Category Archive for: ‘Issue 11 – First Release’

[1] Film/culture adaptation in Asia As Robert C. Allen pointed out in an article in Screen in 1990 [2] , it is easy to overlook the fact that film/cinema is a social institution too, and that film history needs to acknowledge not only the history of film texts, but also the history of the context in which film reached its audience. If …

(with Penny Lin, Kelly Chu-Chun Fan, and Lucia Tai-Yun Cheng) Uploaded 1 November 2000 1.Taiwan and the world The world’s first cinematic performance took place in the Grand Café of Paris in 1895. During the same year, in Asia, the Chinese Qing Dynasty signed the treaty of Shimonoseki, ceding Taiwan to Japan and starting a Japanese rule that lasted to …

Uploaded 1 November 2000 Cinema arrived in China from the West in 1896, one year after the Lumière brothers showed their films in a café in Paris on 28 December 1895, a date generally considered as the beginning of cinema in the world. From 1905 on, with a constant influx of foreign films, China developed its own film industry, merging …

Uploaded 1 November 2000 Women in cinema Introduction In 1931 Japanese critics rated the Shochiku company’s first full talkie, Madamu to nyobo (The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine, dir. Gosho Heinosuke), the best Japanese film of the year. Though superficially a typical Shochiku lightweight domestic comedy, it can be read allegorically in two ways: as an allegory of the transition to sound in …

[1] Uploaded 1 November 2000 The September 1917 Katsudo no sekai (Movie World), containing probably one of the first attempts at a broad factual overview of the Japanese film industry, is a valuable resource to those studying the early Japanese film industry. For instance, in the corner of one page, the journal summarises the average budget of a four-reel, four-thousand foot shinpa or kyuha film (shinpa, …

Uploaded 1 November 2000 Film was invented at the end of the 19th century in a number of Western capitalist countries as a result of certain technological developments. Though China had a long history of civilisation, it was comparatively underdeveloped in economic and technological terms at that time: in fact, Western civilisation was launching an all-out challenge to Chinese civilisation when …

[1] Uploaded 1 November 2000 One of the most startling groups of images in the visually arresting Thai science fiction film  Kawow tee Bangpleng (1994, directed by Nirattisai Kaljareuk) [2] occurs a few minutes after it opens, as a massive spacecraft hovers over a Thai village, shining a beam which, we later learn, is impregnating village women. During this sequence the …

[1] Uploaded 1 November 2000 This paper explores the final consolidation of Hong Kong’s film industry in the 1930s, over thirty years after cinema was introduced to the colony, and twenty years after the first local film was made. A widely held view about Hong Kong’s pre-war cinema is expressed in an essay by Hong Kong film writer Stephen Teo, …

Uploaded 1 November 2000 Locating the original influences on Asian animation can be a daunting task, illustrated by the following two vignettes. 1. Sometime in 1923, the four Wan brothers, credited with starting animation in China, sat in a Shanghai theatre enraptured by three American cartoons shown that day. Forsaking any luxuries and most necessities, the Wans for the next …

Uploaded 1 November 2000 Introduction Like most other places in the world, film exhibition began in Bangladesh (in the then East Bengal) at the end of the 1890s; like much of Asia, silent film production began here during the 1900s and sound film production in the 1950s (in the then East Pakistan). The establishment of film theatres began here in …