Download or read book Lust Caution written by Ailing Zhang and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2007 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a major motion picture from Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain): an intensely passionate story of love and espionage, set in Shanghai during World War II. In the midst of the Japanese occupation of China and Hong Kong, two lives become intertwined: Wong Chia Chi, a young student active in the resistance, and Mr. Yee, a powerful political figure who works for the Japanese occupational government. As these two move deftly between Shanghai’s tea parties and secret interrogations, they become embroiled in the complicated politics of wartime — and in a mutual attraction that may be more than what they expected. Written in lush, lavish prose, and with the tension of a political thriller,Lust, Cautionbrings 1940s Shanghai artfully to life even as it limns the erotic pulse of a doomed love affair. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Download or read book Lust Caution written by Eileen Chang and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1940s Shanghai, beautiful young Jiazhi spends her days playing mahjong and drinking tea with high society ladies. But China is occupied by invading Japanese forces and things are not always what they seem in wartime. Jiazhi's life is a front. A patriotic student radical, her mission is to seduce a powerful employee of the occupying government and lead him to the assassin's bullet. Yet as she waits for him to arrive at their liaison, Jiazhi begins to wonder if she is cut out to be a femme fatale and coldly take Mr Yi to his death. Or is she beginning to fall in love with him? A passionate tale of espionage, deception and love, Lust, Caution is accompanied here by four further dazzling short stories by Eileen Chang.
Download or read book From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee written by Peng Hsiao-yen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2007, Ang Lee made an espionage thriller based on the short story "Lust, Caution" by Eileen Chang, China’s most famous female author of the twentieth century. The release of the film became a trigger for heated debates on issues of national identity and political loyalty, and brought unexpectedly harsh criticism from China, where Ang Lee was labelled a traitor in scathing internet critiques, whilst the film's leading actress Tang Wei was banned from appearing on screen for two years. This book analyses Ang Lee’s art of film adaptation through the lens of modern literary and film theory, as well as featuring detailed readings and analyses of different dialogues and scenes, directorial and authorial decisions and intentions, while at the same time confronting the intense political debates resulting from the film’s subject matter. The theories of Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, Bataille and others are used to identify and clarify issues raised by the film related to gender, sexuality, eroticism, power, manipulation, and betrayal; the themes of lust and caution are dealt with in conjunction with the controversial issues of contemporary political consciousness concerning patriotism, and the Sino-Japanese War complicated by divided historical experiences and cross-Taiwan Strait relationships. The contributors to this volume cover translation and adaptation, loyalty and betrayal, collaboration and manipulation, playing roles and performativity, whilst at the same time intertwining these with issues of national identity, political loyalty, collective memory, and gender. As such, the book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese and Asian cinema and literature, as well as those interested in modern Chinese history and cultural studies.
Download or read book Lust Caution written by Ailing Zhang and published by ePenguin. This book was released on 2007-12-06 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1940s' Shanghai, Jiazhi's mission is to seduce an employee of the occupying government and lead him to the assassin's bullet. But she begins to wonder if she can coldly take Mr Yi to his death. A tale of espionage and love accompanied by four further short stories.
Download or read book The Cinema of Ang Lee written by Whitney Crothers Dilley and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-23 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Taiwan, Ang Lee is one of cinema's most versatile and daring directors. His ability to cut across cultural, national, and sexual boundaries has given him recognition in all corners of the world, the ability to work with complete artistic freedom whether inside or outside of Hollywood, and two Academy Awards for Best Director. He has won astounding critical acclaim for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which transformed the status of martial arts films across the globe, Brokeback Mountain (2005), which challenged the reception and presentation of homosexuality in mainstream cinema, and Life of Pi (2012), Lee's first use of groundbreaking 3D technology and his first foray into complex spiritual themes. In this volume, the only full-length study of Lee's work, Whitney Crothers Dilley analyzes all of his career to date: Lee's early Chinese trilogy films (including The Wedding Banquet, 1993, and Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994), period drama (Sense and Sensibility, 1995), martial arts (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), blockbusters (Hulk, 2003), and intimate portraits of wartime psychology, from the Confederate side of the Civil War (Ride with the Devil, 1999) to Japanese-occupied Shanghai (Lust/Caution, 2007). Dilley examines Lee's favored themes such as father/son relationships and intergenerational conflict in The Ice Storm (1997) and Taking Woodstock (2009). By looking at the beginnings of Lee's career, Dilley positions the filmmaker's work within the roots of the Taiwan New Cinema movement, as well as the larger context of world cinema. Using suggestive readings of both gender and identity, this new study not only provides a valuable academic resource but also an enjoyable read that uncovers the enormous appeal of this acclaimed director.
