Asian Cinema 66695_Khoo.indd695_Khoo.indd i 117/12/207/12/20 111:541:54 AAMM 66695_Khoo.indd695_Khoo.indd iiii 117/12/207/12/20 111:541:54 AAMM Asian Cinema A Regional View Olivia Khoo 66695_Khoo.indd695_Khoo.indd iiiiii 117/12/207/12/20 111:541:54 AAMM This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Lawrence, who taught me everything about life and love. Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Olivia Khoo, 2021 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Monotype Ehrhardt by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 6176 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 6178 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 6179 5 (epub) The right of Olivia Khoo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66695_Khoo.indd695_Khoo.indd iivv 117/12/207/12/20 111:541:54 AAMM Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii 1. Introduction: Theorising Asian Cinema as a Regional Cinema 1 2. Pan-Asian Filmmaking and Co-productions with China: Horizontal Collaborations and Vertical Aspirations 20 3. Re-making Asian Cinema: Inter-Asian Remakes and Asian Omnibus Films 35 4. From Film Festivals to Online Streaming: Circuits of Distribution and Exhibition 57 5. Queer Asian Cinema, Female Authorship and the Short Film Format 77 6. Archiving Asian Cinema 95 7. Asian Cinema in 3D: Regional Technical Innovation 109 Epilogue: New Regional Intimacies 129 Bibliogr aphy 135 Index 152 66695_Khoo.indd695_Khoo.indd v 117/12/207/12/20 111:541:54 AAMM Figures 2.1 Vertical aesthetics in Office 29 2.2 Circular aspect ratio in I Am Not Madame Bovary 32 3.1 Bus stop scene in China’s 20 Once Again 45 3.2 Bus stop scene in China’s 20 Once Again (detail) 45 3.3 Bus stop scene in India’s Telugu-language Oh! Baby 46 3.4 Bus stop scene in India’s Telugu-language Oh! Baby (detail) 46 66695_Khoo.indd695_Khoo.indd vvii 117/12/207/12/20 111:541:54 AAMM Acknowledgements This book was written o ver many years, across multiple places, and with support of family, friends and colleagues from around the world. I am fortunate to work in the collegial environment of the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University; a big thank you to my friends and colleagues at Monash who make work a better place to be. I am constantly inspired by my amazing graduate students and thank especially Daniel Edwards, Katrina Tan and Teck Fann Goh, who have assisted with the research for this book. Sections of this book that have previously been published in different forms have benefited from the editorial advice and insightful comments of Sean Metzger, Patricia White, Maria Elena Indeli- cato and David H. Fleming. I also thank my academic mentors and friends Chua Beng Huat, Koichi Iwabuchi, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue. To my dear friends who have sustained me with shared meals, funny stories and solicitous phone calls and messages; I am grateful to know Lar- issa Hjorth, Therese Davis, Fiona Camarri, Vince Pacecca, Rozleigh Stef- fensen, Derreck Goh, Lara Zeccola, Cynthia Seow, Karen Steinburger and Tan Pin Pin. My family is the source of everything good in my life. Love and thanks to Lee, Alicia, Stuart, Jonathan, Alex and my brilliant nephews and nieces William, Anna, Barnaby, Noah, Lily and Elijah. Thank you Ziggy. And to Sebastian, who lights up my world with his exuberance, kindness, intel- ligence and generosity of love, I am grateful for you every day. 66695_Khoo.indd695_Khoo.indd vviiii 117/12/207/12/20 111:541:54 AAMM 66695_Khoo.indd695_Khoo.indd vviiiiii 117/12/207/12/20 111:541:54 AAMM CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Theorising Asian Cinema as a Regional Cinema In Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love (2012), a retired professor, Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), meets a young sociology student, Akiko (Rin Takanashi), who works as a high end escort to pay off her tuition. Akiko accompanies Takashi to his apartment where the two engage in a conversation that extends through the night. The next day Takashi encoun- ters Akiko’s jealous boyfriend Noriaki (Ryō Kase), who initially believes him to be Akiko’s grandfather. The film, a Japanese–French production, screened at the 2012 Busan International Film Festival in the ‘A Window on Asian Cinema’ category. It represented a marked diversion for Iranian director Kiarostami, known for his Palme d’Or-winning Taste of Cherry (1997). Like the film’s title and eponymous song, the film is also ‘like’ an exquisitely crafted work by Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu, reminding us for instance of Woman of Tokyo/Tokyo no Onna (1933). This film, together with other examples from the last thirty years featured in the chapters that follow, inspired the writing of this book. They exemplify an ongoing strug- gle by audiences