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- Volume 12, Issue 1, 2001
Asian Cinema - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2001
Volume 12, Issue 1, 2001
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Semerah Padi: A Proposal For A New Nation
More LessThe very first images of the Malaysian film, Semerah Padi, are of clouds swirling across a turning and gradually approaching earth that eventually reveals a map of the Malay Archipelago and closes in on an area in present day northern Sumatra. The music accompanying these images is somber and the voice-over is incantatory.
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Cinema and Iran: Culture and Politics in the Islamic Republic
Authors: Ali Mohammadi and Eric EganThe aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the development of cinema in Iran since the revolution and to provide a framework, (by locating it within the social, political and cultural landscape of Iran itself and by linking it to the historical development of the "third cinema"), in which to understand, interpret and locate this evolution.
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Coming of Age: Bollywood Productions of the Nineties
More LessThe last decade has seen a dramatic departure from the formulaic films that the world's largest producer of films, Bollywood, has been feeding the Indian public. The success of a series of blockbusters in the 1990s– Hum Aapke Hain Kaun? (Who Am I to You?), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Man With a Heart Wins the Bride), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something Happens), Dil To Pagal Hai (The Heart Is Crazy), among others - has mystified cine critics. Relatively lightweight films, with thin to no storylines, but rich on the song and dance aspect and with stellar casts, they have captured the imagination of Indian audiences from Delhi to Dubai, and New York to Hong Kong.
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Neglected "Classical" Periods: Hong Kong and Korean Cinemas of the 1960s
By Peter RistBefore discussing the subject cinemas of this paper, I think it is important to consider some general concerns on film history/histories. My own major interest is in histories or taxonomies of film style, both general and personal. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on visual style in the early films of John Ford. Here I argued that the director, whose films are perhaps the most greatly admired (worldwide) from the Hollywood studio era, for their personal visual distinctiveness, in fact, took a long time to develop his style. He worked with a series of brilliant cinematographers and art directors at various studios, and learned from them. In fact, I suggest that the focus on directorial authorship of Hollywood films which began in earnest with the Cahiers du Cinéma group of critics in the 1950s has ultimately done a disservice to Hollywood cinematographers like Lee Garmes, Joseph August, and John Alton and art directors like Anton Grot and William Cameron Menzies whose career work may actually be more distinctive in terms of "visual style" than the "auteur" directors with whom they worked: e.g., Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, and Michael Curtiz.1
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Satyajit Ray's Alien: Agantuk
More LessSatyajit Ray's conception of an alien is almost like his idea of a Bengali male–a missing link between the childlike (that is, somewhat unformed) and the ridiculous (that is, somewhat uncouth). The validity of this observation will be at once manifest upon viewing Ray's sketch of "Bankubabu's Bandhu" ["Bankubabu's Friend"], a strange figure that is an amalgam of the stereotypical ghostly countenance and childlike character and naivete–to quote Ray himself, "a cross between a gnome and a famished refugee child ... {possessing] ... a kind of ethereal innocence" (Banerjee, 1996, 201; see also Mandal, 1999:116-29). A similar image of the "alien" seems to have influenced Ray's vision of a "non-resident Indian," the much maligned NRI, who in the 1980s exercised strong and strange emotions among Indians in general and Calcuttans in particular. The NRI became an object of envy for their wealth and of contempt for their imagined traitorous conduct, by fleeing their homeland and thereby depriving their socieity of their services. They also became an object of curiosity for their acquired foreign accents and a heightened sense of hygiene (recall the neglected tourist inquiring about the "cooking medium" in Jai Baba Felunath or the agantuk's request for a drink with "no ice"), in short, for their acquired "othernesss."
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"To Live" Beyond Good and Evil
By Rujie WangI believe that for a long time now Chinese films have been too abstract, conceptual, gimmicky. They don't relate at all to the lives of ordinary Chinese people. I'm certain that most audiences will like this film. We haven't gone overboard on the tragic elements, but rather have focused on the minute, amusing details in the life of a nobody. There are tears and laughter, one following the other in a gentle rhythm like the breath of a bellows. Zhang Yimou
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Blood Spear, Mt. Fuji: Uchida Tomu's Conflicted Comeback from Manchuria
By Craig WattsFollowing the surrender of the Japanese in World War II, the colonial tables were turned. The Chinese took control of Manchuria and the Manchurian Film Cooperative, and the Americans took control of Japan and its film industry. In a sense, the Japanese, who had fabricated and controlled Manchuria's film industry from 1937–1945, writing the lines to be spoken by Chinese actors in Manchurian productions, were now forced to appear as the puppet actors in an American production. In the early days of the Occupation, the overlay of democracy in Japan seemed to have been effortlessly deployed. But in the postwar period, the ideology that drove Japan to reach new heights of modernism and atrocity on the Continent was not so effortlessly put to rest. As the Japanese cinema entered its post-war golden age, a "working out" of militarist, modernist, and feudalistic ideology on the level of mass culture took place in Japan's packed movie theatres. In this period, celebrated filmmaker Uchida Tomu brought his Manchurian experience living on the edge of Japanese ideological extremes back to Japan with him and infused it into his conflicted 1955 samurai classic Chiyari Fuji (Blood Spear, Mt. Fuji).
