The Cinema Pacific Industry Symposium focuses this year on relationships between the United States and Chinese film industries. The symposium leads off with a producer who has made great films that have been box office hits in the U.S., China, and Hong Kong. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Terence Chang studied architecture at University of Oregon and film at NYU before returning home to work for Hong Kong's Golden Harvest films in the late 1970s. Chang produced John Woo's iconic Hong Kong action films, including 1991's Once a Thief, Hard Boiled, and Hard Target.These films’ energy and entertainment value awed Hollywood, and led to Chang and Woo’s relocation to the U.S., where they formed Lion Rock Pictures. Among their productions here have been Broken Arrow, Face/Off, Windtalkers, and Mission Impossible II, featuring stars Nicolas Cage, Tom Cruise, and John Travolta.
Recently, Chang and Woo returned to China to make Woo's dream project, the epic Red Cliff, and the new martial arts film Reign of Assassins starring Michelle Yeoh, which previews at Cinema Pacific tonight. Chang has helped guide the Hollywood careers of Yeoh and actor Chow Yun-Fat, and has many credits on Hollywood and Asian films apart from his renowned collaborations with John Woo (including Paycheck, Anna and the King, and Color Me Love).We are honored to welcome Terence Chang back to Eugene and the University of Oregon in his first visit since 1974. The conversation will be moderated by Chang's colleague and friend, Michael Andreen, senior vice president of international production at Disney, and also an alumnus of the University.
New York Times article on Terence Chang: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/arts/29iht-fmlede31.1.7304388.html
The second conversation in this year's Cinema Pacific Industry Symposium will be with a producer who has helmed some of the leading independent and feature film distribution companies of the past two decades. Along the way, he has been the executive producer of two important films made in China: Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the current Zhang Yimou production starring Christian Bale, The Thirteen Flowers of Nanjing.
David Linde was born and raised in Eugene, Oregon, the son of legendary jurist and UO Law Professor Hans Linde. After graduating from Swarthmore College, Linde supervised international sales at Paramount and then Fox Lorber before leaving in 1991 for Miramax Pictures. There, he rose to the position of Executive Vice President during the years that Miramax dominated American indie feature filmmaking. In 1997, Linde became co-president of Good Machine International, which handled the international distribution of critical and commercial hits like Crouching Tiger, Dancer in the Dark, and Y Tu Mama Tambien. Linde then became co-president of Focus Features, which Universal purchased in 2002 and designated its specialty film unit. While at Focus, films that Linde oversaw, including Brokeback Mountain and Lost in Translation, garnered 53 Academy Award nominations and eleven Oscars. The next step was his rise to co-chair of Universal Pictures in 2006, where he green-lit such films as The Bourne Ultimatum and Knocked Up, and Universal experienced its two most successful years of its 100-year history. After leaving Universal in late 2009, Linde formed a new production company called Lava Bear and is developing global film projects, including the new Zhang Yimou feature now filming in China.
We are proud to welcome David Linde back to Eugene, where he will join festival director Richard Herskowitz for a conversation about his career in international film production and distribution.
Darrell William Davis, a leading scholar of Asian film, will close the first Cinema Pacific Industry Symposium with a talk on China's film industry and its relationship to Hollywood. Davis writes,
It is tempting to view China’s rise as oppositional, dialectical, and firmly clasped with Western political terms: communist vs. capitalist; authoritarian vs. consumer market; propaganda vs. entertainment. As high concept script, this double imagery offers grand “clash of civilization” rhetoric that measures China up to established global benchmarks and brand names. China’s officials deploy it too, and represent the country’s cultural products in agonistic terms. They challenge Western hegemony by framing their films and television as standing up to an entrenched, powerful opponent... Mirror image or shadowboxing may be what’s required on the public stage of cultural politics, while impersonation is what happens offstage, in the real world of economic institutions and trade.
Davis is Honorary Associate Professor in Visual Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is the author of Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film (1996), co-author of Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (2005) and East Asian Screen Industries (2008), and co-editor of Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts (2007).
The talk will be followed by a reception hosted by the Cinema Studies Program.
