This collection of essays explores the mosaic of East Asian cinema by focusing on issues of identity, history and trans-regional cultural flow within this dynamic region. The argument of the editors is firstly, cinematic cross-pollination within East Asian film has been a constant since 1945, and second, any discussion of the complex identity of East Asia and its national cinemas must consider regional historical issues. These arguments run counter to recent literature published in the field of East Asian cinema that claim responses to Western globalization and modernization are the shaping forces for Asian cultural identity.
In attempts to identify the integral elements contributory to the recent success of South Korean films in East Asia, most existing researches maintain their wide focal length on either: underlying political conditions like South Korea's media liberalization, or the continually rising demand for non-Hollywood films in the region. This text, however, takes a different approach and looks more closely to the question of "South Korean cinema's place in (re)construction of East Asian identity" as it was found a significant yet underexplored area of research. The questioning is attempted by testing the hypothesis that the merit of South Korean films relies more on the cultural "similarity / proximity" based on "common experience of absorption of Western modern civilization" than the cultural "otherness / distance" based on "different experience of consumption of modern culture". The mode of production and the relationship between the global and South Korean film industry are contextually examined in order to identify and understand the invisible underpinnings, which otherwise would go unnoticed while spectators watch films. In doing so, the text analyzes the unique conditions that the South Korean film industry grew out of, and the effects such underlying conditions had on the contemporary "genre-bending" films, for which South Korean cinema is best known and favored nowadays. Furthermore, by placing hanryu (Korean Wave) phenomenon within the context of globalization discourse, the three main strands of globalization discourse - 1. Cultural imperialism, 2. Modernity project, 3. Hybridization of identity - are applied to the questioning of South Korean cinema's place in East Asia amid the changing trend of cultural flows in times of globalization.
With 25 essays that embrace a wide spectrum of topics and perspectives including intertextuality, transnationality, gender representation, repetition, the use of music, color, and sound, depiction of time and space in human affairs, and Wong’s highly original portrayal of violence, A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai is a singular examination of the prestigious filmmaker known around the world for the innovation, beauty, and passion he brings to filmmaking. Brings together the most cutting edge, in-depth, and interesting scholarship on arguably the greatest living Asian filmmaker, from a multinational group of established and rising film scholars and critics Covers a huge breadth of topics such as the tradition of the jianghu in Wong's films; queering Wong's films not in terms of gender but through the artist's liminality; the phenomenological Wong; Wong's intertextuality; America through Wong's eyes; the optics of intensities, thresholds, and transfers of energy in Wong's cinema; and the diasporic presence of some ladies from Shanghai in Wong's Hong Kong Examines the political, historical, and sociological influence of Wong and his work, and discusses his work from a variety of perspectives including modern, post-modern, postcolonial, and queer theory Includes two appendices which examine Wong’s work in Hong Kong television and commercials
Asian cinemas are connected to global networks and participate in producing international film history while at the same time influenced and engaged by spatial, cultural, social and political transformations. This interdisciplinary study forwards a productive pairing of Asian cinemas and space, where space is used as a discursive tool to understand cinemas of Asia. Concentrating on the performative potential of cinematic space in Asian films, the contributors discuss how space (re)constructs forms of identities and meanings across a range of cinematic practices. Cities, landscapes, buildings and interiors actively shape cinematic performances of such identities and their significances. The essays are structured around the spatial themes of ephemeral, imagined and contested spaces. They deal with struggles for identity, belonging, autonomy and mobility within different national and transnational contexts across East, Southeast and parts of South Asia in particular, which are complicated by micropolitics and subcultures, and by the interventions and interests of global lobbies.
This collection examines the exchange of Asian identities taking place at the levels of both film production and film reception amongst pan-Pacific cinemas. The authors consider, on the one hand, texts that exhibit what Mette Hjort refers to as, "marked transnationality," and on the other, the polysemic nature of transnational film texts by examining the release and reception of these films. The topics explored in this collection include the innovation of Hollywood generic formulas into 1950's and 1960's Hong Kong and Japanese films; the examination of Thai and Japanese raced and gendered identity in Asian and American films; the reception of Hollywood films in pre-1949 China and millennial Japan; the production and performance of Asian adoptee identity and subjectivity; the political implications and interpretations of migrating Chinese female stars; and the production and reception of pan-Pacific co-productions. .
