Session 81: Mega-Cities, Minor Cinema: Urban Space and Experience in Recent Asian Cinema

Organizer: Susie Jie Young Kim, Duke University

Chair and Discussant: Michael Raine, University of Chicago

Keywords: Asian cinema, globalization, urban space.

This panel adopts a comparative approach to issues of cultural globalization in the context of films set in East Asian cities. Focusing on cinematic representations of contemporary urban space in Korea, China, Japan, and Taiwan the panel considers the mechanisms that allow local history and memory to survive in cities marked by rapid and uprooting modernization, expansion to an almost incomprehensible scale, and a cosmopolitan ideal developed within the orbit of global capitalism. Scholars and filmmakers have long understood that the history of cinema is intimately linked to the history of the modern city. This panel examines the new cinema developing in tandem with emerging mega-cities like contemporary Seoul, Shanghai, and Taibei, where transformations of unprecedented scope and rapidity inspire new modes of adaptation among the citizenry and new strategies among artists charged with representing both massive change and the most minute and minor survivals.

The Mega-City Film: Lou Ye’s Suzhou River

James A. Tweedie, University of Washington

In the past decade the relationship between cinema and the city has been one of the most productive avenues in film research, as this conceptual framework combines one of the areas of cinema studies most amenable to sociological and industrial analysis with one of the most prominent preoccupations of filmmakers: the historically new spaces and cityscapes of the modern metropolis, the juxtapositions and gatherings of people it makes possible, and the dynamism of the city itself. Several recent collections of essays devoted to the topic of "cinema and the city" have traced the parallels between the development of cinema and urban experience, especially in the context of early-twentieth-century Europe, and most remarkably in the "city film" genre. But the mega-city represents not merely a quantitative expansion of the modern metropolis, an increase in population and an incessant outward sprawl, but also a qualitative transformation of urban experience under the pressure of the mega-city’s unprecedented scale; density, and overload. Focusing on Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (Suzhou He, 2000), this paper considers the challenge to the generic conventions of the "city film" posed by contemporary underground and independent cinema produced in Beijing and Shanghai, with particular attention to the role of digital video and the documentary in the development of the new "mega-city film."

Moving against Time: Seoul and the Asian Cityscape

Susie Jie Young Kim, Duke University

Time is literally of the essence in postwar contemporary South Korea inasmuch as its status as a divided nation puts it under constant duress to define its past, present, and future. This temporal and spatial grid informs this paper, particularly as it configures the representation of Seoul as a dynamic metropolis in the transnational network of Asian centers of cultural production. The broad theme binding this paper will deal with the articulation in recent films of time as distorted, manipulated, and off-center in the construction of Seoul whose parameters are marked by its subway, the neighborhood of Tongdaemun gate (as a historical site and also wholesale fashion center for buyers from all over Asia), and its numerous bridges spanning the Han River. However, Seoul is simultaneously a global city. Moreover, it is also represented as an imaginary Korean cityscape of marginalized peripheries acting as a counterpoint to the radical changes occurring in the postwar/"postcolonial" era of cultural globalization. Here, Seoul is stripped of its gloss and sheen to reveal its underlying hierarchy of spatial compartmentalization, part of which is prompted by the markings of time and memory imprinted on the faces of its inhabitants. The dynamic urban center reveals its other facade as a mnemonic site of counter-memories, which speaks to the simultaneity of different times marking the various spaces of this cityscape.

For Whom to Atone: Trauma and Redemption in Asian Films

Xinmin Liu, University of Pittsburgh

In this paper I propose to study one aspect of the memory vs. history problematic that intersects global concerns and local contestations in Greater China and its neighboring areas: how traumatic pasts are redressed and recuperated in accordance with local historical contexts, without being effaced by a global hybridization of ethical differences embedded in national historical narratives. One key diversion to this study is a spatial "synchronicity" that has lately dominated Chinese and Taiwan films and literatures on post-traumatic memories, i.e., collating different historical traumas in such a way that they can easily be misconceived as earlier and credible tributaries of the eventual cascade of the Euro-American mode of capitalistic modernity. To go beyond this Eurocentric paradigm, it is necessary to stake out different historical topographies in which a study of interactive dialogues and critiques can be engaged between the homogenizing global era and China’s and Taiwan’s convoluted histories, between history conceived along a single linear trajectory and histories as a concurrent commitment to different modes of historical unfolding. I will focus on a cast of redemption-seeking figures that have appeared in both Chinese and Taiwan films on political traumas such as The Blue Kite and How Steel Is Made (China), Super Citizen Kuo, City of Sadness and Good Men, Good Women (Taiwan), whose memory of their past involuntary betrayals induce us to revisit the "could have beens" and "would have beens" suppressed by official histories rather than take the present as the culminating end for all national developments. In sum, their single-minded attempt to reclaim their "tainted" lives from the "missed scenarios" from our shared pasts urges us to engage in more simultaneous (not synchronic) and dialogic (not monologic) modes of recovering and reconstructing historical truths.

Metropolis and Marginal Spaces in Chinese Sixth-Generation Films

Jie Lu, University of the Pacific

One distinct feature that marks Chinese sixth-generation films in general is that of their urban turn: the city and urban spaces are foregrounded to be the main subject and concern of the films as well their backdrop. In focusing on private and personal anxieties and experiences of "being in the city," these films have represented, however, a rather dystopian cityscape formed by various marginal and sub-cultural spaces that are banal and quotidian, yet alien and estranging. In examining the urban spaces in sixth-generation films such as Beijing Bastards, Beijing Bicycle, and Beijing Rock, this paper explores the screenscapes of the cinematic city and the relation between the urban and cinematic space. The paper argues that the dystopian vision of the cinematic city in the sixth-generation films both critiques the modern city and contributes to the formation of diverse urban spaces. The cinematic city thus has expanded the "discursive" city shaped by official statements, newspaper reports, fictions, poems, traveler’s accounts, tourist brochures, advertisements, photographs, artworks, and songs that contribute to our comprehension of urban truth.