A scholarly roundtable with Deep Focus and DIRECTUBE

Abstract

Co-organized by JCC’s guest editors Timmy Chen and Belinda He, a roundtable discussion took place between December 2020 and January 2021. Co-founders of two remarkable cinephilic organizations in the Chinese-speaking world (Deep Focus and DIRECTUBE) and scholars from various backgrounds were invited to share their observations and insights about cinema and cinephilia. Participants from six time zones started with a roundtable gathering via video conferencing and continued the conversation through an online document. The shared file afforded each participant the opportunity to contribute to the discussion at their own convenience, thereby enabling the roundtable to develop organically within the two-month period. The roundtable during the pandemic was a timely attempt to experiment with the notion of roundtable, whereby we appreciate and intend to keep the friction, interruption, fragmental thoughts, in-between moments, and even random diversions in the process. Such a multivocal conversation was a live event among us and remains ongoing for everyone. Part I of the roundtable, as shown below, revolves around participants’ positionalities and border-crossing experiences about cinema. In Part II, our special guest, Bérénice Reynaud recounts her cinephiliac experience of working as a non-Chinese, non-Chinese-speaking scholar and curator who has developed a special relationship to Chinese-language cinema.

Keywords:

• Deep Focus
• DIRECTUBE
• positionality
• border crossing
• cinephile community
• human encounter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liuying Cao

Liuying Cao is co-founder of film critic platform Deep Focus, producer and head of international sales of Midnight Blur Films.

Lin Che

Lin Che is a scholar and curator focusing on new media and multi-reality world exploration. She received her Ph.D. from Peking University, and is now a lecturer at Communication University of China. Her research centers around film festival studies and new media studies such as VR/AR/MR. She has been the curator of Sandbox Immersive Festival (2018-2019) and the curator of Beijing International Film Festival for VR Section (since 2018), which showcases cutting-edge immersive content worldwide.

Timmy Chih-Ting Chen

Timmy Chih-Ting Chen is Research Assistant Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong with the dissertation ‘In the Mood for Music: Sonic Extraterritoriality and Musical Exchange in Hong Kong Cinema’ (2016). Dr. Chen has published in A Companion to Wong Kar-wai (Wiley Blackwell), the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Surveillance in Asian Cinema (Routledge), The Assassin (HKU Press), Frames Cinema Journal, and Sound Stage Screen. He is working on two research projects. The first is a GRF project titled ‘Cross-Cultural Collaboration and Inter-Asia Identities: Wartime Shanghai and Postwar Hong Kong Song-and-Dance Films, 1931–1972’. The second is a study of 1960s Hong Kong experimental cinema and street photographer Ho Fan’s cinema.

Xiaoran Chen

Based in Shanghai and Beijing, China, Hancheng Shen and Xiaoran Chen are the co-founders and editors-in-chief of DIRECTUBE. DIRECTUBE is an art and independent film content platform, which is dedicated to publishing filmmakers’ interviews and talks, journalistic reports about film industry, as well as circulating information about film festivals and other screenings.

Belinda Qian He

Belinda Qian He recently received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (CMS) at the University of Washington, Seattle. Before joining the Film and Media Studies faculty at the University of Oklahoma, she worked as a CCS postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley (2020-21). At the intersection of film & media studies, art history, and legal humanities, her research engages the history of East Asian and transnational screen media, with a focus on image circulation of and as violence over space, through time, and across scale. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Grey Room, The Child in World Cinema, Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization, among others.

Zoe Meng Jiang

Zoe Meng Jiang is a PhD candidate at the Department of Cinema Studies in New York University. She has published in areas of media theory and history, social practice, gender and feminism, and moving-image arts.

Ran Ma

Ran Ma is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University, Japan. Her research interests include East Asian independent cinemas and film festival studies, on which she has published several journal articles and book chapters, including contributions to Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (2017) and The Japanese Cinema Book (British Film Institute, 2020). Dr. Ma is the author of Independent Filmmaking across Borders in Contemporary Asia (Amsterdam University Press, 2019). Besides research, she has also curated and organized screening events of independent films at Osaka, Beijing, and Nagoya.

Hancheng Shen

Jin Zhao studied philosophy in Beijing and Paris. He is a film critic, co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Deep Focus. He is also a producer and partner from Midnight Blur Films and Parallax Films international sales. His production projects include Yanagawa (dir. Zhang Lu, Pingyao & Busan 2021), The Neo-New Adventures (dir. Qiu Jiongjiong, Locarno 2021), All About ING (dir. Huang Zi, FIRST 2019), Vanishing Days (dir. Zhu Xin, Berlinale 2019), etc.