Introduction

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Asian Cinema as phenomenological experience

In the past twenty years or so the term ‘Asian Cinema’ has been a headlining item in international film
festivals, journals, magazines, newspapers, video stores, academic curricula and blogs. Just what exactly is
‘Asian Cinema’ and what is its significance as a name that has come into popular usage in film and cultural
studies? This book sets out to examine the phenomenon commonly called ‘Asian Cinema’. It aims not just
to explain what it is but also to articulate it as a theory so as to facilitate a conceptual understanding of the
term, which is otherwise used in a matter-of-fact fashion to refer to a wide array of film industries in the
continent of Asia, including those of China, Japan, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand,
Singapore, Iran, Indonesia and Malaysia – to mention only those countries whose films are covered within
this volume.
It is not the intention of this book to provide a field guide to all the cinemas of the Asian continent but
rather to emphasise and examine the nature and the subject matter of Asian films to determine a broad
theory of or outlook on Asian Cinema. The proposition is that there is a holistic concept of Asian Cinema
which one can feel and grasp through the experience of watching and analysing Asian films as a
cumulative whole – thus, the title of this book: The Asian Cinema Experience. The word ‘experience’
implies a more phenomenological reception of Asian films but, from this experiential reception, we are
prompted to cognitively explore the cultures, languages and societies depicted in the films. Knowledge and
learning is an inherent part of the phenomenological experience of watching Asian films. It leads us to a
qualitative, if also more theoretical, understanding, as opposed to a more quantitative, survey-like and
preliminary awareness of the various film industries of Asia and their productions. This book therefore
rejects the country-by-country survey approach characteristic of a fair number of volumes published in
recent years (Lent 1990; Hanan 2001; Vasudev et al. 2002; Ciecko 2006; Carter 2007; Vick 2008; Hunt
and Leung 2008; Davis and Yeh 2008). It also avoids the tendency to put Asian cinemas into regional
clusters (for example, East Asia or South Asia) in the interest of cultural homogeneity. While fully
cognisant of the fact that Asia as a whole is not and can never be culturally homogenous, this book opts to
present Asian Cinema as a vast and complex network of film industries connected to each other through a
shared narrative. It aims to discover what is common about the divergent cinemas of Asia in order to
engender a unified outlook or theory of Asian Cinema.
What all the previous books demonstrate is the necessity for further theorising of the term ‘Asian
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Cinema’ – the need to define it, and to explore the boundaries of its usefulness. This book is a response to
that need as well as to the recognition that Asian Cinema is so extensive and multifaceted that specific
areas and concerns demand more rigorous and detailed research. Here my attempt to provide an evaluative
and analytical assessment of Asian Cinema falls under three broad categories: ‘styles’, ‘spaces’ and
‘theory’. Such categories are my way of trying to contain the breadth and complexity of Asia as a whole,
the diversity of the topics and themes addressed in Asian films and the range of genres and the different

