Asian Cinema - Volume 9, Issue 2, 1998

The interaction with the modern West has been a central part of Chinese history of the last hundred and fifty years and continues to dominate Chinese life today. One of the complexities of this cultural interaction is that even the most ardent iconoclasts in China failed to completely break away from the Chinese traditional mode of thinking.1 The tension between the need to hold on to one's cultural identity and the appeal of Western fads has been an essential part of Chinese experience with modernity in the twentieth century.

With his legendary "golden touch," Zhang Yimou, after a series of successes in the Western film market, presented his first film set in a metropolis -- Shanghai Triad. Kennedy (1995, 4) highlighted the glory the film received at the 45th Cannes Filmfest in 1995, "Then came Zhang Yimou's Shanghai Triad, putting all these other movies and their makers in the shade. 'Just a gangster film,' chorused some hacks, obviously suffering from (film) noir overkill. But if this film is 'just' anything, it is just a masterpiece."

Recent work on contemporary Hong Kong cinema frequently notes an apocalyptic current in several representations linked with a traumatic return to Mainland China in 1997. Although this motif features both explicitly (Black Cat, Wicked City) and implicitly (the post 1986 Hong Kong films of John Woo and Tsui Hark's A Better Tomorrow 3) in many films, it is important to remember that reunion has other forms of cinematic manifestations. Not all works view unification as a threat. Stanley Tong's Police Story 3: Supercop (1991) concludes with Jackie Chan's Hong Kong cop arguing with his mainland Chinese counterpart, Michelle Khan/Yeoh, over which country will gain stolen property, only to conclude that the question will be irrelevant by July 1, 1997 anyway. Similarly, Kirk Wong's Rock 'n Roll Cop (1994) ends with Anthony Wong's supercool Inspector Hung welcoming the time when he and his Mainland counterpart Captain Wong Run (Wu Xing Guo) join together in chasing crooks as the real enemy - - instead of each other when they cross their respective boundaries pursuing criminals. Ringo Lam's Prison on Fire 2 (1991) looks towards eventual harmony between "Hongkies" and mainland criminals as seen in the alliance between Chow Yun-Fat's colony prisoner and the aptly-named Triad boss Dragon.

In the early 1990s, Hong Kong movies were imported more expensively into Korea than those from Hollywood. For instance, in 1992, an average price of 74 films from Hong Kong was $164,000, while an average price of 160 films from Hollywood was $113,000.1 Hong Kong movies have been an outstanding alternative for Hollywood's films, at the same time, a threatening competitor to domestic ones.

Vivian Huang of Asian CineVision, sponsor of the Asian American International Film Festival of New York, calls it "Singapore fever." She is referring to the success of Eric Khoo's Meepok Man on the international film festival circuit and to the interest this film has generated in motion pictures coming from the island nation of Singapore. After being dormant for decades, Singapore's cinema culture has begun to heat up.

In the history of British imperialism in India (1757-1947), Bengal occupies a special place. Earliest exposed to post-Enlightenment culture of European modernity primarily through Western education, Bengal was the vanguard of most literary, artistic, and radical political and social movements in India for at least one hundred years. The western educated colonial Bengali elite or the bhadralok,1 who usually led the movements was, as a group, highly politicized and ardent nationalists. This elite was also sensitive to the orientalist claims of India's classical past, and was especially mindful of Bengal's cultural aspirations and achievements, in which literature and the arts enjoyed a privileged place.2 Indeed, the average Bengali's traditional passion for literature and politics even today (generally speaking) colors the attitude to the sister arts, especially cinema. Such an attitude is inscribed in the culture's tacit recognition of the symbiotic weave between literature, politics, and film. One consequence has been that since the "talkie" period of Indian cinema (which began roughly around the early 1930s), the Bengali art film has been particularly dependent upon literature for its themes, characters, and plots. The novels of such eminent late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengali writers as Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Saratchandra Chatterjee, and Rabindranath Tagore, along with popular contemporary fiction, have often provided (and continue to provide) sources of fictional material for the Bengali filmmakers.

A recurrent dilemma for studies of Japanese cinema is that many scholars adopt linear, evolutionary narratives derived from the history of the Enlightenment, or in other words, a colonial model of history with the West as the subject and the force of progress.1 Briefly stated, Japanese cinema is seen in these narratives as a belated national cinema following the trajectory of Hollywood in its various stages of development. The discourse on Japanese cinema and its history shares the same failures of the Enlightenment model of history, which universalizes particular cultural experiences according to Western points of reference.2 While recent debates center on the methodological problems of cross-cultural analysis, Japanese cinema studies remain frozen in the past achievements of their canonical texts, increasingly mirroring the general stagnation of the film industry itself.

Japanese comedies readily available in the West can be counted on the fingers of both hands: a few classical ones by Ozu and Kurosawa, Morita Yoshimitsu's brilliant black comedy Family Game, Itami Juzo's many productions. Now a young Japanese director, Suo Masayuki (b. 1956), can be added to this short list.1 After making several comedies which were popular in Japan but relatively unknown abroad, Suo has become an international rising star with his runaway hit Shall We Dance (Shall we dansu, 1996).

Festivals, Conferences, and Awards The Third Shanghai International Film Festival was opened at the Theater of Shanghai Cinema City, Oct. 24, 1997. More than 1,000 people, including film artists from more than 40 countries, attended the opening. Film director Wu Yigong, director of Shanghai Film Art Bureau, and jury chairman of this year's Shanghai International Film Festival, warmly welcomed all foreign guests. He mentioned that more than 120 film companies from more than 40 countries sent 300 films for this year's festival. From this number, 19 films were selected for competition.