Asian Film and Penetration on Eastern & Western Markets - Research Paper Example

NAME OF THE UNIVERSITY ASIAN FILMS PENETRATION ON EASTERN & WESTERN MARKETS NAME OF THE STUDENT ADM. NO: COURSE NAME: COURSE CODE: NAME OF LECTURER 9/20/2012 Discuss this quote by concentrating on any Asian film that has penetrated both Eastern and Western film markets Introduction The global popularity of films from East Asia has drawn critical attention to the overlapping territories of national and transnational cinemas. The phenomenal success of East Asia's popular cultural products in capturing Asian and Western markets has prompted critical rethinking of the knowledge of “Asian Culture” and the geopolitical importance of the region as an intermediary between the local and the global region. The episode in Junsui Films, for instance “Never the Twain” can be used to examine this evolution and the unmistakable impact in the West. The growing prominence of the “Asian Pacific” as a cultural and economic entity calls for a re-examination of the ways the region has been constructed and in the ways the region constructs itself. This essay focuses on the regional and overseas film dynamism; specifically, the interrelationship among national and transnational cinemas that draw attention to how multinationalism is being mobilised in the region (Berry et al, 2009). While studies in national cinema have focused on filmic and narrative style, convention, strategy and device as types of a national character or as analogues of a national identity, this essay instead foregrounds issues of a regional transnational cinema, issues that center on the region’s multinationalism as inscribed in the cinematic discourses of nation and national identity. Discussion The main arena of cultural production in East Asia entailing several localities of production and consumption is cinema. The global success of modern East Asian films and internationalization of the region’s film industry has been subject of debate in present years. Films arrived in Asian nations with exception of Japan at times they were surrounded by domestic crises and overseas invasions (Duara, 2001, p.101). The development of cinemas like Jinsui also coincided with Japan’s rise to a major imperial power in the region. On the culture front, East Asia “soft power” is mainly felt through its popular cultural products and a dynamic visual culture, such as Japanese “manga”, “modern romance”, “TV Dramas”, “anime” and “horror” films; Hong Kong actions films; Chinese martial arts and costume drama films; Korean blockbusters and the commonly known “Hallyu” or Korean Wave; a developing Asian “auteur cinema” and more recently regional co-productions evincing a self-conscious “pan-Asian” awareness (Berry & Farquhar, 2006). The deepening integration of Junsui Films in regional markets, consolidation of industry structure, and inter-regional collaborations have created an unprecedented occasion for a reconfiguration of these cultural empires. Chu (2003) argues that this latter portion of shared history demarcates that politically sensitive yet culturally and economically versatile space in which cinemas are produced, distributed and consumed. The regional as a critical structure thus has to mediate the tensions arising from the differential power relations, historical memories, and local realities that are structure, partially if not wholly, on the basis of nation in wide sense. Acting cinemas generally focus on a representation of the nation or world happenings and belief different people uphold the issues. In the early 1990s, the film Junsui Films came into existence to illustrate the long history of political repression and state interference. Beginning with the political democratization in 1992, the massive program of commercialization and global orchestrated by the state and large multinational corporations has given rise to the phenomenon of record-breaker or Korean blockbusters. Turning to Junsui Films Japan film industry development, the country relatively earlier admission to international cinema through the works of luminaries such as Ozu, Yasujiro and Mizoguchi has shown that Japanese cinemas in the West have produced a substantial impact, from an aesthetically-oriented, neo-formalist mode of inquiry to ideological and political critique. The concept of the Junsui Films adequately address the region as an interconnected whole that is susceptible to global political fluctuations and multinational capitalism. While East Asia remains differentiated, conflicted region rather than a homogenous whole, government policy and structural changes in the last decade have also brought about further regional consolidation and internationalization of the film industries. In this reference, cinema as cultural industry subject to the vicissitudes of economic globalization, regionalization and national policy regulations offers yet another critical angle from which to configure the field of East Asian cinemas. The existence of decisive writings on East Asia cinemas has revealed that film industry has been a place where native artistic practices are brought into productive dialogues with West customs. In the last decade, the East Asia, if not Eastern world as a whole, have been the concerns of aesthetics developments and film anthologies (Duara, 2001, p.103). The episode, for instance in Jinsui has focused on specific national cinemas or adopting a more “pan-Asia” and global approach, these interventions have accentuated the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary shove in contemporary films. This has incorporated the increasing attention to the inter-connections between film and the political economy of the region’s cultural industries and mass media. While certain Asia Pacific cinemas have moved beyond their respective boarders in their project of national identity formation, Junsui Films have also encroached on less economically developed geographies and bodies. In so doing, these cinemas have reproduced the imperialist ethos and desires. The stereotype in Jinsui denotes the East Asian cinema configurations to regional and international film art and practices, because of the way cultural politics and imagination of different regions is infused in the act. Films offer narrative and discursive nodes whereby a working of the issues of the East Asia and world as a whole can be interpreted. A good illustration of this could be based on two films, which are symptomatic of the