The riverrun Global Film Series

09/29/2022

Dear friends of the Global Film Series,

We would like to let you know that due to financial and administrative reasons the series will now be held bi-annually. Therefore, 2022 will be a gap year, with a new installment of the film series to follow in 2023. Stay tuned for our “country in focus” next year! As always, thank you for your support and enthusiasm for global cinema. See you next year!

05/12/2022

Exciting news!!! MARTIN SCORSESE’S THE FILM FOUNDATION LAUNCHES “RESTORATION SCREENING ROOM”

As many of you know, we screen at least one film restored by the foundation during our festival... we are happy to see they are doing monthly virtual screenings of their restored films. Not to miss!

[April 22 / NY, NY] The Film Foundation, the non-profit organization created in 1990 by Martin Scorsese, is launching The Film Foundation Restoration Screening Room to showcase films restored with support from the foundation and its partners. The Film Foundation Restoration Screening Room will be av...

12/08/2021

Thank you everyone for attending this year's Global Film Series on Chinese Cinemas! Hope to see you next year!

Please see Buffalo Spree on our series this year: “Ending the year at the movies: Hollywood Holidays, the return of riverrun, and pre-code classics” by Christopher Schobert

“Is the world of cinema nearly back to normal? Hard to say, but things are trending in the proper direction. Fall saw a return from a number of old favorites, like Cultivate Cinema Circle, Hollywood Holidays at Aurora Theatre, and the riverrun Global Film Series. Read on for December details from all three.”

“Since 2016, the riverrun Global Film Series has aimed to create dialogue between the community and institutions of higher education through lectures and screening of films chosen to provide a better understanding of our existence in the world. After breaks in 2019 and 2020, the festival returns this year with a different format and focus. Here, series curator Tanya Shilina-Conte, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo, explains what makes the 2021 incarnation of riverrun (which began with screenings and lectures in October and November) so unique.

What’s different about this year’s riverrun?

In the three years pre-COVID, the Global Film Series was staged at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, featuring screenings and guest speakers on the national cinemas of Iran, Cuba, and Mexico. This year’s festival, sponsored in part by the UB Confucius Institute, is instead organized as a lecture series presented via Zoom by distinguished scholars of Chinese-language cinemas. Rather than screen the films on a single weekend in the fall, each speaker will recommend one or more films from mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. Links to the films are provided to the audience in advance.

Describe your December 2 selection, 2010’s We Are Alive, and the accompanying lecture.

We Are Alive is an experimental documentary directed by Yau Ching, who is based in Hong Kong. The film is a collaboration of sorts with “bad children” who have been confined to juvenile detention centers in Hong Kong, Macao, and Sapporo, Japan. The teens are permitted to record their own stories of survival on audiovisual equipment, giving voice to their gender identity and sexual orientation, in the hopes of imagining a better future for themselves. Professor Zhen Zhang, in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU, will speak on the “minor transnationalism” of these teens, whose relegation to the margins of Asian society crosses national borders.

What do you hope audiences take away from the series?

Shilina-Conte: I spent two months lecturing and traveling in China in 2009, also visiting the China National Film Museum in Beijing. While I know that there is tremendous interest in Western films and popular media among the younger generations in China, I feel that American audiences are only somewhat familiar with Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese directors. I hope that this fall’s Global Film Series on Chinese-language cinemas, in the hands of expert lecturers on the films, will take a step further toward introducing American viewers to the very rich history of Chinese-language filmmaking.

4 p.m. on December 2; virtual (to register, write to [email protected]); buffalo.edu/cas/english/news-events/upcoming_events/global-film-series.html

https://www.buffalospree.com/arts_entertainment/film/ending-the-year-at-the-movies/article_3f417fd0-5136-11ec-9057-77aa4723ef03.html

Is the world of cinema nearly back to normal? Hard to say, but things are trending in the proper direction. Fall saw a return from a number of old favorites,

11/22/2021

December 2, 2021, 4pm EST

Prof. Zhen Zhang, NYU, Department of Cinema Studies

Lecture: “‘We Are Alive’: Minor Transnationalism and Yau Ching’s Experimental Filmmaking”

Recommended film: We Are Alive (Huai hai zi, 壞孩子, 2010), directed by Yau Ching, Hong Kong

To register and receive a Zoom link please contact the Confucius Institute: [email protected]

Abstract: Drawing from a book project on contemporary Sinophone women filmmakers, this talk discusses Hong Kong q***r filmmaker Yau Ching’s documentary We Are Alive (2010), developed from therapeutic video workshops she and her team conducted with confined delinquent adolescents in Hong Kong, Macau and Japan. We Are Alive has been seen as “the least q***r film” in her filmography and rejected by several LGBT+ film festivals. Yet, its engagement with the so-called “bad kids” (the films’ Chinese title) and their complex self-presentations questions dominant repressive moral strictures and criminal justice systems across several East Asian societies. In effect, the participatory, transformational and comparative project on juvenile delinquency, adolescent femininities and masculinities, and social conformity offers an instructive case study of minor transnationalism through a q***r lens.

