Early Cinema in Asia

Nick Deocampo

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780253027283
• eBook ISBN: 9780253034441
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Early Cinema in Asia explores how cinema became a popular medium in the world's largest and most diverse continent. Beginning with the end of Asia's colonial period in the 19th century, contributors to this volume document the struggle by pioneering figures to introduce the medium of film to the vast continent, overcoming geographic, technological, and cultural difficulties. As an early form of globalization, film's arrival and phenomenal growth throughout various Asian countries penetrated not only colonial territories but also captivated collective states of imagination. With the coming of the 20th century, the medium that began as mere entertainment became a means for communicating many of the cultural identities of the region's ethnic nationalities, as they turned their favorite pastime into an expression of their cherished national cultures. Covering diverse locations, including China, India, Japan, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Iran, and the countries of the Pacific Islands, contributors to this volume reveal the story of early cinema in Asia, helping us to understand the first seeds of a medium that has since grown deep roots in the region.

1	Early Asian Cinema and the Public Sphere

Wimal Dissanayake

COMMENTATORS ON ASIAN cinema usually point out that cinema as a form of mass entertainment is an importation from the West and that cinema was, in the early years, an inferior form of entertainment given over to sentimentality and thoughtless melodrama. These statements are true, as far as they go. However, they need to be immediately qualified for one to attain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Asian cinema. My objective is to explore the complex and interesting ways in which early Asian cinema was implicated in the public spheres of countries in South Asia and Southeast Asia. The period I cover is from 1910 to 1950. There is nothing magical about the years 1910 and 1950 except that they are a convenient point of demarcation and generally signify the first four decades of indigenous filmmaking in Asia.

Cinema has become one of the most important forms of mass entertainment in Asia. Asia has also become a site in which meanings related to a complex set of issues such as modernity, nationhood, Westernization, feminism, colonialism, urbanization, civil society, and cultural citizenship are negotiated. No cinema emerges from a cultural vacuum. Indeed, all cinemas display the stamp of the culture, society, political structure, and historical moment that produced them. Asian cinemas are no exception. They explore issues such as modernity, nationhood, and urbanization in terms of their specific experiential backgrounds. The cinemas of the eight countries that I discuss have their own distinctive trajectories of growth. While they share certain commonalities of interests and concerns, each also displays its unique preoccupations. Most moviegoers would agree that cinema is a significant social practice; that is, it has many dimensions—social, cultural, political, ideological, technological, artistic, and so on—that are closely and vitally interconnected and that constitute an important cultural discourse with considerable ramifications. It is often said that cinema mirrors social reality. However, it is equally important to recognize that cinema shapes reality, which has been the case from its beginning in the Asian countries that I have selected for analysis. In this chapter, I use the term “cinema” in its wide sense to include individual films as well as the larger social and cultural discourse within which they operated.

Concepts of Asian Cinema

At the very outset, let me share my ideas of the concept of Asian cinema, which are central to the intent of this chapter. The term “Asian cinema” appears simple on the surface, but the more we delve into it, the more we realize that it is problematic and multifaceted. For purposes of analysis, we can discuss Asian cinema at three levels of ascending complexity. The first is the geopolitical aspect. According to the imperatives of this level, we identify Asian cinemas in terms of their geographic location. This seems straightforward enough. However, even here, one runs into numerous difficulties; one has only to consider the histories and geographies of countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Singapore, and Hong Kong to understand the full force of this statement. Second, we can understand Asian cinemas at the level of national cinemas. Here, the concept of Asian cinema refers to the additive collectivity of diverse national cinemas such as Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Korean. This is the way that, for the most part, Asian cinema is being currently interpreted. However, there is a third dimension that one cannot afford to ignore—the idea of a pan-Asian cinema, which includes the commonalities that bind Asian cinema and how Asian cinema comes to signify more than its national parts. What this means is that in terms of aesthetics and discursive formations, there is a recognizable entity that can be termed “Asian cinema,” which rises above the idea of an additive conglomeration of national cinemas. When we examine Asian drama, for example, we see that before the spread of Western realistic drama, the theater of different Asian countries had many things in common in terms of poetics, strategies of representation, and production of textuality. Similarly, in my work on Asian theories of communication, I have pointed out that Asian countries share certain basic presuppositions and understandings of human communication present from classical times. As we focus on the idea of Asian cinema, we need to bear in mind the complex interactions among these three levels.

Asian cinema is an open-ended and contested concept. In discussing it, we need to pay attention to continuities and discontinuities as well as synchronic and diachronic dimensions because none of the Asian cinemas discussed here present us with unproblematic and linear narratives and trajectories. On the contrary, they are driven by contradictions, ambiguities, and uncertainties. Contradictory spaces and multiple histories inform the discourse of Asian cinema. When discussing Asian cinema, we need to keep in mind that the images, meanings, and capital being produced are vitally interconnected. How cinemas draw on and forward the march of capitalism, technical innovation, and ideological issues merits close analysis. At different periods in the evolution of Asian cinema in general we have seen how the confrontations between the colonizer and the colonized, the individual and the collectivity, the local and the global, formed a central part of the cinematic discourse in Asia. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that we are cognizant of the complexities associated with Asian cinema and not treat it unproblematically, as if there were a universal consensus regarding it, or treat it essentially, that is, historically.

There is a general tendency to treat Asian cinematic identity as transparent; nothing could be further from the truth. As with all other forms of cultural identities, Asian cinema is changing and on the move, and it cannot be contained in prefabricated categories. Our focus should be on Asian cinema not as a finished product but as an ongoing process; to speak in philosophical terms, most notably those of Heidegger, we are concerned with “becoming” and not “being.” The eminent cultural critic Stuart Hall observes, “The first position defines ‘cultural identity’ in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective, ‘one true self,’ hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves,’ which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common…. [The] second position recognizes that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are.’ … Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past.”¹ This track of thought is useful when we discuss the identity of Asian cinema. Questions of globalization, post-Fordist economic transformations, the move toward coproductions in cinema, and the role of international film festivals and awards in shaping normative discourses of national cinemas demand sustained attention. At the same time, we should remind ourselves of the palimpsestic nature of Asian national cinemas and the concurrence of different models, paradigms, and aesthetic impulses inhabiting the same cinematic space. I use the term “palimpsest” to highlight that Asian cinemas contain diverse layers of historically driven significances. One has only to consider the works of Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, and Nagisa Oshima, in the case of Japan, to see the simultaneous existence of different cinematic models within the same national filmic space.

With the increasing velocity of cultural modernization, globalization, and transnationalization, the very concepts of national cinema and national filmmakers, which are central to the discussion of Asian cinema, become inevitably problematized. Let us consider Nagisa Oshima’s film Max mon amour (1986), based on a story by Luis Buñuel dealing with the French bourgeoisie. It was financed by the French, and the actors and actresses in the film are French. As Oshima remarked, “This is an Oshima film,” but whether it is a Japanese film is not entirely clear. Do questions regarding nationality still mean anything when we are dealing with film? Similarly, questions can be raised with regard to the work of film directors like Ang Lee and Shekhar Kapoor.

When we discuss the concept of Asian cinema, it is important to keep in mind its closer attention to the writing of film history, which is an open-ended enterprise. In writing film histories, we produce the historical objects we study. This has great implications for the study of the idea of Asian cinema. Today, when we write film histories of diverse Asian cinemas (Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.), we need to simultaneously occupy different spaces created by the past and history, by transnationalization, by the changing shapes of cultural modernities. Writing film histories is also a way of charting the course for the future. Hence, in our efforts to understand the meaning of the concept of Asian cinema, we need to pay particular attention to how film histories have been written and how they are being written today. Film histories widen the discursive domain of Asian national cinema, as is clearly evidenced in the work of Nick Deocampo with regard to the Spanish influences on early Filipino cinema. When we discuss Asian cinema, therefore, it is of the utmost importance that we keep within our sights this problematic and contested nature of the concept of Asian cinema.

The Concept of the Public Sphere

An elucidation of the concept of the public sphere is central to the intent of this chapter. As it does for the concept of Asian cinema, any discussion of the notion of the public sphere has to focus on its problematic nature. This means that we have to raise questions such as, Is there a distinctly identifiable Asian public sphere, as opposed to, say, a European public sphere? How has the nature of the public sphere in Asian countries changed over time? How do these changes affect the relationship between cinemas and the public sphere in Asia? Although the idea of the public sphere and its importance in generating public opinion was articulated in diverse ways by thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, and Walter Lippman, it was the German social philosopher Jürgen Habermas who in recent years was responsible for putting it into circulation in scholarly and popular discussions. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere rekindled a great interest in this concept among both specialists in the humanities and social sciences and lay intelligent readers.² This book, published in Germany in 1962, was translated into English in 1989. In this work, Habermas focuses on a constellation of forces and institutions that had their origins in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Europe. According to Habermas these webs of forces and institutions are pivotal to an understanding of the dynamics of democratic societies and oppositionality that is vital to their proper functioning. He characterizes these forces and institutions as the public sphere. He is seeking to delineate a space that is separate from the government, state, and market forces and that would play a key role in democratic discussions. According to Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere was crucial to the democratically oriented social changes that occurred in the eighteenth century and the concomitant rise of the nation-states. He perceives the institutionalized bourgeois public sphere as both a nexus of interests, a space of oppositionality existing between state and society, and a rational-critical discursive practice that bears on politics in the wider sense of the term.

Habermas makes the observation that the public sphere “may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as public: they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in the debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privileged but practically relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason.”³ What is noteworthy about this public sphere is that it originally took shape within the world of letters. Habermas describes the ways in which the public sphere differentiated itself from the state and civil society. Here he focuses on the important part played by newspapers, journals, literary salons, coffee houses, and works of fiction. One of the great strengths of Habermas’s line of thinking, according to Michael Warner, is that it conceives of the reading practices prevalent in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe as a new and invigorating form of social institution.⁴ The emergence of the public sphere and reading practices were imbricated in complex ways. Print discourse increasingly differentiated itself from the activities of the state and civil society. Reading practices became an important ally in the process of establishing agency and citizenship. This is, of course, not to suggest that the public sphere that took shape within the world of letters was a homogeneous formation. Far from it—it was crisscrossed and segmented by the fault lines of linguistic, religious, political, and class differences, among others.

I believe that the clearest explication of the concept of the public sphere is found in the following description by Habermas:

By the public sphere we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to its citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every convention in which private individuals assemble to form a public body. They then behave neither like business and professional people transacting private affairs, nor like members of a constitutional order subject to the legal constraints of state bureaucracy. Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion—that is, with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express and publish their opinions on matters of general interest. In a large public body, this kind of communication requires specific means of transmitting information and influencing those who receive it. Today, newspapers, magazines, radio and TV are the media of public sphere.⁵

In the eighteenth century, the print media were at the center of the public culture. Today, visual media such as film and television have become the dominant media associated with the public sphere.

There are two sets of meanings that lie at the heart of Habermas’s conceptualization of the public sphere. First, he deploys the term in its historical specificity as a phenomenon that had its origins in seventeenth-century England. Second, he is keen to utilize the term in a more inclusive fashion to signify a wider social phenomenon of which the public sphere is one form. The way he has sought to describe the differences between the bourgeois and the plebian public spheres, and his general desire to extract general implications, serve to turn the public sphere into discursivity with normative resonances.

According to Habermas—a view not necessarily shared by later commentators—the bourgeois public sphere began to decline and lost its adversarial strength as a consequence of the rise of the welfare state, mass media, advertising, and public relations; he thought that these had the effect of eliminating the distinction between the public and the private. In my judgment, Habermas does not adequately explore and understand the complexities of the modern experience. There are several problematic areas in his conceptualization. First, there is a tendency to overvalorize the public sphere and underplay the historically evident tensions and conflicts within it. Second, he does not deal convincingly with the binarism of the public and the private. Third, Habermas does not pay adequate attention to the marginalized status of women in the public sphere. Fourth, he is attached to an interpersonal model of communication that cannot do justice to the complexities of modern life.

Habermas, undoubtedly, opened up an interesting and fruitful line of inquiry that was broadened by later writers. Although he does not talk of cinema as a vital adjunct of the public sphere, the German sociologist Oskar Negt and the filmmaker Alexander Kluge did precisely that. They sought to point out that workers, women, and subalterns did not find a voice in the public sphere and that the ways in which modern electronic media are shaping the public sphere have not been adequately addressed.⁶ They also challenged Habermas’s notion that modern media index the disintegration of the public sphere. According to Miriam Hansen, Negt and Kluge rightly focus on the salience of “social horizon of experience” grounded in “the context of living.”⁷

The concept of social horizon has the merit of bringing into clearer view some of the important phenomena excluded by the public sphere that bear directly on issues of social reproduction. Hansen remarks that Negt and Kluge “do not construct this horizon in analogy to the bourgeois-liberal model—as a presumably autonomous sphere above the marketplace and particular interests—but rather trace its contours in the new industrial-commercial publics that no longer pretend to such a separate, independent status. These ‘public spheres of production’ include a variety of contexts, such as factory communities, spaces of commerce and consumption (restaurants, shopping malls), and, of course, the cinema and other privately owned media of the ‘consciousness industry.’”⁸

What is interesting is that Negt and Kluge widened the public sphere to include the power of cinema in a way that Habermas did not. They were interested in exploring the many sides of the politics of the public sphere. According to Miriam Hansen,

Central to his [Kluge’s] film aesthetics is a concept of montage predicated on relationality—he refers to the montage as the morphology of relations …—a textual climbing wall designed to encourage viewers to draw their own connections across generic divisions of fiction and documentary and of disparate realms and registers of experience. A film is successful in that regard if it manages to activate (rather than merely usurp) what Kluge calls “the film in the spectator’s head”—the horizon of experience as instantiated in the subject. The specific connections encouraged by the film respond to the structu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Beginnings of Cinema in Asia
• 1 Early Asian Cinema and the Public Sphere
• 2 Nationalism, Contradiction, and Identity; or, A Reconsideration of Early Cinema in the Philippines
• 3 Film’s Initial Reception in China during Its Period of Infancy
• 4 Hong Kong’s Cinematic Beginnings, 1896–1908
• 5 How Cinema Arrived and Stayed in Taiwan
• 6 One Print in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Film Industry and Culture in 1910s Japan
• 7 Distributing Scandinavia: Nordisk Film in Asia
• 8 The Civilizing Cinema Mission: Colonial Beginnings of Film in Indochina
• 9 A National Cinema Takes Root in a Colonial Regime: Early Cinema in India
• 10 Colonial Beginnings of Cinema in the Philippines
• 11 From Shadow Play to the Silver Screen: Early Malay(sian) Cinema
• 12 Iranian Cinema: Before the Revolution
• 13 Royalty Shapes Early Thai Film Culture
• 14 I Was Born, but … : Some Thoughts on the Origins of Cinema in Asia
• 15 Before Moana: Early Cinema of the Pacific
• 16 Early Cinema in Central Asia: The Start of an Ascent
• Appendix: Chronology of Film Beginnings in Asia
• Selected Bibliography
• Index