Asian Cinema - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2005

This study will focus on a cluster of new films and television dramas that revisit and rewrite the history of Chinese socialism from a different point of view in light of the capitalist frenzy of commercialism and commodification in contemporary post-socialist China. It seems that it is only possible after some 20 years, after the historical wounds and traumas have been largely healed, that a new critical distance can be reached in regard to the past. Socialism during the 1950s-1970s conveniently signifies the values and ideals that are putatively absent today—idealism, egalitarianism, self-sacrifice, and innocence. The critique of the present consumer society thus comes in the form of nostalgia for the past in contemporary Chinese cinema.

In the following article, Nick Browne examines the numerous achievements in Chinese film production over the last 25 years, and examines the cultural significance of the emerging field of academic criticism.

This article will discuss Nizhalkkuthu/Shadow Kill (2002). Adoor Gopalakrishnan's first fulllength feature in seven years, was hailed by critics as one of his most significant accomplishments. In Nizhalkkuthu, the state is portrayed as a highly repressive and coercive mechanism that determines how people live and function. There's virtually no scope for subjective choices, for stepping outside the rigid codes and rituals that govern almost every aspect of human behavior. It's a feudal world that exists outside time and history, where people are trapped within a relentless cycle of events and identities that repeat themselves ad infinitum. In fact, the sense of inevitability is so pervasive that it's accepted without question as a fact of existence. Kaliyappan's identity as the Other is constituted by and exists within this paradigm. As a creation of the state, he must live exclusively on its terms.

Kitano employs his wellknown "offbeat" sensibilities to add memorable dimensions to the ambiance through which his characters move. Despite his protestations that the film is "an entertainment," and presumably not to be taken too seriously within his oeuvre, it is quite apparent that his use of color, music, and shot composition, as well as his pastiches of Japanese film and of Japanese culture more widely, make of this much more than another installment in the long-running Zatoichi series. These aspects, as well as the particular characterization of Zatoichi by Kitano, will be the focus of this study.

I intend to underline the melodramatic structure of both Japanese furusato movement and the Chinese film Nuan to argue that the melodramatic adaptation from the original story into the current film plays a central role in assuring a smooth assimilation of the cinematic representation of Chinese ethnicity into current Japanese discourses of nostalgia. Moreover, Japanese visual consumption of cross-cultural nostalgia in the form of Chinese melodrama reinforces the trends of internationalizing and feminizing furusato tradition. Based on this analysis, in the conclusion I will give a re-examination of the celebrated new cross-cultural turn and the real signification of the formula of Japanese nostalgia and Chinese melodrama.

Izo is thus a deliberately complex film needing close attention rather than instant dismissal. The film necessitates a knowledge of how it uses it cultural and historical conventions. But, like any challenging work, Izo can be analyzed and understood within the context of international cinematic conventions. Miike restructures the violent codes of samurai, supernatural, and yakuza genres to reveal them as manipulative forces within Japanese culture. Izo contains deliberately excessive violations of geographical, historical, spatial, and temporal conventions. They exist to challenge the audience in a manner akin to the cinematic experiments of Jean-Luc Godard in the late 1960s but never in a deliberately obscurantist manner.

This article is a presentation of a study of representations of adopted Koreans in Korean popular culture. After a background to the history of international adoption from Korea and an introduction to the Korean adoption issue, the article looks at the representations of adopted Koreans in four Korean popular songs and feature films, respectively. At the end, these representations are linked to the ethnic and postcolonial character of Korean nationalism and to the fractured and fragmented state of the Korean nation itself, and are conceptualized as an attempt at reconciling with a tragic history and imagining a new future for a global Korean community.

This paper traces how one horror story served as a blank canvas that allowed filmmakers across cultures, decades, and the political spectrum to utilize it as a remake and a medium for conveying their positions, as well as a vehicle that would allow them to cross national borders. Thus I explain how the lineage of Ye Ban Ge Sheng can provide a critical perspective on the intersection of politics, movies, and commerce in 20th Century China. In particular, an examination of Ye Ban Ge Sheng and its 1941 sequel shows how Maxu Weibang is adept at shifting his message according to the political tides.

In this paper, I shall examine the depiction and portrayal of masculine heroism of Woo's and Kitano's works, namely A Better Tomorrow and Sonatine (1993), and analyze the thematic concerns in these two films. This comparison will highlight the high evaluation of loyalty in the homosocial world of Woo, if not Hong Kong Noir, and how Kitano, and with him contemporary Japanese society, lost belief in heroism.

This article examines Wang's film in terms of one aspect of folk belief that fully saturates it, that of yin and yang. The yin-yang symbol on Grandma's ceremonial robe is not only a true-to-life representation of this type of ritual costume; it is also a globally recognized symbol that serves as a visual cue to this major theme.