Bio: Zhen Zhang is associate professor at the Department of Cinema Studies of New York University. The main areas of her scholarly interests include Chinese-language film history in its cultural, aesthetic, political, and gendered manifestations, within the broad frameworks of modernity, modernism, and cosmopolitanism. Her first scholarly book, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896-1937 (2005), articulates a cultural history of early Chinese cinema within the matrix of exuberant metropolitan mass culture in the early decades of the twentieth century. The interest in the dynamic relationship between the cinema and the city is also evident in the volume she edited, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (2007). She has also been following and working on and with emerging independent film communities in China, especially in the advent of digital media. This long-term engagement has resulted in DV-made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film (co-edited with Angela Zito) published in 2015. Prof. Zhang’s ongoing projects include a volume on women directors of contemporary Chinese-language cinema and another book on the orphan imagination in transnational Chinese film history. She is also deeply interested in both historical and contemporary trans-Asian exchanges in film and media culture. She is the founding director of the Asian Film and Media Initiative (AFMI), which presents or co-sponsors screening programs and symposia and administers a minor in Asian Film and Media. The AFMI also pursues collaborations with NYU Shanghai and NYU Abu Dhabi, as well as other institutions. In addition to programing Reel China Documentary Biennial and other events at NYU, she has co-organized and guest-curated film programs for the Film Society at Lincoln Center of Performing Arts, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Women Make Waves Film Festival in Taipei.

11/13/2021

November 18, 4 pm (Zoom)

Prof. Jean Ma, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Stanford University

Lecture: “Pandemic Premonitions: Revisiting Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole”

Recommended film: The Hole (Dòng, 洞, 1998), directed by Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan

To register please contact the Confucius Institute:
[email protected]

About the speaker:
Jean Ma is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, where she teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program and directs the Stanford Arts Institute. She has published books on the temporal poetics of Chinese cinema (Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema), singing women on film (Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema), and the relationship of cinema and photography (Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography). She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. Her writing has appeared in Camera Obscura, The Cine-files, Criticism, Film Quarterly, Grey Room, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and October. Her latest monograph, At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators, is forthcoming in 2022.

Abstract:
This talk discusses The Hole (1998), a film by the Taiwan-based Chinese-Malaysian director Tsai Ming-liang. The Hole looks forward to the turn of the millennium through an apocalyptic lens, portraying Taipei in the throes of a contagious epidemic, a mysterious airborne disease that causes those infected to behave like cockroaches. The government shuts off the water supply to the epidemic zone to force residents to evacuate; meanwhile, torrential tsunami rains drench the city. Along with a setting that uncannily anticipates the crises of the present moment, the film hearkens back to the past with musical sequences that evoke an earlier golden age of Chinese cinema and incorporate the voice of that era’s biggest star, Grace Chang. The talk unpacks the rich dialogue between past and present constructed by The Hole. It takes the film’s incongruous format, shifting between minimalist dystopia and maximalist exuberance, as a guide to Tsai’s unique filmmaking approach, which combines cinematic modernism with popular genre and straddles the realms of narrative filmmaking, experimental theater, and contemporary art.

Set just prior to the start of the 21st century, this vaguely futuristic story follows two residents of a quickly crumbling building who refuse to leave their homes in spite of a virus that has forced the evacuation of the area. As rain pours down relentlessly, a single man is stuck with an unfinish...

11/11/2021

Join us tomorrow on Zoom! Email the Confucius Institute for the link: [email protected]

November 11, 4 pm Prof. Michael Berry, UCLA, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures Lecture: “Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu: Chinese Cinema in Transition”

Recommended film: Xiao Wu (Pickpocket, 小武, 1997), directed by Jia Zhangke. Restored by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project (https://www.film-foundation.org/world-cinema)

Available on The Criterion Channel. (If you don’t have a Criterion account, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial.)

https://www.criterionchannel.com/xiao-wu

About the speaker:

Michael Berry is a translator and author who is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He has written and edited eight books on Chinese literature and cinema, including Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006), A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008), and most recently Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (2022). He has served as a film consultant and a juror for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse (Taiwan) and the Fresh Wave (Hong Kong). A two-time National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Berry’s book-length translations include The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (2008) by Wang Anyi, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, To Live (2004) by Yu Hua, a selection in the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read library, and Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (2020) by Fang Fang.


Abstract:

With his first feature film, Xiao Wu (1997), Jia Zhangke began to establish himself as the most important representative of the “Sixth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers and one of the greatest talents in world cinema. This lecture puts Xiao Wu in the context of Jia’s body of work and addresses some of its central aspects: the tension between the country and the city, the moral price of modernization, and the unique cinematic strategies employed by the film. Also explored are the film’s connections to other classic works of literature and film from Robert Bresson’s The Pickpocket to Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q. Finally, this presentation will step back and examine the place of Jia Zhangke within the recent development of contemporary Chinese cinema.

