This panel explores cultural and spatial dynamics across borders, examining the "Burma Road" in China's Muslim Northwest, strategies and styles of youth films in the multimedia era, creative collaborations in China-Europe film co-production, and migration's impact on the cosmology of home.
Peng Hai
University of Pittsburg, Assistant Professor
Title:
"Burma Road” in the Muslim Northwest: Centering Borderlands in Kukan
Abstract:
Reemerging as a high-profile patriotic education film at the Chongqing Three Gorges Museum, Kukan: the Battle Cry of China (1941), thanks to a long sequence of air raids descending on China’s war-time capital Chongqing, has greeted the Chinese public since 2015 as the latest documentary evidence of Japanese WWII atrocities after the publications of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (1991) and The Diaries of John Rabe (1997). The air raids footage, well over ten minutes long, has since animated much popular and academic discussion in China. The Academy award winning documentary has also engendered intense interest in Li Ling-ai, the “technical advisor” of the film, an under-credited creative force behind the film according to Asian Americanist filmmaker Robin lung. However, the “film proper,” in which at least two thirds are set in China’s southwestern and northwestern borderlands, has received no attention in English language reviews. This article focuses its analysis on the images of those borderlands and their indigenous inhabitants. A proper treatment of the bulk of the documentary’s content, I argue, brings to light little-known facts of border-crossings in the China Theater of WWII. These border-crossings, from Burma to Yunnan, Guangxi to Chongqing, Sichuan to Gansu, eastern Qinghai to the Tibetan Plateau, and extradigetically, northwestern China to Soviet Central Asia, foreground the critical role traditionally non-Sinitic parts of China played in sustaining the Chongqing-based Kuomintang regime in the Pacific War years. Aside from providing rare documentary footages on the well-told story of the “Burma Road,” images of the “Asiatic melting pot” of Gansu and Qinghai underline the heretofore unknown history of China’s northwestern Muslim transporters and road builders, who were a sine qua non force in ensuring critical supplies from the Soviet Union could reach Chongqing’s ill-equipped army via the tortuous Qilian mountains and treacherous Yellow River by mule caravans and goat-skin rafters.
Ying Xiao
University of Florida, Associate Professor
题目：
融媒体时代青春片的类型策略、视听风格与跨时空想象
摘要：
作为一种重要的题材类型，中国式青春片自1990年代第六代导演以青春成长为载体的艺术电影到21世纪新媒介时代以IP电影的商业模式迅速崛起历经了一系列的嬗变。文章通过分析青春片的叙事结构、类型元素、和文化症候对21世纪融媒体时代中国电影的青春化、数字化和微转向进行解读，并探讨其类型发展流变过程中与当代中国科技、媒介、社会转型之间的关联。这一类型的融合、拓展及媒介间性也很好的体现在青春片的视听风格上，尤其是对流行音乐类型及音乐能动性的运用上。本文首次聚焦青春片的电影音乐，通过文本细读及对视听风格的剖析，并采纳“娱乐产业乌托邦”、“异托邦”和“无托邦”等概念的比照框架对中国式青春片的类型特征及融媒体时代复杂而多变的影视文化生态网络提出归纳性的阐释和进一步的理论思考。
Mei Yang
University of San Diego, Associate Professor
Title:
Migration, Space, and the Cosmology of Home: A Comparative Perspective
Abstract:
Embarking from The Wandering Earth (2019), China’s first interstellar blockbuster, in which actions of the main characters are prompted by their wish to go home, this paper surveys the homecoming narratives observed in contemporary Chinese films, both commercial hits and art house films. These films include Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin (2013), Zhang Yang’s Shower (1999), Getting Home (2007), Yung-Shing Teng’s Return Ticket (2011) and commercial hits such as Lost on Journey (2010). I also extend beyond Chinese features and examine how the desire for home is represented against the background of transnational economic flow and cross-border labor movements in recent films. In the South Korean drama Way Back Home (2013), Australian film Lion (2016), Taiwanese semi-autobiographical American Girl (2021), and Hollywood productions such as Nomadland (2020) and Tár (2022), migration, social mobility, and the pursuit of freedom become jumbled and in the end all eerily resemble dislocation. To confront that reality, films either affirm the validity of homecoming or refute it with a more resolute exile. These films posit one question that lies at the center of my inquiry, namely, where is home, then?
I highlight two Chinese filmmakers, Li Ruijun, and Bi Gan, whose answers through the river scenes in their films are revelatory. Li’s River Road (2014) and Return to Dust (2022) tell of marginalized individuals searching for, returning
