The Department of East Asian Studies is excited to welcome Michael Berry (East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, UCSB; http://www.eastasian.ucsb.edu/home/faculty/michael-berry/) to Tucson on Tuesday, April 15 for the fourth and final installment of our spring colloquium series with the talk: "Chinese Cinema with Hollywood Characteristics." The talk will take place from 12:30 to 2pm at the Poetry Center Rubel Room and be followed by a modest reception at the same location.
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Michael Berry (UCSB): "Chinese Cinema with Hollywood Characteristics"
Tuesday, April 15. 12:30 to 2:00pm with reception to follow
UA Poetry Center Rubel Room
This talk traces the radical changes within the Chinese film industry from the 1990s to 2012, highlighting seven categories through which a new model described as “Chinese cinema with Hollywood characteristics” has emerged. The seven categories discussed include (1) Hollywood-style Chinese blockbusters, (2) Hollywood/Chinese coproductions, (3) Chinese remakes of Hollywood productions, (4) artificial Hollywood, (5) invisible Hollywood, (6) the rise of bicultural filmmakers, and (7) international casting choices. Films like the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid are explored within the context of the Chinese film industry’s transformation from a national cinema model to deterritorialized system modeled in many ways by Hollywood aesthetic and industrial standards.
Michael Berry is Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Berry’s areas of research include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Chinese cinema, popular culture in modern China, and translation studies. He is the author of A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, which explores literary and cinematic representations of atrocity in twentieth century China, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, a collection of dialogues with contemporary Chinese filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zhang Yimou, Stanley Kwan, and Jia Zhangke, and the monograph, Jia Zhang-ke’s Hometown Trilogy, which offers extended analysis of the films Xiao Wu, Platform, and Unknown Pleasures. His most recent book is is full-length interview with the award-winning film director Hou Hsiao-hsien entitled Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Memories of Shadows and Light (in Chinese). (Taipei, INK, 2014). Berry is currently completing a monograph that explores the United States as it has been imagined through Chinese film, literature, and popular culture, 1949-present.