11/03/2021

Join us tomorrow on Zoom! Email the Confucius Institute for the link: [email protected]

November 4, 4 pm

Prof. Lingzhen Wang, Brown University, Department of East Asian Studies

Lecture: “Socialist New Wave: Zhang Nuanxin and 1980s Chinese Women's Cinema”

Recommended film: Sacrificed Youth (Qingchunji, 青春祭, 1985), directed by Zhang Nuanxin

11/03/2021

Abstract: Zhang Nuanxin (1940-1995) was a pioneer in both the theory and practice of post-Mao new Chinese cinema. In 1979, she published an influential, co-authored article, “On the Modernization of Film Language,” promoting the French New Wave and Italian neorealism. In 1981, she spearheaded an experimental and subjective cinema with her first film, Drive to Win (1981). Her best-known film, Sacrificed Youth, was hailed as the most modern film in Chinese film history when it came out in 1985, and her 1990 film Good Morning, Beijing was considered by many as the precursor to China’s Sixth Generation filmmaking. In 1994, Zhang shot her last film, South China, 1994, (re)turning to the (melo)dramatic social realism long practiced in socialist China.

The talk discusses Zhang Nuanxin’s complex negotiations with diverse historical and cultural forces that co-existed in early post-Mao China, examining in particular her socialist resignification of the French New Wave. A brief analysis of Zhang’s Sacrificed Youth further illustrates how Zhang’s experimental cinema critically responded to both the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and the rise of elitist individualism in the 1980s, thus contributing to expanding as well as diversifying socialist feminist cultural practice in post-Mao China.

November 4, 4 pm
Prof. Lingzhen Wang, Brown University, Department of East Asian Studies
Lecture: “Socialist New Wave: Zhang Nuanxin and 1980s Chinese Women's Cinema”
Recommended film: Sacrificed Youth (Qingchunji, 青春祭, 1985), directed by Zhang Nuanxin

11/02/2021

Our next speaker's bio:

Lingzhen Wang is Professor at Brown University, specializing in modern Chinese literature and film, comparative cultural studies, and transnational feminist theory. In addition to Chinese publications, she has authored and edited the following English books: Revisiting Women’s Cinema: Feminism, Socialism, and Mainstream Culture in Modern China (Duke UP, 2021), Other Genders, Other Sexualities: Chinese Differences (Duke UP, 2013), Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts (Columbia UP, 2011), Years of Sadness (Cornell East Asian Press, 2009), and Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth Century China (Stanford UP, 2004).

November 4, 4 pm

Prof. Lingzhen Wang, Brown University, Department of East Asian Studies

Lecture: “Socialist New Wave: Zhang Nuanxin and 1980s Chinese Women's Cinema”

Recommended film: Sacrificed Youth (Qingchunji, 青春祭, 1985), directed by Zhang Nuanxin

10/27/2021

Join us tomorrow on Zoom! Email the Confucius Institute for the link: [email protected]

October 28, 4PM Prof. Jie Li Harvard University, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Lecture: “Madame Mao and Cinema: Actress, Critic, Censor, and Producer”

Abstract: A film actress in 1930s Shanghai and an iconoclastic film critic from the 1950s to the 1970s, Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing, was China’s greatest cinephile and cinephobe. Her ideas and tastes loomed over film censorship and production throughout the Mao era and constituted a kind of “prescriptive theory”—both as top-down cultural policy and as pharmacological prescriptions for the people’s spiritual health. Tracing Jiang Qing’s prescriptive theories and lifelong relationship to cinema, this talk seeks to unravel her simultaneous attraction to and suspicion of the medium, attacking films intended to be revolutionary for their hidden bourgeois seductions, detecting even in documentaries “vicious motives and despicable tricks.” Under her influence, denunciations of films as “poisonous weeds” and “spiritual opium” became the launching sites for mass campaigns. Meanwhile, her intervention and sponsorship of film production and exhibition from 1964 to 1976 came to define the aesthetics and politics of the Cultural Revolution.


Recommended films:

1. The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzijun, 红色娘子, 1961), directed by Xie Jin OR The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzijun, 红色娘子军, 1971), directed by Pan Wenzhan and Fu Jie.


2. In the Heat of the Sun (Yang guang can lan de ri zi, 阳光灿烂的日子, 1994), directed by Jiang Wen

10/24/2021

October 28, 4PM

Prof. Jie Li Harvard University, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Lecture: “Madame Mao and Cinema: Actress, Critic, Censor, and Producer”

About the speaker:

Jie Li is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is the author of Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life and Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era. She also co-edited Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution. Her new book project, Cinematic Guerrillas: Maoist Propaganda as Spirit Mediumship (forthcoming in 2022), explores film exhibition and reception in socialist China. She has also published on the cinema of Manchuria, contemporary Chinese documentaries, and radios and loudspeakers. Li’s writings have appeared in journals such as Grey Room, Screen, positions: east asia cultures critique, Modern China, The Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Twentieth-Century China, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Jump Cut, and Public Culture.