EAST-WEST FILM JOURNAL VOLUME 3· NUMBER 1 SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE CITY AND CINEMA Editor's Note I Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science Fiction Film 4 VIVIAN SOBCHACK Future Noir: Contemporary Representations of Visionary Cities 20 JANET STAIGER Last Seen in the Streets of Modernism 45 PATRICIA MELLEN CAMP Attitudes Toward Tokyo on Film 68 DONALD RICHIE Chinese Urban Cinema: Hyper-realism Versus Absurdism CHRIS BERRY The Rural Base of an Urban Phenomenon 88 CHIDANDA DAS GUPTA Seoul in Korean Cinema 97 BAE CHANG-HO A Tale of Two Cities: Cultural Polyphony and Ethnic Transformation 105 ROBERT STAM Cities and Cinema: A Selective Filmography 117 Book Review 121 DECEMBER 1988 The East-West Center is a public, nonprofit educational institution with an international board of governors. Some 2,000 research fellows, grad­ uate students, and professionals in business and government each year work with the Center's international staff in cooperative study, training, and research. They examine major issues related to population, resources and development, the environment, culture, and communication in Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Center was established in 1960 by the United States Congress, which provides principal funding. Support also comes from more than twenty Asian and Pacific governments, as well as private agencies and corporations. Editor's Note DESPITE differences separating one phase of the evolution of city from another, we can legitimately say that the city as a generic term connotes an identifiable set of meanings. Robert E. Park says, "The city is something more than congeries of individual men and of social conveniences­ streets, buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones, etc.; adminis­ trative devices - courts, hospitals; schools, police, and civil functionaries of various sorts. The city is rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is a product of nature, and particularly of human nature:' This observation enables us to frame the question of filmic representation of urban experi­ ence more productively. Lewis Mumford makes a similar point when he says, "Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind:' If city is a state of mind, then when it finds expression in cinema, cul­ ture assumes a very important role indeed. The diverse cultural discourses that inform urban experience and the cultural codes that are inextricably linked with the cinematic narration merit closer attention. Therefore, we have devoted this special issue to an examination of the relationships that subsist among city, cinema, and culture. The relationships that exist among city, cinema, and culture are as com­ plex as they are interesting. City is decidedly a product of culture; but it is also a producer of culture. Being a generator of social modernization, cit­ ies influence and shape the evolving patterns of culture even as they reflect I 2 EDITOR'S NOTE certain essential currents of those cultures. Hence, there is an intriguing interplay between city and culture. The words city and civilization are derived from the same Latin root, and in many Asian languages the word city carries with it connotations of cultural refinement and elegance. City is a producer of cultural meaning. To read a city, whether it be New York or Paris, Tokyo or Bombay, in terms of cultural meaning is to gain a vital entrance to the deeper layers of the culture that produced the city in question. It can legitimately be said that the city is the most signifi­ cant imprint that a culture can place upon the natural landscape of a coun­ try. Consequently, we can read a culture through the cities that it creates and read a city through the culture that created it. "Reading the city" is indeed an interesting theme. Roland Barthes says that Tokyo has no center out of which the rest of the city radiates as with cities of medieval origin in the Western world. He views everything as writing, and, as in a literary text, the city becomes a galaxy of signifiers. Wittgenstein, approaching this issue from the opposite angle, says that our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight, regular streets and uniform houses. It is sometimes presumed that cities all over the world are the same, constituting as they do symbols of modernization. But this is a mistaken belief; cities are far less universal and far more culture-specific than is gen­ erally perceived. They bear the stamp of history, culture, tradition, world­ view, and change characteristic of a given society. This makes the study of the relationship between city and cinema even more challenging and illu­ minating. This special issue opens with three papers that have considerable theo­ retical value and deal with city and cinema in terms of the ongoing dialec­ tics between the perceived present and envisioned future, synthetic and authentic cultures. Vivian Sobchack deals with the urban science fiction film; she points out how the imaginary city of most contemporary science fiction films, while not lamenting the failed aspirations of its past, is una­ ble to envision its future. Janet Staiger explores contemporary representa­ tions of visionary cities. She sees the mise-en-scene of cities in science fic­ tion films as utopian commentaries centering on hopes and failures of the present or implicit criticisms of contemporary city life and the socioeco­ nomic system that gave rise to it. Patricia Mellencamp, with her character- EDITOR'S NOTE 3 istic wit, examines the intriguing relationship among city, women, and cinema. She demonstrates how image hides the city, its inhabitants, and its legends, and authentic culture. Following these three, we have five papers that deal more specifically with case studies. Donald Richie discusses attitudes toward Tokyo on film. He points out how the attitude to city in Japanese films differs con­ siderably from those in Western films; it is more benign, but still one of disapprobation. Chris Berry focuses attention on Chinese urban cinema in relation to two highly talented post-Cultural Revolution directors who have succeeded in introducing stylistic innovations - Zhang Liang and Huang Jianxin. He characterizes their respective styles as "hyper-realism" and "absurdism." Chidananda Das Gupta, in his paper on the Indian case, examines the impact of urbanization on the social fabric and the concomi­ tant changes in terms of values, life-styles, beliefs, tradition, and how these find expression in Indian cinema, both artistic and popular. Bae Chang-Ho surveys the ways in which the city of Seoul has been repre­ sented in Korean cinema; he makes a plea for dealing with the more posi­ tive aspects of the urban experience. Finally, Robert Starn investigates the portrayal of two cities in film - New York and Sao Paulo. Using a Bakh­ tinian framework, he examines how the diverse ethnicities that character­ ize these two large cities meet, clash, and interact. The eight papers gathered in this special issue on city and cinema, we hope, will call attention to some vital aspects of this relationship in terms of East and West. Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science Fiction Film VIVIAN SOBCHACK IN I952, science fiction writer Clifford Simak published City, a loosely related collection of short stories unified by their location in a city that - over thousands of narrative years - radically changes its shape, its func­ tions, and its citizenry. This episodic and millennial history of urban transformation is framed and synopsized by its narration as a "bedtime story" - told by a golden robot to a pack of articulate young dogs gath­ ered around a blazing hearth, wondering if it is true that once, and very long ago, the nearby city (and the world) was populated by animate, warm-blooded beings called "humans." Like most of the cities in science fiction literature and film, Simak's city and its fabulous transformations over time is clearly a city of the imagina­ tion. Owing no necessary allegiance to representational verisimilitude, such an imaginary city serves as a hypnogogic site where the anxieties, desires, and fetishes of a culture's waking world and its dream world con­ verge and are resolved into a substantial and systemic architecture. This imaginary architecture - particularly as it is concretely hallucinated in American science fiction film images - is more than mere background. The SF film city's not-always-made-of-concrete spatial articulations pro­ vide the literal premises for the possibilities and trajectory of narrative action - inscribing, describing, and circumscribing an extrapolative or speculative urban world and giving that fantasized world a significant and visibly signifying shape and temporal dimension. That is, enjoying partic­ ular representational freedom as a genre of the fantastic, the SF film con­ cretely "real-izes" the imaginary and the speculative in the visible spectacle of a concrete image. Thus, it could be argued that because it offers us the most explicitly poetic figuration of the literal grounds of contemporary 4 CITIES ON THE EDGE OF TIME 5 urban existence, the SF city and its concrete "realization" in American cin­ ema also offers the most appropriate representational grounds for a phenomenological history of the spatial and temporal transformation of the city as it has been culturally experienced from the 1950S (when the American SF film first emerged as a genre) to the present (in which the genre enjoys unprecedented popularity).