Asian CinemaPub Date : 2024-07-29DOI: 10.1386/ac_00074_1
Edwin Jurriëns
{"title":"The politics of the participatory in Indonesian environmental documentary: The oeuvre of Dandhy Laksono","authors":"Edwin Jurriëns","doi":"10.1386/ac_00074_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00074_1","url":null,"abstract":"Indonesian documentary filmmaking has been riding the global wave of unprecedented interest in the creation, distribution and viewing of environmental documentaries. One of the frontrunners is investigative journalist and filmmaker Dandhy Laksono (b. 1976). With his production house, Watchdoc, and other collaborators since the late 2000s, he has created an extraordinary quantity of thought-provoking environmental and sociopolitical documentaries, many of which have received millions of views. In addition to public screenings in hundreds of Indonesian villages, the popularity of these documentaries has been driven by their streaming on online platforms, particularly YouTube. I argue that Laksono’s work is not merely about nature but about the politics of the environment. The film director not only criticizes political and social structures and practices with a destructive impact on the natural environment but also presents alternative, more sustainable visions for our planet based on Gunter Pauli’s model of the Blue Economy. His documentaries address these environmental politics and alternative visions not only through their content but also through their participatory modes of representation and distribution. This article discusses the politics of the participatory by focusing on the aesthetic modes of address for inviting audience involvement; the promotion of the commons as a cause or ideal in communication and social and environmental affairs; the representation and expression of diverse social, cultural and political voices, including those of marginalized groups; the use of public screenings and interactive media for the sharing and creating of content, and the social debates, connections and actions established through these communicative processes.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141796662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Asian CinemaPub Date : 2024-07-25DOI: 10.1386/ac_00078_5
Yixin Xu
{"title":"Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjing Zhang (eds) (2020)","authors":"Yixin Xu","doi":"10.1386/ac_00078_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00078_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjing Zhang (eds) (2020)\u0000 Amherst: Cambria Press, 328 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-1-63857-024-0, p/bk, $49.99","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141805178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Asian CinemaPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/ac_00068_1
Sebastian Byrne
{"title":"Moving between worlds: Performance, the scene of empathy and flexible identity in Infernal Affairs","authors":"Sebastian Byrne","doi":"10.1386/ac_00068_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00068_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the bodily and psychological dimensions of Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s performance in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s urban noir thriller, Infernal Affairs (2002), as a way of trying to comprehend the actor’s flexible, transnational stardom. Through a textual analysis of a pivotal scene from the film, the article argues that Leung’s facial acting facilitates an embodied and empathetic connection between the actor and the spectator, effectuated through cinematic techniques such as close-ups, editing and music. An embodied understanding of Leung’s facial work in the close-up thus challenges the existing scholarship that limits Leung’s transnational appeal to a restrained or minimalist acting style. A greater appreciation of Leung’s modulating, flexible and multi-layered performance is also illustrated through the scene’s juxtaposition of narrative and spectacle. The rupturing of the spectator’s empathetic and bodily engagement with Leung’s character during the spectacle sequence encourages the actor to shift his emotional response and bodily expressivity towards a performance delivery dictated by a flexible identity, thus bringing into relief the film’s preoccupation with a postcolonial identity crisis.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139325447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Asian CinemaPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/ac_00072_1
Zhaoyu Zhu
{"title":"Documenting Chinese homecomings: Reflexive aesthetics and cinematic memories in Four Springs (2017) and The Reunions (2020)","authors":"Zhaoyu Zhu","doi":"10.1386/ac_00072_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00072_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines two contemporary Chinese films that document the filmmakers’ homecoming journey during the Chinese New Year: Sige chuntian (Four Springs) () and Jixiang ruyi (The Reunions) (). It argues that both films have the characteristic of being reflexive documentaries exploring and expanding the boundaries of documentary films. According to Meunier’s three types of filmic identifications – the documentary attitude, the home-movie attitude and the fiction attitude – the two films challenge documentary norms and combine the documentary attitude with the other two types of attitude. Four Springs combines documentary and home movie by closely capturing the four journeys of homecoming confined in the private sphere of the filmmaker’s home, whilst The Reunions combines documentary and fiction, and even actuality and performance, through actor Liu Lu’s portrayal of the director Da Peng’s cousin in the presence of his real family. By challenging these documentary forms, these two films reflect the directors’ uses of documentary to memorialize their personal experiences with their families, more than merely reflecting the cultural phenomenon of the Chinese New Year homecoming.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139328458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Asian CinemaPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/ac_00073_5
Debarati Byabartta
{"title":"How Do We Look? Resisting Visual Biopolitics, Fatimah Tobing Rony (2022)","authors":"Debarati Byabartta","doi":"10.1386/ac_00073_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00073_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: How Do We Look? Resisting Visual Biopolitics, Fatimah Tobing Rony (2022) Durham: Duke University Press, 248 pp., ISBN 978-1-47801-460-7, p/bk, $26.95 ISBN 978-1-47801-367-9, h/bk, $102.95 ISBN 978-1-47802-190-2, e-book, $26.95","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139327716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Asian CinemaPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/ac_00071_1
