East Asian Cinemas Also by Vivian P

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East Asian Cinemas Also by Vivian P. Y. Lee HONG KONG CINEMA SINCE 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination East Asian Cinemas Regional Flows and Global Transformations

Edited by Vivian P. Y. Lee Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Vivian P. Y. Lee 2011 Individual chapters © Contributors 2011 Preface © Yingjin Zhang 2011 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-27767-0

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-32559-7 ISBN 978-0-230-30718-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230307186 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data East Asian cinemas : regional flows and global transformations / edited by Vivian P.Y. Lee. p. cm. Includes index. 1. Motion pictures—East Asia. 2. Motion picture industry—East Asia. I. Lee, Vivian P. Y., 1966– II. Title. PN1993.5.E19E275 2011 791.43095—dc22 2011004143 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Contents

List of Figures and Tables vii Preface viii Acknowledgments xi Notes on Contributors xii

Introduction: Mapping East Asia’s Cinemascape 1 Vivian P. Y. Lee Part I Filmmaking, Film Industry, and the Film Market 1 Transnational Trajectories in Contemporary East Asian Cinemas 15 Song Hwee Lim 2 Hollywood’s Global Strategy and the Future of Chinese Cinema 33 Hong Yin and Zhiwei Xiao (Translated by Vivian P. Y. Lee) Part II Genre and Transnational Aesthetics 3 Bicycle Thieves and Pickpockets in the “Desert of the Real”: Transnational Chinese Cinema, Postmodernism, and the Transcendental Style 61 Gina Marchetti 4 007 in Late Colonial Hong Kong: Technology, Masculinity, and Sly Humor in Stephen Chow’s From Beijing with Love 87 Eric K. W. Yu 5 “Asia” as Regional Signifier and Transnational Genre-Branding: The Asian Horror Omnibus Movies Three and Three … Extremes 103 Nikki J. Y. Lee 6 J-Horror and Kimchi Western: Mobile Genres in East Asian Cinemas 118 Vivian P. Y. Lee

v vi Contents

Part III Screen Cultures and Identity Politics 7 Rethinking a New National Identity in Heisei Japan: Neo-Conservatism and Japanese Cinema 145 Kinnia Shuk-ting Yau 8 Cinematic Imagination of Border-Crossing in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta: Comrades, Almost a Love Story and Durian, Durian 170 Tsung-yi Michelle Huang 9 In the Name of “Asia”: Practices and Consequences of Recent International Film Co-Productions in East Asia 189 Ti Wei Part IV Interviews: Filmmakers on Filmmaking 10 Framing Tokyo Media Capital and Asian Co-Production 213 Stephanie DeBoer 11 “Working Through China” in the Pan-Asian Film Network: Perspectives from Hong Kong and Singapore 235 Vivian P. Y. Lee

Index 249 List of Figures and Tables

Figures

1.1 The comfort of strangers: lonely characters in Last Life in the Universe 23 3.1 Xiao Wu 64 6.1 Toshio in The Grudge 2 126 7.1 Brother 154 9.1 The Promise 198

Tables

9.1 Main production details of the three films in question. Compiled from the official websites of the three films, www.mtime.com, www.truemovie.com, www.imdb.com, www.taipeibo.com/#top, and other related press reports. 199 9.2 Leading characters and actors/actresses. Compiled from the official websites of the three films and www.imdb.com. 202 9.3 Casting (lead characters). Compiled from the official websites of the three films and www.imdb.com. 204

vii Preface

Yingjin Zhang

In an era of globalization when deterritorialization and reterritori- alization are taking place simultaneously at various geographical scales around the world and when nation-states and transnational capital have formed close partnerships and are radically reconfiguring the local, regional, and global landscapes, the idea of “East Asian cinema”—with or without a plural designation—would arguably be best conceptual- ized as mutating and shifting, historically and geopolitically. On the one hand, scholars, filmmakers, and even government policymakers are increasingly aware of the limits of the previously dominant model of national cinema and have actively sought joint ventures of recognizably transnational varieties. On the other hand, given the unfailing emphasis on nation-states and regions implemented by both the international film festivals and the international media distribution system, films are still subject to a fundamentally essentialist standard and are frequently treated as the representative of a particular nation, culture, and people. Indeed, despite much talk about transnationalism, the nation still looms large in film production and film scholarship in East Asia, and it is not an aberration or paradox that the Chinese state is only too eager to exercise its “soft power” in a global promotion of its “national image” since China became the world’s second largest economy in 2010. It is against this backdrop of multi-directional tugs of war that I see the current volume as an exciting new step forward in charting the impact and potential of the growing transregional flows of media products in Asia-Pacific. The term “Asia-Pacific” is chosen here because the volume’s coverage extends beyond the conventional parameters of East Asia (i.e. China, Japan, and Korea) to include places like Singapore (a Sinophone and Anglophone media capital), which normally falls inside Southeast Asia. The strict geographic or national designation, as it turns out, is actually what the volume tries to problematize, as the contributors have taken us across the national boundaries that often mark the previous English-language scholarship on Asian cinema.1 The logic of “trans” in transnationalism necessarily directs attention to border- crossing issues. In this respect this volume moves current scholarship