and scholars, one that enchants as well as frustrates, to define what constitutes Asian cinema given the myriad examples that con- tinually expand, complicate and upend existing categories and conceptual boundaries. While scholarship on Asian cinema has grown exponentially over a corresponding period, the theoretical frameworks for understand- ing the proliferating categories of this cinema are only catching up, if not quite keeping up. Our understandings of national cinemas from Asia have deepened with new studies, as have our knowledges of the complex pro- duction ecologies surrounding particular films; however, coming to terms with Asian cinema as a scholarly field, a marketing category and a specta- torial experience remains unapprehended in a more comprehensive way within academic studies of the cinema. While these demands cannot be fully answered in a single volume, this book provides two analytical frames that are aimed at opening up future studies in this field. The first is to 66695_Khoo.indd695_Khoo.indd 1 117/12/207/12/20 111:541:54 AAMM 2 ASIAN CINEMA unabashedly study Asian cinema as a regional cinema. Such an approach is not meant to discount the importance of national cinema models or to discourage close analyses of particular films, but to offer an alternative analytical lens through which to approach the complexity of Asian cin- ema, despite the usual criticisms of the incommensurability of language, cultural, political and economic contexts that attend to such an approach. The second, related, method suggests that a comparative approach to understanding Asian cinema from within Asia is necessary to its analysis. This comparative approach is steadfastly rooted within intra-Asian con- nections, whatever outside influences and cinemas may also impinge or impress upon it. Retaining Asia as the reference point for Asian cinema might appear to be a theoretical sleight of hand but the aim is to foreground the internal analytical logic of Asian cinema as a regional cinema, a logic that most appropriately manifests the messiness and complexity of lan- guage, funding imperatives, fickle audiences and the best (and worst) of scholarly intentions. From National Cinemas to a Regional Cinema Since the late 1980s, ‘Asian cinema’ has become a well circulated term at international film festivals, in academia and among popular cinemagoers. This has been accompanied by an increase in scholarship on cinemas from Asia, from cult and fan-based studies to studies of high profile directors. Asian cinema is a field that now attracts critical attention and avid audi- ences from around the world, as witnessed by the popular success of Asian genre films (from martial arts to horror), and top prizes awarded to direc- tors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chen Kaige, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Hirokazu Kore-eda at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, and most recently, Bong Joon-ho at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020.1 Yet although the term Asian cinema is now widely accepted, it does not constitute ‘a unified discursive field’ (Yoshimoto 2006: 255). The field of Asian cinema is at present dominated by studies of individual filmmakers representing different national industries (usually male directors such as Hou Hsiao- Hsien (Taiwan), Zhang Yimou (China), Wong Kar-wai (Hong Kong), Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan), and Park Chan-wook (South Korea)), or read- ings of individual films or sets of films again predominantly from a national cinema perspective. This overriding national approach represents a missed opportunity for understanding the dynamic industrial and cultural trans- formations that have occurred in the region over the past thirty years, with greater collaboration and integration between Asia’s film industries affect- ing how films from the region are being made, distributed and viewed. 66695_Khoo.indd695_Khoo.indd 2 117/12/207/12/20 111:541:54 AAMM INTRODUCTION 3 This book provides a critical study of the development of Asian cinema as a regional cinema in the past three decades. By this, I mean a definition of Asian cinema that is more than a sum of its national constituent parts, and that can account for the growing inter-Asian and pan-Asian films and filmmaking practices being produced out of the intensifying collabora- tions between Asia’s film industries. Although active exchanges have long taken place between film industries in Asia, this book investigates how a period of regional consolidation and cooperation, marked by new mod- els of production, film financing, exhibition and reception, emerged with the development of Asian modernities and economies in the late 1980s, and was again compelled by the collapse of key markets during the Asian financial crisis of 1997.