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 styles and aesthetics represented. To develop a theory from this diversity and complexity is perhaps
over-ambitious but it is nevertheless a necessary part of defining the term.
Such an effort is certainly fraught with problems, not least the problem of defining Asia itself, a vast
continent with many different nations, cultures, languages and political systems with their disparities of
wealth and resources. Where does Asia begin and where does it end? Are countries such as Russia, Turkey,
Israel and Egypt part of the Asian Cinema hemisphere? (I have, in fact, chosen not to include these
countries in this book and I leave it to other scholars to pursue and argue the case that they should be
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included.) ‘Asian Cinema’ is, to be sure, difficult to define exactly, but the term is widely used in our
present era as if it is something that is readily understood by the general public. Today the term is used to
cover courses being taught in schools and universities, and it is often used in journalism. Its meaning
seems simple enough – it refers to films from Asia generally, to indicate what is new, strange and exotic
about a category of non-European, non-Hollywood films. The one measure that is invoked is that all these
films hail from Asia and all come in various forms and genres. They run the gamut from the commercial to
the artistic, from the exploitative to the most esoteric. Because of their range and diversity, Asian films
need to be studied in greater depth for cultural nuances and quirks, the genres defined more explicitly and
given more distinctness from their qualities of universality, the stories and the content examined more
closely for their variations and disparities, considering the multiple cultures and societies which are all
represented within the nomenclature ‘Asian Cinema’.
Yet the term is indeed used as a handy abbreviation to refer to all Asian films which otherwise are
categorised into the specific national cinemas of the Asian continent. It can refer to films of broad regions
(South Asian, East Asian or the Arab World) or it can refer to cinemas of a narrower territorial entity, often
a city where the film industry is based (Bollywood, Tollywood, Hong Kong, Shanghai); it can refer to
cultish genre movies dubbed ‘excessive’ or it can refer to sophisticated art movies. The holistic scope of
the term is both an advantage and a disadvantage. It allows the scholar to theorise freely, but in the final
analysis its broadness may be too vague for it to emerge as a discipline. As the idea of Asian Cinema is put
forward, its insufficiency as a theoretical concept is exposed and its subordination to the concept of
national cinema in particular (the tendency to reduce Asian Cinema to specific national cinemas such as
Chinese cinema, Japanese cinema, Indian cinema and so on) makes a theory of Asian Cinema even harder
to pin down. It is therefore vital in any discussion on Asian Cinema to think about how a theory of Asian
Cinema can be formulated and grasped.
I do not propose at this stage to go into a discussion of theory at length but it is necessary to outline
some of the factors that I will invoke in theorising and writing about Asian Cinema in the following
chapters. Theorising is necessary in order to rise above the shallow or the merely platitudinous in writing
about Asian film. It is easy to say that Asian Cinema is united by a sense of Asian values, such as family,
hard work and loyalty, or by some spiritual quality such as Zen or the Dao. One could also say that Asian
films are exceptional because they tell interesting stories in interesting ways. No doubt, the premise of an
Asian Cinema experience is that Asian films are interesting and their methods of telling stories are
therefore worthy of study. Such a truism needs some justification although it seems self-explanatory, and
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hence the book is designed to justify in what way Asian Cinema is indeed an experience and how it is so.
Theorising about Asian Cinema is an inherent task of this experience.
The book, then, is on the whole a theoretical speculation on the concept of Asian Cinema. At the same
time most of the chapters are grounded in textual analysis so as to isolate discerning characteristics and
styles that can possibly sustain an Asian Cinema theory. Theorising Asian Cinema is itself an ideological
imperative in the discipline of film studies, which is so completely dominated by Euro- and
America-centrism. The theorising factors that I will outline below are concepts and ideas that will

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 hopefully anchor our appreciation and awareness of Asian Cinema as we think more about how it can
stand up as a theoretical force. These are not necessarily new ideas, nor indeed ideas specifically to do with
Asian Cinema, and they have been mentioned before by other writers. They are recapitulated here as a
source for thinking and rethinking about Asian films, to suggest a framework to pursue a greater
understanding of Asian Cinema.

