Bliss Cua Lim
Biographic Data
| ID | 4977185 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bliss Cua Lim |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bliss Cua |
| FAMILY NAME | Lim |
| SIGNATURE | LIM B C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema
The notion of “pan‐Asian cinema” crystallized in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the downturn experienced by the film industries of Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Its inception thus coincides with a broader tendency towards “market‐led” regionalization in Northeast and Southeast Asia, which saw an increasingly “integrative market for culture.” This essay grapples with an apparent contradiction: Going Home (dir. Peter Ho…
Queer Aswang Transmedia
In recent years, the aswang—a supernatural creature of Philippine folklore that is often associated with female monstrosity and patriarchal misogyny—is being flamboyantly queered across a range of media. The aswang is a centuries-old transmedial, transgeneric figure whose monstrosity has been interpellated by gender-essentialist agendas while nonetheless epitomizing disruptive gender instabilities. In the handful of texts that comprise queer aswa…
Fandom, Consumption and Collectivity in the Philippine New Cinema
National Artist Nick Joaquin called Nora Aunor the ‘lowly morenita from Iriga’, the dark-skinned, destitute provincial girl who rose to unparalleled prominence as the Philippines’ first media-convergent superstar (de Manila, 1970: 6). The daughter of a train porter in Bicol province, Nora Aunor exploded into the nation’s popular consciousness as an amateur singing contest champion on TV and radio at the end of the sixties. By 1970, at the age of …
Neoliberalism and Global Cinema
Committed to exposing the ways in which the personal is always crosshatched with the social and the political, Filipino filmmaker Jeffrey Jeturian’s traces the relentless conversion of all forms of social experience into economic transactions. Whether in Pila Balde [Fetch a Pail of Water]) or Kubrador [Bet Collector], 2006) Jeturian’s films thematize the neoliberal transformation of social individuals into calculative entrepreneur-consumers. This…
Sharon's Noranian Turn
Sharon's Noranian Turn:Stardom, Embodiment, and Language in Philippine Cinema Bliss Cua Lim (bio) Writing in 1965 under the pseudonym Quijano de Manila, National Artist Nick Joaquin vividly describes an era when the decline of the great Philippine film studios spawned an unbridled "star system still in apogee." In the 1960s, star worship fuels the popular cinema and feeds "the avarice of the independent producer." The middle-class lament that mai…
Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and New Global Cinema
Our current moment is characterised by furious transnational exchange between Hollywood and what has been dubbed the ‘Asian horror film’ – a new regionalist appellation less inclusive than it sounds, since it consists primarily of Japanese, South Korean, Hong Kong, and Thai horror films. What I am calling the new Asian horror film refers to the pronounced role of the horror film, among other commercial genre fare, in the convergence of regional, …
Spectral Times
Ghosts call our calendars into question. The temporality of haunting, through which events and people return from the limits of time and mortality, differs sharply from the modern concept of a linear, progressive, universal time. The hauntings recounted by ghost narratives are not merely instances of the past reasserting itself in a stable present, as is usually assumed; on the contrary, the ghostly return of traumatic events precisely troubles t…
Dolls in Fragments
Bliss (Felicidad) Cua Lim is an assistant professor in the Film Studies Program at the University of California, Irvine. Her work on film has appeared in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, The Velvet Light Trap, Asian Cinema, The Journal of English Studies and Comparative Literature, Philippine Critical Forum, and the anthology Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures. Her research interests include film theory and genr…
Spectral Times
Ghosts call our calendars into question. The temporality of haunting, through which events and people return from the limits of time and mortality, differs sharply from the modern concept of a linear, progressive, universal time. The hauntings recounted by ghost narratives are not merely instances of the past reasserting itself in a stable present, as is usually assumed; on the contrary, the ghostly return of traumatic events precisely troubles t…
Sharon's Noranian Turn
Sharon's Noranian Turn:Stardom, Embodiment, and Language in Philippine Cinema Bliss Cua Lim (bio) Writing in 1965 under the pseudonym Quijano de Manila, National Artist Nick Joaquin vividly describes an era when the decline of the great Philippine film studios spawned an unbridled "star system still in apogee." In the 1960s, star worship fuels the popular cinema and feeds "the avarice of the independent producer." The middle-class lament that mai…
