Genre in Asian Cinema: An Introduction

African and Asian Studies, 1984

AMIC 7th Annual Conference: Asia's Information …, 1998

PART 1. REMEMBRANCE OF THE DECADE PAST The Festival Circuit Continents, history tells us, are meant to be 'discovered'. They begin to exist only when the eye of the other gazes on them. Self-perception in a mirror can be fascinating, but it is the look of another that ignites new energies. The very title 'Festival of Three Continents' of the Nantes Film Festival, for instance, manifests this desire not to see oneself but to explore the other.

Chinese Independent Cinema Observer 华语独立影像观察, 2021

Beijing Film Academy, 1992. The city of Beijing was still covered in a depressing gloom following the Tian'anmen Incident. Inside the academy, I was following a man with a large build and close-cropped hairstyle, who was walking briskly along a dark, deserted corridor. We entered an empty classroom, and I sat on a chair anxiously. As soon as the man closed the classroom door, words poured out from him as if a dam had burst, and in a bass voice with a strong Yunnan accent, he spoke eloquently about the first foreign documentary director he had met, Ogawa Shinsuke ⼩川绅介 from Japan. This man was director Wu Wenguang 吴⽂光, who had just finished the film Bumming in Beijing 流浪北京 (1990) a year or so earlier. 1 Since then, I have been invited to private gatherings with Wu and his friends whenever I visited Beijing, and have acted as their interpreter when they were invited to Japanese film festivals, doing my own small part by acting as a bridge between them and Japan. It was by pure chance, then, that I came to bear witness to nearly thirty years of Sino-Japanese documentary conversations ever since the birth of Chinese independent cinema (a term that did not even exist back then). As an epilogue to this issue, I will retrace the trajectory from Bumming in Beijing's screening in Japan in 1991 to a new exploration of collaborations in a post-Covid era, using documentary-related events and examples that I have witnessed to contour a network of Sino-Japanese exchanges in three main focuses: the Asian boom, film festivals, and television. I will then conclude with a short introduction to the overall structure of this issue. It goes without saying that with my limited experience and exposure, there are bound to be many works, directors, and perspectives that we have not been able to cover in this special issue. Comments are most welcome, and it is our hope that more multi-faceted discussions on Sino-Japanese documentary exchanges will take place. Hong Kong was the first key window through which Chinese independent films were exported abroad. Ever since selfproduced Chinese films first appeared, the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) ⾹港国际电影节 had always actively promoted such works thanks to the efforts of programmers such as Wong Ain-ling 黄爱玲. Wu Wenguang's Bumming in Beijing was also screened at the 15 th HKIFF in spring 1991, not long after its completion in 1990. 2 Benefitting from its unique and rich exposure to Eastern and Western cultures, the HKIFF was known for its avant-garde programming and attracted many filmmakers from Japan every year, who would then screen many of those films in Japanese film festivals several months later. Wu Wenguang was not present at the 1991 HKIFF, so the first international film festival he was invited to was the Fukuoka Asian Film Festival in August 1998, followed by the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in October that year. In between those two months, Wu Wenguang stayed in Japan thanks to the generosity and hospitality of Japanese documentarians who were enthusiastic about new creations from China. He met the Japanese documentary director Ogawa Shinsuke, and could feel Ogawa's fervent passion beneath his broken English. He was also able to bathe in the light of many of Ogawa's films at Ogawa Production's (hereafter Ogawa Pro) down-to-earth studio in Tokyo. All these took place within half a year from Bumming in Beijing's first screening in 3 Hong Kong. In this way, Chinese independent cinema was able to unlock a circuit of exchange with Japan in its earliest days through such personal introductions and connections. Japan was then in the midst of an 'Asian Boom', which refers to a government-initiated cultural policy starting in the mid-1980s that aimed at facilitating dialogue in the region and capturing new cultural currents in Asian film, art, music, theatre, Screenshot from the film Choko (1981) showing a tidal front between the Yangtze River and the Pacific Ocean. Responding to a request from the supervisor-in-chief Ichikawa Kon for a 'picturesque' representation ('e' in Japanese) of the Yangtze River flowing into the sea, assistant director Hara Kazuo took charge and went on a helicopter to film from the sky of Shanghai.

Assignment for a third-year Screen Studies subject.

The Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies provides a snapshot of all the archival and bibliographic resources available to students and scholars of Japanese cinema. Among the nations of the world, Japan has enjoyed an impressively lively print culture related to cinema. The first film books and periodicals appeared shortly after the birth of cinema, proliferating wildly in the 1910s with only the slightest pause in the dark days of World War II. The numbers of publications match the enormous scale of film production, but with the lack of support for film studies in Japan, much of it remains as uncharted territory, with few maps to negotiate the maze of material. This book is the first all-embracing guide ever published for approaching the complex archive for Japanese cinema. It lists all the libraries and film archives in the world with significant collections of film prints, still photographs, archival records, books, and periodicals. It provides a comprehensive, annotated bibliography of the core books and magazines for the field. And it supplies hints for how to find and access materials for any research project. Above and beyond that, Nornes and Gerow’s Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies constitutes a comprehensive overview of the impressive dimensions and depth of the print culture surrounding Japanese film, and a guideline for future research in the field. This is an essential book for anyone seriously thinking about Japan and its cinema.