Theorising factors
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One of the factors which I consider to be the most fundamental and pervasive, the most immediately
distinctive, the most cinematic and the easiest to understand is that of the face. The idea of a
phenomenological experience of Asian films implies that we have a direct encounter with the situations
and the characters within the film narratives. If we think of experiencing Asian films by watching Asian
faces and taking in what they reveal to us, we are directly experiencing a factor that will lead us towards
greater appreciation of the films. Asian physiognomy is therefore crucial in understanding Asian Cinema.
Asian faces constitute a physiognomic database of emotion and experience. They may reveal fear, anxiety
and sentimentality, or coolness, thought and spirituality. This roughly echoes Deleuze's idea of the face as
‘affective-image’ (see Deleuze 1986: 87), but Deleuze's concept of the face is more abstract, and in a sense
faceless, whereas Asian faces broadly typify Asian Cinema, projecting an ‘other’ kind of cinema into the
theoretical domain of cinema so theorised by Deleuze which is otherwise overwhelmingly identified with
European or Caucasian faces.
The face as a factor in film theory is borrowed from Bela Balazs, who theorised about the face in his
Theory of the Film, in the chapter entitled ‘The Face of Man’. There, Balazs theorised about the racial,
national and class characteristics of the face and he referred to the cinema's ability to reveal a ‘new world –
the world of microphysiognomy which could not otherwise be seen with the naked eye or in everyday life’
(Balazs 1952: 65). The close-up was the device to reveal the face, and Balazs favoured silent cinema as the
ideal medium to reveal microphysiognomy, though the concept would work equally in sound film if
perhaps less efficaciously, according to Balazs.
Generally, Balazs believed that cinema would take ‘human culture in a visual direction, endowing man
with a “new face” (which) could restore man's “visibility” and thus also create the foundation of a new
internationalism’ (Balazs, quoted in Nagl 2009: 25). To Balazs, ‘man possessed a “fixed” physiognomy
that expressed racial character, perceived as an inherited ensemble of physical gestures, which our facial
features only vary individually’, and the face constituted a battlefield in which ‘“soul” and “fate”,
“personality” and “type”, “ego” and “id” were seen to grapple eternally’ (Nagl 2009: 25). Balazs therefore
argued that ‘human physiognomy resembled a glass mask through which a “truer” face gleaned’ (Nagl
2009: 25). Since the idea of ‘face’ in Asian culture is that which one puts on in public and which hides the
inner being, Balazs’ argument is not an idea that is strange to Asians. In Asian Cinema we ought to be
looking through several layers of glass masks, in effect. To ‘lose face’ is to reveal too much and, all the
more so, therefore, we need to look at Asian faces in Asian films, which become all the more fascinating
inasmuch as they are an instrument to glean the true soul of Asian Cinema.
Copyright @ 2013. Routledge.

The Asian face, then, is the key to the soul of Asian Cinema, and there is an element of ‘devotional
engagement’ (Nayar 2010: 40) with the face in Indian cinema that we can draw on to address the face and
its connotation of the soul. Indian critics have evolved a theory of frontality (also sometimes called the
tableau form) that is connected to religious iconicity. Geeta Kapur argues that ‘there is a transfer of
iconicity, if one might put it like that, between god and saint to the viewer’ (Kapur 1987: 86). ‘More
importantly, there is a transfer of effect by a frontal contact, with all the implied qualities of such a
relationship’, and such a transfer acquires ‘specially cinematic virtues’, by which Kapur means that it is not
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 necessarily tied to an ‘ultimate verisimilitude’ but is more a phenomenological grasping of ‘existential
meaning that accrues from the choice of certain language conventions, especially where the instance of a
rare subjectivity, indeed of saintliness and grace, are involved’ (Kapur 1987: 86). Frontality heavily
implies a public response as it involves a direct address to the public, despite subjective meanings that may
arise out of the actor's face, as Vasudevan has intimated: ‘The publicness of character derives from the idea
that the subject is constituted in and through an address to an audience’ (Vasudevan 2011: 44). This
‘publicness’ emphasises once again the phenomenological trait of experience in Asian Cinema, and this
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experience is predicated on a devotional engagement with the face.

Sheila Nayar attributes frontality in the Indian cinema to an oral tradition:

We might postulate that the frontal privilege given to the face is no more because the face serves as the
nexus of emotional expressions (as exhibited in the eyes, facial muscles, etc.) than because the face is an
adjunct to the mouth, whose primacy comes from its being the residence of speech.
(Nayar 2010: 41)

Nayar's emphasis on speech and orality helps us to consider other parts of the face and eventually the body
itself as factors essential to one's appreciation and understanding of Asian Cinema. In fact, Asian Cinema
contains some of the most popular body genres in world cinema – the Bollywood song and dance genre
and the Asian martial arts film (on the notion of ‘body genres’ see Williams 1991; also Tasker 1993). Such
body genres are perfect for thinking about Asian Cinema as phenomenological experience, which leads to
a cognitive recognition of wider issues. Wimal Dissanayake states that dance sequences

which are de rigueur in Indian popular films, are the key to comprehending the totalities of popular
reception ... The dances contained in Indian films enable us to question such categories as gender
identity, masculinity, and femininity, regimes of visuality, and the carnal consciousness of the body.
(Dissanayake 2003: 220)

It can be said, then, that the body in Asian genres exerts an immediate phenomenological impact on
reception. Aaron Anderson has provided a useful account of such a phenomenological experience in his
analysis of the Asian martial arts film. He described the martial arts genre as a ‘movement-art’ which
‘implies a phenomenological – or bodily – involvement in reception’ (Anderson 2009: 194). The
movement of martial arts is characterised as choreographed dance.