Seth A. Wilder
{"title":"The revolutionary subject: Masao Adachi and Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War","authors":"Seth A. Wilder","doi":"10.1386/ac_00071_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00071_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article’s title originates from a line spoken by a revolutionary towards the end of the film Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War. Like the film born of the collaboration of politically radical Japanese experimental filmmakers and revolutionaries, this examination concerns revolution itself as a film subject. More specifically, it interrogates this film as a revolutionary tool and the limitations thereof, as well as revolution and revolutionaries captured in the film and the revolutionary as embodied in the film’s maker Masao Adachi. What it produces might be termed ‘the revolutionary subject’.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139329580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Asian CinemaPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/ac_00069_1
David Kelly
{"title":"Sisworo Gautama Putra’s Primitives and the paradox of savagery","authors":"David Kelly","doi":"10.1386/ac_00069_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00069_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the lone outlier associated with the cannibal boom of European exploitation films in the 1970s and 1980s – with the main point of diversion being that Sisworo Gautama Putra’s film is an Indonesian production rather than the typical Italian fare. Being an Asian film that emulates the traditionally European style of cannibal film, Primitives opens a larger discussion about the role of the theoretical savage and the implications thereof, put in place by ghosts of imperialism and cinematic mimicry. The author explores these concepts with psychoanalytic input, opting to unpack the rationality behind an Indonesian film following the same imperialist notions utilized by the preceding Italian directors, which ultimately results in a subdivision of the artificial–natural dichotomy: the meta-natural.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139325500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Asian CinemaPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/ac_00070_1
Maria do Carmo Piçarra
{"title":"‘Luso-orientalism’: Portuguese Asian ‘imagined communities’ in Estado Novo film propaganda","authors":"Maria do Carmo Piçarra","doi":"10.1386/ac_00070_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00070_1","url":null,"abstract":"Portuguese filmography on Portuguese Asia during the Estado Novo is limited. Additionally, much of this filmography appeared late and while also espousing a Luso-tropicalist rhetoric that sought to project the bygone mythical importance of a formerly vast empire. During the dictatorship, however, the colonies in the East held symbolic value. I propose that the scarcity of films on the ‘Portuguese Orient’ stems from this symbolic value of an imagined community that is evoked more through its vagueness than through its visual representation. With the emergence of tensions between Portugal and India regarding the control of Portuguese India in 1947, and the beginning of the independence war in Angola in 1961, interest in filming Portugal’s eastern colonies arose from the need to sediment a Luso-orientalist discourse that ignored the broad range of local characteristics and the myriad differences that existed between Africa and Asia and, moreover, between various colonies within those regions.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139327986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Asian CinemaPub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1386/ac_00061_1
Liam Ball
{"title":"Legend of The Chinese Boxer: Jimmy Wang Yu’s cosmopolitan wuxia pian","authors":"Liam Ball","doi":"10.1386/ac_00061_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00061_1","url":null,"abstract":"The response to Jimmy Wang Yu’s death in April 2022 revealed the symptoms of undercelebration: while every professional obituary recognized the late filmmaker’s importance, few could explain why without inaccuracy or misattribution. This resonates with a long tradition of subjugating Wang’s work within the context of other, much more integral figures, in which the cultural and economic motivators for his filmic aesthetics are insufficiently considered. Similarly, various elements of Wang’s work, especially his purported anti-Japanism, have long been subjected to conjecture and simplification, or else an overreliance on the incorporation of biographical details into textual analyses of his films. This article aims to disentangle and clarify the myths and misconceptions that complicate the story of Wang’s career. To avoid repeating prior mistakes – i.e., to prevent the narrative distortion of associated figures within Wang’s narrative – the article will use the political economy of cinema as a guiding framework. The overall aim is to present a decentralized view of The Chinese Boxer (1970) to evaluate the cultural and material factors that motivated Wang’s career peak and the film for which he is most remembered.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41695040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Asian CinemaPub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1386/ac_00065_1
Xuefei Ma
{"title":"Queer voice(over): Reassembling female desire in Chinese cinema","authors":"Xuefei Ma","doi":"10.1386/ac_00065_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00065_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses Chinese director Ning Ying’s 2006 film wuqiongdong (Perpetual Motion) with an emphasis on the development of queer voice(over) – a queer feminist aesthetic achievement that subverts and perverts the heteropatriarchal suppression of women’s desire. Specifically, I analyse the ways queer figure’s voice-over interacts with haptic visuality, contemporaneous image and the intertextual references between film-texts and exterior texts about the film. I argue, through queer voice(over), Perpetual Motion expands its theme beyond the issue of infidelity in a heterosexual marriage, develops a cinematic critique to the twentieth-century Chinese feminist movements and articulates female desires from multiple registers of senses, psychology and historical subjectivity. In Chinese cinema where queer voices are usually marginalized, Ning’s queer voice(over) establishes a mutually referent relation between queer and heteronormative storylines, thus circumventing the state censorship and adding queerness into Chinese-language feminist debates and cinematic expression.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47109377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}