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Brushed in Light: Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema
Drawing on a millennia of calligraphy theory and history, Brushed in Light examines how the brushed word appears in films and in film cultures of Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and PRC cinemas. This includes silent era intertitles, subtitles, title frames, letters, graffiti, end titles, and props. Markus Nornes also looks at the role of calligraphy in film culture at large, from gifts to correspondence to advertising. The book begins with a historical dimension, tracking how calligraphy is initially used in early cinema and how it is continually rearticulated by transforming conventions and the integration of new technologies. These chapters ask how calligraphy creates new meaning in cinema and demonstrate how calligraphy, cinematography, and acting work together in a single film. The last part of the book moves to other regions of theory. Nornes explores the cinematization of the handwritten word and explores how calligraphers understand their own work.
Figure 3.16. Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984) uses clerical style to infuse a sense of enduring history into the opening of the film, which is set during the Japanese invasion of China. In the first line, the effect of seeing a modern date (一九三七年九月) in ancient script is striking.
Figure 4.19. The soldier from Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984), framed by couplets with circles instead of characters because the owner is an illiterate farmer.
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