Focuses on the cooperation between Hong Kong and Japanese cinema from the Sino-Japanese War, which broke out in the 1930s, up until the early 1970s, to re-evaluate the significance of this event in the context of Asian film history.
This collection examines the exchange of Asian identities taking place at the levels of both film production and film reception amongst pan-Pacific cinemas. The authors consider, on the one hand, texts that exhibit what Mette Hjort refers to as, "marked transnationality," and on the other, the polysemic nature of transnational film texts by examining the release and reception of these films. The topics explored in this collection include the innovation of Hollywood generic formulas into 1950's and 1960's Hong Kong and Japanese films; the examination of Thai and Japanese raced and gendered identity in Asian and American films; the reception of Hollywood films in pre-1949 China and millennial Japan; the production and performance of Asian adoptee identity and subjectivity; the political implications and interpretations of migrating Chinese female stars; and the production and reception of pan-Pacific co-productions. .
This book brings together nine original chapters to examine genre agency in East Asian cinema within the transnational context. It addresses several urgent and pertinent issues such as the distribution and exhibition practices of East Asian genre films, intra-regional creative flow of screen culture, and genre’s creative response to censorship. The volume expands the scholarly discussion of the rich heritage and fast-changing landscape of filmmaking in East Asian cinemas. Confronting the complex interaction between genres, filmic narrative and aesthetics, film history and politics, and cross-cultural translation, this book not only reevaluates genre’s role in film production, distribution, and consumption, but also tackles several under-explored areas in film studies and transnational cinema, such as the history of East Asian commercial cinema, the East Asian film industry, and cross-media and cross-market film dissemination.
Depictions within a movie of either filmmaking or film watching are hardly novel, but the dramatic expansion of the reach of the metacinematic into contemporary Chinese cinemas is nothing short of remarkable. To G. Andrew Stuckey, the prevalence of metacinematic features forms the basis of a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. Such a discourse, in turn, outlines the boundaries of the possible for film in China as aesthetic or sociopolitical practice. Metacinema also draws our attention to the presence of the audience, people actively responding to a film. In elucidating the affective responses elicited by the metacinematic mode in the viewers, Stuckey argues that metacinema reflects ways of being in the world that audiences may take up for themselves. The films studied in this book are drawn across the full spectrum of Chinese films made in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the 1990s and 2000s, from award-winning conceptual art films to popular crowd pleasers, blockbusters to low-budget productions, and documentary-style social realist exposé projects to studio assembly-line investments. The recurrence of the metacinematic across this broad range of works is indicative of its relevance to Chinese films today, and the analysis of these diverse examples allows us to gauge the cultural, social, and aesthetic implications of Chinese cinemas as a whole. “Stuckey surveys a broad swath of contemporary Chinese cinema, from popular blockbusters to elite art films, around the theme of metacinema, yielding new insights into both previously neglected films and those already acknowledged as contemporary classics. The result is a fascinating dive into the growing and diversifying cinema culture of China today.” —Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota “Stuckey’s brilliant work, Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film, offers insightful close analyses of films by key directors from the PRC (Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Jia Zhangke, and Li Yu), Hong Kong (Peter Chan), and Taiwan (Tsai Ming-liang). This clearly written book is essential reading for scholars and students of Chinese cinemas. Stuckey’s study of genre and metacinema makes it a must-read for anyone interested in cinema.” —Michelle Bloom, University of California, Riverside
This book makes a timely contribution to understanding perceptions on national identity and National Education, with both of them have become controversial topics in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China. In a so-called globalization era, national identity and National Education, with the latter having an aim of fostering a Chinese national identity in education, have been significantly pushed ahead by the Hong Kong SAR government since the early 2000s as a response to the return of sovereignty to China in 1997. Teacher perception matters to what they select and how they teach in the schools. By incorporating fieldworks of teacher interviews, observation and documentary analysis, this book argues for a multi-layered conception of identity, different aims, contents and diversified methods of National Education should be recognized. This book is likely to become a useful account of teacher perception on national identity and National Education in citizenship education literature, and it will be relevant to policymakers, teachers, trainers and researchers. Chapters include, 1. Different meanings of national identity of teachers and aims, contents and methods of National Education 2. From Citizenship Education to National Education in a Chinese society 3. Implications for understanding National Education in a globalization era: mixed identification, multi-layered identities, knowledge transmission, and ‘global identity’
