Asian Cinema - Volume 33, Issue 1, 2022

Chinese-language film studies have paid scant attention to the intersection of feminism and postmodernism. This article argues that Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (1991), a film with a female protagonist and a postmodern narrative format, is demonstrably a feminist film. The parodic representation of protagonist Ruan Lingyu and the film’s scripted re-enactments of scenes from Hong Kong cinema are revealed as postmodern aesthetic processes, through which traditional gender norms can be explored and questioned. Finally, the article examines Kwan’s unique, self-reflexive narrative practice, which constructs an alternative female celebrity biopic and situates the film firmly as feminist historiographic metafiction.

This article will examine the way in which Koreans are mobilized in Kitano Takeshi’s Outrage series and how their representations may be related to Kitano’s vision of Japan. In order to do so, the article first places the Outrage trilogy in the context of Kitano’s other films as well as previous representations of Koreans in Japanese yakuza (gangster) films in general. The article then continues to explore the role of Korean characters in Outrage Beyond and Coda and discusses the way in which the seemingly progressive transnational bonding and Korean representation may confirm Kitano’s romantic nationalism or what I would call ‘melancholic nationalism’.

The legacy of Akira Kurosawa has become ‘fertile land’, beckoning a plethora of intercultural and intermedia adaptations. Rashōmon (1950), which is adapted from two short stories by the great Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), namely, ‘Rashōmon’ (1915) and ‘In a Grove’ (1922), surprised Hollywood by refusing the dominant traditional narrative techniques of the period. Although this masterpiece was created over half a century ago, it has been reproduced continually through multimediated practices. Rashōmon was a cognitive explosion that revolutionized western perceptions of the creative and imaginative potential of eastern cinema. Since its release, this cinematic masterpiece has been rewritten and recontextualized into a slew of film, stage and musical productions. Adaptation is the process of reinterpreting and negotiating a target text for new cultural and sign biospheres. This work analyses the transformation process of Rashōmon into the movie adaptations The Outrage (Ritt 1964) (United States) and อุโมงค์ผาเมือง (The Outrage, also known as At the Gate of the Ghost) (Devakula 2011) (Thailand) to answer the following questions: what elements are added, amplified or excluded in the Rashōmon adaptations? Can the recontextualization of Rashōmon in the United States and Thailand show how the Rashōmon adaptations accommodate and confront cultural and epochal similarities and differences? What translatable and adaptable ‘textual gaps’ allow the adaptations to discourse and reinterpret the source/original/adapted texts? This article uses theory of adaptation as the main theoretical framework to address the questions above.