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How can media philosophy help us rehistoricize Zhang Shichuan (director) and Zheng Zhengqiu’s (screenwriter) Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, 1922] and foster a deeper understanding of its aesthetics within its historical context? In this article, I take Zhang Zhen’s (1999, 27–50) book chapter on the film, “Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage Cinema,” as a point de départ of my investigation. I argue that Laborer’s Love is best understood as part of a larger media ecology that has always been in transition, or more properly speaking, always in a process of becoming. I want to demonstrate that in the film, the hybridity between a more presentational style that stemmed from early-twentieth-century Chinese theater and a more representational style that stemmed from American cinema may not be a symptom of the film’s transitionality. Rather, such hybridity might have been Zhang Shichuan’s conscious stylistic choice. Also, in the light of Thomas Lamarre’s understanding of the cinema as a negotiation between two relationships between the human and the machine—cinematism (an alignment between the human body and the moving trajectory of the machine) and animetism (a positing of the body within a moving machine)—we can rethink the film as an anthropotechnical mediation between these two relationships.

For many years, the role Buddhism played in twentieth-century Chinese intellectual thinking on cinema has been grossly underestimated. In this chapter, I argue that by addressing Buddhism’s footprint in early twentieth-century intellectual discussions of cinema, one can access a deeper register of how these thinkers might have understood cinema ontology and the relationship between its spectators and reality. I first address the question of why it is important to designate Chinese film criticism as part of the larger topos in global film theory. I also outline the historical development of film thinking and writing between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries in China. Then, I explicate the role of Buddhism in late-Qing and early-Republican intellectual debates. With these contexts in mind, I illustrate how Buddhism can offer us new insights into certain impasses in the current debates in film and media studies.

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 (sensory organs). Likewise, imagining refers not only to the formational process of an image in here, but also to how these imaginations constitute the body's relationship with the larger milieu out there. In the second half of this article, I analyse how the interdependent relationship between imaging and imagining is configured textually and in the overall cinematic experience in Bi Gan's Diqiu zuihou de yewan/ Long Day's Journey into Night (2018).

tert-Butyl (5-chloro­penta-2,4-diyn-1-yl)carbamate and tert-butyl (5-iodo­penta-2,4-diyn-1-yl)carbamate are new members of the isostructural family of compounds with the general formula BocNHCH2CCCCX (X = H, Cl, Br, I). In the crystals of all these di­acetyl­enes, mol­ecules are linked via a bifurcated N—H⋯O hydrogen bond and C—X⋯O halogen bond involving the same carbonyl group., The crystal structures of tert-butyl (5-chloro­penta-2,4-diyn-1-yl)carbamate, C10H12ClNO2 (II), and tert-butyl (5-iodo­penta-2,4-diyn-1-yl)carbamate, C10H12INO2 (IV), are isomorphous to previously reported structures and accordingly their mol­ecular and supra­molecular structures are similar. In the crystals of (II) and (IV), mol­ecules are linked into very similar two-dimensional wall organizations with anti­parallel carbamate groups involved in a combination of hydrogen and halogen bonds (bifurcated N—H⋯O=C and C≡C—X⋯O=C inter­actions on the same carbonyl group). There is no long-range parallel stacking of diynes, so the topochemical polymerization of di­acetyl­ene is prevented. A Cambridge Structural Database search revealed that C≡C—X⋯O=C contacts shorter than the sum of the van der Waals radii are scarce (only one structure for the C≡C—Cl⋯O=C inter­action and 13 structures for the similar C≡C—I⋯O=C inter­action).

This chapter is about the critical debate on what it meant by Hong Kong cinema after the 1967 Riots, and the historical context––both in the film industry and in politics––that shaped the contour and topos of this debate. In this discourse, the question ‘What is Hong Kong cinema?’ was never raised or addressed directly. Very often, it was asked under the disguise of finding out what Chinese cinema was. Film critics between 1966 and 1978 worked through this problem by understanding how Hong Kong left-wing Cantonese filmmakers in the 1950s grappled with this question, and the anxieties such question had generated, both narratively and stylistically. Through their retrospective investigation, these critics retroactively theorised how Hong Kong cinema gradually individuated itself from Chinese cinema out of its long history of being politically ostracised, linguistically marginalised, and culturally despised by their Mainland counterparts.