Download or read book Close ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas written by Hsiu-Chuang Deppman and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-10-31 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two of the most stylized shots in cinema—the close-up and the long shot—embody distinct attractions. The iconicity of the close-up magnifies the affective power of faces and elevates film to the discourse of art. The depth of the long shot, in contrast, indexes the facts of life and reinforces our faith in reality. Each configures the relation between image and distance that expands the viewer’s power to see, feel, and conceive. To understand why a director prefers one type of shot over the other then is to explore more than aesthetics: It uncovers significant assumptions about film as an art of intervention or organic representation. Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas is the first book to compare these two shots within the cultural, historical, and cinematic traditions that produced them. In particular, the global revival of Confucian studies and the transnational appeal of feminism in the 1980s marked a new turn in the composite cultural education of Chinese directors whose shot selections can be seen as not only stylistic expressions, but ethical choices responding to established norms about self-restraint, ritualism, propriety, and female agency. Each of the films discussed—Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew, and Wei Desheng’s Cape No. 7— represents a watershed in Chinese cinemas that redefines the evolving relations among film, politics, and ethics. Together these works provide a comprehensive picture of how directors contextualize close-ups and long shots in ways that make them interpretable across many films as bellwethers of social change.
Download or read book Love in a Fallen City written by Eileen Chang and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2017-06-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masterful short works about passion, family, and human relationships by one of the greatest writers of 20th century China. A New York Review Books Original “[A] giant of modern Chinese literature” –The New York Times "With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere." –Ang Lee Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang’s achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Ang Lee written by Robert Arp and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ang Lee (b. 1954) has emerged as one of cinema's most versatile, critically acclaimed, and popular directors. Known for his ability to transcend cultural and stylistic boundaries, Lee has built a diverse oeuvre that includes films about culture clashes and globalization (Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994, and The Wedding Banquet, 1993), a period drama (Sense and Sensibility, 1995), a martial arts epic (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), a comic book action movie (Hulk, 2003), and an American western (Brokeback Mountain, 2005). The Philosophy of Ang Lee draws from both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions to examine the director's works. The first section focuses on Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist themes in his Chinese-language films, and the second examines Western philosophies in his English-language films; but the volume ultimately explores how Lee negotiates all of these traditions, strategically selecting from each in order to creatively address key issues. With interest in this filmmaker and his work increasing around the release of his 3-D magical adventure The Life of Pi (2012), The Philosophy of Ang Lee serves as a timely investigation of the groundbreaking auteur and the many complex philosophical themes that he explores through the medium of motion pictures.
Download or read book Lust Caution written by Alexandre Desplat and published by Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Piano Solo Songbook). Piano solo arrangements of 16 Alexandre Desplat pieces from the controversial espionage thriller directed by Ang Lee: Brahms Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118, No. 2 * Check Point * The End of Innocence * Exodus * Falling Rain * Sacrifice * Shanghai 1942 * more.
