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- Volume 20, Issue 2, 2009
Asian Cinema - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2009
Volume 20, Issue 2, 2009
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The Fabulous Adventures of Benjamin Brodsky: China’s First Films — Really
By Frank BrenWhat follows solves the long-running conundrum of who made the first Hong Kong films and when, questions underscored by the territory’s proclaimed film centennial this year based, as many agreed, on mighty slim evidence. As the new evidence shows, the celebration was premature.
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Traveling Bodies: Gender, Nationalism and Diasporic Identity Formation in Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach
More LessGurinder Chadha’s film, Bhaji on the Beach , explores the issues of home, identity, hybridity, and belonging with respect to Indian women in Britain. The film revolves around a group of Indian women ranging from the age of 16 to 60, all members of the Saheli (girlfriend) Women’s Centre who go on a day-trip to Blackpool, a popular beach resort for working class Britons. This ensemble of characters represents a range of marginalizations experienced by the ethnic women in Britain today.
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Love or Hate: The First Emperor on Screen — Three Movies on the Attempted Assassination of the First Emperor Qin Shihuang
By Kun QianIn recent years, the image of China’s first emperor Qin Shihuang has made multiple statements on the notions of hero, Empire, nation states, history, and globalization. Navigating across media opera stage, television, and film screen alike, and across national borders produced within or outside China, the representations of this notoriously controversial figure manifest the changing vision of national imagination of China, China’s continuous attempt to position itself in the world, and its participation in redefining the revived notion of “Empire.”
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A Preliminary Study of the Market for Documentaries in Taiwan
By Daw-Ming LeeForeign guests were surprised by the long line waiting to see documentary films during the 1998 and 2000 Taiwan International Film Festival. It was obviously an indication that audiences in Taiwan yearned for documentaries, especially those from abroad. Moreover, in the years between 2004 and 2006, documentary films and videos such as Gift of Life , Viva Tonal — The Dance Age, Jump! Boys , and The Last Rice Farmer had made it into the commercial cinemas in direct competition with domestic and foreign feature films, and had outperformed most Taiwanese feature films at the box office.
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Identity and Otherness in the Films of Kim Kiduk
More LessIn a central scene in 3-Iron, the female protagonist dissects her own photo and reconstitutes it in a cubistic fashion. While in this film the act of reframing seems to symbolize the establishment of a new identity, in other films by Kim Kiduk, various subject positions can be defined neither as re-compositions of disparate identities nor as splits of two polar opposites. Often we are confronted with situations in which the notion of the authentic subject has possibly been overcome. In the present article, I attempt to understand these patterns evolving in Kim Kiduk’s films, within the Korean cultural context determined by the country’s division, as well as occupations by foreign powers.
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A Space of a Thousand Faces: Spatial Poetics in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska
By Jing NieWayne Wang (1949- ), the director of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska, is a prolific Chinese American film director, who made his name with independent films rooted in Chinese diasporic culture, such as Chan Is Missing (1982) and Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989). He is probably best known for directing The Joy Luck Club (1993), a film adaptation of Amy Tan’s novel depicting entangled relationships between American-born Chinese women and their native Chinese mothers. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska, premiered at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, marked Wang’s return to small, intimate filmmaking related to Chinese culture from his Hollywood detour (Maid in Manhattan , 2002; Because of Winn-Dixie , 2005; Last Holiday , 2006).
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A Study of the Post-Handover Hong Kong Action Cinema 1997-2007
More LessThe action movie has always been a genre that Hong Kong cinema is proud of. Many symbolic figures of Hong Kong cinema arose from this genre. Examples include Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Yuen Woo-ping, John Woo, Jet Li, Johnnie To, and Andrew Lau. Some of them were invited to participate in Hollywood pictures, and a few of the movies such as Infernal Affairs, were remade into Hollywood versions which achieved box office success and recognition with film awards. Undoubtedly, Hong Kong action movies have received worldwide recognition, fulfilling the dream that Hong Kong filmmakers have been striving hard to achieve for years.
