Asian Cinema - Volume 34, Issue 1, 2023

The response to Jimmy Wang Yu’s death in April 2022 revealed the symptoms of undercelebration: while every professional obituary recognized the late filmmaker’s importance, few could explain why without inaccuracy or misattribution. This resonates with a long tradition of subjugating Wang’s work within the context of other, much more integral figures, in which the cultural and economic motivators for his filmic aesthetics are insufficiently considered. Similarly, various elements of Wang’s work, especially his purported anti-Japanism, have long been subjected to conjecture and simplification, or else an overreliance on the incorporation of biographical details into textual analyses of his films. This article aims to disentangle and clarify the myths and misconceptions that complicate the story of Wang’s career. To avoid repeating prior mistakes – i.e., to prevent the narrative distortion of associated figures within Wang’s narrative – the article will use the political economy of cinema as a guiding framework. The overall aim is to present a decentralized view of The Chinese Boxer (1970) to evaluate the cultural and material factors that motivated Wang’s career peak and the film for which he is most remembered.

In this article, I attempt to establish some auteurist coordinates for analyses of the films of Kon Ichikawa. Though historically overlooked in studies of Japanese cinema in favour of more classical filmmakers like Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa on the one hand and more contemporary filmmakers like Seijun Suzuki, Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike on the other, I argue that Ichikawa is a unique and skilled auteur whose complex narratives and powerful themes are manifest in his richly idiosyncratic visual strategies. Towards the goal of capturing the scope and diversity of his prolific career, I explore films from The Heart (1955) and Conflagration (1958) through Odd Obsession (1959) and An Actor’s Revenge (1963) up to The Devil’s Island (1977) and The Makioka Sisters (1983). In so doing, I strive to distinguish Ichikawa from contemporaries like Ozu and elucidate the specifics of his unique visual strategies. Focusing on his penchant for character studies and his ability to isolate his characters in physical space in front of the camera as well as within the space of the frame itself, I argue that the unifying thread in Ichikawa’s career is his fascination with outsider characters alienated from friends, family and society and whose isolation he depicts by virtue of brilliant use of both the full and widescreen frame, by playing with foreground and background, by utilizing light and shadow and by subverting shot/reverse shot editing. Whether in comedic or dramatic contexts, and whether in period sagas or contemporary stories, Ichikawa devoted himself to lonely characters in crisis and committed his mise en scène to the externalization of the internal thoughts and emotions of his anguished characters.

This article analyses techniques that contemporary South Korean horror films use to depict historical trauma, how these techniques are harnessed to frighten audiences and how different approaches articulate different relationships to the historical traumas that they depict. It analyses Gidam (Epitaph) (Jeong and Jeong 2007) and Gonjiam (Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum) (Jeong 2018) as case studies for how the articulation of historical trauma operates by showing historical trauma in the former, but by concealing it in the latter. It considers not only how history is referenced on-screen but also how historical consciousness can be felt through the horror genre.

This article analyses Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007) and Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden (2016) as melodramas which foreground trauma as a deadlock of identity. In both films, trauma exposes cultural and social consequences of national betrayal and colonial hierarchies, drawing our attention to politically charged predicament of suspended agency. At the same time, in both Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden, trauma as the ‘affective bearing’ also becomes significant with regard to how the spectator understands the expressed, cinematic world. This affective bearing is not a quality ‘attached’ to the film externally, but it is immanent to its aesthetic-expressive specificity which evokes direct emotional engagement in the spectator. The trauma examined in this article in both Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden bears less resemblance to attempts of representing national traumas than to matters of affective intensities experienced and understood organically from within the cinematic experience. This focus on trauma makes both films universally accessible insofar as it demonstrates not only what cinema can represent, but also what cinema can do: by means of its affective bearing a film can directly engage the spectators’ emotion in a way that alters their cinematic experience.

This article discusses Chinese director Ning Ying’s 2006 film wuqiongdong (Perpetual Motion) with an emphasis on the development of queer voice(over) – a queer feminist aesthetic achievement that subverts and perverts the heteropatriarchal suppression of women’s desire. Specifically, I analyse the ways queer figure’s voice-over interacts with haptic visuality, contemporaneous image and the intertextual references between film-texts and exterior texts about the film. I argue, through queer voice(over), Perpetual Motion expands its theme beyond the issue of infidelity in a heterosexual marriage, develops a cinematic critique to the twentieth-century Chinese feminist movements and articulates female desires from multiple registers of senses, psychology and historical subjectivity. In Chinese cinema where queer voices are usually marginalized, Ning’s queer voice(over) establishes a mutually referent relation between queer and heteronormative storylines, thus circumventing the state censorship and adding queerness into Chinese-language feminist debates and cinematic expression.

Review of: 昨天今天明天： 內地與香港電影的政治、 藝術與傳統 (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Hong Kong Cinema with Sino-links in Politics, Art, and Tradition), 吳國坤 Kenny K. K. Ng (2021)

Hong Kong: Chunghwa Bookstore, 288 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-88875-897-5, p/bk, $16.31