Asian Cinema - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2003

This discussion on Wong will first focus on her career, film roles, and professional challenges, as an Asian American actress negotiating Hollywood’s studio system. We will then survey the construction process of her publicity stills/ roles, her acting/performance style, and mainstream filmmaking’s othering practices for a critique of her vamp/China doll image

Focusing on the imaginary constructs, especially the Titanic posters in The Road Home, this paper studies their relevance, function, and significance in the film. By showing how, as necessary references, these imaginary constructs help viewers experience the absences, contradictions, and anxieties of contemporary Chinese life, this paper contends that they constitute the director’s critical insights into the complexity and the dynamics of Chinese culture and society in the process of globalization. With these imaginary constructs, Zhang Yimou turns Bao Shi’s simple story about the death of a dedicated school master into a serious contemplation of China’s contemporary reality.

This article discusses female Japanese directors, and in particular Hisako Matsui. There are enough (Japanese women directors) already to enforce a pause as one considers where to begin, whom to discuss and how. My own choice here does owe something to the recent conspicuous success of Hisako Matsui (b. 1946). She has made two feature-length films on fairly large budgets: Yukie, released in 1998; and Oriume, first shown in the 2001 Tokyo International Film Festival. But there is more to Matsui than sudden fame, because her accomplishments reflect the long and difficult road to success in an art as tricky and costly as making and marketing films.

What this article will share is a new and compelling discussion surrounding film policies and censorship regulations in Korea under Japanese colonial rule. With this task in mind, we may begin to revisit the lost memories of Korean cinema. So few films made before 1945 exist today, the search for and discovery of them is a vital tool in understanding Korean history

The topic of this paper is how the Korean film industry; ownership, distribution, and production was transformed by the economic and film policies, and how the increase of American influence during the USAMGIK era (1945-1948) influenced film distribution and release practice in Korea

The aim of this article is to assist in the project of overcoming indifference to and unawareness of Thai cinema, and to begin to position Thai films as objects deserving of critical attention, by focusing on one young Thai director of particular merit. The three feature films to date of Pen-ek Ratanaruang have stood out among recent Thai productions, not only for their stylistic inventiveness and playfulness, their eschewing of generic form (in a market dominated by crime films, teen films, period films, and, most recently, horror films), and their pitch-black humor, but also for their incisive, gender-conscious examination of a changing Thai society at the turn of the 21st century

This article attempts to investigate the historical meanings of New Taiwanese Cinema. First, it plans to examine the emergence of the new cinema movement in Taiwan and factors related to its rise. Not only does the paper want to understand cinematic and other factors, but it also tries to inspect distinctive aspects of New Taiwanese Cinema, such as its stylistic and thematic characteristics, its contribution to the overall Taiwan film industry. Although new cinema was not a dominant mode in the whole production of Taiwan films, it cannot be denied that this cinema radically transformed the image of Taiwan cinema.

Released on December 21, 2001, just days after China formally gained its WTO admittance on December 11, Big Shot’s Funeral (Da Wan’r) was not only the most anticipated He Sui Pian (New Year’s Movie) of 2002 in China; it was also a highly reflexive film registering some of the mixed emotions in China toward the long-awaited admittance and its implications. In addition, the film is the first Sino-American co-production1 released after the WTO accession, bearing witness to an important historical moment. The many layers of meanings embedded in this postmodern text of self-conscious mockery, cynicism, and pastiche also reflect a general sense of anxiety, ambiguity, and uncertainty associated with the new market economy in China and its consequences. Issues of nationalism, cross-cultural imagination, Sino- American relations, and piracy are also touched on in this social satire.

This article describes Kurosawa’s symbolic and dramatic use of the horse in some of his most important films set in the medieval era. The Japanese filmmaker’s horse scenes are pregnant with symbolism deeply rooted in archetypes of the horse embedded in worldwide myths, legends, and folktales. Kurosawa also exploited horse imagery to generate both comedy and pathos.

The Ronny Yu produced/Clifton Ko directed Chicken and Duck Talk (1988) is a vehicle for the comedic talents and social satire of Michael Hui. Hui’s working class characters lampooned Hong Kongers’ obsession with “getting rich quick,” ridiculed the population’s “money mania” as mental illness. The filmmaker’s employment of stereotypes familiar to Hong Kongers and his sense of place coupled with everyman characterizations helped to establish new Hong Kong comedy

As Richard Dyer (1979) states in his classic monograph on the star system, stars represent different ways of representing and reworking national cultural contradictions. Dyer’s work has focused upon the Western version of stardom. However, his axiom concerning cultural contradictions may be significantly applied to the case of Maggie Cheung Man-yuk who represents a particular example of a transnational stardom in recent cinema. Cheung’s major roles not only exhibit the multifaceted nature of a changing world where old traditions are called into question and new challenges confront a supposedly secure sense of personal identity. They also extend Dyer’s original definition of stardom by involving issues of transnational, rather than national, cultural contradictions.

Given that a large percentage of silent films have been lost forever, and given that the survival rate for Asian silent films is even lower than it is for European and American silent films, it is not surprising that written histories on the subject of Asian silent cinemas are scant in number and somewhat speculative. Perhaps the greatest of all tragedies of lost film history, is that of the Korean cinema before 1946. Simply stated, nothing has survived. This is especially sad, because all accounts point to Arirang (1926, dir., Na Un’gyu) and other films made under the Japanese occupation in the 1930s as representing, perhaps, the world’s first model of clandestinely political cinema. (I understand that the script of Arirang has survived and that a new film has been made based on that script, but without even stills having survived it is impossible to recreate a visual resemblance of the original work.)

While Korea was under Japanese occupation before World War II, at least four Koreans became rather famous in the film industry of Shanghai--Cheong Gi-tak, Lee Kyeong-son, Cheon Chang-guen, and Jin Yan. This article deals with Jin Yan and includes an interview with Qin Yi, Jin Yan’s Wife