Remembering the body: Deleuze's recollection-image, and the spectacle of physical memory in Yip Man/Ip Man(2008)

This article explores how Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of the flashback, as‘recollection-image’, can assist our understanding of the rendering spectacular of physical memory in contemporary Chinese martial arts movies. The focus is a prominent flashback in the climactic duel in the kung fu movie, Yip Man/Ip Man (Yip, 2008). This recollection-image demonstrates how trained bodies in Chinese martial art movies suggest a slightly different understanding of time and affect from that which Deleuze formulated, based on his observation of US and European films. On textual, cultural and historical levels this article explores the usefulness of martial arts movies for developing our understanding of physicality in cinema, and for reconsidering Deleuze’s ideas in light of the Eurocentrism of some of his conclusions

Branded city living: Taipei becoming-Paris in Yi ye Taibei/Au Revoir Taipei (2010)

This article analyses Yi ye Taibei/Au Revoir Taipei (Chen, 2010). Due to its status as a co-production (with talent drawn from across borders, its various international funding sources and its deliberate appeal to global audiences through the festival circuit), the film is seen to provide a transnational perspective on Taipei. In this the film’s relationship with a film tourism agenda, a branding process pursued by the Taipei authorities, is stressed. Au Revoir Taipei’s consideration of life in Taipei, as a ‘branded city’, is analysed in terms of its three becomings (becoming-Paris, becoming-imperceptible, becoming-dance), in relation to Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the time-image (a striking example of which concludes the film) and it’s intertextual referencing of several ‘world’ or ‘art’ cinema classics, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à Part (1964). The film’s transnational view of life in the branded city is thus understood to emerge at the conjunction of global production and distribution realities for film-making, and contemporary work and lifestyle opportunities in Taipei, the convergence of which create a cinematic construction of Taipei city that can be deciphered using Deleuze’s concepts

Changes in A level history and re-establishing greater support for history in schools by university history departments

Paper given at History in Schools and Higher Education: Issues of Common Concern (second conference