Download or read book Literati Lenses written by Mia Yinxing Liu and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese cinema has a long history of engagement with China’s art traditions, and literati (wenren) landscape painting has been an enduring source of inspiration. Literati Lenses explores this interplay during the Mao era, a time when cinema, at the forefront of ideological campaigns and purges, was held to strict political guidelines. Through four films—Li Shizhen (1956), Stage Sisters (1964), Early Spring in February (1963), and Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1979)—Mia Liu reveals how landscape offered an alternative text that could operate beyond political constraints and provide a portal for smuggling interesting discourses into the film. While allusions to pictorial traditions associated with a bygone era inevitably took on different meanings in the context of Mao-era cinema, cinematic engagement with literati landscape endowed films with creative and critical space as well as political poignancy. Liu not only identifies how the conventions and aesthetics of traditional literati landscape art were reinvented and mediated on multiple levels in cinema, but also explores how post-1949 Chinese filmmakers configured themselves as modern intellectuals in the spaces forged among the vestiges of the old. In the process, she deepens her analysis, suggesting that landscape be seen as an allegory of human life, a mirror of the age, and a commentary on national affairs.
Download or read book The Literati Lenses Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema written by Yinxing Liu and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation probes into the Chinese cinematic appropriation of landscape aesthetics, particularly the established motifs and themes within the literati art tradition. The period under examination is between the 1950s and late 1970s. While literati art itself has undergone many changes in the twentieth century and has found itself in a delicate situation in the post-1949 political reality, and while its marriage to cinema, an audacious although sometimes crude project undertaken by so many films in the 1930s and 40s and apparently suspended in mainstream cinema during the three decades after 1949, this dissertation demonstrates that its vital signs are still detectable in many of the films and are especially vivid in some of the "problematic" films made during the sporadic "thawing" periods in between political campaigns and crackdowns. This research uncovers this obscure lineage between cinema of this era and traditional landscape art and sheds light on how such allusions to the pictorial traditions and conventions associated with a bygone era took on different significances and even transformative meanings in the contemporary context. In particular, this work examines the representation of iconic loci in traditional landscape art such as Mt. Huang and "jiangnan" in films such as Li Shizhen (1956) and Stage Sisters (1965), and it interrogates the notions of monumentality, history, and memory. The dissertation further investigates the visual motif of a Chinese antiquarian utopia "Peach Blossom Spring" and how that motif is re-appropriated and re-framed in the 1964 film Early Spring in February. This film embodies a complex history of discourses as it is based on a 1929 novella that reflects on the post-1919 psychology of new Chinese intellectuals, and it is a film made in the 1960s that pays homage to the unfinished enlightenment project of the 1920s that was interred by the current political culture. The last chapter is a study of ruins in post Cultural Revolution films such as Legends of Tianyunshan (1979) and how ruins, an interesting visual theme in literati landscape paintings, are introduced in the film to embody the experiences of Chinese intellectuals in the recent history of People's Republic of China. This dissertation contributes to the study of Chinese cinema a fresh look at landscape representation and how landscape can be infused with a narrative to heighten the agenda of the film's political goal and sometimes to offer a quiet and disquieting alteric text that upsets and undermines the apparent message. They can be utopian conjurations, monumental sites, and loci of history, but they can also be heterotopian spaces, sites of memory that whisper another story in the voice of the (un)dead, asking to be exhumed and re-examined.
Download or read book Titian s Portraits through Aretino s Lens written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After classical antiquity, the Italian Renaissance raised the portrait, whether literary or pictorial, to the status of an important art form. Among sixteenth-century Renaissance painters, Titian made his reputation, and much of his living, by portraiture. Titian's portraits were promoted by his friend, Pietro Aretino, an eminent poet and critic, who addressed his letters and sonnets to the same personages whom Titian portrayed. In many of these letters (which often included sonnets), Aretino described both an individual patron and Titian's portrait of that patron, thus stimulating the reciprocal relation between a verbal and pictorial portrait. By investigating this unprecedented historical phenomenon, Luba Freedman elucidates the meaning conveyed by the portrait as an artistic form in Renaissance Italy. Fusing iconographical analysis of the most famous Titian portraits with rhetorical analysis of Aretino's literary legacy as compared to contemporary reactions, Freedman demonstrates that it is due to Titian's many portraits and to Aretino's repeated simultaneous writings about them that the portrait ceased being primarily a social-historical document, preserving the sitter's likeness for posterity. It gradually became, as it is today, a work of art, the artist's invention, which gives its viewer an aesthetic pleasure.
