Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh – författare

Hong Kong is known as an entrepôt in its colonial history, but its place in early cinema has not received the same scholarly attention. The Colonial Screen: Early Cinema in Hong Kong explores the exhibition, regulation, circulation, reception, and social place of motion pictures, from the time the cinematograph, an early mechanism for motion pictures, first arrived in the territory in 1897 through to the late 1920s when Hong Kong emerged as a film entrepôt in South China.Drawing on concepts of screen practice, dispositif (deployment, apparatus), kinematography (motion pictures before cinema), and entrepôt, author Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh presents an unknown history of early film in Hong Kong. She traces the transition from film exhibition as a tie-in with staged entertainment to a full-fledged attraction of its own, acquiring a niche position in local society, and explores the roles of showmen, technologies, regulation, movie theatres, and entertainers. In each chapter, she brings to light the historical significance of Hong Kong as a regional node in movie trade routes and how racial politics and commerce were behind the British "rule of law" in making film regulations. Yeh locates the reception of motion pictures in the time of colonial modernity and governance, unveiling how, despite the dominance of European entrepreneurs in the exhibition circuit, the rise of Hong Kong Amusements in the early 1920s shaped a localized film practice. Ultimately, The Colonial Screen adds an important frame to Hong Kong as a film entrepôt across multiple borders and different regions in China in the early twentieth century.

Hong Kong is known as an entrepôt in its colonial history, but its place in early cinema has not received the same scholarly attention. The Colonial Screen: Early Cinema in Hong Kong explores the exhibition, regulation, circulation, reception, and social place of motion pictures, from the time the cinematograph, an early mechanism for motion pictures, first arrived in the territory in 1897 through to the late 1920s when Hong Kong emerged as a film entrepôt in South China.Drawing on concepts of screen practice, dispositif (deployment, apparatus), kinematography (motion pictures before cinema), and entrepôt, author Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh presents an unknown history of early film in Hong Kong. She traces the transition from film exhibition as a tie-in with staged entertainment to a full-fledged attraction of its own, acquiring a niche position in local society, and explores the roles of showmen, technologies, regulation, movie theatres, and entertainers. In each chapter, she brings to light the historical significance of Hong Kong as a regional node in movie trade routes and how racial politics and commerce were behind the British "rule of law" in making film regulations. Yeh locates the reception of motion pictures in the time of colonial modernity and governance, unveiling how, despite the dominance of European entrepreneurs in the exhibition circuit, the rise of Hong Kong Amusements in the early 1920s shaped a localized film practice. Ultimately, The Colonial Screen adds an important frame to Hong Kong as a film entrepôt across multiple borders and different regions in China in the early twentieth century.

Thirty-two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema covers thirty-two films from Taiwan, addressing a flowering of new talent, moving from art film to genre pictures, and nonfiction. Beyond the conventional framework of privileging “New and Post-New Cinema,” or prominence of auteurs or single films, this volume is a comprehensive, judicious take on Taiwan cinema that fills gaps in the literature, offers a renewed historiography, and introduces new creative force and voices of Taiwan’s moving image culture to produce a leading and accessible work on Taiwan film and culture.Film-by-film is conceived as the main carrier of moving picture imagery for a majority of viewers, across the world. The curation offers an array of formal, historical, genre, sexual, social, and political frames, which provide a rich brew of contexts. This surfeit of meanings is carried by individual films, one by one, which breaks down abstractions into narrative bites and outsized emotions.

Thirty-two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema covers thirty-two films from Taiwan, addressing a flowering of new talent, moving from art film to genre pictures, and nonfiction. Beyond the conventional framework of privileging “New and Post-New Cinema,” or prominence of auteurs or single films, this volume is a comprehensive, judicious take on Taiwan cinema that fills gaps in the literature, offers a renewed historiography, and introduces new creative force and voices of Taiwan’s moving image culture to produce a leading and accessible work on Taiwan film and culture.Film-by-film is conceived as the main carrier of moving picture imagery for a majority of viewers, across the world. The curation offers an array of formal, historical, genre, sexual, social, and political frames, which provide a rich brew of contexts. This surfeit of meanings is carried by individual films, one by one, which breaks down abstractions into narrative bites and outsized emotions.

This volume, the most comprehensive work to date on Chinese film, explores the manifold dimensions of the subject and highlights areas overlooked in previous studies. Leading scholars take up issues and topics covering the entire range of Chinese cinema. Their cross-cultural engagements with individual films, accomplished with an acute sense of chronology and history, tackle questions of issues related to historiography, poetics, aesthetics, genres, and directorial styles; at the same time, they address the economics of film production and consumption as well as the cultural politics of globalization, identity, subjectivity, nationality, citizenship, and gender formation as embodied in filmic texts.

In Staging Memories, authors Abé Mark Nornes and Emilie Yeh present an updated study of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s landmark contributions to Taiwanese and world cinema, with particular emphasis on A City of Sadness (Beiqing Chengshi), the winner of the Golden Lion award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. Staging Memories is based on Narrating National Sadness, one of the first hypertext analyses in film studies, and its analysis is couched in a general history of Taiwan, the political massacre that A City of Sadness recreates, and the history of Taiwan New Cinema. This background information is crucial context for viewers, and one of the reasons teachers have long valued the hypertext version of the book. The body of the text analyzes Hou's style, representation of violence, and the complex manner in which he renders history in his oblique long-take style. The book ends with a chapter that examines a single sequence that unifies the various threads of the overall analysis.