In this way, viewed movement evokes different phenomenological perceptions (perceptions felt rather
than thought) and bodily memories (sensations remembered as feelings rather than as consciously
considered recollections) within each body engaged in interpretation. Movement in and of itself is the
medium through which kinesthetic (felt, body-to-body) communication takes place, and so the
transference of any movement's ‘meaning’ always involves a range of nonlinear elements. For example
... choreographic rhythmic patterns within, or accompanying, movement can contribute significantly to
Copyright @ 2013. Routledge.

the enjoyment and understanding of any movement performance. This may be, in part, because everyone
feels the presence of his or her own internal rhythmic heartbeat and breathing patterns and most people
also learn a more esoteric understanding of rhythmic cycles of time.
(Anderson 2009, his emphases)

Anderson goes on to state that many Asian martial arts forms ‘incorporate into their practice what might be
described as spiritual or philosophical elements, and these are difficult, if not impossible, to separate from

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 other, functional elements in the practice of the forms themselves’ (Anderson 2009: 195). As such, Asian
martial arts forms ‘offer challenges for Western understanding of movement’ (Anderson 2009). This is an
acknowledgement of the body as a factor which may allow us to theorise about the distinctiveness of Asian
Cinema. While I do not concentrate on the martial arts genre in this book (for a study of this particular
genre, see Teo 2009), I am borrowing Anderson's diagnosis of the body as phenomenological experience to
underscore a theorising factor in understanding Asian Cinema. The body as experience can direct us to a
more soulful realisation of our existence, and the way that it can do this is through affect – emotion or
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feeling – as another factor which is possibly unique in Asian Cinema.

There is in fact a classical theory formulated on emotion in Indian poetics known as rasa theory.
According to Pravas Jivan Chaudhury, rasa literally means ‘taste or savor, and, as used to denote the
essence of poetry, it signifies the peculiar experience that poetry affords us’ (Chaudhury 1965: 145). Rasa
is the experience by the self ‘of some emotion in its generalized form’ so that ‘this self is self-aware
through awareness and enjoyment of an emotion which colors it’ (Chaudhury 1965: 146). The kind of
emotion is dependent upon the nature of the poem or the work of art and there is a range of emotions, with
ones that are predominant and others that are subsidiary. As rasa stresses the ‘experiential and subjective
side of poetic meaning’ (Chaudhury 1965: 145), the theory boosts the essential thesis of this book, which is
that Asian Cinema should be experienced and is itself an experience in that it contains drama and
characters who radiate rasa which is then passed on to the audience who are themselves emotional beings.
Emotion is, therefore, a key factor of experience. Rasa can thus be incorporated into Asian Cinema as a
theory of emotion or affect which raises one's self-awareness through an appreciation and enjoyment of
Asian emotion in cinema.
Rasa theory is increasingly applied to the discourse on Indian cinema and I will refer to it in my
discussions of Bollywood and other Asian films in this book. Hence, I will attempt to expand on the idea
of rasa theory as a distinctive part of Asian Cinema theory in the chapters that follow. For now, suffice it to
say that rasa is a helpful theoretical device that allows us to understand how emotion is applied in Asian
films and how it enhances the audience's experience. Indian artists have, of course, long known the magic
of emotion in their music and drama and have applied it to films, and many Asian directors in their own
ways have resorted to emotions as inherently artistic components of drama as well as cultural expressions
of behaviour. The display of heightened emotion can be a sophisticated part of the culture and art of Asian
Cinema. Lest this should conjure up a picture of Asian films as being highly melodramatic (and this is
certainly a part of the effect), the connotation of emotion as a theory, or at least as a theorising factor, is to
point up the role of emotion as a cultural and aesthetic ingredient which may be easily misunderstood.
For our purposes, then, emotion can be understood as a theorising factor that promotes a wider
conception and appreciation of Asian Cinema. Emotion is not merely personal or private but also contains
many latent issues of social and national importance which can form a network of related factors in further
theorising Asian Cinema. Ciecko, in her chapter ‘Theorising Asian Cinema(s)’ (Ciecko 2006: 13–31), has
already rehearsed some of these factors as generic topics which flow out of the ‘texts and contexts’ in the
‘social life of Asian Cinema’. Ciecko gives a somewhat sweeping view of Asian cinematic issues,
Copyright @ 2013. Routledge.