viii Preface ix forward by tracing transnational and “translocal” (the latter a more accurate term in many cases, as I have argued elsewhere)2 practices both on and off screen and by investigating interrelated topics such as the dynamic relationship between the region and Hollywood, the intra- regional flows in Asia-Pacific, as well as comparative aesthetics at work in transregional imagination. As with other national or regional cinema studies, the global as represented by Hollywood makes its presence visible everywhere, here particularly in the cases of its recent remakes of Asian hits (as discussed by Song Hwee Lim) and its long-term strategy of global domination (as surveyed by Hong Yin and Zhiwei Xiao). The global also enters the genre consideration, as Asian horror creatively engages aesthetic representation and business strategies (illustrated in separate studies by Nikki Lee and Vivian Lee), or as Stephen Chow resorts to screen parody in his renegotiation with the local (Hong Kong), the national (Beijing), and the global (the 007 series), which Eric Yu takes time to show. The imbrication of the local and the global in Hong Kong is further explored in relation to the Pearl River Delta in mainland China by Tsung-yi Michelle Huang, who delineates distinct intra-regional flows as a new development in cultural geography. Another transnational node is the French connection in recent realist films from Hong Kong and mainland China, which Gina Marchetti demonstrates through the lens of comparative aesthetics. The idea of Asian or East Asian cinema has its historical roots and its own share of identity politics (as illustrated by Kinnia Yau’s study of Neo-conservatism in Japan through the war film), and the current transnational turn inevitably complicates concepts like “new Asian cinema” (as Ti Wei contends). Although East Asian cinema may not constitute an entity with a clearly defined boundary, it nonetheless boasts of a rich tradition and an innovative spirit, as testified by a succession of new waves sweeping in turns across Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, and South Korea, and speaks elo- quently to the interest of other national and regional cinemas around the world. Writing this preface has brought back my fond memory of the two-day international symposium, “Cross-Cultural Perspectives on East Asian Cinemas,” held at the City University of Hong Kong in July 2008, which served as the basis of this volume and for which I had the honor of delivering a keynote speech. I thank my hosts Jonathan Webster and Zhang Longxi in Hong Kong and I commend the convener/editor Vivian Lee and the contributors for successfully turning conference papers into an exciting academic volume. This new x Preface project will encourage its readers to rethink East Asian cinema not as a catalogue of snapshot profiles of individual national cinemas but as a vibrant synergetic field of cooperation and contention where new initiatives are launched, new ideas are created, and new possibilities are imagined. San Diego, November 2010

Notes

1. Books on Asian cinema are usually distinguished by national or regional focuses, as is the case with an earlier work: John Lent, Asian Film Industry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Despite the increasing emphasis on the global, the format is still preserved in three recent publications: Anne Tereska Ciecko (ed.), Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame (New York: Berg, 2006); Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham (eds), Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006); and Tom Vick, Asian Cinema: A Field Guide (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). For new efforts at border-crossing scholarship, see Darrell William Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, East Asian Screen Industries (London: British Film Institute, 2008); Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai (eds), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008); Yomi Braester and James Tweedie (eds), Cinema at the City’s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010). 2. Yingjin Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010). Acknowledgments

This collective volume is inspired by the papers presented at “Cross- Cultural Perspectives on East Asian Cinemas”, an international symposium held at the City University of Hong Kong, July 3–4, 2008. The editor gratefully acknowledges the contribution of all the speakers who generously shared their knowledge and ideas during this two-day event. Special thanks are due to our keynote speaker Yingjin Zhang, Zhang Longxi and Jonathan Webster, whose support and participation were instrumental to the success of the symposium. The intellectual exchange at the symposium was greatly enriched by the presence of Joe Cheung, Gordon Chan, Michelle Yeh, and Ning Jingwu at the “Filmmakers on Filmmaking” seminar, which facilitated a productive and stimulating discussion on the current developments of the Chinese-language film industry. I am indebted to Daisy Ng, who co-hosted the seminar and generously assumed the daunting task of consecutive translation for the speakers, and Bonnie McDougall, whose concluding remarks brought the program to a fruitful end. The participation of filmmakers Iseki Satoru, Ichiyama Shozo, Ueda Makoto, Joe Cheung, and Man Shu Sum in the interviews presented in Chapters 10 and 11 has also ensured that industry perspectives are duly reflected in this volume. Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues at CityU for their friendship and moral support, and the Palgrave Macmillan editorial team, in particular Catherine Mitchell, Christabel Scaife, and her successor Felicity Plester for their patience, understanding, and professionalism at every stage of the publication.

