New Waves: Red Sorghum

Michael Berry is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at UCLA. His areas of research include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Chinese cinema, popular culture in modern China, and literary translation. He is the author of A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, which explores literary and cinematic representations of atrocity in twentieth-century China and Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, a collection of dialogues with contemporary Chinese filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zhang Yimou, and Stanley Kwan, Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy and Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Memories of Shadows and Light. Forthcoming books include The Path of Shadow and Light: Jia Zhangke on Cinema and an edited collection on the 1930 Musha Incident in Taiwan. At present, he is completing a monograph that explores the United States as it has been imagined through Chinese film, literature, and popular culture from 1949 to the present. Also an active literary translator, Berry has translated important contemporary Chinese novels by Yu Hua, Ye Zhaoyan, and Chang Ta-chun. In 2016, his translation of To Live was selected for the NEA’s “The Big Read” program, and his 2017 translation of Wu He’s Remains of Life was met with widespread acclaim.

Wesley Jacks is a PhD candidate working in the fields of Chinese film history and media industries studies. His dissertation focuses on the contemporary distribution of imported films in the People’s Republic of China. At UCSB, he has been a member of the Media Fields Collective, a contributing researcher on the Connected Viewing Initiative, and a programmer/researcher at the Carsey-Wolf Center. He has presented his research at Peking University, Nanyang Technological University, SCMS, and Warner Brothers Studios. His essay on Sino-Japanese film connections from the mid-70s to the early-90s is forthcoming in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and he co-authored a chapter in Film Marketing into the Twenty-First Century (2015). His research interests include distribution studies, media policy, film aesthetics, and piracy.