transnational developments between the Philippines and Asia Pacific: Days of Being Wild which depicts the search for Hong Kong national origin in the Philippine landscape and All Under the Moon which tackles the related lives of subaltern beings in the highly sexualised sphere of the Japanese transnational. Though the films veer away from overtly orientalist depictions of the other, emblematic of tourist or nature films shot on international locations, they are more explicit in providing for an alternative film-making practice within their own national cinemas. As the Junsui Films forefront the present impact of the cultural transmission in the world and Asia Pacific capitals, they also foreshadow other cultures like Philippine nation space. The Philippines films are presently competing with Hollywood cinemas, they have generated from the newly fueled economies of Asia Pacific and their cinemas. Recent developments in Asia Pacific cinemas have implicated the Philippines and its people in forging respective images of national identities. This move to allot and demarcate the Philippine space and the Filipino body in various Asia Pacific cinemas constitutes a notion of the Philippine culture and economic safety. Rather than designating a homogenous, free-standing regional cinema, this understanding of East Asian cinemas refers to a mutating network of film practices at the intra-regional levels. It also means that the cinemascape of East Asia is involved in the geopolitics and the conflicting national discourses that make territorial and ideological claims on the region. One of the more visible impacts of economic globalization on East Asia’s film industries is the industry-wide change toward co-production, which has become a dominant mode of practice in the mainstream commercial cinema. Co-produced films have gained a stronghold in the Asian film market. Successful pan-Asian films are able to invoke a sense of universality through the manipulation of setting, costume, characterization and narrative. Far from being culturally innocent, this universality is the result of commercial and ideological calculations. No doubt co-productions can mobilize a diverse range of cultural, financial, technical, and artistic resources in the production of mega-blockbusters across national boundaries. However, it is also true that a majority of the recent co-productions are primed for the China market (East), while more and more films labeled pan-Asian are effectively pan-Chinese in terms of language, cast and content. Economics and cultural power, after all, are important denominators in the co-production enterprise. This is presented by the inherent instability and contingence of the very idea of East Asia and its multifaceted cinematic traditions and cultural imaginations, in addition to more recent changes in the global and regional political economy. Instead of imagining one regional cinema, it attends to pre-existing and emerging traits, patterns, practices and relations of production and consumption, especially those whose nuanced connections have not yet been fully accounted for. While cultural policy and economic globalization can blur and redraw the boundaries of any national or regional cinema, in the new global order cinema can still afford to be a powerful means of popular cultural imagination and identity articulations whose origins remain the local realities and experiences, where the regional and the global obtain tangible form and substance. According to Berry and Farquhar (2006), the latest developments in China’s film industry, the impact of co-production on local films, and their personal experiences in working in, with and through China. Hong Kong and Singapore are two key players in the pan-Asia co-production network with deep historical and cultural links to China, and their respective futures in the growing Sinophone film market deserve closer attention. Conclusion Among the most popular East Asian cinemas in Asia and increasingly visible and influential in Europe and the US, recent films from South Korea for instance did not arise out of nowhere. Yet its greatest contribution may very well be in analyzing not just the “why” of Asian cinema, but the “how”-how the Korean film industry remade itself in the early 1990s to become a veritable juggernaut at home and abroad, a major player in global film culture, arguably more important on the world stage today than either the Japanese or Hong Kong cinemas (Gateward, 2007). Indeed, the contributions of Asian films are immense on global film industries. The regional has initiated a stiff competition with Western cinemas that had previously dominated the market. With the existence of technology like Second Life opening up new horizons in simulation film industry, the development is simply expected to speed up. One of the key challenges facing us in postmodern world of technology and hyper reality is to aggressively uphold real, valid activities and relations in lives. Bibliography Berry, C. & Farquhar, M. 2006. China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Berry, C., Liscutin, N. & Mackintosh, J.D. 2009. Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Chu, Y. 2003. Hong Kong Cinema: Coloniser, Motherland and Self, London and New York: Curzon. Chua B. 2004. Conceptualising an East Asian Popular Culture, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, 200–21. Ciecko, A. 2006. Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame, Oxford; New York: Berg. Darrell, D. & Yueh-yu E. 2008. East Asian Screen Industries, London: British Film Institute. Duara, P. 2001. The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism, Journal of World History, 12:1, 99–121. Gateward, F. 2007. Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, Albany: State University of New York. Geller, T.L. 2008. Transnational noir: style and substance in Hayashi Kaiyo’s The Most Terrible Time of My Life, East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, 172–87. Hunt, L. & Leung W.F. 2008. East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, London: I. B. Tauris. Iwabuchi, K. 2002. Nostalgia for a (Different) Asian Modernity: Media Consumption of ‘Asia’ in Japan, Positions, 10:3, 543–73. Miyagi, T. 2006. Post-War Japan and Asianism, Asia Pacific Review, 13:2, 1–16. Stringer, J. & Chi-Yun, S. 2005. New Korean Cinema, New York: New York University Press. Zhang, Y. 2004. Chinese National Cinema, New York and London: Routledge. Read More

