Asian Cinema - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2009

Like that popular definition of the Korean War, most Hollywood representations appear to be as "forgotten" as the still relevant implications of the actual conflict. Exceptions do exist such as the early 50s films of Samuel Fuller - The Steel Helmet (1950) and Fixed Bayonets (1951 -- as well as M*A*S*H. (1970) that led to the popular CBS television series version that ran from 1972-1983. However, these films generally received attention as works of film "auteurs," while Altman's M*A*S*H received acclaim more as an allegory of the Vietnam War that was occurring at the time of production than a representation of the earlier conflict. However, cinematic representations of Korea were scarce in comparison to earlier and later representations of conflict.

The enigmatic and evocative characteristics of ruins (for example, ruined monuments, gardens, tombs, or steles) and the visual representations of ruins by painting, photography, and cinema, have been explored and elucidated by philosophers, theorists, art historians, and film scholars over decades or even centuries. The romantic tendency to aestheticize ruins in terms of their innate beauty as objects of venerable decay (Schonle, 2006: 649-669; Makarius, 2004: 81, 84, 108) has been contested by Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, 1977) in the modern period, since war catastrophes and human disasters which have resulted in vast ruins in the 20th Century make the aesthetic appreciation of ruins problematic.

Independence-era Malaysia boasted a robust film industry that produced hundreds of films per year between the late 1950s and early 1960s. The multiinstrumentalist, singer, composer, actor, and director P. Ramlee was the most productive and popular figure in this scene. Today Ramlee is lauded as one of Malaysia's and Singapore's most important cultural figures. In this article we argue that Ramee's film music served to score the topography of ethnic relations in independence-era Malaysia. In Ramlee's films, which featured almost exclusively Malay casts and cultural contexts, inter-ethnic relations were heard more often than seen. Ramlee's music stood in a complex if sometimes contradictory relationship to the representation of modern Malay culture and class in his films. While upper class Westernized Malay characters were inevitably portrayed as betraying traditional values, Westernized Malay music (and vice versa) served as the soundtrack for modern, working class Malaysians rooted in traditional cultural mores.

A man sits on the floor wolfing down his food while a woman, seated across, serves him from time to time. Anyone familiar with Adoor Gopalakrishnan's oeuvre would immediately recognize this visual trope since it surfaces in almost all his major films, including his recent Naalu Pennungal/Four Women (2007). Food and its consumption, in fact, are integral to his exploration of gender relations in his native Kerala. Along with the physical act of eating, he seeks to capture the psychological, social, and cultural dynamics of a ritual involving two individuals.

How to view the historically and institutionally constructed concept,"East Asia" is a highly political question: is it a troublesome reminder of a "co-prosperity" sphere as coined by Japanese Imperialists? Does it signify a security bloc consolidated by cold war geopolitics? Does it denote a cultural locality based on the essentialized Confucianism? Is it a model region of "modernization," or on the contrary, an imaginary space for an alternative? Acknowledging the fact that the concept carries a complex history, this essay introduces another way of approaching the concept. It describes a cultural geography shaped by the circulation of one popular image. Through this phenomenological cartography, I hope to trace the sociopolitical transformations of the region in the 1980s. The horizontal cut of 1980s' East Asia can reveal the complex historical layers and "archaeologies of the future," borrowing Fredric Jameson's expression (Jameson, 2002: 215; Jameson, 2005).

In 1983, Japanese director Imamura Shôhei's film The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushikô1) gained international recognition by winning the Palme d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was based on a well-known Japanese novel of the same name, written by Fukasawa Shichirô in 1956,2 depicting a rural village where an elderly woman, Orin, stoically prepares to make her final journey to a sacred mountaintop where she will await death, after the village custom. The earthy realism of the film's portrayal of the harsh world of the farming village both shocked and touched critics (Kehr, 1997: 85-86; Lardeau, 1997: 157-158; Tesson, 1997: 159-163). Imamura's film was not, however, the first to adapt Fukasawa's novel for the screen. Earlier, in 1958, Kinoshita Keisuke had also directed a film3 based on the same novel, in a very different style which incorporated elements of traditional Japanese theatre.

Born in Hong Kong, producer Terence Chang is known in film circles for his business savvy and artistic acumen. After studying architecture at the University of Oregon and film at New York University, he returned to Hong Kong and worked as a production manager on two films before joining Rediffusion Television (RTV, now ATV). By the mid-1980s, he was in charge of distribution at D&B Films, successfully launching the careers of Michelle Yeoh (he later became her manager) and Brandon Lee. As general manager at Film Workshop, he was in charge of The Killer, Swordsman, Spy Games, Love and Death in Saigon, A Chinese Ghost Story 2, and Gunmen. During this time, he and John Woo became business partners, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Korean film business was constructed during the Japanese Occupation era (1910 1945). Under the situation that Japanese immigrants owned all theaters, Koreans managed to produce local films based on a distinct culture and history. From the Sino-Japanese War (1937) to the end of World War II, Korean local films fell into war propaganda film and were even suspended. From the end of WWII to the Korean War (1950 1953), the base of the Korean film business was almost destroyed. From 1954 to 1973, the Korean film business developed rapidly and was so prosperous that this era was called the South Korean Golden Age. But the establishment of Park Chung-hee's military dictatorship regime (1973) tightened its control of society including the film business. Besides, the nationwide spread of television made Korean film business stagnate from the 1970s to the mid 1980s.