Studia Filmoznawcze

The East Asian Westerns of the twenty-first century have been studied extensively by scholars of East Asian cinema, yet have been largely missing from the conversations animating the Western genre studies, despite the field’s recent transnational turn. This absence might be linked to their unique for­mal feature: their de-coupling of the genre’s most recognizable tropes and props from their presumed location in the American West. By indigenizing the Western, films such as Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django 2007 or Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird 2008 have served to consolidate national cinemas in East Asia and refashioned our understanding of globalization by highlight­ing regional, intra-Asian trajectories of influence. Despite their hasty dismissal by some Western film critics, they may still reinvigorate the theoretical conversations at the heart of Western studies as well as pose productive questions about their influence on the practice and reception of the U.S...

Asian Studies Review, 2014

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2018

Tauris pp. 202, illus., £49 (hard cover) Felicia Chan's Cosmopolitan Cinema (2017) is a welcome addition to the Tauris World Cinema Series. The series, edited by Lúcia Nagib and Julian Ross, publishes international and innovative scholarship that challenges outdated conceptions of world cinema for an academic and general audience. They have published substantial work highlighting the too often overlooked cinemas of the Basque country, Brazil, Sri Lanka, New Zealand. Chan's contribution, which contains traces of her doctoral thesis, develops her career-long interest in the politics of cultural translation, cultural imaginaries and the negotiation of self-identities in world cinema, specifically, East Asian. Chan explores, through the critical framework of cosmopolitanism, East and Southeast Asian filmmaking from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan and Singapore. She is particularly interested in the 'tripartite relationship between world, text and critic' which in turn, 'help us understand how cosmopolitanism's ideals and contradictions may be mediated through the form of cinema' (p. 16). The book is separated into four well-researched chapters and a postscript, all of which, as Jackie Stacey declares in her foreword, 'speaks to a number of unanswered questions about the place of East and Southeast Asian screen cultures in studies of Cosmopolitanism' (xi). One of the more notable and unique aspects to the book is Chan's isolated focus on multilingual cinema, which opens up a wide seepage of discussion on the paradoxical relationship between subtitled and dubbed films and their East Asian/non-East Asian audiences. Chapter one, 'The cosmopolitan challenge of multilingual cinema' compellingly examines the cosmopolitan effect on multilingual films from Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan in three case studies: the examination of 'multilingual Chineseness' in several of Wong Kar-wai's Hong Kong 'new wave' films, the dubbing practices in the Japanese animated Studio Ghibli film Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondo, 1995), and lastly, an examination of muteness in Taiwan's first film to use synchronised sound A City of Sadness directed by Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien (1989). The film was awarded the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion but also was heavily criticised for its representation of Taiwanese political history. Fascinatingly, Hou's economically-driven decision to cast then-unknown Hong Kong actor Tony

1997

This curriculum module offers concrete and specific examples for instructors who wish to integrate the films of Yasujiro Ozu of Japan and Zhang Yimou from China into film studies courses. Through this module, students should learn to compare and contrast conventional screen space, color, and editing to alternative forms. By becoming more familiar with Asian examples of film making, students should be able to articulate, discuss critically, and demonstrate the differences between Hollywood and alternative Asian styles. Included in this module is a list for audiovisual support and resources, step by step instructions for time allocation, goals and student objectives and content and teaching strategies. Pre-test and post-test assessments are provided along with discussion questions and additional activities. A detailed annotated bibliography provides a rich review of books on Asian film and cultural negotiation. Two appendices include comparative information and illustrations contrasti...

2021

Japanese interests in Chinese cinema go as far back as to the 1910s, when film magazines reported on the situation of Chinese cinema. Discussions of Chinese cinema began to flourish in the 1920s, when intellectuals wrote travelogue essays on Chinese cinema, particularly on Shanghai cinema. In the mid-1930s, more serious analytical discourses were presented by a number of influential contemporary intellectuals, and that trend continued until the end of WWII. PostWar confusion in Japan, as well as political turmoil in China, dampened academic interests of Japanese scholars on Chinese cinema somewhat, but since the re-discovery of Chinese cinema in the early 1980s with the emergence of the Fifth Generation, academic discussions on Chinese cinema resumed and flourished in the 1980s and the 1990s. In the past decade or so, interesting new trends in studies of Chinese cinema in Japan are emerging that include more transnational and comparative approaches, focusing not only on film text but the context of production, distribution, and exhibition. Moreover, scholars from outside of the disciplines of literature and film studies-such as cultural studies, history, and sociology-have begun to contribute to rigorous discussions of Chinese cinema in Japan.