Intermedial Laughter: Hou Baolin and xiangsheng dianying in mid-1950s’ China

Comedy film in the early Mao era is a site of negotiation and contestation. The ephemeral presence of satirical comedies in the Hundred Flowers period (1956–1957) and the long–awaited reemergence of the genre, albeit in the form of eulogistic comedies, in the early 1960s bespeak at once the challenge of producing sociopolitically appropriate laughter and the unceasing popular yearning for it. Recent studies have explored the determinants of laughter’s tortuous path to screen by paying great attention to the varied kinds of conflict and negotiation among film artists, audiences, critics, cultural administrators, and party authorities.¹ They have also..

The Might of the People: Counter-Espionage Films and Participatory Surveillance in the Early PRC

The increasing penetration of surveillance technology in everyday life as well as the widespread concern for national security in the face of global terrorism in the past decade has not only boosted surveillance studies in general but also fostered critical attention on surveillance cinema. Aside from film narratives and the new realist aesthetics informed by pervasive surveillance in contemporary societies, issues pertaining to the mutual implication of cinema and surveillance are of particular interest to film and media scholars. For instance, Sébastien Léfait in his study of contemporary film and television programs suggests that cinema engages surveillance structurally through its fictional creation of surveillance microcosms. In the meantime, by being a reality-capturing device, the cinematic apparatus “translates the problem of the ambiguity of the visible into terms of mediated watching,” which is also a matter at the heart of surveillance (ix). Similarly, Catherine Zimmer states that surveillance cinema is not simply one of the recurring tropes or iconographies of surveillance, but also concerns “the multiple mediations that occur through the cinematic narration of surveillance, through which practices of surveillance become representational and representational practices become surveillant” (2)

The Captive Audience and Albanian Films in Mao’s China

The ironclad alliance between the People’s Republic of China and Albania during the 1960s is often taken as the unquestioned starting point of transnational film exchanges between the two fraternal socialist states. This article delineates the presence of Albanian cinema in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 to 1976, when geopolitical realignments reconfigured the socialist camp, with special attention to Albanian cinema’s position within the filmscape in Mao’s China. Drawing on official news reports, movie reviews and recently published personal reminiscences, and employing the lens of the captive audience, it teases out the multifaceted reception of Albanian films, including the types of engagement that deviate from and challenge the then-prevailing revolutionary discourses. The study thus helps to demystify a reductive understanding of the socio-political significance of Albanian cinema in China

Overlooked Poses Actually Make Sense: Distilling Privileged Knowledge for Human Motion Prediction

Previous works on human motion prediction follow the pattern of building a mapping relation between the sequence observed and the one to be predicted. However, due to the inherent complexity of multivariate time series data, it still remains a challenge to find the extrapolation relation between motion sequences. In this paper, we present a new prediction pattern, which introduces previously overlooked human poses, to implement the prediction task from the view of interpolation. These poses exist after the predicted sequence, and form the privileged sequence. To be specific, we first propose an InTerPolation learning Network (ITP-Network) that encodes both the observed sequence and the privileged sequence to interpolate the in-between predicted sequence, wherein the embedded Privileged-sequence-Encoder (Priv-Encoder) learns the privileged knowledge (PK) simultaneously. Then, we propose a Final Prediction Network (FP-Network) for which the privileged sequence is not observable, but is equipped with a novel PK-Simulator that distills PK learned from the previous network. This simulator takes as input the observed sequence, but approximates the behavior of Priv-Encoder, enabling FP-Network to imitate the interpolation process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our prediction pattern achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarked H3.6M, CMU-Mocap and 3DPW datasets in both short-term and long-term predictions.Comment: accepted by ECCV202