Asian Cinema最新文献

{"title":"Illustrating isolation: Visual strategies in the films of Kon Ichikawa","authors":"Kyle Barrowman","doi":"10.1386/ac_00062_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00062_1","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I attempt to establish some auteurist coordinates for analyses of the films of Kon Ichikawa. Though historically overlooked in studies of Japanese cinema in favour of more classical filmmakers like Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa on the one hand and more contemporary filmmakers like Seijun Suzuki, Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike on the other, I argue that Ichikawa is a unique and skilled auteur whose complex narratives and powerful themes are manifest in his richly idiosyncratic visual strategies. Towards the goal of capturing the scope and diversity of his prolific career, I explore films from The Heart (1955) and Conflagration (1958) through Odd Obsession (1959) and An Actor’s Revenge (1963) up to The Devil’s Island (1977) and The Makioka Sisters (1983). In so doing, I strive to distinguish Ichikawa from contemporaries like Ozu and elucidate the specifics of his unique visual strategies. Focusing on his penchant for character studies and his ability to isolate his characters in physical space in front of the camera as well as within the space of the frame itself, I argue that the unifying thread in Ichikawa’s career is his fascination with outsider characters alienated from friends, family and society and whose isolation he depicts by virtue of brilliant use of both the full and widescreen frame, by playing with foreground and background, by utilizing light and shadow and by subverting shot/reverse shot editing. Whether in comedic or dramatic contexts, and whether in period sagas or contemporary stories, Ichikawa devoted himself to lonely characters in crisis and committed his mise en scène to the externalization of the internal thoughts and emotions of his anguished characters.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49502886","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}

{"title":"To see or not to see: Historical trauma and the production of fear in contemporary South Korean horror cinema","authors":"W. Carroll","doi":"10.1386/ac_00063_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00063_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses techniques that contemporary South Korean horror films use to depict historical trauma, how these techniques are harnessed to frighten audiences and how different approaches articulate different relationships to the historical traumas that they depict. It analyses Gidam (Epitaph) () and Gonjiam (Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum) () as case studies for how the articulation of historical trauma operates by showing historical trauma in the former, but by concealing it in the latter. It considers not only how history is referenced on-screen but also how historical consciousness can be felt through the horror genre.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45124992","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}

{"title":"昨天今天明天： 內地與香港電影的政治、 藝術與傳統 (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Hong Kong Cinema with Sino-links in Politics, Art, and Tradition), 吳國坤 Kenny K. K. Ng (2021)","authors":"Jessica Siu-yin Yeung, Michael Ka Chi Cheuk","doi":"10.1386/ac_00067_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00067_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: 昨天今天明天： 內地與香港電影的政治、 藝術與傳統 (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Hong Kong Cinema with Sino-links in Politics, Art, and Tradition), 吳國坤 Kenny K. K. Ng (2021)\u0000 Hong Kong: Chunghwa Bookstore, 288 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-9-88875-897-5, p/bk, $16.31","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45187290","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}

{"title":"Games of love and lust: Performance, masquerade and trauma in Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden","authors":"T. Laine","doi":"10.1386/ac_00064_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00064_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007) and Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden (2016) as melodramas which foreground trauma as a deadlock of identity. In both films, trauma exposes cultural and social consequences of national betrayal and colonial hierarchies, drawing our attention to politically charged predicament of suspended agency. At the same time, in both Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden, trauma as the ‘affective bearing’ also becomes significant with regard to how the spectator understands the expressed, cinematic world. This affective bearing is not a quality ‘attached’ to the film externally, but it is immanent to its aesthetic-expressive specificity which evokes direct emotional engagement in the spectator. The trauma examined in this article in both Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden bears less resemblance to attempts of representing national traumas than to matters of affective intensities experienced and understood organically from within the cinematic experience. This focus on trauma makes both films universally accessible insofar as it demonstrates not only what cinema can represent, but also what cinema can do: by means of its affective bearing a film can directly engage the spectators’ emotion in a way that alters their cinematic experience.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46189344","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}

{"title":"Lost in the Fumes: Affective resistance in relation to the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement","authors":"Lucas L. H. Wong","doi":"10.1386/ac_00057_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00057_1","url":null,"abstract":"Recent years have demonstrated the rise of localism worldwide. In an Asian context, we are witnessing an increasing number of protest events and numerous social movement documentaries being produced. In Hong Kong, Edward Tin-kei Leung 梁天琦 was the first self-proclaimed localist to participate in a democratic election and the first to be charged for riot since the Handover. The documentary film of Leung’s story, Lost in the Fumes, achieved an impressive degree of popularity among local people during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) movement. Analysing its storylines and plots, as well as filming techniques, from the perspectives of film studies and cultural studies, together with several interviews as a supplement, this article examines the emotional connections of films and protesting bodies in social movements. It explores the cinematic representation of Leung and how this representation was received by viewers to facilitate self-mobilization in the Anti-ELAB Movement. Hence, I will analyse the functions of films as a cultural or emotional foundation in social movements that facilitate the creation of a shared emotional engagement.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43778557","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}