This chapter is about how extraterritoriality was elevated from the level of spontaneous awareness to a fully formed political consciousness in the 1980s and 1990s under the uncertainty of the future of Hong Kong. It argues that the sociopolitical unpredictability, irresolution, and disquietude during this period created a milieu in which individuation, subjectivisation, and autonomisation were impossible, an environment constituted by a perpetual failure of becoming: the time it takes for time to end. This chapter offers a historical account of the Sino-British negotiation of the future of Hong Kong between 1979 and 1984. After that, it analyses how such a traumatic experience was actively negotiated by a kaleidoscopic media environment from both industrial and cultural perspectives. Eventually, it departs from most scholars’ tendency to focus on Hong Kong’s successful mainstream film and television industries by examining how artists responded to these relationships in video art. It scrutinises the works of artists from an organisation called Videotage, which further developed the experimental ethos of the women (and in the 1980s, lesbian and gay) filmmakers in an intersection of three modes of extraterritoriality: as Hong Kongers, as women, and as lesbians and gay men.

This chapter examines Hong Kong-Mainland co-productions made under the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA). CEPA facilitated the collaboration between Mainland Chinese investors and Hong Kong filmmakers to produce films that are supposed to cater to audiences in both regions. This triggered a renewed effort to individuate, subjectivise, and autonomise Hong Kong’s sociopolitical voice and position in these co-productions, which requires an active rewriting and re-understanding of extraterritoriality in the aftermath of the 1997 handover as a form of posthistoricity: (1) as a continual performance of a civic society that had already failed under global neoliberalism; (2) as an invocation of a new assembly of biopolitical lives that are eager to form a new civic society. This chapter first explicates the sociopolitical conditions and affects in Hong Kong after 1997. It then expounds how CEPA emerged out of a complex process of industrial transformation under neoliberalism between the 1990s and the early 2000s and how scholars evaluate the first ten years of Hong Kong-Mainland co-productions after CEPA. With such a background in mind, it scrutinises how Hong Kong filmmakers confront the crisis of authorship under CEPA in three registers––industrial, creative, and sociopolitical––with close attention to Johnnie To as a case study.

This chapter is about the precarity of life and the image in the twenty-first century. Since 1 July 1997, Hong Kongers have found themselves increasingly caught in a posthistorical performance of the city’s juridical and economic extraterritoriality. This chapter first discusses what it means by precarity and how it has generated a sense of anguish among young people around the world. It also explicates how it is intertwined with local politics in Hong Kong, including the Umbrella Movement. Finally, it conducts analyses of documentaries made during and after the Movement. These documentaries are not made with the presupposition that what the spectators see on the screen must be an access to the truth. Rather, at an age when film, video, and media images are assumed to be mediated, manipulated, and fabricated, these documentarians offer their spectators texts that are constructed out of realities captured, re-narrated, and remediated from multiple perspectives. Their truth claims must then be contested and defended in the larger public discourse. Such a public discourse in turn makes visible that a set of problematics are embedded in the interstices in the debate between the political establishments and the hard-line supporters of political reforms.

This chapter asks the question: Can women filmmakers, cinematic spectators, and televisual viewers speak from their doubly––sociopolitically and gendered––extraterritorialised position? It -historicises the theoretical discourse and film practice of the first phase (1968–78) of the Hong Kong New Wave from the perspectives of women filmmakers and critics. It also discusses three different ways by which women speak through the cinema and television as authors, all aiming to establish what Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) would call a free indirect discourse. For independent filmmaker Tang Shu-hsuen, through unlearning Euro-American aesthetics and relearning medieval Chinese one from the perspective of modern women, a cinema specific to the extraterritorial position of a Hong Kong female spectator can be fostered. For screenwriter Joyce Chan and her collaborator director Patrick Tam, a free indirect discourse can only be achieved when the addresser-message-addressee mode of communication in commercial television is actively challenged. Finally, for director Ann Hui and screenwriter Shu Kei and Wong Chi, the classical Hollywood paradigm can be reconfigured to enable desubjectivised and abjectivised gay male characters to negotiate their traumas and desires in terms that are understandable by heterosexual and heteronormative viewers.