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From Saviors to Rapists: G.I.s, Women, and Children in Korean War Films
More LessThe Associated Press' September 29th, 1999 report on the alleged massacre of Korean civilians by U.S. soldiers during the Korean War shed newlight on what has long been considered a "forgotten war." According to the survivors, over the course of three days in late July 1950 U.S. soldiers machine- gunned hundreds of villagers (mostly women, children, and old men) huddled underneath the railroad bridge near Nogun-ri, 100 miles southeast of Seoul1. Their account was corroborated by the testimonies of ex-GIs interviewed by the AP. The massacre supposedly took place because of the U.S. troops' fear of North Koreans infiltrating South Korean refugee groups. The Nogun-ri report fueled further claims of American civilian killings at other villages throughout the country, including Masan, Tanyang and Iksan. The U.S. government recently admitted the existence of the Nogun-ri killing and offered $1 billion for monument-erection and $750,000 for school scholarships.
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Has the Movie Red Corner Driven China into Its Corner ?
More LessWhen Hollywood released its movie Red Corner starring Richard Gere in late 1997, it triggered waves of criticism throughout the world. The impact was explosive. This project, therefore, is to examine, through 87 articles from international and domestic newspapers and journals, 1) to what extent Hollywood, at the center of American popular culture, is able to exercise its influence on the world, and 2) how effective our international/intercultural communication can be through films.
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Mrinal Sen: 'Rambling Thoughts' on Unforgettable Masters, Lost Friends, Enigmatic Ruins and Life
More LessMrinal Sen is the most important living filmmaker of India today. Born in 1923 in Faridpur, which is now in Bangladesh, Sen arrived in Calcutta in 1940 to study science and soon got involved in underground Leftist movements. Following India's independence (1947), a serious art cinema emerged in Bengal, which was nurtured by the foundation of Calcutta Film Society. By 1955, Sen had given up his job as a representative for a pharmaceutical firm and made his debut as a filmmaker. This was also the year, another famous Bengali, Satyajit Ray produced his celebrated first film, "Pather Panchali."
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Darius Cooper, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). xii + 260 pages.
More LessDarius Cooper's book, based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Southern California (year not known), has not been updated with recent Ray scholarship, notably the studies by critics and specialists of Ray's Calcutta. On the other hand, even a cursory glance at Cooper's bibliography reveals the inclusion of an idiosyncratic melange of peripheral titles, some dealing with critical theory and literary criticism and some with Western cinema. Conspicuous for their absence are studies by Bengali writers, published both in Bengali and in English. Obviously the author's major handicap has been his unfamiliarity with Bengali language and culture, the medium and foundation of Ray's films respectively. Nevertheless, his puzzling oversight of numerous specialist studies in English, especially after Ray's death in 1992, is unconscionable.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 34 (2023)
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Volume 33 (2022)
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Volume 32 (2021)
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Volume 31 (2020)
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Volume 30 (2019)
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Volume 29 (2018)
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Volume 28 (2017)
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Volume 27 (2016)
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Volume 26 (2015)
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Volume 25 (2014)
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Volume 24 (2013)
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Volume 23 (2012)
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Volume 22 (2011)
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Volume 21 (2010)
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Volume 20 (2009)
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Volume 19 (2008)
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Volume 18 (2007)
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Volume 17 (2006)
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Volume 16 (2005)
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Volume 15 (2004)
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Volume 14 (2003)
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Volume 13 (2002)
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Volume 12 (2001)
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Volume 11 (2000)
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Volume 10 (1998 - 1999)
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Volume 9 (1997 - 1998)
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Volume 8 (1996)
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Volume 7 (1995)
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Volume 6 (1993)