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Battle Royale 2 Revenge: The Last Testament of Kinji Fukasaku
More LessFollowing the notorious success of Battle Royale (2000) in Japan, a sequel appeared inevitable. Unfortunately, Kinji Fukasaku (1930_2003) did not live to complete the next episode in a film based upon a well-known 1999 novel by Koushun Takami, depicting a life-threatening situation devised by the authorities affecting Japanese students living within an allegorical parallel world set in the new millennium. Kinji Fukasaku did begin pre-production work on the film and contributed to the screenplay written by his son Kenta, Norio Kida, and Koushon Takami. However, he died from prostate cancer on Jan. 12, 2003 and may have directed only one scene.
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Simple Stories for a Complicated World: An Interview with Filmmaker Izidore Musallam
By Anne CieckoFilm and television director, writer, and producer Izadore Musallam’s work stretches across national boundaries and explores shifting identities.1 Born and raised in the Middle East and educated as a filmmaker in North America, he continues to reside in Canada while making English and Arabic-language films at home and abroad. Musallam’s debut feature Foreign Nights (1989) dealt with cultural and generational clashes within the Arab diaspora with the story of a Canadian teen dancer and her traditional Palestinian parents; his follow-up Nothing to Lose (1994) is a gangster spoof about a French Canadian boxer. Heaven Before I Die (1997) is a comedy about a young man from Palestine who moves to Toronto, receives advice from the ghost of Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran played by Omar Sharif, and gets a job as a Charlie Chaplin imitator. Forbidden Fruit (2002) is an updated Adam and Eve story of the seduction of a priest.
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Social Critiques and Sentimentalism: On Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Close to Paradise
By Haomin GongAs a key figure in the so-called “Sixth Generation” directors in China, Wang Xiaoshuai has attracted considerable attention in academics, both in China and in the West. His first “legal” film — a film that is officially authorized by the state-controlled filmmaking system in China — So Close to Paradise (Biandan guniang, 1996) deserves special attention. As a transitional film from the “underground” to “in-system” production, this film represents a salient transition in Wang’s filmmaking when he was facing the imperatives of art, state censorship, and commercialization. In this sense, it is also a locale where investigations of the problematics of Chinese film at the turn of the 21st Century can be fruitfully conducted.
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Cultural Proximity and Distance: The Reception of Korean Films in China Through the Lens of My Sassy Girl
Authors: Ying Huang and Kwang Woo NohThis article explores the reception of Korean romantic comedy, My Sassy Girl, among Chinese youth. Through the lens of this popular movie, the authors attempt to explain the complexity of the popularity of Korean films and other cultural products in China in recent years. By analyzing the outcome of online questionnaires and depth interviews regarding the reception of My Sassy Girl, the authors argue that although the strong presence of Korean films in China is contributed by the significant growth of the film industry in South Korea since the 1990s, the current conditions of China society and its movie market, and the cultural proximity the Chinese youth as movies viewers perceived among these two nations in comparison with Western media products, especially Hollywood movies, facilitates Korean films’ popularity at the personal level.
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“100% Sadist”: Violence Is Sex in Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer
More LessTakashi Miike’s cult film Ichi the Killer has become renowned for its audacious and extreme depiction of violence. A gangster film set in the world of the Japanese yakuza, it distinguishes itself by commenting directly on the genre’s inherent sadism. Through an excessively graphic style, the film highlights not only that the act of violence is central to the genre, but also that violence can be a source of pleasure. Thus, I will argue in this analysis that Miike’s Ichi the Killer represents violence not only as a highly erotic activity, but as replacing sex as a means of bodily pleasure. In this film Miike foregrounds the transgressive elements contained in representations of sadism, which highlight a radical crossing of the boundaries of sexuality, through the incorporation of pain, masochism, and the sexualization of previously “nonsexual” acts, objects, and body parts.
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Distant Voices, Still Lives: Love, Loss, and Longing in the work of Makoto Shinkai
By Adam BinghamWithin the hallowed ranks of Japanese anime, the label of “new Miyazaki” is something that is at once both too difficult and too easy to bestow on new directors: too difficult because the Studio Ghibli luminary is as distinctive a figure as is currently working in Japanese cinema; too easy as a great deal of our current Anglophone critical establishment seems only able to valorize promising new directors by relying on lazy comparisons to great filmmakers of past generations. Discourse on Kitano Takeshi in particular exemplifies this trend. By the time of his own international breakthrough with Hana-Bi in 1997, he was being variously compared to Ozu, Kurosawa, and Oshima in Japan; elsewhere to Martin Scorsese, Buster Keaton, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson, John Woo, Sam Peckinpah, and Quentin Tarantino.
