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 empha- sis 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 con- tributors 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 main- land 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.