Asian Cinema - Volume 24, Issue 2, 2013

In 1955 members of the Indian People’s Theater Association, a group closely associated with the Communist Party of India, travelled to China as part of a cultural exchange between the two countries following the state level meeting between Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954. Their visit saw an ‘Indian film week’ in which Hindi films were screened throughout China, most notably the 1951 Raj Kapoor film Awara, remembered fondly by many Chinese growing up in the later 1970s–early 1980s Reform period as Liulangzhe. This article situates Awara in the history of Chinese cinema, as a leftist text that depicted a fellow third world nation also engaged in constructing an alternative to the western experience of modernity.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan, India’s most distinguished contemporary film-maker, has made eleven award-winning films and over 40 documentaries, most of which are set in his native state of Kerala, in southern India. A 1965 graduate of the Film and Television Institute of Pune, his first film, Swayamvaram/One’s Own Choice (1972), heralded the New Wave in Kerala. It is Kerala’s abrupt displacement from a princely feudal state into twentieth-century modernity that forms the backdrop to most of his complex narratives about identity, selfhood and otherness in which innocence is often at stake and characters grapple with their consciences. The films deal with eviction and dislocation, with the precarious nature of space, and the search for home. They are also about power and its abuse within a destructive patriarchy and the abject conditions of servility it breeds. At the same time, these narratives are usually placed within the larger frameworks of guilt and redemption in which the hope of emancipation – moral, spiritual and creative – is a real one.

In Mongolia cinema has been a medium of artistic expression and documentation for more then seventy years and a popular leisure activity for the Mongolians for even longer. This article frames the investigation of Mongolian Cinema within the field of small nation cinema studies and subsequently traces the historical development of a national based film culture in Mongolia from its implementation in the 1930s under communist rule to its present state. The article explores the question of what happened to the national based film culture in the wreck of the Soviet meltdown around 1990 and how the socio-political transformation of the country since the early 1990s has challenged the existence of a locally rooted film culture in Mongolia.

This article identifies and elaborates on two models of resistance evident in JiaZhangke’s film corpus. The deployment of different cinematic strategies produces an experimental calling into question of the value of truth and of truth as value. In the films here analysed Jia moves from resistance through organic observation to a model of resistance structured around a series of fabulations. If the first regime addresses the truth of ideology, then the target of the second is the ideology of truth. It is in this passage that Jia enters political cinema, collapsing the distinction between factual and fictional and opening up a space that belongs to no collectivity.

This study examines Ai Xiaoming’s Women de wawa/Our Children (2009), an independent film documentary about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake where over 50,000 children died in collapsed school buildings. The analysis draws on film-making techniques, issues in modern Chinese media and politics and psychology, and trauma studies. Our Children reveals a violent process of governmental oppression that attempted to erase traumatic memory. As a result of the politically enforced amnesia, the earthquake victims were doubly victimized. Because crucial information related to the trauma – the quality of the school buildings – remains inaccessible, and the official explanation is unacceptable, the trauma continually haunts the traumatized victims, as well as the society at large. However, by drawing on everyday people’s testimonies and an abundance of images from digital phones and cameras, Our Children succeeded in preserving both individual and public traumatic memories and allowed some people to heal.

This article examines colonial melancholia among conflicting positions of colonial subjects represented in the 1941 film, Jiwŏnbyŏng/The Volunteer. This wartime propaganda film tells the story of a colonial Korean man who joins the Imperial Japanese Army following implementation of the Special Volunteer Army System in 1938. By showing the ways in which discourses of assimilation into, and imperialization by, the Japanese empire become an ‘imperfectible’ narrative in colonial Koreans’ production of local discourses, this paper conveys the discourse of Koreans’ Imperial subjecthood as an expression of melancholia through a close examination of narratives from the literary works of female writer Ch’oe Chong-Hui and the pro-Japanese The Volunteer. I aim to establish a theoretical and historical framework for analysing colonial mentality during the Total War era and the formation of continual colonial epistemology.

This article contains an interview with Messrs. Lo Wing Keung, Shao Haowen and Don Wu who are the creative force behind one of China’s most foremost and longest running animation series called Xi Yang Yang yu Hui Tai Lang/The Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf (2005–). The interview discusses developments in Chinese creative/cultural industries and animation production for TV and film, as well as issues of intellectual property.