xi Notes on Contributors

Stephanie DeBoer is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her teaching and research interests include Japanese and Chinese language film and media, inter-Asia cultural studies, and global media studies. Her article, “Co-Producing Cross-Border Action: Technologies of Contact, Masculinity, and the Asia-Pacific Border,” is forthcoming in an anthology from Hong Kong University Press. A recent recipient of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC/JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellowship, she is currently writing a manuscript on Asia Pacific film, television, and media co-productions from the second half of the twentieth century. Tsung-yi Michelle Huang is currently Associate Professor of Geography at National Taiwan University. Her work on cinema, literature, cultural studies, and global cities has been published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Narrative Theory, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, and Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies, among others. In 2004 her book Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai was published by the Hong Kong University Press. She received an Academia Sinica Research Award for Junior Research Investigators in 2005. Nikki. J. Y. Lee received her PhD in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has taught at the Yonsei University and Korea National University of Arts. Her research interests cover transnational East Asian cinemas, and South Korean cinema and popular culture. She has published several articles on Korean films and direc- tors such as “Localized Globalization and a Monster National: The Host (2006) and the South Korean Film Industry” in Cinema Journal. She is co-editor of a forthcoming title, The Korean Cinema Book (British Film Institute/Palgrave MacMillan). Vivian P. Y. Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her articles on Chinese cinemas have

xii Notes on Contributors xiii appeared in academic journals and anthologies including Scope, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Chinese Films in Focus II, Chris Berry (ed.) (British Film Institute, 2008). Song Hwee Lim is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawaii Press, 2006), co-editor of Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (Wallflower Press, 2006), and founding editor of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. He recently completed a book manuscript entitled Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness, and a co-edited volume, The Chinese Cinema Book (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan), will appear in 2011. Gina Marchetti teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, at the University of Hong Kong. In 1995, her book, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (University of California, 1993), won the award for best book in the area of cultural studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. Her recent books include Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s INFERNAL AFFAIRS, The Trilogy (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), and Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema, co-edited with Tan See-Kam (London: Routledge, 2007). Ti Wei is Assistant Professor of the Department of Communication and Technology of the National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan. He received his PhD from the Department of Social Sciences in Loughborough University, UK, with a research thesis on globalization and Chinese cinemas. His most recent English article, “How did Hou Hsiao-Hsien change Taiwan cinema?—a critical reassessment,” is published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. He is currently writing on the political, economic, and cultural-aesthetic aspects of the international co-production of film. Zhiwei Xiao is Associate Professor of History at California State University, San Marcos. His research focuses on Chinese film history. Kinnia Shuk-ting Yau is Associate Professor at the Department of Japanese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her recent publications include Interrelations between Japanese and Hong Kong Film Industries: Investigation of the Roots of the Asian Film Networks (The University of Tokyo Press, 2007), and “Nostalgia and Anticipation: A Case Study of Contemporary Japanese Melodrama,” Asian Cinema, 2008. xiv Notes on Contributors

Eric K. W. Yu received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He taught literature and cultural studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Dong Hwa University before he joined the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Chiao Tung University of Taiwan. He was previously the Director of the NCTU Film Studies Center. His research interests include comparative literature, travel writing, and film. He is currently completing a book on popular film genres. Hong Yin is Professor of Film and Television Studies and Director of the Center for Film and Television Studies at the Tsinghua University in China. He is the author of seven books and editor of six collections of essays. His work has also appeared in numerous academic journals in China and abroad. Professor Yin is also a senior advisor to various CCTV programmes and other independent TV dramas in China. Yingjin Zhang is Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at University of California, San Diego, USA. His English books include The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (1996), Encyclopedia of Chinese Film (1998), China in a Polycentric World (1998), Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai (1999), Screening China (2002), Chinese National Cinema (2004), From Underground to Independent (2006), Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (2010), and Chinese Film Stars (2010).

A Note on Name and Romanization

This book uses conventionally established Romanization systems for Asian characters as far as possible. For names of filmmakers, actors, and internationally known people, it follows the version in general circula- tion rather than the standardized English format, e.g. Chen Kaige and Kim Ji-woon rather than Kaige Chen and Ji-woon Kim.