including questions of national cinema, globalisation and localisation, the influence of Hollywood and the
reaction against it. The significance of these issues, as well as others, will depend on the texts and contexts.
Aesthetic, political and economic concerns are encoded within these texts and contexts. Asian religions
such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Islam, as well as the ‘wide range of governing sociopolitical
structures and systems including constitutional monarchy, parliamentary and multi-party democracy,
socialism and communism’, all contribute ‘to the contextual fabric of Asian cinema as cultural production
and social experience’ (Ciecko 2006: 17).

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 Contexts are certainly indispensable to understanding Asian Cinema, and it is perhaps best to
characterise Asian Cinema as a web-like ball threading together many related issues, one issue leading to
the next and so on. For example, the topic of national cinema will yield issues of nationalism, colonialism
and postcolonialism. It can also bring us to the question of Hollywood, since the concept of national
cinema is often seen as a counterweight to Hollywood by domestic film industries in Asia. There are
several layers to the Hollywood question: Hollywood as threat; the Asian imitation of Hollywood; Asian
Cinema as an alternative to Hollywood; and Asian Cinema as a connection between the local and the
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global (the latter being symbolised by Hollywood).

Hollywood also symbolises the technology of cinema, a modern art form that engages with the Asian
traditions of storytelling. Ciecko has mentioned the element of the ‘popular’ in connection with Asian
Cinema, which can connote many things, including mainstream audience appeal, the over-determined
nature of production, the use of genres and stars, and narrative accessibility (Ciecko 2006: 16). Asian films
assert a cinematic identity of their own through Hollywood-style spectacle and genre. Asian Cinema, it can
be argued, is essentially an engagement with Hollywood as the universal model of popular, vernacular
cinema, but in this engagement Asian Cinema evolves its own paradigm of the popular.
On another level, Hollywood also signifies an engagement with modernity on the part of Asian nations
and cultures, as expressed in Miriam Hansen's contention that Hollywood cinema provided ‘to mass
audiences both at home and abroad, a sensory-reflexive horizon for the experience of modernization and
modernity’ (Hansen 2000: 10). Hansen has applied her theory of Hollywood as an influential model of
‘vernacular modernism’ to the early Chinese cinema (Hansen 2000), and other scholars have essentially
followed her cue in the literature on China (see Lee 1999; Tang 2000; Zhang 2005; McGrath 2008). Much
ink has already been spilled on the question of Asian modernity touching on Asian cinemas and their
historical relationship with Hollywood or European cinema, such that there is no real need for me to repeat
it as one of the major themes in this book, though it will feature as a sub-theme in some of the discussions,
as in Chapter 5’s examination of horror.
Modernity has become an intellectual mantra as it relates to Asian Cinema or Asian Culture as a whole
because of Asia's fast-growing economies and the perception of these economies as the testing ground of
Western modernity in the developing Third World. In many respects, Asian Cinema is the epitome of
modernity in Asia, but, as Jameson has warned, ‘the critique of modernization risks tipping the scales’ in a
Third World ‘classically fixated on the dualism between the Old and the New, between tradition and
Westernization, culture and science, religion and secularization’ (Jameson 1992: 206–7). Today, the scale
of Asian modernisation is so startling that Jameson's perception of Asia as Third World may already be
outdated, and Asian films are now perceived to be so fashionably modern that in the case of something like
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), for example, which may strike many Western viewers as a
modernist approach to the martial arts genre, it behooves the Asian critic to point out the opposite – that, in
fact, it is quite traditional. Asia is classically fixated on the dualisms between old and new, tradition and
Westernisation, culture and science, religion and secularisation, and there may be no way of avoiding the
issue of modernity, but what this book seeks to do is to show that Asian film-makers have transcribed both
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the popular and the modern in their own vernacular fashion. Modernity in Asian Cinema is, of course, a
transformative project – as the name ‘Bollywood’ attests. It is an Indian transcription of Hollywood
modernity and the vernacular, and it comes across as something altogether unique and not always
appreciated. Bollywood makes the case that it makes better sense for the Asian critic to tip the scales of the
modernisation discourse toward those properties that transform modernity into something else, or
something Asian: Asian as a sign of altered states, altered modernity, emerging from the hegemonic field
of Hollywood or Western modernity.

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 The state of altered modernity represents the complexities of modernisation in Asia, leading both to gain
and to loss. With modernisation comes consumerism and urbanisation of the sort that threatens traditional
familial ties, overhauls gender roles and relationships, secularises society and transfuses vernacular genres
with a sense of the contemporaneous (see again Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Asian Cinema so
transparently encapsulates the redecorated and retouched effects of modernisation that it seems pointless to
consider it as an allegory of modernity. Under the circumstances, what does one make of Asian Cinema
having influenced Hollywood, as in the case of Hollywood remakes of Asian films? Could it be said that
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Hollywood is re-engaging with modernity?

What, then, is Asian Cinema really, in terms of the modernity discourse? As a late starter in the
Jamesonian schema of the geopolitical aesthetic Asian Cinema should be more postmodern than modern,
but while Jameson's aesthetic is a forewarning of global doom, Asian Cinema's lateness gives us intriguing
possibilities to consider how the concept could work as a more positive model of late twentieth-century
millennial film-making, yielding a postmodernist development of film scholarship that is not too
encumbered by Eurocentric movements in film studies. Thus, from the factor of Hollywood modernity and
Asian Cinema's response to it we may see a network of theoretical concerns that are constantly evolving or
even changing. Gender and family could lead to issues of class and social hierarchies, generational conflict
and generation change. As societies develop and turn from tradition we may see cities appearing and
disappearing, as it were. Law and order is an issue, and so is crime and punishment. There are matters of
the heart and mind, as well as those of the supernatural, religion, ritual and worship.
Such issues will be explored in greater detail as we move into the chapters to follow, but the point I am
making here is that they all generate factors which may be employed in discussing a theory of Asian
Cinema. Nationalism, colonialism and postcolonialism generate a certain idea of national cinema which
may be seen as a necessary stage towards a wider conception of Asian Cinema. Nationalism and
colonialism also engender other theoretical concepts which Asian Cinema must outgrow, such as Third
Cinema theory, often linked with Asian cinemas of the ‘Third World’ (I touch on this in Chapter 12). The
reaction against Hollywood generates a conception of Asian Cinema as an alternative paradigm, but, as I
have intimated above, there is more complexity to this particular issue than meets the eye: Asian Cinema is
not exactly anti-Hollywood (again, more on this in Chapter 12). Gender issues generate a theory of
melodrama in Asian Cinema and thus a certain genre that constitutes a special entity that defines Asian
Cinema. Similarly, crime and punishment, the mind and the supernatural, religion, ritual and worship are
all elements that constitute a field of topics energising the analysis of genres (such as Asian horror and
crime thrillers). Genres can encompass nationalistic sentiment (such as the Chinese wuxia martial arts film)
or come to fulfill a certain national essence (such as Japanese horror, or J-horror: the name itself already a
sign of a certain nationalistic presence residing in the genre or perhaps taking over the genre).
Ciecko refers to genre, to stars, auteurs and fans, and to cinematic spectacle as further factors in finding
commonalities in Asian Cinema; the implication is that commonalities that exist in popular traditions,
genres and styles may allow for a unified vision of Asian Cinema. Ciecko gives a special mention to
melodrama as a factor that pervades ‘across genres of Asian cinema’ (Ciecko 2006: 26) and ‘permeates
Copyright @ 2013. Routledge.

film narratives, impacts representational strategies, and regulates and unleashes displays of affect’ (Ciecko
2006: 27). This is an interesting factor to think about briefly here, in that we have an idea of Asian Cinema
being unified in essence and generic substance by nothing more than melodrama. Within Asian Cinema,
we may in fact think of melodrama not so much as a genre or as a ‘structure of feelings’ (according to
Raymond Williams, quoted in Ciecko 2006: 27), but as a lifestyle that determines the behaviour of Asian
characters. This is a factor that I will certainly engage with in discussing specific films in the following
chapters.