This book’s conclusion revisits what extraterritoriality means and the historical journey of different generations of filmmakers and spectators who tried to work through this problem by creating, theorising, defining, and defending Hong Kong cinema, television, and media. The end of the previous chapter suggests that humanism is perhaps the answer to our political impasse. However, the mode of humanism that was widely promulgated by politicians and artists during and immediately after the Second World War (1939–45) had already failed and it turned out to be the beginning of the problematics that have produced the precarious milieu in which we live. This conclusion therefore proposes that we revisit what it means by being human while living with other human beings, by not re-territorialising any place or anybody, but by giving extraterritoriality a presence, a body. It argues that in Hong Kong, Mainland filmmakers who were exiled from their homeland use their films to explore and negotiate the means by which one can reclaim humanity.

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 Kong’s extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguistic and cultural forces. It argues that filmmakers and spectators actively define and reconfigure Hong Kong cinema and media by fostering them as a public sphere, where contesting affects associated with these political lives’ shifting extraterritorial conditions and positions can be negotiated. Based on a combination of archival research, industrial studies, textual analysis and media and political philosophies, Extraterritoriality studies how creative works in mainstream cinema, independent films, television, video artworks and documentaries – especially those by marginalised artists – actively rewrite and reconfigure the way Hong Kong cinema and media are defined and located. These stylistically and political diverse works and practices seek – in their respective manners – to foster new ways to live with Hong Kongers’ double occupancy and double ostracisation that constantly deindividuate, desubjectivise, and deautonomise them, and how they can survive in their constant state of exception.

The social, political and cultural complexity of post-war Hong Kong (1945–1997) produced a highly fragmented, unsystematic, and historically transient mode of critical debate on the cinema. One film scholar, however, Lam Nin-tung (林年同 Lin Niangtong, 1944–1990), tried to systematize the debate and proposed a thought-provoking idea: jing you [geng jau 鏡游] or mirroring-drifting. In this article, I argue that Lam’s theory is best understood as an attempt to re-examine the relationship between the subject and the object in cinematic perception, a project motivated by a subjectival crisis embedded within the social, cultural and political complexity of the historical period.

For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier’s insightful thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier’s intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator’s engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies can reach the wide audience they have deserved ever since their publication in French in 1969.

This chapter offers a critical account of a docu-drama that portrays a group suicide of some ethnic left-behind children to question the dehumanisation of those unwanted others by the ruling class, which is accompanied by the bankruptcy of trust in the interdependency between photogenic reality, its authenticity, and credibility.

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 colonisation 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 the community’s political consciousness after 1997 and the larger national imagination promulgated by the Beijing government. The term ‘extraterritoriality’ was translated into Chinese after 1895 via Japanese as zhiwai faquan the right to exercise one’s law outside a nation state’s sovereign terrain, and colonialism in China between 1844 and 1949 was largely characterized by a continuous reformulation and systematisation of this concept. It in fact still informs the way former colonised regions in China are administered today, and the political unconscious of their residents. With Jonnie To’s 2012 film Duzhan (Dukzin) /Drug War as a case study, contemporary Hong Kong cinema, Fan argues, can be understood as a public sphere where an extraterritorial consciousness and the contesting political affects associated with it are actively negotiated.

In the popular imagination and state-sponsored discourse, “China’s soft power” often reiterates a more-than-a-century-long narrative that China needs to “catch up” with the Euro-American “West.” It is as though taking over the United States’ leadership in branding, marketing, and exercising European humanism would be the final hurdle for China to enter modernity. My interest is not how scholars and policy makers define “soft power.” Rather, I wish to explore one of its key concepts, “humanism.” Featuring humanism as their core value with the aim of promoting China as a modern nation, contemporary Chinese blockbusters and the discourse around them consistently raise three interrelated questions: (1) What is humanism? (2) What kind of humanism can China contribute to the global community? (3) Why has Chinese cinema failed to allow a global audience to resonate with this new mode of world thinking? Nonetheless, what fascinates me is not why China fails to rebrand itself; rather, I ask how the structure of affect associated with such failure negotiates the conflicting sociopolitical values based on humanism. The film I will examine here, Zhi women zhong jiang shiqu de qingchun [So Young, Vicki Zhao or Zhao Wei, 2013], performs the indefinability, unnameability, and porousness of humanism itself.