Dolls in Fragments
Bliss (Felicidad) Cua Lim is an assistant professor in the Film Studies Program at the University of California, Irvine. Her work on film has appeared in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, The Velvet Light Trap, Asian Cinema, The Journal of English Studies and Comparative Literature, Philippine Critical Forum, and the anthology Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures. Her research interests include film theory and genr…
Spectral Times
Ghosts call our calendars into question. The temporality of haunting, through which events and people return from the limits of time and mortality, differs sharply from the modern concept of a linear, progressive, universal time. The hauntings recounted by ghost narratives are not merely instances of the past reasserting itself in a stable present, as is usually assumed; on the contrary, the ghostly return of traumatic events precisely troubles t…
Dolls in Fragments
Bliss (Felicidad) Cua Lim is an assistant professor in the Film Studies Program at the University of California, Irvine. Her work on film has appeared in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, The Velvet Light Trap, Asian Cinema, The Journal of English Studies and Comparative Literature, Philippine Critical Forum, and the anthology Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures. Her research interests include film theory and genr…
Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and New Global Cinema
Our current moment is characterised by furious transnational exchange between Hollywood and what has been dubbed the ‘Asian horror film’ – a new regionalist appellation less inclusive than it sounds, since it consists primarily of Japanese, South Korean, Hong Kong, and Thai horror films. What I am calling the new Asian horror film refers to the pronounced role of the horror film, among other commercial genre fare, in the convergence of regional, …
Sharon's Noranian Turn
Sharon's Noranian Turn:Stardom, Embodiment, and Language in Philippine Cinema Bliss Cua Lim (bio) Writing in 1965 under the pseudonym Quijano de Manila, National Artist Nick Joaquin vividly describes an era when the decline of the great Philippine film studios spawned an unbridled "star system still in apogee." In the 1960s, star worship fuels the popular cinema and feeds "the avarice of the independent producer." The middle-class lament that mai…
Neoliberalism and Global Cinema
Committed to exposing the ways in which the personal is always crosshatched with the social and the political, Filipino filmmaker Jeffrey Jeturian’s traces the relentless conversion of all forms of social experience into economic transactions. Whether in Pila Balde [Fetch a Pail of Water]) or Kubrador [Bet Collector], 2006) Jeturian’s films thematize the neoliberal transformation of social individuals into calculative entrepreneur-consumers. This…
Fandom, Consumption and Collectivity in the Philippine New Cinema
National Artist Nick Joaquin called Nora Aunor the ‘lowly morenita from Iriga’, the dark-skinned, destitute provincial girl who rose to unparalleled prominence as the Philippines’ first media-convergent superstar (de Manila, 1970: 6). The daughter of a train porter in Bicol province, Nora Aunor exploded into the nation’s popular consciousness as an amateur singing contest champion on TV and radio at the end of the sixties. By 1970, at the age of …
A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema
The notion of “pan‐Asian cinema” crystallized in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the downturn experienced by the film industries of Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Its inception thus coincides with a broader tendency towards “market‐led” regionalization in Northeast and Southeast Asia, which saw an increasingly “integrative market for culture.” This essay grapples with an apparent contradiction: Going Home (dir. Peter Ho…
Queer Aswang Transmedia
In recent years, the aswang—a supernatural creature of Philippine folklore that is often associated with female monstrosity and patriarchal misogyny—is being flamboyantly queered across a range of media. The aswang is a centuries-old transmedial, transgeneric figure whose monstrosity has been interpellated by gender-essentialist agendas while nonetheless epitomizing disruptive gender instabilities. In the handful of texts that comprise queer aswa…
Art (8 works) · Art history (6 works) · Movie theater (6 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Asian Culture and Media Studies (4 works) · History (4 works) · Literature (4 works) · Philippine History and Culture (4 works) · Media studies (3 works) · Motion pictures (3 works)