2019/05/29 Song Hwee LIM-Poor Cinema from a Global South Perspective

Title：“Poor Cinema from a Global South Perspective”
Speaker：Song Hwee LIM (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Time：2019/05/29 (Wed),14:00-17:00
Venue：Room 106A, HA2 Bldg, NCTU
*The talk will be conducted in English. 

This talk aims to map different practices and conceptualisations of poverty and the cinema in the twenty-first century. It argues that the relationship between poverty and cinema must be reconfigured in the age of neoliberal capitalism and digital technology. It asks the following questions: How can the medium of cinema contribute to our understanding of economic poverty? How has cinema represented the poor and problematized the issue of poverty? How can it be mobilized to raise awareness about economic inequality and as a tool for activism to fight for social justice under neoliberalism? What potential changes does the democratization of filmmaking and film viewing in the digital age bring to the relationship between cinema and poverty? 

This talk will interrogate the notion of poverty as it has been deployed across different artistic media and theoretical formulations, including “poor theatre”, “poor image”, and “poor theory”. It will pay particular attention to works produced in the Global South, including feature films that both portray poverty and mobilize poverty as a method as well as documentaries that deal with environmental destruction and waste collectors.

Song Hwee LIM is Professor of Cultural Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness(2014) and Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (2006). He is the founding editor of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. He is also the co-editor of Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Film (2006) and The Chinese Cinema Book (2011). His latest book manuscript on Taiwan New Cinema as soft power is currently under review.