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Mentoring Millennials in an Asian Context
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78973-484-3

Book part
Publication date: 23 November 2023

Christopher Sommer

This chapter examines changing attitudes towards exhibiting Chinese immigration in New Zealand. Drawing on archival research and qualitative interviews with subject experts and…

Abstract

This chapter examines changing attitudes towards exhibiting Chinese immigration in New Zealand. Drawing on archival research and qualitative interviews with subject experts and visitors, three museums are discussed: national narratives at the New Zealand Maritime Museum in Auckland and The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington; and regional representations at the Toitū Otago Settlers Museum in Dunedin.

The exhibition analysis shows that multicultural narratives of tangata tiriti immigration including Chinese only became prevalent in the 1990s, when changing attitudes in society at large and progressive immigration legislation influenced strategies of display.

These modernised national narratives propagate a multicultural paradigm. However, exhibiting Chinese immigration history constitutes only a small part of the larger mission of national museums. Accordingly, narratives of Chinese immigration remain superficial, serving celebratory representations of ethnic communities, while racism and discrimination are an important, but not central aspect of these narratives.

At the regional level, Toitū re-invented itself into a social history museum with a more inclusive and reconciliatory agenda, with a redesign in 2013 subsuming Chinese immigration into an intercultural narrative, featuring alongside other minority groups with a focus on cultural contact and exchange.

Nevertheless, all three museums still rely on narratives based on minorities and majorities arranged around a stable hegemony. Consultation and cooperation with Māori also reveal the wish to be presented as first people, set apart from tangata tiriti. That way biculturalism seems to act as a dividing force spatially, but thematically both immigration histories are more and more intertwined.

Book part
Publication date: 24 November 2022

Jasmine Yu-Hsing Chen

This chapter examines how the breakthrough of Zhang Ziyi's depiction of a female kung fu master in The Grandmaster (2013) transforms the figure of the heroine in Chinese action…

Abstract

This chapter examines how the breakthrough of Zhang Ziyi's depiction of a female kung fu master in The Grandmaster (2013) transforms the figure of the heroine in Chinese action films. Zhang is well known for her acting in action films conducted by renowned directors, such as Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar-wai. After winning 12 different Best Actress awards for her portrayal of Gong Ruomei in The Grandmaster, Zhang announced that she would no longer perform in any action films to show her highest respect for the superlative character Gong. Tracing Zhang's transformational portrait of a heroine in The Grandmaster alongside her other action roles, this analysis demonstrates how her performance projects the directors' distinctive gender viewpoints. I argue that Zhang's characterisation of Gong remodels heroine-hood in Chinese action films. Inheriting the typical plot of a daughter's use of martial arts for revenge for her father's death, Gong breaks from conventional Chinese action films that highlight romantic love during a woman's adventure and the decisive final battle scene. Beyond the propensity for sensory stimulation, Gong's characterisation enables Zhang to determine that women can really act in action films – demonstrating their inner power and ability to create multi-layered characters – not merely relying upon physical action. This chapter offers a relational perspective of how women transform the action film genre not merely as gender spectacles but as embodied figures that represent emerging female subjectivity.

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Gender and Action Films
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-514-2

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Book part
Publication date: 24 November 2022

Chin-Pang Lei

With its worldwide fame for making action films, Hong Kong cinema has been defined as masculine. Action films, including the costumed martial arts films and the modern gangster…

Abstract

With its worldwide fame for making action films, Hong Kong cinema has been defined as masculine. Action films, including the costumed martial arts films and the modern gangster films, have been a major genre in Hong Kong cinema from the 1960s on. Despite the dominant masculinity, women still play significant roles in some of these films. In fact, fighting women leave footprints in the history of Hong Kong cinema, which precede their counterparts in the West and even provide models for Hollywood after 2000.

This chapter focuses on the female characters portrayed by the acclaimed Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, whose works have an ambiguous connection to mainstream genres. He modifies Hong Kong action films and creates unconventional female characters such as the drug dealer in Chungking Express (1994), the killer dispatcher in Fallen Angels (1995), the swordswoman in Ashes of Time (1994), and the kung fu master in The Grandmaster (2013). Wong's films have been mush discussed in academia, but the gender images therein are quite ignored. With high intertextuality, these characters are used to question mainstream action films and redefine women's roles in male's cinematic space. In addition, via the writing of these women, Wong constructs an open and ambivalent post-colonial Hong Kong identity. This paper contextualises the figures of sword-wielding and gun-shooting women and examines how Wong Kar-wai deploys these images to articulate the cultural identity of a post-colonial city.

