Category Archive for: ‘Issue 5 – First Release’

There is no central theme to this issue – but it does take up several themes that have appeared in earlier issues. One of the original purposes of this journal was to invite a dialogue between archivists and their customers among the community of screen scholars. In our very first issue we published Ray Edmonsden’s article about the problems and …

Uploaded 18 December 1998 The left-wing films of the period after World War 2 in China are collectively referred to as “progressive” (jinbu)in People’s Republic of China (PRC) film discourse. As such, these films represent both the culmination of the May Fourth left-wing film movement (referring to the cultural and social reform movement launched in China in the wake of …

Uploaded 18 December 1998 During recent years, historical film has been of great interest to both historians and film scholars. There are many excellent studies that analyze historical film at a general level. Pierre Sorlin’s The Film in History (1980) is already a classic, but it does not actually focus on how history is narrated in the cinema. This question is, instead, a …

[1] Uploaded 16 November 1998 I. Introduction Film history is like a massive graveyard in which lost films are buried, never again to be recovered or seen. As in life, the dead outnumber the living by a long shot. Although we have only just celebrated the first centenary of cinema, the statistics of mortality are frightening. Of all the films …

Uploaded 18 December 1998 Various writers on Fifth Generation filmmaking have noted a characteristic ambiguity which refuses to prescribe a single set subject position for audiences.  [1] Rey Chow, for instance, describes Zhang Yimou’s films as the “enigmatic traps he sets up in order to engage his viewers in an infinite play and displacement of meanings and surfaces.” [2]  She writes: …