[1]
Film/culture adaptation in Asia

As Robert C. Allen pointed out in an article in Screen in 1990 [2] , it is easy to overlook the fact that film/cinema is a social institution too, and that film history needs to acknowledge not only the history of film texts, but also the history of the context in which film reached its audience. If we look back to the beginnings of film, that includes not only the screening venues, but also the wider cultural context in which early film needed to find a place, alongside other spectacles (like sport or theatrical performances), other story-telling media (like newspapers, books, and plays), other forms of cultural expression (like dance or painting). The cultures (in the broadest sense of the term as “a whole way of life” but with special emphasis on all forms of artistic expression) that pre-existed film needed to accommodate to the new medium, and as they did this film also adapted in different ways, finding its place within those cultures.

We need to acknowledge also the national and regional variations in this story. In this issue of Screening the Past we are specifically interested in Asia, but we are not suggesting that the phenomenon of “film/culture adaptation” occurs only there. In fact, we would like to receive submissions building on this issue – further explorations within Asia, and new ones from other parts of the world. But we are starting in Asia because it seemed to make sense that the more unlike western models any culture was, the more individual the response to film was likely to be. At the most general level, both film (the aesthetic object) and cinema (the institution) are considered to be western inventions, dependent on western technology. Film machines (projectors, cameras, etc) were invented in the scientific West, but the non-West, including most of Asia, very quickly indigenised the industry/institution of cinema within its own social, political and cultural context. This process occurred over a wide range of timelines: unlike Europe, where virtually all countries had adopted some version of the new technology by the end of the nineteenth century, film spread more sporadically in Asia, with often quite a substantial time between the first exhibition of film, and the first local film production in any part of the region.

Our first “Call for papers” honed in on the introduction of film exhibition, but the proposals we received indicated that adaptation between film and the broader culture was not something that happened once and then stopped: scholars were concerned with different aspects of the process, occurring at different times, and sometimes ongoing. So we broadened our Call, and the nine papers offered here now cover the period from the 1890s to the 1990s, as well as many different parts of the region: there are papers specifically about mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Bangladesh and Thailand, as well as a paper that discusses more broadly the introduction of animation across the whole region.

In all of this, one of the major tensions is between the local/indigenous culture, and that imported (with the film technology) from the West. Jubin Hu’s argument begins with the naming of the new form – a name which emphasised its aesthetic rather than technological nature, and which located the essence of the new medium within or beside the traditional Chinese shadow play. Hu argues that this naming then helped to construct the Chinese philosophy of film, and so to account for differences from the West in consequent film practice. Adam Knee looks in detail at one much more recent film example, clearly thematically and stylistically related to the Western science fiction genre, but inflecting that in ways that can be read as specifically Thai. John Lent traces the growth of the animation industry across Asia, along the way both adopting western aesthetics and technology and adapting these to meet specifically Asian industrial and cultural needs and expectations.

Cultural expression has often been assumed to be a marker of national identity – a way of establishing national credentials in opposition to imported cultural artefacts. The period of the appropriation of cinema into local cultures in Asia corresponded with the rise of Third World nationalism, and it is not surprising that the arrival of film, and other key aesthetic and technical developments in the medium, coincided in some places with significant moments in the imagining of the nation. So, Jeanne Deslandes links the arrival of film in Taiwan at the end of the nineteenth century with the establishment of Japanese hegemony in the island, and so with the Japanese influence on local Taiwanese film production in its early years. Linda Lai chooses the 1930s as a key moment in both the political and social history of Hong Kong and in the history of its film industry – a period when local film culture in all its manifestations boomed, as part of a national-cultural expression which aimed to find a balance between Chinese nationalism and the pursuit of Western-style modernisation. This urge to modernity is also discussed by Aaron Gerow, in Japan of the 1910s – a time when Japanese producers still made and distributed only one print of any film at a time, resisting modernisation and contributing to what Gerow calls a “culture of combination”. Of all the nation-states represented here, Bangladesh is the newest, only thirty years old, and far younger than the film medium. Zakir Raju’s article attributes the way Bangladesh cinema history has been so far discussed to the way key terms such as “history” and “nation” have been conceived.

It is no wonder, then, that the idea of an independent nation coupled with a sovereign state expedited the acculturation process of cinema in so many Asian societies. One essential component of these national developments was language. It was restrictions on the use of the Chinese language in Taiwan that made space for the dominance of the benshi. And it was the use of Cantonese that marked Hong Kong films as different from mainland films, so that, even though not all films in that language were made in Hong Kong, film contributed to the growth of a specifically Hong Kong Chinese identity. Linda Lai connects this with campaigns for social and moral hygiene, which linked national loyalty with personal growth and ethical standards. Gerow, on the other hand, cautions against assuming that the (admitted) links between indigenous Japanese cinema and other traditional cultural forms (particularly kabuki theatre) meant a seamless adaptation of the former into the latter, or – at least in the very early years with which his article is concerned – any sense of a truly “national” cinematic form. Freda Freiberg’s discussion centres on a later period of Japanese film history, when the theatre and the nation-state both acted as shaping forces on indigenous film production.

In all these examples, film found its own level, alongside or in opposition to other cultural forms, and in debates about national identity and cultural specificity. In the process, some powerful cultural expressions were adopted into and adapted by the new medium. Concerning Hong Kong, Lai speaks of the song films which were clearly related to the Cantonese song forums in Chinese restaurants. Concerning mainland China, Wenwei Du and Jubin Hu both speak about the films of Chinese (Beijing and other styles) opera. John Lent mentions the connections between film animation and the Japanese manga (comic books). Personnel and techniques (like the Japanese benshi) moved between and among several cultural forms. These movements were encouraged or impeded by social developments in what Lai refers to as the “public sphere”: so, Lai describes how in Hong Kong in the 1930s, the prostitutes outlawed by new legislation took their entertainment skills into the film industry as performers in the song films, and Du describes how in mainland China period costume film commented on current political concerns. Then there are the stylistic transferences, such as the family melodramas and romantic tragedies played out in both the pages of Hong Kong’s newspapers and in their film production.

This complex social and cultural matrix, founded on the crossroad of colonialism and nationalism, but inflected differently in each of the cultures under discussion here, provided the stage for culture to accommodate to film across Asia. But there are also influences that moved in the opposite direction – back from film into traditional forms such as theatre (as Du describes for mainland China). In some places, such cultural adaptation is still occurring – in both directions… Film censorship is still responding to cultural pressures that wish to limit the range of possible expression within the film medium, and there is a worldwide phenomenon of novelisation of film scripts. It is a never-ending – and circular – story…

Ina Bertrand and Zakir Raju
October 2000

[1] We wish to thank editorial board member Chris Berry whose generous assistance has been invaluable in the preparation of this issue.
[2] Robert C. Allen, “From exhibition to reception: reflections on the audience in film history”, Screen 21, no.2 (1980): 79-91 (recently anthologised in Annette Kuhn & Jackie Stacey (eds), Screen Histories: A Screen Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998)