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Gender and Action Films 1980-2000
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-506-7

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Book part
Publication date: 8 August 2022

Omid Oshriyeh and Antonella Capriello

Films are arguably one of the most influential phenomenon of modern society. They are remarkable and effective means of conveying stories and influencing humans. Films are one of…

Abstract

Films are arguably one of the most influential phenomenon of modern society. They are remarkable and effective means of conveying stories and influencing humans. Films are one of the most important factors that motivate people to travel to a destination. This chapter will explore the phenomenon which is widely known as film tourism and its role in tourist experience. To gain a better understanding of film tourism experiences, this chapter presents key concepts and analyzes existing studies. The analysis investigates important aspects of film tourism experience, including experience satisfaction and storytelling. It tries to highlight how films can influence tourist experiences beyond the travel itself, with a strong emphasis on the role of storytelling and film tourism experience satisfaction. To help readers achieve a clearer and more detailed understanding of the unique and dynamic nature of film tourism experiences, this chapter provides an overview of the tourist experience by conducting a comprehensive literature review on the subject. By doing this, this chapter proposes a new framework of film tourist experience satisfaction while describing the relationship between influential factors such as previous film experiences, motivation to visit a destination, destination expectations, on-site destination experience, and tourist involvement. Finally, conclusions are drawn presenting storytelling as a contemporary approach in the domain of film tourism experiences.

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Contemporary Approaches Studying Customer Experience in Tourism Research
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-632-3

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Book part
Publication date: 24 November 2022

Steven Gerrard

The 1980s saw both a return and rise to box office prominence of the once-popular Sword and Sorcery genre. Following on from Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance as Conan the…

Abstract

The 1980s saw both a return and rise to box office prominence of the once-popular Sword and Sorcery genre. Following on from Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance as Conan the Barbarian (1982), a raft of imitators followed. On the one hand, there were films like Krull (1983) and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) with their big budgets and excellent casts. On the other were their ‘spaghetti’ variations, such as Conquest (1983), Hercules (1983) and the Ator (1982–1990) series, where poor production values, doleful acting, and even more atrocious dubbing remained more frightening than any monsters the hero encountered.

For the most part, the sword and sorcery genre predominantly focused on the male in the canon. However, using Yvonne Tasker's (1993) work on spectacular and hard bodies in action cinema, this chapter will provide an analysis of how female characters in the sword and sorcery genre are portrayed, using Barbarian Queen (1985) as a case study.

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Gender and Action Films 1980-2000
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-506-7

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 13 March 2019

Emilio Audissino

The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2015) is the story of a group of teenage friends that, during the screening of a Friday the 13th-like 1980s slasher horror, happen to be…

Abstract

The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2015) is the story of a group of teenage friends that, during the screening of a Friday the 13th-like 1980s slasher horror, happen to be sucked into the film. Trapped in the gruesome narrative, they have to survive the deranged killer that haunts the premises of the campsite by applying their knowledge of the rules and cliches of the slasher genre. The film is of interest not only because it mixes horror and comedy and exaggerates the horror genre’s conventions – as Scream and other neo-slashers already did. By employing the device of the screen rupture, the film constructs a complex network of self-reflexive moments and intertextual references. The metalinguistic play involves in particular the notoriously sexophobic and gender-led dynamics of the 1980s slashers – those more emancipated girls who have sex are killed; the most prudish girl is the one that eventually manages to defeat the monster, the ‘Final Girl’. In this sense, the film is almost like a video essay that reprises and illustrates one of the most seminal study of the slasher genre, Carol Clover’s 1992 Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. The chapter presents the defining elements of the slasher subgenre as theorized by Clover and then focusses on the analysis of the metalinguistic elements of The Final Girls vis-à-vis Clover’s classic text.

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Gender and Contemporary Horror in Film
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-898-7

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 10 November 2011

Eunju Ko and Seulgi Lee

In “the century of culture,” a current drift is toward utilizing cultural heritage branding. Cultural heritage brand referred to in this study means a brand with value proposition…

Abstract

In “the century of culture,” a current drift is toward utilizing cultural heritage branding. Cultural heritage brand referred to in this study means a brand with value proposition based on cultural heritage. As Asian cultures are gathering global focus amid ongoing trend of exoticism and the growth of Asian economies, there is more opportunity especially for Asian brands to benefit from cultural heritage branding. Also, the advantages of cultural heritage branding can benefit fashion brands, considering that designs of great importance in fashion brand's competitiveness can earn creativity and originality from cultural heritage.

