“Wow, this is homemade.” notes

Notes

1. For their detailed accounts, see Featherstone, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity; Kraidy, Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization; Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. [return to page 1]

2. For some previous discussions of the relation between China’s cultural policies and Xi’s political ideals, see Kokas, Hollywood Made in China; Chu, Main Melody Films: Hong Kong Directors in Mainland China; Zhu, Hollywood in China.

3. For the former, see Brzeski, “‘Wandering Earth’ Director Frank Gwo on Making China’s First Sci-Fi Blockbuster”; for the latter, see Zhu, Hollywood in China, 217-8.

4. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis have written about the reform of the China Film Group, see Yeh and Davis, “Re-nationalizing China’s Film Industry: Case Study on the China Film Group and Film Marketization”.

5. See Brzeski, “China Box Office Roars Back to Life as ‘Wolf Warrior 2’ Makes Massive $130M Debut”.

6. For more information on this, see Brzeski, “China’s $80M War Film ‘The Eight Hundred’ Cancels Release After Suspected Government Pressure”.

7. For some examples of this view, see Davis, “Market and Marketization in the China Film Business”; Su, “Cultural Policy and Film Industry as Negotiation of Power: The Chinese State’s role and Strategies in its Engagement with Global Hollywood 1994–2012”; Yeh and Davis, “Re-nationalizing China’s Film Industry: Case Study on the China Film Group and Film Marketization”.

8. Previous scholars holding this view most often focus on the cultural exchange between China and Hollywood, see Berry, “Chinese Cinema with Hollywood Characteristics, or How The Karate Kid Became a Chinese Film”; Kokas, Hollywood Made in China; Zhu, Hollywood in China. More recently, Yiu-Wai Chu discusses specifically the infusion of Hong Kong talents since the signing of the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) between China and Hong Kong in 2003, see Chu, Main Melody Films.

9. See Guo and Zhou, “Interviewing with Guo Fan”.

10. In 1994, China started to import annually 10 foreign films—most of them are big-budget productions like Hollywood blockbusters—as an attempt to bring back audience loss in the domestic cinema which is known as the quota system. Since then, the yearly quota has been increased to 20 titles in 2000 and 34 in 2012, and these foreign imports have been strong competitors for domestic films, taking up more box office earnings every year up until the mid-2010s. To protect domestic films, China has several unoffical blackout periods during the year in which no foreign films are released in the mainland market so as to boost the sale of domestic titles. These blackout periods often correspond with the most lucrative release windows of the year, such as the summer, the Lunar New Year week, etc.

11. See Brzeski, “Does Hollywood Need to Rethink Its China Strategy?”.

12. For a more detailed discussion of cycle study and its difference with genre study, see Klein, American Film Cycles, 1-24. [return to page 2]

13. Jordan Schonig has noted that the creation of such fuzzy objects attracts the increasing attention of computer animation in the past twenty years and for animators, the challenge in creating such fuzzy objects comes from their irregular and ill-defined shapes which requires more advanced techniques of computer image synthesis such as what has been called “particle systems”. See Schonig 43-4.

14. For more information about the Variety review, see Lee, “Film Review: ‘Operation Red Sea’”.

15. Mark Seltzer once uses the term “body-machine-image complex” to pinpoint the violence both in and via the mass reproduction of the wounded body. See Seltzer, “Wound Culture” for a more detailed illustration of this.

16. For information about the production process, see Guan and Hou, “Believing in Gods or Creating Miracles: An Interview with Guan Hu, Director of Sacrifice”.

17. In a marketing video for Sacrifice, the pyrotechnician mentioned how they designed the explosions to control the transforming light and water shape in a manner that is no less rigorous than that in a visual effects design. [return to page 3]

18. See Pierson, Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder for his discussion of the spectatorship of special effects as connoisseurship.

19. Chow observes that the fantasies of primitivism are often played out through a generic realm of associations that typically have to do with the animal, the savage, the countryside, the indigenous, the people, and so forth. See Chow, Primitive Passions 22.

20. As of June 2024, the three top-grossing films of the year are all comedy dramas released during the Spring Festival holiday–usually deemed the most lucrative release window of the year–including YOLO by Jia Ling whose 2021 fantasy drama Hi, Mom is another smash hit with its box-office earnings trailing Battle at Lake Changjin in that year, Pegasus 2 by the blogger and writer Han Han, and Article 20 by the renowned director Zhang Yimou.

21. See Kokas, Hollywood Made in China.

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