Victor Fan
Biographic Data
| ID | 4246342 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Victor Fan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Victor |
| FAMILY NAME | Fan |
| SIGNATURE | FAN V |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7015-9699 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Blue Island: Toward a democratic sociality through affective dissonance
In Jauwat zi dou (Youyu zhi dao in Mandarin or Blue Island, 2022), director Chan Tze-woon puts into dialogue four traumatic memories and experiences that were considered by many Hong Kongers as mutually incommensurable. In the initial screenings of the film, some viewers even found such comparison objectionable. This article is an outcome and an attempted ‘continuation’ of my conversation with Chan Tze-woon from 2023. Through a close reading of B…
The spatializing consciousness of Chinese cinema
Written in 1983, this article has been considered the magnum opus of the Hong Kong film scholar Lam Nin-tung (林年同, 1944–90). For Lam, even though the cinema is technologically and ideologically configured according to the European theory of perspective, Chinese filmmakers have long experimented with spatializing the relationship between the spectator’s body and the image by layering views of reality onto a two-dimensional frame. In so doing, Lam …
Toward a cinematic transtopia
Has Chinese independent cinema begun to foster a discursive space – or what Howard Chiang calls a transtopia – where trans identity, subjectivity, and agency can be debated, discussed, and reconfigured? In this article, I conduct a close analysis of The Rib (Zhang Wei, 2019). Under the current conditions of Chinese independent filmmaking, which have rendered trans self-representation nearly invisible, The Rib presents an option of how a visible s…
Cinematic Imaging and Imagining through the Lens of Buddhism
The oft-undiscernible boundary between imaging and imagining is especially apparent in our cinematic experience. In Buddhist philosophy, imaging and imagining are neither the same nor different, neither not the same nor not different. In this article, I argue that imaging in Buddhism refers not only to the formational process of an image (external form) out there, but also the external form's interdependent relationship with the internal forms (s…
Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media
This book examines how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with a perturbation: What is Hong Kong cinema? Framed between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book scrutinises the interdependent relationship between cinema and politics by rethinking how Hong Kong cinema has been historically in-formed by dispossession and exclusion, rather than identity and belonging. It traces how Hong…
Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media
Examining how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with this perturbation between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book traces how Hong Kong's extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguistic and cultural forces.Extraterritoriality scrutinises creative works in mainstream cinema, indepen…
What is a ‘Chinese film market’
Collective memory and spatiality: Rethinking post-socialist/colonial/martial-law Chinese cinemas
Cultural extraterritoriality: Intra-regional politics in contemporary Hong Kong cinema
In this article, Victor Fan argues that analysing contemporary Hong Kong cinema requires active rewriting of established postcolonial theories by taking into account the specific mode of colonization of Hong Kong: extraterritoriality. This concept has been responsible for the construction of the cultural plurality, linguistic ambiguity and political liminality of Hong Kong and its cinematographic experience, as well as the incongruence between th…
The Poetics of Addiction: Stardom, “Feminized” Spectatorship, and Interregional Business Relations in the Twilight Series
This article studies the success of the Twilight franchise in relation to the stardom of Robert Pattinson by proposing a model of interpretation called “the poetics of addiction.” The term addiction is used in this essay not as a top-down form of dependency but as a multilateral and multilayered network of mutual dependency and interactive/interpassive reconfigurations. The article asks in what ways the Twilight films construct or imagine their t…
The unanswered question of Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) is often interpreted as a film that restages a series of traumatic events survived by the baby-boomer generation. However, perhaps these historical events are not traumas until we define them as such, while their reinterpretations and reactivations are merely paths that allow us to get close to a traumatic core that has always been inaccessible to us. In this article, I explore the function of Jenny Curran (Ro…
The Poetics of Addiction: Stardom, “Feminized” Spectatorship, and Interregional Business Relations in the Twilight Series
This article studies the success of the Twilight franchise in relation to the stardom of Robert Pattinson by proposing a model of interpretation called “the poetics of addiction.” The term addiction is used in this essay not as a top-down form of dependency but as a multilateral and multilayered network of mutual dependency and interactive/interpassive reconfigurations. The article asks in what ways the Twilight films construct or imagine their t…
