Asian Cinema - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2006

South Korean screenwriter and newbie director Kim Hyun-seok first grabbed the attention of an international audience as co-scripter of Joint Security Area , a powerful drama that humanizes the politics between North and South Korea. In 1999, this movie not only became the biggest box office draw in Korean history, but it also indicated that the Korean New Wave is no fluke. Mature writing, strong acting, powerful editing, and gorgeous cinematography made this film also well-recognized on the international filmfest scene. Kim next served as assistant director on Kim Ki-duk’s The Isle . Kim Ki-duk, one of the bad boys of new Korean cinema, with his dubious representations of women and unexpected bursts of gut-twisting violence amid the everyday, served as a stepping stone for Hyun-seok’s directorial debut in an altogether different style film, YMCA Baseball Team , in 2002, which Hyun-seok also wrote.

In Japan during the Edo period (1603-1868), the shogunate heaped together all things immoral -- gambling, theater, prostitution, bars – into districts separate from the rest of the city in an attempt to both provide and control licentious activities. These areas came to be known collectively as the “floating world,” a heady terrain of sex and art, an island of hedonism in a balancing act with strict patriarchal morality and social code. Tokyo’s district, called Yoshiwara, or “happy fields,” was the most famous. In Lost in Translation and demonlover , Tokyo is depicted as a floating world in the here and now, a contemporary mecca of fleeting pleasures disconnected from the West’s heavy-handed morality, from meaningful relationships, from Christian guilt.

One of the early explorers in motion picture music in China, Xu Ru-Hui, was born in July 1910 in Zhejiang. He arrived in Shanghai with his uncle in 1923 and joined the United Music Association of Shanghai, which was led by the Chinese music master Zheng Jian-Wen at the time, in 1925. He studied national classic music there including performance and composition, mastering over a hundred types of Chinese instruments. By the late 1920s, he had formed his own band called Midnight National Music, and had become one of the most famous pop music composers in Shanghai.

Whenever I heard people mention that “most of Sun Mingjing’s film were silent and black & white,” the statement always came as a shock to me, very hard to accept. In fact, many viewers of Sun’s films in Nanking still remember the vivid sound and colorfulness of his films. What brought about this discrepancy? I searched my memory and found that my impressions were probably from the way my father showed his films. He would often lead people into singing a relevant song to create the right atmosphere, then he would make commentary himself with a witness’s precision and a storyteller’s vivid language.

The name John Grierson (1898_1972) will certainly echo among historians of documentary film. Regardless of the controversial legacy Grierson left behind, his status as a film theorist, producer and the leading figure of the British Documentary Film Movement (1926-1948) is unquestionable. While the name Grierson immediately brings us back to the early history of documentary filmmaking, the name Sun Mingjin (1911-1992) remains obscure. The little known Sun was actually a pioneer Chinese documentary filmmaker and educator with over a hundred film credits to his name.

Independent documentary filmmaking in contemporary China started a few sparkles after 1989, with works like Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990) and Wang Guangli’s I Graduated (1992). Followed by more developed works from Zhang Yuan, Duan Jinchuan, Jiang Yue, and Kang Jianning, China began to see perhaps its first independent documentary group: the New Documentary Movement. Later, with the advent of the DV technology in the mid-1990s, the freedom of one-man’s-film-studio became easily realizable; China further witnessed a spate of independent documentaries pouring forth, with a greater variety in subject matter and style, and a greater variety of faces, lives, spaces, and voices along with them.

Gosho Heinosuke (1902-1982) directed almost 100 films from the late 1920s -- 1968, but only 40 survive. Arthur Nolletti Jr.’s recently released The Cinema of Gosho Heinosuke: Laughter Through Tears offers an insightful appraisal of the work of this important -- and yet too long overlooked --Japanese film director.

Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films presents a concise history of China’s Fifth Generation filmmakers and their unprecedented impact on Chinese film. Readers of Asian Cinema need no introduction to the Fifth Generation filmmakers: They are those individuals who graduated from the Beijing Film Academy’s class of 1982, the first class to graduate after the Cultural Revolution years. Clark’s thesis contends that the common life experiences of these individuals, combined with the profound changes that took place in Chinese society between 1966 and 1989, created an environment where both Chinese artists and the Chinese public were ripe for reinvention. Clark argues that the early films of the Fifth Generation helped the Chinese public re-imagine their culture and recent history in ways that had not been possible before.

Confucian filial piety was a basic social norm to consolidate family ties in pre-communist China. However, Confucianism was fiercely attacked by communist ideology under the Mao regime. What kind of principle have the Chinese people followed to deal with family relations in the post-Mao era? The Day the Sun Turned Cold (in Chinese tian guo ni zi ) provides an excellent case study in explaining these questions by demonstrating a complex murder story based on a real-life Chinese criminal case. This film won the Best Film and Best Director awards at the 1994 Tokyo Film Festival.