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The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture-Altering Archives
Edited by Peng Hsiao-yen and Ella Raidel

Routledge Contemporary China Series

The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture investigates Sinophone films and art projects that express this desire for archiving and reconfiguring the past. Comprising ten chapters, this book brings together contributors from an array of disciplines – artists, filmmakers, curators, film critics, and literary scholars – to grapple with the creative ambiguities of Sinophone cinemas and image culture. Blending eclectic methods of scholarly research, knowledge-making, and art-making into a new discursive space, the chapters address the diverse complexities of the cinematic culture and image production in Sinitic language regions.

With contributions by: Yu-lin Lee, Chen Chieh-jen, Hongjohn Lin, Peng Hsiao-yen, Ella Raidel, Sandy Hsiu-chih Lo, Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, Agnes S. Schick-Chen, Isabel Wolte

Hot off the press: Ghostpaper, the latest news on the project ‘Of Haunted Spaces’

 

Publication:

Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, Volume 11, Issue 2
Edited by Tse-Lan Deborah Sang and Chun Zhang

Ella Raidel, “The Exhausted Narrative in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Films”, pages 329-351

This articel sets out to examine the “exhausted narrative” in aesthetic and poetic experience, revealing the affect and effect of Tsai Ming-Liang’s film-making. He is notable for his obsession with ruins, defunct construction sites, abandoned buildings, and film itself as a modern ruin. These sites are a reminder of the alienated subjects within its historical context, a fragmented narrative, and an uncertain or failed future to come, just like the ruin-a chapter of a halted story. Tsai’s films are not only full of ruinous images and bodies, but even the fragmented narratives are ruinous, turning in elliptical circles, aiming toward their morbid ending until their total exhaustion. This cinematic ouroboros ophis will be discussed in two aspects: first, as an aesthetic practice, and second, as the parallelism between the onand off-screen reality of the mode of production and reception in the cinematic experience. The term “exhausted narratives” refers to the processes of writing meta-fiction, as that of “re-orchestrating” and “re-editing” the past with respect to the present, and to inscribing Tsai’s own narrative universe.

http://journal.hep.com.cn/flsc/EN/volumn/volumn_3084.shtml#1

http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/16737423/11/2