Download or read book Global Cinema Studies in Landscape Allegory written by David Melbye and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-08-19 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Cinema Studies in Landscape Allegory explores the narrative and stylistic approaches to imbuing natural settings in audiovisual media with a psychological dimension – or, in other words, configuring a ‘landscape’ to function beyond its typical role as a backdrop – and the cultural contexts for this aesthetic impulse. Contributors argue that while audiovisual allegory can be understood as inherently avant-garde, certain kinds of stories – and the ways in which they are presented – can be categorized as a ‘landscape allegory.’ Focusing on the idea of a ‘landscape’ in the most concrete and literal form, contributions drawing from a global spectrum of cultural contexts work toward establishing a fuller and more culturally diverse understanding of landscape allegory in cinema.
Download or read book Hollywood in China written by Ying Zhu and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2022-07-02 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China surpassed North America to become the world ’s largest movie market in 2020. Formerly the focus of exotic fascination in the golden age of Hollywood, today the Chinese are a make-or-break audience for Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. And movies are now an essential part of China’s global “soft power” strategy: a Chinese real estate tycoon, who until recently was the major shareholder of the AMC theater chain, built the world’s largest film production facility. Behind the curtains, as this brilliant new book reveals, movies have become one of the biggest areas of competition between the world’s two remaining superpowers. Will Hollywood be eclipsed by its Chinese counterpart? No author is better positioned to untangle this riddle than Ying Zhu, a leading expert on Chinese film and media. In fascinating vignettes, Hollywood in China unravels the century-long relationship between Hollywood and China for the first time. Blending cultural history, business, and international relations, Hollywood in China charts multiple power dynamics and teases out how competing political and economic interests as well as cultural values are manifested in the art and artifice of filmmaking on a global scale, and with global ramifications. The book is an inside look at the intense business and political maneuvering that is shaping the movies and the U.S.-China relationship itself—revealing a headlines-grabbing conflict that is playing out not only on the high seas, but on the silver screen.
Download or read book Cinematic Guerrillas written by Jie Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-26 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How might cinema make revolution and mobilize the masses? In socialist China, the film exhibition network expanded from fewer than six hundred movie theaters to more than a hundred thousand mobile film projectionist teams. Holding screenings in improvised open-air spaces in rural areas lacking electricity, these roving projectionists brought not only films but also power generators, loudspeakers, slideshows, posters, live performances, and mass ritual participation, amplifying the era’s utopian dreams and violent upheavals. Cinematic Guerrillas is a media history of Chinese film exhibition and reception that offers fresh insights into the powers and limits of propaganda. Drawing on a wealth of archives, memoirs, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, Jie Li examines the media networks and environments, discourses and practices, experiences and memories of film projectionists and their grassroots audiences from the 1940s to the 1980s. She considers the ideology and practice of “cinematic guerrillas”—at once denoting onscreen militants, off-the-grid movie teams, and unruly moviegoers—bridging Maoist iconography, the experiences of projectionists, and popular participation and resistance. Li reconceptualizes socialist media practices as “revolutionary spirit mediumship” that aimed to turn audiences into congregations, contribute to the Mao cult, convert skeptics of revolutionary miracles, and exorcize class enemies. Cinematic Guerrillas considers cinema’s meanings for revolution and nation building; successive generations of projectionists; workers, peasants, and soldiers; women and ethnic minorities; and national leaders, local cadres, and cultural censors. By reading diverse, vivid, and often surprising accounts of moviegoing, Li excavates Chinese media theories that provide a critical new perspective on world cinema.
