Department of Comparative Literature

Dire Straits: Representation of 1949 in Wang Tong’s Cinema

The year 1949 does not only divide. It connects and reconnects various interrelated parts and fragments, showing not a clear sense of what China is but, rather, “China” as a question. As an event, the year 1949 stands against history by resisting complete texualization; it is at once clusters of texts and sets of contexts, and the contextualization of each text generates more texts and creates more contexts. And in this generative mode we see the representation of 1949 changes over time. This talk begins with some broad consideration of the “event” to situation the year 1949 as one such pivotal event in the 20th Century and beyond. Wang Tong’s cinema, particularly 香蕉天堂(1989), 紅柿子 (1995), and 風中家族 (2015), helps me trace the shifting and yet evergenerative mode of cultural representation of 1949 in Taiwan Cinema.

Speaker:Prof. Guo-Juin Hong
Moderator: Prof. Nicole Huang

Speaker Bio:

Guo-Juin Hong is Associate Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and Director of the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. Hong received his PhD in Rhetoric and Film from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. His book, Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; paperback edition 2013;Chinese edition forthcoming), is the first and only full-length study of Taiwan cinema in English language that covers its entire history since the colonial period.

Date: 27 September 2018 (Thursday)
Time: 17:00 – 18:30
Venue: Room 434, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Enquires:
lylouis@hku.hk

All are welcome!