This article rethinks where the films of Sun Yu (1900–1990) stand in a highly complex political, theoretical and industrial matrix. By combining a historical reading of the industrial conditions, and a hermeneutic reading of the theoretical discourse in the 1930s, this article argues that the ‘soft film’ is not ‘apolitical’; rather, it shares with the ‘hard film’ position a common belief that cinema is an educational tool for political ends. In this light, the article uses a close analysis of two films by Sun Yu, Tianming/Daybreak (1933) and Tiyu huanghou/Queen of Sports (1934), to demonstrate that Sun's films were intended as Nationalist propaganda. However, by focusing on perfecting the forms of these films as entertainment so knowingly, and by turning the female protagonist of each film as what Giorgio Agamben calls a homo sacer, the text becomes open to multiple and mutually conflicting readings.

The objective of this study was to compare the osteogenic potential of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) within two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) culture systems. hESCs of the H1 line (Wicell Inc., Madison, Wisc., USA) were induced to form embryoid bodies (EBs) through 5 days of suspension culture within non-adherent culture dishes. Following enzymatic dissociation, the EB-derived single cells were seeded on either novel 3D porous PLGA scaffolds or 2D culture dishes with the same total cell number. Osteogenic differentiation was induced through culture media supplemented with dexamethasone, L-ascorbic acid and beta-glycerophosphate. After 3 weeks of in vitro culture, quantitative and qualitative assays of osteogenic differentiation were conducted. Osteocalcin secretion and alkaline phosphatase (AP) activities were detected at significantly higher levels within 3D culture compared with the 2D system. Subsequently, the cell-scaffold constructs were implanted in iliac crest defects of immunosuppressed rabbits. After 4 weeks, the constructs were subsequently explanted and characterized by histology and X-ray analysis. Formation of new bone was detected within and around the implanted scaffolds. The results demonstrate that the osteogenic differentiation of human embryonic stem cells is enhanced in a 3D culture system compared to a 2D culture environment. Upon implantation in situ, the differentiating human embryonic stem cells can contribute positively to the repair and regeneration of bone defects.

For many people, the pleasure of watching a Hong Kong Cantonese film in the 1950s requires a taste for a set of stylistic traits that are distinct from classical Hollywood cinema. In this chapter, Fan argues that there is a poetics specific to the Hong Kong Cantonese cinema in the 1950s. Such poetics serves to negotiate a set of conflicting sociopolitical values via a form of parapraxis (Freudian slip). With Weilou chunxiao [Ngailau ceonhiu or In the Face of Demolition, Lee Tit, 1953] as a case study, Fan proposes that the Cantonese cinema in the 1950s performs the failure of the leftwing intellectuals to perform in a colonial space where they had no active sociopolitical agency, and their collective failure to even consider returning "home" and reconstruct the "national" space. These films offer narratives in which intellectuals are reeducated and reintegrated into the masses, thus offering the spectators a "second chance" to rehearse the possibility of having a political agency to activate social change.

Distant metastases from oral squamous cell carcinoma are unusual, but generally occur in lungs, bone, and liver. Cutaneous metastasis is extremely rare, and it often reflects an advanced stage with sinister prognosis. The authors report an 81-year-old male patient with multifocal cutaneous metastases from a recurrent squamous cell carcinoma of the hard palate 5 months after primary treatment.

Although various sedative drugs in different regimens and given by different delivery routes have been used for conscious sedation, the ideal agent and regimen remain to be established. This study was designed to compare the efficacy (sedation, anxiolysis, analgesia, operating conditions, and patients’ satisfaction) and safety of midazolam and dexmedetomidine as sedatives for dental procedures in a randomised, double-blind study in third molar and dental implant surgery. Sixty healthy patients who were American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) group I or II were enrolled and we recorded their personal details, the amount of drug used, their degree of satisfaction, duration of operation, and haemodynamic and respiratory variables. The two groups were comparable. The amount of local anaesthetic ( p = 0.11) and the duration of operation did not differ significantly ( p = 0.32). The patients in the dexmedetomidine group had a slower heart rate, lower systolic and diastolic pressure, and cooperated better. There were no significant differences in their respiratory rates, bispectral index, and total volume of drugs used. We conclude that dexmedetomidine works as well as midazolam for outpatient dental procedures and can be used as an alternative to midazolam.

