Melancholy Drift

Ma offers an innovative study of three provocative Chinese directors: Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang. Focusing on the highly stylized and monlinear configurations of time in each director's films, she argues that these dirctors have brought new global respect for Chinese cinema in amplifying motifs of loss, nostalgia, hauntin, absence and ephemeral poetices Hou, Tsai, and Wong all isist on the significance of being out of time, not merely out of place, as a condition of global modernity. Ma argues that their films collectively foreground the central place of contemporary Chinese films in a transnational culture of memory, characterized by a distinctive melancholy that highlights the difficulty of binding together past and present into a meaningful narrative. Jean Ma is assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University

Melancholy Drift rides the films of three Chinese auteurs right into the heart of its subject, the mismatch between private feeling and collective history. These crucial films, set carefully beside one another, begin to pulse anew under the deft touch of Jean Ma's analyses. Drawing on a deep reservoir of historical and critical knowledge, she helps us hear these films speak of our times, then speak of time itself and of its dislocations---Dudley Andrew, Yale University

Theoretically sophisticated and elegantly written, Melancholy Drift elucidates the subject of cinematic time in its various configurations: as a response to historical ruptures and political upheavals as representational politics, and as a reinvention of the art cinema. This book is a timely demonstration of the key roles played by Chinese auteurs in shaping the new face of world cinema today and an important contribution to scholarship both within and beyond the field of transnational Chinese cinemas---Song Hwee Lim, University of Exeter