USA (2010)
Directed by: Nora Bateson
Written and narrated by: Nora Bateson
Produced by: Nora Bateson and David Sieburg
Edited by: David Sieburg
With: Fritjof Capra, Jerry Brown, Mary Catherine Bateson
Running Time: 60 min.
An Ecology of Mindwon the Gold Medal for Best Documentary at the recent Spokane International Film Festival. It is a film portrait of Gregory Bateson, celebrated anthropologist, philosopher, author, naturalist, systems theorist, and filmmaker, directed by his daughter, Nora Bateson. GregoryBateson’s theories, such as “the double bind” and “the pattern which connects,” continue to impact the fields of anthropology, psychiatry, information science, cybernetics, urban planning, biology, and ecology, challenging people to think in new ways.
The film includes footage from Gregory Bateson’s own films shot in the 1930s in Bali (with Margaret Mead) and New Guinea, along with photographs, filmed lectures, and interviews. Nora Bateson depicts her father as a man who studied the interrelationships of the complex systems in which we live with a depth motivated by scientific rigor and caring integrity.Through contemporary interviews with people Bateson influenced (including Governor Jerry Brown, Stewart Brand, William Irwin Thompson, and Fritjof Capra), along with his own words, Bateson’s way of thinking reveals practical approaches to the enormous challenges confronting humanity and the natural world.
An Ecology of Mindhopes to inspire its audience to see their lives within a larger system—glistening with symmetry, play, and metaphor. Deborah Tannen writes: "This unique documentary will be an invaluable resource to the many who have drawn on Gregory Bateson’s ideas—myself included—and to those for whom this will be an enlightening introduction."
Preceded by Portland-based animator Joan Gratz's latest films: Puffer Girl (2009, 5 min.), the perplexing adventures of a puffer fish who pushes the boundaries of her world, and Kubla Khan (2010), based on Coleridge's opium-induced poem and clay painted by Gratz in a drug-free state.
Nora Bateson is a media producer and educator based in Vancouver. Her work includes documentaries, multimedia productions, magazine columns, and developing curriculum for elementary and high school students. Central to all her pursuits is the idea of utilizing media and storytelling to encourage cultural understanding, social justice, and environmental awareness.
An accomplished director, artist, and animator, Joan Gratz pioneered the animation technique known as claypainting. Her recent short film, Puffer Girl, blends claypainting with digital techniques. Her Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase won the Academy Award in 1992.
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqiHJG2wtPI
Official Site: http://www.anecologyofmind.com/
China (2010)
Directed by: Su Chao-pin, John Woo
Written by: Su Chao-Pin
Produced by: John Woo and Terence Chang
Edited by: Cheung Ka-fai
Cinematography by: Horace Wong
With: Michelle Yeoh, Jung Woo Sung, Wang Xueqi, Barbie Hsu
Running Time: 120 min.
Reign of Assassins is John Woo and Terence Chang's revival of classic "wuxia" martial arts filmmaking. The film tells the story of a female assassin who tries, and fails, to return to a normal life. After defending herself and her husband from a gang attack, her own former gang members track her down. Michelle Yeoh, who starred in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, gives an outstanding performance as the assassin, and has been nominated for the Best Actress award at the 2011 Asian Film Awards. L'Express praised the "sublime choreography" by Stephen Tung of the film's fight scenes, and they will leave you breathless. Derek Elley of Film Business Asia wrote that "without heavy resort to visual effects, the film gives new life to a genre that's been pulled every which way in the past 20 years in search of new thrills." Su Chao-pin wrote and directed the film, but producer Woo was on the set in China and Taiwan advising the director so closely that, ultimately, he accepted a co-director credit. Su Chao-pin, however, earned the award of Best Director from the Hong Kong Film Critics Society.
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i4yVbYX98I&feature=related
Official Site (China): http://jianyu.ent.sina.com.cn/
Mailing address:
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Contact:
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© 2011 University of Oregon
An equal-opportunity, affirmative-action institution committed to cultural diversity and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Cinema Pacific is sponsored by the UO Arts and Administration Program and UO Academic Extension, with support from University Relations, UO Cinema Studies, and the School of Journalism and Communication.
Cinema Pacific also receives major support from UO Libraries, East Asian Languages and Literatures, the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, the UO Confucius Institute, and additional support from the Office of International Affairs.