Global Image Transfer: Chinese Cinema Event

Global Image Transfer: Chinese Cinema

Since the early 1980s, three generations of Chinese filmmakers have created dynamic and unconventional cinema in China. On the one hand, Chinese film is built on a traditional understanding of the pictorial knowledge of its own culture; on the other, it reflects forms and figures of other cinematic cultures. Through this process of “transfer,” Chinese film has left its mark on the current world cinema. This conference will also focus on the aesthetic and analytical dimensions from the discipline of film studies, e.g. theoretical and methodological questions, as well as institutional and discursive problems. For example: Which motives and chronotopoi, image types and genres, style characteristics and rhetorical figures are the preferred vehicles of this worldwide circulation of images? Which paradigms and methods from film theory may be developed to analyse such migrations? How does the theoretical transfer between Mainland China and other centres of theory production work?
Film festivals function as knots within the network of transnational image transfer and promote the canonization of independent and “auteur” films. Which normative functions are they taking over within the distribution process of Chinese films of the 5th and 6th generation?

As an accompaniment to this conference, the film “Le voyage du ballon rouge” of Hou Hsiao Hsien (France 2007) will be shown at the Filmhaus Kino am Spittelberg, Spittelberggasse 3, 1070 Wien.
25 November 2009, 18.00 Uhr c.t.

CONCEPTION: Karl Sierek (Kunsthistorisches Seminar, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)
PARTICIPANTS: Chris Berry (Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths University of London); Chen Xihe (School of Film and TV Art and Technology, Shanghai University); Rey Chow (Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, Providence; currently at Program in Literature, Duke University, North Carolina); Lu Xinyu (School of Journalism, Fudan University, Shanghai); Christine Noll Brinckmann (Prof. em. Seminar für Filmwissenschaft, Universität Zürich).

Kooperationsveranstaltung von IFK und Stadtkino.