Asian Cinema - Volume 26, Issue 2, 2015

Female ghosts and other supernatural entities, including the pontianak, in Malaysian horror cinema are excessive psychosocial articulations of traditional Malay femininity gone awry. In Malay ghost stories, the pontianak is a vengeful spirit. She is the ghostly reincarnation of a pregnant woman who dies before or during the birth of her child and who then seeks vengeance on the living for causing the gruesome death that kills her and her unborn child. Since biological reproduction is the primary determinant of a woman’s social value in traditional Malay societies, the double death is devastatingly cruel. The pontianak thus embodies the horror of abject femininity associated with thwarted womanhood. Another recurring theme in Malaysian horror cinema relates to women possessed by evil spirits. Typically portrayed as lacking in emotional restraint, and therefore given to hysterical behaviour, such women are thought to be particularly vulnerable. Malaysian horror cinema has been adept at depicting psychosocial horrors of feminine excesses as such that transgress otherwise restrictive social and customary expectations for Malay femininity. This article examines the horror of abject femininity in two contemporary Malaysian films by female film-makers: Shuhaimi Baba’s Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam/Pontianak of the Tuber Rose (2004) and Zarina Abdullah’s Chermin/Mirror (2007). Both films collectively provide a spine-chilling commentary on female–female relations and motherhood that puts to play the female gaze and the monstrous feminine. This article argues that the themes of failed motherhood, death and the abject are salvaged by strong mother–daughter relations and the female gaze, making the two films a women-oriented rejoinder to spirit possession and the misogynistic tale of the pontianak.

This article examines three Japanese science-fiction movies that present dis-organ-ized bodies as ontological disintegrations of the ‘sublime’, namely, Dopperungengâ (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2003), Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu (Yoshihiro Nishimura, 2008), and Kataude mashin gâru (Noboru Iguchi, 2008). My article argues that these films approach the amalgamation of organic bodies and mechanical artefacts as an anti-sublime mitigation of the physicality of the body that puts demand on the audience to empathize with the abject emotion of the incommensurable.

In recent years, well-known martial arts movie actor Jet Li has attained phenomenal success through star-powered philanthropy, even establishing his own worldwide humanitarian charity, One Foundation. With the advent of participatory Web-based culture, cyberspace becomes an emergent locus of constructing and reinventing Li’s star image. This article investigates Li’s celebrity-philanthropist image in cyberspace and its signification. The analysis focuses on Facebook Pages, an organized virtual space displaying content including user interactions and microblogging known as a timeline. This article argues that Facebook presents a new and promising venue for users to negotiate Li’s ‘polysemic’ personae as martial arts master and philanthropist juxtapose, parallel and contradict each other in a decidedly nationalist vs cosmopolitan manner. Li’s national-yet-cosmopolitan personality not only yields an image of a viable global player in the entertainment arena but also serves as a text of linked significations opened up for users’ relentless (re)making, revisiting and interrogating, complicating the meaning of Chinese celebrities in the milieu of globalcyber culture.

Zombie film is a minor, yet growing, sub-genre within Japan’s contemporary horror genre. This article seeks to situate this sub-genre within the context of cult cinema and examine the aesthetic qualities prominent within key Japanese zombie films. Using Mathijs and Mendik’s anatomical categories in conjunction with an exploration of the international marketing and reception of the sub-genre, this article discusses Helldriver (Nishimura, 2011), Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead (Iguchi, 2011) and Rape Zombie: Lust of the Dead (Tomomatsu, 2012) as key examples of the sub-genre’s cult designation.

This article discusses the functional potentialities of the static long-take application, as an alternative filming method to the coverage approach, in the film-making style of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. By employing stylistic analysis on Sang Sattawat/Syndromes and a Century (2006) and Sud Sanaeha/Blissfully Yours (2002), the study argues that the patterning of the static long-take technique in handling lengthy conversation scenes sacrifice narrational clarity to foreground the expressivity and nuances of interpersonal interaction. An important facet of this expressivity is the deliberation of indirect communication, that is ‘the means in which one meaning is conveyed indirectly through utterances or non-verbal behaviors in order to achieve certain goal, or the means in which one’s intent is revealed in a roundabout way’. But acting more than a creative exercise in the poeticization of human communicative behaviour, this foregrounding of indirect communication opens up a wider socio-historical framework that Apichatpong’s film-making taps into.

Postcolonialism, Diaspora, and Alternative Histories: The Cinema of Evans Chan, Tony Williams (ed) (2015) Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 169 pp., ISBN: 9789888208166, h/bk, HKD590.00 / USD79.00