The unanswered question of Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) is often interpreted as a film that restages a series of traumatic events survived by the baby-boomer generation. However, perhaps these historical events are not traumas until we define them as such, while their reinterpretations and reactivations are merely paths that allow us to get close to a traumatic core that has always been inaccessible to us. In this article, I explore the function of Jenny Curran (Ro…
The unanswered question of Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) is often interpreted as a film that restages a series of traumatic events survived by the baby-boomer generation. However, perhaps these historical events are not traumas until we define them as such, while their reinterpretations and reactivations are merely paths that allow us to get close to a traumatic core that has always been inaccessible to us. In this article, I explore the function of Jenny Curran (Ro…
The Poetics of Addiction: Stardom, “Feminized” Spectatorship, and Interregional Business Relations in the Twilight Series
This article studies the success of the Twilight franchise in relation to the stardom of Robert Pattinson by proposing a model of interpretation called “the poetics of addiction.” The term addiction is used in this essay not as a top-down form of dependency but as a multilateral and multilayered network of mutual dependency and interactive/interpassive reconfigurations. The article asks in what ways the Twilight films construct or imagine their t…
Collective memory and spatiality: Rethinking post-socialist/colonial/martial-law Chinese cinemas
Cultural extraterritoriality: Intra-regional politics in contemporary Hong Kong cinema
In this article, Victor Fan argues that analysing contemporary Hong Kong cinema requires active rewriting of established postcolonial theories by taking into account the specific mode of colonization of Hong Kong: extraterritoriality. This concept has been responsible for the construction of the cultural plurality, linguistic ambiguity and political liminality of Hong Kong and its cinematographic experience, as well as the incongruence between th…
Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media
This book examines how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with a perturbation: What is Hong Kong cinema? Framed between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book scrutinises the interdependent relationship between cinema and politics by rethinking how Hong Kong cinema has been historically in-formed by dispossession and exclusion, rather than identity and belonging. It traces how Hong…
Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media
Examining how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with this perturbation between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book traces how Hong Kong's extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguistic and cultural forces.Extraterritoriality scrutinises creative works in mainstream cinema, indepen…
What is a ‘Chinese film market’
Cinematic Imaging and Imagining through the Lens of Buddhism
The oft-undiscernible boundary between imaging and imagining is especially apparent in our cinematic experience. In Buddhist philosophy, imaging and imagining are neither the same nor different, neither not the same nor not different. In this article, I argue that imaging in Buddhism refers not only to the formational process of an image (external form) out there, but also the external form's interdependent relationship with the internal forms (s…
Toward a cinematic transtopia
Has Chinese independent cinema begun to foster a discursive space – or what Howard Chiang calls a transtopia – where trans identity, subjectivity, and agency can be debated, discussed, and reconfigured? In this article, I conduct a close analysis of The Rib (Zhang Wei, 2019). Under the current conditions of Chinese independent filmmaking, which have rendered trans self-representation nearly invisible, The Rib presents an option of how a visible s…
The spatializing consciousness of Chinese cinema
Written in 1983, this article has been considered the magnum opus of the Hong Kong film scholar Lam Nin-tung (林年同, 1944–90). For Lam, even though the cinema is technologically and ideologically configured according to the European theory of perspective, Chinese filmmakers have long experimented with spatializing the relationship between the spectator’s body and the image by layering views of reality onto a two-dimensional frame. In so doing, Lam …
Blue Island: Toward a democratic sociality through affective dissonance
In Jauwat zi dou (Youyu zhi dao in Mandarin or Blue Island, 2022), director Chan Tze-woon puts into dialogue four traumatic memories and experiences that were considered by many Hong Kongers as mutually incommensurable. In the initial screenings of the film, some viewers even found such comparison objectionable. This article is an outcome and an attempted ‘continuation’ of my conversation with Chan Tze-woon from 2023. Through a close reading of B…
Art (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Art history (6 works) · History (6 works) · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics (6 works) · Movie theater (6 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (5 works)