The concept of the Junsui Films adequately address the region as an interconnected whole that is susceptible to global political fluctuations and multinational capitalism. While East Asia remains differentiated, conflicted region rather than a homogenous whole, government policy and structural changes in the last decade have also brought about further regional consolidation and internationalization of the film industries. In this reference, cinema as cultural industry subject to the vicissitudes of economic globalization, regionalization and national policy regulations offers yet another critical angle from which to configure the field of East Asian cinemas.

The existence of decisive writings on East Asia cinemas has revealed that film industry has been a place where native artistic practices are brought into productive dialogues with West customs. In the last decade, the East Asia, if not Eastern world as a whole, have been the concerns of aesthetics developments and film anthologies (Duara, 2001, p.103). The episode, for instance in Jinsui has focused on specific national cinemas or adopting a more “pan-Asia” and global approach, these interventions have accentuated the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary shove in contemporary films.

This has incorporated the increasing attention to the inter-connections between film and the political economy of the region’s cultural industries and mass media. While certain Asia Pacific cinemas have moved beyond their respective boarders in their project of national identity formation, Junsui Films have also encroached on less economically developed geographies and bodies. In so doing, these cinemas have reproduced the imperialist ethos and desires. The stereotype in Jinsui denotes the East Asian cinema configurations to regional and international film art and practices, because of the way cultural politics and imagination of different regions is infused in the act.

Films offer narrative and discursive nodes whereby a working of the issues of the East Asia and world as a whole can be interpreted. A good illustration of this could be based on two films, which are symptomatic of the transnational developments between the Philippines and Asia Pacific: Days of Being Wild which depicts the search for Hong Kong national origin in the Philippine landscape and All Under the Moon which tackles the related lives of subaltern beings in the highly sexualised sphere of the Japanese transnational.

Though the films veer away from overtly orientalist depictions of the other, emblematic of tourist or nature films shot on international locations, they are more explicit in providing for an alternative film-making practice within their own national cinemas. As the Junsui Films forefront the present impact of the cultural transmission in the world and Asia Pacific capitals, they also foreshadow other cultures like Philippine nation space. The Philippines films are presently competing with Hollywood cinemas, they have generated from the newly fueled economies of Asia Pacific and their cinemas.

Recent developments in Asia Pacific cinemas have implicated the Philippines and its people in forging respective images of national identities. This move to allot and demarcate the Philippine space and the Filipino body in various Asia Pacific cinemas constitutes a notion of the Philippine culture and economic safety. Rather than designating a homogenous, free-standing regional cinema, this understanding of East Asian cinemas refers to a mutating network of film practices at the intra-regional levels.

It also means that the cinemascape of East Asia is involved in the geopolitics and the conflicting national discourses that make territorial and ideological claims on the region. One of the more visible impacts of economic globalization on East Asia’s film industries is the industry-wide change toward co-production, which has become a dominant mode of practice in the mainstream commercial cinema. Co-produced films have gained a stronghold in the Asian film market.

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