While electron microscopes and AFMs are capable of high resolution imaging to molecular leve ls, there is an ongoing problem in integrating these results into the larger scale structure and functions of tissue and organs within a complex organism. Imaging biological samples with optical microscopy is predominantly done with histology and immunohistochemistry, which can take up to a several weeks to prepare, are artifact prone and only available as individual 2D images. At the nano resolution scale, the higher resolution electron microscopy and AFM are used, but again these require destructive sample preparation and data are in 2D. To bridge this gap, we describe a rapid non invasive hierarchical bioima ging technique using a novel lab based x-ray computed tomography to characterize complex biological organism in mult iscale- from whole organ (mesoscale) to calcified and soft tissue (microscale), to subcellular structures, nanomaterials and cellular-scaffold interaction (nanoscale). While MicroCT (micro x-ray computed tomography) is gaining in popularity for non invasive bones and tissue imaging, contrast and resolution are still vastly inadequate compared to histology. In this study we will present multiscale results from a novel microCT and nanoCT (nano x-ray tomography system). The novel MicroCT can image large specimen and tissue sample at histology resolution of submicron voxel resolution, ofte n without contrast agents, while the nanoCT using x-ray optics similar to those used in synchrotron radiation facilities, has 20nm voxel resolution, suitable for studying cellular, subcellular morphology and nanomaterials. Multiscale examples involving bo th calcified and soft tissue will be illustrated, which include imaging a rat tibia to the indi vidual channels of osteocyte canaliculli and lacunae and an unstain ed whole murine lung to its alveoli. Th e role of the novel CT will also be discussed as a possib le means for rapid virtu al histology using a biopsy of a human regenerated bone sample done without contrast agents and that of other soft tissues with contrast agents. Comparison between histolog y, SEM and MRI will be given. Keywords: Multiscale bioimaging, hierarchical framework bioimaging , microCT, nanoCT, nanotomography, 50 nm resolution, virtual histology, osteo cyte lacunar-canaliculi network, cancellous bones, cartilage, alveoli, tissue regeneration, PLGA resorbable bioscaffold, contrast agents

Utilizing a suitable combination of lactide and glycolide in a copolymer would optimize the degradation rate of a scaffold upon implantation in situ. Moreover, 3D printing technology enables customizing the shape of the scaffold to biometric data from CT and MRI scans. A previous in vitro study has shown that novel 3D-printed poly-lactic-co-glycolic acid (PLGA) scaffolds had good biocompatibility and mechanical properties comparable with human cancellous bone, while they could support proliferation and osteogenic differentiation of osteoblasts. Based on the previous study, this study evaluated PLGA scaffolds for bone regeneration within a rabbit model. The scaffolds were implanted at two sites on the same animal, within the periosteum and within bi-cortical bone defects on the iliac crest. Subsequently, the efficacy of bone regeneration within the implanted scaffolds was evaluated at 4, 12 and 24 weeks post-surgery through histological analysis. In both the intra-periosteum and iliac bone defect models, the implanted scaffolds facilitated new bone tissue formation and maturation over the time course of 24 weeks, even though there was initially observed to be little tissue ingrowth within the scaffolds at 4 weeks post-surgery. Hence, the 3D-printed porous PLGA scaffolds investigated in this study displayed good biocompatibility and are osteoconductive in both the intra-periosteum and iliac bone defect models.

In his paper "English Football and Its Hong Kong Television Audience," Victor Fan applies Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's thought in their Kafka. Pour une litterature mineure to map the relationship between the English Premier League of football (soccer) and its Hong Kong television audience/spectatorship. Fan first introduces the background of the English Premier League in relation to its increasing subjugation under Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite consumerist economy. He then examines how the Premier League as televised image transforms the game to hyperreality. Fan argues that these are conditions under which the subaltern would appropriate the hyper-sign as an individuated mental screen, which, in turn, triggers the process of becominganimal. This allows the subaltern to form a contiguous relationship with the exaggerated diabolical power, rewrites the codes of signification, and claims, finally, ownership to her/his own virtual game and virtual desire. Fan proposes that this process leads to the dismantling of the major game to the nth degree and a true deterritorialization of all forms perceived. Victor Fan, "English Football and Its Hong Kong Television Audience" page 2 of 13 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 8.1 (2006)