Asian Cinema - Volume 34, Issue 2, 2023

This article discusses the lone outlier associated with the cannibal boom of European exploitation films in the 1970s and 1980s – with the main point of diversion being that Sisworo Gautama Putra’s film is an Indonesian production rather than the typical Italian fare. Being an Asian film that emulates the traditionally European style of cannibal film, Primitives opens a larger discussion about the role of the theoretical savage and the implications thereof, put in place by ghosts of imperialism and cinematic mimicry. The author explores these concepts with psychoanalytic input, opting to unpack the rationality behind an Indonesian film following the same imperialist notions utilized by the preceding Italian directors, which ultimately results in a subdivision of the artificial–natural dichotomy: the meta-natural.

Portuguese filmography on Portuguese Asia during the Estado Novo is limited. Additionally, much of this filmography appeared late and while also espousing a Luso-tropicalist rhetoric that sought to project the bygone mythical importance of a formerly vast empire. During the dictatorship, however, the colonies in the East held symbolic value. I propose that the scarcity of films on the ‘Portuguese Orient’ stems from this symbolic value of an imagined community that is evoked more through its vagueness than through its visual representation. With the emergence of tensions between Portugal and India regarding the control of Portuguese India in 1947, and the beginning of the independence war in Angola in 1961, interest in filming Portugal’s eastern colonies arose from the need to sediment a Luso-orientalist discourse that ignored the broad range of local characteristics and the myriad differences that existed between Africa and Asia and, moreover, between various colonies within those regions.

This article’s title originates from a line spoken by a revolutionary towards the end of the film Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War. Like the film born of the collaboration of politically radical Japanese experimental filmmakers and revolutionaries, this examination concerns revolution itself as a film subject. More specifically, it interrogates this film as a revolutionary tool and the limitations thereof, as well as revolution and revolutionaries captured in the film and the revolutionary as embodied in the film’s maker Masao Adachi. What it produces might be termed ‘the revolutionary subject’.

This article examines two contemporary Chinese films that document the filmmakers’ homecoming journey during the Chinese New Year: Sige chuntian (Four Springs) (Lu 2017) and Jixiang ruyi (The Reunions) (Da 2020). It argues that both films have the characteristic of being reflexive documentaries exploring and expanding the boundaries of documentary films. According to Meunier’s three types of filmic identifications – the documentary attitude, the home-movie attitude and the fiction attitude – the two films challenge documentary norms and combine the documentary attitude with the other two types of attitude. Four Springs combines documentary and home movie by closely capturing the four journeys of homecoming confined in the private sphere of the filmmaker’s home, whilst The Reunions combines documentary and fiction, and even actuality and performance, through actor Liu Lu’s portrayal of the director Da Peng’s cousin in the presence of his real family. By challenging these documentary forms, these two films reflect the directors’ uses of documentary to memorialize their personal experiences with their families, more than merely reflecting the cultural phenomenon of the Chinese New Year homecoming.