Asian Cinema - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2007

In general, four major factors are in place to support women's entries into the film communities: the nature of film industries, the availability of social patronage, the privileges accorded by social class, and education. These four factors play different roles in supporting women to be a part of their directing circles. To sum up, social change and education are the key elements in drawing Korean women from the shadow into the light of opportunities, while social patronage and class are placed in priorities for Southeast Asian women. In all cases, education is a key factor to promote them in integrating into the film industries. These four factors are either interconnected or single-handed in influencing women in their respective film industries.

The title O Re Majhi , a recent book (Pralhad Agarwal) on my father, Bimal Roy, is inspired by these evocative opening words of poet/lyricist Shailendra, set to tune by S.D. Burman. The haunting bhatiali -boatman's song was the climax in Roy's last film Bandini -1963.The words o re majhi (oh, you boatman) are a strangely appropriate metaphor for baba. He was born in the land of a thousand rivers, in East Bengal (Bangladesh). And like the indigenous boatmen, my father, baba, set sail for the unknown shores at the age of 19.

The aims of this paper are to come to an understanding of the distinctive aspects in the films of Takashi Miike and to explore the continuities and discontinuities between the filmmakers of Japan's cinematic generations. Miike's films revolve around the use of social marginals, sex and violence, having some elements in common with the films of Shohei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima, representative directors in the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s. This article first examines how an emphasis on popular criticism over elitist criticism in Miike's cinema offers an example of going beyond conventional anti-establishment cinema. The next section discusses how Miike's emphasis on artificiality over primitivism challenges the failings of his New Wave predecessors. In the concluding section, I argue that an emphasis on comic presentation over realistic documentation in Miike's films contributes to the unique appeal of his work.

This article seeks to understand what makes Feng's New Year films tick among the Chinese audiences. To begin with, how can one approach Feng's films? What frame of reference do we have in making sense of Feng's New Year films? Feng's is clearly a commercial practice, which can not be accounted for by the social and economic logics of China's indigenous blockbuster films. Hollywood's reputation of producing blockbuster films in terms of budget and boxoffice and its affinity with such a practice make it an obvious point of entrance for our understanding of Feng Xiaogang's New Year films.

This study defines a "Pan-Chinese" movie as one produced by Asian film companies from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This paper questions the reasons for Chinese movies' growing popularity in the West since the 1990s. Further, it leads to another question: what elements of these movies the Western audience like and dislike. The authors conducted a case study by analyzing the success of two Chinese movies in America. The authors also surveyed more than 300 American moviegoers to find out their motivations to see Pan-Chinese movies and what they like and dislike about them.

This paper attempts to explore issues about China's film industry that are of interest to Hollywood majors, or foreign investors in general, i.e., the regulatory framework of China's film policies regarding foreign investment, the impact of such policies on foreign film investors, and the long-term policy change in this regard. This study is based on an extensive examination of China's filmrelated legal documents, press reports on foreign media investments in China, and academic literature related to the subject.

Asian animation during the past decade has entered a new era in its nine-decade evolution - new in its production techniques and emphases, in its relationships with government, and in its marketing orientations. A result is the art form and industry model are barely recognizable to those who knew Asian animation before. A number of factors played into this transformation, including foreign influences and connections, national governments' involvement, and digitalization advances, all of which were responsible for increases in domestic production and a heightened sense of professionalism.

This paper is to look into this specialty of Hong Kong animation in two folds, namely the Chinese myth of wuxia fantasy and the eastern visual effect culture behind the uncanny story. Hong Kong animation is in peripheral existence to the Hong Kong film industry. Compared with the variety of praised and commercially successful genres in Hong Kong cinema, it is ironically not easy to identify the trails of local animated movies. Do we have an animation industry? Where is it rooted? How has it evolved?

Chinese cartoon films can be traced back to two roots. One is the Wan brothers (Wan Laiming, Wan Guchan, Wan Chaochen). They watched Disney cartoons in Shanghai in the 1920s and then began to produce some short cartoon films. In 1941, they produced a feature film named Iron Fan Princess. The other root is the cartoon film team of the Northeast Film Studio. It was reconstructed from Manchurian Film Company which was taken over by Yan'an Film Group after World War II. That time the team was headed by cartoonist Te Wei. Several short cartoon films were produced for political purposes. After the People's Republic of China was founded, the cartoon film team became formally one department under the Northeast Film Studio.

Old Master Q is one of the most significant idols which existed for more than 40 years since its first publication in a newspaper in 1961. Old Master Q is not a superhero figure but he is remarkably famous among Chinese nationals in Chinese communities across Asia and North America. This paper studies the transformation and development of this character from comic strips, to a cartoon personage, and finally, the high-end 3D computer generated character.

This paper explores the way the disabled are presented in Hindi films that leads to the formation of stereotypes which thereby contribute to the formulation of cultural and representational meanings of disability. We will discuss the contention of the stereotypical representation of the disabled in the films derive from the deep rooted social prejudices which demarcate the boundary between the "normal" and the "disabled" as its "other," privileging the former and denigrating the latter.

2007 saw the tenth anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Mainland China following a century and a half of British rule. For China, the restoration was a matter of national pride. But the inhabitants had little say in the manner of their return. This article discusses the representation of national identity in Journey to Beijing and Adeus Macau.

In this paper, I will focus on Himatsuri the film, its reception in Japan, and the Nakagami novella of the same title, in order to study the significance of Himatsuri in the history of Japanese cinema. The film holds an intriguing place in Japanese cinema. It becomes possible, through analyzing the film and its reception in Japan, to capture an instance when both the cinema and the film critics came to construct yet another nihonjinron (theories of the Japanese), in complicity with re-crafting the Japanese national consciousness.

The cultural analysis of Chinese film can provide a privileged perspective from which to view modernity because the evolution and development of Chinese film culture has been central to the ways in which Chinese modernity has been pursued and conceptualized, especially in an ideological sense. Chinese film melodrama has provided a platform for the discussion of Chinese history and the value of Chinese modernity. In this way it has reflected the development of Chinese society and culture throughout the 20th Century.

For this article, I will focus on a director who made his reputation largely in the fields of horror and crime films, and whose work has been largely overlooked in the west, despite a fanatical cult following among hardcore J-cinema addicts. Nobuo Nakagawa has been called Japan's first and greatest horror director. Among the 97 films he directed are several acknowledged classics. Yet his name is entirely absent from all but a handful of English-language books on Japanese film history.

The following is a report from the Centennial Celebration of Chinese Cinema and the 2005 Annual Conference of Asian Cinema Studies Society.

Non-resident Indian filmmakers display a peculiar relationship when it comes to presenting and representing India to the West. In Mira Nair's film, which is presented as an exotic continent and progressively becomes in Barthesian terms, "the political center of the world [which] we see here (as) all flattened, made smooth and grandly colored like an old-fashioned photograph" (see Barthes, 1972: 94). By insisting on exoticizing her subject, Nair completely denies any identification of her subject with its nativised history. Situating her wedding in India's capital city of New Delhi, and housing it within an upper class Punjabi joint-family tradition, supplies her with the necessary alibis for creating a highly embroidered product which is exempt from really undertaking any serious examination of all the cultural and familial tensions that erupt during the preparation of such an important event.

This article examines the representation of Indian film at the annual Seattle International Film Festival.

The following is a review of the The Clay Bird (dir. Tareque Masud, 2002, France/Bangladesh co-production, 98 min).