Anne Tereska Ciecko (ed),
Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame.
New York: Berg, 2006.
ISBN: 1 845 20237 6
250pp
US$29.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Berg Publishers)

Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame is a much needed book given that more than half of the world’s population is concentrated in Asia and more than three quarters of the world’s production of film comes from this continent. Although the largest volume of film comes from this continent, Asian film is still under studied. Contemporary Asian Cinema is an excellent and useful updated introduction to the contemporary trends in Asian cinema. But, as Ciecko points out, discussing Asian cinema is not an easy task considering the enormity and diversity of Asia. Thus, the book is not without its limitations. It is an ambitious anthology of articles that provides an overview of the contemporary film culture of fourteen different countries in the continent: the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong[1] , South Korea and Japan. According to Ciecko, these countries have been selected “based upon volume of annual film production, established history, and current perceived viability of local industries” (6).

Aside from the fact that some of the chapters cover film cultures that are not widely known such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, some of the articles take quite interesting perspectives. William van der Heide’s “Malaysia: Melodramatic drive, rural discord, urban heartaches” (chapter six) examines the intertextual and transtextual dynamics of contemporary Malaysian films, uncovering the melodrama that revolves around women and exploring urban relationships and the tensions between modernity and rural values and communities. Zakir Hossain Raju’s “Bangladesh: Native resistance and nationalist discourse” (chapter nine) informs us of the unique cultural set-up of Bangladeshi cinema where this Bengali-language film industry “is one of those rare species of medium-sized, vernacular-language national film industries that manages to survive, almost ignoring the Hollywood film industry” (123). His article explores how Bangladeshi popular cinema constructs a nationalist discourse in our fast globalizing world that appeals to Bengali-speaking, Bengali-Muslims and some non-Muslims and non-Bengalis in postcolonial Bangladesh. While in chapter ten, Jyotika Virdi and Corey K. Crekmur’s “India: Bollywood’s global coming of age” explore the significance of the “economic liberalization” of the early 1990s in India and discuss how Hindi cinema combines Hindu nationalism and Western-style consumerism to create a ‘Bollywood blockbuster’. These glitzy, trendy, cosmopolitan, transnational and MTV-influenced films replace “the [previously] subaltern figure’s centrality with the middle-class subject’s angst” (138).

Augusta Lee Palmer takes us to the Far East with her article “Mainland China: Public square to shopping mall and the New Entertainment Film” (chapter eleven), where she analyses the resurgence of the entertainment film that she says has been absent from mainland Chinese screens for 50 years. She uses the metaphor of the shift from the public square to the shopping mall to exemplify the shift in politicized Chinese films to a “new consumer utopia” in China. In Ciecko’s article “Hong Kong: Cinematic cycles of grief and glory” (chapter thirteen), she rather entertainingly writes in installments of “flashbacks” and “flashforwards” of Hong Kong cinema. These include “Flashback to 1986: Heroism and its Cyclical Sequels”, “Flashforward to 2002: Blockbuster Box-office and Anti-hero Redux”, “Flashback to 1973: Martial Arts Mania and Hong Kong Cinema’s Global Kick”, “Flashforward to 2001: Global/Local Genreplay and Neo-Auteurism”, and “Flashforward to 2003 and Beyond”, and this structure truly captures the culture and politics of disappearance in Hong Kong that has been articulated by Ackbar Abbas[2] , which she likens to the narrative structure of  Infernal affairs III (Hong Kong/China 2003).

But what I found most useful in Contemporary Asian Cinema is Ciecko’s theorization of Asian cinema in chapter one, “Theorizing Asian cinema(s)”. Asian cinema, according to her, is a flexible construction that engages in pan-Asian, diasporic, and global “cross-over” audiences. Because of its polyglot nature, she engages with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, which she describes as “multiple voices within (and outside) the cinematic texts, as well as the interactions between films and their audiences” (16). Ciecko’s theorization is both current and pertinent. She shows how capitalism (such as the movement of some countries from “third world” to “first world” status, the “opening” of Chinese and Indian economies and the impact of the Asian crisis) comes into play. She employs Foucauldian notions of the social uses of language and systems of thought, power and knowledge (such as the religious and philosophical traditions of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam and even Christianity or the 1997 Hong Kong Handover) and shows how these affect the institutions, disciplines and mechanisms that control the final form of Asian films produced. She also addresses issues of the national, transnational, regional and global forces which inevitably include the discussion of exilic, diasporic and postcolonial film production that has shaped contemporary Asian cinema.

Although there is an increasing interest in the studies of Asian cinema, books on Asian cinema, especially on Southeast Asian countries are still few and far between. Contemporary Asian Cinema is, therefore, certainly a welcome book that is not only valuable, but also an excellent introduction to Asian cinema.

David Neo
La Trobe University, Australia.

Endnotes:

[1] Although politically mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan may be considered one country, they each have a distinctive film tradition, history and culture; and have traditionally been studied and categorized “nationally” according to these three regions.
[2] Ackbar Abbas. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Created on: Friday, 24 November 2006