and nationalism.
One of the most important legends to emerge from the history of competing visions of Taiwanese identity is Zheng Chenggong (aka Koxinga, Lord of the Imperial Surname, or Imperial Name Keeper, 1624-1662). He has alternately been cast as a Han Chinese martyr to a lost cause to oppose the "barbaric" Manchurian rulers, a defender of Ming China's last frontier against Dutch colonizers, a deity in Taiwan (“Sage King Who Settled Taiwan”), and an iconic "national" hero (minzu yingxiong) to all sides in Chinese and Taiwanese politics--though to each for a very different reason. Zheng looms large in the cultural politics of nationalism both in the past and present. The son to a Japanese mother and Chinese father, Zheng (born in Kyushu, Japan) embodies Taiwan's multicultural roots. His posthumous reputation has given birth to numerous narratives, all of which informed by various forms of nationalism.
Wu Ziniu'sThe Sino-Dutch War 1661 (aka Hero Zheng Chenggong, 2000) is the latest cinematic period drama appropriating Zheng's life and achievements—embellished with fictive details. The present paper examines Zheng as a historical figure and the film’s appropriative strategies, focusing on the identity politics and the place of Taiwan in the cinematic re-imagination of the legend.
Both Eileen Chang (1920-1995) and Ann Hui (b. 1947) have successfully transformed lived Hong Kong experience into bestsellers and box office hits. Their mixture of Chinese upbringing and British education endowed them with unique abilities to understand and express the city’s complex histories of race, sex, class, and political uncertainty. Hui made her connection to Chang directly visible when she adapted the writer’s “Love in a Fallen City” (1943) into a 1984 movie with the same title and "Eighteen Springs" (1951) into a 1997 film. These adaptations have drawn critical attention for their representations of women and the city.
Some scholars may have been tempted to construe Chang and Hui as trailblazers of a Chinese/Hong Kong feminism championing gender equality, but if we assume too readily that they are idealistic or progressive artists we miss much of their artistry. In their versions of “Love in a Fallen City,” for example, they explore and empathize with the reasons why women professionalize a traditional female desire for marriage to ensure social mobility. In this essay I show how in different ways Chang and Hui construct and manipulate allegorical parallels between the colonial city and the domestic woman -- suppressed subjects that must master the art of masquerade for self-preservation -- and turn their art to the purposes of pragmatic humanism.
This project explores the life of the early 20th-century Chinese revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin in the form of a biographical documentary film. A key figure in China's nascent feminist and nationalist movements, Qiu Jin (1875-1907) attempted an armed uprising against the Qing Dynasty, for which she was arrested and executed. She became the first female martyr for the republican revolutionary cause and is celebrated as a national heroine in China today.
While primarily recognized for her role as a nationalist martyr, Qiu Jin was also a classically trained writer who composed a large body of literary work including several hundred poems, essays, speeches, letters to family and friends, and an autobiographical novel. These works played an integral part in shaping her identity as a women's rights activist and political revolutionary. Blurring the lines between male and female, East and West, tradition and modernity, they constructed a fascinating self-image that lends itself to visual exploration through the medium of film. We will discuss the making of the documentary and our creative process as filmmakers, addressing the challenges of transforming Qiu Jin's literary works to the screen. We use a selection of her writings as the foundation for dramatic recreation scenes performed by actors in period dress and settings. Incorporating Qiu Jin's own words, we aim to create a more intimate portrait of the subject and provide deeper insight into her personal life. The presentation will be illustrated by selected clips from the film.
It is commonly known that Taiwan’s premier film director Hou Hsiao-hsien and the acclaimed writer Zhu Tianwen are long-time collaborators. Zhu has been given credit for being the scriptwriter for most of Hou’s films, from Boys from Fenggui (1983) to Red Balloon (2007). However, she has repeatedly claimed in essays and interviews that Hou’s working method on the set involves a tremendous amount of improvisation, and that his finished films often depart significantly from her screenplays. A close examination reveals that many of Zhu’s screenplays function less as shooting scripts for the films than as invocations of fictional worlds that serve as source texts for Hou’s rather free and spontaneous adaptation. Also present here is Hou’s auto-adaptation, as some of the screenplays are in fact the result of long conversations that occurred between Hou and Zhu during the planning and conception stage of the projects. In short, the relationship between Zhu’s screenplays and Hou’s films points to some fundamental issues in transmedial adaptation, such as the primacy of the word vs. the primacy of the image, different narrative logics, questions of authorship, and so forth. The present paper will read the complex collaboration, mutual adaptation, and competition between Zhu the screenwriter and Hou the director by focusing on some of Hou’s canonical films as well as the relatively recent Three Times (2005).
This project explores the life of the early 20th-century Chinese revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin in the form of a biographical documentary film. A key figure in China's nascent feminist and nationalist movements, Qiu Jin (1875-1907) attempted an armed uprising against the Qing Dynasty, for which she was arrested and executed. She became the first female martyr for the republican revolutionary cause and is celebrated as a national heroine in China today.
While primarily recognized for her role as a nationalist martyr, Qiu Jin was also a classically trained writer who composed a large body of literary work including several hundred poems, essays, speeches, letters to family and friends, and an autobiographical novel. These works played an integral part in shaping her identity as a women's rights activist and political revolutionary. Blurring the lines between male and female, East and West, tradition and modernity, they constructed a fascinating self-image that lends itself to visual exploration through the medium of film. We will discuss the making of the documentary and our creative process as filmmakers, addressing the challenges of transforming Qiu Jin's literary works to the screen. We use a selection of her writings as the foundation for dramatic recreation scenes performed by actors in period dress and settings. Incorporating Qiu Jin's own words, we aim to create a more intimate portrait of the subject and provide deeper insight into her personal life. The presentation will be illustrated by selected clips from the film.
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