Download or read book The Melancholy Lens written by Tony Pipolo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of significant loss has exerted a powerful influence on several American avant-garde filmmakers . The Melancholy Lens offers a detailed look at biographical and psychological factors discernible in the art of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, and Ernie Gehr with an aim toward a greater understanding of their work.
Download or read book Lens Laboratory Landscape written by Claudia Schaefer and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary study of the rise of empirical observation in the Spanish arts and sciences as the principle vehicle for acquiring knowledge about the natural world. Lens, Laboratory, Landscape focuses on competing views about the power of vision in Spain between the 1830s and the 1950s. The photographic lens, laboratory microscope, retinal vision of philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and the topographical studies of Manuel de Terán are woven together in and around a European cultural milieu that gave observation primacy. For once, Spainnow bereft of its empirewas not on the outside of such debates. Whether in the laboratory, family home, darkroom, art gallery, or on the road, in Cuba or Zaragoza, Madrid or Massachusetts, Spanish artists and scientists were engaged with the social and economic power of observation at a time when the speed of modern life made observing a challenge. Claudia Schaefer brings the technologies of the eyephotograph, microscope, lens, tools for land surveyingto light as markers on the nations touted path to modernity.
Download or read book The Indigenous Lens written by Markus Ritter and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-12-18 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historiography of early photography has scarcely examined Islamic countries in the Near and Middle East, although the new technique was adopted very quickly there by the 1840s. Which regional, local, and global aspects can be made evident? What role did autochthonous image and art traditions have, and which specific functions did photography meet since its introduction? This collective volume deals with examples from Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and the Arab lands and with the question of local specifics, or an „indigenous lens." The contributions broach the issues of regional histories of photography, local photographers, specific themes and practices, and historical collections in these countries. They offer, for the first time in book form, a cross-section through a developing field of the history of photography.
Download or read book Field Recordings written by Russell Brakefield and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-26 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry that uses American folk music as a lens to investigate themes of family, art, and masculinity. Firmly rooted in the dramatic landscapes and histories of Michigan, Field Recordingsuses American folk music as a lens to investigate themes of personal origin, family, art, and masculinity. The speakers of these poems navigate Michigan’s folklore and folkways while exploring more personal connections to those landscapes and examining the timeless questions that occupy those songs and stories. With rich musicality and lyric precision, the poems in Field Recordingslook squarely at what it means to be a son, a brother, an artist, a person. Inspired by the life and writings of famous ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, Field Recordingsis divided into three sections. It is anchored by a long poem that tracks Alan Lomax on his 1938 journey through Michigan collecting music for the Library of Congress. This poem speaks to the complex process of recording the voices and stories of working-class musicians in Michigan in the early part of the twentieth century. It is rich with the pleasures of music and storytelling and is steeped in history. Like the rest of the collection, it also speaks to the questions and anxieties that, like music, transcend time and technology. In poems alternately elegiac and rhapsodic, Field Recordingsexplores the way art is produced and translated, the line between innovation and appropriation, and the complex, beautiful stories that are passed between us. From poetry readers to poets, music fans to musicians, this collection will undoubtedly appeal to a wide audience.
Download or read book The Lens Within the Heart written by Timon Screech and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting a revised edition with a new preface of this important work, previously available only in hardback. It has long been assumed that Japan's closed country policy meant that Japan was isolated from the influence of the outside, and in particular the Western, world. However, this study of 18th century Japan, using sources wholly unstudied since their writing, reveals the profound influence that the introduction of Western technology and scientific instruments including glass, lenses and mirrors had on Japanese notions of sight, and how this change in perception was reflected most clearly in popular culture. Screech goes to the core of later eighteenth century thought through popular objects and the propositions which many considered groundbreaking on the book's first publication in 1996 have yet to be substantially challenged.
