Joshua Neves Interview
Joshua Neves is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute and the instructor of INI397H1F (Fall 2011): Special Topics in Social and Cultural Practices: Contemporary Chinese Documentary. We asked him a few questions about his background and interests.
Joshua Neves
Tell us about your background and research area.
I was always very interested in movies and TV, but only came to media studies as academic interest as a master’s student at the University of Chicago. I had done my undergrad degree in History at California State University, and toward the end of my studies had discovered critical theory. In fact, it was reading Foucault, Hayden White, Saussure, and a host of historians interested in cinema, that led me to want to pursue film studies. At any rate, Chicago was an intensely stimulating introduction to the discipline, after which I interned at the Harvard Film Archive for a year or so while I was applying for PhD programs.
I also spent the last year of my undergraduate degree studying and teaching in Beijing. It was during this period that I first became interested in Chinese cinema(s) and the role of media in social transformation. It was a very exciting time. The Fifth Generation filmmaking was still pretty lively, and a range of independent, art house, and popular films were in circulation—from Zhang Yuan and Wang Xiaoshuai to Zhang Yang and Feng Xiaogang.
With these varied interests I began a PhD at UC Santa Barbara, which was at that time a brand new graduate program. I had a really great experience there. It is such an amazingly smart and warm group of people. I finished my degree last year and am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute here at the University of Toronto. I am also teaching courses this year in the Cinema Studies Institute and, next term, in the Department of East Asian Studies. My current research focuses on Chinese film and TV, global and inter-Asian media, cultural theory, urbanism, and media ethnography.
What are 3 of your favourite films?
The Gleaners and I
This is one of those impossible questions…but is fun to think about from time to time. One of my favorite films is Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000). The essayistic documentary manages to be at once formally arresting, and have an incredible emotional and intellectual velocity. I find myself very drawn Varda’s personal vantages, and to the pursuit of a variety of “gleaners” or collectors who live on or reuse excess or discarded foods and objects. Gleaners is fun to watch and one of those really useful films to think with.
A City of Sadness
Another favorite of mine is Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989). I have had the chance to see this film projected on 35mm a few times in the last couple of years, and I think it is a perfect film. In tightly choreographed long-takes, Hou explores the traumatic and, at that time, largely concealed experiences of the Taiwanese in the years between the end of Japanese occupation (1945) and the occupation of the island by the KMT, who fled the mainland after losing a civil war to the communists. The film was released in 1989 and is often thought of in relation to wider constellation of Chinese experience given its proximity to the Tiananmen Square democracy movement and a host of regional shifts that same year.
San Yuan Li
Finally, I will mention another recent film that is closer to my research—though, of course, I am leaving out so many other periods and places—and that video-film is San Yuan Li (2003). San Yuan Li is an experimental documentary that draws on and reanimates the city symphony tradition. It was produced by a collective of artists and videograpers working with Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s U-thèque in Guangzhou. The work examines the village San Yuan Li as it becomes a “village-amidst-the-city,” embedded in a new space of economic development. The film also points to new energies in small-scale Chinese filmmaking, including the impulse to archive and to participate in the highly politicized and highly mediated issues surrounding urban planning, and the like.
Could you describe your course for the fall term? What screening are you looking forward to the most?
This fall I am teaching a course focusing on Contemporary Chinese Documentary, and related cinema cultures in the PRC. In particular, we are focusing on what is referred to as the New Documentary Movement. The NDM emerged between 1989 and 1992, and exploded by the late 1990s with the widespread accessibility of DV technologies as well as new spaces for production and exhibition. Importantly, the New Documentary Movement operates at the peripheries of popular or mainstream audiovisual culture in China. Yet, it remains central to understanding contemporary Chinese media: it is an avant-garde that both challenges and seeps into official and popular television, cinema, Internet, and other critical practices. In addition to situating the NDM in the context of postsocialist transformation and the broader field of documentary studies, the course explores issues relating to documentary aesthetics, authorship and amateurism, modes of production, DV technologies, subalternity, the archive, public culture, alternative exhibition, ethics, realism, urbanization, and the like. For those wanting to learn more about Chinese documentary, and Chinese independent cinema in general, I would recommend the website for dgenerate films (http://dgeneratefilms.com), a New York based group that distributes Chinese films and runs a very useful webforum. As for screenings in the course, there are a number of very interesting, if difficult films. One of my favorite upcoming films is Zhang Zanbo’s Falling from the Sky (2009)—a documentary that explores life in the footprint of satellite launches in China’s Hunan Province.
Could you describe your course for the winter term?
Next term I am teaching a course in the Department of East Asian Studies (EAS496H1S) that explores piracy and various economies of the fake. While the focus of the course is East Asia, we will also approach piracy from an inter-Asian perspective, examining what scholars like Ravi Sundaram have called “pirate modernity.” Beyond the simplistic focus on Western intellectual property rights—a narrative that emphasizes spectacular statistics and the victimization of IP owners—the course will consider a broad range pirate discourses, styles, modes of distribution, objects, audiences, etc., as well as their relationship to urbanization, development, and forms of regionalization and globalization.
What are your future plans?
At present, I am very excited to spend a year developing my research at the Jackman Humanities Institute, and to work with students and faculty in the Cinema Studies Institute and the Department of East Asian Studies here at the University of Toronto. My current/future research projects include an edited collection examining Asian Video Cultures (with Bhaskar Sarkar), and a book manuscript exploring the role of media technologies in shaping urbanism, development, and political society in Olympic era China. Next fall I begin a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University.