Download or read book Curtains of Light written by George Toles and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Toles's Curtains of Light explores the ways in which various kinds of theatrical space in film engage with the film reality adjacent to them, and alter our understanding of the cinematic real. Film art is a dialogue between the world created for a film narrative and theatre spaces that confront it across the shadowline. This book provides a new way of thinking about film's relation to theatre, and challenges old conceptions of how cinema needs to escape the theatrical, or rise above it. Toles offers elegantly written and jargon-free readings of a rich variety of films, spanning the distance from D.W. Griffith's True Heart Susie up to David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. and Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. The methodology is predominantly aesthetic, but informed by Toles's decades of experience as a professional theatre director. Among the many topics covered are audition scenes, stage deaths on film, the close up and theatrical aloneness in film, eloquent objects, and characters who alternate between directing and playacting for each other, with tragic consequences. Curtains of Light would be an extremely useful introductory text for university students studying the relationship of cinema to theatre.
Download or read book Half a Lifelong Romance written by Eileen Chang and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shanghai, 1930s. Shen Shijun, a young engineer, has fallen in love with his colleague, the beautiful Gu Manzhen. He is determined to resist his family’s efforts to match him with his wealthy cousin so that he can marry her. But dark circumstances—a lustful brother-in-law, a treacherous sister, a family secret—force the two young lovers apart. As Manzhen and Shijun go on their separate paths, they lose track of one another, and their lives become filled with feints and schemes, missed connections and tragic misunderstandings. At every turn, societal expectations seem to thwart their prospects for happiness. Still, Manzhen and Shijun dare to hold out hope—however slim—that they might one day meet again. A glamorous, wrenching tale set against the glittering backdrop of an extraordinary city, Half a Lifelong Romance is a beloved classic from one of the essential writers of twentieth-century China.
Download or read book Bonding written by Maggie Siebert and published by Apocalypse Party. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Maggie understands that splatter for splatter's sake is boring. Psychopathy is boring. Coldness is boring. She's interested in feeling, and when her stories turn violent (as they frequently do), it's with a surreal emotional barbarity that distorts the entire world. You can mop up blood with any fabric. Maggie's concern is with the wound left behind, because the wound never leaves-it haunts. As a result, each of these stories leaves a wound of its own. Some weep, watching as you try (and fail) to recover. Others laugh. But never without feeling." -B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space "And once finished, I felt like my tongue had been misplaced, guts heavy and expanded ... gums numb with a tongue that'd been put elsewhere, my mouth clean around a pipe weaving up through pitch and shadow ... and well past ready, primed for delight, waiting but knowing I had already been filled to skin; crying shit, hearing piss, fingernails seeping bile, pores dribbling blood, soles slopping off and out to meet a drain mid-floor ..." -Christopher Norris, author of Hunchback '88
Download or read book Eileen Chang written by Kam Louie and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eileen Chang (1920–1995) is arguably the most perceptive writer in modern Chinese literature. She was one of the most popular writers in 1940s Shanghai, but her insistence on writing about individual human relationships and mundane matters rather than revolutionary and political movements meant that in mainland China, she was neglected until very recently. Outside the mainland, her life and writings never ceased to fascinate Chinese readers. There are hundreds of works about her in the Chinese language but very few in other languages. This is the first work in English to explore her earliest short stories as well as novels that were published posthumously. It discusses the translation of her stories for film and stage presentation, as well as nonliterary aspects of her life that are essential for a more comprehensive understanding of her writings, including her intense concern for privacy and enduring sensitivity to her public image. The thirteen essays examine the fidelity and betrayals that dominate her alter ego's relationships with parents and lovers, informed by theories and methodologies from a range of disciplines including literary, historical, gender, and film studies. These relationships are frequently dramatized in plays and filmic translations of her work.
Download or read book The Piano Teacher written by Janice Y. K. Lee and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A rare and exquisite story . . . Transports you out of time, out of place, into a world you can feel on your very skin." —Elizabeth Gilbert The New York Times bestseller Janice Y.K. Lee's latest novel, The Expatriates, is now available from Penguin In the sweeping tradition of The English Patient, Janice Y.K. Lee's debut novel is a tale of love and betrayal set in war-torn Hong Kong. In 1942, Englishman Will Truesdale falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world. Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong to work as a piano teacher and also begins a fateful affair. As the threads of this spellbinding novel intertwine, impossible choices emerge-between love and safety, courage and survival, the present, and above all, the past.