Download or read book Modern Austrian Literature through the Lens of Adaptation written by Catriona Firth and published by Brill. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades postwar Austrian literature has been measured against and moulded into a series of generic categories and grand cultural narratives, from nostalgic ‘restoration’ literature of the 1950s through the socially critical ‘anti-Heimat’ novel to recent literary reckonings with Austria’s Nazi past. Peering through the lens of film adaptation, this book rattles the generic shackles imposed by literary history and provides an entirely new critical perspective on Austrian literature. Its original methodological approach challenges the primacy of written sources in existing scholarship and uses the distortions generated by the shift in medium as a productive starting point for literary analysis. Five case studies approach canonical texts in post-war Austrian literature by Gerhard Fritsch, Franz Innerhofer, Gerhard Roth, Elfriede Jelinek, and Robert Schindel, through close readings of their cinematic adaptations, concentrating on key areas of narratological concern: plot, narrative perspective, authorship, and post-modern ontologies. Setting the texts within the historical, cultural and political discourses that define the ‘Alpine Republic’, this study investigates fundamental aspects of Austrian national identity, such as its Habsburg and National Socialist legacies.
Download or read book Ancient Bronzes Through a Modern Lens written by Susanne Ebbinghaus and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication brings together prominent art historians, conservators, and scientists to discuss fresh approaches to the study of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern works of bronze. Featuring significant bronzes from the Harvard Art Museums' holdings as well as other museum collections, the volume's eight essays present technical and formal analyses in a format that will be useful for both general readers and students of ancient art. The text provides an overview of ancient manufacturing processes as well as modern methods of scientific examination, and it focuses on objects as diverse as large-scale statuary and more utilitarian armor, vessels, and lamps. Filling a current gap in the art historical literature, this book offers a much-needed, accessible introduction to ancient bronzes.
Download or read book China through the Lens of Comparative Education written by Ruth Hayhoe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single, manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field. Ruth Hayhoe is a distinguished scholar in comparative education and higher education, as well as one of the most highly regarded experts on Chinese education in the world. Extremely well respected throughout China, she has authored about 75 articles and book chapters, as well as several books on Chinese education and East-West relations in education. This selection of 15 of her most representative papers and chapters documents the most significant works of her research on Chinese education, higher education and comparative education. The three sections cover: comparative education and China higher education and history religion, culture and education. The collection not only helps foreign scholars understand Chinese education development in its cultural context comprehensively and systemically, but also provides a fresh point of view for education practitioners and policy makers in China. Podcast of Professor Ruth Hayhoe's interview at New Books Network discussing this book and her distinguished career: http://newbooksnetwork.com/ruth-hayhoe-china-through-the-lens-of-comparative-education-the-selected-works-of-ruth-hayhoe-routledge-2015/
Download or read book A Panoramic View of the Song Dynasty Through the Lens of Shipbuilding Industry written by Chunyan Huang and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Meiji Unification Through the Lens of Ishikawa Prefecture written by James C. Baxter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Credit for the swift unification of Japan following the 1868 overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate is usually given to the national leaders who instigated the coup and formed the new Meiji government. But is brilliant leadership at the top sufficient to explain how regional separatist tendencies and loyalties to the old lords were overcome in the formation of a nationally unified state? On the contrary, argues James C. Baxter. Though plans were drawn up by policy makers in Tokyo, the efforts of citizens all over the country were required to implement these plans and create a sense of national identity among local populations. Drawing on extensive archival resources, Baxter describes the transformation of the Tokugawa domain of Kaga into the Meiji prefecture of Ishikawa. The result is a richly detailed study that helps explain how Japan achieved national unity without the bloody struggles that have often accompanied modernization and nation-building."
Download or read book Asian Alterity With Special Reference To Architecture And Urbanism Through The Lens Of Cultural Studies written by William Siew Wai Lim and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2007-12-04 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asian Alterity is an interdisciplinary theoretical analysis that vigorously contests the homogeneity of the mainstream Eurocentric values. Part I argues for the need for an alternate perspective to be introduced so as to understand the diversity of Asia's cultural differences at their varied development stages and to meet the complex challenges of the explosive urban expansion and disruptive changes in traditional cultures and lifestyles.Part II of the book consists of nine case studies of Asian major urban cities by well-established academic writers and urban theorists. Each author presents diverse aspects of urban dynamism. The case studies will collectively demonstrate a broad framework to understand the essentiality of the interdisciplinary mode of Cultural Studies as an important lens towards meeting the challenges in Asian Architecture and Urbanism.Highlights of the book:
