Asian Cinema and the Use of Space

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Lilian Chee, Edna Lim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781134629602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Asian cinemas are connected to global networks and participate in producing international film history while at the same time influenced and engaged by spatial, cultural, social and political transformations. This interdisciplinary study forwards a productive pairing of Asian cinemas and space, where space is used as a discursive tool to understand cinemas of Asia.

Concentrating on the performative potential of cinematic space in Asian films, the contributors discuss how space (re)constructs forms of identities and meanings across a range of cinematic practices. Cities, landscapes, buildings and interiors actively shape cinematic performances of such identities and their significances. The essays are structured around the spatial themes of ephemeral, imagined and contested spaces. They deal with struggles for identity, belonging, autonomy and mobility within different national and transnational contexts across East, Southeast and parts of South Asia in particular, which are complicated by micropolitics and subcultures, and by the interventions and interests of global lobbies.

1 Asian Films and the Potential of Cinematic Space

Lilian Chee and Edna Lim

The foregrounding of space as the subject of inquiry in film studies is, in itself, not new. Indeed, the variety of scholarly work that focus on space in cinema is as wide-ranging as the ways in which space may be defined; from discussions on landscape, geography and cartography in films to how space is constructed in particular genres (such as science fiction) and cinematic representations of urban space and particular cities, as well as within the boundaries of specific cinemas (such as European, notably Italian, cinemas).¹

This book is concerned, on the one hand, with how cinematic space can be used to study, understand and reveal new perspectives on Asian cinemas, and on the other, to reciprocally employ these cinematic spaces as a means to understand the construction and production of physical spaces within a national milieu. Given its cultural diversity and immense geographical coverage, we acknowledge that “Asia” is a conceptually problematic term and use it here as a broad label to bring together a limited range of cinematic practices. Our intention is not to develop an Asian-based theory for exploring Asian cinema through space or to propose an Asian conception of space. Nor do we assume that Asian cinemas use space differently from other cinemas. Instead, this book forwards the proposition that a dedicated study of how space is used in a range of Asian films could potentially allow us to learn more about cinema in Asia in ways that are either new or relatively unexplored. The aim is to respect the cultural diversity of “Asia” as a series of relatable but independent entities through chapters that seek to represent this plurality while also recognizing the possible commonalities and overlaps between different cinematic practices. Mindful of the global and transnational flows of capital, labor, culture and commodity impacting these cinemas, this book also argues that a productive understanding of transnational mobility can be achieved when viewed in tension with specific national ambitions. As such, the inquiry is couched within the remits of a range of Asian cinemas and foregrounds cinematic space as the site of inquiry in films from different genres across various cinemas in Southeast, South and East Asia. The chapters focus on the negotiations that occur within these cinemas and takes into account the specificity of geopolitical contexts, different articulations of nation and nationhood and how these issues are enacted in cinematic performances and representations of space.

In this volume, space is projected as a conceptual tool that allows access, consciously or unconsciously, to the latent political, social and cultural ideologies underpinning a geopolitical region. We are interested in the role of space in film, that is, when such ideologies find material expression in spaces portrayed through filmic media. What we propose here follows on from Frederic Jameson’s argument that “the political content of daily life, with the political logic which is already inherent in the raw material with which the filmmaker must work”² finds its unembellished form in a series of spaces and locales, which when read closely suggest that they are more than just mise-en-scène. The essays here propose that space becomes the prime motivator of filmic plot, narrative and style. More importantly, such cinematic space ultimately reveals the “emergence of profound contradictions”³ that mark the material or absolute spaces to which the films refer. In particular for this volume, such contradictions revolve around the persistent dialectic of the national and the transnational, with their attendant sites and spaces, as these ideologies and identities are played out in the cinematic spaces of Asian films.

Taking its cue from the multidimensional potentials of space as a conceptual tool to unpick Asian films, this book engages the relationships, outcomes and discourse which ensue between space and film by exploring the performance of space in Asian films in two ways: how cinematic space (re)produces or (re)imagines the material space to which it refers, and the implications that such negotiations reveal about national cinematic practice(s) in an increasingly transnational field.

Transnationalism and National Cinema

Current research on Asian cinemas tends to involve what Mette Hjort calls “the ‘transnational turn’ in film studies.”⁴ Indeed, the currency of transnationalism seems to have elevated critical conceptions of Asian cinemas from the boundaries of area studies. As Hjort puts it:

The assumption, much of the time, seems to be that ‘transnationalism’ is the new virtue of film studies, a term that picks out processes and features that necessarily warrant affirmation as signs, amongst other things, of a welcome demise of ideologically suspect nation-states and the cinematic arrangements to which they give rise.⁵

