2015/01/02 by Ling Zhang · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Aesthetics #Amateur #Anthropology #Art #Art history #Asian Culture and Media Studies #Cinema and Media Studies #Criticism #Film director #History #Identity (music) #Japanese History and Culture #Literature #Movement (music) #Movie theater #Sociology #Subject (documents) #Symphony #Transculturation #Visual arts
paper · doi:10.1080/17508061.2015.1010303
openalex publication_date 2015/01/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
This article explores how the creative career, protean experiments and theoretical writings of Taiwanese/Shanghainese/Japanese writer, translator, filmmaker and critic Liu Na'ou (1905–1940) were enriched by the interpenetration of his transcultural and transmedial aspirations. Through close reading of Liu's amateur “city film,” The Man Who Has a Camera (1933), paying explicit homage to Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov's “city symphony” film The Man With a Movie Camera (1929), I investigate how it embodies and encompasses the notions of reinvention and transculturation. Furthermore, through Liu's film criticism, especially on sound aesthetic and rhythmicity, I examine how camera movement and body movement, rhythm and musicality communicate and become entangled with the concept of transmediality. These complications also mediate Liu's ambiguous cultural identity as a colonial subject and transnational practitioner. I suggest how these intertwined concepts and practices created new aesthetic possibilities in 1930s Shanghai and contributed to—as well as constrained—a distinctively cosmopolitan vision.