Asian cinema: the World and a region on screen

Abstract

Film scholars have wrestled with the concept of “Asian cinema” for decades. Cognizant of the dangers of Orientalist overgeneralizations, the history of colonial redrawing of borders, the legacy of Japanese pan-Asian imperialism and Cold War falling dominoes defining the region, many have argued against the need for the term. Film studies, after all, has many ways of categorizing motion pictures according to studios, stars, domestic markets, genres, auteurs, styles, and various markers of identity (gender, sexual orientation, generation, race, ethnicity, class, nation, religion, culture/subculture). The discipline, however, struggles to let go of the centrality of the “nation” in looking at films made outside Europe and America. There are substantial books in English (as well as French and some other European languages), for example, on Japanese, Indian, Korean and Chinese film (including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and, more rarely, Singapore), with the occasional slimmer volume on Philippine, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese film, and the cinemas of West and Central Asia. However, the books that take a regional perspective are rare, and they most often, as the case of the enormously important books by John Lent, Anne Ciecko, and Yeh Yueh-Yu and Darrell Davis on the topic, look at the region in terms of discrete, national film industries. Although Yeh and Davis gesture toward the transnational co-production as a new regional standard, the implication of these industrial changes and the impact of globalization has yet to be charted systematically. Beyond this, the significance of “Asian cinema” as a category within world film needs to be mapped out, and this paper argues for the necessity of this concept for understanding regional connections that cannot be fathomed without “Asia” as an overarching idea.