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 Melodrama brings us to issues surrounding the family, an Asian institution if ever there was one, and, in
many cinemas in Asia, the family is synonymous with melodrama either as structure or genre (it can be
argued that the family substantiates melodrama as genre). The family can be both unitary and fragmentary,
involving questions of generational change and conflict, problems of youth and the etiquette and
conservatism of social hierarchies. It can be metaphorical, as in the gangster film, where the theme of
brotherhood and patriarchal authority functions as a shadow of the family in the space of the criminal
underworld.
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All in all, Asian Cinema implies a special point of view, a certain way of looking at and thinking about
Asian films, even if we broadly accept the idea of transculturalism as an intrinsically universal factor in the
appreciation of Asian films. Transculturalism, in the formalistic and stylistic sense that David Bordwell has
envisioned it (Bordwell 2005), is really the artful manipulation of film, but Asian Cinema is the sum total
of transcultural universality and local knowledge that goes on to determine the Asian cinematic point of
view. This special point of view may be linked to another factor that I mentioned above – that of the
portrayal of Asian faces or physiognomies, bodies and gestures, emotions and their behavioural patterns –
the way Asians look, both in terms of looking and being looked at. All these factors, and more, are entirely
germane to this book's theoretical concerns. There may be other points and issues that are not listed here
but which will become obvious in the chapters following. This book does not claim to be the last word on
Asian Cinema and is intended to open the lid on Asian Cinema as the receptacle of problems and
possibilities in order to facilitate thought, understanding and further discussion on the subject.

Parts and chapters

I have chosen to divide the book into three parts which I have characterised as ‘styles’, ‘spaces’ and
‘theory’, headings which provide the conceptual framework for the discussions. They are meant to reflect
the broadness of the subject while providing some direction for the analyses and to guide the reader
through the book. Hopefully, readers will regard these headings not merely as hypothetical models but also
as practical routes toward discovering commonalities in Asian Cinema and understanding what theoretical
areas of Asian films can be regarded as foundational grounds for a unified theory of Asian Cinema. In Part
I, ‘Styles’, genres and auteurs form the basis of the discussion. In Part II, ‘Spaces’, Asian Cinema is
understood as a geographic region, involving settings from the rural to the urban, from the private bedroom
to the communal living room. There is also the notion of space as we might think of it in Chinese
paintings, as apparent in the films of certain directors (Ozu, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wong Kar-wai, for
example), whose manipulation of this kind of space constitutes theoretical analytical models. In Part III,
‘Theory’, we pursue more conceptual issues raised in conjunction with the rise of Asian cinemas in recent
years. These issues revolve around rival theories such as World Cinema, National Cinema, Third Cinema
and Hollywood, and how Asian Cinema may compete with them and eventually become an alternative
paradigm.
The first two chapters of Part I, are devoted to discussions of the great classical Asian stylists Kurosawa
Akira and Satyajit Ray. Kurosawa and Ray were also the two greatest Asian directors responsible for the
Copyright @ 2013. Routledge.

