Paola Voci
Paola Voci is the Director of Globals Studies at the University of Otago (NZ). She is the author of China On Video: Smaller-screen Realities, Routledge, 2010, 2012 and co-editor of Screening China's Soft Power, Routledge 2018. She completed a B.A. Honours in Chinese Language and Literature (Venice University), a Diploma in Film Theory and Practice (Beijing Film Academy), a M.A. in East Asian Studies (Indiana University) and a PhD in Chinese (Indiana University). She specializes in “Chinese-accented,” "light" visual cultures, and, in particular, documentary, animation, and other hybrid video practices. Her current research focuses on vernacular “animateur” practices and postdigital documentary and examines their contribution to histories and theories of the moving image. She has published articles in Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Bianco e Nero, Global Storytelling, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Screening the Past, Senses of Cinema, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Parol. Her work also appears in several edited collections of essays, such as Chinese Animation: Multiplicity in Motions, Dv-made China, The Chinese Cinema Book, The New Chinese Documentary Movement, and The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas.
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Books by Paola Voci
Promoting China’s cultural soft power by disseminating modern Chinese values is one of the policies of President Xi Jinping. This is usually understood as a top-down initiative, implemented willingly or unwillingly by writers, filmmakers, artists and so on, and often manifesting itself in clumsy and awkward ways, for example in the concept of “the Chinese dream”, intended to rival and perhaps appeal more strongly than “the American dream”. Yet, modern Chinese values are in fact put forward in many ways by many different cultural actors. Through analyses of film festivals, CCTV, Confucius Institutes, auteurs, blockbusters, reality TV, and online digital cultures, this book exposes the limitations of China’s officially promoted soft power in both conception and practice, and proposes a pluralistic approach to understanding Chinese soft power in local, regional, and transnational contexts. As such, the book demonstrates the limitations of existing theories of soft power, and argues that the US-derived concept of soft power can benefit from being examined from a China perspective.
By describing smaller-screen movies, moviemaking and viewing as light realities, Voci points to their "insignificant" weight in terms of production costs, distribution size, profit gains, intellectual or artistic ambitions, but also their deep meaning in defining an alternative way of seeing and understanding the world. The author proposes that lightness is a concept that can usefully be deployed to describe the moving image, beyond the specificity of recent new media developments and which can, in fact, help us rethink previous cinematic practices in broad terms both spatially and temporally.
Journal Articles by Paola Voci
Paola Voci, paola.voci@otago.ac.nz
Link to full article: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/MHRiq5JI3BFxJKqTprFw/full
The lingering shadows (ying) in the word for cinema (dianying) did not seem to have a significant impact in Chinese film studies, which have been predominantly preoccupied with indexicality and issues related to realism. By bringing these shadows into focus, this essay reflects on the handmade nature of the moving images as key to better framing and understanding some of the most recent developments in Chinese digital animation. In the work of an increasingly visible number of solo producers (i.e., the postdgital animateurs), the moving image is more intimately connected to the human creator/manipulator/performer, rather than the technological medium (be it the kinoeye, the film strip, or the digital software). Reframing their animations within the broader temporal and spatial context of handmade cinema, I explore a longstanding, but largely unscrutinised, connection between cinema and the performative apparatus of the shadow play to sketch a parallax story – rather than a parallel history – of manipulated and evocative moving images that are not contained in the institution of cinema and do not submit themselves to the supremacy of the index. The animateur’s moving images offer meaningful evidence of the important, albeit mostly unrecognized, role that animation can play in (Chinese) film studies, and more broadly, film theories.
Six key words:
postdigital animation, shadow play, handmade cinema, animateur, lightness, media archeology
Promoting China’s cultural soft power by disseminating modern Chinese values is one of the policies of President Xi Jinping. This is usually understood as a top-down initiative, implemented willingly or unwillingly by writers, filmmakers, artists and so on, and often manifesting itself in clumsy and awkward ways, for example in the concept of “the Chinese dream”, intended to rival and perhaps appeal more strongly than “the American dream”. Yet, modern Chinese values are in fact put forward in many ways by many different cultural actors. Through analyses of film festivals, CCTV, Confucius Institutes, auteurs, blockbusters, reality TV, and online digital cultures, this book exposes the limitations of China’s officially promoted soft power in both conception and practice, and proposes a pluralistic approach to understanding Chinese soft power in local, regional, and transnational contexts. As such, the book demonstrates the limitations of existing theories of soft power, and argues that the US-derived concept of soft power can benefit from being examined from a China perspective.
By describing smaller-screen movies, moviemaking and viewing as light realities, Voci points to their "insignificant" weight in terms of production costs, distribution size, profit gains, intellectual or artistic ambitions, but also their deep meaning in defining an alternative way of seeing and understanding the world. The author proposes that lightness is a concept that can usefully be deployed to describe the moving image, beyond the specificity of recent new media developments and which can, in fact, help us rethink previous cinematic practices in broad terms both spatially and temporally.
Paola Voci, paola.voci@otago.ac.nz
Link to full article: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/MHRiq5JI3BFxJKqTprFw/full
The lingering shadows (ying) in the word for cinema (dianying) did not seem to have a significant impact in Chinese film studies, which have been predominantly preoccupied with indexicality and issues related to realism. By bringing these shadows into focus, this essay reflects on the handmade nature of the moving images as key to better framing and understanding some of the most recent developments in Chinese digital animation. In the work of an increasingly visible number of solo producers (i.e., the postdgital animateurs), the moving image is more intimately connected to the human creator/manipulator/performer, rather than the technological medium (be it the kinoeye, the film strip, or the digital software). Reframing their animations within the broader temporal and spatial context of handmade cinema, I explore a longstanding, but largely unscrutinised, connection between cinema and the performative apparatus of the shadow play to sketch a parallax story – rather than a parallel history – of manipulated and evocative moving images that are not contained in the institution of cinema and do not submit themselves to the supremacy of the index. The animateur’s moving images offer meaningful evidence of the important, albeit mostly unrecognized, role that animation can play in (Chinese) film studies, and more broadly, film theories.
Six key words:
postdigital animation, shadow play, handmade cinema, animateur, lightness, media archeology
Evidence of this approach can be found in the work of many Chinese filmmakers and artists, across different generations and Sinophone locations. Rather than a new turn, a movement or a discernible trend, the post-digital approach may be better described as producing marginal but pervasive detours in Chinese cinema. Deviating outside (although not necessarily conflicting with or isolated from) mainstream cinema, these detours attract relatively small audiences and limited capital, but are widespread. They are not isolated experiments confined to one specific film genre, category, or location; rather, they develop in diverse cinematic forms and platforms.