YING Xiong

Profile

YING Xiong Professor
Research Subject

Film studies, Chinese Cinema

Research Fields
Image and Representation Studies
Faculty - Division / Research Group / Laboratory
Division of Humanities / Research Group of Cultural Representations / Laboratory of Visual and Modern Culture
Graduate School - Division / Department / Laboratory
Division of Humanities / Department of Cultural Representations / Laboratory of Visual and Modern Culture
School - Course / Laboratory
Division of Humanities and Human Sciences / Course of Linguistics and Literature / Laboratory of Visual and Modern Culture
Contact

Email: yingpang(at)let.hokudai.ac.jp
Replace “(at)” with “@” when sending email.

Foreign exchange students who want to be research students (including Japanese residents) should apply for the designated period in accordance with the “Research Student Application Guidelines”. Even if you send an email directly to the staff, there is no reply.
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Lab.letters

Lab.letters
Laboratory of Visual and Modern CultureYING Xiong Professor

Live your life like a movie – as if 24 frames a second were running across a cinema screen

“Matter or mind, reality has appeared to us as a perpetual becoming . . . it is never something made.” (Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

“It is therefore true that God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly, and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world.” (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition).

Unlike classic cinema based on “pre-established harmony,” modern cinema depicts the world and life so in such a way that there is no harmony but rather “badly done” actions or behaviors. I am currently trying to approach my research in a similar manner.

Some of the books and movies we are studying and discussing in our seminars.
the steep streets of San Francisco, like a shot of a movie (photo by professor Ying.)

Becoming researchers unafraid of change through broad-based education free of bias

No matter what you specialize in, you will be required to develop an extensive knowledge of humanities. If you are going to write a master’s thesis or a doctoral dissertation, you should try to discover new results that differ from previous studies. In cinema studies, an extensive knowledge of humanities will help tremendously when you try to search for something new. The fields of image and representation studies or—in a broader sense—humanistic studies are always looking for change. If you continue moving forward without settling for the status quo, you will grow as an individual and develop courage. I have two pieces of advice for you: broaden your knowledge and enjoy making discoveries!

Message

At the beginning of Pierrot Le Fou, a 1965 film by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo is reciting Vélasquez written by Élie Faure: “Vélasquez, after the age of fifty, never again painted sharply defined things, he wandered around the objects with the air and the twilight; in the shadow and transparence of the backgrounds he surprised the colored palpitations which he used as the invisible center of his silent symphony . . . ” If you try hard to grasp something between “sharply defined things” such as “air,” “twilight,” “shadow” and “colored palpitations,” you might just encounter something amazing.