Tag: Reading Resposne

Cat Links 2024 Blog, Lecture 4: Everyday Spaces as Narrative

[READING RESPONSE] EUNICE SENG: “Cuts through Hong Kong”

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Like a classical poem, “In the Mood for Love” conveys rich information through its minimalist camera work and precise editing, creating ample space for viewers’ imagination and contemplation. The film serves as a visual collage of various spaces, including bedrooms, mahjong rooms, hotel rooms, hallways, and corridors, as well as scenes depicting still life. Moreover, the movie ingeniously combines the characters’ movements and costume changes, particularly the cheongsam, to accentuate shifts in time and place, capturing the essence of a transitioning Hong Kong. From 1962 onwards, Hong Kong experienced a profound transformation, with Tsim Sha Tsui evolving from an urban

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Cat Links Lecture 6: Housing Stories, Uncategorized

Reading Response: Ancuta, K.

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I think the relationship between ghosts and housing in hong kong is interesting as hong kong horror films have a unique strong linkage to a collective or a community, while foreign ghost films do not. Housing in Hong Kong thematically aligns with ghost stories in many ways, ghost can be a concretization of the anxieties and fears of residents in public housing. The living condition of public housing is often poor. The interior is dark and the spaces are cramped, which creates a sense of anxiety. The feeling of living in this poorly developed estate is presented in a visible

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Cat Links 2023 Blog, Lecture 6: Housing Stories

Reading Response: Katarzyna Ancuta

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Ancuta’s intriguing essay focuses on ghost stories within Asian cinema culture and how it relates to the urban context of rapidly advancing societies. She believes that ghosts are much more than being phantomic apparitions who scare people; they are residues of the past. Within modern societies, they are representations of a failed dream of economic success. These spirits tend to haunt buildings designed to house lots of people. Despite the crowded setting, the main emotions which these apparitions evoke in the viewers are that of alienation and solitude, which are two major characteristics of modern urban lifestyles. Within this context,

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Cat Links 2023 Blog, Lecture 2: Filming the Asian City

Reading Response: Leo Ou-fan Lee

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After reading Leo Ou-fan Lee’s The Urban Milieu of Shanghai Cinema, 1930-40: Some Explorations of Film Audience, Film Culture, and Narrative Conventions, in general, I found that it is difficult to understand the content and we need to be very concentrated when we are reading to follow the film examples mentioned in ghe text as they are very old that we do not know what they are talking about. Therefore, it is hard to understand Leo’s arguement. In content, Shanghai is a complex and unique place in China in 1930s as there is the settlement of many countries such as

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Cat Links 2022 Blog, Lecture 7: Monsters, Materials & Skyscrapers

[READING RESPONSE] William M. Tsutsui

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Oh No, There Goes Tokyo After reading the article, I realized how films would be affected by history and it will also change people’s thinking or even cultures. This article focuses on disaster films in Tokyo, Japan. The question raised: why there are so many disaster movies emerge frequently in Japan? The most obvious aim is to record Japanese history. Japan was situated in such traumas, so not only disaster movies but also movies in different genres were affected by it. To face the fear, the phenomenon of more and more disaster movies’ big fans also reflects that people try

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Cat Links Lecture 7 Monsters, Materials & Skyscrapers

[Reading Response: William M. Tsutsui]

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After learning about the reasons for the popularity of monster films in Japan, I could not help but reflect on what it is about a movie that attracts the audience’s attention. In the past, I would say that it is the admiration for trends, the artistic expression of beauty, and the empathy for the story. Now I still think so, but there is a unified standard above them – the spirit of the film. Monster films have endured in Japan, at first because their lives were greatly affected by the mushroom cloud, and later as an artistic communication of such

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Cat Links Lecture 4: Urban Everyday Spaces as Narrative

Reading Response: Nezar AlSayyed

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The phrase that impressed me the most in this reading material is “male gaze”. Similarly, the first two movies involved in this text all reflect the unfair situation between male and female, because the male protagonists always play a voyueristic role, while women are the ones to be controlled. Combine with a bunch of 1970s movies that Eunice mentioned in lecture 3, the images of working-class women in Hong Kong reflect the awakening of women. For example, females can also have a heroic position in the movie as men, or they can overcome challenges under very difficult circumstances. However, back

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Cat Links 2021 Blog, Lecture 9 Global Space, Time & Architecture

Reading Response: Ackbar Abbas

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While Abbas introduced the invisible city and generic city in the reading, I was hooked on the concept of Generic city, a strangely interesting and vague term to me. A city with something of anything, but also nothing: No characteristic, no history, identity nor iconic shape. The movie clip shown in the tutorial from The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) clearly justified the idea. We cannot identify which city or countries the characters were in. Just a normal and crowded station. Hong Kong as an international city is also generic to some extent. Think about any Central Business District of the developed

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