Download or read book Theorizing Ambivalence in Ang Lee s Transnational Cinema written by Chih-Yun Chiang and published by Framing Film. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorizing Ambivalence in Ang Lee's Transnational Cinema takes a unique approach to the study of transnational cinema by examining the representation of Chinese identity in Ang Lee's films and the public discourse from various audience communities. This book focuses on his transnational films Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Lust, Caution (2007) as two case studies. Providing a systematic analysis of audience discourse from Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora, this study challenges ideological constructions of racial and ethnic identity, such as Chineseness, that are objectively defined within a static nation-state mechanism in an era of globalization. Through the study of the representation of Chineseness, this book expands the theoretical discussions on the politics of national identity and cultural syncretism represented in transnational cinema and further provides a good example of the familiar cycle of ambivalent emotion toward the West in the aftermath of postcolonialism. China and Taiwan's long history of engaging in a subordinate relationship with the West enhances the resurgence of ambivalence. The representations become a significant and predominant way to mediate one's bodily experiences, to connect and collaborate with one another, and to form and inform one's cultural identity. The analyses of these films and the audience discourse are essential to an understanding of the ways in which new media technologies impact and alter the human interactions between peoples from various cultural, social, and political contexts.
Download or read book Carl Theodor Dreyer s Gertrud written by James Schamus and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If there is one film in the canon of Carl Theodor Dreyer that can be said to be, as Jacques Lacan might put it, his most �painfully enjoyable,� it is Gertrud. The film's Paris premier in 1964 was covered by the Danish press as a national scandal; it was lambasted on its release for its lugubrious pace, wooden acting, and old-fashioned, stuffy milieu. Only later, when a younger generation of critics came to its defense, did the method in what appeared to be Dreyer's madness begin to become apparent. To make vivid just what was at stake for Dreyer, and still for us, in his final work, James Schamus focuses on a single moment in the film. He follows a trail of references and allusions back through a number of thinkers and artists (Boccaccio, Lessing, Philostratus, Charcot, and others) to reveal the richness and depth of Dreyer's work--and the excitement that can accompany cinema studies when it opens itself up to other disciplines and media. Throughout, Schamus pays particular attention to Dreyer's lifelong obsession with the �real,� developed through his practice of �textual realism,� a realism grounded not in standard codes of verisimilitude but on the force of its rhetorical appeal to its written, documentary sources. As do so many of the heroines of Dreyer's other films, such as La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), Gertrud serves as a locus for Dreyer's twin fixations; written texts, and the heroines who both embody and free themselves from them. Dreyer based Gertrud not only on Hjalmar Soderberg's play of 1906, but also on his own extensive research into the life of the �real� Gertrud, Maria van Platen, whose own words Dreyer interpolated into the film. By using his film as a kind of return to the real woman beneath the text, Dreyer rehearsed another lifelong journey, back to the poor Swedish girl who gave birth to him out of wedlock and who gave him up for adoption to a Danish family, a mother whose existence Dreyer only discovered later in life, long after she had died.
Download or read book Braised Pork written by An Yu and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chinese woman embarks on a dream-like journey through Beijing, Tibet, and mysterious worlds beyond in this novel of “startlingly original imagination” (Guardian, UK). One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead in their half-full bathtub. Like something out of a dream, Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure next to the tub. The mysterious drawing launches Jia Jia on an odyssey across contemporary Beijing, from its high-rise apartments to its hidden bars, as her path crosses some of the people who call the city home, including a jaded bartender who may be able to offer her the kind of love she had long thought impossible. Unencumbered by a marriage that had constrained her, Jia Jia travels into her past in search of unspoken secrets. Her journey takes her to the high plains of Tibet, and even to a shadowy, watery otherworld. An atmospheric evocation of middle-class urban China, An Yu’s Braised Pork explores the intimate strangeness of grief, the indelible mysteries of unseen worlds, and a young woman’s empowering journey of self-discovery.