This article will determine the suitability of Volcano High, its fantasy elements, and the implication of the film to fit into the fantasy genre. I will investigate the military regime's way of hegemony and the oppressive educational system, by means of inquiring about the transition of the Korean regime from a military to a civil government, from the early 1960s through the early 1990s. Then, I will examine the postmodern aesthetics of the film, in relation to the apparatus of concealing socio-politically critical comment, and the process by which the South Korean government lost its authority, under the context of socio-political implication, by means of close textual analysis.

This article will explore the representations of war and empire building in two selected movies. More specifically, I intend to compare and contrast the different interpretations of the final stage of the Warring States period (453-221 BCE), leading to the first unification of the Chinese Empire under the Qin (221-207 BCE), in the two movies Hero by Zhang Yimou, and The Emperor and the Assassin by Chen Kaige. My principal goal is to examine the foundation myth of Chinese "righteous" Empire in these movies, as well as the ideological connotations concerning this past that the directors attempt to convey to their contemporary audiences.

In a brilliant and enigmatic film, Happy End, director Jung Ji-woo has indexed all of these themes: shifting gender hierarchies, the valorization of aggressive masculinity, the establishment of a modern national identity, and the social uncertainties of a faltering economy. Happy End is a film clearly situated within the significant political, economic, and social events of the period within which it was made.

During the early part of the 20th Century, the world was in a volatile state. Shifting loyalties and power games, fueled by fallout from the World War I in the West, had spread to Asia and sat firmly at the forefront of international relations; colonialism had become a major part of many nations' foreign policies. It was into this morass that directors Mizoguchi Kenji and Kamei Fumio waded. Mizoguchi Kenji's 1936 film Gion no Shimai, or Sisters of the Gion, suggested that Japan's options were not limited to the extreme dichotomy of submission or aggression, and that perhaps there was a third way out that necessitated neither capitulation to Western imperialism nor the colonization of other nations. Meanwhile, Kamei Fumio shocked censors and astute audiences in 1938 with Shanghai, a subtle but scathing denouncement of Japanese imperialist aspirations in China.

This article will discuss Fruit Chan's films Durian Durian (2000), Hollywood Hong Kong (2001), and Three… Extremes: Dumplings (2004). The prominent reference to edibles is evident in the titles of the first and the third films; the second film is set in a shanty town below a luxury apartment complex called Plaza Hollywood, featuring, among others, a family of roast pork mongers. Although vastly different in style, all three works employ food as a vehicle to explore the interplay between Hong Kong society and mainland Chinese, and as this essay argues, they also symbolize a phobic undercurrent that has gathered strength with the growing Hong Kong-China co-dependency since the 1997 handover.

While some scholars have noted the presence of Buddhist imagery in Ran, no critic has paid close attention to the complete inventory of the Buddhist symbols embedded in the film, or what they imply. The purpose of this paper is to provide such an analysis and to suggest that Buddhist themes form important subtexts in the film.

This article will consider how the film The Hole offers images of that utopian potential in its juxtaposition of apocalyptic urban decay with the euphoric extravagance of the movie musical, a parallel world that sends the Man Upstairs, the Woman Downstairs and several dancers into joyous song and dance sequences across the barren hallways and derelict stairwells.

Behind appearances, behind the multitude of the modern megalopolises (Hong Kong, Buenos Aires), the cinema of Wong Kar-Wai underlines an architectonic of the primary esseulement: solitudes, as in The Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express or Fallen Angels, which are just added up, only joined side by side; which never draw up a whole and never merge in a common-ity; which never cancel each other out as pluralities. Even through the kindness of the other, through the willingness (when it exists) of the other, I am deterritorialized, I miss the sol under my sol-itude.

This article begins with my interpretation of possible interrelations between the film and the above-mentioned poem that begins with 'beifang you jiaren' ('There is a beauty in the North'; my own English translation). In Li Yannian's poem, the 'jiaren' (the beauty) is compared with the 'cheng' (the city or castle) and 'guo' (the nation or country) and thus objectified. Li Yannian inadvertently turns the jiaren into a scapegoat if the country and citizens are not taken good care of. Zhang Yimou revises the destiny of the jiaren by permitting her to speak her mind and decide her fate.

This paper intends to examine how masculinity has been presented in the films of John Woo. We will examine his vision using two of his action films: The Killer, a Hong Kong film, and Broken Arrow, a Hollywood film. In these two films, Woo provides an interesting representation of masculinity. His films celebrate a vision of masculinity that combines intimacy and action (work), physical strength and emotion, and heroism and villainy. We will compare and contrast Woo's use of masculinity in the two action films by analyzing how the vision of masculinity is presented differently in The Killer and Broken Arrow.