There can be few greater pleasures open to the committed and insatiable cinephile than the discovery of a new talent; the unearthing of a heretofore unheralded filmmaker one feels may potentially be a significant figure. The work of the Japanese director Fujiwara Toshi, in both documentaries and features, offers such a find: a small body of films that resonate across different genres, styles, and idioms to emerge as among the most interesting of any young Japanese director working today.

The post-war period in Japanese cinema must surely rank alongside the most important eras in the history of documentary filmmaking. In spite, or perhaps because, of the demise of the country's commercial film industry, which continued almost unabated throughout the 1960s and 1970s, these years saw the emergence of several figures who would revolutionize the documentary form. In particular, they would significantly change the parameters of what is traditionally thought of as a documentary film, and irrevocably alter and transform perceptions of the roles and responsibilities of the documentary filmmaker. Of these directors, the elder statesmen and key names are Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke. These filmmakers are held in the highest esteem in Japan and Asia for their groundbreaking work in the 1970s, but for various reasons have not quite achieved comparable visibility or acclaim in the West.

Cape No. 7 (2008) was the most extraordinary cultural phenomenon to sweep Taiwan in 2008. From its debut on Aug. 22, 2008 to its close on Dec. 12, 2008, Cape No.7, a locally produced low-budget movie, not only achieved the longest theatrical release in Taiwanese cinematic history, stretching to 16 weeks, but also earned US$ 15.5 million in box office sales, becoming Taiwan's second highest-grossing movie of all time, trailing only to Titanic (Li, 2008).

Cape No. 7 seems to have a simple storyline despite the large number of characters: essentially the story involves a Mandarin-speaking fashion model from Japan assigned the difficult task of managing a hastily assembled band comprising seven untrained locals. Not only in the movie, is the journey to success of the band a "miracle," but the marketing of the movie itself is a miracle as well1. The unusual music-comedy genre, strong character development, and localized humor are all important to the content of the movie (Hu, 2008; Cape No. 7 official site). The characterization in the film is especially impressive, as the characters are presented as rounded individuals with multi-faceted personalities.

Miike Takashi's Box is the most surreal compared to Fruit Chan's Dumplings and Park Chan-wook's Cut in Three…Extremes. The ambiguous narrative structure and dreamlike elements in Box enable different possible interpretations of the film. Due to the film's dreamlike qualities, it is easily tempted to decipher the film by applying Western psychoanalytical theories. Nevertheless, there are many underlying elements in the film that actually display Japanese tradition, especially the performing arts, i.e. noh which existed since the 14th Century, about five hundred years before Sigmund Freud was born.

In 2008, two relatively new and internationally visible Southeast Asian film festivals - the Bangkok International Film Festival and the Jakarta International Film Festival - faced the prospect of cancellation; each went ahead only on short notice and in downsized form, though in each case for rather different reasons. The Bangkok festival, held Sept. 23-30, was in fact experiencing downsizing for the second year in a row. Started in its present form in 2003 by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, the festival had long been criticized for an emphasis on opulent gala events for VIPs to the detriment of the interests of local filmgoers and, indeed, the filmmakers themselves. One of the clearest pieces of evidence for this was a lack of Thai subtitles for screenings of international films, something roundly criticized by the press for a number of years.

If people do not go to the cinema, the cinema goes to the people. This is the best way to describe the Festival on Wheels that has been bringing quality cinema to the remotest corners of Turkey while carrying the best of Turkish cinema to European and North American capitals. Kars, an eastern town laden with history lies at the Turkish-Armenian border. For a population of about 325,000 inhabitants, there are only two halls with screening possibilities. Hence, the importance of the festival that showcases an impressive selection of films from around the world in addition to the latest gems of Turkish cinema.

The winning actresses of the last year decorating its hefty catalogues, the national Golden Orange and the International Eurasia Film Festivals of Antalya on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey kicked off with a rich and rewarding program. On the home turf, it was an exciting year that showcased new styles from old masters, stylistic works of the representatives of the "new Turkish cinema," as well as daring and not so daring first attempts. Erden K1ral, who was instrumental in introducing Turkish cinema to the Western world in the 1980s, with remarkable social realist films such as Bereketli Topraklar Üzerinde / On Fertile Lands (1979) and Hakkari'de Bir Mevsim / A Season in Hakkari (1983), tried his hand in a fantasy melodrama called Vicdan / Conscience that started as a social commentary about women working in a brick factory but swiftly moved on to a love triangle resulting in murder with a dose of lesbianism thrown in.