{"title":"Authoritarianism, the struggle for current affairs public service broadcasting and Radio Television Hong Kong","authors":"I. Aitken","doi":"10.1386/ac_00051_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00051_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article is one outcome of research into primary documents held in national archives in Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and, in Hong Kong, the archives of Radio Television Hong Kong and Hong Kong Public Records Office. These documents indicate how the territories of Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong responded to calls to develop television broadcasting systems which embodied public service broadcasting (PSB). That response was conditioned by the reality that all three territories were authoritarian entities, and that PSB was, in contradistinction, a liberal-democratic concept. This article will chart the problems involved in establishing television PSB in these territories, beginning with Malaysia and Singapore during the 1960s, and then Hong Kong, 1970–2020. The article will begin with a brief account of the notion of PSB, and the role played by western broadcasting companies during the Cold War, in colonial British South East Asia, during the 1950s and 1960s.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48321321","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}

{"title":"The ‘We’ in two pairs of documentaries about protests by The 70’s Biweekly syndicate and the 2019 Hong Kong Documentary Workers","authors":"Jessica Yeung","doi":"10.1386/ac_00053_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00053_1","url":null,"abstract":"In the history of Hong Kong, the two largest and most impactful waves of social movements took place in the 1960s–70s and in the 2010s. The two documentaries-pair, 香港保衛釣魚台示威 (The Protect Diao Yu Islands Protest in Hong Kong) (1971) and 給香港的文藝青年 (To Hong Kong Intellectual Youths) (1978) produced by the anarcho-pacifist 70年代雙週刊 (The 70’s Biweekly) syndicate, and 佔領立法會 (Taking Back the Legislature) (2020) and 理大圍城 (Inside the Red Brick Wall) (2020) produced by Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers effectively construct a ‘We’ of the protesters in alliance in the Butlerian sense. In the case of the 2020 films, this ‘We’ is unwittingly expanded by the government by imposing censorship on them, thus creating another layer of alliance with some Hong Kongers who might not have even watched the films, but stand in solidarity with the filmmakers in defending freedom of expression.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49522527","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}

{"title":"The making of the citizen-spectator in postmillennial Hong Kong: Authorial and spectatorial engagement with independent documentary films","authors":"Helena Wu","doi":"10.1386/ac_00055_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00055_1","url":null,"abstract":"Established by several independent filmmakers in Hong Kong in 1997, Ying E Chi (YEC) has facilitated the production and the distribution of Hong Kong independent films by means of VCD/DVD releases, video streaming, film festivals and community screenings. The non-profit body has played a key role in aiding local independent filmmakers’ projects, seeking film distribution opportunities locally and transnationally and building community networks in its home city. As the organizer of the Hong Kong Independent Film Festival since 2008, YEC has demonstrated its fluid translocal positioning by not just promoting the works of local filmmakers, but also introducing worldwide independent cinema to Hong Kong audiences. In retrospect, the development of YEC has reflected the transforming cultural landscape of Hong Kong to different degrees. From cinephiles and academics to the public, the audiences YEC has developed over the years indicates an ever-changing spectatorship in the making, bespeaking the various responses to the social environment under which these films were made, shown and watched. This article will use YEC as a case study to explore the mutual impacts between documentary films and their spectatorship which have shaped independent filmmakers’ production and distribution strategies continuously in postmillennial Hong Kong, particularly in the wake of the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. The article will draw on interviews with local independent filmmakers, in order to understand how industry practices and dynamics have responded to identification, social events and audience behaviours over time. In this regard, spectatorship is understood as not just an embodied experience of film viewing, but also a series of affinities between the filmmaker, the audience and the film work. As a whole, the article will probe how the idea of citizen-spectator has evolved and has become inscribed in spectatorial engagement with independent documentary films, which has oscillated between audiences’ approval and authorities’ disapproval in postmillennial Hong Kong.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49083208","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}

{"title":"Documentary and democracy: An interview with Evans Chan","authors":"G. Marchetti","doi":"10.1386/ac_00059_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00059_7","url":null,"abstract":"Gina Marchetti’s interview with NewYork-based Hong Kong independent filmmaker Evans Chan took place after Chan had said goodbye to his former home and to nearly three decades of filmmaking in the city, following the introduction of Hong Kong’s National Security Law in 2020. Her interview focuses on Chan’s non-fiction filmmaking, particularly his recent films dealing with Hong Kong’s two protest movements of 2014 and 2019, namely Raise the Umbrellas 撐傘 () and We Have Boots 我們有雨靴 (). While the latter part of the interview concerns Chan’s thoughts on the relationship between documentaries and democracy, it also explores the signature aesthetics of his films and an underlying ‘story of Hong Kong’, which the interviewer sees as a consistent thread running through his fiction and non-fiction filmography. A wide range of cinematic, literary, sociopolitical and philosophical influences in his work emerge in the course of this in-depth interview with the filmmaker.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47820276","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}

{"title":"Remembering the losers: The hopeful politics of memory in Raise the Umbrellas 撐傘","authors":"Jason G. Coe","doi":"10.1386/ac_00058_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00058_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how the documentary film Raise the Umbrellas (Evans Chan 2016) enacts a more democratic form of collective memory that generates a politics of hope by remembering the failed 2014 Umbrella Movement for universal suffrage. I argue that the documentary engages in democratic remembering by taking an agonistic and pluralist view of the movement, emphasizing the intersubjective and recursive circulation of collective memories of the event and poeticizing the failure of the movement. Through aesthetic commemoration that emphasizes the value of failed political resistance, the film generates hope – the most basic and fundamental requirement for democratization.","PeriodicalId":41198,"journal":{"name":"Asian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48295533","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}