Organizer and Chair: Yeh Yueh yu, University of Southern California
Discussant: Gina Marchetti, University of Maryland, College Park
Colonialism has occupied an important place in Asian Pacific cinemas. It is represented to form a dialogue with colonial power, mediate identity crisis and call up resistance. The concept of the nation, questions of identity and constitution of spectatorship have become central issues in discussing the films. However, filmmakers of each country have sought different modes of representations pertinent to their socio political and cultural context. The multiformity of cinematic narration of the nation has rendered a unifying discourse on Asian Pacific cinemas difficult and impossible. The panel is thus organized to address the differences of Asian Pacific cinemas and the plurality of methodologies in engaging with the continuous discourse of identity, nation and colonialism.
Yeh Yueh yu's paper discusses the relationship between Taiwan's film and music in the political and historical transformation of the late 1980s. She examines how an (inter)media's articulation of a new national identity is problematized by the global postmodern culture. Roland Tolentino's paper situates Filipino cinema in a concept of "community" represented in films of the most celebrated Filipino director, Lino Brocka. Kyung hyun Kim deals with North Korean cinema in a historical context of utilizing socialist realism for consolidating, national identity, mediating, institution between the party and the masses. Chris Hamm focuses on a popular martial arts hero Huang Fei hong in Hong Kong's TV and film since the 1960's. He argues the configuration of the legendary hero in current films is a construct for mediating identity crisis in the late colonial Hong Kong.
Kyung Hyun Kim, University of Southern California
Despite a large and active film industry that exists in North Korea, critical interrogation of North Korean cinema has never been undertaken in the Western film studies. The phenomenon is consistent with other cultural areas of North Korea that have also been largely ignored in Western scholarship, especially in the United States. This is rather contradictory when considering the enormous stake the U.S. has in the Korean peninsula since the conclusion of World War II. The U.S. continues to operate large military bases in South Korea after having already intervened in a major war. It also has a large economic trade with the South while the North recently became the focal point of the U. S. national security and media surrounding the nuclear issue and the change of leadership.
A number of reasons can be ascertained as to why there has been a certain reticence regarding North Korean cultural studies: 1) even after the conclusion of the East West conflict, Korean peninsula remains as the last site of Cold War which limits and discourages active trade and dissemination of information between two Koreas; 2) the South Korean government promotes an anti North strategy in the western scholarship through its various agencies that has largely de legitimized cultural developments in the North and has stressed cultural works of the South as the sole constituent of Korean national identity; and 3) the discussion of realism, especially of socialist realism, has become largely archaic and mute in the West as realism has undergone a crisis of representation, and superseded by modernism. However, a re evaluation of North Korean socialist realism demands urgency and cogency since realism continues to occupy an invaluable position in the Third World and a comprehensive assessment of Korean national culture would be impossible without it. Furthermore, the failure to understand North Korean culture by the West has brought serious ramifications. North Korean state has been advertised as "a beast without its head" by the popular Western press, occupying the landscape of Orientalist imagination. In this paper, I will present a brief general overview of North Korean film industry and examine the relationship between civil society and the state. A case study of Sea of Blood (1969) will also be offered to illustrate how art functions as a mediating institution between the party and the masses.
Chris Hamm, University of California, Berkeley
Tsui Hark's phenomenally popular Huang Feihong movies draw strength from their links with earlier representations of the martial arts master Huang in Hong Kong cinema. At the same time, they derive much of their vitality and humor from their dramatic reformulations of and outright breaks with this cinematic tradition. The Confucian patriarch portrayed by Kwan Tak Hing in the 50's and 60's became a "wayward son" in director Yuen Woo Ping's late 70's productions; as interpreted by Li Lienjie in Tsui Hark's films, Huang is again transformed, now appearing in the image of a "young professional." This refurbished hero operates, moreover, in a radically re imagined social and ideological context. The earlier Huangs' struggles transpired within the unchallenged and apparently timeless moral and social contours of the traditional martial world. Tsui Hark's Huang Feihong, however, finds himself in an explicitly historicized China, where the identity and validity of China and its traditions are themselves the focus of struggle. In this context, the very notion of the martial arts hero becomes problematized. By simultaneously venerating the traditional hero and presenting him as susceptible to change and vulnerable to humor, Tsui Hark's films propose an affirmative response to this problem of identity-breathing new life into the inherited image, and offering the revitalized hero as a model for response to current political and cultural crises. The various spin offs from and outright parodies of the series offer further proof of its impact and insight into its distinctive contributions to the image of the martial arts hero.
Roland B. Tolentino, University of Southern California/University of the Philippines
The experience of the motherland ("inangbayan")-that female cultural representation that inspires people into nationalist thought and popular struggle-in my contention, is analogous to the experience of the sublime: the contact between a temporal event and a massive inspirational feeling that produces contestation of nationalism, which transforms into popular history and generates the nation-space. This paper examines the modes by which the motherland is engendered in Lino Brocka's later social drama films and in iconographic (Virgin Mary; Inangbayan in the "seditious" Tagalog zarzuelas of 1903-1905) and recent (Corazon Aquino and Imelda Marcos; Our Lady of EDSA in the Ortigas flyover interchange) cultural representations. Furthermore, it links the experience of inangbayan as sublime to the modes by which transnationalism is affected from within Manila's urban space and spacing of the rural periphery. It maps the discourse of the motherland and mothering of the nation within the legacy of Marcos' drive to modernism and dreams of modernity as taken up by succeeding presidencies of Aquino and Ramos. Consequently, the paper also attempts to foreground some issues in a dialogue between nationalism and feminist thought.
Yeh Yueh yu, University of Southern California
When martial law was lifted in Taiwan in 1987 after its 40 years' enforcement by the reigning regime, Guomingdang (KMT), Taiwanese society immediately entered into a historical phase of rapid political reform and raging social change. One of the most significant changes galvanized by the political transformation is the return of the repressed Taiwan identity, which had been denied and suppressed since the Japanese occupation at the turn of the century. The regain of the long lost national and cultural identity is celebrated in many cultural fields, especially in the media. However, economy is still considered as a prerogative even when politics is allowed to come into play. Therefore, art, profits and politics are seen irrevocably symbiotic in creating new forms of cultural products. In popular music, rap is incorporated with Taiwanese folk music for textual innovation as well as commercial concerns. In film, the representation of the indigenous identity, commodification and search for new forms are major tendencies of the post New Taiwan Cinema.
Given the domination of the global commodity culture, what kind of identity has been represented by Taiwan's rap music and film respectively? Are they different from the one imposed by the state apparatuses? Is there any similarity or difference between the two media's representation of a new identity? If so, what manifests the disparity? These questions frame a context within which the paper discusses a new, split and polyvalent identity in formation. By focusing on two popular rap albums Liagong gwa (Songs of Madness, 1989) and Ditaopuei ei Funny Rap chokuei liamgwa: wuo zhi shenjing bing (Pig Head Skin's Funny Rap: I Am Nuts, l994) and the relationship between the film Treasure Island (1993) and its soundtrack album the paper suggests that a perspective of plurality has been incorporated in contesting official indoctrination and articulating the actual instability of a society in transformation.
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