rise of Asian Cinema in the 1950s and its discovery by the West. These chapters focus on the directors’
works to determine how a classical Asian Cinema style emerged that was narrative and theme-based with a
social-humanist preoccupation. Chapter 3, ‘The historical blockbuster style’, assesses and critiques the
blockbuster style as a major form associated with historicist epics in Asian production. The chapter
acknowledges the theme of nationalism in these epics. Nationalism manifests as a monumental style and
the chapter asks whether this is a style that adds to and defines Asian Cinema in some way, or whether it
distracts from our vision of Asian cinema as an intimate, low-budget but socially conscious exercise.
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 Japanese anime is probably the most popular and well-known form of Asian Cinema and, as such, merits a
whole chapter devoted to an analysis of its style and characteristics: this is Chapter 4, ‘The abstract
transnational style of anime’, in which a critical investigation and critique of anime as both style and genre
helps to place questions of cultural identity within the medium's real or perceived transnationalism.
Chapter 5, ‘Asian horror and the ghost-story style’, examines the horror genre, focusing on the ghost-story
tradition that is seen across the whole spectrum of Asian cinemas, including the Japanese, South Korean,
Hong Kong, Malaysian and Thai cinemas. The chapter explicates the characteristics and themes of the
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ghost story, with its focus on female spirits, in an effort to improve our understanding of Asian beliefs,
fears and superstitions as reflected in Asian Cinema. The final chapter in this section, Chapter 6, offers a
viewpoint on the unique Bollywood style. With its emphasis on extravagant song and dance, Bollywood is
a major mode in Asian Cinema, recently given more prominence by semi-Bollywood productions such as
Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and Western productions that evoke the Bollywood style (for example, Baz
Luhrman's 2001 musical Moulin Rouge). Previously dismissed as fundamentally local and accessible only
to South Asian audiences and the Indian Diaspora, it is now receiving greater critical attention. A
discussion of key Bollywood films, old and new, will form the basis of this chapter, which is devoted to an
understanding of Bollywood as an integral style of Asian Cinema.
In Part II, four chapters aim to delineate space in various dimensions and shapes as a crucial indicator of
Asian distinctiveness in Asian Cinema, exploring the notion that Asian films may be united by a certain
language of space. The fallback position of film theorists may be to declare that Asian Cinema is united by
the language of film – that, where culture divides, the semiotics of film unites. However, the idea of Asian
Cinema itself is inherently fragmented and will need much theorising on a microanalytical level to imply
that it is a unified entity at all. These chapters attempt to find a justification through the element of space as
a common film sensibility that marks Asian cinemas. Chapter 7 deals with the space of Asian melodrama,
investigating how Indian and Japanese directors mobilise space in film to display unique styles and
compositions that go a long way towards a definitive sense of Asian aesthetics. Chapter 8 deals with
geographic and personal space in Iranian cinema, which has impressed film-goers with its poetic and
humanistic treatments of its subject matter. The chapter will focus on the films of Abbas Kiarostami and
other Iranian directors in terms of how they use the wide geographic space of Iran to delineate an inward
space of personal occurrences and national experiences. This kind of approach is an important step towards
affirming the concept of Asian Cinema as an inter-Asian method of communication and exchange,
especially since Iran is still largely an isolated entity in the community of nations. The idea of domestic
space centring on the family is treated in Chapter 9, in relation to the South Korean cinema. The films of
Bong Joon-ho, Lee Chang-dong and Kim Ki-duk are given special attention for their remarkable
delineation of a heavily domesticated kind of space in which the family resides. The family unit is seen to
break down but it ultimately regroups with renewed strength and inner resolve. Erotic space is the subject
of Chapter 10, which looks at sexuality as another distinct component of the Asian cinematic experience.
Sex is associated with culture and society, and the chapter examines the social and cultural space that is
conjured up in acts of sex.
Copyright @ 2013. Routledge.

In Part III, Chapter 11 examines how Asian Cinema has outgrown the concept of World Cinema to
become a transcultural medium in its own right. The principle here is that Asian Cinema already functions
like a virtual World Cinema. Chapter 12 continues the discussion of Asian Cinema in relation to other
concepts and rival theories: National Cinema, Third Cinema and Hollywood. How does Asian Cinema
overcome these theories and come into its own? How does nationalism affect Asian cinemas? Is the
concept of Third Cinema an antidote to nationalism? How does Asian Cinema accommodate ideas of Third
Cinema? This chapter will also present more analysis of Asian Cinema's relationship with Hollywood. Can

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 Asian Cinema develop as an alternative paradigm to Hollywood? Is Hollywood basically an industrial
model copied by Asian film industries? An attendant issue is that of cultural identity. How do Asian
directors and critics assert cultural identity in a context of an unequal exchange in the field of discourse
driven by Western domination and knowledge?
The book ends with a brief coda, ‘Asian Cinema as conclusion’. The object of analysis and of our
theorising may defy definition, but the book has striven to begin a process of examining and looking at
Asian films through direct experience in order to reach towards a foundational theory of Asian Cinema.
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 Part I
Styles
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