Therefore, this study (1) profiles cultural heritage fashion brands based on Asia: Japan, China, and Korea, (2) identifies components of cultural heritage fashion branding by comparative analysis, and (3) identifies characteristics in brand management strategy from the brands, and offer managerial implications for upcoming cultural heritage fashion brands.

This study adopts a case study approach that focuses on Asian fashion brands; Issey Miyake (Japan), Shanghai Tang (China), and Damyeon designed by Lee Hye Soon (Korea). The analytical contents of this research include general profiles (i.e., brand history, brand philosophy and concept, and BI and visual representation), cultural heritage perspectives and brand management perspective (i.e., product, price, place, promotion, and brand extension). Most of the information was retrieved from multiple sources including books, academic papers, brand's annual report, brand official website, news articles, etc.

Overall, this study shows cultural heritage fashion branding can be useful in distinctiveness in positioning and delivering brand value in depth, authenticity, and credibility for customers (Urde, 2007). The findings suggest some managerial as well as cultural heritage-related indications for upcoming cultural heritage fashion brands.

Although common components of cultural heritage fashion branding (i.e., utilization of traditional prototype, emphasis on traditional fabric, and preservation of traditional craftsmanship) were drawn out, achieving optimal balance between tradition and modernity was found critical as well. Managerial guidelines include foreign brand naming, premium pricing, art-related promotions, and extension for a total lifestyle brand. In further research, the type of industry and different country-of-origins can be applied in order to extensively study about the issue of cultural heritage branding.

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Tourism Sensemaking: Strategies to Give Meaning to Experience
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-853-4

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 24 November 2022

Shelley O'Brien

Wesley Snipes has had an extensive career on the big screen starting out as part of the New Black Cinema movement in the 1990s working with Spike Lee and Mario Van Peebles. His…

Abstract

Wesley Snipes has had an extensive career on the big screen starting out as part of the New Black Cinema movement in the 1990s working with Spike Lee and Mario Van Peebles. His roles have been incredibly varied covering drama, comedy, action, thriller, horror and Science Fiction: he has played everything from jazz saxophonist to paraplegic and drag queen to vampire, as well as recently appearing as character actor D'Urville Martin in Eddie Murphy's critically acclaimed Dolemite Is My Name. However, despite his versatility as an actor and his popularity in action films such as Demolition Man and the Blade Trilogy, Snipes has been, surprisingly, the subject of minimal analysis unlike, for example Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Unfortunately, he has also fallen foul of the direct to video curse from around 2005 as well as being sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion. However, this should not negate Snipes' contribution to cinema, especially in the genre of action. Snipes can be a commanding presence given the right script and direction – as an expert martial artist he is lithe and agile; he has strong facial features and a powerful voice, plus the ability to deliver the wisecracking humour which often goes hand-in-hand with action performances. The aim of this chapter, then, is to focus on Snipes as an action star and, more specifically, his significance as a black action star, examining several key films which have helped to develop his onscreen persona and performance style.

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Gender and Action Films
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-514-2

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 30 May 2017

Marcelo Dídimo Souza Vieira

Cangaço was a form of banditry that occurred in the North-East of Brazil between 1870 and 1940. The movement has inspired many films over the years. This chapter explores the…

Abstract

Cangaço was a form of banditry that occurred in the North-East of Brazil between 1870 and 1940. The movement has inspired many films over the years. This chapter explores the contribution of Cangaço-inspired productions to Brazilian cinema, as well as the particular characteristics of what constitutes the Cangaço genre.

Following a historical survey of the Cangaço, the films were divided into different categories and ranked in terms of relevance. Only the most important are discussed in this chapter.

The Cangaço has been portrayed in Brazilian cinema through the decades in diverse ways, dating back to the 1920s. After becoming a consolidated film genre in the 1950s, then known as Nordestern, the Cangaço finally acquired a proper structure, featuring multiple Western references among its common characteristics. In the 1960s, Glauber Rocha, one of the most prominent filmmakers of the Cinema Novo avant-garde movement, added his own symbolism to the genre. Eventually, the Cangaço was also revisited by directors who combined it with other genres such as comedy, documentary, and erotic films. Another relevant reinterpretation came in the 1990s, when filmmakers of the so-called New Brazilian Cinema offered a new view on the subject.

Despite its strong association with Brazil, the Cangaço has not been thoroughly investigated by researchers. This chapter presents a historical survey and analysis of Cangaço films, highlighting their relevance to Brazilian cinema.

Details

Brazil
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78635-785-4

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