Asian Citations: Postmodernism, Politics, and Global Cinema

Abstract

Film plays a critical role in creating a common ground for the exchange of political and aesthetic ideas between Asia and the rest of the world. The depiction of Asia on contemporary world screens serves as a site, sight, and citation—a place, an image, and a reference point—for an ongoing critique of global politics and film aesthetics. In this paper, I plan to show how transnational productions—made in and/or about Asia—use intensely self-reflexive techniques with a high degree of intertextuality in order to carve out a cinematic common ground. Film quotations, then, operate as part of a postmodern cultural marketplace, but, more importantly, they also link current motion pictures to past political movements and unresolved social issues that continue to fuel screen fantasies about Asia in the 21st century. Taking Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Café Lumiere and The Flight of the Red Balloon as case studies, I plan to look at the various ways the films negotiate a space between Chinese-language filmmaking in Taiwan and the legacy of French and Japanese cinema, while simultaneously creating a site for a particular type of transnational Asian art cinema.