Asian Cinema - Volume 9, Issue 1, 1997

Adoor Gopalakrishnan is widely regarded as India's greatest living filmmaker after Mrinal Sen. Born in 1941 in Kerala, a state in southern India, he belongs to a family with strong links to the performing arts, especially Kathakali, a highly-stylised form of dance drama. From the age of eight, Gopalakrishnan began acting for the stage, and has produced over twenty plays, several written by him.

When Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List was banned in Malaysia in 1994, most Westerners probably saw the act as a simple case of anti-Semitism by the Islamic government of a relatively obscure Third World nation. Although anti-Semitism certainly was a factor, the case was hardly simple.

This incident was complicated in several ways. It was, primarily, the inevitable result of a clash of cultures. One of these, that of the United States, is Western, liberal, economically developed and has an essentially Judaic-Christian tradition. The other is Asian, conservative, a developing Third World economy, essentially Islamic, and has a tradition of government and sense of community that differs from those of the West. Other factors include the realities of national and regional politics, changing alliances among nations and ideological groups, and, finally, the universal factors of simple human pride and emotion.

This essay examines the various levels of dialogue and contestation between Lino Brocka's films-and to a large extent, Brocka himself as a cultural worker~and the Marcos regime. The focus will on Brocka's film, Jaguar (1979), as a cognitive map of the effects of the Marcos regime that enforces the nation and its people into the circuits of the present day operations of transnationalism. The envelopment of the nation-space and bodies of people within the transnational grid, in turn, constructs newer modes of experiencing the everyday and the social.

The history of filmmaking in China can be traced to the dawn of this century, 1905, the year when a photography studio in Beijing filmed select episodes of a popular play performed by the famous Peking opera actor Tan Xinpei. Film exhibition can be traced even further back, to 1896, but it was not until after the 1911 revolution had overthrown the Qing dynasty that cinema began to emerge as a mass medium for commercial entertainment. The popularization of cinema in China is intimately related to the disintegration of the Qing dynasty and the subsequent social changes. Although cinema was a novel medium introduced from the West, the Chinese attitude toward cinema was considerably informed by existing cultural traditions. The early development of Chinese cinema is inseparable from the transformation of traditional forms of entertainment through the impact of Western culture.

Kawabata's novella The Izu Dancer (Izu no odoriko ) has been adapted for screen six times since it was published in 1926. That number seems small, considering the nature of the story. After all, it offers the time-honored romantic theme of young lovers separated by social barriers.

The most recent adaptation is Mitsuo Wakasugi's 1976 vehicle for teen pop idols Tomokazu Miura and Momoe Yamaguchi-hardly a version to single out for praise. Of course social barriers are not what they used to be, and a film of the 1970s may be expected to reflect that fact. In any case, the first film version of The Izu Dancer is the best-Heinosuke Gosha's work for the silent screen in 1932. Any director could mine the melodramatic vein in Kawabata's tale, but Gosha's pioneering work surpasses the others by accommodating the novella's lyrical aspects to the shomingeki genre he was himself most comfortable in.

That monster of Philippine lower mythology, the aswang, is possessed of a career as varied as her aspect. The years have not withered her, nor custom stated her cruel variety. She is seductive: a vampire who craves blood; terrifying: a viscera-sucker who consumes internal organs; confounding: a werebeast who transforms into pig, dog, cat, and human; horrific: a witch who causes illness; disgusting: a ghoul who preys on corpses and laps up the phlegm of the sick (Ramos xvii-xxxii).

In 1913 D. G. Phalke modeled his mythological film, Raja Harischandra, on a Hollywood Biblical spectacle. Thus began the practice of the remake, or "Indianization": transformation of Western movies for the Indian mass audience. Hundreds of American films have passed through this process since then, chosen primarily for their box office potential in India. From early mythologicals through the family comedies of the sixties (The Parent Trap produced three Hindi and several Dravidian language versions) to the violent action films of today (Fatal Attraction turned into Haar Jeet in the North and Aksharathettu in the South), the choice of original has been influenced by changing audience tastes, as well as the dictates of strict censorship.

Picturing Japaneseness is the result of years of research, writing, and conference presentations on a relatively unexplored area of film history: the Japanese films produced between 1936 and 1941. Davis identifies a select group of films which he considers representative of the "monumental style" of that period. This "monumental style," according to the author, can be recognized by certain characteristic hallmarks: an epic sweep, ponderous narrative, long takes [in terms of the duration of a sequence] and long shots [in terms of the distance from the character or object being filmed], and a general mood of reverence and ceremony.

Davis argues strongly for a consideration of this "monumental style" as a celebration and exaltation of traditional Japanese elements that came to the fore because of the relative absence of foreign elements in the film industry of this period.

To mark the historic significance of Hong Kong '97, the Asian Cinema Studies Society (ACSS) will hold its Fifth Biennial Conference from August 20-23, at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. At the same time, colleagues at the university will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Cultural Studies Program, in a parallel conference entitled, Endings and Transformations: Cultural Studies and the Millennium. Registration in one conference allows participation in both.