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This tribute to Paul Willemen's scholarship is inspired by his debate with Kim Soyoung about the use of the freeze-frame in South Korean film as “blockage”. It examines the phenomenon of splitting and doubling in contemporary independent Chinese films about young women alone in the public sphere, and in particular Liu Shu's Lotus (Xiao He, 2012). As well as the comparison with the South Korean situation, the essay locates these films in the long lineage of Chinese films that use the figure of the woman alone in the public sphere as a symbol of China alive in the bitter seas of modernity. The essay argues that instead of blockage, perhaps what we find with splitting and doubling is a symptom of compulsory progress under conditions of Chinese neo-liberalism, which combines a one-party authoritarian political system with a market economy structured around growth. (Source: publisher's abstract)
This two-part essay is on the erotics of pedagogy or education of the senses through learning how to learn from images and sounds of cinema as manifestations of rhythm. Part one creates a conceptual framework derived from the archives on Neurological Modernity and Theatre Anthropology, so as to develop the concept of a “Second Nervous System” which animates performers in the great Asian and European civilizational traditions of performance. Their relevance to early twentieth century European avant-garde performance and cinema and to contemporary transcultural work in performance provides a mobile, flexible, conceptual framework for thinking with film. Part two activates this network of rhythmic connections so as to explore, observe, analyse and learn from the film Khayal Gatha by Kumar Shahani, which is, among other things, about the conditions of transmissibility of cultural traditions after colonialism and political independence. A question drives this essay in memory of Paul Willemen. In the emerging “Asian Century” will we, the peoples of the Asia-Pacific zones of contact, be able to take cues from the anthropology of theatre to create “a thousand and one” transversal story lines on “a thousand plateaus” across the globe and beyond, with cinema/film as our mentor? (Source: publisher's abstract)