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Song Liling and Cheng Dieyi: An Orientalized Asian and His Native Informant — Comparing M. Butterfly with Farewell My Concubine
By Xiaoling ShiWhen depicting Asians, both the Asian American play M. Butterfly and the Chinese film Farewell My Concubine utilize Beijing Opera and homosexuality as two selling points to create an enticingly exotic dish to pique the curiosity of Occidental viewers, which makes the two works comparable. They demonstrate how Orientalism has insinuated itself in the discourse of “Asian minorities living in the West” and “the Orient,” a venture that Sheng-mei Ma claims Edward Said “seldom” undertook and he himself partially pursued in his book Immigrant Subjectivities: In Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (Ma, 1998:24).
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Two Coming-out Shorts Related to India
By Lyle PearsonTwo gay shorts shown at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival had an Indian connection — Kali Maa, a Columbia University project about a mother defending her battered son, shot in the U.S., and Cowboy Forever, a French/Brazilian answer to Brokeback Mountain.
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Cape No. 7 and Taiwan’s National Consciousness
More LessIn 2008, the release of Cape No. 7. directed by Wei De-sheng. was a national sensation. Lauded as a miracle in the history of Taiwanese cinema, the film reached the box office revenue of more than 320 million New Taiwan Dollars (approx. US$10 million) in two months after its release, topping the most expensive Asian-financed film, John Wu’s Chinese epic The Battle of Red Cliff, released in 2008, and Ang Lee’s adaptation of a short story by the iconic author, Eileen Chang, Lust Caution, in 2007. Without the extravagant promotion campaigns of Wu’s and Lee’s films, the movie with a cast of mostly amateur actors started slow but became a blockbuster by word of mouth and through the internet.
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Love Letters from the Colonizer: The Cultural Identity Issue in Cape No.7
More LessMy trip back to Taiwan near the end of 2008 was full of surprises caused by my observation that the whole country had been in a mania for Cape No.7, a locally made film released in August 2008 that obtained a tremendous success in the following months. The film was very frequently mentioned in local news reports and in people’s conversation and had gone on to be so successful that famous TV programs held interviews with the director and crew, variety shows invited the actors to do performances, and commercials made parodies of some pieces in the film. And also, a large number of tourists poured into Hengchun town to visit the sites where the film took shots. Numerous objects seen in the film, such as props, costume, houses, settings, landscape, became popular commercial items. It seemed that everybody was celebrating the birth of this most popular Taiwanese film of all time, Cape No.7.
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Adapting Japanese Horror: The Ring
More LessThe examination of Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films presents the compelling opportunity to analyze the imagination of ghosts and haunting in diverse cultures. In 1998, Ringu, directed by Nakata Hideo, was released to widespread acclaim. Four years later, Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) was released in the United States. The latter film was criticized as a retelling of the hit Japanese thriller, little more than a Hollywood knock off.
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The Other Face of Modernity in 1950s’ Mainland Chinese Films
By Chi LiIn the documentary film Morning Sun (2003), Carma Hinton uses two different types of ballet performances to emblematize the visual memory of Mainland China of the 1950s and 1960s. While the 1950s is represented by the classical ballet “Swan Lake,” the 1960s is represented by the model play “The Red Detachment of Women.” In the memory of an American who spent many years in China, the 1950s appears as modern and romantic in contrast with the revolutionary and radical 1960s.
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Festival Paris Cinéma
More LessFestival Paris Cinéma (2-14 July, 2009) is a summer delight in the French capital abandoned to the tourists by the inhabitants heading south. Presided over the British actress Charlotte Rampling who made Paris her home long time ago, the event celebrated its seventh anniversary with an eclectic program of first runs, tributes and guests of honor. The ‘country of honor’ was Turkey as part of the ‘Season of Turkey’ in France, a six-month program that aims to bridge the gap between the two countries through culture.
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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)