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DEC
4
Chivalrous Psychogeography: Martial Arts, Avant-Garde, Sinophone Imagination
Date:
Friday, 04 Dec 2020
Time:
1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
Location:
Zoom meeting ID 955 8605 4695 Password 034457
Department:
Asian Studies Center
Event Details:

Weijie Song, Associate Professor, Rutgers University.
Ang Lee once famously confessed that every Chinese-language director has a dream to make a martial arts (wuxia) film. Literary historian Chen Pingyuan also noted that, over a thousand years, Chinese literati have shared a dream of becoming a knight-errant. Indeed, from the 1960s to the present, a number of major Chinese-language filmmakers sought to create a martial arts work at the crucial stage of their careers. This talk seeks to chart a cultural and emotional geography of martial arts narratives constructed by avant-garde cinematic aesthetics from the Cold War to the post-Cold War eras in Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China and beyond. I will examine five leading film auteurs and their martial arts works in the Sinophone world: (1) diasporic relocation and obsession with a Chivalrous China in King Hu's Come Drink with Me (1965), Dragon Inn (1967), and A Touch of Zen (1971); (2) ashes of time and traces of subjectivity in Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time (1994), Ashes of Time Redux (2008), and The Grandmaster (2013); (3) emotion in motion in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000); (4) epiphanies from the tale, the marvel, and the quotidian in Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin (2015); and (5) crippled chivalry and subaltern psychogeography in Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin (2013) and Ash is Purest White (2018). Chinese chivalrous psychogeography brings to limelight the human feelings and spatial trajectories of knights-errant, outcasts, and outlaws drifting across vast terrestrial regions beyond specific geographical environment, steered by psychological coordinates and emotional navigations, and thus showcases the entangled connections of diasporic imagination, personal/historical violence, and social (in)justice immersed in political, martial, and cultural crisis.
This talk is a part of the Global Virtual Speakers Program/MSU Asian Studies Program, and funded by the Anthony Koo/Kwan-Wai So Lecture endowment.