Defined by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden as “the global forces that link people or institutions across nations,” transnationalism emphasizes the globalization, networks and flows that underpin film production, distribution and exhibition.⁶ Based on the assumption that cinema is international, transnationalism complicates and questions the adequacy of viewing films within the seemingly outmoded rubric of national cinema. As Kathleen Newman observes, “changes in film industries and in film style are now understood not merely to be a response to national conditions and pressures, but also to have, most always, multiple international determinants.”⁷ As such, “[b]orders are seen to have always been permeable, societies always hybrid, and international film history to have been key to the process of globalization.”⁸

Although transnationalism has played a key role in integrating Asian cinemas, particularly those of less developed countries, within a globalized community and network of cinematic production and consumption, it is, nonetheless, also a problematic concept that urgently needs critical definition or risk exhausting its value as a “virtue” in film studies. As Hjort points out: “Oftentimes the term functions as shorthand for a series of assumptions about [contemporary] networked and globalized realities … and it is these assumptions, rather than explicit definitions, that lend semantic content to ‘transnational’.”⁹ Moreover, as she notes:

There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that a number of film scholars are tiring of the endless incantation of ‘transnational’ and are beginning to ask themselves whether the very cinematic phenomena currently being described in 2009 as transnational would not, just some ten years previously, have been discussed in terms of a now allegedly outdated national cinemas paradigm.¹⁰

Transnationalism, as the trendy, relatively new buzzword in film studies is, in short, in danger of burning out if its critical possibilities are not properly arrested, developed and advanced. To that end, Hjort calls for “a far more polemical and less unitary discourse about cinematic transnationalism” and clarifies her own view that:

the more valuable forms of cinematic transnationalism feature at least two qualities: a resistance to globalization as cultural homogenization; and a commitment to ensuring that certain economic realities associated with filmmaking do not eclipse the pursuit of aesthetic, artistic, social and political values.¹¹

This collection of essays follows Hjort’s valuation of transnationalism. Here, the conception of transnationalism is less about “transcending” national boundaries or the taken-for-granted-ness of what Newman sees as the “geopolitical decentering of the discipline,”¹² but takes on an inter-national perspective, where the emphasis is on the prefix “inter-.” Unlike its implication in the term “international,” which Nataša Ďurovičová sees as “predicated on political systems in a latent relationship of parity,”¹³ the prefix is used here to highlight the inter-relation and inter-action of cinematic connections that acknowledges the mobility of cinema and the uneven relationship between cinemas. This is consistent with what Ďurovičová views of the “transnational” as an “intermediate and open term” receptive to the “modalities of geopolitical forms, social relations and especially the variant scale [sic] on which relations in film history have occurred that this key term its dynamic force, and its utility as a frame for hypotheses about emergent forms.”¹⁴ According to Ezra and Rowden, “the transnational at once transcends the national and pre-supposes it.”¹⁵ As such, far from signaling its demise, integral to this conception of transnationalism is a (paradoxically) renewed focus on national cinema as a simultaneous point of access and departure. The national is no longer viewed in isolation but within the context of the global, underscoring the role and theorizing of the national in an age of permeable boundaries where, according to Jürgen Habermas:

we must distinguish between two different things: on the one hand, the cognitive dissonances that lead to a hardening of national identities as different cultural forms of life come into collision; on the other, the hybrid differentiations that soften native cultures and comparatively homogeneous forms of life in the wake of assimilation into a single material world culture.¹⁶

Habermas’ “two different things” inform not only current cinematic practices but also the study of it as critical trajectories move beyond conventional perspectives of national cinema towards a consideration of the transnational, requiring a reframing of how we think about the interaction between cinema and the nation. According to Chris Berry, “[w]ithin this framework, the national is no longer confined to the form of the territorial nation-state but multiple, proliferating, contested and overlapping.”¹⁷

This framing of the national is important if we are to understand cinemas, particularly the lesser known and/or those of less developed nations, as not just connected to and imbricated in a global network, participating in and producing an international film history, but also as functioning within the scope and scale of particular cultural, social and political movements and transformations within nations and nation states. As Dudley Andrew observes, “[q]uite distinct strains of national and regional styles and genres surely tell several histories of East Asian film, each harbouring its particular idea of cinema.”¹⁸ It is, therefore, the aim of this volume to find, through a focused perspective on cinematic space as a methodological tool, these “distinct strains” in South, East and Southeast Asian films and discover their particular idea(s) of cinema.

Cinematic Space

Cinematic space is represented or produced space, and if, as Henri Lefebvre argues, “space is produced, then the ‘object’ of interest must … shift from things in space to the actual production of space.”¹⁹ Lefebvre’s theorizing of space is the starting point for Yingjing Zhang’s recent Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, one of the few published works that focus on space in general, and Asian cinema in particular. However, whereas Zhang emphasizes how spaces of production and reception affect our encounters with films from mainland China, this volume interrogates instead the (re)production of space(s) in Asian cinemas, and provides a critical context for understanding Asian film via space; and vice versa for negotiati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Asian Cinemas and the Potential of Cinematic Space
• 2 Between the Visible and the Intelligible in Asian Cinema
• Ephemeral Space
• Imagined Space
• Contested Space
• Contributors
• Index